Fat Acceptance Movement

caffeinatedcami

I was thinking about body image issues (my own and society's in general) and I learned about something called the Fat Acceptance Movement. The Healthy at Any Size Movement is related to this as well. I am curious what people's thoughts on this are.

Personally I am of two minds about it. I have never been clinically overweight but I definitely flirted with the normal-overweight bmi boundary at one point. I have had body image issues since I was a teenager and three of my immediate family members have suffered from anorexia. So I know the toll that negative body image can have on a person. Everyone should love themselves regardless of their size. And fat-shaming should not be tolerated. However, I agree with a lot of the points made in this blog post "6 Things I Don't Understand About the Fat Acceptance Movement". At a certain point does it really demonstrate self-love to give up on weight loss? What are your thoughts?

http://thoughtcatalog.com/carolyn-hall/2014/04/6-things-i-dont-understand-about-the-fat-acceptance-movement/

MommyL2015

I don't have a problem with it. I honestly don't care what size anyone is because it's not my body, not my life. I don't care if someone's tall, short, skinny, fat, black, purple, gay, straight, is a boy but wants to be a girl, is a girl but wants to be a dog, is married to a car or doesn't like chocolate and puppies. I am against shaming anyone for anything. I don't like it when people capitalize on these things but what you do with your own life isn't my business.

I didn't like myself when I was big and there was enough self-shaming going on. If the general 'you' are happy with whatever you're doing or being, that's fine. Just don't put yourself on TV and expect me to watch.

eta stupid typos.

Shana67

I think that shaming people for the size of their bodies is unbelievably cruel and should not happen, ever. Having said that, it is worrisome to me that it is becoming socially acceptable to be so very overweight. It is super unhealthy and can lead to early death. But, I can only do so much in my little corner of the world, so I encourage my girls to eat right and get decent amounts of exercise, and talk to them openly (and kindly) about the dangers of being obese.

kuftae

It seems silly. Nobody should be made fun of for their weight but it should be acceptable to have a fact-based candid discussion with somebody you care about concerning their weight if it becomes a medical issue.

Gamliela

I think fat shaming is rude and unkind. We all have our own decisions to make, leave it at that.

JoshuaMcAllister

I don't buy into any of it, its the brain child of a couple overweight people to justify an unhealthy lifestyle.
That being said fat shaming and anything similar, is disgusting and should not be accepted any less than sexism or racism. In many cases we do not know what has caused the weight gain aside from ones laziness, mental/physical health are usually major factors.
These kinds of movements never highlight the dangers of being fat or overweight, just the beauty of it?? I'd like them to explain the beauty in later life complications due to strain that they have put there vital organs under for decades.

zyxst

Some people feel FA means you don't give a sh1t about your health. From what I understood it to mean is you don't have to be a certain weight to love yourself. The opponents I've heard from are in disbelief that fat people can love themselves and have "good" blood work/health markers.

randomlyred

Nope, just nope. I "loved" myself overweight, because I was "worth it" to "treat myself" (etc. etc.). One day I woke up and realised that I disgusted myself and needed to change. Self love and accepting myself led to complacency and increasingly larger pants. Realising that I wasn't genetically destined to be big and that my weight was something I could change, hating looking at myself in mirrors, crying buying clothes, that got me off my *kitten* and out of the fridge.

singingflutelady

The problem I have with HAES (which should be HABS-health at bigger size) is that they demonize anyone who is trying to lose weight or unintentionally lose weight and they bodyshame thin people. It seems to be covering up binge eating disorder behaviours

nknjansen

It's Health at Any Size, not Healthy at Any Size - which means that anyone, no matter what their current weight can strive to be more healthy, i.e there is no lost cause. It's been distorted to mean that anyone at any size can be healthy.

singingflutelady

I agree that is what it is supposed to mean but after a preliminary search of HAES websites and fb groups it has definitely been distorted

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tapwaters

I think there are two competing ideas going on.

1. Fat shaming is wrong and cruel no one can know where another person is in their life or how hard they're working to be the person they want to be.

2. Fat acceptance is dangerous. You get these "statistics" which say humans CAN be healthy at varying levels of being overweight, but the simple fact is the vast majority are not. If people are not eating healthy foods and exercising as part of their routines, they're not going to be healthy. The emphasis of such movements should always be for people to seek help first, be it a food logging app or a commitment with buddies to do the gym.

3. Everyone is well within their own right to "pick their own poison," but in doing so they should be aware that that is what they're doing.

So many obese people use food like a literal drug -- it's self-medicating in a lot of ways for a lot of people. They should be encouraged to get help, not some illogical "acceptance."

Bronty3

I see the movement in two ways. One way for those who are overweight and those who are obese. I think it's nice that if you've found yourself moving less and you've suddenly gained weight and are like say 20 lbs. (number I was above when I started...could be 30 lbs. or whatever for others I'm short) above a healthy BMI weight that people will accept you and you can still be considered beautiful in today's society. I think people take issue with it when the feeling makes you complacent and you continue gaining weight and you become obese and your health suffers. That then jeopardizes your life. Not everyone becomes complacent, though, some people have become empowered by the movement to love themselves and be happy. That in turn made them go out more and be more active and decide, while they weren't ashamed of being overweight, they wanted to be healthier so they could continue to enjoy the world. So the movement has done some good. I guarantee, though, being shamed and called fat has very rarely motivated someone to something healthy. It probably made them eat more to deal with their hurt or to starve themselves and develop and eating disorder. So I'm for the movement if it is helping people be happier and motivating them to get down to a healthier size and not when it makes people ignore the very real health issues of being very large.

WakkoW

You can't be Healthy At Every Size. Both ends of the spectrum are terrible for the body and mind.

I am so very glad that BS wasn't around when I was younger. I was a fat kid (70's fat kid, not today's fat kid) and was shamed for it. As an adult, I am very happy that I was fat shamed. I would have totally fallen for some fat acceptance crap telling me being fat was okay.

There are worse things than being fat, but for the most part how much excess fat we carry is totally under our control. There is something very liberating about this knowledge. I control my fat, it does not control me.

sashayoung72

I was morbidly obese. I didn't have high cholesterol, I wasn't pre diabetic, my blood work was great. No one was making fun of me or making me feel bad about myself. But I felt like crap day in and day out. I was in pain from being big. I am down 80 and full of life. I feel like FA is a load of crap being twisted. No we shouldn't make fun but lets be realistic, MORBIDLY OBESE just ain't healthy.

MissusMoon

I think people shouldn't be jerks.

lemurcat12

singingflutelady wrote: »

I agree that is what it is supposed to mean but after a preliminary search of HAES websites and fb groups it has definitely been distorted

This is what I see too. At least some combination of the acceptance message with the idea that losing weight is a bad goal or even impossible and that trying to can be a betrayal.

It's too bad, because otherwise I would be broadly sympathetic. For me, getting over hating myself and being disgusted by my body (which was something I struggled with when a perfectly normal weight in my early 20s too, as part of an overall self-loathing and lack of self-acceptance), was part of how I understood I had the control and power to make changes to improve my health and fitness. Also, because I didn't really believe (after getting fat) that I could lose weight when I initially did it in my early 30s, being able to focus on the fact that I could, at least, be as fit and healthy as I could be as a fat person was also part of what enabled me to make the lifestyle changes I did and lose the weight (and yes, making those changes resulted in losing weight also).

Stopping hating myself did not make me more okay with being out of shape and less healthy than I could be (nor did it make me not want to look more attractive or be more comfortable in general). It helped make me feel more capable to do what I needed to do and less like I was too big a loser to accomplish it (despite successes in other areas).

rankinsect

Well, I think some level of fat acceptance is necessary, in that if you are mired in depression and self-loathing, weight loss is far, far harder, because a key feature of depression is to lack the ability to imagine how things could be different. Depression itself is the worst kind of sabotage to any self-improvement.

That said, of course it's better to lose the weight - but for many of us, loving ourselves as we are goes hand in hand with being able to lose the weight; I don't see the two ideas in opposition. I was never successful at losing weight before I stopped hating myself for being obese.

zyxst

shell1005 wrote: »

zyxst wrote: »

Some people feel FA means you don't give a sh1t about your health. From what I understood it to mean is you don't have to be a certain weight to love yourself. The opponents I've heard from are in disbelief that fat people can love themselves and have "good" blood work/health markers.

If that is what FA actually meant I would totally be on board, but it isn't.

One of tenets says that losing weight is abusing your body. There is a mentality that you can't love the body you have and also want to lose weight. I am not on board with that.

I want to like HAES. I got the message at a very early age that fat was ugly, fat was shameful, fat people were less than, fat people were not worth receiving love, etc. I still confront those thoughts...no matter my size. I wish the movement focused on that instead of spewing that same hate over to those who do not have overweight or obese bodies.

Getting put on the sh1t-list by readers (and I feel herself) of Raegan Chastain's (sp) blog, I learned fast that losing weight was BAD and NAUGHTY. Any change in physical form that might have any, however minuscule, relation to weight-loss was deemed non-HAES. I felt like I was a shunned Amish. That's when I learned HAES and FA aren't about "loving yourself regardless of your size", but "be fat, shove it in people's faces, and crush any naysayers under your bootheel".

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positivepowers

I'm a nurse in a hospital in the unhealthiest town you can imagine. A large percent of our population are >300 lbs. As in, as small as my town is, we have several scooter stores and the majority of the scooters the medical equipment stores carry are bariatric.

What I've never understood is the attitude of the morbidly obese with whom I deal. Mostly they are either militant about it ("Yes, I'm fat, do you have something to say about it?") or clueless ("Morbidly obese? Me? When I went to bed last night I weighed 120 lbs., now you say I'm over 400? WTH? When did this happen?")

Just because you love yourself and accept your failings doesn't mean you must give into them. As another poster stated, "FA is bu11$hit."

justrollme

This guy voices my opinion on this with a lot more eloquence than I would:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoTQ3aOEz54

shrcpr

Excellent video @justrollme. Thanks for sharing.

GaleHawkins

How many obese people to you know or yourself if you are or where obese that set a goal to be obese?

In my case as the arthritis grew worse I felt worse so I ate more carbs for a 'boost'. I then got more fat and needed more carbs for more energy. Somehow I went from about 180 to 238 without an alarm going off. I had to hit 250 three times and lose most of my mobility before I stopped abusing carbs.

It was not a lack of medical knowledge. It took me looking death in the face to change in my case. I did not want our teenage kids watch me eating myself to death.

Fat acceptance has many meanings. It was when I accepted Fat was good to eat and in my case Carbs were not good to eat and I replaced carbs with fats in my macro that my body fat just started to melt away without real effort because my driving cravings were gone. My brain started controlling my eating again. For the last year I have been eating 2500+ calories daily and maintained at 200 for a year now.

Now when I see obese people I understand they may not grasp the importance of their WOE just like I did not for so many years. When we are sick to the core weight loss is not going to happen based on my experience.

Accepting being fat as being OK sounds like a sure way to stay fat until death occurs. I no longer was OK with being Obese when I decided to find a WOE that would fix my pain.

There are times when I am NO OK with my piled up desk, shop, etc and I act.

I became very NOT OK dying prematurely due to my old way of eating. I am OK with being 12% overweight but not more at the age of 65.

Christine_72

I will never accept myself being overweight, it's just an easy excuse to remain that way..

enterdanger

I'm just over the word "shaming." Its over used and I don't think shame is an external emotion. No one can "make you" feel shame. Shame comes within.

If you were truly happy with yourself you wouldn't feel shame regardless of someone else's actions. The whole thing is kinda stupid.

No, we shouldn't discriminate against people based on size. I know fat jerks and I know skinny jerks.

yarwell

nniznik wrote: »

It's Health at Any Size, not Healthy at Any Size - which means that anyone, no matter what their current weight can strive to be more healthy, i.e there is no lost cause. It's been distorted to mean that anyone at any size can be healthy.

yes, in the UK media today by coincidence - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-36101302 -

There are genuine issues with anaesthesia and with the practicality of keyhole surgery in larger patients. Hospitals have been buying bigger beds, larger MRI scanners and longer instruments to carry out procedures in people that are to be frank in some cases are the size of farm animals.

There's a big cost-effectiveness issue, if you can demonstrate rapidly decreasing effectiveness of a procedure with weight it may be cost effective to treat the normal weight but not the obese. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-26526212 points to the extra cost of overweight pregnancies, that combined with reduced effectiveness of fertility treatments means the latter are withheld from heavier patients.

yarwell

GaleHawkins wrote: »

How many obese people to you know or yourself if you are or were obese that set a goal to be obese?

Explicitly set a goal - none. Couldn't care - quite a few. Made decisions that lead to them becoming obese over time - many.

Decisions are not always free choices - families can overfeed children or other family members, depression and the like can lead to inappropriate decisions, food environments can lead you to the wrong place, education may be lacking and so on.

LKArgh

Shaming someone for their body type or any choice they make about themselves should never be ok, and there is no need to make this specific about weight. Bullying is not ok, what you are bullied about is irrelevant.
How this translates to not being able to state facts, like that being fat increases health risks, I do not get it. It is like saying we should never mention smoking has health risks because it will make smokers feel uncomfortable.

Expatmommy79

justrollme wrote: »

This guy voices my opinion on this with a lot more eloquence than I would:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoTQ3aOEz54

Love this video. Love it!