Fat/Size Acceptance

[GothAnneGeddes]

I'm not sure if we have a thread on this yet, so apologies if we have and I've missed it.

I think of all the toxic, time-wasting shite women have to put up with, Diet Culture aka Be Thin and Win, is one of the most widespread. It is the unholy triumvirate of body policing, self hatred and bad science.

I thought this was a really interesting take on Jamie Oliver's new obesity campaign: shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-fat-hatred-and-eliminationism.html#disqus_thread

Would love to know what you all think

I don't think they should be seen as lesser value just that we don't view obesity as 'okay' when it's not and so where possible they should be helped, if you go to a doctor and they see something that is threatening your health then you would be informed based on health risk rather than appearance.

Sardine Queen I think you are right. A fat women is thought of as greedy and not willing to prioritise looking sexually appealing to men. Women are not meant to take up too much space, not meant to consume too much and must, must, must cater to the male gaze. So a fat women is a very bad women indeed and must be punished.

Agree that demonisation of fat people= stupid and that there is a HUGE gender bias.

Also think that obesity gets too much attention as a public health issue and they should just drop it because the causes of overeating are not going to be fixed by a 5 a day campaign or Jamie Oliver nagging people.

However, I also think they should quit nagging re smoking, drinking and taking drugs for all the same reasons.

TheBride I think they know none of that stuff works, but the DoH and charities etc need to be seen to be doing something.

To address the real causes of these problems would be too epxensive and require significant social change!

There's been some excellent feminist work on the problematic image of women as consumers, which is really relevant here. On the one hand, women are supposed to consume, rather than producing, but on the other this leaves them exposed to being portrayed as greedy and parasitic. A woman is also apt to be designated 'fat' more easily than a man because women's proportion of bodyfat to muscle is generally higher than men's, and also increases with age; so fat bodies are gendered bodies; it's literally true that fat cells produce oestrogen.

Also size implies entitlement - Naomi Wolf says somewhere that the greater the apparent progress by women in breaking into male bastions, the lower the fashionable female body size becomes. You can also get this from watching men and women on public transport -the men sprawl, and the women sit small and neat.

And Sardine, however much we spend, nobody actually knows how to 'cure' obesity, since more than 95% of people, male and female, will gain back any weight lost within 12 months, plus 10%.

You can't cure it. You can only temporarily arrest it.

Skinny people have issues too

I wish I could PUT wait on.....looks like I'll be a twig for the rest of my life. I eat loads bit nothing..it's not a blessing but a curse. I hate my boy like figure. I die to be able to fill a bra and jeans....

*weight

Silly iPhone

I have been thin and I have been fat. When I have been fat it is because I eat too much, and am lazy - I deserve derision. I'm rather sick of fat people blaming their genes, metabolism and everything under the sun for their condition. Self discipline and willpower ( which I aspire to but don't always have) are required. TBH if anyone was abusive to me when I was fat I'd think I deserved it.

I feel quite sad that anyone would feel they deserve to be abused and derided because of their appearance. :(

Isn't the obesity epidemic the biggest health threat facing the UK?

All right, so the trolls didn't win. I must post!

Doesn't a lot of this boil down to policing women's bodies yet again? I keep thinking that women get so much more stick for being too large or too small or too thin or too curvy, that is for daring to have their own bodies.

This concern feeds into the notion that a woman's body isn't her own, doesn't it? That others must keep control of it because, heavens, she might just do something dreadful like dare to enjoy food.

I like to think that we're designed to be hunter-gatherers, and the best human body is one that lets us get out and bend down to dig for wild carrots or chase after the mountain goats, all lean and sleek. But then, there are those years when the caribou migrate some other way, and the drought kills all the plants and the fish die out--and then if the tribe survives, it'll be because there were some plump people who lasted till the next year. Sure, we miss those slim graceful hunters, but they didn't always have what it takes.

However, we've got ourselves in a place where we get all the food we want, and the famine isn't coming (goddess forbid). Our problems are more with having too much to eat and not too little. But we should be thinking that variety in bodies is a good and wonderful thing.

Um, "thinking" = "thin king" or is that just for crosswords?

I know this may not be popular, but very few of us think of smoking as a neutral choice. It's something harmful that affects the person, people around them, and costs the rest of us money. As much as people shouldn't be a size zero, isn't a bit relativist to suggest that it doesn't matter what weight someone is? That there aren't consequences for them and those around them?

So perhaps then fattening food should be taxed like cigarettes?

I appreciate that no-one should be attacked or vilified for being overweight, but obesity is a bad thing

As far as I'm aware the government makes more in tax on tobacco than it spends on the whole nhs.

No- the government makes about £10-11bn in duty and VAT on fags, plus maybe another £7bn in corporation tax on tobacco companies such as BAT. However, the NHS costs closer to £100bn. What is true is that smokers definitely cover their own health costs plus some.

Should there be a fat tax? Possibly, but see cigarette taxes for why this raises cash but doesn't change behavior. Things like banning smoking in the office/ bars has done far more to reduce the number of people who smoke/ reduce the number of ciggies a smoker has in a day than cost of cigarettes. In fact, one reason for taxing fags and booze is that consumers tend to be quite price insensitive, so increase in tax doesn't have a significant impact on consumption (thereby reliably increasing tax take). Therefore, if you're taxing junk food to reduce consumption of these foods, it quite probably wont work.

Also, there's a very strong argument to say that there's no such thing as good and bad foods, only good and bad diets, and I think this is a very sensible line to take. Demonising certain foods is controverisal. Smoking is bad for everyone, all the time. Junk food is only bad if eaten in excess. Even a Macdonalds does have some nutritional value. If you ate too many carrots, that would be bad for you. Cheese has a higher fat content than a Big Mac. It's very difficult to say "this is a bad food", "this is a good food"

Fat taxes also further demonise the fat, which is a bad thing.

I agree TheBride. Actually, to take this thread round in a circle Jamie Oliver was asked this when he gave evidence to a committee of MPs, and he was asked about universal food labelling. He said it wasn't simple - he gave the example of Marmite, which if you just looked at its contents in isolation, it's incredibly salty, but that's not really a problem as no-one eats a jar of Marmite at a sitting.

I can't read all the posts to this thread - or any other thread about body sizes - because, despite having completely got over my eating disorders 20 years ago, it makes me start feeling all squirmy and is dangerous. I wonder if all those of you, who've posted so knowledgeably about diet and obesity, realise how disordered you sound?

There are physical conditions which cause fatness and thinness. Lots of them, in fact, and they can change over a lifetime just like any other health condition.

Obsession with diet and body shape/image is a psychological-emotional disorder.

A physically and mentally healthy person, who accepts their body as it is and is reasonably OK with it, WILL naturally settle at a healthy weight for them.

Neither fashion and beauty editors nor the government know the correct weight & body composition for every individual in the country.

There is such a thing as puppy fat in children. Growth spurts happen in random sequence and in all directions. Fat adolescents are often on the way to becoming particularly tall or muscular young adults (this happens in my family; I know whereof I speak.)

Insufficient fat on the body leads to hormonal imbalances, interferes with the metabolism and is generally a bad thing for the health. Malnutrition is a much bigger threat than obesity.

I am not sure why people posting on this thread sound disordered? Surely people being interested in this stuff is not disordered?

The people who seem disordered to me are the people I have met at work who quiz others over what they eat, when they eat, ostentatiously eat 2 pieces of salad for lunch and then around 3 get all "ooh shall I be really naughty and have a biscuit" etc etc. The people who do all the diets and know how many calories there are in everything and say they have food intolerances in order to cover up the fact that they dont' actually want to eat much.

IME all of the people I have met who have behaved this way have been women. And it's so sad and boring that they give so much of their time and energy to it.

That is worth talking about. Also the situation with health in the UK is worth talking about. I don't think that these things make anyone disordered. I thought the discussion had been very interesting.

On the point of tobacco - yes of course govt don't ban it as they'd be bankrupt.

With the food industry the current govt are in bed with them.

They want to get rid of the food standards agency article here although it has gone quiet on that and I'm not sure what the outcome was.

government won't ban transfats and talks about andrew lansley's relationship with fast food manufacturers (he has worked for them)

and last but by no means least an article about how the government has invited major fast food manufacturers to be involved in writing governement policy on obesity etc. Quote from there:

"The groups are dominated by food and alcohol industry members, who have been invited to suggest measures to tackle public health crises. Working alongside them are public interest health and consumer groups including Which?, Cancer Research UK and the Faculty of Public Health. The alcohol responsibility deal network is chaired by the head of the lobby group the Wine and Spirit Trade Association. The food network to tackle diet and health problems includes processed food manufacturers, fast food companies, and Compass, the catering company famously pilloried by Jamie Oliver for its school menus of turkey twizzlers. The food deal's sub-group on calories is chaired by PepsiCo, owner of Walkers crisps."

Shocking, isn't it. So don't expect anything to change at the moment.

Not suggesting it shouldn't be discussed, SQ. I was upset by the numerous mentions of how awful it is to be fat, how it's a dreadful problem and how people ought to be made (in various ways) to control their diets. The issues underlying eating disorders are obviously complicated and vary by individual, but the single overwhelming problem is one of control.

Do you not find it odd that we - in the industrially-developed world, at least - are so obsessed by a wish to control our bodies? Can't we trust them to just get on with life? I'd hazard a guess that this is far more pronounced in women than in men - it's easy to observe men who don't betray any concern about how their bodies are functioning, but pretty hard to find a woman who isn't trying to rein in her natural functions and alter her physical configuration.

I was interested to read the thread but alarmed to find it was mostly about control, albeit postulating different means of control.

My own recovery was facilitated by Susie Orbach's 'Fat is a Feminist Issue', which says it all much better than me!