Or the savanna. Or a zombie apocalypse. That, in addition to "But you're eating up all of the foooooooood!" is one of the biggest arguments against fatness. People seem to think that if your body isn't rigged so that you could move to the wilderness right now and survive easily, you're somehow failing at life.
To that I have to ask, "Why?"
I DON'T live in the wilderness. I live in a cushy society where my needs are supplied by people I've never even met. I live in a society with cars that take me farther than I could ever get on foot. Medical treatment far superior than what would otherwise be available. I don't NEED to be ready to hunt a mammoth, because my lifestyle simply doesn't call for it.
A lot of people would see that as a failure. Some see it as me succumbing to an artificial lifestyle that humanity was never meant to endure (remember, I'm an atheist, so in my book humanity was never MEANT to do anything). Alternatively, some would see it as my becoming overadapted, which could be bad if, say, the United States were to suddenly collapse.
And there's a point in that, but the argument is flawed.
See, humans have never been good at living on their own. We're social animals. Even if the entire country comes crumbling down, I'm guessing we'll be more likely to reach out to people around us for support than hole up in our homes with a bunch of canned beans, and for a reason: that's suicide. Strength is in numbers.
And a funny thing about social groups is that they work best when the members specialize.
The kind of people who would criticize my usefulness in a survival scenario are focusing on raw physical capability. If you can't run, fight or hunt, they say, you're useless. Dead weight, even. No one would keep you around; you'd be a burden.
Huh?
What about the people who mend your clothes? What about toolmakers, cooks, babysitters? (Who do you think is going to watch the fit people's kids while they're out hunting, exactly?) What about entertainers? (Storytellers have been an integral part of human society since before the dawn of civilization.) What about gardeners, sentries, scribes? Are you really saying that they all have to be physically fit?
Or are you saying you could do without them? Because I would love to see you try. I'd love to see a small group of physically fit people try to balance hunting, gathering, sewing, cooking, toilet maintenance, fishing, building, toolmaking, and whatever else you have to do, while still having enough time to rest so you can do it all again the next day. Sure, you can do task rotation, but all that means is that no one is going to get good enough at any one job to get as much out of it as you could be. A few fat specialists, to take up some of the easier but time-consuming jobs while the rest of you focus on keeping everyone fed and watered, could make a lot of difference in this situation.
And in case you're worried about us eating up all of the food: remember, people who are physically active eat a lot more than people who are sedentary. Our diets are going to look light compared to yours.
Suckers.
Showing posts with label fatphobia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fatphobia. Show all posts
Friday, April 1, 2011
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Fat Shaming: It Starts Young
I don't know how old I was. No older than three, maybe even two. (I have memories of being two. Some people will tell you that no one has memories under the age of four - this is not true; four is the average and the cutoff runs between two and five. So now you know.)
"You do not need more food," she said. "You have ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate."
That was when I first learned that it was wrong to eat too much. Even if you were hungry, there was a limit to the amount of food you could eat and still be considered a good person.
My mother would swear up and down that she NEVER gave me a reason to feel ashamed of being "round." That was how she used to describe me. "Round" or "chubby." "[William]'s a little chubby," she'd say, and while she will tell me that she didn't mean it in a bad way, at the tender age of three I understood her vaguely apologetic tone that meant that there was something about my chubbiness to be ashamed of. Even better, I understood what it meant to have "swinging arm fat," a "gross, bloated gut," and "love handles."
No, she never gave me a reason to feel ashamed.
She squeezed my sides when she told me I was growing "love handles." Grabbed my sides right on the fatty pockets and pinched them. Not hard. Just enough to communicate "Look, you've got those body parts that your aunt was just saying are disgusting and need to be fought with a vengeance, and while she has been dealing with them for the past couple of years, you're five years old! Better get on that diet!" (I didn't know that my aunt had been overweight her entire life.)
Now, she never tried to put me on a diet. She never told me I couldn't have a food item that everyone else was having. But I could tell - again, from the age of three or younger - that she was watching me. It was like she was just waiting for me to slip up, to reveal my secret gluttony that was so clearly the cause of my fatness. If I dared take more food than she thought I needed, she was right there to cut me off and let me know I had enough. She didn't have to do this to my sister, of course - she was normal weight, so there obviously wasn't a problem. It's no wonder that by the time I was six years old I felt like I was contributing to my problem every time I ate more than a certain, arbitrary amount that I considered "normal."
But she never gave me a reason to be ashamed.
From my perspective, it felt like I was being inducted prematurely into the world of adulthood. The world of "no, you can't eat that, you're already chubby." "Yeah, we have a hard time finding pants for my daughter because she's so round, so we get her boy pants." "Oh my GOSH, you're bigger around at five years old than your sister is at nine." She never, ever told me that there was anything wrong with it. She just made it out like I was violating the natural order of things by not fitting into my sister's hand-me-downs.
That was how I felt: unnatural. Maybe she didn't tell me directly that being fat made me inferior. But every time I turned around she was commenting on my fat body, feeling it, gossiping about it with everyone from my aunts to complete strangers (who, in the mind of a three-year-old, aren't that different). It didn't take a genius to figure out that there was something weird about being fat. She never talked about my sister that way. She didn't have to. My sister was growing up right. My mother never talked about the trouble she had finding clothes to fit her. She didn't even have a word for my sister's body type. She didn't have to, because she was normal. I was the aberrant one. I needed an extra label to explain why I wore a different size of pants than my sister had at my age. I needed my mother to apologize to everyone she met for the shape of my body.
There's a lot of comment in the feminist world about the way women are shamed for having inferior bodies. They are put under constant scrutiny to ensure that they're thin enough, pretty enough, busty enough, but not too busty. Going through the world it feels like their physical appearance is the business of everyone who might look at them, and if they don't match up then they've better have a good reason why. They put up with this from the moment they start puberty, it's said.
When you're a fat child, it doesn't start at puberty. It starts as soon as your body becomes different from the thin child your parents expected to have. For people like me, who were born "chunky," being content with your body is a privilege that we were never allowed.
But, of course, it's all in my head, because my mother never told me there was anything wrong with being fat.
"You do not need more food," she said. "You have ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate."
That was when I first learned that it was wrong to eat too much. Even if you were hungry, there was a limit to the amount of food you could eat and still be considered a good person.
My mother would swear up and down that she NEVER gave me a reason to feel ashamed of being "round." That was how she used to describe me. "Round" or "chubby." "[William]'s a little chubby," she'd say, and while she will tell me that she didn't mean it in a bad way, at the tender age of three I understood her vaguely apologetic tone that meant that there was something about my chubbiness to be ashamed of. Even better, I understood what it meant to have "swinging arm fat," a "gross, bloated gut," and "love handles."
No, she never gave me a reason to feel ashamed.
She squeezed my sides when she told me I was growing "love handles." Grabbed my sides right on the fatty pockets and pinched them. Not hard. Just enough to communicate "Look, you've got those body parts that your aunt was just saying are disgusting and need to be fought with a vengeance, and while she has been dealing with them for the past couple of years, you're five years old! Better get on that diet!" (I didn't know that my aunt had been overweight her entire life.)
Now, she never tried to put me on a diet. She never told me I couldn't have a food item that everyone else was having. But I could tell - again, from the age of three or younger - that she was watching me. It was like she was just waiting for me to slip up, to reveal my secret gluttony that was so clearly the cause of my fatness. If I dared take more food than she thought I needed, she was right there to cut me off and let me know I had enough. She didn't have to do this to my sister, of course - she was normal weight, so there obviously wasn't a problem. It's no wonder that by the time I was six years old I felt like I was contributing to my problem every time I ate more than a certain, arbitrary amount that I considered "normal."
But she never gave me a reason to be ashamed.
From my perspective, it felt like I was being inducted prematurely into the world of adulthood. The world of "no, you can't eat that, you're already chubby." "Yeah, we have a hard time finding pants for my daughter because she's so round, so we get her boy pants." "Oh my GOSH, you're bigger around at five years old than your sister is at nine." She never, ever told me that there was anything wrong with it. She just made it out like I was violating the natural order of things by not fitting into my sister's hand-me-downs.
That was how I felt: unnatural. Maybe she didn't tell me directly that being fat made me inferior. But every time I turned around she was commenting on my fat body, feeling it, gossiping about it with everyone from my aunts to complete strangers (who, in the mind of a three-year-old, aren't that different). It didn't take a genius to figure out that there was something weird about being fat. She never talked about my sister that way. She didn't have to. My sister was growing up right. My mother never talked about the trouble she had finding clothes to fit her. She didn't even have a word for my sister's body type. She didn't have to, because she was normal. I was the aberrant one. I needed an extra label to explain why I wore a different size of pants than my sister had at my age. I needed my mother to apologize to everyone she met for the shape of my body.
There's a lot of comment in the feminist world about the way women are shamed for having inferior bodies. They are put under constant scrutiny to ensure that they're thin enough, pretty enough, busty enough, but not too busty. Going through the world it feels like their physical appearance is the business of everyone who might look at them, and if they don't match up then they've better have a good reason why. They put up with this from the moment they start puberty, it's said.
When you're a fat child, it doesn't start at puberty. It starts as soon as your body becomes different from the thin child your parents expected to have. For people like me, who were born "chunky," being content with your body is a privilege that we were never allowed.
But, of course, it's all in my head, because my mother never told me there was anything wrong with being fat.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Fat, Pt. 2
In the last post, I made an introduction to the topic of fatness and a criticism of pervasive fatphobia. In this post I'm going to take on an equal and opposite problem: the Fat Acceptance movement.
Fat Acceptance, despite its desire to combat the unhealthy thinking and behavior that accompanies fatphobia, is not an appropriate option. The majority of people involved in the fat acceptance movement are obese or overweight people who have had little to no success controlling their weight through the diet methods prescribed by conventional wisdom. They can shed the weight, sure (or some of it, anyway) but as soon as they get tired of starving it comes back.
Frustrated - and rightly so - they've given up. Instead of fighting their fatness, they've decided to embrace it, and tell the rest of the world that it's time to do so to.
So what's the problem?
Firstly, fat acceptance places a false dichotomy on the entire health/diet issue. Either you follow Conventional Wisdom's starvation model or you live with being obese your entire life. Either you have no willpower (which simply isn't true for many of these people) or your genes are wired to keep you from slimming down. This either/or declaration completely ignores the many other options there are available - including alternative diets, which are not only sustainable when done correctly but have proven effective in many cases where the conventional diet has failed.
(Full confession: I subscribe to one of these "alternative" diets. As I have said, I am a caveman. I haven't lost weight in years - in fact, I've gained a lot recently due to exercise - but I have successfully ended the fat-building cycle while managing to eat the foods I want and stay fully nourished.)
Secondly, fat acceptance push several other notions that are contrary to reality: the "healthy at any size" philosophy, which flouts such facts as internal fatty buildup, skeletal strain, and correlation to a number of illnesses to proclaim that obesity has no impact on a person's health; the "fat is normal" philosophy, which ignores the inherent suddenness of this rise of overweight people; the "beautiful at any size" philosophy, which will optimistically describe the fattest bodies as "curvy;" and the associated "everyone is fatphobic" idea, which insists that if we could all get over our societal hang-ups we could learn to love fleshy blobs that barely resemble human beings.
If I have offended anyone or caused them to cry, I sincerely apologize for hurting your feelings, but I stand by this: As the saying goes (credit to Krishnamurti), "it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." The reason fat bodies are not the standard is not because they are not the social ideal, but because they are not the ideal for good health or functionality. Obesity cripples the body, limiting one's strength and stamina. The types of diets which are known to cause or reinforce it are equally as harmful, crippling the immune system and throwing the body's functions out of whack, leaving it vulnerable to stroke, heart disease, and diabetes - three of the greatest killers in the modern era. Occasionally, you will come upon someone who is truly obese in spite of the best health care conditions, or someone who eats a poorer diet but survives free of the typical killers, but these are rare occasions. For every obese person you know who lives to a healthy old age, there will doubtless be five or more who have suffered from heart problems, or else are afflicted by diabetes or mobility problems. Some of these problems are doubtless brought on by age, but it is not practical to dismiss obesity and diet simply because one is frustrated with one's own inability to lose weight.
This is not a one-size-fits-all assessment, of course. Much of it is based on my own experiences and family, but plenty of it is based on interpersonal stories from others on the Internet and my own experience with the fat acceptance community. Yo-yo dieting is not the answer, but treading carefully into a new lifestyle with your eyes wide open and plenty of knowledge at hand cannot be more dangerous than giving up and letting the pounds pile on.
But if I do not agree with either of these camps, where then do I stand? I am not instantly critical of someone just for being overweight. It makes them appear less healthy, and therefore attractive, in my eyes, because extra weight is a common indicator of poor diet or other problems that can result in weakness or early death. But I cannot criticize someone simply for having that body - not when I have been completely unsuccessful in curing my own weight problems. The greatest hurdle, I believe, is in overcoming my eating disorder; it is true that weight loss can be prevented or even reversed through the consumption of excess calories. The second hurdle is in mustering up the strength to say "no" - to fight the societal pressures to consume certain foods, and also my own senseless urges as they crop up. I will not say that I am perfect or that my experiences speak for everyone, but this is your world as I see it.
Fat Acceptance, despite its desire to combat the unhealthy thinking and behavior that accompanies fatphobia, is not an appropriate option. The majority of people involved in the fat acceptance movement are obese or overweight people who have had little to no success controlling their weight through the diet methods prescribed by conventional wisdom. They can shed the weight, sure (or some of it, anyway) but as soon as they get tired of starving it comes back.
Frustrated - and rightly so - they've given up. Instead of fighting their fatness, they've decided to embrace it, and tell the rest of the world that it's time to do so to.
So what's the problem?
Firstly, fat acceptance places a false dichotomy on the entire health/diet issue. Either you follow Conventional Wisdom's starvation model or you live with being obese your entire life. Either you have no willpower (which simply isn't true for many of these people) or your genes are wired to keep you from slimming down. This either/or declaration completely ignores the many other options there are available - including alternative diets, which are not only sustainable when done correctly but have proven effective in many cases where the conventional diet has failed.
(Full confession: I subscribe to one of these "alternative" diets. As I have said, I am a caveman. I haven't lost weight in years - in fact, I've gained a lot recently due to exercise - but I have successfully ended the fat-building cycle while managing to eat the foods I want and stay fully nourished.)
Secondly, fat acceptance push several other notions that are contrary to reality: the "healthy at any size" philosophy, which flouts such facts as internal fatty buildup, skeletal strain, and correlation to a number of illnesses to proclaim that obesity has no impact on a person's health; the "fat is normal" philosophy, which ignores the inherent suddenness of this rise of overweight people; the "beautiful at any size" philosophy, which will optimistically describe the fattest bodies as "curvy;" and the associated "everyone is fatphobic" idea, which insists that if we could all get over our societal hang-ups we could learn to love fleshy blobs that barely resemble human beings.
If I have offended anyone or caused them to cry, I sincerely apologize for hurting your feelings, but I stand by this: As the saying goes (credit to Krishnamurti), "it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." The reason fat bodies are not the standard is not because they are not the social ideal, but because they are not the ideal for good health or functionality. Obesity cripples the body, limiting one's strength and stamina. The types of diets which are known to cause or reinforce it are equally as harmful, crippling the immune system and throwing the body's functions out of whack, leaving it vulnerable to stroke, heart disease, and diabetes - three of the greatest killers in the modern era. Occasionally, you will come upon someone who is truly obese in spite of the best health care conditions, or someone who eats a poorer diet but survives free of the typical killers, but these are rare occasions. For every obese person you know who lives to a healthy old age, there will doubtless be five or more who have suffered from heart problems, or else are afflicted by diabetes or mobility problems. Some of these problems are doubtless brought on by age, but it is not practical to dismiss obesity and diet simply because one is frustrated with one's own inability to lose weight.
This is not a one-size-fits-all assessment, of course. Much of it is based on my own experiences and family, but plenty of it is based on interpersonal stories from others on the Internet and my own experience with the fat acceptance community. Yo-yo dieting is not the answer, but treading carefully into a new lifestyle with your eyes wide open and plenty of knowledge at hand cannot be more dangerous than giving up and letting the pounds pile on.
But if I do not agree with either of these camps, where then do I stand? I am not instantly critical of someone just for being overweight. It makes them appear less healthy, and therefore attractive, in my eyes, because extra weight is a common indicator of poor diet or other problems that can result in weakness or early death. But I cannot criticize someone simply for having that body - not when I have been completely unsuccessful in curing my own weight problems. The greatest hurdle, I believe, is in overcoming my eating disorder; it is true that weight loss can be prevented or even reversed through the consumption of excess calories. The second hurdle is in mustering up the strength to say "no" - to fight the societal pressures to consume certain foods, and also my own senseless urges as they crop up. I will not say that I am perfect or that my experiences speak for everyone, but this is your world as I see it.
Fat
Back in the 1970's, when my mother was a teenager, she was what they referred to as "fat." (Whether she was overweight or obese, I neither know nor particularly need to know.) Back in the day, if you were a young, white, dating-age woman, being fat was absolutely the worst thing that could happen to you (worse, even, than belonging to a different religion from the guy you were interested in). It wasn't just that individual men saw fat girls as unattractive. It was that the male hivemind saw fat girls as unattractive, so even if you were a man who found a fat girl attractive you wouldn't have dared go out with her. Many of these young women were so desperate to get some male attention that they would sleep with anyone who asked, just to say that they had a boyfriend. (In case that sounds remotely like a good idea: as a consequence, fat girls were proclaimed "easy lays," further discouraging anyone from wanting to date them for other reasons.) In order to get my dad to pay any attention to her (and boy, what a catch he was), my mum had to virtually starve herself until they were married.
Fortunately, things are a lot better now. Right?
Haaaaaaahahahahahaha.
Sure, it's no longer quite so stigmatized for a man to date a fat woman. He's allowed to it, but now he's derogatorily referred to as a "chubby chaser" - a special brand of pervert who's into FAT WOMEN of all things. (Same goes for gay men, actually.) Meanwhile, fat people on the whole are seen as stupid, slovenly, lazy beasts, shuffling down the sidewalk in search of their next Big Mac. On the other hand you've got the "size acceptance" people, who are so frustrated with their inability to lose weight through conventional means that they've given up and are declaring that they - and the rest of the world - need to get over it and "embrace their curves," among other optimistic euphemisms.
The problem with these mindsets - the "hey, fatty, ever heard of a gym?" and the "beauty at any size" perspectives - is that neither of them seem to grasp the complexity of the situation.
Before I continue, I feel I should point out that I am a caveman, and everything I am going to say is going to be informed by that fact, and therefore it will not necessarily be congruent with the perceived reality of non-cavemen. Gehddovuhit.
Firstly, the anti-fat. This is the mindset that is the most annoying and potentially damaging, for a few reasons: firstly, it is so pervasive that even fat people hang onto it, and secondly, it advocates a "weight-loss-at-any-cost" mindset that can and has destroyed people's health. Even worse, it's based on a model for health that is narrow, incomplete, and based on dodgy science.
Case in point: my mother. Weight problems from a young age, as I said. She spent most of her earlier adulthood doing the "yo-yo" form of diet - follow the guidelines until you reach the recommended poundage for your height, at which point you get sick of starving yourself and start eating again, at which point the weight comes back with extras. The reason this happened was because she followed the "starvation diet" model - an idea that encouraged her to underconsume calories to force her body to cannibalize itself, and get most of her other calories from carbohydrates - a source known for its low calorie-to-consumption ratio, which gives the consumer the illusion of being full without eating extra calories, and its ability to burn up extremely quickly inside the body, leaving you with... nothing.
So just from a scientific standpoint, this kind of thing is damaging. Fatphobia has led to doctors and dietitians everywhere to advocate the dangerous "calories in/calories out" lifestyle, wherein people try to eat as little food as possible and expend as much energy as possible to force their bodies into a starvation state so they can shed those horrible, horrible pounds.
Problem is, it doesn't work. For one thing, the body isn't fooled by your attempt to stuff it with calorie-void fluff (hence why you can eat three cups of salad, but only one six-ounce chicken breast). You can persuade it to accept fewer calories if the food you eat is nutritious, but the kind of food they advocate - bread, cereal, rice, and pasta - is anything but. It's cheap energy, and the human body doesn't appreciate it.
Since continuing on this subject would require a long, dull, scientific and highly controversial blog post all on its own, I'm going to turn the reins over to Mark Sisson at Mark's Daily Apple. He is also a caveman, which means that he eschews the "stuff with fluff" dietary ethos in favor of a grain-free, meat-and-veggies type of diet. Before you read any of his resources, check out the pics of his abs.
Anyway, so in lieu of an actual health-focused diet for the overweight, they have the low-calorie model begotten by a knee-jerk fear of fat and fat people. That's the scientific side; now let's talk social.
Years after she recovered from the need to yo-yo diet, my mother is still suffering from fatphobia. I can hear it in the things she says. She describes her own body (a victim of lower-end obesity) as "gross." She puts down chubby women who dress in revealing clothing, rails against pot bellies, and gripes regularly about the bad food choices people make - despite being a fat woman herself.
This hypocrisy not only confused me, but encouraged severe self-esteem issues when I was a child. I remember getting into a spat with my little brother over some food, and my mother marching me into the bathroom, made me look at my own obese reflection and made it known to me that the reason I was fat was because I ate too much. Another fat-combating tactic that she employed: poking me in the stomach and telling me exactly what I'd been eating too much of. My dad joined in the fun, criticizing me for an accidental overspill of bleu cheese dressing by telling me I was well on my way to becoming my obese aunt. The message: "Even though I am buying you highly-processed food, including sweets, and ignoring your actual nutritional needs, you are making yourself fat."
Now, it's true: I have an eating disorder. I will eat when I'm bored, I will eat when I'm stressed, and I will eat even when I'm full just because I like the taste of whatever I'm eating. It's something I fight with all the time. And realistically, there's no way my parents could have known that I was sneaking frozen snack cakes to eat in the middle of my chores. But maybe instead of blaming a ten-year-old child - who saw his/her parents not as trying to help him/her, but as creatures bent on controlling as much of his/her life as possible without actually making an effort to help him/her change - they might have taken a little more proactive steps. Like not bringing snack cakes into the house. You can't ask a ten-year-old child to muster up a level of self-control that many adults (including my dad) can't cultivate in themselves.
Yes, I would say that fatphobia has affected me deeply.
Even today, when my mother professes herself to be an ally of persons with "extra fat", it doesn't take long in any conversation for her colors to come through. We can talk about someone who appears 20-40 pounds overweight, and her favorite way to preface her acceptance of their fat level: "I'm not saying he/she couldn't stand to lose a little weight, but..."
Persons familiar with the anti-racism movement might notice a similarity between this and another popular white phrase: "I'm not a racist, but..." It means basically the same thing. "I don't want you to think I actually support being people being fat, but I think she's fine just the way she is [as long as she doesn't dress in any clothing that I think is unflattering on her]."
So. Anti-fat = fail.
Tune in next time for Part 2, where I take on the fat acceptance movement and why it isn't any better for people.
Fortunately, things are a lot better now. Right?
Haaaaaaahahahahahaha.
Sure, it's no longer quite so stigmatized for a man to date a fat woman. He's allowed to it, but now he's derogatorily referred to as a "chubby chaser" - a special brand of pervert who's into FAT WOMEN of all things. (Same goes for gay men, actually.) Meanwhile, fat people on the whole are seen as stupid, slovenly, lazy beasts, shuffling down the sidewalk in search of their next Big Mac. On the other hand you've got the "size acceptance" people, who are so frustrated with their inability to lose weight through conventional means that they've given up and are declaring that they - and the rest of the world - need to get over it and "embrace their curves," among other optimistic euphemisms.
The problem with these mindsets - the "hey, fatty, ever heard of a gym?" and the "beauty at any size" perspectives - is that neither of them seem to grasp the complexity of the situation.
Before I continue, I feel I should point out that I am a caveman, and everything I am going to say is going to be informed by that fact, and therefore it will not necessarily be congruent with the perceived reality of non-cavemen. Gehddovuhit.
Firstly, the anti-fat. This is the mindset that is the most annoying and potentially damaging, for a few reasons: firstly, it is so pervasive that even fat people hang onto it, and secondly, it advocates a "weight-loss-at-any-cost" mindset that can and has destroyed people's health. Even worse, it's based on a model for health that is narrow, incomplete, and based on dodgy science.
Case in point: my mother. Weight problems from a young age, as I said. She spent most of her earlier adulthood doing the "yo-yo" form of diet - follow the guidelines until you reach the recommended poundage for your height, at which point you get sick of starving yourself and start eating again, at which point the weight comes back with extras. The reason this happened was because she followed the "starvation diet" model - an idea that encouraged her to underconsume calories to force her body to cannibalize itself, and get most of her other calories from carbohydrates - a source known for its low calorie-to-consumption ratio, which gives the consumer the illusion of being full without eating extra calories, and its ability to burn up extremely quickly inside the body, leaving you with... nothing.
So just from a scientific standpoint, this kind of thing is damaging. Fatphobia has led to doctors and dietitians everywhere to advocate the dangerous "calories in/calories out" lifestyle, wherein people try to eat as little food as possible and expend as much energy as possible to force their bodies into a starvation state so they can shed those horrible, horrible pounds.
Problem is, it doesn't work. For one thing, the body isn't fooled by your attempt to stuff it with calorie-void fluff (hence why you can eat three cups of salad, but only one six-ounce chicken breast). You can persuade it to accept fewer calories if the food you eat is nutritious, but the kind of food they advocate - bread, cereal, rice, and pasta - is anything but. It's cheap energy, and the human body doesn't appreciate it.
Since continuing on this subject would require a long, dull, scientific and highly controversial blog post all on its own, I'm going to turn the reins over to Mark Sisson at Mark's Daily Apple. He is also a caveman, which means that he eschews the "stuff with fluff" dietary ethos in favor of a grain-free, meat-and-veggies type of diet. Before you read any of his resources, check out the pics of his abs.
Anyway, so in lieu of an actual health-focused diet for the overweight, they have the low-calorie model begotten by a knee-jerk fear of fat and fat people. That's the scientific side; now let's talk social.
Years after she recovered from the need to yo-yo diet, my mother is still suffering from fatphobia. I can hear it in the things she says. She describes her own body (a victim of lower-end obesity) as "gross." She puts down chubby women who dress in revealing clothing, rails against pot bellies, and gripes regularly about the bad food choices people make - despite being a fat woman herself.
This hypocrisy not only confused me, but encouraged severe self-esteem issues when I was a child. I remember getting into a spat with my little brother over some food, and my mother marching me into the bathroom, made me look at my own obese reflection and made it known to me that the reason I was fat was because I ate too much. Another fat-combating tactic that she employed: poking me in the stomach and telling me exactly what I'd been eating too much of. My dad joined in the fun, criticizing me for an accidental overspill of bleu cheese dressing by telling me I was well on my way to becoming my obese aunt. The message: "Even though I am buying you highly-processed food, including sweets, and ignoring your actual nutritional needs, you are making yourself fat."
Now, it's true: I have an eating disorder. I will eat when I'm bored, I will eat when I'm stressed, and I will eat even when I'm full just because I like the taste of whatever I'm eating. It's something I fight with all the time. And realistically, there's no way my parents could have known that I was sneaking frozen snack cakes to eat in the middle of my chores. But maybe instead of blaming a ten-year-old child - who saw his/her parents not as trying to help him/her, but as creatures bent on controlling as much of his/her life as possible without actually making an effort to help him/her change - they might have taken a little more proactive steps. Like not bringing snack cakes into the house. You can't ask a ten-year-old child to muster up a level of self-control that many adults (including my dad) can't cultivate in themselves.
Yes, I would say that fatphobia has affected me deeply.
Even today, when my mother professes herself to be an ally of persons with "extra fat", it doesn't take long in any conversation for her colors to come through. We can talk about someone who appears 20-40 pounds overweight, and her favorite way to preface her acceptance of their fat level: "I'm not saying he/she couldn't stand to lose a little weight, but..."
Persons familiar with the anti-racism movement might notice a similarity between this and another popular white phrase: "I'm not a racist, but..." It means basically the same thing. "I don't want you to think I actually support being people being fat, but I think she's fine just the way she is [as long as she doesn't dress in any clothing that I think is unflattering on her]."
So. Anti-fat = fail.
Tune in next time for Part 2, where I take on the fat acceptance movement and why it isn't any better for people.
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