Fat – Page 3 – Feministe

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, this sounds like a well-made piece of television heading our way: MTV is debuting a new reality show in October in which a small town girl moves to Los Angeles to pursue her dreams in the fashion industry. The twist? She’s fat. (Note: the linked article actually lists her weight, so if that’s triggering for you, you might not want to click through. I can only conclude that this particular detail is included because the headline says “plus-sized” and they want to be specific that it’s not “Hollywood plus-sized”.)

23-year-old Chelsea Settles is going to star in what’s being billed as a docu-drama that will “be a viewer-friendly blend of reality dramas like “The Hills” and weight loss programs like “I Used to be Fat” or “The Biggest Loser.”” The show itself will be called Chelsea Settles and chronicle topics like her long-distance relationship, social phobias, and weight loss.

Really: what could possibly go wrong in trying to address topics like mental health and weight loss in a TV show format that is infamous for chewing up its stars and spitting them back out? Set in a city and industry infamous for their complete and total preoccupation with appearances? I’m sure it will be a nuanced, thoughtful interrogation of the issues and everyone will go through a period of profound personal growth, and the horridness of the trailer is just there to set up drama.

If you watch the trailer, (trigger warning for some pretty serious fatphobia) it seems like Chelsea is a lovely young woman of color whom other people are trying to make miserable in the name of achieving her dreams. There are some truly peculiar shifts. In one clip, Chelsea is being fat-shamed by some random bypassers yelling that she’s fat, and that’s framed as cruel. But she’s also shown eating fast food and then that immediately cuts to a lecture from a physician about her need to lose weight and eat better. She’s bullied by various personal trainer types and shown crying about how much she loathes her body. Apparently, the right to pick on someone for their weight is reserved to people with letters after their name or at least six pieces of matching fitness gear.

The show’s also framed with the expectation that we should all understand why Chelsea hates her body: because she’s fat. It’s a very public struggle with body image and disordered eating (also mentioned in the trailer). I’d note that other MTV reality TV shows have also featured women who dealt with major body image issues, but here it’s pitched as a particular issue only because Chelsea’s fat. The Hills (to which Chelsea Settles has been compared) featured Heidi Montag, whose own body image issues are so well known that the top Google suggestion for her name is followed by plastic surgery.

From the very beginning, Chelsea is told that fashion is a very image conscious field and ties this to her weight. (Curiously unmentioned is the fact that she’s a woman of color, which almost certainly plays into the image consciousness.) It seems as though the only way she will ever be successful is if she loses weight, so that’s the focus of the show: getting her thin enough to be able to work in fashion. I have no doubt that people are being honest with her when they say she’s got to be thin (or at least significantly thinner than she is at the opening of the show) in order to be able to do the kind of work she wants to do in LA, but man alive, is that depressing.

I would really love it if we could have a TV show that featured fat characters without the fat being a gimmick. I would also love it if Chelsea could find her way in life and in her chosen profession without being tormented about her weight or being told that it’s completely dispositive to her success. I doubt MTV will be showing that, though: a young, happy, fat woman, makes peace with herself and finds professional success? I mean, the latest story about Jennifer Hudson is that she’s prouder of her weight loss than she is of her Oscar. That makes it sound like that even achievement is wholly secondary to being thin.

Fat and healthy – not an oxymoron.

Hey there! I know you’re all like “didn’t she say adieu (and spell it incorrectly, too) awhile ago?” Well, I did, but the delightful Powers That Be at Feministe are allowing me to another quick visit, in order to drop some new science on y’all.

So I’m just going to leave this here (along with a small reminder that America’s current conversation surrounding weight and health is shaped, in no small part, by money from the diet industry):

Heavy but healthy? New formula slims down definition of dangerously obese

New Canadian research suggests being obese doesn’t necessarily doom people to an early grave.

Two research teams using a new tool called the Edmonton Obesity Staging System, which ranks overweight and obese people on a five-point scale according to their underlying health, have found that not only can the scale predict who is at greater risk of dying, but that otherwise healthy obese people live as long as those of “normal” weight, and are less likely to die of cardiovascular causes.

The back-to-back studies come as more evidence emerges that a significant proportion of overweight people are metabolically healthy and that the risks associated with obesity do not make for a one-size-fits-all formula.

The Edmonton staging system grades obesity on a scale of zero to four. It uses physical measures such as body mass index, as well as waist-to-hip ratios. But it goes farther by taking into account the presence — or absence — of a spectrum of disease.

Under Stage 0, the person is obese, but has no apparent obesity-related health risks, meaning their blood pressure, blood fats and other risks are all within the normal range. Stage 1 obesity describes people with “sub-clinical” signs of trouble, such as borderline high blood pressure, elevated liver enzymes and occasional aches and pains. Stage 4 is the most severe. At Stage 4, patients have serious, “potentially end-stage” disabilities and illnesses from obesity-related diseases.

In one study published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, University of Alberta researchers tested the system using data from a survey of 8,143 people in two U.S. national health and nutrition surveys.

They found that although 77 per cent of overweight or obese people in one survey, and 90 per cent of those in another, were classified as Stage 1 or Stage 2, their risk of dying over 20 years of followup was substantially lower than people classified as Stage 3 obesity.

After adjusting for age, history of smoking and metabolic syndrome — a cluster of conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes —about two per cent of people with scores of O or 1 died during followup, compared to about 40 per cent of Stage 3 patients.

“That’s a huge difference,” said Dr. Arya Sharma, who first proposed the Edmonton classification system.

…

The findings not only challenge the notion that everyone who is obese needs to lose weight. “Just because you’re normal weight doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re healthy,” Kuk said. “You can still have high blood pressure, you can still have diabetes, you can have a poor lifestyle — and all of these contribute to obviously negative health and early mortality risk.”

“You really need to take the emphasis off trying to attain this normal body weight, because lifestyle practices are equally, if not more important.”

The study was published online in Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism.

…

“If someone comes to my office and their BMI is 35, they have obesity, there’s no question,” Sharma said.

“But if I do the tests and I find that they have no other risk factors, then I can confidently tell them that they are at extremely low risk of dying. There shouldn’t be an urgent need to lose weight just because their BMI is high. The focus really should be on trying to maintain that weight and not get heavier.”

The opposite could hold for people with lower BMI’s who don’t meet criteria for surgery but who are at high risk and should be treated. “And we’re missing those patients,” Sharma said.

Sharma said people who have a history of weight cycling — losing large amounts of weight only to put the weight back on, or more — appear to be at higher risk of obesity-related complications.

“If you’re constantly dieting and trying to lose weight, and you put it back and you diet again, you might actually be causing problems.”

(all emphasis mine)

To read the whole article as it appeared in the Canadian press yesterday, click here. To read the actual research papers, click on the links embedded above. To read me ranting about some of these issues and the harm they can and do cause, you can click here, or here, or here (or just crawl inside my head, where the rant is on a constant loop).

Crossposted at Emily L. Hauser In My Head and Angry Black Lady Chronicles.

Twirling in Neon

Violet Photons Have Low Entropy or
I Used to Wear Black

I wear colors now!
a purple hat
red top
green skirt blends in
with grass
when I lay back
to hug the sky
my lips as clovers
eyes brown caterpillars
their fuzz itches my nose
flies buzz into my hair
smack them!
no, that’s wrong
but it’s just entropy
(sometimes, S happens)
we turn to iron
low energy
slow…slow…

Stop
We need the Color need it
Raise it up raise it higher
Faster Bigger More Life More Light
Further further further from black
I don’t wear anymore.

When I was 18, I dyed my hair bright, tomato red. In the seven years since then, my hair has rarely been entirely its natural color. I had red hair for most of college. Then mostly blue and purple. My clothes also went from the mostly black and white of a wannabe goth to the exact opposite. Lime green became the predominant color in my wardrobe, followed closely by purple and turquoise. And, while I do love colors, I understood even then that it was about more than loving colors. It was about being seen.

Not in the stereotypical look at me look at me teenage angst kind of way, though there was also that. I was just. so. tired. of being overlooked. I was so tired of hiding my body. I was so tired of being ashamed. So I went to the other extreme, which is more-or-less where I hang out today. Because it is subversive in the US to be fat and to proudly inhabit your body.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my first taste of color, dying my hair that bright shade of red, occurred shortly after I started regaining weight from the most extreme diet that I’ve ever been on. I was devastated and I was feeling rebellious. And I was so tired of hiding in the back while wearing clothes that made me as invisible as possible.

There’s a lot of pressure, when you’re fat, to make yourself as small and unnoticeable as possible. Wear black! And grey! And navy blue! I have this habit of leaning off the edge of bus seats so as to prevent any possibility of my belligerent thighs coming into any contact with another person. But the more angry I get about the way fat people are treated, the more unapologetic I insist on being. And it’s been incredible.

I used to hate fashion, but now I see it as an amazing avenue for self-expression (not that anyone is required to use that particular avenue, any more than anyone is required to play a musical instrument). Giving myself permission to stand out has been so damn freeing.

Because it is OK for you to be noticed.

You are allowed to experiment with your dress.

The fashion police will not arrest you, I promise.

You are under no obligation wear black or grey or navy if you are fat fatty like me. It will not make you less fat. It may not even make you appear less fat. No carefully tailored top or placement of lines is going to make me look thin, because I’m just not thin. Once I realized that, I was able to focus on wearing what made me happy, which is a pretty awesome way to start the day.

What ‘childhood obesity’ is really doing to kids

‘Gosh, she’s sooo heavy!’ is not really an exclamation you want to hear uttered by someone as they lift your child onto their lap. Especially if that someone is loved and respected by your child and in a position to influence her. And when you are a fat mother, and a feminist, and that person is a relative (whom you love, but don’t always understand), it makes for a pretty tense moment. Which is fucked up, I realise, because my kid is heavy, and remarking on it shouldn’t be any different to remarking on her eye colour. But it is.

My daughter, for the record, is not ‘obese’ or fat. Not that I should have to state that here, since it’s not anyone’s business nor particularly relevant. (Really, I shouldn’t have to, and I’ve written and deleted that sentence multiple times, but I do state it because I know some of you are wondering and I know that, sadly, in this ridiculous climate of obesity panic and parent-blaming, it’s just going to be that way). She is, however, tall for her age and she has a large head and solid limbs. She’s strong; she has heft.

I was like that as a kid. I thought I was hu-ugely fat by the time I was a pre-teen but photographic evidence shows me that I was not. The fat came later, long after the bullying began.

People who comment on my daughter’s solidity don’t necessarily see her as fat, with all the judgement and stigma that unfortunately implies, but we know that young children are becoming increasingly vulnerable to experiencing weight messaging as a hit to their self esteem . And I know that as a fat parent, I am doubly scrutinised. The shape and weight of my child is, for some, tied directly to the strength of both my morality and my parenting skills. It’s also true that as she grows, my child will comprehend the stigma that is attached to having a body like mine and, because stigma is awful, she may fear it falling on her. Whatever kind of body she grows into, she may suffer because of other people’s lack of sensitivity and compassion, as well as the general public’s lack of real knowledge of the relationship between fat and health. That hurts to know.

I was once told that I had an obligation to become thin (as if I could just choose to be and, voila!) because my kid will grow up looking at me and thinking that fat is a way to be. As if, somehow, she would catch my fat, no matter how our family lives and eats and moves and no matter what her genetic predispositions. (This person assumed, as many do, that thin is objectively healthier and ‘better’ than fat.) Some people think children should be kept from the terrible knowledge that contented fat people exist because that would, by some sorcery, mean that the notion of fatness would never occur to them and they would always remain thin. Some people just don’t believe fat parents can possibly provide a healthy home. Some people think parents of fat children are by definition lazy or incompetent or unloving. Some people are ignorant. Some people are arseholes.

Some of those people have been in the media this past week talking about a study which, it has been widely reported, recommends that very fat children be removed from their parents and put into foster care. One of the problems with this is that the study has been widely misrepresented: have a read of this break-down by Dr Samantha Thomas if you’re interested. I’m not in the least surprised that the media haven’t been more accurate and sensitive in their handling of this ‘news story’. That’s par for the course when it comes to ‘obesity’ and they do love to parade us fatties as cautionary tales. Unfortunately, what could have been an opportunity for some serious discussions about systemic barriers to good health and the ethical problems with performing gastric banding surgery on minors, became a great big festival of fat hate with a large helping of mother blaming. Especially poor mothers, cause they’re really easy to hate on, apparently.

Opportunities for bonus misogyny aside, childhood obesity is a juicy story, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to conveniently forget the facts. In Australia at least, rates of ‘childhood obesity’ have plateaued and we’ve known that for a few years now. On the other hand, rates of body dissatisfaction and unhealthy behaviours like yo-yo dieting are increasing in young people. But it’s far easier to scapegoat parents — most often mothers who are more typically charged with cooking and shopping — than to consider some of the nuance here. There is a strong case to make for changing the story from one about ‘childhood obesity’ to one about ‘childhood poverty’ (because yeah, fat kids can be undernourished kids) but that would involve facing up to some ugly social inequality and who wants to hear about food deserts when we could see a glossy grab about how Happy Meals are killing our children, amirite?

Hyper-awareness of childhood ‘obesity’ leads to shit like the absolute violation of privacy and trust that is public weigh-ins and fat shaming in educational settings. It increases the stigmatisation and bullying of fat kids but apparently not even prominent anti-bullying advocates give a shit about that, so would should the media?. Unless the bullied fat kid ends up in a viral video, and then the mainstream media will run stories about how he responded to that bullying the wrong way.

I know some readers may see this as contradictory: one minute I’m saying that kids are everyone’s responsibility and then the next I’m saying that we shouldn’t subject them and their families to undue scrutiny! Oh my!

But actually, I ask people to care about children and young people and about mothers and parents, and that implies reserving snap judgements. I ask people to approach parents with compassion, to educate themselves enough to understand the pressures that families face, to realise that individual circumstances vary, and to recognise that systemic barriers to ‘good parenting’ and ‘lifestyle choices’ exist. This complements an acknowledgement that children have the right to live free from abuse and bullying, from undue coercion and from deprivation. And it makes it harder to keep foisting the responsibility for society-wide health concerns onto individuals.

Whatever your beliefs about fat and health (and hey, I know you’ve got ’em), you’ve got to acknowledge that stigma is harmful. There is no value from a health-promotion perspective in further stigmatising fat people, and certainly not fat children. Most people can’t self-loathe their way to permanent thinness (and certainly not to good health). Fat hate won’t amount to a positive contribution to society, no matter how many ‘reality’ TV shows imply otherwise.

My kid is three years old and she’s already learning what it means to have a heavy body in the midst of ‘obesity’ panic. You cannot tell me that’s for her own good.

Fat, Gender and Achievement

File this one under “Fat is a feminist issue“:

MUCH of the debate about the nation’s obesity epidemic has focused, not surprisingly, on food: labeling requirements, taxes on sugary beverages and snacks, junk food advertisements aimed at children and the nutritional quality of school lunches.

But obesity affects not only health but also economic outcomes: overweight people have less success in the job market and make less money over the course of their careers than slimmer people. The problem is particularly acute for overweight women, because they are significantly less likely to complete college.

We arrived at this conclusion after examining data from a project that tracks more than 10,000 people who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. From career entry to retirement, overweight men experienced no barriers to getting hired and promoted. But heavier women worked in jobs that had lower earnings and social status and required less education than their thinner female peers.

At first glance this difference might appear to reflect bias on the part of employers, and male supervisors in particular. After all, studies find that employers tend to view overweight workers as less capable, less hard-working and lacking in self-control.

But the real reason was that overweight women were less likely to earn college degrees — regardless of their ability, professional goals or socioeconomic status. In other words, it didn’t matter how talented or ambitious they were, or how well they had done in high school. Nor did it matter whether their parents were rich or poor, well educated or high school dropouts.

The solution can’t be just promoting more healthful behaviors (although that should be Public Health 101); promoting health has to be for the point of promoting health, not to “end obesity.” And schools should be making concerted efforts to take on anti-fat bullying and counter poisonous social narratives about weight and one’s worth.

I’ve long been critical about The Obesity Crisis(TM), but of course it’s worth promoting public health initiatives that focus on health eating, and particularly on getting health food into schools. Schools shouldn’t have to sign contracts with Pepsi in order to buy books; kids, and especially lower-income kids who rely on schools to provide some of their daily meals, shouldn’t be fed over-processed high-calorie low-nutrition slop. Public education funding should be sufficient to help pay for gym teachers and sports teams. Schools and teachers shouldn’t tolerate or promote anti-fat teasing or commentary. And health-promoting initiatives should be instituted because the point of public health initiatives is to help people be healthy — not to shame people for their physical size.

Fat-hate hurts everyone, but it particularly hurts fat women. And it’s hurting fat women in very real ways — they’re poorer, less educated and less successful in the job market because of the culture of shame and judgment we’ve created around weight.

The feminist naturist. A.k.a. the “naked grandmas” post!

This is one of those guest-posts I’ve been promising to write for many an age now. I hope you enjoy…?

I became a naturist in a totally feminist fashion – all due to a man.

When he told me that he believed that genuine nude beaches were the best, my initial reaction was, “Um, hell no. Wtf?!”

Roughly 24 hours later, I was standing on a nude beach, having been dragged there. I was really tired, due to the dragging and whatnot. We were camped out near a group of naked strangers, most of whom were middle-aged Ukrainian men. They were busy roasting something over an open fire. A couple of little boys, also naked, really wanted to be part of the roasting experience. “Alright, who farted?!” One of the naked men yelled. “If you little bastards are going to cook, you’ll need better manners!”

It was at that point I decided that I had absolutely nothing to lose in this situation. “Can you untie these?” I asked my guy, and offered him the strings at the back of my bikini top. He untied them for me, and then I slid out of my bikini bottoms as well, and walked into the sea, naked as a jaybird. After I was done floating and watching the seagulls and clouds and marveling at how much better my body felt without the bikini on, I sat on my towel and stared at the waves. People on their way through to a different beach, people who totally had their clothes on, kept glancing at me as they passed, but not in any way that made me feel uncomfortable.

“Hm, wow, this is kind of awesome, actually” I thought to myself at the time. And so I became a naturist.

Say Yes to the Dress: Big Bliss

Admission: I love wedding shows. LOVE THEM. Say Yes to the Dress is my favorite because even though I do not particularly endeavor to get married and the idea of wearing a wedding dress makes me nearly break out in hives, I love wedding dresses on other people. They’re so pretty and lacy! And the ladies in them are so happy and everyone cries! And I love weddings, as long as I do not have to be involved in any way other than watching and drinking champagne! It is just great.

Vera dress — Admission #2: I would consider marriage if I wore this dress. MAYBE.

But what in holy hell is Say Yes to the Dress: Big Bliss? As far as I can tell, it’s the exact same show… for big girls. Which seems kind of unnecessary, no?

Fat stigma goes international

Being concerned about public health is fine and good; it’s part of a government’s job. Promoting public health is also part of that job. What doesn’t promote public health? Stigmatizing fat people. And yet.

If Maura Kelly doesn’t like seeing fat people, perhaps she should get a room and not leave it.

File this one under “If you think these things, you are an asshole, and if you publish them on the internet and in a major magazine you are really the worst human being”: Marie Claire writer Maura Kelly pens a whole piece about how “fatties” on TV should “get a room,” because she doesn’t like seeing fat people. Anywhere. Ever. But especially on TV.

I won’t excerpt it here because the whole thing is atrocious, but suffice it to say that Kelly points to every OMGObesity! line in the book. Fat people are gross! They could lose weight if they just tried! It’s impossible to be that fat and be healthy! Showing fat people as anything other than total failures at life encourages obesity! Etc etc.

There’s a post-script apologizing for being “insensitive.” But even her apology doesn’t seem to really get it. Perhaps, as a magazine that supposedly caters to women, Marie Claire would be better served by writers who don’t use the magazine’s website as a platform to publicly shame and berate women whose bodies are outside of one woman’s ideal.

Fat acceptance: when kindness is activism

A guest post by Spilt Milk

Once, when I was in my late teens, I had a fleeting reunion with my mother, with whom I’d had very little contact since childhood. It had been about five years since we’d seen each other in person; I was apprehensive about our meeting but mostly I was excited. Fantasies about happy mother–daughter bonding even after such a long estrangement are really that seductive. She did me a favour though and squashed them right away with her greeting: where I had imagined tearful embraces and a tumble of words was simply “My gosh, you’ve gotten fat! I was never that fat in my life, you know.” Evidently I’d smooshed her happy families fantasy too — I wasn’t the daughter she’d ordered. I was kind of shameful.

I’m aware that my little anecdote is not typical (my mother is ill and we’ve never had a ‘normal’ relationship). But I also know that some version of body-shaming goes on in most families. Mothers sitting around prodding their own cellulite and reprimanding themselves for eating a slice of cake condition their children to think it’s normal to hate their bodies. We know this so well it’s practically a cliché. It’s also a familiar kind of mother-blaming: someone develops an eating disorder, and everyone starts asking questions of the mother. Publications wanting to promote a fuzzy ideal of healthy body image may typically devote column inches to admonishing mothers for engaging in diet culture in front of their daughters. These sit nicely alongside narratives about neglectful mothers lazily ordering take-away and overbearing mothers plumping up their children with too much sugary love and fatty indulgence. Hence, I’m wary of the misogyny lurking behind critiques of mothers’ behaviour towards their bodies and food. Whilst it’s a goal of feminism to allow for the dissection and transgression of narrow beauty ideals, it’s clearly not feminist to lay the blame for the perpetuation of young people’s low self esteem upon women in the way that popular narratives about mothers and daughters often seem to do.

Still, there’s a kernel of truth in there. I do wonder how my own relationship with my body may have been different had my mother been kinder to me. Body shame is a great tool of kyriarchy and we often get it from our mothers first, as we learn how bodies can be reduced to a collection of parts and how those parts can be ranked in order of acceptability. Thighs and bums, boobs and upper arms, back-fat and belly-rolls can all be prodded and critiqued, despaired over, disparaged, loathed. This is often a social activity, too. Who doesn’t love normalising misogyny over a cup of tea and a (low calorie) biscuit while the kids play in the next room?

Me, actually. I don’t love it.