More Love, Less Fat-Phobia

There is a lovely bull-shit article from the New York Times titled "More fitness, Less Fatness" by Jane E. Brody.  It discusses in part how horrible and deadly being fat is, and also talks about the "subtle peer pressure" to find being heavier than "normal" as acceptable.

This article is full of fat-phobia, fear-mongering, and of course the ever-present push that weight is the end all of the health train. So I wanted to break it down, and challenge the points made in this article.

I'll start by addressing the awful line regarding "peer pressure"

Apparently treating people as people, regardless of size, is a disgusting viewpoint for Brody.  People "significantly" heavier (than a "normal" range on a chart that is notoriously awful at telling us anything?) shouldn't be acceptable.

PEER PRESSURE

And by encouraging people to love and respect their bodies is really just peer pressure? I guess promoting a non-weightloss centric health care system, and telling society at large that people are more than their weight and we should really treat everyone as people with feelings, problems, and dreams regardless of weight is the same as your college friends yelling "SHOTS" at you until you're vomiting your guts up at 4 am.

This section of the article also mentions how Americans have gained extra pounds in recent decades. You know what else Americans have gained in recent decades? Inches! As humans get taller, we put on more pounds. Very few people 200 years ago weighed 200lbs, but that's probably because they maybe grew to 5 feet, and died before 30.

Also, what were those men and women supposed to say? That they felt their body was hell on earth, and they couldn't wait to get the weight off of their bones? Are people not supposed to feel ok with their weight? Would this study have been better if all these people had said that they feel disgusted and will do anything to lose weight?

And yes, fewer people are trying to lose weight because it doesn't work. 95% of diets fail, and even when people keep up the calorie restriction and exercise, they can still expect to gain the weight back or gain more weight back then they lost in 5-6 years! But who cares about the weight loss? Did this study cover if they were doing health-promoting behaviors? No. Just the sole fact that they were not trying to lose weight is (once again) used as a yardstick for health.

First off, trying to find a doctor who accepts Medicare can be very difficult depending on where you live, and if you have access to a vehicle or reliable public transport (and the money for said public transport). Some doctors do not accept Medicare because they do not pay as high compared to commercial insurances, while other doctors only accept a limited amount of Medicare recipients. Not to mention for many overweight and fat people going to the doctor (for anything) somehow results in a weight loss consult.  Ranging anywhere from a broken arm, cancer, to the flu many patients who are not a straight size can expect their weight (and what they "should" do about it) to come up during their appointment.

Not to mention many people can see improvements in these same health risks through habit based changes, instead of weight loss based changes! Not only do you not have to guilt yourself into hating your body, or weight yourself every day, you can make habit changes that work for you and your life to result in positive changes, and (unlike weight loss) they are actually more likely to stay with you during your lifetime.

Activities can actually be because you enjoy them

They also discuss the good ol' "calorie in, calorie out" concept for weight loss. If weight loss was that easy, so many people would be their "ideal" size. However, no two bodies utilize calories in the same way, so this "simple, fail-proof" concept flies right out the window. Not to mention, the longer you try to sustain weight-loss the fewer calories you have to bring in or the more calories you have to expend, just to maintain the loss. This is not very feasible for humans, whose energy needs fluctuate on a day-to-day basis, but also to simple living.  Working for 8 hours a day is about to become a lot harder if you have to keep lowering your calorie intake over the years.

But most concerning to me is the quote from Dr. Livingston about how
"the common denominator for all successful diet plans is calorie reduction, irrespective of how that is achieved."

And this is considered a good thing. Irrespective of how it's achieved? Really? So as long as people are underfeeding their bodies, punishing themselves mentally and physically for not being small enough is a-ok as long as they are getting lower numbers on the scale?

This shows to me just how fucked our societal importance on weight loss has become. We no longer truly care about the cost of it, just that people need to do it because we have placed weight on a pedestal it doesn't deserve. Making weight such a huge focus of health is only going to result in harming the population and take the focus away from more important aspects of health such as access to fresh foods, the affordability fo fresh foods, and access to adequate, non-fat phobic health services.

It's okay to be fat, it's okay to be straight-sized, it's okay to be super fat. You still deserve to be treated with respect and as a freakin' human. We should not put weight loss above all else, and we should stop acting like weight loss at any cost is somehow healthy.

So if I'm peer pressuring you into loving yourself, accepting yourself, and to stand up for the rights you have even as a (gasp!) larger person in America than fuck it, I'm gonna be peer pressuring for a long time.  And I hope you join me.

Your last dose of "peer pressure" today :)