STFU Sizists

THIS IS TOO IMPORTANT NOT TO READ.

redefiningbodyimage:

“Like it or not, fat people are at war. I’m not hyperbolizing or dramatizing. If you don’t believe me, Google “War on obesity”. Tonight HBO premiered its new documentary series “The Weight of a Nation”. On the premiere page it says “Obesity in America has reached a catastrophic level. Almost every aspect of our lives is threatened. The first step toward ending the damage is learning how to fight back.” I spend a lot of my time politely asking people to please stop oppressing me. I don’t apologize for that, nor do I begrudge it – it’s proven to be a very effective way to create change and I think that people deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt and the support they need to shift their thinking, and it’s a reasonably pleasant form of activism. I will continue to do it. But I also have to acknowledge that there is a war being waged against me because of how I look, by people who have been given every opportunity to know better. In concert with HBO’s documentary, I received a Tweet letting me know that Kaiser Permanente is launching the “most aggressive anti-obesity campaign in history.” They know that there are healthy fat people and unhealthy thin people. They know that not a shred of research shows that any method of weight loss works in the long term. They know that research shows us that we could vastly increase health by providing access to healthy foods, safe movement options, and affordable/free evidence based health care. Nobody is obligated to be healthy or thin; however, I wonder how many people would make different choices if they knew they just need 30 minutes of moderate movement 5 days a week? If they knew that people who choose simple healthy habits have very similar health outcomes regardless of weight. What would people choose if they knew they could abandon the goal of weight loss completely and they could still pursue health. America could be a successful role model for giving people access to health, but instead they are choosing to be a failed role model for thinness - waging war on people based on their appearance for tremendous profit and actively blaming the casualties of the war for the war’s massive failures. Let’s be clear - they are pathologizing a body size. It doesn’t matter if they say that we need to seek solutions environmentally instead of at the individual level, or if they say that we should have “compassion” for fat people – they are still telling people that is is not ok to exist in fat bodies and that they should see fat bodies as a threat to America. There are tons of thin people who eat unhealthy foods and are sedentary (which is completely their right), but as far as the government is concerned, as long as you are thin you’re part of the “solution,” feel free to do whatever you want. They want people to look at me (and you, if you’re fat) and think “She is part of a catastrophe. She is threatening almost every aspect of our lives. The first step toward ending the damage is learning how to fight back against her.” I say that if they want a war, I will damn well give them one.”

THE GOVERNMENT FOUND A GROUP OF PEOPLE IDENTIFIABLE BY HOW WE LOOK, ALLOWED THOSE WITH A PROFIT INTEREST IN ANTI-OBESITY TO CALCULATE OUR “COST” TO SOCIETY, DECIDED THAT WE SHOULD BE ERADICATED TO MAKE THINGS CHEAPER, THEN BROUGHT TOGETHER PUBLIC AND PRIVATE INTERESTS AND DECLARED WAR ON US. THAT IS TERRIFYING. AND IT’S HAPPENING.

—

They Want A War, Let’s Give Them One - By Ragen Chastain

The Obesity Nightmare Tumblr

obesitynightmare:

…or rather, a site is starting to show fat people’s reaction to America’s (drumroll…fanfare…blinking lights…)

Obesity Nightmare 

It started with a Tumblr post, and has continued with photos from Brian (at Red No 3) and Turn It Over.

Why?

Because we do not exist to be the government’s or the healthcare industry’s nightmare.

We are people. We are living our lives.

You want to know what we think of the “obesity nightmare”? Here is our response.

Our lives? Are our lives.  Not yours.

I realize this may be a challenge to you.

We are not nightmares, unless your nightmare is people who aren’t afraid of being fat.

Seriously: Think about this.  If me living my employed, home-owning, happily married life without your intervention is your nightmare … why?

On the other hand, if your nightmare is fat people demanding to be treated as people without losing weight, then yes, I am your nightmare.

Want to join in?  Submissions are welcome. :)

EVIDENCE: FAT PEOPLE CAN BE AS HEALTHY AS THIN PEOPLE

If you live in the U.S. you are absolutely bombarded with the idea that being overweight is bad for your health.  This repetition leaves one with the idea that being overweight is the same thing as being unhealthy, something that is simply not true.  In fact, people of all weights can be either healthy or unhealthy; overweight people (defined by BMI) may actually have a lower risk of premature death than “normal” weight people.  Being fat is simply not the same thing as being unhealthy.

The Health At Every Size (HAES) movement attempts to interrupt the conflation of health and thinness by arguing that, instead of using one’s girth as an indicator of one’s health, we should be focusing on eating/exercising habits and more direct health measures (like blood pressure and cholesterol).

A recent study offered the HAES movement some interesting ammunition in this battle. The study recruited almost 12,000 people of varying BMIs and followed them for 170 months as they adopted healthier habits.  Their conclusion? “ Healthy lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index.”

Take a look.  The “hazard ratio” refers to the risk of dying early, with 1 being the baseline.  The “habits” along the bottom count how many healthy habits a person reported.  The shaded bars represent people of different BMIs from “healthy weight” (18.5-24.9) to “overweight” (25-29.9), to “obese” (over 30).

The three bars on the far left show the relative risk of premature death for people with zero healthy habits. It suggests that being overweight increases that risk, and being obese much more so.  The three bars on the far right show the relative risk for people with four healthy habits; the differential risk among them is essentially zero; for people with healthy habits, then, being fatter is not correlated with an increased relative risk of premature death.  For everyone else in between, we more-or-less see the expected reduction in mortality risk given those two poles.

This data doesn’t refute the idea that fat matters.  In fact, it shows clearly that thinness is protective if people are doing absolutely nothing to enhance their health.  It also suggests, though, that healthy habits can make all the difference.  Overweight and obese people can have the same mortality risk as “normal” weight people; therefore, we should reject the idea that fat people are “killing themselves” with their extra pounds.  It’s simply not true.

How To “Breakup” With Dieting In 5 Easy Steps

Stopping dieting is a lot like breaking up with an actual person. When you’ve dieted, your dreams of how your life will look are a lot like your dreams of what your life will look like with a particular person in it. For example, if you’re dating someone, you might be dreaming of going on a vacation with them. Similarly, if you’re dieting, your vacation dreams may involve imagining yourself at your goal weight.

Whether you’re breaking up with a person or diet, you have to acknowledge the fact that some of your dreams may not come true and you have to make room for new ones. I hope these five steps will help you in that process. This actually would be a good note to write to yourself.

Step 1: It’s Not You, It’s Your Diet

The old “it’s not you, it’s me” breakup line does not apply when it comes to you in your diet. If you lost weight with this diet only to gain it back or to endlessly plateau, you didn’t fail at your diet–your diet failed you. About 95% of dieters gain back all of the weight they lost (often plus more) within 3 to 5 years. So obviously, diets are total crap and they don’t deserve you. Plus, diets never treated you right anyway, which brings me to my next point.

Step 2: Remember The Bad Times

Just like with any breakup, it’s important to remember the bad times and not dwell on the good. If you keep remembering a particular day, perhaps early on in your diet, when you were feeling super attractive and someone commented on how skinny you looked and it made you feel good, you may find yourself back in a Weight Watchers meeting before you know it. But I challenge you to instead remember all the reasons why you broke up with your diet. And I have a feeling that you’ll have more reasons to break up than to stay together. Remember that day you weighed yourself after being so careful sticking to your diet all week and your weight went up and you felt like crap about yourself for days. Remember all the guilt and stress you felt any time you had to decide what to eat when you weren’t sure how the food fit into your diet. Remember that diets aren’t actually good for you at all. When you remember to focus on how stressful and difficult your relationship with your diet was, it’ll be easier to not get back together. But I will say this…

Step 3: You May Temporarily Get Back Together With Your Diet

Look, it happens. Change is hard. You may lose resolve and go back to that Weight Watchers meeting once or twice. You may stress out that you ate something fatty and the guilt washes over you. It happens. When it happens, it’s important to revert to step two, and remember the bad times. Sometimes I think this moment or two of getting back together with your diet is almost necessary to process – usually you start to remember right away all the things you hated about being on a diet. So if you get caught in this step, do not worry. Just revert to step two and your breakup will be official again in no time.

Step 4: There Are Other (Delicious) Fish in the Sea

Exploring the other fish in the sea can be a little scary in the beginning. It can be nerve-racking to go from a dieting paradigm, with all of its rules and structure, to a non-dieting paradigm where the only rules are dictated by you. To me, this is the perfect time to start exploring Health at Every Size, particularly the intuitive eating aspects of it. With Health at Every Size principles, you learn to connect with your body’s own signals in terms of hunger and fullness, and get to explore what foods are really best for your body and your needs. Explaining how this works is really beyond the scope of this post, but if you want to learn more about it and how to incorporate it into your life in an in-depth way, you should definitely check out The Big Beautiful Goddess Academy.

Step 5: One Day You’ll Barely Remember It’s Name

It’s been five years since my last diet, and I have to say, it does get better. All the stress and guilt I used to experience around food and my body are truly gone. Now I eat from a completely different place–one where my focus is on nourishment and what my body needs and desires, not some rules that somebody made up because it led to some temporary weight loss and sold a few books. It is a much happier place, I’m so glad I made that choice to break up with dieting forever.

(Source: bodylovewellness.com)

ladysugatits:

STFU Sizists: While i am a HUGE supporter of the Health At Every Size (HAES), big is beautiful movments

While i am a HUGE supporter of the Health At Every Size (HAES), big is beautiful movments

libbylibbylove:

A lot of people are not praticing what they preach

a lot of chubbs  (skinnies too, but i can only speak from my fat girl’s perspective, because i am a fat girl)are supporting this movement and they are truly NOT healthy….

which in turn perpetuates the stereotype that larger people are unhealthy

fatties are all HAES, HAES, HAES and they are NOT healthy

just the same as Skinnies yelling “thin is in” and they have health issues as well

and not to mention the amount of ridicule the a plus size girl/boy faces when she/he wants to become active and get healthy, people from her/his OWN plus size community will call her/him a traitor and a sell out because she/he wants to do better in their life, people are doing too much reflecting, they see themselves in EVERY plus size person and when that person changes(i.e. lose wright) they feel a sense of anger because they feel that person is “betraying them” when in reaity that persons lifestyle shouldnt have anything to do with your life

if you want to stay fat stay fat, but dont knock the other person down because they dont want to

you should ALWAYS love yourself regardless of your size, love yourself fat, skinny, and inbewteen as long as your not hurting yourself or others and your staying balanced in your mind, body, and spirit(not necessarily religion, but yourself as a being)

ultimately, 

their is no way around it

eating better food, and moving your body,connecting with yourself will make you change inside and out and sometimes that means your weight will change to

let everyone go on their OWN journey, stop riding their coattails……

IT IS NOT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PEOPLE WHO THE STEREOTYPE OPPRESSED TO BREAK THE STEREOTYPE.

Thin people need to stop judging fat bodies as innately unhealthy. This is something done TO fat people by thin people and this whole post is just dripping in internalised fat-hate and victim-blaming. 

Fat people can be healthy. That doesn’t mean they have to be. Health is also a subjective concept, and who the fuck are you to judge whether someone’s healthy enough to pass an arbitrary measure you’ve made up?

You’re perpetuating the same shit you suffer. 

Please actually read what I write if you’re going to criticise it. 

From the original post:

a lot of chubbs …are supporting this movement and they are truly NOT healthy….

which in turn perpetuates the stereotype that larger people are unhealthy

fatties are all HAES, HAES, HAES and they are NOT healthy

This is what my response was to. 

As for “When one decides to improve upon their health, they don’t need people like YOU screaming that they have self-hatred because they want to change.”- excuse me, what? Pointing out how a fat person is enabling fat-hate is  ”screaming that they have self-hatred”? No.

You can leave quietly now.

While i am a HUGE supporter of the Health At Every Size (HAES), big is beautiful movments

libbylibbylove:

A lot of people are not praticing what they preach

a lot of chubbs  (skinnies too, but i can only speak from my fat girl’s perspective, because i am a fat girl)are supporting this movement and they are truly NOT healthy….

which in turn perpetuates the stereotype that larger people are unhealthy

fatties are all HAES, HAES, HAES and they are NOT healthy

just the same as Skinnies yelling “thin is in” and they have health issues as well

and not to mention the amount of ridicule the a plus size girl/boy faces when she/he wants to become active and get healthy, people from her/his OWN plus size community will call her/him a traitor and a sell out because she/he wants to do better in their life, people are doing too much reflecting, they see themselves in EVERY plus size person and when that person changes(i.e. lose wright) they feel a sense of anger because they feel that person is “betraying them” when in reaity that persons lifestyle shouldnt have anything to do with your life

if you want to stay fat stay fat, but dont knock the other person down because they dont want to

you should ALWAYS love yourself regardless of your size, love yourself fat, skinny, and inbewteen as long as your not hurting yourself or others and your staying balanced in your mind, body, and spirit(not necessarily religion, but yourself as a being)

ultimately, 

their is no way around it

eating better food, and moving your body,connecting with yourself will make you change inside and out and sometimes that means your weight will change to

let everyone go on their OWN journey, stop riding their coattails……

IT IS NOT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PEOPLE WHO THE STEREOTYPE OPPRESSED TO BREAK THE STEREOTYPE.

Thin people need to stop judging fat bodies as innately unhealthy. This is something done TO fat people by thin people and this whole post is just dripping in internalised fat-hate and victim-blaming. 

Fat people can be healthy. That doesn’t mean they have to be. Health is also a subjective concept, and who the fuck are you to judge whether someone’s healthy enough to pass an arbitrary measure you’ve made up?

You’re perpetuating the same shit you suffer.