The engagement has been awesome so far! Excited to hear your thoughts on the piece, or pieces, you choose
On fat fetish
Gaining is the fetish that changes how we think about the male body
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/lifestyle/article/gaining-fetish
Feederism: Eating, Weight Gain, and Sexual Pleasure
On race and fat
BMI
https://elemental.medium.com/the-bizarre-and-racist-history-of-the-bmi-7d8dc2aa33bb
Fatphobia
https://www.dropbox.com/s/w3f75wpefna44p1/Fearing the Black Body.pdf?dl=0
On dismantling thin privilege
https://www.dropbox.com/s/r9f06lm0g8j0y1w/Reflections on Thin Privilege and Responsibility.pdf?dl=0
Week one - Identity
Week two - Capitalism, gender, media and health at every size
As a reminder, these fall in the area of Fat Studies and there’s some norms you should be aware of:
- “fat” is taken as a neutral descriptor, think of it as reclaiming the word.
- “obese” arbitrarily medicalises fatness and Others fat people
:sankara-salute:
Again, fat person here. Being fat is not healthy, physically or mentally. No we shouldn’t attack or criticize people for being fat, but acting like being fat is perfectly fine is wrong. BMI might not be a good system, but that doesn’t mean the idea behind it isn’t.
“obese” arbitrarily medicalises fatness
Fatness is medical. Fatness comes with a host of health problems. To say it’s not medical is some anti-science bullshit.
I don’t think I can respond directly to your first point, as I think we are working from very different premises. I think being fat is normal and okay, and you think that it is inherently unhealthy. I recommend the Health at Every Size reading from last week if you would like to understand where I’m coming from.
and I think you can just as easily say having a body is medical. The emphasis in my phrasing is arbitrarily, it’s difficult to say what is obese and what isn’t, as body fat is distributed differently across races, body types etc.
I know being fat is inherently unhealthy. I am unhealthy and so is every fat person I know. “Healthy at Every Size” is complete bs.
You might be able to keep yourself relatively healthy for your weight, but being fat is still inherently unhealthy. Whatever you do to stay “healthy” while fat would be easier to accomplish and work even better while at a normal weight.
I managed to lose ~50 pounds from my walk to work over the course of 2019 (still fat though, and that loss stopped in 2020 for obvious reasons). Even without changing my diet at all, I started feeling much better because of it.
it’s difficult to say what is obese and what isn’t, as body fat is distributed differently across races, body types etc
Yeah it’s difficult to set a hard bottom line for obesity, and it can differ greatly depending on a number of factors, but that doesn’t mean obesity isn’t real or that it’s some completely arbitrary thing that should just be dismissed.
just to let you know, losing weight with your walk to work is something that is completely compatible with Health at Every Size. Like HAES doesn’t say you can’t lose weight, but that you should stay active, eat intuitively and losing weight can be a side effect of those healthier choices.* It’s hard for me to imagine that focusing on being healthy, rather focusing on decreasing your weight is complete bs.
From what I can tell, I think you are mistaken that the “Health” in HAES is a noun rather than a verb
edit: I meant * you should pursue staying active, eating intuitively rather than pursuing losing weight itself
All of those things inherently lead to losing weight. I wasn’t healthy at almost 300 lbs, even when I started walking. It was only when my weight was significantly lower that I started feeling better (still not healthy, but healthier than 50 lbs ago). Getting healthier coincides with weight loss. If you aren’t losing weight, you aren’t getting much healthier.
If you want to reduce some social stigma around being fat, that’s fine. Don’t treat people like shit or blame them for their health problems or whatever. But to insinuate that you can stay 300 lbs and be healthy is complete bullshit. So the social goal should be to replace negative stigma with positive social encouragement and support towards losing weight and becoming healthier. Not to just act like being fat is perfectly fine in every possible way, including medical.
There’s a bit of a tricky situation though, in that just because you lose weight doesn’t automatically mean you are healthier. Anorexic women are praised by society for their unhealthy eating habits, and fat anorexic women:
Erin Harrop, a researcher at the University of Washington, studies higher-weight women with anorexia, who, contrary to the size-zero stereotype of most media depictions, are twice as likely to report vomiting, using laxatives and abusing diet pills. Thin women, Harrop discovered, take around three years to get into treatment, while her participants spent an average of 13 and a half years waiting for their disorders to be addressed.
The HAES movement moves the focus from losing weight, as dieting is a strong predictor of eating disorders:
In a large study of 14– and 15-year-olds, dieting was the most important predictor of a developing eating disorder. Those who dieted moderately were 5x more likely to develop an eating disorder, and those who practiced extreme restriction were 18x more likely to develop an eating disorder than those who did not diet. Golden, N. H., Schneider, M., & Wood, C. (2016). Preventing Obesity and Eating Disorders in Adolescents. Pediatrics, 138(3). doi:10.1542/peds.2016-1649
Staying active and eat intuitively do lead to losing weight, but there are many ways to lose weight and harm your body. By focusing on health, you avoid a lot of these pitfalls
None of what you said is consistent with being “healthy at every size”. Of course how you lose weight can be unhealthy, but again, someone who is 300 lbs is not healthy and will never be healthy unless they lose weight. Healthy at every size insinuates it’s possible to stay 300 lbs for the rest of your life and be perfectly healthy. It’s just not.
You’ve created a strawman of HAES and you’re asking me to defend it, please read the article from last week https://www.dropbox.com/s/ybfbkqak4wtu3wp/What is “Health at Every Size”%3F.pdf?dl=0