An Open Letter to Fat Acceptance Bloggers
Dear Fat Acceptance Bloggers,
Believe me when I say, hooray for you. It’s great you’re working in any way to get all shapes and sizes accepted in society. As a fat gal myself, I appreciate the work that goes into this.
However, over the past few weeks I’ve seen some startling things in FA blogs, and frankly I can’t not mention this to you and to any of your readers.
I’ve seen claims that people should not try to lose weight. This is fair enough if a person is at their natural weight level, is eating well and moving enough. For some people that weight level is higher than for others, and that’s okay. Working to help people accept and embrace these larger sizes is fantastic, but blogging on the net doesn’t give you the right to guilt or harass people who – for whatever reason – decide they wish to lose weight.
I’ve seen claims that body weight cannot cause joint pain. Fact is, it can. For example, when I am at my heaviest, my knees and ankles are incredibly painful. My frame is not made to carry the weight I do, hence the pain. When I lose weight, no more pain. And before you say “but there might be another reason” I’ve had X-Rays and scans it’s simple trying to make my frame do more than it should. End of story.
I’ve seen claims that lifestyle is not a factor in weight. I’m sorry, but that is just out and out bullshit. Certainly for many people, it isn’t. For many people genetics, medical conditions or medications are the deciding factor, but at the same time you cannot tell me that someone who is eating nothing but junk food couldn’t be healther and, yes, thinner, if they changed their lifestyle.
Claims that are based purely on your own beliefs, with no medical or proven backup should be labeled as such. You are more than doing your readers a disservice by publishing your opinions as fact, you are being dangerous. It’s not okay to tell people to stay fat if their bodies are meant to be thinner. It’s not okay to enable unhealthy living, simply because YOU think it’s okay.
Body acceptance is important, I fully endorse the concept in every way, but there needs to be an understanding from you and from anyone else that all bodies are different, that some people are naturally fat and some people aren’t. By telling people that it’s really okay to just be as fat as they can be, you’re risking their health. It’s one thing to decide your own lifestyle, it’s totally another thing when your lifestyle choices are pushed onto other people as fact and the only way.
For the most part, fat acceptance bloggers are a reasonable and wise lot, but like any group on the internet, there’s rogues with their own agendas. I urge each and every fat blogger on the net to review their blogrolls from time to time. If you see dangerous or upsetting behaviour from someone on your blog roll, take them off. Don’t endorse them.
Finally, think about some full disclosure. Are you, FA Blogger, fat because of a medical condition, genetics, medications or something else? Let your readers know WHY you are over weight, so they can see where you’re coming from. If it doesn’t work for YOU to work out or whatever, that doesn’t mean you should discourage others from doing so, and it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work for anyone.
Thanks.
PS. I also know many of you delete comments you disagree with. Apart from obvious trolls, there’s no reason to do this at all. Certainly you have the power to do it, and it’s your blog and therefore your rules, but if you aren’t able to actually discuss your opinions, then there’s something wrong.
The Weight Police
Body shape is something that cannot be changed. Oh sure you can change your weight, but the basic shape of your body will stay as it is, just smaller or larger.
Ideal body weight is largely predetermined by genetics and medical conditions, and varies from person to person. Generally speaking, if you’re taking a good amount of exercise and eating a reasonably balanced diet, you’re around where you should be. Now that might be a size 8, or it might be a size 20 or whereever, but it’s not really up to YOU what your ideal weight is, your body knows where it should be. Bear in mind that a balanced diet does include cakey things, which are as much for mental health as to offset all those salads. Avoid Rice Cakes, they be pretty blah. You can of course become even thinner than ideal, but it takes a lot of hard work, a lot of self denial and a lot of starvation.
Anyway. There’s plenty of fat acceptance blogs out there, and there’s plenty of thin acceptance. There may even be standard Body Acceptance, I haven’t really looked. I am a fat acceptance failure, in that I am about to restart treatment to control my insulin resistance. The upshot of this is that I may lose weight.
Granted, not all fat acceptance movement members judge or belittle people who do lose weight, but plenty do. I stopped bouncing around the fat blogs a while back, feeling like even thinking about treatment for the PCOS that I have was a shameful horror. I should be happy in my fat skin, and frankly I’m pretty okay with my fat most of the time.
Health and fat are linked in the minds of about everyone, from those who want the world to see that you CAN be fat AND healthy (and you can too, no argument here) to those who want to explain to fat people that fat = unhealthy. Which is not always true.
Sometimes it is. Yes, there are gray areas. Let’s take two fat people I’ve made up. We’ll call them Stella and Lola. Let’s pretend that against all the odds, they’re the exact same body type and weight and are both size 22. So let’s say Stella takes spanish dance lessons once a week, swims regularly and does other interesting body moving things almost every day, as well as watching her food and making sure she takes things like cheesecake in moderation. Medically, she is in fine fettle – blood pressure great, cholesterol great – everything that should be fine is fine.
Lola on the other hand takes no exercise, has a diet that leans more to the fast food end of the spectrum and tends to snack on less than great for her foods. You can’t argue, in this case, that she is a healthy fat person, because she isn’t. She’s overweight because she eats too much crap and never works it off.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is this: What should come first, the consideration of health or the fat acceptance? Should I be okay with my insulin resistance which caused my obesity because there’s a strong and growing movement to accept all body shapes, or should I seek treatment for it, therefore becoming a failure in the fatlove circles?
Bear in mind I will never – ever- be skinny. I’m not built that way, I come from a long line of curvy ladies and there’s no reasonable way I could ever be a size 4 or whatever the ideal is (not that I would want to anyway. Winter would suck without some extra insulation).
I’m at the stage here where my doctor blood tests me quarterly to make sure I haven’t developed diabetes. Now before you get up on your high horse about that, there’s a good chance I WILL develop diabetes since my insulin is all screwed up – she’s just keeping an eye on me so we can catch it early.
Regardless of how I feel about my body, I HATE my PCOS. I seriously hate it, I hate everything it did to me and everything it took away from me and I’m tired of just letting it go. I want to do something, and there’s another treatment available to me which I wish to try.
So why the guilt? Why the shame and the horror and the self loathing? Surely taking control of your health is a GOOD thing? Maybe. Maybe not. When fat acceptance goes too far, and when people are discouraged from taking the best care of themselves they can – at ANY size – then it’s become a Weight Police Issue, and that’s not right.
News Flash: Women have hairy legs.
I admit I wouldn’t be able to spot Mo’Nique in a line up, so out of touch am I with anything that’s happening in the world of hollywood, however she seems to have caused a bit of a bruhaha with her choice to not shave her legs.
Commenters on this here internet have branded her “disgusting” “gross” “a pig” “unclean” “lazy”. Wow. Harsh old internet, innit?
So here’s a news flash for everyone, ever: Women do actually grow hair on their legs. And their arms. And their stomachs, chests, chins, upperlips, feet and infact everywhere. Just like men. Some women grow a fine peach fuzz, some women grow a dark forest – amount and type of body hair depends on things like race, colouring and hormonal levels.
There’s a multi-billion dollar industry based on telling women that their body hair is disgusting and needs to be plucked, waxed, shaved, bleached, lasered etc etc. As a result, western society now decides that a woman who dares to have hair anywhere on her body that is not her head is really just lazy and disgusting, and doesn’t choose to attend to personal hygiene.
Let’s back it up a bit. As recently as 100 years ago, it was perfectly normal for a woman to maintain a crop of hair on her legs. Then magazines started showing shorter hemlines and sleeveless tops and it all went to hell. I know, it’s a shock to hear that fashion mags were telling women they were fuzzy freaks. That would never happen now. Cough.
Here’s a confession for you, I don’t always shave my legs. I don’t always shave my armpits. I do tend to maintain a smooth upperlip, but that is purely because I find it more comfortable to do so. I rarely do anything with my eyebrows apart from raise them in disbelief. I have hair on my chin, my chest and my stomach as well as my back. I could, it’s true, spend a good chunk of time shaving or waxing it all off, but frankly I have better things to do with my time.
Is it lazy to not remove body hair? No, I don’t think so. It’s certainly tedious (though to be fair some women love doing it, and that’s their choice). It’s also painful, even shaving can be painful if you happen to sneeze while doing your shins (ask me nicely and I’ll show you the scar).
However, airbrushed perfection as presented to us in magazines and movies dictates that women need to be 100% smooth 100% of the time. And apparently a lot of men are shocked and disgusted by a women who might have something more interesting to do with her time and money than invest a ton of it in hair removal.
For any men reading this who think “God, hair on a woman is so disgusting, I’d leave a woman who didn’t shave” then I want you to do this for at least two months: Make sure there is NO hair on your legs, chest, underarms, pubic area, stomach, back and hands. I mean it. Shave that shit if you hate it so much, if you think it’s disgusting on women then it’s time to see why some women decide not to bother. Keep it shaved. Even if that means doing it every day, do it. You could also go for waxing. But you’ll probably only do it once. However you decide to do it, keep it up for a couple of months, then figure out that time spent over an adult lifetime.
Boring, isn’t it?