Appropriate serving sizes of fruit usually = under 50 calories each so how do you get 250 calories = 2 extra pieces of fruit (unless you’re talking about an avocado)?
I frankly don’t think that the situation is comparable with alcohol. Unless someone’s degree of imbibing is affecting their work or life with others, most people don’t seem to care if they’re drinking a bit more than is healthy. Have you ever heard someone say “Well, I hear Bob drinks three or four beers a night, that’s just more than he ought to be drinking”. Yet, the threshold for being fat isn’t when it’s interfering with a normal life - it’s at the point where they appear fat to that individual.
What makes you think I didn’t exercise? Again, exactly what I’m talking about here; the assumption is that fat people eat a ton and never exercise. This just isn’t true (while I am in no way a fitness guru, I exercise more than most people I know). In fact I did exercise, though I found it very difficult to adapt home programs to my level of fitness. I mostly did walking, but it wasn’t nearly as helpful as doing strength training or circuit training as I do now.
The point isn’t that I couldn’t exercise, the point is that I was afraid at that time to do so in front of other people, because of the lack of acceptance for fat people that I’ve experienced in my life. In other words, this is one way that lack of acceptance discourages weight loss.
Again I’m not saying that the hurdles to losing weight are insurmountable; I’m saying that it’s already true that some people have more trouble losing weight that others, and encouraging an ongoing social stigma only increases the difficulty of losing weight. What fat acceptance should be is not saying “it’s okay to be fat” but avoiding the marginalization of fat people. My experience has certainly been that it is a significant hurdle not just in romance but also in platonic friendships and even in the workplace.
A “large” apple (3 inch diameter) is about 100 calories.
Most of the apples I find in the store are that size.
This is the crux of the problem.
People see smokers, alcoholics, anorexic/bulimic people, and generally accept that they have a problem of some kind, and generally aren’t too terribly judgemental, condescending or spiteful.
Fat people, on the other hand, are almost uniformly judged as lazy, slothful, lacking in control, etc… when, in many people’s cases, it’s just as much of a problem as any of the people in the above category.
If anything, I’ve thought that smokers and alcoholics should be judged more harshly than fat people- you don’t HAVE to smoke or drink alcohol, but everyone has to eat daily.
For example, there’s no real discernment between some chick who damn near starves herself and smokes like a chimney to stay thin, vs. a girl who’s much healthier, eats right and excercises, but is maybe 15 lbs overweight. People will judge the 15 lb over girl much more harshly than the thinner one, despite the overweight one having a healthier lifestyle. (and yes, you can have a healthy lifestyle and be a little overweight)
The other thing that’s galling is that people who have never been fat blithely assume that once you start eating right, then the weight magically disappears.
It don’t work that way. First of all, when they say it has to be lifestyle changes, they’re absolutely right. And they have to be ingrained enough to stick when the chips are down.
Here’s why- if you’re say… 40 lbs overweight, that’s 20 weeks at 2 lbs/week, which is the generally accepted safe weight loss rate. 20 weeks is 5 months of eating roughly 7000 calories a week less than you normally do, or 1000 calories less per day. Try doing that consistently for a week, much less 5 months straight. Exercise helps, but diet’s ultimately where it’s at.
The other thing is that many of us fat folks tend to overeat in times of stress and uncertainty. I actually lost 65 lbs about 8 years ago, and kept it off for about 3 years, but when I started graduate school, I slowly gained it all back, due to the stress and irregular schedules. I suspect that if I’d never gone to graduate school, I probably wouldn’t have gained much back, if at all.
I don’t think that there should be “fat acceptance” in the sense of celebrating fat people like it’s a perfectly valid lifestyle choice like say… being a mountain biker, but neither do I think that fat people deserve to have snap judgments made about their character based on their weight, and nor do they deserve to be excluded from things or publically humiliated or ridiculed because of it. Rather, it should be seen and approached as a medical problem/eating disorder and the people treated accordingly.
I think we have it all wrong. People aren’t any different from the way they were 50 years ago on the inside, but we sure as hell are a whole lot fatter. Even up to the mid-eighties people weren’t as fat as they are today.
People are more health conscious now than ever! My grandparents ate nothing other than good old fashioned southern food at every meal. They weren’t fat. I ate the same stuff growing up and I am also not fat.
I don’t think we ought to gloss over these facts. People used to eat far worse, and were less fat. Now we’ll have some people coming in here saying that we were much more active in the past, but I have to ask, really? I can understand when you talk about the Great Depression but what about the 70’s and early 80’s have things changed all that much? As far as sedintary lifestyle, I haven’t noticed any difference at all.
What I have noticed though is the way food has become this weird grotesque entity since I was a child. It’s almost designed to be abused. Food isn’t just food anymore. It’s not Doritos, which came in two flavors (when I was a kid at least) it’s now some kind of extreme thing. There are millions of flavors of doritos now. People talk on TV commercials of “craving” all of these foods. We have something called the “baconator” burger etc. You can laugh at this all you want, but the truth is that introducing these memes into the discourse is a bad idea.
I think a lot of it has to do with our puritanical nature. We look upon other drugs that are more common in other western countries (tobacco and alcohol) differently, so we have to have our drug of choice. The American might scoff at some brit who goes to the pub for a pint or two every night as some kind of addict, all the while scarfing down baconators and various other extreme foods.
We live in a society that promotes overindulgence. That’s the simple fact. And no super-skinny model hatred will change the fact. And I feel sorry for the actual skinny people who go through all of the criticism of being anorexic too. Ever meet a skinny dude? Yeah I’m sure you have. Well there are women like this too, and they aren’t anorexic. So stop trying to divert blame on them.
Hopefully that will change though. Gas prices going through the roof are making people think twice about buying hummers. But it comes from the same place. Somewhere we forgot what austerity is. We forgot about overindulgence etc.
I know a good handful of fat people who went to live in Europe and came back substantially thinner. Why? Because in a lot of places in Europe they have a different attitude towards food than we do. It’s much more modulated.
They can also make it very uncomfortable for people who sit beside them in airplanes, on busses, and in the movie theatres.
Sound petty? I don’t think so. I still remember what it was like to be practically smothered by a sleeping, morbidly obese woman on a Greyhound bus. She tried to squeeze two seatfuls of person into one seat, and she made it extremely difficult for me to reach the bathroom.
And I say this as someone who used to be about 30 lbs overweight, if not more.
http://kateharding.net/2008/03/31/ask-aunt-fattie-how-do-i-talk-sense-into-my-dieting-friend/
This one kind of disturbed me. A girl’s friend, who used to be overweight, became much thinner, and the girl writing in is basically saying how worried she is about her friend, and doesn’t she know that she still looked good even at a few pounds heavier. But there’s no evidence that the thin girl is anorexic or anything like that…it kind of smacked of misery loves company.
Maybe it’s a problem with defining the term “fat acceptance”
To me, “_____ acceptance” involves giving up. I have had various things in my life about which I’ve said “Well, I’ll just have to learn to accept it” but I would never say that about things that endanger my health, like smoking, or make me embarrassed to participate in society, like a nasty attitude.
I know what they’re going for, but when they put it in those terms, particularly in a hostile tone, it shuts down any reasonable discussion of the topic. Yes, absolutely, obese people shouldn’t be assumed to be stupid and lazy, but obese people need to see the other side of things as well. Most people do not want to see 200-pound lingerie models, and having to share public seats with obese is uncomfortable.
That’s exactly the type of shit I’m talking about. My friend thought it was okay for me to be a size 8/10 even though I’m only 5’2" (I’m down to a 4 across brands now). Was I in danger of Type II diabetes? No. But I felt like crap! I’m still quite hale looking, hardly at risk of floating away, but my friend sent me the damn link to Shapely Prose, as though quitting eating out and drinking coffee and processed foods suddenly = anorexia.
This is the same person who asked me whether or not my twat waxing habit was because I had internalised the patriarchal hegemony or some such. Usually I can just laugh it off, though the time she told me a man’s (including my bf’s) preference for brazilian waxing = subconscious pedophilia was a little much. I love her to pieces but I just write off most of her views as extreme, which is what I’ve concluded about Shapely Prose. Some very good points, also a whole lot of crazy.
The one on binge eating to deal with death really, really upset me. I mean, come on, that’s a depressing cycle-you overeat because you’re sad, then you probably gain too much weight, leading to low self-esteem. Repeat and wash. How is saying “it’s okay, wear some elastic waist band stuff till you get over your dad’s impending death” helpful advice? Overeating is also disordered eating.
I get the same crap. No, I’m not seriously overweight, maybe 20-25 pounds but I feel awful like this. Physically, mentally, I dislike my appearance, etc. To someone else I may look ok but I want to be smaller. I’m more comfortable in my own skin when that skin is covering a smaller body!
I think there’s a lot to that. Yogurt is a perfectly healthy food that’s been eaten for thousands of years. Nothing wrong with yogurt. But then you get crap like Go-Gurt, squeezable *cotton candy *flavored yogurt loaded with sugar and corn syrup, marketed to children. And Yoplait tries to pass that shit off as nutritious. Sure, it’s better than giving your kid a Snickers bar for lunch, but it’s still junk.
I think that’s part of it. Many people are also sucked into a lifestyle where sitting down for a homecooked meal is a rare occasion rather than a daily occurance. When you cook for yourself, you control how much fat and sugar go into your food. When you rely on take-out and pre-packaged stuff, it’s out of your hands.
Hmm. When I’m 200 pounds, I’m a size 16 which isn’t crazy big. Emme is 190 and she looks pretty good. But for the most part, even plus-size models aren’t 200 pounds so you probably won’t be visually assaulted by that. 
I read another post on bigfatblog.com saying that a CNN story about a father who lost 30 pounds and climbed Kilimanjaro with his teenage daughter was an “anti-fat” piece. I get accepting people who are fat, but acting like a man (who admits he was overweight and felt very unhealthy) who loses weight and does something he’s proud of is “anti-fat” is bewildering to me. A lot of these people just seem to want a justification for being the way they are. And I don’t criticize them for it, I just don’t see why they’re so critical of people who want to be physically active and to slim down, maybe not to a zero, but to a smaller size.
Some people just want a justification for their vice. It’s the same kind of mentality of, ‘I deserve to drive an SUV dammit!’, as though every behavior is equal and we should not judge anything ever.
http://bigfatblog.com/dear-cnn#comments
From these comments, people are saying things that amount to that it’s anti fat bias because people can be fat and fit and news stories never focus on fat people who are healthy–basically, they’re saying there’s too much emphasis on the weight loss aspect. Which…I don’t understand. The man clearly was overweight and admitted that his lifestyle was not so healthy, and said he felt much better after losing it and become more active. It seems like they’re grasping at straws.
I guess overall, I get the whole mentality that the media tends to promote super thin, often unattainable (for many people) weights. I think feeling inadequate and wanting to promote the fact that most women just don’t look like supermodels, etc. is all fine…but then you can go way, WAY too far in the opposite direction in terms of justifying being overweight, and I think that’s what some people on these blogs tend to do.
Part of my problem with the concept of Fat Acceptance is my own weight struggles. I had an eating disorder in my early 20’s, I weighed about 120 pounds, 26 inch waist…and felt fat. Over several years I got through that but ended up where I am now at around 180. I want to lose the weight but I fear slipping back into disorder territory and not being able to stop. I know I’m unhealthy now just like I know I was unhealthy at the low end but I don’t know if I can find a balance. The whole thing quite frankly terrifies me at times. I come from a family of heavy people (my dad has been as high as 300 and my mom at 5’3" is probably around 250 and a size 26ish) so I have the fear of ending up at weights like that with their health problems.
Sorry guys, I’m slipping more into MPSIMS (borderline pit) territory here. It’s hard to discuss these sort of things without letting people know where I’m coming from with it.
I dunno if by fat acceptance they mean, “You should be nice to fat people.”, I agree. If by fat acceptance they mean, “I have the right to be a big sloppy glutton and you are supposed to support my lifestyle because I have the right to be this way.”, then I don’t agree. Certainly someone has the right to be fat if they want, but I also have the right to think being fat isn’t the way to go.
It seems more like they think that anything should simply be accepted, and that we shouldn’t look at weight loss as a road to health as a positive development. Yeah, it’s a good thing that homey lost a bunch of weight and climbed a mountain. Good for him.
What’s interesting about their gripes is that they want fat acceptance, but clearly have not accepted it themselves if they are looking for CNN to validate them.
I happen to be about 30 lbs overweight. If I could get to around 180ish, that would be nice. I’ve been realizing how sedentary I’ve been. I’ve been making more effort to be more spry like I used to. Hurdling the baby gate instead of just stepping over it. 
Yes - I’m home from work, and now have had an opportunity to read some of the posts. They just seem like they’re from angry, frustrated people.
I understand their position. I have successfully and unsuccessfully watched my weight, and know deeply the embarrassment and feeling of failure. However, I am floored by what seems like purposeful ignorance on their “acceptance” of the reality of weight loss. It is a very simple science - take in less than you burn off. It works, period. It’s harder than almost everything I’ve ever done, and requires a lifetime of diligence, but to say “Diets Don’t Work” is idiotic. It sucks, but, yes, for them and everyone else, their failure to burn off fat and keep it off is a failure on their parts. The decision on how to deal with that failure is a personal one, ranging from suicide to happy-go-lucky optimism. Right now, I’m dealing with my own personal failure to keep off my extra 30 pounds by having some tater-tots 
I am a smoker, and have failed at quitting many times. Should I just “accept” my smoking? Would it be right for me to say that “cold turkey” doesn’t work, because I have failed at it in the past? Should I deny the real and scary medical issues my smoking causes? Of course not - that would be silly.
Neither a smoker nor an obese person can deny that, when that behavior ceases, their *body *feels better. I think that, as a biological entity, what our organs and tissues are trying to tell us should be listened to.
By the way amarinth, thank you for that link on the calories in an apple. I’m loathe to tell anyone to limit fruits (except bananas and avocados), unless they’re eating them by the trashbag, because I think the fibre in fruits and veggies fills you up such that you eat fewer processed foods. I guess in my mind, a serving size of an apple that size would be a 1/2 (which is usually what happens with those sized apples or the gigantic chinese pears…I split them with my dad or mom).
My general guideline for fresh fruits is as much as I can hold in a fist = a snack.
I make basically the same distinction. If “fat acceptance” means treating fat people with courtesy and respect, I’m all for it. But if it means treating obesity as normal, or as something you don’t need to worry about, I don’t.
Obesity isn’t just an aesthetics issue – it’s a serious health problem. I think there ought to be some (reasonable and respectful) social pressure to lose weight if you’re obese.