It’s on YouTube, and it’s awesome.
Curtsy: Cool Beans. As Bean says, Joy Nash, I love you!
Also, check out the term paper on “Fat and Oppression” she wrote a few years ago. There’s some especially interesting stuff in light of the discussions of “oppression” we’ve been having here recently. And also this factoid:
FAT!SO? author, Wann, cites a study reported in the International Journal of Obesity stating that “a whopping 95 percent of the people who lose weight on diets gain back every pound within three years… Other researchers have found failure rates for diets as high as 98 percent.” But what’s really astonishing is that, as Poulton explains, “we blame the 95-98 percent failure rate of diets on dieters instead of applying basic cause-and-effect logic” (84). Success is practically a freak occurrence, and yet we still see dieting as a plausible option for losing weight and “changing lives.”
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Yay for Joy Nash, I’m stable at 205 lbs. and I enjoy my life. I eat what I like and I am strong enough to take care of myself. I am not going to give up life so that clothing manufacturers can justify ignoring me, I will find the ones that don’t and give them my business. I gave up hiding my weight when I realized that the diet industry was just another bunch of hacks trying to scam money out of my pocket.
Awesome! Thanks for the posting Amp!
A few years ago I needed to lose about 40 pounds. “Needed” means that I wanted to go on a backcountry trip, and there were height/weight restrictions imposed by the outfitter. At 6’2″, I had to get down to 256 pounds or I would not be allowed to go out on the trip.
It never occurred to me to take up a “diet”; Atkins, etc. Diets don’t work. At least, not by themselves, and not ones that have some kind of imbalance. What I did was to a) stop eating a lot of fats, b) stop eating simple sugars, c) stop eating much after about 6:30 PM, d) have breakfast (usually shredded wheat or oatmeal and skim milk), e) eat a lot less of everything, and f) do cardiovascular exercise at a reasonably strenuous level for 45 minutes at least 3 or 4 times a week.
It took about 6 months, but I lost the weight. I still exercise, but not quite as much. I’m not as careful about what I eat, so I’ve gained about 1/2 of it back. The key is, if I eat whatever I want and don’t exercise, I’ll get to about 300 pounds. Based on how I feel when I’m at that weight and how I move, etc., I don’t think I’m nearly as healthy as when I was at 255 – 260.
Where am I going with this? Ask yourself if your weight keeps you from doing things you want to do. Ask yourself if you feel healthy. Understand that your weight is at the point it is in part because of how you live your life, and that if you want to lose weight you’ll have to make a permanent change in that. Finally, look at a “diet” and ask yourself if you can commit to doing that permanently. Because that’s what it’ll take to keep off the weight you lost while you were on that diet. And ask yourself (or ask a doctor!) if that diet is healthy and will lead to other complications.
I do note that there are other reasons why someone would be at the weight they are. Someone else who eats and exercises like me might not lose much weight. Others might lose a lot more. The fact that one’s metabolism has a lot to do with how much you weigh is also a factor in considering whether you can or should try to lose weight and how much, but it’s also worth asking whether or not that means you shouldn’t try at all.
Why would I want to ask myself these questions? They really only make *other* people happy. People really are horrified that a fat person might not even *think* about losing weight.
Aieeeee!
I mean really. I’d rather enjoy a stroll along a mountain path in all my glorious fattitude than have to deal with a uber-guide who doesn’t want my fat ass slowing down the group. Of course, I’ll see more. Hear more.
And, I’d be happy. Like the fat-ass, smiling Buddha.
Or the cat with the canary.
No, Qgrrl, that’s not at all my point. That’s why I gave the example. I didn’t lose weight because I wanted someone else to find me more attractive or socially acceptable. I lost weight because it was keeping me from doing something I wanted to do. If I had tried to go on that trip weighing 295 lbs. I can tell you now (after having gone on it and a few since then) that I wouldn’t have slowed the group down; I wouldn’t have been able to make it at all.
A “travel day” of the trip would consist of something like this:
Get up, get packed, cook and eat breakfast, pack the canoe.
Paddle 10 Km in about 3 hours.
Pick up the 75 lb. canoe and carry it 1/2 mile and over a 100 foot elevation change over large rocks and then through root-filled mud.
Set down canoe, go back across the trail, pick up the 60 lb. equipment pack, and carry it across the trail to the canoe.
Paddle another 10 Km in about 3 hours.
Do another portage, about 1/4 mile this time.
Paddle another 5 Km. Set up tent and tarp and go fishing. Catch fish, clean fish, start fire, break out the Bushmills and Cohibas and praise the Lord.
Personal experience over the last 8 years tells me that at 295 pounds, I wouldn’t have slowed down the group. I’d have stopped it. This wasn’t an uber-guide getting anal, this was someone experienced in the back country trying to prevent injuries and heart attacks. Understand, too, that I volunteered for this. The payoff for this kind of regimen is that at the end of a couple of days of this you are on a lake 3 Km across by 10 Km long that no one else is on and where the fishing is fantastic. I’d been wanting to do this for about 15 years. To me, folks, this is fun.
Which is not to say that you can’t have fun walking down a well-maintained trail – I’ve done it many a time myself, both alone and accompanied. But carrying a certain amount of weight doesn’t always just mean you will do something slower than anyone else; sometimes it stops you. At some point limitations are not social, they’re basic physics. It’s up to each individual whether or not they care, and if so what they want to do about it. I didn’t lose the weight to be popular or virtuous or superior, I did it so I could do something I wanted to do. You would certainly enjoy that walk down the path, but you wouldn’t get to catch and eat the 28″ Lake Trout that I did. If that doesn’t matter to you, fine! There’s all kinds of ways to enjoy the outdoors. But it did matter to me.
Ron, do you believe that your personal experience constitutes a statistically significant sample of how well weight-loss plans work?
And do you really believe that there is no such thing as a fat person who is capable of having endurance and lifting heavy weights?
Ron, do you believe that your personal experience constitutes a statistically significant sample of how well weight-loss plans work?
Nope. As I said, It never occurred to me to take up a “diet”; Atkins, etc. Diets don’t work. At least, not by themselves, and not ones that have some kind of imbalance. Whether or not what I did will work for someone else depends on whether or not their metabolism will respond to the diet and exercise changes I made, their ability to make those changes from a time and materials viewpoint, and whether they have the motivation. Mine did, I was able to, and I was very highly motivated, as for the first time I was going to be able to take a backcountry trip with my then 14-year old son and I was going on that trip come Hell or high water. I could recommend to someone else that they try what I did, but I make no guarantees, and in any case if someone wants to lose a lot of weight I’d suggest they seek out a qualified medical opinion before doing anything. I say qualified because there are a lot of doctors out there who are not well-informed regarding nutrition and metabolism.
Can a 6′ 2″ guy who weighs 295 pounds lift a 75 lb weight or walk 1/2 mile? I could, at the time. Can he do both simultaneously? Different story. The kind of thing I’m talking about is more than just endurance and lifting heavy weights. Those are included, but there’s also the issue of combining the two; not just lifting 75 lbs, but keeping it lifted while you walk 1/2 a mile on a very rough course, especially up a couple of rock faces. There’s the issue of maintaining one’s balance while doing that so that you don’t fall and either injure yourself or damage your equipment, and how much additional stress/strain that imposes on your joints. There were a couple of times that another 50 lbs. would likely have been the difference between spraining or not spraining my ankle or knee after my foot slipped and got twisted in between a couple of rocks.
Again; I’ve done this a few times now. It’s my considered judgement that if I weighed another 50 pounds, I’d have either not been able to get to where I was going, or I’d have sustained an injury trying. At some point, too much weight imposes a limitation on what you can do.
Tell me, Amp, do you think that one’s weight is immaterial to the kinds of physical tasks you can perform? Of course not. The point I’m trying to make here is that whether or not one tries to lose weight should be a function of what you think best meets your own goals, not what you think will make someone else happy. But it seems to me also that we shouldn’t discount that sometimes it turns out that your goals require that you lose weight. As far as the various highly-publicized weight-loss plans go, every time I have looked at the latest diet it’s pretty obvious why it won’t work; on a long-term basis, they are neither healthy nor sustainable.
I don’t think your weight is immaterial, but I do think it’s a pretty crude measure. I expect there are people who could have done the trip at 6′ 2″/295 pounds and people who couldn’t have done it at 245 pounds. Did your guide have strength/fitness requirements, or was it just height/weight?
Dear RonF,
You like so many refuse to accept the evidence that is all around you and more sadly of your own experience. You and your ilk state repeatedly that fat people must be doing it wrong because your minds cannot grasp the idea that we are telling the truth and others are deluding themselves.
Scientist tell you so it must be so, even though theory has to be demonstrated in actuality, the results must be the same, given the same conditions.
The defenses the mind and body throws up against weight loss are too powerful to be overcome long term by such a dubious concept as ‘willpower’ and it seems that in general, the fatter the person the more powerfully these defenses tell. Pretending we are wrong is willful stupidity.
If the results don’t match the theory, look again at the theory.
Diets don’t work , they never have and they never will, not the way they have been thus far. It is not a question of matching the diet to the individual, what possible combination of foods are thus far untried and untested? None, certainly not your recipe for breakfasts that taste like wet papier-mache. You can recognize this today, tomorrow or never, but you can count on them failing the way they always have. Once you can accept this, the reasons not to keep ‘trying’ start to become more apparent.
Getting rid of all the guff you pick up, is like cult deprogramming, the more you uncover, the more there is lurking underneath. The damage you have done to yourself becomes clearer and clearer as you struggle to free yourself from the diktats of people you have been inculcated to respect almost unquestioningly. Your peace of mind starts to return, your belief and trust in yourself is refreshed.
Some things are slower than others to recover, for me the instinct to move for freely has been badly compromised by the ‘exercising for weight loss’ degradation. The reasons to move are to get from A to B, and for the sheer pleasure of it. Exercise for weight loss fits neither of these, which is why people are giving gym owners money for nothing.
The people who want to make a liar out of me and millions like me, need to remember that we are the experts in our own experience nobody can gainsay that. Even if you truly believe it works for you, it doesn’t for me, as for me what I say goes. I stand by that.
Ron, thank you for acknowledging that your experience is not generalizable. (And I think it’s unfair of B. Ado to not have acknowledged that, although it’s possible he cross-posted with you and so didn’t see your clarification).
I apologize if I’m a little cranky on this; from my perspective, it seems like I can’t post about fat people accepting themselves as they are without someone almost immediately posting weight-loss stories or advice.
There are certainly physical limitations that come with being fat. I don’t think, however, that it would be impossible for all fat people to become fit enough to do the kind of regime you’re describing. It would depend on each individual fat person’s body’s limits. It certainly is the case that fat people carry more body weight, and that can have effects on one’s endurance; but it’s just one factor, not the sole controlling factor. (As Nancy said.)
I think that, as Nancy Lebovitz touched on, strength and fitness are a much more useful and valid metric than weight, albeit a far less easily charted one. RonF, I can guarantee you that I would not be up to the trip you describe, and I’m quite thin. Even when I was a non-smoking healthy person, I wouldn’t have been up to it. That I’m lazy and don’t work out might have something to do with it.
Some body types respond to healthy food and lots of exercise by turning everything available into muscle. Some bodies are always going to carry a layer of fat around any amount of muscle that builds up. Some bodies are just going to be small, and don’t show muscle increase in a body-building sense (my sister is one of these freakishly strong tiny people; she wins a lot of bar bets). To use Joy Nash an example since her name’s in the post title and all, judging by this video: If I saw her walking down the street and then saw me walking down the street, based on how we each carry ourselves and apparent energy level, I’d peg her as the one able to canoe 10km with a 60lb bag and not even blink at such fraternizing of measurement systems. A person’s height/weight proportion just really doesn’t tell you much at all about how healthy or strong they are, which is why simple numerical guidelines don’t sit well with me, at least. I can’t speak for other people. I am curious, though, was there a minimum weight requirement as well?
And I want to clarify that I know that RonF clarified that he wasn’t meaning to generalize, but there’s a whole outside world that makes the discussion still relevant :)
I think that RonF’s point was in a meandering way something to do with the reasons why a person might want to lose weight, or might not: not so much an attack on the idea that a person might *not* want to lose weight, but a defense of the idea that a person might want to, under some circumstance that isn’t specifically an attempt to follow meaningless societal dictates. It seemed like he wasn’t so much saying that his experience applied to everyone, more that it applied to him & his own body, and seemed to be excluded from previous general statements.
I think that any statement about bodies which generalizes is of limited use, because we all have our own statements about our own bodies, and any statement which generalizes will exclude one or more people’s experience.
I may be wrong, though, at guessing the specific motivations of others.
Anecdotal: is like defenestrated says; I know someone who could probably manage those crazy canoe trips at 300+ lbs, and I know others (heh, me) who probably couldn’t at 150, even packing more muscle.
The fundamental problem with though is that assigning height weight ratios as a substitute for strength/endurance testing is a nearly pure example of a meaningless societal dictate. Somebody decided that anyone who was 6′ 2″ and 290 lbs. was too fat to be in good enough shape to do this trip, which is a nonsensical decision, but one which RonF had to obey in order to get to go on the trip.
Er – true. I somehow skimmed over that in the original post.
That is, in fact, a nonsensical decision. I do agree that weight limits tied to height, etc (not meaning absolute weight limits such as “2000 lbs total can ride in this elevator”) are meaningless and absurd. Ability tests might be more appropriate, but are less lazily implemented.
yeah, in terms of what’s a reasonable metric for fitness: I’ve had some frustration with a doctor I have who makes a big deal about my weight. I’m much more active as a lifestyle than I was in, say, highschool or college, and yet I weigh much more — of course, muscle weighs more than fat. in highschool I weighed some 30+ pounds less but wore pants two sizes larger! get over it, doc. I’d be happy at a pants size smaller, but I’m not going to overhaul my world to make that happen.
someday we need to change the way our medical system thinks (I leave fashion for a more ambitious soul) from a 1950s sedentary lifestyle expectation to one more in keeping with urban walkers, regular exercisers, sporty folks, and generally those for whom fitness and weight take a different curve.
oh, and thanks for the vid. be happy in the skin you’re in is definitely the unheard message of our times!
OK, I do have to say that I was a little disappointed, after this whole counter-cultural, love-thyself video, to see it end with the tag line from an ad campaign. Moreover, a makeup/skin care ad campaign that, as such, is specifically designed to make the (ad) watcher “unhappy in the skin [they’re] in.” The message itself worked here for obvious reasons, but knowing where it came from still irked me :(
Overall; yes, what I’m trying to say is that while it’s quite valid (and quite counter-cultural) to say “don’t lose weight just to meet society’s expectations”, we shouldn’t lose sight of the idea that there are often very good reasons to lose weight for our own purposes. Be your own person. If you’re heavy and society says “skinny is pretty”, tell ’em to stuff it if it suits you. OTOH, if you’re heavy and you decide to lose weight because you want to do something like this, don’t let your heavy friends or some activist give you any lip either.
Nancy, there was a complete medical workup required; physical exam, urinalysis, blood tests, etc. I was given a form by the outfitter listing all the examination points and tests and the doctor had to fill in the test values. The physician also had to sign off specifically on a statement that they thought I was up to the trip. Sure, I could have pencil-whipped the whole thing, but that would let the outfitter completely off the hook from a legal viewpoint, I’d expect.
I would certainly agree that being within that height/weight guideline was no guarantee that you’d be fit enough to make the trip. But as a first approximation it’s worthy of note. This kind of trip has to be planned at least 6 months out; if you want to take a trip into Quetico Provincial Park (Ontario, Canada) in June you need to get your permit application in by January by the absolute latest. If you’re looking at that guideline in December and your trip is in June, you’ll get the idea that it’s time to get some work in if you’re way off (like I was!).
I would say that part of that height/weight limitation specificiation was risk managment on the part of the outfitter (“Mr. Defendant Outfitter, wasn’t it obvious to you that a 350 lb. man couldn’t carry 75 pounds up a 100 foot rockfall?” The issue being not the medical facts, but the effect on a jury.). I think another part of it was that someone reading that would have a immediate revelation that “Gee, I better build up some fitness”, that these guys were serious when they are trying to tell you that this is not a walk in the park.
Fresh walleye, cut up, dipped in Shore Lunch, and deep fried in peanut oil. Smallmouth bass in Zatarain’s Jambayala mix. Lake Trout with a dry rub grilled over a birch fire. Walleye, potatoes and Vidalia onions wrapped in foil and thrown on the coals. Food, whiskey, and sitting on the rock bluff watching the otters swim across the bay at sunset. I wish I was there now.
Conducting exhaustive fitness tests of people is time-consuming and expensive. Having a height-weight grid and a checkbox provides 80% of the benefit for 1% of the effort, in terms of sorting prospective candidates for actual fitness. It provides 99% of the benefit in terms of forestalling lawsuits.
People concerned with risk management are not always concerned only with reality. They also have to be concerned with consensus perceptions of reality. Sure, it’s bullshit that fat guys automatically can’t climb cliffs. Equally surely, the jury in RonF’s wife’s hypothetical lawsuit against the outfitters after his tragic falling death aren’t fat rights activists, and can’t be counted on to know that it’s bullshit, or to adjudicate cases accordingly.
Someone invested in the notion of privilege as an organizing theory of social relations might consider the concept of “irresponsibility privilege”. When I’m not responsible for an outcome, I don’t have to worry about actual outcomes or empirical results of the decisions made by the people who are so responsible; I have the privilege of being very pure in my opinions about how these strangers should conduct their business. You don’t pay the premiums for the outfitting company, or absorb their risk, so your view of the criteria they ought to use in risk assessment is redolent of this type of privilege.
Oh, ok. That makes me feel a lot better about the whole thing. The more I thought about it the more I realized the very real physical risks associated with being too small or weak for such an adventure; surprisingly or not, they’re pretty similar to those of being a larger version of the same out-of-shapeness.
bean writes,
and I say, exactly right. Especially in light of that 95-98% dieting statistic, it seems obvious that huge numbers of people are being given really dangerous advice these days.
btw, just so y’all know, I know I’m not Nancy. No amnesia this morning :D
Actually, defenestrated, I was noting Nancy’s question:
Did your guide have strength/fitness requirements, or was it just height/weight?
And missed yours.
bean:
Here’s the problem, though, with looking at it from a “lose weight” perspective: if you do all those healthy things and you don’t lose weight, what then? Is it more important to then start taking more drastic measures, ones that may actually make you unhealthy, in order to achieve the goal of weight loss?!
Then you have to figure out whether the game’s worth the candle; why do you want to lose weight? If you have to do something unhealthy to lose weight to get healthy you’ve got a bit of a oxymoron there, and you need to step back and figure out the purpose and worth of your goals. If you are still committed to losing weight, you need to stop buying the latest diet book or blog and hie thee to a physician to get a workup. Maybe you just ain’t gonna go on that canoe trip.
A.J. Luxton Writes:
March 29th, 2007 at 10:56 pm Anecdotal: is like defenestrated says; I know someone who could probably manage those crazy canoe trips at 300+ lbs, and I know others (heh, me) who probably couldn’t at 150, even packing more muscle.
Robert Writes:
March 30th, 2007 at 1:01 pm Conducting exhaustive fitness tests of people is time-consuming and expensive. Having a height-weight grid and a checkbox provides 80% of the benefit for 1% of the effort, in terms of sorting prospective candidates for actual fitness. It provides 99% of the benefit in terms of forestalling lawsuits.
Ampersand Writes:
March 29th, 2007 at 12:44 pm Ron, do you believe that your personal experience constitutes a statistically significant sample of how well weight-loss plans work?
And do you really believe that there is no such thing as a fat person who is capable of having endurance and lifting heavy weights?
Sure,Vasily Alekseyev is ft one of the greatest weight lifters of all time and he was obese. Also, one of the greatest long distance swimmers is an obese woman who is about 5 ft tall. I can’t recall her name but she is an exceptional athlete with an amazing of level cardiovascular fitness. But these are the exceptions to the norm. Reality is that you don’t see many obese people competing in a marathon
Just out of curiosity, if you don’t like the hight to weight ratio rule what would you use in it’s place?
Dear Ampersand,
B. is a she!
RonF is the best person to decide what he does with his body.
What I object to, are the falsehoods and double speak that he and others perpetuate.
If you take in less calories than you expend, RonF you are on a diet. Why do people persist with this “don’t call it a diet, it’s healthy eating, or a lifestyle change” nonsense. Who do they think they are fooling? Certainly not the body which responds the same way as the above, it fights to defend its girth.
Why not? Could it be that your body’s defenses are beginning to gain the upper hand, ditto your eating.
Why can you not stay at this weight, if it makes you feel so good? Because your body is trying to do what it is programmed to do, trying to regain what you have
lost.
If it does what is the solution, yo-yo?
Your feeling of well-being is, assuming you are free of disease, mainly subjective. I’m sure you know your attitude to what you think you can and can’t do is important. ‘Most people live lives of quiet desperation’ the slim also have sorrows ,disappointments, fears and limitations.
What is different or permanent about yet another diet? Doing the same thing again and again expecting a different result. Goethe’s definition of madness.
95-98% of times, no.
This is irrelevant to the principle of whether it is worth investing any hopes or efforts in dieting.
Chiefly no acceptable alternative to the thing that doesn’t work.
Whether or not someone should go on a diet depends mainly on the effort you have to put in, the likelihood of success and the level of risk.
Dieting can damage your metabolism slowing it down, sometimes long it never fully rights itself. It can and does destabilize the nervous system leaving you more ‘sensitized’ and less able to cope with life in general.
I am not against the idea of weight loss, I know there is a job to be done here, but is it too much to ask that it be tolerable and sustainable for all who want and need it.
I am not forgetting the people who are dying from their weight, bedridden unable to breathe unaided.
Also don’t forget that there are people that lose weight seemingly spontaneously, often after giving up on dieting. Whether they are rarer than permanent diet successes, your guess is as good as mine, but they exist. Are scientist falling over themselves to study them though? It is often exceptions like this that provide progress, what to look for, answers even.
The nub is how do we replicate this ‘spontaneous remission’ ?
Maybe part of the reason why there is not more pressure to find out, is the refusal of so many of us to value ourselves and our actual experiences enough to say over and over again no more diets!
Weight lifting does not burn fat. The body has no reason to burn fat if you are only lifting weights and as a consequence many weight lifters are quite heavy as they carry a ton of weight in muscle and fat.
Long distance swimming (most swimming) is a cold activity and while sprinting distances may burn fat, long distance swimming triggers the brain into laying down a thick layer of subcutaneous fat for insulation. Must keep the core warm!
Long distance running does burn calories and eats fat without the body developping the lay down more fat urge. Thus most marathoners are rail thin. There is an obese triathlete but he came from long distance swimming before entering Ironman competitions.
The body works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. The best bet is always to know yourself and your personal and family history and find a competent primary care doctor. Me- I’m working on the eat less and think about exercising more diet- thinking burns alot of calories for effort ;)
Bean – those aren’t fitness tests. Fitness tests would involve hooking you up to a heart monitor, having you do a few miles on the treadmill, etc.
So, despite taking this “time consuming” and “expensive” route, they still wouldn’t allow perfectly fit and capable people from engaging in this activity if they didn’t fit into their preconceived notion of “fit.”
You’re absolutely correct. They’re using a simplified method to weed out a whole big chunk of the population from participating in their activity, and that simplified method is undoubtedly giving them false positives – people who actually are fit enough to go, and could be found as such, but who don’t qualify under the weight/height simple test.
But not letting those people go is costing them money – lots of it. Why on earth would they let false positives slip through their fingers? The answer, of course, is that it would cost more to catch the false positives than it costs to let them go. Giving everyone a fitness test, to increase the accuracy of the screening process, would cost a fortune. The enhanced profit they would make by catching the overweight-but-fit is less than that fortune. So, they don’t do it.
Just for the record, the Atkins diet—the real one outlined by Robert Atkins, as opposed to the folk-Atkins diet portrayed in the media—is not a “diet” in the sense in which you’re using the word (i.e., a crash diet intended to be followed for short-term weight loss but unsustainable in the long run).
The Atkins diet, and AFAIK all other reduced-carbohydrate diets, are intended to be permanent dietary changes, and are based on the proposition that fat is preferable to carbohydrate as a source of energy, and that high-carbohydrate diets eventually lead not only to weight gain, but also to a host of unrelated health problems.
You again seem to be working on the assumption that thiner=healthier, so much so that you would advocate a perfectly HEALTHY person to engage in unhealthy behaviors in order to lose weight, to become “healthy.
That’s why I said it was an oxymoron.
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This Joy Nash video is extremely refreshing, thanks for passing it on.
Re: the thread- I, too am deeply annoyed when anyone’s attempt to discuss body acceptance (with a clear inclusion of being healthy and able to do what you want to do as an integral part of that acceptance) turns into a massive argument about dieting, what ‘fitness’ is and how to quantify it, external determination of what healthy is and what it looks like, etc.
Happens every time. Here, too. And I’m susceptible, I guess, to going there, because while watching Joy Nash’s video, my one hesitation was her embracing of the term ‘fat.’
It is a negative-value-laden word, and when she described herself as being in the medical category of ‘moderately obese,’ I thought (and hoped) she’d be focusing on how completely absurd that is, given that she’s healthy, fit, able to do what she wants, and beautiful to boot (as much as a result of her charisma, wit, positive and energetic inhabitation of her own skin, and ferocity as her pretty hair and awesome curves or great smile or whatever other subjectively appealing physical traits).
Instead, it becomes a ‘fat acceptance’ thing, which bums me out – I guess because it seems more radical to me to challenge the very notion of what ‘fat’ is and the medical standardization which fails to accurately reflect people’s experiences of their own bodies and fitness.
I celebrate hearing average-sized (and Joy Nash is) women publicly say they love their body and their experience in it, and hearing them challenge the fashion industry. I celebrate hearing large people who feel healthy and fit publicly say they feel healthy and fit.
I’m not at all sure how I feel about framing political change in body image, fashion industries, media images in terms of ‘fat acceptance,’ particularly when doing so adopts the definition of ‘fat’ given by those industries (ie: anything over an emaciated size 2).
But maybe I’m doing the same thing I mentioned above – imposing externally defined standards (ie: ‘Joy Nash is NOT ‘fat’!’), which leaves other people out in the cold.
I seriously wish we could just stop talking about ‘fat’ though, and size, in the same conversation as health and fitness, because they do not necessarily correlate. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Anorexia’s hell on fitness and health, too.
Not sure I articulated that very well, but my .02.
The video made me feel happy, mostly, and it’s definitely a good thing. I just wish we could hold the standards accountable for irrationality, rather than ’embracing’ ourselves as ‘fat’ if we don’t conform to them.
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Heh. Just to give yet another completely anecdotal example… There was a time when I was part of a spelunking club. We were quite the nazies as to whom we would take with us. The one time we had a total mess on our hands, including people freaking out, guides and long timers splitting away from the group… it was caused by a stunningly looking, very thin women who could have been a model.
Our planned exit turned out to be impassable, and we had to track back. Eight extra hours, many people had not packed extra food, she had no body fat to fall back on, she must have been hungry to begin with… By the end, three of us were carrying her where we could and dragging her like a casualty where we could not. One of us was a long timer whose recent weight gain had been tactfully ignored… boy was I glad to have her around that night.
I am still prejudiced against overweight people when it comes to physical activities, though. I know that some of them are just as fit as I am, but I do not want to bother finding which ones, and definitely don’t want to assume any of the risks. Of course, after that caving trip gone bad, I am wary of underweight people just as much.
And by the way, I have not been inside a cave since.
Have you ever noticed how men are never judged by how much they weigh, or how “fat” they are?? Only women are judged by their weight. The tabloids devote pages and pages of their magazines to how fat (or even super skinny) women actresses are. There are never any stories about how much weight Brad Pitt has gained etc. It’s sickening. I am an average size female (5’4 and about 125 lbs) and even I can’t find clothes. Who the hell are they making these little clothes for?? They would’nt fit my dog!
Speaking as a fat man, I assure you that isn’t true.
However, it’s certainly true, speaking in general, that women are judged more harshly for being fat. Furthermore, women who are only a little fat are judged harshly for it, whereas men have to be quite fat before being judged harshly for it. (By and large.)
I’ll 2nd Amp’s comment.
Just musing… It seems that fat men get bashed upon more when other targets are not around, or have already been “dealt with.” For instance, fat men in the military (especially about thirty years ago, but one suspects things are just as bad now) have gone through absolute hell, both because of hazing from their peers and from those in charge. (The excuse is sometimes that the “fat boy” is in training to improve his performance, but the hazing rituals occur regardless of whether the fat man’s performance on specific tasks is adequate or even superior to that of thinner people.) The phrase “fat boy” in that situation becomes almost as bad as “pussy” as an epithet, perhaps because real “pussies” aren’t around to feel superior to. Ditto some business situations, where women (and probably non-whites) have been successfully intimidated out of a business culture (or not hired into it to begin with.) The fat guys become the next targets on the Hate Checklist…
Conjecture: Both men and women are judged, even by members of their own sex, on the basis of their attractiveness to members of the opposite sex. The reason that women are judged more harshly for being fat than men are is that men find fat more unattractive than women do. Conversely, men are judged more harshly for being underweight or for having lackluster social skills.
You have an obvious advantage over the majority of fatties and that is you are a very good looking girl. There is a lot less discrimination against the overweight when you have a pretty face.
Not everyone is that lucky. I’m speaking from my own personal observations.
I had a best friend in high school who had a weight problem unlike me she was not all that attractive. She was discriminated against all the time.
I witnessed it and I felt bad for her. I still feel bad for her.
I’m not a skinny girl now like I was in High School. I weigh 213 pounds, I’m 5″ 5′ and I wear a size 18-20.
I know, that because I still have a very pretty face and an hourglass shape,(It’s a big hourglass) I’m treated better and discriminated against much less than someone who is not similarly blessed.
I enjoyed watching your little youtube submission and I wish every fattiephobic person would watch it. Good Job.
I am a 41 year old woman who is considered by the fashion industry and medical constabulary as “fat”. I wear a size 14 (16 top – very large breasts). According to beautiful ex-model Mia Tyler, “plus sizes” begin at size 8 in the fashion industry. Marilyn Monroe was a size 16. I have gotten weird looks from people for daring to wear skimpy sexy outifts in the summer because of my less-than perfect middle-aged belly and thighs. I will never be perfect – I can only be me. And I love me just the way I am, and everyone else should love themselves too. Not loving yourself enough can have dire consequences.
My best friend since kindergarden, Jeannette, died at age 23 back in 1990 from anorexia less than three months after giving birth. She was the kind of friend who, if you didn’t have a smile, she would lend you one of hers. She was not always anorexic – she developed a very poor body image because she didn’t have the Hollywood starlet “perfect pregnant body.”
The jerk who practically twisted her arm to have his baby decided he no longer loved her once he realized that pregnancy meant stretch marks, varicose veins, saggy boobs, and weight that won’t come all the way off. Did this moron think that pregnancy entailed going to Montgomery Ward, picking out an emryo to carry around for nine months in the latest style Gucci bag? If he could not love my friend because of the things pregnancy does to women’s bodies, he should not have proposed marriage and pushed her into a pregnancy that she really wasn’t ready for, but went through for him because she loved and trusted him.
He was pointedly cruel to Jeannette and held her up to the unrealistic airbrushed standard of Vanity Fair. She did not kill herself – he killed her. But he had co-conspirators. The fashion industry, big media, a society that values women solely on physical appearance acting as the final arbiter in beauty, and the plastic surgery “professionals” hawking their wares like snake oil salesmen.
Recent reports from a myriad of medical journals state that more and more women are giving birth to low-birth weight babies due to eating disorders during pregnancy. Low birth weight babies run a much higher risk of being developmentally delayed, and susceptible to other serious ailments as well.
Post partum depression is rampant and studies show the primary cause being poor body image, due to societal pressures to be super thin with perky breasts, washboard abs and zero flaws. Many younger women of Generation Y have admitted that they avoid pregnancy because they fear getting fat and having other pregnancy-related flaws that are, unfortunately, permanent – unless you’ve got $20K to afford risky plastic surgery.
In a society where overweight women are unemployed longer, and earn 12% less than their thinner, trimmer peers, it is no wonder that this femicide has had such far-reaching consequences: Countless deaths from eating disorders, underdeveloped babies, and an entire generation of women who have an unhealthy fear of pregnancy and giving birth. And that is society’s greatest shame.