Also, I Really Hate Fat Jokes
I tell you what, I can work out how to think about most things if given enough time, but weight loss defeats me. Because fundamentally, yes, being overweight is probably not good for your health or quality of life. But believing that you have something terribly wrong with you (never just physically, when it comes to fat people) is also quite bad for your health and quality of life!!
I agree wholeheartedly with this New Republic article about the US government’s Let’s Move campaign. Maybe there are fat kids out there who have rock-hard self-esteem and can hear, “You’re getting fat, we need to change your lifestyle,” and respond “Oh, that is good advice. Thank you for wanting to help, please tell me more!”. The majority of fat kids, and even not-particularly-fat kids, will hear that and translate it to, “I am fat, being fat is bad, therefore I am bad.” I don’t really know what the right way is to deal with kids in this context. I do know that I was firmly convinced that I was disgustingly fat by the time I was 7 or 8 years old, and still convinced at 11, and still convinced at 15. And I was… quite indoorsy, and hated sports, but neither was I at any health risk, and certainly never close to obese at that time. For me, being encouraged to lose weight as a child did little more than to seal “fat” into my identity – it was something I was not able to change, because it was something I had always been. While it’s good for kids to avoid getting overweight, it’s important to bear in mind that culturally, this is not a physical problem to overcome with some healthy food and sport, but a judgement on that child’s success and value as a person.
I see Fat Acceptance as a really good thing. We tell people constantly that they are bad for being fat. If you’ve had the message drummed into you for years that you’re lazy, ineffective, helpless, unmotivated, dumb, worthless etc – if you can hardly bear to own up to your body or even think too hard about it – then feeling empowered to change anything about yourself is a huge challenge! I got to be properly obese in my early 20s (probably for various reasons, but it’s telling that I already felt as fat at seventy kilos as I did at ninety – i.e. I had already written myself off so why not get KFC), and (although there was most certainly constant overlap) it wasn’t a case of “I lost weight and felt better about myself”, it was a case of realising that I was able to lose weight, and worth it, before I could make that move.
So perhaps talking to kids and teenagers about their weight as a problem is inherently damaging. I have a feeling the (rather small?) Health at Every Size movement is a good thing. On the Let’s Move website, quotes like “Children need 60 minutes of active and vigorous play every day to grow up to a healthy weight” could be modified fairly easily to “Children need 60 minutes of active and vigorous play every day to grow up healthily”. Perhaps it really isn’t too hard to focus on nutrition and fitness and leave weight and fat out of it. Certainly I think it’s quite immoral to view being fat as somehow “worse” than being slender. This is not a humanistic viewpoint!
Which is where my internal conflict really lies, because I chose to lose a lot of weight, and I would never choose to put it back on. It seems like wanting to lose it in the first place must be an admission that there was something wrong with being overweight. And, I have gained a few kilos over the last year and despite all my rhetoric, it still does feel like almost a moral failure. While, on the other hand, I am not a better person after losing weight and I was not a bad person for being fat. I am yet to figure out how I can have it both ways. All that really changed was what I looked like, and therefore how other people viewed me. So maybe it is all about image, and conforming in order to be liked. Yet for about a year, people would congratulate me whenever they saw me. I don’t know how to reconcile it.
But I do think that it’d be nice if, when people saw a fat person, they said, “Oh, her calorie intake has exceeded her calorie output!” instead of, “Oh, she looks quite slothful and slovenly, let us scorn her!”.














