The engagement has been awesome so far! Excited to hear your thoughts on the piece, or pieces, you choose
On fat fetish
Gaining is the fetish that changes how we think about the male body
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/lifestyle/article/gaining-fetish
Feederism: Eating, Weight Gain, and Sexual Pleasure
https://www.dropbox.com/s/plxactm1t42iy2v/Feederism%20%E2%80%93%20Eating%2C%20Weight%20Gain%2C%20and%20Sexual%20Pleasure.pdf?dl=0
On race and fat
BMI
https://elemental.medium.com/the-bizarre-and-racist-history-of-the-bmi-7d8dc2aa33bb
Fatphobia
https://www.dropbox.com/s/w3f75wpefna44p1/Fearing%20the%20Black%20Body.pdf?dl=0
On dismantling thin privilege
https://www.dropbox.com/s/r9f06lm0g8j0y1w/Reflections%20on%20Thin%20Privilege%20and%20Responsibility.pdf?dl=0
Week one - Identity
Week two - Capitalism, gender, media and health at every size
As a reminder, these fall in the area of Fat Studies and there's some norms you should be aware of:
- "fat" is taken as a neutral descriptor, think of it as reclaiming the word.
- "obese" arbitrarily medicalises fatness and Others fat people
:sankara-salute:
Again, fat person here. Being fat is not healthy, physically or mentally. No we shouldn't attack or criticize people for being fat, but acting like being fat is perfectly fine is wrong. BMI might not be a good system, but that doesn't mean the idea behind it isn't.
“obese” arbitrarily medicalises fatness
Fatness is medical. Fatness comes with a host of health problems. To say it's not medical is some anti-science bullshit.
I don't think I can respond directly to your first point, as I think we are working from very different premises. I think being fat is normal and okay, and you think that it is inherently unhealthy. I recommend the Health at Every Size reading from last week if you would like to understand where I'm coming from.
and I think you can just as easily say having a body is medical. The emphasis in my phrasing is arbitrarily, it's difficult to say what is obese and what isn't, as body fat is distributed differently across races, body types etc.
I know being fat is inherently unhealthy. I am unhealthy and so is every fat person I know. "Healthy at Every Size" is complete bs.
You might be able to keep yourself relatively healthy for your weight, but being fat is still inherently unhealthy. Whatever you do to stay "healthy" while fat would be easier to accomplish and work even better while at a normal weight.
I managed to lose ~50 pounds from my walk to work over the course of 2019 (still fat though, and that loss stopped in 2020 for obvious reasons). Even without changing my diet at all, I started feeling much better because of it.
it’s difficult to say what is obese and what isn’t, as body fat is distributed differently across races, body types etc
Yeah it's difficult to set a hard bottom line for obesity, and it can differ greatly depending on a number of factors, but that doesn't mean obesity isn't real or that it's some completely arbitrary thing that should just be dismissed.
just to let you know, losing weight with your walk to work is something that is completely compatible with Health at Every Size. Like HAES doesn't say you can't lose weight, but that you should stay active, eat intuitively and losing weight can be a side effect of those healthier choices.* It's hard for me to imagine that focusing on being healthy, rather focusing on decreasing your weight is complete bs.
From what I can tell, I think you are mistaken that the "Health" in HAES is a noun rather than a verb
edit: I meant * you should pursue staying active, eating intuitively rather than pursuing losing weight itself
All of those things inherently lead to losing weight. I wasn't healthy at almost 300 lbs, even when I started walking. It was only when my weight was significantly lower that I started feeling better (still not healthy, but healthier than 50 lbs ago). Getting healthier coincides with weight loss. If you aren't losing weight, you aren't getting much healthier.
If you want to reduce some social stigma around being fat, that's fine. Don't treat people like shit or blame them for their health problems or whatever. But to insinuate that you can stay 300 lbs and be healthy is complete bullshit. So the social goal should be to replace negative stigma with positive social encouragement and support towards losing weight and becoming healthier. Not to just act like being fat is perfectly fine in every possible way, including medical.
There's a bit of a tricky situation though, in that just because you lose weight doesn't automatically mean you are healthier. Anorexic women are praised by society for their unhealthy eating habits, and fat anorexic women:
Erin Harrop, a researcher at the University of Washington, studies higher-weight women with anorexia, who, contrary to the size-zero stereotype of most media depictions, are twice as likely to report vomiting, using laxatives and abusing diet pills. Thin women, Harrop discovered, take around three years to get into treatment, while her participants spent an average of 13 and a half years waiting for their disorders to be addressed.
The HAES movement moves the focus from losing weight, as dieting is a strong predictor of eating disorders:
In a large study of 14– and 15-year-olds, dieting was the most important predictor of a developing eating disorder. Those who dieted moderately were 5x more likely to develop an eating disorder, and those who practiced extreme restriction were 18x more likely to develop an eating disorder than those who did not diet. Golden, N. H., Schneider, M., & Wood, C. (2016). Preventing Obesity and Eating Disorders in Adolescents. Pediatrics, 138(3). doi:10.1542/peds.2016-1649
Staying active and eat intuitively do lead to losing weight, but there are many ways to lose weight and harm your body. By focusing on health, you avoid a lot of these pitfalls
None of what you said is consistent with being "healthy at every size". Of course how you lose weight can be unhealthy, but again, someone who is 300 lbs is not healthy and will never be healthy unless they lose weight. Healthy at every size insinuates it's possible to stay 300 lbs for the rest of your life and be perfectly healthy. It's just not.
You've created a strawman of HAES and you're asking me to defend it, please read the article from last week https://www.dropbox.com/s/ybfbkqak4wtu3wp/What%20is%20%22Health%20at%20Every%20Size%22%3F.pdf?dl=0
It's not a strawman, it's what those words in that order literally mean...
I'm not engaging in this conversation until you read that piece. Health at Every Size is a very specific movement, it's not just the meaning you assign to the words. There's a little FAQ at the end of that piece with common myths, one of the myths is "The HAES model argues that people of every size must be healthy"
"These words we use that have a certain meaning aren't actually what we mean."
I looked through the paper, I get what you are trying to say, but the phrase "healthy at every size" just doesn't work. And neither does the insistence that being fat isn't necessarily unhealthy.
There are some good ideas in there. A reduced focus on weight and focusing on a more holistic approach to health can be good, but weight is still an important factor. But again, that's not at all what the words "healthy at every size" convey. It conveys the idea of a very fat person having no more health problems than the average person, which just isn't the case.
But reading the paper I get the impression that they think there is not necessarily anything wrong with being fat. That fatness is perfectly fine. It's not.
lmao, here's a particularly egregious line from the paper:
The diseases that are associated with higher BMI also occur at low BMI. If fat-ness causes these diseases, why do they exist across the weight spectrum?
"Lung cancer also occurs in non-smokers. If smoking causes lung cancer, why does it exist in both smokers and non-smokers?"
And the story about "Jody" shows someone doing all the wrong things to lose weight. It's not her trying to lose weight that's bad (at 195 anyway), it's the way she tries to lose weight. No shit 1000 calories a day isn't healthy. And avoiding fat and carbs is misguided as well. As for 105 Jody, that's a problem of thinking she's overweight when she's not. That may come from some social stigmas that need to be worked on, but that doesn't mean overweight doesn't exist, and it doesn't mean 195 Jody isn't overweight.
one of the myths is “The HAES model argues that people of every size must be healthy”
I didn't say that. The model says fat people can be perfectly healthy, which just isn't true.
Thanks for putting effort into fighting this nonsense. This poster is making medical concerns arbitrary by bringing attention away from the syndrome of obesity and focusing on the symptoms which possibly can be “present at every BMI level.”
Your analogy of the syndrome of smoking causing the symptom of lung cancer is apt here. For how are we to stop endemic lung cancer without stopping endemic smoking, and how are we to stop what are provably endemic symptoms of obesity without first dealing with obesity?
(my usage of ‘symptoms’ and ‘syndrome’ was chosen bc the word syndrome is widely considered ‘that which causes symptoms’. by calling obesity a syndrome, i am only claiming that it produces symptoms. there is not meant to be any further negative connotation than it being the thing that produces symptoms)
sorry for not engaging with you more, I don't like the effect these online conversations have on my brain. I feel like I get addicted to Being Right.
Anyway, I just want to make an analogy that I've been thinking about that hopefully will be helpful for seeing our common ground. Our idea of cleanliness - in terms of laundry, dirty dishes etc - is based in science (germs, fungus etc) and in culture (squeaky clean, clothes should smell a certain way). It is possible to highlight that our mental models of cleanliness have been corrupted by soap companies to make us hold our environments to a higher standard than they realistically need to be. In making that argument, people may object and say "how can you defend eating raw chicken? don't you know how dangerous germs are?". And like yes. In many cases, of course you need to be clean, however that isn't what the discussion is actually about.
I'm not saying that there are no negative health factors for heavier people, but the framing that we're using isn't about how much it sucks to be fat. We all, especially fat people, know that. I'm trying to provide other, novel perspectives that will hopefully expand our mental models and help us to think of this in a completely new way.
Not the person you're responding to, but am also fat and very skeptical of HAES. I agree with most of what /u/eduardog3000 has said so I won't retread all that. Read through some of that article you linked and it still doesn't really make sense to me. From my understanding, my obesity puts greater stress on my body. Specifically I suffer from obstructive sleep apnea, AKA things blocking my airway and preventing breathing during sleep. This developed in the same period of time as rapid weight gain. Even after having my tonsils removed to help clear the airway, I still suffer from the condition and require the use of a CPAP. I fit none of the other risk factors besides obesity. Would you say that my obesity is not contributing to this issue, and thus my obesity is unhealthy?
I get the idea of destigmatizing fatness. I've been made fun of and lost friends because of my weight, and it sucks. I don't like feeling gross or unwanted or weak-willed because of it. And ultimately, weight loss should occur as a result of healthy living, not in spite of it. But that doesn't mean being overweight is normal or good for humans, and that doesn't mean it can exacerbate or trigger conditions that directly harm quality of life.
Also there are just some weird takes in that doc, like:
There is plenty of data, but inadequate attention, on the risks of having a low BMI, making the hysteria about high-BMI particularly suspect.
Maybe because over two thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, while less than 2 percent are underweight? That isn't to disregard or devalue the problems that come with being underweight, but when a majority of the country is suffering from one condition, it makes sense that it's focused on more.
sorry for not engaging with you more, I don’t like the effect these online conversations have on my brain. I feel like I get addicted to Being Right.
I just want to say that it is a misconception that the “Health” in HAES is a noun rather than a verb. It's not saying that people can be considered healthy at any size, but that people at any size can pursue healthiness — which may or may not correlate with weight loss. HAES isn't just for fat people, which is why becoming healthier might include gaining muscle and therefore weight.
This isn't related to the excerpts but i've been thinking a lot about is how capitalism and capitalist adjacent societies denigrates bodies who are or look unfit to work/produce. I'm reading caliban and the witch right now, and learning about the scale of how often women (well, people who had a uterus and AFAB during those times) were punished for simply trying to retain control of their bodies. They were denigrated to the role of a womb and if their womb was not producing the right kinds of children, with the right people and often enough, you were in danger of being deemed a witch and punished for it.
Of course, controlling whether your uterus is capable of producing healthy children and the health of those children in a time before vaccines was completely out of control of these parents.
Later on, during the slave trade era, black slave women would be seen as equal worker to any man on top of well, the much fouler and triggering stuff involving wombs and chattel slavery. In every case, the assigned-woman worker here is seen as having value only related to their bodies and what they can be used for, as if every human is just another cog in the capitalist machine, and the value of the cog is entirely decided by what the external body looks like (completely out of the human's control).
Woman shaped cog can be used for babies. Strong shaped cog can be used for labor. If you don't fit those, you are useless, valueless and we will persecute you for not fitting in our machine how we like. Even today if you have an intellectual type job, it's still difficult to get those if you are visibly physically disabled in some way or there is a social stigma attached to you.
Speaking of how being fat relates to this, being fat makes you less likely to be hired and impacts your income negatively, most especially if you are being perceived as a woman.
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/aug/30/demoted-dismissed-weight-size-ceiling-work-discrimination
Shown hypothetical CVs with photographs depicting fat and thin people, the participants clearly perceived men and women of average weight to be the most suitable for employment. Obese women were the least likely to be hired. The researchers concluded that stereotypes of obese people being “less physically capable and slothful” were likely to have played a role in this outcome.
The result of this prejudice is not only that overweight people stand less chance of getting a job; they are paid less, too. In 2016, researchers at the University of Exeter found that a woman who was a stone heavier would on average earn £1,500 less a year than a comparable woman of the same height. Overweight people also work longer hours, are considered less qualified for leadership positions and are expected to be less successful, according to numerous studies.
But this shouldn't be a surprise. Over and over, we see powerful people picking and choosing who and what is acceptable to them and basically creating a restrictive culture around it. And of course those powerful people are going to mainly be focused on how to exploit workers and extract profit. Fatphobia succeeds in that completely, AND creates an industry that profits billions off people's shame that they are or might become fat.
Some excerpts to tickle your fancy:
From Gaining is the fetish that changes how we think about the male body:
I do not think it is always helpful to unarchive the roots of fetishes, since this tends only to pathologise queer and non-normative forms of desire (after all, no one ever asked a heterosexual man why he likes boobs so much)
From Feederism: Eating, Weight Gain, and Sexual Pleasure :
It is argued that attempting to understand feederism using a psychological framework of pathology is inappropriate. The childhood attraction to fat and lifelong interest and erotic feelings for it into adulthood suggests a form of sexuality more so than a fetish
From Fearing the Black Body :
I argue that two critical historical developments contributed to a fetish for svelteness and a phobia about fatness: the rise of the transatlantic slave trade and the spread of Protestantism. ... Not until the early nineteenth century in the US in the context of slavery, religious revivals, ... did these notions come together under a coherent ideology
[T]he phobia about fatness and the preference for thinness have not, principally or historically, been about health.
I have been way too skinny all my life. In school we once had to calculate our BMI (school is a fucked up place) and our teacher told me my BMI was impossible and NOBODY could live with a BMI like that. I tried everything to gain weight but nothing worked. Then I found out I have been depressed for the majority of my life. My doctor put me on antidepressants and for the first time in my life I understood people who could always eat. I ate more than ever before and gained more than 20lb in three weeks. What I'm trying to say is: Your hunger, your drive to eat something and all these things are determined by your hormones, nothing else. Every person has unique brain with a unique mix of hormones. Eating less has nothing to do with a lack of will. You can't decide how much you have to eat, your hormones do that and dictate your life. So don't be ashamed when your the one eating the most at a dinner (or every dinner). Maybe don't eat too much sugar tho. The sugar industry made fat the villain when actually a high fat, low sugar diet is probably the best for humans.
In school we once had to calculate our BMI (school is a fucked up place) and our teacher told me my BMI was impossible and NOBODY could live with a BMI like that.
How did they reconcile this with you clearly being alive?
They didn't really let me say anything after I said my BMI and the teacher said it's not possible. I know someone who had something similar at the doctors. She told them she didn't take a shit in 14 days and the doctor just startet screaming at her, that she was a liar and nobody would survive such a thing.
It just happened fucking again! Not with my weight but the "that can't be true". Friend of mine had a collapse. She took her temperature and it was 33° C, which is 91.4 Fahrenheid, which is waaay to low and extremely dangerous. She took the temperature under her arm, so maybe it was 0.5 dagrees more. She is in another country, so I could only be there over the phone. I looked up what do to and told her to drink a tee. A friend was supposed to come and help and it took him half an hour to get there. She kept drinking tee and kept warm but didn't want to see a doctor because she had to pay half a month salary for a corona test. It didn't get better and she went to the Doctors today. When she told her, that she took the temperature under the arm and is was only 33°, she told her that wasn't possible. She sent my friend home without any further inspection but measuring the heart rate. It's rediculous, this girl can barely walk and is being told to go home because her sympthoms were impossible and her heart rate is fine.
so called free-thinkers when they are asked to confront their learned fatphobia
non-snarky answer: read the intro to the Fearing the Black Body piece linked above and consider whether fatness being bad is such an apriori belief or one fueled by the billion dollar diet industry
you're purposely picking 400lbs people bc you see them as indefensible.
I'm asking you to question why someone with a BMI over 25, but lives a healthy and active lifestyle, is classified as obese and the impact that has on their lives.
My life wouldn’t be easier if I were thin. My life would be easier if this culture wasn’t obsessed with oppressing me because I’m fat. The solution to a problem like bigotry is not to do everything in our power to accommodate the bigotry. It is to get rid of the bigotry.
You cannot earn freedom through conformity. You cannot buy your way in. And we can only claim it when we recognize it is already ours.
I like these threads but I hate buzzwords. I've always found social justice buzzwords extremely annoying.
i do not know the context but having these threads next to this emoji makes it weird :joe-ligotti:
ahah the context is just rooting reactionary thought out of this community. Idk the dude at all, but if he's like a comedian/actor/personality I think it's fine to have the emoji. Like fat people are funny! but fat people being the joke is fatphobic
