Today I was conversing a bit on twitter with someone about the whole “fat acceptance” movement. Now, being a fatty (on my way to being an ex-fatty) I believe I can discuss this without anyone yelping about “discrimination.”
First, let’s take a look at what the “fat acceptance” movement says. You can find that over on their website. Some quotes:
Size Discrimination Consequences are Real!
- Creates medical and psychological effects
- Results in wage disparity
- Affects hiring and promotion
- Affects academic options and advancement
I would agree 100% with all of this. There is absolutely an issue with fat people getting decent medical care, being treated like human beings on the job, etc. I compare this to what people with mental illness used to suffer a lot more in the past (at one point being burned at the stake for “demon possession”) and the stigma they still suffer somewhat today. Doctors and nurses often do not even make an attempt to hide their disgust with the obese and the mentally ill. A fat person or a mentally ill person may have enormous intelligence and brain power, but that is overlooked in the workplace in many cases when someone finds out you are on psychiatric drugs or are obese.
Obesity is an illness. Just like mental illness is an illness. Just like cancer is an illness. And my primary issue with the “fat acceptance” movement is not any disagreement with what they say about the way fat people are treated by doctors or on the job, but the fact that they will not acknowledge that obesity is an illness which needs medical/health intervention.
If you are fat, you’ve taken some kind of abuse at one time or another. Insipid narcissistic idiots that can’t see beyond their own nose might tell you what they told me: “You belong in a concentration camp!” (totally real. i’ve been told that about my weight before) None of this abuse is ever helpful with losing weight. In fact, the more abuse someone endures for being obese, the more obese they get; which is why some doctors will give you SSRI anti-depressants (I happen to take Prozac myself) because the lower the serotonin in your brain, the more carb and sugar cravings you have. The more abuse you take, the more your brain chemistry goes out of whack and so forth. Prozac helps me laugh at the assholes while staying on the path to get this weight off. Your mileage may vary, but it helps me.
I’ll say it again: obesity is an illness. Obesity is not “laziness” or a “character flaw.” But it is an illness, and the people that have a fat person in their lives that they care about should be treating it like an illness and trying to help the fat person get healthy again. You wouldn’t abandon your spouse if they had cancer, would you? Once we begin to clearly see obesity for what it is, a chronic, debilitating illness, then we can actually get on the path to treating this monster. If you have an obese loved one, you must, YOU MUST, behave as if they have a grave illness, because they do.
Before I went through a million diets and scams to try to lose weight, I had the same opinion that a lot of people out there have about obesity, that it is a “character flaw.” And if my character is flawed and I’m just a piece of blubber, why even bother? It wasn’t until I fully accepted the fact that I have an illness that requires medical/health intervention that I began to lose weight, and keep it off.
The fat acceptance crowd is right about some things, and totally wrong about “fat people can be fat and healthy.”
5 Comments
Hi, I’m one of “those” fat acceptance people so you can probably guess what I’m going to say, but I’ll say it anyway.
I’m a healthy fat person. I exercise and I eat well and take care of myself and go to the doctor and all of my test results are normal. I weigh upwards of 350 pounds. How do you explain this? I know many other fatties who have similar stories.
I’ve been fat all my life and I totally get how ridiculously hard it is to live in the world as a fat person. Of course when the world is telling you there is something wrong with your body, you have two options. You can choose to change your body to go along with what the world is saying or you can chose to tell the world to F off and make your own decisions about the value of your own body. Obviously I chose to do the latter and, you know, it’s a process. Choosing to accept and love and take care of my body doesn’t mean I’m always comfortable with it or never feel too fat for the room or never have nagging thoughts about how I should change myself to fit into the world better. And I don’t have all the answers about this stuff either. It’s a personal choice and it helps to have people around you to help support that choice, just like dieting works better when you have people around you to help you stick with it.
So I guess my point is, fat acceptance is a choice that is working for me. I’m not saying it should work for everybody. What a person chooses to do with is or her fat body is his or her own decision, nobody else’s. Does the fat acceptance movement have to be wrong for your choices to be correct? If not, then why spend time and energy arguing against us?
Carrie, thanks for coming over and posting your thoughts on this.
I too am like you, obese, and every time i would see a doctor the first thing they wanted to do were the diabetes and blood pressure tests, because they were always sure, always soooo sure, that i had something wrong. And each and every time when my sugar and blood pressure came back normal, the look on the dr’s faces was always so classic… lol…. Jaw hitting floor kind of thing. Because, in their mind, me being 120lbs overweight, I should have something really wrong with me. Last time I saw the doc, before I started losing weight, she said to me, “my goodness, you are heavy but you have the blood pressure of someone that gets exercise, you must be getting exercise!?!?” Oh hell no doc. I sit on my ass all day. She couldn’t understand, and even checked my blood pressure and blood sugar a second time. LOL!!!
So in fact you are correct, some obese people never get the standard co-morbids of diabetes and high blood pressure.
But I am not free of co-morbids…. just the ones the doctors seem to get the most excited about. I have had severe GERD, digestive issues and arthritis related to my weight that are sometimes totally debilitating (before I started losing weight).
I think you are in denial if you are as heavy as you say you are, and believe that you are healthy. I mean to say that with love and respect.
And yes, I do believe in personal choice, although, obesity is not a personal choice, no one sets out to gain weight and become obese, it happens because obesity is an illness. Now, if an adult has cancer, and they choose not to get medical treatment for it, that doesn’t mean they don’t have cancer.
I don’t think that anyone should be discriminated against for an illness or disability. My objections to the “fat acceptance” movement are not the anti-discrimination activities, but the fact that they do not acknowledge obesity as an illness, something science has done for a long time.
So, if you believe that obesity is an illness–as you state here–then why are you also tacitly condoning those people who say that we’re obese because we don’t love them enough to lose weight?
I’ll tell you a little secret: I’m NOT one of those Fat Acceptance people. I think that in the face of the knowledge we have about obesity, and what causes it, we should still be striving to be healthy individuals. On that other site, I saw a lot of comments about sitting on our fat asses, eating McDonald’s, and how that’s causing our obesity–I do neither. My diet consists largely of fresh vegetables, grains, chicken breast two to three nights a week. And I get exercise. And I am still heavy–and there are a lot of people like me out there.
What I do think it means for we obese is that we should be setting our goals for health reasons, not “I want to weigh x number of pounds” and then beating ourselves up when it doesn’t happen, and when we can’t maintain it, and then we say “f it” and spiral back into a place of self-loathing. I think that if certain people didn’t go around screaming that it’s because we’re lazy and we don’t love them, and if certain industries didn’t beat it into our heads that we’re not thin because we are bad people and can’t control our eating, we could work to find better solutions for a real cure for obesity–which, knowing what is known now about how the body sends hunger signals, is likely to involve hormone therapy. This makes more medical sense than “you’re just fat because you like to eat”–the endocrine system controls just about everything in our bodies, from our sex drive to our body temperature to growth to our activity level–and, hunger. It’s as easy to willfully control hunger as it is to, say, change your temperature a few degrees by the sheer power of your mind.
It also makes sense because most naturally thin people don’t consciously regulate their food. They might think that it’s because they have awesome willpower, but in truth, their bodies just know when to stop. (I’ve never seen a person who doesn’t struggle with his or her weight measuring and weighing every bit of food they eat, and counting calories, the way that we have to, to stay their weight–have you?) Our bodies, for whatever reason, don’t know when to stop, and I think that is what needs to be addressed before we can have a shot at curing obesity.
GGG,
I haven’t condoned anything. In fact, I went over to their site to correct some BS about how obesity is like “addiction” and one needs “willpower” and so forth.
And actually, I see that site as more of a rant space for spouses, so yeah, people are going to say “ranty” things there to blow off steam. I really don’t care about that.
I care about health. And I think the FA movement is totally misguided when it comes to health. The FA movement is right about namecalling and discrimination and totally wrong about fat people being “healthy.”
that’s all.
I wanted to address this too.
You see, I am just like you. Even when I was at my biggest size, I hated fast food. I haven’t had fast food in years. I ate a pretty good diet… it was HOW MUCH good food I was eating. Portion size is everything. You can get fat on healthy food! One of my favorite healthy foods used to be whole grain olive bread dipped in massive amounts of olive oil. LOL.
You must take in less calories than you expend. There is no other way.