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Fat Acceptance Movement
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caffeinatedcami
Posts: 168 Member
in Debate Club
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/
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/
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Replies
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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.180 -
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.156
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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.99
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I think fat shaming is rude and unkind. We all have our own decisions to make, leave it at that.50
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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.114 -
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.69
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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.112
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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 behaviours92
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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.69
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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 distorted18
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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."58 -
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.22
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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.51 -
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.100
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I think people shouldn't be jerks.78
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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).22 -
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.69 -
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".44
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