Let’s get one thing straight

*This post will follow on from a previous entry, which is here.

Club Troppo has posted a bit of a link round-up of the response to John Birmingham’s Biggest Loser article. You may want to have a little look-see. (You may know of some other relevant pieces that are also of interest; feel free to drop a link in the comments but please do add fat-hate or ED trigger warnings if warranted.)

I have many long posts swirling around in my head but time and weariness demands (relative) brevity. So here’s a pretty basic message.

Fat acceptance does not kill anybody.

Let’s imagine for a minute that I and other body acceptance bloggers and Health At Every Size researchers and promoters are completely wrong. Let’s imagine that fat bodies cannot be healthy and fit. Let’s imagine that the US Surgeon General is recklessly ill-informed:

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT Doctor Regina Benjamin, an African-American woman wearing the uniform of her office as Surgeon General, addresses the camera. She says: Hello, I’m Dr Regina Benjamin, the United States’ Surgeon General. Two thirds of adults and nearly one in three children are overweight or obese. As a result, our nation has high rates of diabetes and other chronic illnesses. The good news is, we can be healthy and fit at any size or any weight. As America’s family doctor, I want to change the conversation from a negative one about obesity and illness to a positive conversation about being healthy and being fit. So let’s start with making healthy choices. Eat nutritious foods, exercise regularly, and have fun doing it.

Right, so you’ve ignored everything Dr Regina Benjamin has said and everything I’ve said about my beliefs about health and you are convinced that a fat person cannot be a fit and healthy person. And, presumably, you also think there is some kind of moral obligation to be healthy.

How do people become healthy? How do healthy people live?

Perhaps, they exercise.

Perhaps, they go to the doctor regularly and insist that they receive sensitive and skilled care.

Perhaps, they eat competently.

Perhaps, they have mental health support.

Perhaps, they belong to a community which helps them to advocate for their own health and wellbeing.

Perhaps, they help their children to develop healthy relationships with their bodies, too.

Not everyone who is fat is interested in participating in fat acceptance or using a Health At Every Size approach to weight, and that is okay. As individuals, we all ought to have bodily autonomy and make our own informed decisions about our bodies, including and especially how we eat (or ‘diet’) and how much exercise we do and how we ‘manage’ our weight (or let it manage itself). Free free to read this back to me if you ever hear me say otherwise. (Hint: you won’t.)

But for the people who do participate in FA/HAES, or even just come across a little of our message, there is absolutely nothing to endanger them.

What often stops fat people from doing all the healthful things that I mentioned above? Much of the time the answer is fat stigma. (This is not the only answer: socio-economic barriers and social isolation are two more main factors but they are both enhanced by…well, stigma.)

When fat people are abused simply for getting out and walking (and they are, please go read this post, it’s important and not an unusual story unfortunately) there is little incentive to actually keep going. It’s hard to take care of your body when you face bullying and disdain every day. What fat acceptance does is provide support and encouragement for people so that they can keep on walking. Fat acceptance is not giving up.

A lot of people tell me I’m deluded. To that I say: just because I have a different opinion to you and make different choices does not mean that I am stupid or ignorant.

So I won’t say that John Birmingham* is deluded for saying that fat activists

need smashing flat when they try to redefine obesity as normal. They’re killing people as surely as the shareholders of Benson and Hedges.

He’s entitled to his opinion.

And when I kill someone with my activism, when size acceptance hurts people more than it helps them, when fat activists start pulling people off treadmills and force-feeding them deep-fried Mars bars, he’s welcome to smash me as flat as he likes. (Hint: it ain’t gonna happen.)

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*by the way, this isn’t really about Birmingham. His opinions on this are popular, and not particularly novel. So this post is less a rant aimed at an individual man and more a blanket statement refuting what I am rather sick of hearing. Thanks for indulging me, if you’ve read this far.

I am not your cautionary tale

In some ways fat bodies are our current culture’s dumping ground for fear and loathing: we are the go-to places for thrashing out anxiety about consumption and excess, death and disease, work ethic and individual responsibility, boundaries and restraint, ugliness and beauty. Fat bodies are politicised — even politicians literally use fat as short-hand for bad, wrong, excessive. Fat bodies are ridiculed, dehumanised, demonised and charged with meaning.

All of this is, perhaps, largely academic. I’m a fat activist, of sorts, but most days I’m not overtly doing activism. Most days I’m buying bread and milk and taking my daughter to playdates and watching Dexter and, you know, living.

Except my life is lived in this body, which is fat, and when I am buying my bread and milk etc. I am visibly fat and when I am existing I am inhabiting a politicised body.

Today writer John Birmingham had a column in the Brisbane Times about The Biggest Loser. He gave this nod to fat acceptance:

Obesity is an intensely politicised topic… Traducing someone’s character, or mocking them for their weight, isn’t far removed from doing the same things on the basis of their skin color or ethnic background. Grown-ups should be above it.

He also mischaracterised the fat acceptance movement, I think, as angry and somehow ‘dangerous’ as well as misguided about health. But that’s not what I want to write about. What struck me most about his piece was the admission that he views the “freakshow” elements of The Biggest Loser as useful parenting tools.

I wanted [my kids] to feel disgust at the carefully calibrated circus presented for us by the program’s producers. Why? Because as a parent fresh fruit, oatmeal for breakfast, drinking lots of water, and playing sport rather than Nintendo DS, is a hell of a hard sell. The grotesque obesity on display in Biggest Loser makes explaining the benefits of good nutrition and exercise that much easier. Harsh and ugly, but true.

You know, I have some sympathy for Birmingham’s position as a parent who is trying to instill healthful habits in children who are presumably bombarded with “junk food” advertising and the lure of screen time, like the rest of us. Bean is very active, in touch with her natural appetite, and in love with the existence of fresh fruit but she is also not-yet-three and so I willingly accept that what has been a breeze for me may require more conscious effort in coming years (although I am of course hoping that our early approach will continue to help Bean have a healthy and peaceful relationship with food and activity as she grows). I certainly don’t feel that modeling any kind of body-shaming — of her body or others’ — will ever form part of my parenting strategy. Fat-shaming children is harmful and I know I could never be convinced otherwise, despite how hard I work not to be overly judgmental about the parenting decisions of others.

But, to be frank, I find it quite chilling that the “grotesque obesity” played up for the cameras on ‘reality’ TV could be masquerading as a fable for children in homes across the world. Look kids, you don’t want to be so big and wobbly and disgusting that they put you on television, do you? Chilling because it normalises fat stigma and body shame (wouldn’t it be better to normalise diversity and acceptance?) but also because it is a reminder, to me, that some people are looking at me and feeling grateful that they aren’t like me and fearful that they could be.

I am a walking cautionary tale.

When I raised this concern with John Birmingham on Twitter, his response was

Maybe it’s not about you.

Obviously, his piece was about The Biggest Loser, a particular kind of “freakshow”. Me going to the shops to buy my bread and milk? Not so freakshowish, admittedly. But I am still there, I am still visible, I still jiggle, I still have a double chin, I still look fat enough to be a folk devil.

Fatshion bloggers sometimes find their images reblogged as thinspiration by people who are engaging in disordered eating and looking for fodder to increase their fears of becoming fat. People in public places like swimming pools snark and gossip about fat bodies around them and barely feel the need to disguise their disgust. A friend on Twitter, Jennifer Gearing, mentioned this afternoon that Birmingham’s article “reminds me of time stranger told his 5-6yo she didn’t want Maccas or she’d look like me.” That’s right, children, fear and pity that fatty over there, and thank your lucky stars it’s not you.

There are so many problems with taking that approach with children. (I shan’t list them all but, um, how about these: what if your child grows up fat? what if your child develops an eating disorder? what if your child becomes a rude and judgemental body-snarker?) One really big loser of a problem is that the fatty over there is a human being. The fatty on your television screen is a human being. Human beings have emotions and a need to be treated with respect. We also have diverse histories and reasons for being the sizes that we are; we have individual stories that you can’t read from just looking at us.

My fat body is not your punch line, it is not your entertainment, it is not your grotesque freakshow, it is not your life-lesson.

I happen to think that many kids could learn a thing or two from people like me, beyond a cautionary tale. But until our culture starts valuing people for what they have to give and not what they (apparently) have to lose, a lot of people will fail to see that.

And exploiting that failure to see human beings instead of “the obese” isn’t edgy and it isn’t even productive. It just hurts.

The biggest loser is health

A while back I wrote this post about body image and fat, asserting that The Biggest Loser is a giant con, perpetuating the myth that healthy always = thin and that healthy habits like regularly exercising and eating your vegetables cannot coexist with a fat body.

So I was not at all surprised by this New York Times article (via Feministe).

The Biggest Loser is not inspirational or aspirational or motivational, it’s mythological. And it’s dangerous. Until we start seriously seeing the promotion of health over an aesthetic ideal, the ‘weight loss’* industry will continue to benefit hugely from damaging the health of the vast majority of dieters – who are, let’s face it, the vast majority of women and a good portion of men.

*’weight loss industry’ would be more properly called the ’lose weight and regain it plus some’ industry but hey, why quibble when there’s billions of dollars at stake?

International No Diet Day

Yesterday was International No Diet Day. I’ve been working on this post for a little bit, but then took a mini hiatus, so I didn’t get it ready in time. I’m so bad.

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I made the mistake of watching some of The Biggest Loser this year. It started as a bit of an in-joke with The Fireman on a Friday damn-let’s-just-order-pizza night. The irony of watching a show designed to make any viewer lighter than a draughthorse feel self-righteous, whilst sliding fat-laden takeaway down our throats, is quite delicious. And I admit, there is an sentimental part of me that gets sucked in by the schmaltz that is the flipside to the show’s appeal: it’s okay to gawk at the fat rolls like it’s a freakshow because really we’re all full of sympathy for the contestants’ plight and admiration for their hard work. And it’s true that the trainers on the show seem to be genuinely concerned with improving the contestants’ outlook on life and their health.

But that’s actually the heart of the problem: what The Biggest Loser and actually the media in general does is conflate thinness with health. You only have to see five minutes of one finale show to confirm that in fact the series is not about health at all: it’s about looking good in a fake tan and new clothes. Success is judged by appearance rather than a health check. In fact, since the last leg of their ‘weightloss journey’ occurs at home, I have no doubt that at least a few of the contestants are cramming diet pills and possibly even more dangerous things into themselves in a desperate grab to be emaciated enough to win a helluva lot of money. Nothing healthy about that. But nevermind hey, because AJ says they look ‘hot’ on national television. Now that’s a self-discovery and lifestyle improvement for you!

It’s probably unfair to expect much more from a reality show on commercial TV. But it does grate a little that this stuff passes by largely without comment because most people genuinely believe that fat and health are mutually exclusive. Getting thinner is automatically a virtuous, and not merely aesthetic, pursuit. But the reality is that there’s little evidence to prove that fatness in itself is seriously bad for your health. Poor nutrition, chronic overeating and a lack of exercise certainly are. I’m not disputing that. Yet, research shows that unfit thin people die younger than fat people who are otherwise healthy. The risks associated with being underweight are high, and there is increasing concern that people of ‘normal’ weight are becoming complacent about heart disease because they wrongly assume that so long as they’re not fat they won’t get sick. We don’t hear much about this though because fat makes a sexy headline in places where it is implied that actual fat people being sexy impossible . (If you want to read more about fat=unhealthy myths I suggest a visit here.)

The thing is, I know you can be fat and healthy, just as you can be fat and unhealthy. I’ve been both.

I’ve lost a significant amount of weight twice in my adult life. Once when I was a uni student and so poor I ate less and walked more; once when I wanted to get my polycystic ovaries pumping out eggs and started going to the gym upwards of four times a week as well as following low GI eating guidelines. In neither case did I end up any smaller sized than what some people might refer to as Large Heifer. Admittedly, I wasn’t really aiming to get skinny but my intuition and common sense tell me that no amount of (safe) dieting and exercise would ever make me into a thin person. I am how I am.

Which is fine with me. Not so much with everyone else, apparently.

I went to the gym for a programme update a while back. The woman whose job it was to write up my programme had never met me before and she didn’t ask me many questions so all she had to go on was my appearance. And she was no mistress of deception: I practically saw a thought bubble with “Whoah, fatty!” popping out of her head as I approached her. And the programme she gave me was rubbish. Everything easy, everything the lowest weight, everything boring as hell. Because I’m fat, so I must be incapable of actual exercise, right? Needless to say I lost interest in that programme in about five minutes and that became one of the many excuses to stop going.

Next time I didn’t make the same mistake. I made sure that Erin did my programme – Erin who used to be my kick-arse personal trainer. Erin who knows I’m actually pretty strong because bracing the punching bag for me had her landing on her bum a few times. Erin who is stunningly beautiful and weighs about 45 kilograms but never once looked at me like I was disgusting or freakish. And the programme I’ve got now is so hard I did it once and was knackered for days. But it’s kind of fun, involves doing exercises I’d associated with superfit people, and is thusly good for my self esteem. (And I’d be doing it right now if The Bean hadn’t been too sick to take to the creche today. Excuses excuses!)

Now I haven’t written this post just to gush about a girl at the gym. What I want to say is that we simply need less of the Whoah, Fatty! and more of the Look, A Human Being. Not just from workers at the gym, but from clothing store assistants and people on the bus – and from doctors. For every doctor who bothers to take a patient’s blood pressure, general health check and history before declaring that they’re too fat to live, there are ten who don’t. Like the one who took one look at my friend and said ‘You’re way too fat for this surgery’ before he even introduced himself. Or consulted the chart to find out that she was 27 weeks pregnant.

I’m blessed because I have a partner who loves me whatever size I am, friends who are too interesting to harp on about diets all the time (is there anything more boring or self-indulgent?) and, at least these days, a healthy dose of self regard. I don’t let the body police get me down too often.

Not everyone is this lucky. And the most vulnerable of all are the young. I want my daughter to grow up loving her body, whatever it is like, for what it can do and not just how it looks. I want her to grow up with the confidence to go for a run or to play a sport, and the self respect to choose mainly nourishing foods, and the sense to know that eating a packet of Tim Tams because she’s premenstrual might not be wise but isn’t worth feeling guilty about.  How this happens in a world full of photoshopped images and Diet! Diet! Diet! messages, I don’t know.

I do know that I’m not happy about her childcare workers spending most of the kids’ lunchtime chatting to each other about how ‘good’ they were on the weekend and fetishising deprivation and self-loathing. Not happy at all. At least I know Bean was way too busy eating and ‘mmmm mmmm mmmm’ -ing to pay any attention.