LonieMc

So I’m going to take this opportunity to plug a recently published FAT POSITIVE review article about weight and health! 

The article is called “Weight-loss is not the answer: A well-being solution to the “obesity problem.”   (this link takes you to a full-text version). 

Seriously, this paper is great and I highly recommend that everyone read it. I mean it. Read this article! 

It is very short and reader-friendly and tackles most of the arguments concerning weight and health that we all hear about in the media. It also cites a wide range of research from diverse academic fields, so it’s a good primer for people interested in learning more about this important topic from a fat-positive perspective.

It’s also a good article to pass along to co-workers, friends, or family who are still invested in weight-loss culture because it gently undermines most of the premises of weight-loss culture using “OMG SCIENCE!!”… and who can argue with that?

Enjoy!

“Fat” is not a dirty word — and #FatGirlsCan proves it

I think that society viewing thinness as more attractive is part of thin privilege.

Personally, I think that fat hatred has taken over our societies because it let’s us practice old prejudices in the guise of “for someone’s health.” Women, you don’t need to get an education or move up the corporate ladder -- you need to focus on looking “right”! People of Color, we can’t discriminate against you because of your skin color, but we can not hire you because you “don’t fit our corporate image.” Older folks, ageism may be illegal, but saying your body is too big let’s us not hire you anyway! Fat people who are disabled, you must be disabled because you were too lazy to lose weight -- so we can ignore the ADA. Poor people, we don’t have to give you food anymore because that might make you fat. Etc. Fat prejudice has just let other illegal and immoral prejudices be practiced legally.

And that isn’t even touching on why prejudice exists in the first place -- can you say permission to exploit people? Or that getting folks to lose weight takes all of their time and energy so they don’t have time to question dominating forces. Or how focusing on fat folks gives us scapegoats for all kinds of things like healthcare costs and small airplane seats.

But what they really mean is to stop smiling. 

But what they really mean is to hide. 

But what they really mean is to stop existing.

But they don’t get to decide how you live.  

But they don’t get to decide who you are.

Be happy.  Feel things. Cry, laugh, love, and live. Kiss, hug, embrace yourself, and others. Eat, stay hydrated, take baths, and cuddle your pets. Take selfies, take group photos, take your time. Dance and sing and sleep in. Love only those who deserve it and love yourself even on the days you want to give up. Never stop caring and never stop fighting. Glorify every bit of yourself because you’re glorious.

Sending this out into the community, since my head is not in food stats at the moment.

McMichael, Lonie. Acceptable Prejudice? Fat, Rhetoric, and Social Justice. Pearlsong Press, 2013.

From Chapter 6: Is it Prejudice?

I often hear people suggest that by looking at a fat body they can tell how much a person eats, how much they exercise, and what kind of person lives in that body. People prejudge fat people. The Oxford English Dictionary defines prejudice as a “[p]reconceived opinion not based on reason or actual experience; bias, partiality; (now) spec. unreasoned dislike, hostility, or antagonism toward, or discrimination against, a race, sex, or other class of people.” Fat prejudice, stigma and oppression abound in our culture. Entire articles and books have been written detailing fat issues as a whole and numerous studies have been conducted detailing domination in many situations. In this chapter, I bring to light only a few of the most interesting and relevant statistics.

American society as a whole has preconceived negative attitudes – in other words prejudice – toward fat individuals based solely on their body size. In “Confronting and Coping with Weight Stigma,” Puhl and Brownell summarize the perceptions of fat individuals:

Negative stereotypes include perceptions that obese people are mean, stupid, ugly, unhappy, less competent, sloppy, lazy, socially isolated, and lacking in self-discipline, motivations, and personal control.

Because of the panic around childhood “obesity,” children experience a great deal of fat prejudice – often experiencing pressure or teasing from the adults who are supposed to protect them. Preschool aged children already have anti-fat bias, while those with a caregiver who have anti-fat attitudes have higher levels of anti-fat bias. As many as 25% of adolescents report weight-based teasing throughout their adolescent years by their peers, and 48% report teasing by both peers and family, with obese adolescents report significantly higher incidence of teasing. Overweight adolescents who are teased experience a greater risk of disordered eating thoughts and behaviors as well as psychological problems such as anxiety, low self-esteem, depression and anger says Libbey et al. And, most disturbing of all, prejudice toward fat children and teens appears to be growing, not diminishing. A recent study by Lumeng and others has shown that fat children are six times more likely to be bullied than children who are not fat.

Fat individuals also experience stigma. Erving Goffman, a sociologist writing in the 1960s, has defined stigma as “an attribute that is deeply discrediting.” Friedman, Ashmore and Applegate say that, for the fat individual, stigmatized experiences include the following:

Encountering physical barriers (e.g., not being able to find medical equipment in an appropriate size), people making unflattering assumptions toward the obese individual, being avoided, excluded, ignored because of weight, and receiving inappropriate comments from physicians.

Finally, fat individuals experience oppression. Merriam-Webster defines oppression as “unjust or cruel exercise of authority or power.” As I will show in the next few paragraphs, fat individuals are denied jobs and opportunities based on their body size alone.

Body size can affect income. Being fat can reduce a white female’s net worth significantly says Zagorsky in an article entitled “Health and Wealth: The Late-20th Century Obesity Epidemic in the U.S.” Puhl and Brownell found in 2001 that fewer “obese” employees are hired into high-level positions and fewer “obese” individuals are promoted. College students ranked “obese” individuals as “having less leadership potential, as less likely to be successful, and as less likely to be employed than normal-weight candidates” while assigning them lower starting salaries and considering them less qualified, according to a 2008 study by O’Brien, Latner, Halberstadt, Hunter, Anderson and Caputi . Interestingly enough, individuals with a BMI over 35 experienced higher levels of perceived mistreatment when they were of higher socioeconomic status, according to Carr, Jaffe, and Friendman. We can see that being fat can affect individuals’ opportunities in terms of both employment and wealth.

We also cannot ignore the fact that fat prejudice is tied up with classism. A fat person is more likely to be poor and lower class than their thinner counterparts, says nutrition professor Paul Ernsburger in The Fat Studies Reader. Ernsberger argues that fatness actually causes poverty, saying that “intelligent fat people were far more likely to end up living in poverty than intelligent thin people.”

Scholars have established that fat prejudice, stigma and oppression exist in a great quantity. This discrimination and prejudice has almost doubled between 1996 and 2006 and now rivals race and age discrimination a study by Andreyeva, Puhl and Brownell found. However, our society does not see this domination as an issue since fat people are expected to lose weight in order to overcome these concerns.

Andreyeva, T., Puhl, R., & Brownell, K. D. (2008). Changes in perceived weight discrimination among Americans, 1995-1996 through 2004-2006. Obesity, 16, 1129-1134.

Carr, D. S., Jaffe, K., & Friedman, M. (2008). Perceived Interpersonal Mistreatment Among Obese Americans: Do Race, Class,and Gender Matter? Obesity, 2(Supp. 16).

Friedman, K. E., Ashmore, J. A., & Applegate, K. L. (2008). Recent Experiences of Weight-based Stigmatization in a Weight Loss Surgery Population: Psychological and Behavioral Correlates. Obesity, 16(Supplement 2), S69-S74.

Goffman, Erving. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York, London and Toronto: Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Libbey, H. P., Story, M. T., Neumark-Sztainer, D., & Boutelle, K. N. (2008). Teasing, disordered eating behaviors, and psychological morbidities among overweight adolescents. Obesity, 16(Suppl 2), S24-29.

Lumeng, J. C., Forrest, P., Appugliese, D. P., Kaciroti, N., Corwyn, R. F., & Bradley, R. H. (2010). Weight Status as a Predictor of Being Bullied in Third Through Sixth Grades. Pediatrics, 125(6), e1301-e1307

O'Brien, K. S., Latner, J., Halberstadt, J., Hunter, J., Anderson, J., & P., C. (2008). Do antifat attitudes predict antifat behaviors? Obesity, 16, 87-92.

Puhl, R. M., & Brownell, K. D. (2006). Confronting and coping with weight stigma: An investigation of overweight and obese individuals. Obesity (14), 1802-1815.

A very, very few people can sustain major weight loss long term. They generally either have some disorder (allergies, intolerances, celiac, etc) that caused major weight gain, and they lose weight once it’s been treated; or they spend 20-30 hours a week exercising hard and have an extremely limited diet, essentially starving themselves permanently, and are lucky enough to have that work. Those are the people you see the stories about.

As for people you know, do they fit either of those profiles? How long have they kept the weight off? We often perceive people as having kept it off much longer than it’s actually been. The time frame for regain is, at most, 2-5 years.

I want you to do whatever you want. I want people to have the real facts, not just what the weight loss industry would have you believe, so that they can make truly informed decisions. I want people to make their own choices, I just want them to do so based on truth, not lies.

There are a lot of things that are a pain in the ass about being fat in this society, but all of them, all of them, come down to what society does to us. We are discriminated against constantly. That’s not the fault of being fat, that’s the fault of bigotry. I would rather work to change bigotry than make myself miserable forever by trying to change my body and failing and blaming myself. Choosing to stop that wasn’t giving up, for me, it was finally getting free of a cage.

Bigotry and discrimination are morally wrong. My body is not. I would rather work to change the thing that’s actually wrong.

You can do whatever the fuck you want, though.

I collect stories of people who have kept 50 lbs plus off a long time. Almost all of the people I have found were thin women who gained a large amount of weight during pregnancy. The two I have found who were not: 1) is on some serious psychotropics that keep her weight down, 2) had a major car wreck and is now in constant pain. For most people, pain tends to trigger weight gain, but it triggered weight loss in her.

Actually at first I was in denial. I’d read the studies, but didn’t want to believe it. I was maybe still holding onto the idea that I was a special weight-losing snowflake. And then when my doctor (!!!) said to me, “actually successful weight loss is going to be pretty impossible for you; it’s like less than 5% of people who can keep it off” — I was angry! I was so mad that he was such a debbie downer and wasn’t encouraging at all, didn’t have faith that *I*, the magical loser-of-the-weight could do it.

Then, you know, some bargaining probably happened. Very five stages of grief. But mostly I remember the mourning. How sad I was that this fantasy that I’d been sold my entire life was inaccessible. Dreams dashed. All hope, gone.

But you know? That was the first step.

Towards self-acceptance. Towards living a full, happy life that -wasn’t- put on hold until I had lost weight. It was the release I needed to put all that dieting energy towards more useful and beneficial things. Not only am I happier now, I’m healthier, and I enjoy fitness pursuits. (Your mileage may vary.)

And I am talking from an obese perspective, yet it never even occurred to me to either bring down others cause I didn’t want them to get “better” or “thinner” just cause I couldn’t do it, nor I expected society to suddenly change parameters, or worse, HEALTH OF THE HUMAN BODIES FOR HOW THEY HAVE BEEN THE LAST 200,000 YEARS (cause that’s how long homo sapiens sapiens have been around in our present form) cause it didn’t suit me.

A) HAES is not part of body positivity. There’s overlap between the movements, but it’s a separate thing with separate goals.

B) The goal of HAES is literally to help people be healthy. The societal definition of “health” is fucked up and ableist, and HAES continues to classify “health” as superior to any alternative, thereby positioning people who cannot be “healthy” as less-than people who can or are, and so it continues to be a problem in this context, but at least it has a more flexible definition of “health”. It’s not “giving up” on anything, it’s encouraging people to eat and exercise in ways that allow their bodies to operate optimally.

C) If you think that fat bodies are automatically unhealthy then you are not body positive, you little shit.

There are a lot of problems with HAES, and we should talk about them, but you have nothing legitimate, constructive, or informed to say about it.

You ignorant fucking squiddittle.

I will say that one of the things I like about HAES, as you mentioned MG, is that it encourages people to eat and exercise in ways that allow their bodies to operate optimally.  It’s about helping a person feel better, instead of meeting a line on the scale.  It’s a push back against the idea that in order to meet society’s definition of “healthy” you have to also meet society’s definition of “thin” (and idea which is complete and utter horseshit btw).  From my personal experience with it (maybe I just haven’t come across the ableists in HAES yet, lucky me! *starts to eye the HAES community nervously*), it’s all about individualization and working within your body’s unique parameters and towards your individual goals and needs.  Modification is a big (pardon the pun) part of it and that’s one of the reasons I like it.  There is not one, golden, set in stone plan.  It’s all about individualization for eating, exercising and wellness, which I love.  Person A’s goals is going to be wildly different from person B’s goals which will be different from person C’s goals, and all are embraced and supported in HAES (from what I’ve seen) and I think that’s great.  Certainly, as you noted, it’s a lot more flexible and it certainly is a lot better than the whole “get healthy thin or die trying” mantra in the thin-centric fitness world.

I’m sure there are horribly overtly ableist people in the HAES movement, because there are those people everywhere. It’s not the overt ableism that I’m talking about. It’s the implicit stuff, the failure to entirely reject cultural narratives about “unhealthy” people being bad for being “unhealthy”.

A lot of HAES people reject that for themselves and do better personally, but unfortunately HAES still exists within an ableist society and can’t get away from the ableist implications of the word “health”.

Making fat a moral affront to society contains an element of prejudice that we seldom acknowledge in the Western world: healthism. Robert Crawford, the originator of the term, explained healthism in the article “Healthism and the medicalization of everyday life” written in 1980:

Healthism represents a particular way of viewing the health problem, and is characteristic of the new health consciousness and movements. It can best be understood as a form of medicalization, meaning that it still retains key medical notions. Like medicine, healthism situates the problem of health and disease at the level of the individual. Solutions are formulated at that level as well. To the extent that healthism shapes popular beliefs, we will continue to have a non-political, and therefore, ultimately ineffective conception and strategy of health promotion. Further, by elevating health to a super value, a metaphor for all that is good in life, healthism reinforces the privatization of the struggle for generalized well-being.

In other words, as a society we have made it to where you are a “good” person if you are healthy and a “bad” person if you are unhealthy: a state of “health” is morally superior to a state of not being healthy. Since fat is seen as unhealthy, whatever a person’s actual state of health, fat people are therefore morally “bad.”

______

A very, very few people can sustain major weight loss long term. They generally either have some disorder (allergies, intolerances, celiac, etc) that caused major weight gain, and they lose weight once it’s been treated; or they spend 20-30 hours a week exercising hard and have an extremely limited diet, essentially starving themselves permanently, and are lucky enough to have that work. Those are the people you see the stories about.

As for people you know, do they fit either of those profiles? How long have they kept the weight off? We often perceive people as having kept it off much longer than it’s actually been. The time frame for regain is, at most, 2-5 years.

I want you to do whatever you want. I want people to have the real facts, not just what the weight loss industry would have you believe, so that they can make truly informed decisions. I want people to make their own choices, I just want them to do so based on truth, not lies.

There are a lot of things that are a pain in the ass about being fat in this society, but all of them, all of them, come down to what society does to us. We are discriminated against constantly. That’s not the fault of being fat, that’s the fault of bigotry. I would rather work to change bigotry than make myself miserable forever by trying to change my body and failing and blaming myself. Choosing to stop that wasn’t giving up, for me, it was finally getting free of a cage.

Bigotry and discrimination are morally wrong. My body is not. I would rather work to change the thing that’s actually wrong.

You can do whatever the fuck you want, though.

I collect stories of people who have kept 50 lbs plus off a long time. Almost all of the people I have found were thin women who gained a large amount of weight during pregnancy. The two I have found who were not: 1) is on some serious psychotropics that keep her weight down, 2) had a major car wreck and is now in constant pain. For most people, pain tends to trigger weight gain, but it triggered weight loss in her.

I’ve yet again gotten a Woman Within catalog with a bunch of size zero models looking ridiculous in plus size clothing. IT PISSES ME OFF!! They want my money but they hate my body so much that they can’t even provide pictures of someone half my size? It’s bad enough that plus-size models are size 8-12 (nowhere near my 26).

We have few enough options for shopping. We have to shop online. Now we have to look at skinny women in clothes made for rolls and curves?

Can we get a campaign going here? Please don’t shop at catalogs or online stores who use skinny women to model plus-size clothing. These stores include Roaman’s, Woman Within, Jessica London and Ulla Popken.

I know that we already don’t enough options.  But do we really want to give money to people who hate our bodies that much?

Mod response: I’m willing to stop shopping at places that use thin women as plus size clothing models. I know not all people have those options – Woman Within, JL and Roaman’s are some of the most reliable places to get size 28+ clothing. But for those who can afford to, it would be great to start a campaign. Anyone wiling to take up the Twitter helm for this, and think of a hashtag? If you are, let us know when you start posting and we’ll promote you.

Thin privilege is being included in a major workshop on oppression and privilege: http://www.uccs.edu/knapsack/institute-curriculum-and-faculty.html.

I’ve given them both books. The decision to exclude fat is not for lack of documentation.

“I forwarded your message and article on to our Lead Learners at KI and we are always interested in learning more and expanding our knowledge base. Some of us use this form of discrimination within the larger context of gender oppression. Many of us teach body image and how appearance reinforces and perpetuates misogyny and sexism in our culture. In terms of our KI curriculum, we cannot possibly cover all forms of discrimination, but we do our best to provide a framework for understanding the dynamics of privilege and oppression so participants can take that framework and apply it to a myriad of other social identities.”

Thin privilege is being included in a major workshop on oppression and privilege: http://www.uccs.edu/knapsack/institute-curriculum-and-faculty.html.

I’ve given them both books. The decision to exclude fat is not for lack of documentation.

The books are pretty accepting of all bodies and are vehemently against dieting and purposeful weight loss. They focus on loving your body, full permission to eat, and intuitive eating.

The discussion boards try to be fat accepting and not focused on weight loss, but do not always succeed. In fact, I found fat acceptance through them, but not directly. Someone said, "this is not a fat acceptance forum, this is a size acceptance forum." I thought "Dang! I want fat acceptance" and then went and found some FA blogs.

I decided that one of my New Year’s resolution is to be more healthy; I don’t exercise hardly at all right now, and I’m not really aware of what I’m eating. I don’t really care that much about weight loss; I just want to be healthy. 

I decided I really wanted to buy an exercise bike, because I’ve always loved biking but I can’t really bike where I live in the winter because it’s so cold and snowy. But all the exercise bikes I can find won’t support my weight, and the ones that do cost upwards of $1,000.

So, I decided instead to buy some exercise DVDs, but even those are all made up of people who are already thin—and that’s not super encouraging, and a lot of the things they do on those (from previous experience) I can’t do because I’m not thin. Finally, I found a yoga DVD specifically for fat people, but it was a hell of a search and it’s so discouraging. Everyone is always yelling at the fatties that we need to exercise more, but they sure don’t make it easy.