1. Health is not a moral issue. This means being healthy by an arbitrary government standard does not make you a good person. Being “unhealthy” by that same arbitrary standard does not make you a bad person. Health /= morals.
2. You don’t, no matter what your size, need to conform to the mainstream societal ideal of beauty to be a person worthy of respect, love, dignity, and all those other things we’re told are only really for the pretty people.
3. Fat is a feminist issue. If some feminists choose not to deal with it, well, I’m not entirely sure they are feminists.
4. Fat is a social justice issue. Yes, fat discrimination is just that serious.
5. Dieting is antithetical to Fat Acceptance. Sorry, but it’s true. Trying to get rid of fat is the opposite of accepting it. This is a political stance. Personally, I know many dieters and my love for them is not determined by their diet. Dieting conveys no special morality or virtue on a person. However, this blog is an explicitly political space. Dieters are welcome as everyone is. But diet talk is not.
6. I’ve not laid out my comments policy but it is thus: Don’t be an asshole. If you are an asshole, I’ll mark your comment as spam. Don’t come here just to promote your new whatever – I’ll just delete it. Spam comments piss me off.
7. There is no size limitation for Fat Acceptance. There is no, “Oh, she’s okay but I’m way too large!” There is no, “Oh, she’s so thin, what’s she doing commenting here?”
8. An important definition: Politics refers to the ways in which systems of people interact. It is not just about who is running for which office. If you think talking about fat politics is stupid, go somewhere else, please, and save us all a bunch of irritation and headaches.
31 Comments
5. Dieting is antithetical to Fat Acceptance. Sorry, but it’s true. Trying to get rid of fat is the opposite of accepting it. This is a political stance. Personally, I know many dieters and my love for them is not determined by their diet. Dieting conveys no special morality or virtue on a person. However, this blog is an explicitly political space
THANK YOU. Well said.
Fat is a feminist issue. If some feminists choose not to deal with it, well, I’m not entirely sure they are feminists.
Yes. I for one am tired of the fat hatred in most of the progressive political world, among people doing wonderful anti-racist and anti-homophobic and anti-classist work.
I especially needed to hear #s 1 and 2 today. Thank you. =)
Can I get an amen? Honestly, why do dieters want so much to be part of the fat acceptance movement, anyway? They have the rest of the known fucking universe.
Yes. I for one am tired of the fat hatred in most of the progressive political world, among people doing wonderful anti-racist and anti-homophobic and anti-classist work.
ABSOLUTELY. It’s like the obesity epi-panic is one of the few issues the progressive community as a whole swallows without any examination. In my opinion, it’s shameful. I’ve said it before, but it’s apropos here: the only time I’ve ever had someone explicitly confront me about my weight in public was at a moveon.org event.
Yee Ha!
Sounds like you’ve had a run of assholishness in your comments of late, TR. Sorry you have to deal with that shite. Glad for you that you wrote this.
YES YES YES YES YES. I can understand why people find it hard to let go of the FOBT, to be sure; what I do not understand, at all, is why they fail to grasp why “I did it/will do it so can you” or “you’re just jealous because I’m/she’s/he’s thin now and you’re not” or “my life is/will be so much better as a thin(ner) person” talk would get an extremely frosty reception in a fat-acceptance space.
I think it was Kate Harding who said something like it would be akin to going to LGBT boards and talking about how awesome PIV sex is and how much better you feel and how much more accepted you are by society when you’re having lots of it. Even if true, that’s not the place for it.
I just wanted to come and promote my new – oh, wait. Nevermind.
You make some excellent points. I enjoyed reading them
Hey, y’all, I am glad you are here, reading and participating and GETTING IT.
kmd, there’s just been a lot of stuff all over the internet lately that made me think now might be a good time to restate the basics. Kate gets all the good trolls, honestly.
Really, I don’t see many trolls – the exception is when I post pictures. Then they come out of the woodwork, it’s kind of amazing.
As for the promotional stuff…. It is SO transparent. Like, I don’t care if you guys post links to stuff – any regular reader is absolutely encouraged to link to something they saw or something they wrote that they want more people to see/read. I love that stuff! But when it is “Oh, thanks, you might also find my new weight loss site interesting”…. Yeah, no.
It’s funny, I absolutely don’t mind emails to me asking if I mind including a link in my sidebar. Sometimes I even say yes! But spam comments? RARGH!
Can I get an amen? Honestly, why do dieters want so much to be part of the fat acceptance movement, anyway? They have the rest of the known fucking universe.
Seriously, amen.
Also, TR, thanks for restating #1 today — I needed reminded. I’m looking back on the craziness yesterday and I realised that one of the arguments I got into was whether one can be fat and healthy. The argument I should have been getting into was “THERE IS NO MORAL IMPERATIVE TO BE HEALTHY. AND STOP USING THAT TO DISGUISE THE FACT THAT YOU JUST HATE FAT PEOPLE. AND OH GOD, SHUT UP.” That would have been funner *and* far more truthful than dancing round that elephant, for sure.
I heart you with my cholesterol-laden heart. Word to everything you said.
#7 is my favorite.
It reminds me all the time that fat acceptance is not directly about the -size- of the body. It’s actually about treating every body equally regardless of size, about seeing size as irrelevant.
–avid reader
“Dieting is antithetical to Fat Acceptance.”
I get what you’re trying to say, but I don’t think this is always true. I can see that dieting because you think thin is better or more attractive is antithetical to fat acceptance. But what if, just as a hypothetical, you had a joint condition that was being made worse by the weight you were carrying? Would deciding to lose some weight mean you also lost your fat acceptance cred? Surely it’s actually all in the attitude and the reasons, and not in dieting itself?
I don’t diet, I’m just asking.
Rebekka, here’s the thing: your hypothetical situation assumes that a) diets work and b) even if they don’t work, aren’t harmful.
So – while I’m not the Queen of Fat Acceptance – I wouldn’t regard someone dieting under those conditions to be really into FA. They could absolutely still participate, but their diet is still antithetical to Fat Acceptance.
There is no such thing, in my opinion, as dieting for your health. Diets are fucking AWFUL for your health. Doing positive, proactive things for your health is awesome – getting low-impact or no-impact exercise to strengthen your muscles and improve your general fitness is, in my book, always a good thing. But there is no state of perfect health, no moment of statis in which all of our bodies can be preserved if only we eat the right foods and do the right exercises.
A lot of joint problems, specifically, are also associated with aging. But no one is suggesting that people, you know, JUST STOP AGING (well, in some ways they are, culture-of-youth that we have, bleh) as we can’t actually do that.
Suggesting that someone diet for their health is about as realistic as suggesting someone age in reverse for their health. Suggesting it means that, on some level, the person has bought into the idea that diets work and that they are a magical cure-all.
Attitudes and reasons have a lot to do with HAES but, no, dieting ITSELF is antithetical to Fat Acceptance.
Another person chiming in to say thank you for putting words to my primal scream.
The sheer bloody-mindedness of people wanting to claim that the decisions they make about their body are “individual” and have nothing to do with outside pressures and are entirely *rational* responses is just boggling. I mean, I get–you like believing you’re a fully autonomous individual and it makes you nervous to think you’re socially constructed. Okay, I get that. But just. shut. *up*.
It’s like whole slews of women missed that whole “the personal is political” message the first couple of times it made the rounds.
But what if, just as a hypothetical, you had a joint condition that was being made worse by the weight you were carrying? Would deciding to lose some weight mean you also lost your fat acceptance cred? Surely it’s actually all in the attitude and the reasons, and not in dieting itself?
Rebekka, the point is that it doesn’t matter what your reasons are for trying to lose weight, because a) it doesn’t work and b) it causes lasting physical harm. You don’t up your chances by dieting “for your health” instead of vanity (?); they just don’t work. To talk about “deciding to lose some weight” as if it were a simple choice to make is to ignore a mountain of evidence and the lived experiences you can read all over the fatosphere of people who have tried decades of dieting and exercise and pills and WLS and god knows what else and found that it just doesn’t work. We don’t know how to make fat people permenantly thin.
If you can’t accept that, then on some subconscious level you still believe that being fat is a choice people make — because they could choose to lose some weight, couldn’t they? And that belief is very hard to reconcile with the thinking behind FA.
Also from http://bodychronic.blogspot.com/
Thank you for the first one. I’m tired of people questioning others’ morals regarding health. It’s just a sad state of affairs.
Also, on the dieting thing I agree. But I have to differentiate between choosing a new lifestyle choice for health reasons (such as not eating sugar because of diabetes or not eating gluten because of an allergy) with “dieting”) To me, dieting = setting a specific caloric, fat or other type of intake for a finite period of time for the specific goal (and sole goal) of weight loss.
Kim, I’d advise you to look at the 101 section linked to in the sidebar. Here, we define dieting as an intentional effort to lose weight through food restriction.
Dietary choices that are meant to manage a medical condition are different things entirely.
Also, “lifestyle choice” is such diet industry code for, you know, diet.
And SERIOUSLY, where are people getting the idea that not eating sugar because you are diabetic is a goddamn diet anyway? Kim, this isn’t your fault – I’ve just seen way too much “Oh, well, I don’t eat so and such because it makes me sick and now I don’t feel welcome in the fatosphere because bloggers say dieting is antithetical to fat acceptance” and it just smacks of created drama to me.
Absolutely. Most people in the fatosphere are very very careful to define exactly what they mean by “diet” when they say things like “diets don’t work”, either in the post itself or somewhere on the site. People (this isn’t aimed at you, Kim, just a general frustration) do not get to be offended because they don’t exercise reading comprehension.
Also, TR, I’ve just posted something on BFD that contained a line about dieting to eradicate fat being the opposite of accepting it, which I’m pretty sure is verbatim something I’ve read on here, but I hit “submit” before I realised I was quoting you. So in case you see it and think “wait a minute…”, I’m aware that way of putting it is all yours
. And I will reference it as such in future.
“Rebekka, the point is that it doesn’t matter what your reasons are for trying to lose weight, because a) it doesn’t work and b) it causes lasting physical harm.”
“Also, on the dieting thing I agree. But I have to differentiate between choosing a new lifestyle choice for health reasons (such as not eating sugar because of diabetes or not eating gluten because of an allergy) with “dieting”)”
“Here, we define dieting as an intentional effort to lose weight through food restriction.”
“Dietary choices that are meant to manage a medical condition are different things entirely.”
So if I cut out gluten and sugar because of diabetes and a gluten intolerance, and just happen to lose some weight, that’s fine and dandy, but if I cut them out with the *intention* of losing weight because my joints are suffering, then it won’t work, it will permanently ruin my health, and I suddenly hate all fat people?
Strange logic.
Rebekka, for a non dieter, you seem very interested in protecting the status of dieting.
If you need to restrict your sugar intake because of a medical condition, do so absolutely. Restricting your sugar will, hopefully, manage your blood sugar successfully. What it will not do is guarantee weight loss. But, since you aren’t restricting your sugar intake to lose weight anyway, it won’t matter. You are reaching for an attainable goal – managing your blood sugar.
Restricting your sugar with the goal of losing weight loss will also not guarantee weight loss. But participating in that never-ending rollercoaster of dieting WILL do damage both emotional and physical.
No one knows how to make fat people thin. It is not so simple as “well, I will restrict my sugar and be slender!” if it were, Rebekka, everyone would be doing it. And everyone would be getting and staying thin.
“No one knows how to make fat people thin. It is not so simple as “well, I will restrict my sugar and be slender!” if it were, Rebekka, everyone would be doing it. And everyone would be getting and staying thin.”
It’s impossible to “make fat people thin”, as that suggests someone waving around a magic band and *pop*, thinness. It *is* possible for a fat person to become thin through their own hard work, often times through changing their lifestyle and diet (as in: what someone eats). Magical diets which last for five days and let you eat only, I dunno, cauliflower, are destined for failure. Of course, these conscious *lifestyle* choices are not easy, nor are they obligatory to make, and I completely and wholeheartedly agree that everyone, no matter how big or small or wide, deserves the same respect.
I agree that fat is not a moral issue and that you can be happy and healthy at any size, but I really can’t accept the position that you can’t change your weight if you want to. I’ve been on the chubby side and on the leaner side and I can honestly say I felt much better without dragging around all that extra weight. (And I don’t crash diet cause it doesn’t work.)
betarraga, it doesn’t matter if you call it a diet or a lifestyle choice. We aren’t just talking about crazy fad diets – though those will wreck your health in super special ways.
“Lifestyle choices” are still diets. If that floats your boat, go for it. But it sounds like, surprise of all surprises, even with your lifestyle choice the weight came back and you are, in your words, chubby again. This happens because the work that has to be done to lose weight is, by and large, unsustainable.
I’m leaving your comment because you are not an asshole and you are not saying we are all going to die of Diabeetus. But this isn’t a space for the diet debate. Check out the research. Read and believe it, believe your own lived experience, or not.
End of story.
I didn’t realize my comments would spark such a debate. I stand by them, nevertheless, but I just find it interesting.
I agree that making a necessary medical change is not the same as a diet, but unfortunately there are a lot of people in the fat acceptance and health at any size movements that decry such decisions.
And if your joints are hurting, you probably have a joint problem. I can tell you this, from my entire life of being fat that not all my joints hurt–just those that I’ve injured along the way from being a clutz (which is wholly unrelated).
TR–I completely agree that “lifestyle choice” has been coopted or coined by the diet industry to be just another word for diet, but I haven’t come up with an alternative term yet for what I meant. It’s sad that every day language has been so overzealously co-opted to be used as ammunition against us.
Rebekka–You say “So if I cut out gluten and sugar because of diabetes and a gluten intolerance, and just happen to lose some weight, that’s fine and dandy, but if I cut them out with the *intention* of losing weight because my joints are suffering, then it won’t work, it will permanently ruin my health, and I suddenly hate all fat people?” Yes, diets will permanently ruin your health. I can name hundreds of people that I personally know that this has happened to. As I stated above, your joints suffering is a seperate issue from being fat. I know it has been used so many times as some sort of excuse given by medical professionals for people to lose weight, but honestly not only does it not work, but it ignores the foundational problem which is joint related. For example, I have two knees–one of them I injured and I will have pain on. The other is usually fine unless I engage in really strenuous activity that is out of the norm (I’m talking new yoga positions or something). That is a joint problem–it’s not from me being fat, it’s from having a bum joint. And the medical profession is so careful not to deal with fat people’s actual health issues by just brushing them all off with a broad brush because they consider us “overweight” or “obese”. If they dealt with the problem itself they’d be likely to find a solution.
re: joints–I can second the ‘joint problems don’t equate with weight gain’ chorus –my serious joint problems started at the BOTTOM of my “non-diet” diet (doctor told me to cut down on carbs and lose weight for the PCOS…) . I was fine at my heavyest weight (the first time around), but when I was back down, I wore shoes that put me two-three inches off the ground (the difference between barefoot and Dansko shoes), and I sprained my ankle four times in seven weeks. Compensating for the weakened ankle (and the fact that one leg is now slightly longer than the other) put stress on my knees and spine. Go figure. Now I’m back up near my highest weight again, and my knees are better (thanks, physiotherapists!) and my ankle is better, but still weak. My back is the only one that’s gotten worse, through various non-weight reasons, and lack of physical therapy since the first injury.
re: what to call food restrictions for other reasons than weight loss– Dr. Peggy Elam (of the Health at Every Size radio show http://www.healthateverysize.info/) differentiates between weight loss diets and therapeutic diets. My only issue with that is that doctors (every doctor I’ve had in the past eight years, for example.) prescribe weight loss diets as though they’re therapeutic diets. Even when (as the latest endocrinologist I’ve seen does) they insist that it’s ‘not a diet, I don’t want you to diet. I just want you to follow these restrictions and lose weight.’ And they can be pretty arbitrary restrictions. White flour pasta is ok, but whole-grain flour cracker-bread is not. *boggle*
With food allergies, I just call them food allergies. As in, “I can’t eat nuts, I’m allergic to them.” For a diabetic trying to control blood sugar (hi, Mom!), why not say that? Instead of talking about a ‘diet’, talk about controlling blood sugar. Or, and this just occured to me, and I think I’ll adopt it, if there are foods that bother you for whatever reason (blood sugar, allergies, PCOS, IBS, whatever), why not just say that you don’t eat them because they don’t agree with you? It doesn’t tell people what problem/disease you have if you don’t want them to know, and it’s the truth.
I feel like I’ve rambled a little and maybe gotten off the topic… If so, I apologize.
Hey, chiming in a little later than everyone else, and slightly off topic by now:
My mum was diagnosed with diabetes last year, and we’ve made (as a family, I still live at home, with my parents and my younger siblings) what I personally called a lifestyle change (sort of). We’ve switched over to Low GI foods (pasta, with tomato sauce and not creamy sauce) (and MULTIGRAIN BREAD
Crapbuckets, that last comment was me, but accidentally hit submit too soon!
I was saying Multigrain bread, which is sooooooo fine by me because it’s WAY more delicious. We’re just trying to eat healthier, not to lose weight, but just to eat healthier in general.
I mean, my mother has lost weight as a result (mostly because she’s upped her exercise too). I haven’t, at least not much, but I’m not fussed.
… I’ve sort of forgotten what I was saying… *rereads* I guess according to some people it counts as a diet, but I’m not sure in this situation if you would. Mostly we’re trying to support my mum (and it makes it easier to only have one set of dinners, etc).
Also, RT, I think I’m going to write out #1 and put it in my uni diary. Sometimes I (and other people) really really need to be reminded of this.
“, but I really can’t accept the position that you can’t change your weight if you want to. ’ve been on the chubby side and on the leaner side …” – betarraga
The thing is that you cannot extrapolate from your personal experience. Like you, I find it relatively easy to change my weight. That does not make us typical examples. I smoke regularly and yet I can just “skip” a day without cravings. I normally need about 30-45 minutes to get to sleep. My hair is fine and soft.
From *none* of these stupid little facts can I gain any insight into what other people’s lives are. And of course from none of these factoids should I get any kind of moral standpoint from which I judge other people for not doing or not being the same as me (not saying you are doing that).
I’m not “defending dieting”, I’m actually trying to get my head around what you’re all arguing – part of how one does that is by working out where the boundaries are of what you’re talking about.
It seems to me that the definition of “diet” is problematic – it doesn’t actually make sense that if you cut out sugar to try to lose weight that’s a “diet” and your health will be ruined, but if you do it to control blood sugar problems that’s not a “diet” and it’s just part of being healthy. If you’re talking about the *attitude* behind one being unhealthy and the *attitude* behind the other being healthy, then that I get. But arguing that the same physical action is going to have two different health consequences based on the motivation behind it? Not logical.
My personal view is that the way you’re defining diet is problematic, because people outside the fat acceptance movement use it differently. “A healthy diet” is not necessarily constructed as being about weight loss by everyone in the world, but you’re constructing “diet” to mean solely restricting your eating with the aim of losing weight. I think you need to specify that you mean “weight loss diet” and to specify that what’s harmful is restricting your overall intake of food or calories because you don’t think your weight is acceptable.
And I don’t actually have any major health problems, certainly not diabetes.
Rebekka, diet is defined in a specific way for our purposes. I’m sorry if you don’t like that but it isn’t going to change. It’s clearly stated and I’m not going to debate it. OF COURSE it can mean other things. So, no, I DON’T need to specify “weight loss diet” every time because that definition is already clearly given.
As for your health issues – no one has said that you have any. You proposed a hypothetical and we went with it, too. Also, having diabetes is not a fate worse than death so I don’t actually appreciate your tone when you say “certainly not diabetes” as though it is beyond the realm of the possible that you have it.
As for the rest – restricting your sugar intake for the sole purpose of losing weight when your body does not have a problem processing sugar IS going to have a different physical affect than restricting your sugar when your body cannot process it. Come ON.