I’ve noticed a trend within the fatosphere lately. Maybe it has always been there, and my being new resulted in it going unnoticed before. It was mentioned before in my Creating Community post; “it” being the whole hierarchy between the good fatties and the bad. More and more I’ve noticed entries which discuss healthy eating, which hold food as moral character indicators, and posts outlining how the authors needs to incorporate more physical exercise into their life. To me, these things sound oddly similar to a diet. The regulation of food, the insistence on exercise, the weighing of what foods should and shouldn’t be eaten. And while there is also mention of listening to one’s body and enjoying the exercise, something inside of me is struggling.
Perhaps it is because every time I read these posts I feel as though I am not doing my part to represent the fat world. I am not trying to eat healthier, and by that I mean trying to choose mostly vegetables and whole grains or exclude soda. I do not exercise, and I do not want to. I don’t really enjoy the whole physical exertion thing. There are some things I’m doing, such as eating less meat or taking an Omega 3 supplement, though none of these things are to be healthier. And I worry, if I am judging myself based on these entries and deciding whether or not I’m a good fattie, what are these things doing to the writers?
Am I way off base here, folks? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill or are more and more fat acceptance blogs concerned more with being healthy (It seems they all follow HAES as well) and fat than just acceptance of all fat?
I do agree with what you are saying & I have spoken up about it before in comments on blogs. So many fat people are feeling guilty about ‘not doing it right’ &/or enjoining themselves & others to be ‘healthy fatties’, not to eat ‘junk’ (ALL food is food, has nutrients &, unless it is spoiled or contaminated in some way or a person is allergic to it, there is no reason not to eat it or to attach a moral value to it), to exercise more, to ‘improve their health’. I am & always have been an active person & my problem all my life has in fact been a strong tendency to exercise compulsively; I have gone through several periods of three to four years in my life where I exercised three to four hours per day, including one ending six years or so ago where, among all the other things I was doing, I did at least 1500 stomach crunches every day. That was MY ‘non-diet diet’, trying to be superfit & work off every calorie I ate. I kept this up for over 3 1/2 years, lost a total of 15 pounds, & speeded up the progression of my arthritis.
However, this seems to be where we are in the fat culture within the larger culture. Fat people can do these things such as what I did to myself & very few people caution us that we are being excessive or worry about us, but instead applaud us & our ‘fitness’ & what a great example we are to the culture of how fit a fat person can be & that we really ARE ‘just like everyone else’, meaning that we are killing ourselves to earn rights & acceptance &, in the case of someone like myself, if we MUST be fat, we are representing the ‘healthy’ fat person, the ‘acceptably fat’ person. Yes, indeed, I have seen loud & clear the message that there are ‘good fatties’ & ‘bad fatties’, even as many of the bloggers protest that they do NOT mean that, that they include everyone, etc. Lately I have once again seen some brief mention of the old (pretty much scientifically disproven) idea of “naturally thin people who EAT themselves fat” as opposed to ‘genetically fat” people, when in fact 1) it has been shown in repeated studies that naturally thin people CANNOT “eat themselves fat” & many can gain little if any weight, all gain less weight than expected & with difficulty, all lose gained weight easily & often start to lose even while the ‘overfeeding experiment’ is going on & 2) that fat & thin people, on average, eat no differently, fat people do not eat MORE than thin people, different people of ALL sizes have varying food intakes unrelated to body size & 3) that anyone who is fat & stays fat has the genes to be fat. However, this argument about ‘thin people eating themselves fat’ comes up every so often as another argument about who is a ‘good’ fatty or a ‘bad fatty’, whereas we ALL deserve rights, access, fair treatment, & all the opportunities life offers regardless of how fat we are OR what or how much we eat, exercise or anything else.
I always come to a dead stop somewhere along the way reading a blog entry when someone is raving about fat hatred & fat rights & fat acceptance & inserts something about how all we can do…& it is inferred that it is our responsibility to DO this…is live according to HAES, & eat ‘right’ & exercise, thereby showing that we are ‘good fatties’ who are doing all we can to take care of ourselves, optimize our health, & not be a drain on the healthcare system, thereby once again affirming the belief that health & longevity are all about ‘lifestyle choices’ & that we can control how healthy we are & how long we live. I have been involved in fat liberation for over 30 years now, & this whole belief that fat people MUST be fit & healthy & do everything ‘right’ (in other words, do everything possible to get thin & then, if it doesn’t result in weight loss, at least we can pat ourselves on the back for living right & use that as an argument against our detractors) in order to deserve the liberation, the rights, the full access to life & the world for which we are supposedly fighting seems to hold sway with a large percentage of those who call themselves fat activists. I know for a fact, from years ago when I was doing this thing myself & making the people who lived differently & weren’t doing it ‘right’ feel unwelcome in the fat acceptance movement, that these attitudes hurt people deeply & they divide us & further prevent us from gaining the ground we need to end fat hatred & discrimination.
On the one hand, I can see the positives of HAES, since it provides a weight-neutral incentive for increasing one’s health indices, and a way to combat the medical establishment’s cure-all for everything that afflicts an obese person- weight loss. (Ironic statement, since I’m pre-med, and in a few years will join the medical establishment.)
However, I agree that it also might be interpreted as “only good fatties deserve rights and respect”, which is not what is intended at all. Moreover, the terms “good fattie” and “bad fattie” also put moral value on diet, exercise, and health. This is not a positive thing.
I don’t have a solution though. There are positives, negatives, and neutrals to HAES. I don’t think it should be banned from all talk of fat liberation, but I don’t think it should be the be-all, end-all either. Moderation is key, I think.
I forgot to add last time that it is definitely your life & your body & no one should hassle you about whether or not you should exercise. There seems to be some indication that MAYBE getting some moderate (like 30 minutes of walking) movement several days per week may have some health benefits, but it is not engraved in stone. I certainly know & have known…& been related to…many people whose idea of exercise is walking from the house to the car & back, who lived to be very old. That is yet another thing one does see often in the ‘fat community’, that passionate urging to find a form of movement you enjoy, yadda yadda. It kind of reminds me of someone who came into a fat bulletin board community where I posted for many years some years ago flatly stating that she hated vegetables; you never saw such efforts at cajoling & persuading that she try this, that, or some other thing, for surely if you don’t like vegetables, you will die. So, yes, the ‘nondiet diets & the ‘health’ policing indeed abounds throughout fat acceptance & has for the past 40 years.
I was going to say “I get the same feeling” until I realised that you’re the person I disagreed with on this topic a while ago. Huh. I think I see where you’re coming from now. I always defend HAES as a concept (= being fat and healthy at the same time is possible), but the way it is being promoted sometimes makes me unhappy, too. However, I assume that many of the people who do this are recovering from an eating disorder or at least from a lifetime of dieting, and since I don’t share their experiences I usually keep quiet. As a chronically ill person, I sure do understand the desire to improve one’s health, but of course I would only recommend this to those who are actually suffering in some way. Hmmm, there’s some food for thought.
Perhaps the problem is that people who are physically or mentally uncomfortable/sick (not to say that both are the same, I imagine this as a spectrum), who are searching for ways to feel better and want to share what they find out, automatically assume (like me) that healthy and happy people would feel no need to even read their advice … when in reality said healthy and happy people don’t identify as healthy because they’re not doing what society tells them to do. I have no idea if that sentence makes any sense outside of my head – in case it doesn’t, sorry. I’ll have to think about this some more.
This seems to come up periodically, and it’s only my intuition, but think even the “healthiest” of HAES “good” fatties would agree with you if put to the point.
But I’m kind of torn about HAES talk because I think it can come from different places and have different outcomes.
I think the FA movement, as a movement, is NOT served by promoting the “good fatty” as an ideal, but I think it is important to be able to counter the fat hater’s favorite weapon of “health” concern. It would be best if we could answer it with a simple “my health isn’t your business,” but in a culture STEEPED in health paranoia and obsession, that–true as it is–is often not enough. And, honestly, many fatties ARE healthy and physically active while this fact is virtually unknown to the greater world.
On a similar note, I think it can be individually helpful for fatties to think about HAES, because many of us are told for so long that we simply CAN’T be healthy until we are thin. If health is a big concern for an individual, then HAES and be enormously anxiety-relieving.
Of course, I’ve certainly seen posts that (to my eye) look like hold-overs from diet mentality–which can either be a dangerous slippery slope back to self-hate or a first step out.
The danger is creating the good/bad split, which divides our (already meager) forces, and fosters alienation and infighting, and, worse, opens the window to defining peoples’ worth by what they eat and how much they exercise.
But, as I said above, I don’t think most FA writers actually WANT to say that. They may sound like they do, sometimes, in their enthusiasm for HAES, but I’ve seen this topic kicked around enough in the last few years to believe they don’t buy into that rhetoric.
So, I agree. HAES and “good fatty” talk can be alienating. But try bringing up your point of view in the comments–it is important to say, as often as necessary, that, not only can fat people be gung-ho health nuts, we can also be utterly unconcerned with health, or deeply unhealthy, and it is no one’s business but ours. And we still deserve to be treated like human beings.
I notice that to in alot of posts I read, many saying we have to get the message out that we are not like those fatties ie: the ones who aren’t healthy or who do overeat which seems to me to defeat the point Fat Acceptance is trying to make and that is that people deserve the same rights and respect that any other person does REGARDLESS of if they are being a “good fattie” or a “bad fattie”.
I have noticed that some people’s versions of HAES really are just another diet and many people speak about THEIR HAES with pride talking about what they avoid eating or about all the “Good” food they eat. I find myself kind of chuckling about this because I hear the same thing from alot of my dieting friends and family.
I think that this comes from the need to be the best at things, and that it is hard sometimes to get away from the mentality that there is a moral factor to food, or health, or excercise and the thought is often ok I am Fat and thats ok but I am not a bad fattie, somehow trying to EARN acceptance and shake of the guilt and shame fat people get loaded onto them everyday.
I love what Elizabeth said “The danger is creating the good/bad split, which divides our (already meager) forces, and fosters alienation and infighting, and, worse, opens the window to defining peoples’ worth by what they eat and how much they exercise.” It seems that for some the point of FA is to separate yourself from the bad fatties and work so hard to show that they have earned the right to be free of discrimination because they follow the rules. This can and does alienate those who may not be that healthy, who don’t eat all organic or good foods and who might not like or be able to exercise. No one can judge a persons health, eating or exercise habits by simply looking at them, and honestly those things are not really anyone s business they shouldn’t factor into how a person is treated.
There is a quote that I absolutely love that says this …
“I support the radically simple idea that people should not be discriminated against, made fun of, restricted, or oppressed because of the size and shape of their bodies. Moreover, I believe that everyone has a right to dignity, respect, and self-love, and that jokes that denigrate fat people are just as offensive as those that denigrate women or ethnic groups.”
We are just like anyone else. Some people are into what’s called ‘healthy living’ some are sceptical about those doctrines. Being fat doesn’t make any difference, it’s not good/bad fatty, it’s healthy lifestyle exponent or not, full stop.
I used to be into the above, I’m not anymore and have a low tolerence for things such as boasting that broccoli is your favouritest food in the whole wide world.
Having said that, without fat people who follow these dictats, it would be harder to know that they don’t make you thin.
I’m a great believer in diversity is strength, I do agree though that healthy eatism’s grip on the soul of FA needs to be loosened.