- hates on individual dieters
- tells people they should eat more (or any) “junk food”
- tells people not to change the way they eat
- denies that if you wish to make healthy ‘lifestyle’ choices, there are some choices that are healthier than others (although this varies by individual needs)
- tells people that changing their lifestyle is bad or a waste of time
- claims that no one has lost weight, ever
- says that allegiance to a movement trumps bodily autonomy
I’m kind of sick of people saying that fat acceptance does this stuff.
I’ve been seeing more and more about the clash between fat acceptance and the rest of the world lately, and I’ve been looking at the conflicts and seeing where they come from. There are flaws in both sides—and they mostly come from fear.
I think FA bloggers, as a group, tend to be really fervently enthusiastic. We’re excited and we’re angry and we’re loud. I, personally, am excited and angry and loud. That comes from two places. On the one hand, it has been such a tremendous relief to stop denying my lived experience and to receive affirmations in response. Diets don’t work for me. They worked for me, poorly, for awhile, and then I got so good at dieting that I probably should have been diagnosed with anorexia, but I wasn’t, because I was still fat, and then they pretty much stopped working altogether.
Finding FA, reading Kate Harding say that diets don’t work for her, diets don’t work for lots of people, you are not alone, was SO EXCITING. Because diets don’t work for me, and diets don’t work for my mother or any of her friends in such a profound way that I have trouble understanding how they could work for anyone. And dieting was such a profoundly horrible experience for me that I don’t understand how anyone engages in it voluntarily. This is probably colored by my relationship with food, which has been really profoundly dysfunctional for as long as I can remember. So I was really excited when I found out I could stop and the world wouldn’t end. And when that happened—I enjoyed vegetables for the first time in my life. So I’m excited, because it turns out BROCCOLI IS DELICIOUS.
I’m also ANGRY, because people have been denying my lived experience so fervently for my whole life that I denied it too. I was brainwashed into lying to myself and convinced that I was just defective, just lazy and weak, and it never even occurred to me that maybe I was just meant to be fat and maybe—just MAYBE—that didn’t mean that the bullies would never leave me alone, that I would never have friends or a date, that I would die alone and smelly and sad. I have been shaped by my interactions with my food, my body, and the diet culture. I spent a long time being sick and sad and afraid and I am FUCKING DONE WITH IT. PLUS, a lot of what we are saying has been said for a very long time, and we are sick of not being heard.
I’m also terrified. I am still, after discovering FA very nearly three years ago, terrified that someone is going to come along and take it all away, and convince me again that being fat IS terrible and I WILL never be loved as long as I’m fat and my only option is to yo-yo diet until I hit the deathfat threshold (which I think is somewhere between 10 and 30 lbs. away, for me) and get WLS and have horrible stinky farts and endless vomiting forever. I’m aware that this is not entirely rational.
I am aware that this basically boils down to the “tone argument.”
But.
Not only are we saying things very loudly, but what we are saying is very hard to hear.
We’ve all been receiving messages about the inferiority of fat people and the superiority of thin people since we were old enough to understand language. I posted yesterday about how fat acceptance can be difficult for those of us who are fat. In order to fully accept my fat, I had to wrestle with a lot of really difficult and painful childhood memories, and reinterpret them in ways that were really pretty unfavorable for my loved ones, and it sucked. That’s a painful process. For some people, I think fat acceptance is just so shocking and so painful that it can be difficult to understand the finer points.
I can see how the enthusiastic nature of a lot of fat acceptance bloggers (myself included) could be read as hating on individual dieters, or as telling people that changing their lifestyle is bad or a waste of time. I have seen posts that encourage eating more “junk food” if you want to, in the context of the moral neutrality of food. I can see how you could read Kate Harding’s Diets Don’t Work as saying “no one has ever lost weight, ever,” and especially if you were still clinging to your fantasy of being thin and really, really invested in losing weight.
Because we’re all so, so excited and angry about it, we’re being so, so loud, and what we’re saying is so, so terrifying.
So I get frustrated, too, definitely, when people mischaracterize the movement and spew bigotry and generally just don’t get it.
But then I think about what they must be feeling, and mostly I just feel bad for them.
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I have never read a post by a fat acceptance blogger that does any of the following:
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