I’m here on my own (for my own reasons - I’m part of the fat acceptance activist community as well) and also because I live with Hanne, so have this privileged(?) perspective of having daily conversations with her.

I think it would be dishonest of me to participate in a conversation about Hanne without making it perfectly clear where I’m coming from, so that’s why I do it. But I think you’ve got a point in twigging to the potential issues of interpretation of my role in any debate (especially about Hanne) that I participate in, so I’ll try to phrase my disclaimer in a less tangled way in the future.

I should note, though, that I don’t think it’s really constructive (or going to end well) to talk with someone you hardly know about their boundaries or lack thereof. If you’d like to take that particular conversation somewhere else, I’m pleased to do so privately. Please feel free to write me about it at malcolm.gin@gmail.com.

My perspective of the Fat Acceptance Movement’s feelings/agenda on the whole about the subject of Weight Loss is that it’s a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which I find objectionable from having been in other civil rights activist movements in my life (and am still involved in). My impression of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies is that they’re essentially hypocritical, and I don’t like them, either from a personal point of view or from an organizational policy-making point of view.

Therefore, personally (as my own activist), and through knowing Hanne as well, and talking about these sorts of topics with her frequently, I feel I am on very solid ground talking about these topics here for my own good, whether or not Hanne’s part of the picture at all.

Yes, I’m familiar with OA; that’s how I recognize some of my problems with food as being akin to addiction. It was following several years of participating in OA that I had the strength to start working on incest issues and it was then that I re-gained a lot of weight. The protective symbolism is obvious, of course, as is my recognition now that I self-medicate with food in times of stress, but at the time it was just devastating to be “working the program” and no longer having the program work for me. After a time, I became disillusioned and left OA.

Malcolm,

I have to say that I think it’s a little odd that you are here seemingly speaking for Hanne Blank. She’s addressing these issues on her blog as she sees fit and is not commenting on other blogs out of choice presumably. Triangulated conversations are awkward at best and pathological at worst, imo, reflecting a lack of appropriate boundaries.

Personally, I think this ideological purity requirement regarding weight loss within the fat acceptance movement is misguided, but otoh, my impression was that Hanne Blank has said, in effect, “I’m not the fat activist you all assumed I was so your sense of betrayal is misplaced”.

If the agreed-upon understanding among the members of “Fat Acceptance” with a capital A are that deliberate weight loss is a contradiction in terms with accepting one’s own body as fat, then yes, they have a legitimate peeve with Hanne Blank. But since she herself does not appear to be clamoring to be IN the movement, why are you, whoever you are, objecting to them being exclusionary?

I’m the Malcolm who is Hanne’s partner, not the other Malcolm in the fat-o-sphere (who I understand is something of a no-dieting extremist, so it should be easy to tell us apart).

Hanne is losing weight even as we speak. The primary difference she has from some others in the fat acceptance activist community that are also effectively losing weight for various reasons is that Hanne is doing it intentionally and publicly. Like Hanne, I won’t out anyone who doesn’t feel like making the choice to take your bull by the horns intentionally, but I assure you I personally know at least two others who are involved in weight loss activities as well (just not publicly).

I hear what you’re saying and honestly so does Hanne. She is doing this project partly out of personal curiosity (to see just how much bullshit she can sniff out and how much helpful health-related protocols she can find for her body and her health issues) and partly because she feels that these are conversations that need having, within the fat acceptance community.

Why do folks who lose weight and refuse to toe the dogmatic party line about not doing it intentionally, not doing it publicly, and who don’t participate in an alarmingly similar to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” dynamic so extremely objectionable that they can no longer be tolerated in the community?

In her eyes, it seems, the reason is that the topic is so objectionable, so taboo that no one within the community is willing to talk about these in a fair way with eyes toward building more community, compromising, and working to get along and build strength between us.

Folks like Hanne (and me, in other contexts), are the kinds of folks who tend to take that sort of circumstance head on, take the bull by the horns.

Your language (about Hanne’s public choices) continues to be exclusionary, and while you are certainly putting a huge amount of effort into explaining your perspective to the others here (for which I applaud you), your mind seems basically made up and you seem disinclined to work toward mutual understanding and community building.

Instead, like many of the other very vocal opponents of Hanne’s project, you are treating these issues as non-negotiable boundary issues. That’s fine from a personal standpoint, but I don’t think it’s acceptable in a community that is about acceptance, and not really an acceptable point of view, I think, for a community spokesperson.

In that case, if you haven’t already used them, you might want to try something like Overeaters Anonymous, which was created to deal with those kinds of food issues and (even better) is free.

If it helps, it’s very very common on weight loss message boards to see messages from incest survivors who have a meltdown when they start losing weight and getting attention that they just can’t handle, so they gain the weight back again. That’s the advantage to working with a group — you feel like so much less of a freak when everyone else has issues, too.

I just know people who got to 300 pounds eating just like the thinner people around them, and I’m not sure how you lose weight in a healthy way from that.

I wish I could be around 100 years from now because I think that medical research is going to know a whole lot more about issues like these. I certainly don’t think that every fat person is fat in the same way or for the same reasons as others.

There has been some interesting research that learned about certain things such as enzyme reactions and bacteria in the gut, that are different in the obese which I think will one day yield meds or other interventions that will change life as we know it. Who would ever have guessed, for instance, that weight loss surgery’s effectiveness probably owes as much to subsequent hormonal changes as to having a much smaller stomach?

Thanks for the good wishes.

Losing weight is something I’ve always been able to do though it’s clearly a little harder now post-menopause. I’m not really a foodie; don’t like to cook, try new foods, go out to eat, etc. It’s more that food is the substance that I use and abuse addictively. (Both siblings are alcoholics). I’m an incest survivor and my body and I are uneasy strangers at best. I’ve been working on these issues for a long time and hope that maybe now at long last, I’m ready to make peace with my bod. We’ll see.

I’ve been walking regularly for over 20 years now, btw. Excellent for depression and my golden retriever loves it too, of course. We have some nice places to walk here, including a 7 mile mountain bike trail where he can chase deer and rabbits. For 30 seconds.

JL

Zuzu, I really love you for saying that there. I really do it made my day. Would you mind if I quoted that?