Fat Chicks Rule

Guess what still doesn't work? Stigma!

I have mentioned repeatedly that stigma  not only does not make you thin but can cause health issues due to stress, fear of exercising and binging. 

I'm not a lone crazy for saying this, even groups that encourage weight loss such as the Rudd Center believe that stigma does not work and is harmful.

Of course you can't tell that to the Hastings Center Daniel Callahan who writes in his article:

It will be no less necessary to find ways to bring strong social pressure to bear on individuals, going beyond anodyne education and low-key ex- hortation. It will be imperative, first, to persuade them that they ought to want a good diet and exercise for themselves and for their neighbor and, second, that excessive weight and outright obesity are not socially acceptable any longer. 

He then continues that more stigma not less will help fat people become super thin. He essentially wants to make being fat unpopular like smoking but being fat isn't a habit. 

It won't work. It won't work because diets, "lifestyle changes", stigma, financial incentives, penalties, and eating less calories than your body needs  does not work for most people in the long run. With 20 million dieters, I'm sure you're going to find some who succeeded but most won't. With almost 40 years of yo-yo dieting, we're aren't getting thinner and dieting is causing a lot of the weight gain. (As I have mentioned before, I estimate about 50 pounds of my weight is from dieting)  And what happens to people who despite Daniel Callahan's whipping and screaming at them to lose weight,  still fail to do so? (Hint: tough shit.)

He says that fat people don't think they are fat. Here's the lowdown, Mr. Callahan, we know we are fat. We know we are fat when people scream at us "Fat Bitch" while trying to exercise, or when we try to find fashionable, affordable, well fitted clothes, or a comfortable seat on the bus, train or plane or we are told for every ailment we have is weight related (Even when thin people get the same fucking diseases) or we are told we are too fat to keep the same job we had for ten years or we are denied health or life insurance because we weight too much. We know when we see billboards that say "Obesity Kills" "Beat Obesity with a stick." or "Save the whales, lose the blubber, go vegetarian." 

That is what it's like to be fat. No amount of stigma, pressure, or flat out hatred will change that. Every fucking morning both and after I accepted my body I knew I was fat. Fat people aren't in denial we just don't want a lecture when we mention our weight.  

In the end the intense pressure to be thin comes from one really place, a 66 billion dollar incentive to make people hate their bodies. 

New diet drug: Bulimia.

No blog post next week as I will be away.

Here on the market is new device to make your fat issues go away. It’s called the SuckIt 3000. In order to you use this device you have to have one criterion: be fat (it doesn't matter if you are healthy or not). If you are slender the SuckIt3000 is not for you. It is socially unacceptable for a thin person to have bulimia (thin people with bulimia get interventions and Lifetime TV specials). It is however social acceptable for fat people to have bulimia. (Fat people don’t worry, instead of a Lifetime special, you get the hit TV show The Biggest Loser!)

What the SuckIt3000 does is stick a tube into your stomach (either through magic or a surgical incision) and after you eat, the tube will suck all the food vaccum cleaner and into your handy dandy vomit purse.

Then all you have to dump those contents in the toilet or nearest trash receptacle. Don't worry you won't feel humiliated. Fat people love to be shamed! 

Think I'm joking? Well last year this very device was approved for use in some EU countries and they are also looking for an approval in the US. No it’s not called the SuckIt3000 but it is in fact a surgical incision into your stomach where a tube is place. That tube sucks up food into a container which you then dump into a toilet.

Rebecca Jane Weinstein covers this horrible device in an article in XOJane. 

I imagine that this aspiration port will be a sexy new accessory with my bikini on the beach, and intimacy will be greatly enhanced by the hole in my stomach where food pours out (what a chuckle we’ll get during a romance accident). I will feel nothing but pride in my new appearance when I have to get up from the table in 20 minutes to aspirate, and everyone will be so enamored by my hot new bod that no one will blink an eye when I carry my aspiration bucket to that new trendy joint while I am wearing the perfect little black dress (which I guess I will have to remove for aspiration purposes –- but who knows, the latest runway fashions may include an aspiration-port-cut-out).  

In the end this means one thing, it's okay to be anorexic or bulimic, tortured with crazy surgeries, but only if you're fat. 

 

BMI doesn't know how healthy you are.

I can't do a blog post without covering a third study  (Actually a Systematic Review that looks at other studies) done by Katherine Flegal of the CDC that says again that people with BMI in the overweight or slightly obese (A/K/A Obesity 1, not to be confused with Obesity 2 electric boogaloo or Obesity 3: The Fat strikes back) category have better mortality outcomes then those of normal weight.  This essentially means that people with a BMI of 25-34.9 have a better chance of living longer than those whose BMI is 24.9 or less or 34.9 or more. 

I could write a rant about our horrible treatment of fat people, our constant pressure to diet, the billion dollar industry that funds it, the obsession with putting everyone in this arcane BMI category instead of looking at their actual health, or how ridiclous it would be if we told people with "normal" weight BMI to gain. 

Instead Paul Campos pretty much sums it up in New York Times op ed that I recommend you read in it's entirety. 

Now, if we were to employ the logic of our public health authorities, who treat any correlation between weight and increased mortality risk as a good reason to encourage people to try to modify their weight, we ought to be telling the 75 million American adults currently occupying the government’s “healthy weight” category to put on some pounds, so they can move into the lower risk, higher-weight categories.

In reality, of course, it would be nonsensical to tell so-called normal-weight people to try to become heavier to lower their mortality risk. 

After this study came out both it and Paul Campos' Op-Ed were attacked. I have mentioned before that any time a study comes out proving obesity was in fact responsible for Hitler, it is taking as fact without question. 

Any time a study comes out suggesting that being fat doesn't in fact step on puppies, it is always attacked as either wrong, or that while we live longer we are very sick, as this Op-Ed from David Katz points out.  Though I wouldn't call it an Op-Ed, exactly . . . it's more like a frothing at the mouth rant in which David Katz points out a lot of anecdotal evidence where he has seen a few people become thin and turn into super humans, never to have another health problem again. What he neglects to mention is all the people he didn't see. Those who never got fatty liver disease, diabetes, or any "obesity" related diseases. People have to remember that for the most part people see doctors when they are sick.  

No one questions methods used for studies proving fat is bad. No one looks to see other aspects of it for example history of dieting, history of being denied health care, stigma and stress. 

Marilyn Wann points out in her own oped piece on CNN how bias health care is towards fat people.

Weight bias has been documented among doctors, nurses, fitness instructors and other professionals on whom a fat person might need to rely for help. Last year, researchers who themselves are part of an anti-"obesity" institution (Yale's Rudd Institute) surveyed medical professionals who specialize in caring for fat people and found that they had high levels of weight bias, viewing us as "lazy, stupid, and worthless."

Why are people going crazy over news that being fat isn't the end and being thin doesn't make you healthy.

I still got 20 billion reasons. 

 

Blog post postponed until tomorrow