I’ve been aware of the fat acceptance movement for a few years now, and involved for a bit less. I’ve been fat, really fat, for lot longer than that. In the past 20 years I have vacillated between a size 14 and a size 28. I grew up with a certain amount of privilege. While I can sympathize with other people’s lives and struggles, I don’t really know what it is like to be a different race or sexual orientation or socioeconomic class. I don’t really expect people who have always been thin, or even those who carry a little more weight than they would like, to fully understand what it is like to be this big. There is quite a difference between 20 pounds and 150, and until you have failed to fit into a seat at the movie theatre or been forced to buy an extra plane ticket, you can’t really know what it is like. If you are able to buy clothes at “normal” stores, it is hard to understand the limitations of plus size. I get this.
I also understand that not everyone is passionate about the same stuff I am. Frankly, there are plenty of people who are really into causes that I don’t understand, and just like I don’t necessarily jump onto their bandwagons, I don’t expect them to jump onto mine.
What I cannot understand are the people who ignore what’s right in front of them, affecting their lives. The people who see blatant fat hatred and ignore it, or even perpetuate it. The ones who continue to let themselves be manipulated, even after they know what’s happening. The Dorothys who continue to fear the wizard, even after they have seen the man behind the curtain, or even choose to ignore the evidence, and keep telling the rest of us that the big floating head is real and that the man behind the curtain is a figment of our crazed imagination.
If I had never learned that paper was made from trees and had never heard of recylcling, then no one could really hold me responsible to do it. But since I do know that, even if I don’t go all gung-ho about it, it would be pretty silly of me to throw paper in the trash if there is a recycling bin 3 feet away.
I get that paradigm-shifting is hard, and I am not asking anyone to jump head first into FA. But I have to say, I am getting tired of all of the people playing ostrich. Ignoring the problem isn’t going to make it go away, and embracing your illusions in the face of contrary information just makes you look stuid in the end.
I think part of it is that fat people have been so brainwashed for so many years into believing that fat is bad, that it’s their fault they’re fat, and that if they just worked hard enough, they would get thin and all their problems would be solved. And it’s so hard to be told that everything you’ve ever heard about fat is a lie and that it’s not your fault, especially when you’re bombarded every day with the opposite. It takes a long time to figure out what the truth is and how you feel about it, and then integrate that into your life.
I’ve been really fat for at least 30 years, and it’s taken me a long time to realize that my worth as a person isn’t based on the size of my ass. It’s only been the last 2 years or so that I’ve finally been able to tell everyone that if they don’t like looking at my fat ass, they can look elsewhere. So it can take a really long time to pull your head out of the sand.
I hear your frustration we in FA are going to have to learn that getting out of this mess for some people is as hard as dieting itself.
It’s not only that we are brainwashed-we are- it is the way that the lies we are told bind with every good value that we have. By that I mean most of us believe in striving and doing whatever in our power that it takes to achieve our most cherished goals.
Desire for weight loss is deliberately tangled up in this in order to keep us going with it.
We are told to keep trying, to keep listening to keep doing everything that a person keen to make the best of themselves would do.
Leaving that behind can feel like leaving your values behind. It can feel as if you are having some kind of mental collapse, some instinctively get this and shy away, or get aggressive.
We in FA are going to have to come to terms with the fact that it is far harder than we imagined to get away from these ties that bind.
In a way, we should be congratulating ourselves more on our achievement, and in a sense good fortune to be able to do so, unlike some poor mites.
I fully agree. (Then again, I am a traitor to the FA cause by having WLS.) One of the reasons why I chose surgery is because diets dont work, and one of the big things that I have seen from losing weight is how much emphasis people put on losing weight.
We never see articles that talk about “Bring your blood pressure to this number, or you are a failure and will die.” Or cholesterol, or Vitamin B12 numbers, or some other marker of actual health. Weight has very little to do with health or fitness (and, I am actually less healthy after the WLS due to complications from the weight loss).
This is why the FA movement needs to succeed. Bring sanity to people’s obsession with weight.