WARNING: THIS IS VERY TRIGGERING.
If you were wondering about my stance on diets etc, you can read this: http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2009/08/open-letter-fat-positive.html
this whole thing reeks of classism and total disregard for science and is little more than a pile of fence-walking bullshit, but THIS is the thing that pissed me off the most:
“We do understand that fatness is a health concern — and we think it should be treated as such, as a public health issue.”
Being fat is NOT a public health issue. A lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables and the extremely skewed way that the government gives subsidies to farmers is a fucking public health issue. The pharmaceutical industry being based on money instead of on an actual investment in public health is a fucking public health issue. A lack of funding to schools to provide healthy meals is a fucking public health issue. People going without health care is a fucking public health issue. But being fat is NOT a public health issue because being FAT and being HEALTHY rarely have anything to do with each other.
We received a message about this from berry-go, and before I had the chance to read it and come up with a reply (silly real life, always getting in the way of my Very Important Bloggings) this had popped up on my dash. While I mostly agree with Alithea’s commentary, I do want to add a couple of things, especially with regard to weight as a health problem and weight loss as a solution to a health problem.
Weight gain CAN be a symptom of actual illness, and the current obesity crisis booga booga media hype encourages EVERYONE to TOTALLY IGNORE THAT. Maybe if, when I’d gone to my ob/gyn for a three-months-on-birth-control checkup and she’d said “Hey, you’ve gained five pounds. You’ve had mental health issues in the past. Is everything OK?” I wouldn’t have relapsed quite so epically as I did. Buuut she fat-shamed me instead. And there are far, far worse stories.
I think the same thing holds true at the population level. Our chemical environment has changed drastically over the past several decades, and it’s not unreasonable to think that maybe something we’re being exposed to is related to an increase in average weight. But whether that means anything else about our health is changing is anyone’s guess, because all the doctors and the media are focused on is how disgusting and lazy those disgusting, lazy fatties are. Never mind that if the media and those doctors weren’t so lazy, they’d see some pretty convincing precedent for the idea that fatness is heritable and mostly controlled at the cellular & molecular levels.
Beyond the “public health concern” thing, there is a lot going wrong in Greta Christina’s original post. She sets up & knocks down a lot of straw fat acceptance activists, which is beyond annoying. She oversimplifies and misrepresents a lot of FA arguments—for example, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone claim definitively that “fat poses zero health problems.” I have seen the argument that correlation does not equal causation and most studies only demonstrate correlation between things like fat and cardiovascular disease or fat and diabetes, so there’s no way to prove that fat causes cardiovascular disease or diabetes. There are a lot of underlying factors that could cause both fatness and the diseases with which it has come to be associated. There are also many reasons to be somewhat skeptical of scientific studies regarding obesity, since they’re often funded by pharmaceutical companies attempting to develop diet drugs, and they’re often conducted by people who have probably grown up in a world full of fat hatred. The unconscious biases of a scientist can play out in his or her results in pretty extreme ways.
She claims to rely on scientific research, but her understanding of that research seems to be coming directly from the popular press, which is sloppy; citations for studies regarding the failure rate of dieting can be found at the bottom of this post by Marilyn Wann, for example, and Junkfood Science is another great resource.
But I think at the heart of it, she feels alienated by the way some FA activists have responded to her decision to attempt to lose weight because of her knee problems. And in between all of the straw FA activists—seriously, the second half of that post is like a round of bowling—she actually makes a really good point about respecting the bodily choices and autonomy of others. I don’t think that we, as a movement, will be successful unless we can practice what we preach. This is tricky, but I think diet-shaming is really akin to slut-shaming in the sense that yeah, participating in voluntary, intentional weight loss does kiiiind of contribute to the diet culture, but she probably wouldn’t be dieting if she hadn’t been inundated with fat hatred her whole life. If she thinks that losing weight will really help with her knee problem, and she really thinks she can lose weight, I think that’s her prerogative.
(Although, I guess since I’m calling her out for a lot of stuff here, I might as well call attention to the ableism in the graphic reading “I’ve got a black belt in crazy.” Really, really not okay, especially considering how many fatties do have mental health issues. I guess she may be using it in a reclamatory way, but that’s not how it reads to me.)
This is great, thank you. Bodily autonomy is awesome but so is a consideration of different factors like ability and class. It is not up to me what others do with their bodies but speaking for my own, one with disability and on meds that induce weight gain… it’s not as simple as dieting to lose weight. In fact, weight loss might not even factor into my own individual “health”.
For those who feel as if Gabi might be getting dog piled, please understand that we are discussing the original post. People can and do believe in different things but when other people try to tell me what to do with my body that’s not cool.