The Fat Nutritionist |

On debates and comments and exhaustion.

By Michelle | Published: October 25, 2012

I’ve never published an official comments policy, because it always seemed kind of an unnecessary thing to do. I mean, obviously this is my website, so what I say goes, and if I don’t like a comment, I don’t have to publish it. End of story. Pretty self-explanatory, right?

It gets fuzzy at times. I am actually quite lucky in that I don’t come under attack too often, and usually the really obvious stuff (UR A DUMB BITCH!!!) doesn’t get to me much, and I just delete it. But recently, it has been harder than usual to stomach that stuff because I am exhausted.

It gets especially fuzzy when people want to come here to debate. I want them to have a chance to air their questions and arguments so that I may answer them honestly for the sake of everyone else reading who may have similar questions. For some people, this is simply an engaging intellectual exercise in which they get to argue for or against the right of fat people to exist without having their bodies legislated against or their personal choices controlled. Debate club! Fun!

But it’s a little bit less fun and intellectual for those of us who live in those bodies – it is no longer just an exercise in civil debate, it is an exhausting and frankly scary conversation to have. In the current political climate, our lives may literally be on the line.

For some others, this is an issue of intense emotion because they have struggled with weight, and either found a way to lose weight and keep it off, or are still struggling and are very angry and frustrated with me for seeming to take their hope away. Or they have a family member who is struggling, or who died of some illness associated with being fat. Difficult personal experience has led them to the firm belief that fat kills, and that they must do everything they can to save themselves and others from that fate – and my viewpoint, and the statistical indicators that fat people can be healthy, represents an intolerable fly in the ointment.

For me, this is also an emotional conversation, for reasons I mentioned above, and because my beliefs about this issue are anchored to an immovable ethical conclusion that I have come to in my life: that it is not right to treat people poorly, or to afford them fewer rights, because of their body or appearance. This belief is the foundation not just for my beliefs about how fat people should be treated in society, but also my beliefs about racism, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and all the various ways we have of marginalizing each other as human beings.

People have complained about my inability to be shaken from my position, to which I respond: to some extent, that is true. From this position – that it is not right to treat people poorly or afford them fewer rights because of their appearance – I will not be moved. It is not a position based solely on logic (although there are logical arguments to be made in its favour) – it is a deeply-held moral conviction arrived at after years of study, relationships and conversations with others, questioning my priorities, spiritual belief/unbelief, and often painful personal experience.

On all other matters, I may be impressed by evidence, though I will not accept evidence on the strength of forced consensus, or comfortable and privileged status-quo. I also recognize that, while the scientific method is the best way humans have of observing and grasping something of a reality that is much larger and more complex than we can fully apprehend, the humans themselves, the researchers, reviewers, publishers of journals, university PR departments, and finally, the journalists who disseminate findings through the mass media, are all vulnerable to bias.

Nevertheless, science and sociological research has shown some things about fatness that I accept.

I am comfortable with the fact that, yes, there is a clear association between higher levels of weight and ill health. (There is a similar association between underweight and ill health, and there is data to show that healthy behaviours can lower this risk for fat people, even without weight loss.)

I am comfortable with the fact that, yes, behaviour contributes to weight. (But it is not the whole story. There are also significant contributions to weight from genetics, living conditions, and social determinants of health.)

I am comfortable with the fact that, yes, many people do not find fat people sexually or aesthetically attractive. (I don’t need them to. There is a subset of people who do, and aesthetic ideals of beauty are partly socially constructed, subject to change over time and place, and should never be used as a referendum on whether someone has the right to exist and be treated fairly.)

None of these facts shakes my conviction that It Is Not Okay To Engage In Appearance-Based Discrimination, to deny rights or enforce unfavourable social policies on people because of their appearance.

These facts also do not preclude the peculiar theory to which I subscribe, that people can be healthy and happy at a variety of weights by focusing on self-care instead of weight loss, and that, in my opinion, this is a preferable policy to the destructive and ineffective “War on Obesity” we have waged for the last decade.

I have been studying this topic, and writing about it online, for over ten years. I was so interested in it that I went and got a degree in nutrition, and worked in hospitals for nearly five years. I am not always right about everything, certainly, and my friends, mentors and colleagues can easily point out holes in my arguments and flaws in my reasoning that make me laugh and blush (Dee, Joy, Kate, Regina, Katja, Linda, Ellyn, Deb, Jacqui, Ricky, Kelly, closetpuritan, the two Chrises, and many others, I am indebted to you.)

I usually welcome this, though it may smart at times, because ultimately it makes my understanding better and my arguments stronger. What makes me able to take in these suggestions is the trust and respect we have established, and the fact that I can count on their sharing my moral belief that it is not right to discriminate against people based on appearance, and that all people have the right to bodily autonomy.

It is going to be much harder for me to engage in intellectual exercises and arguments with people who do not share those ethical underpinnings. It is uncomfortable and draining to talk with someone who seems to wish, more than anything, that people of my size and shape would just go away and stop ruining the world for everyone, or someone who genuinely believes that my body is proof of my laziness, gluttony, and moral corruption. I don’t debate about women’s rights with transparent misogynists, either. How could I have a productive, civil debate with a person who, not to put too fine a point on it, hates me at first sight?

Occasionally, I am up for it, and sometimes I am not. Right now is one of the latter times. As great as the outpouring of support and interest has been, it cannot undo the damage that is done when someone hurls epithets at me, wishes my death, or questions my worth as a human being. Love and abuse are two different things, and one cannot entirely erase the other, which is both a blessing and a shame.

This is my long-winded way of saying, I hosted a bit of debate at the beginning of the month for the sake of people who were finding my website, and this wild notion of fat people being equally valuable, for the first time. Now I’m done. Maybe we’ll have another debate again sometime, but it’s time for me to take care of myself, to take care of my regular readers and commenters, and to get on with the business of communicating with the people who largely get it, even if we disagree on the details.

As such, I’m no longer letting through naysayer or pro-weight-loss comments, because I do not have the time and energy to deal with them, and since this website is not intended to be a Speakers’ Corner, I will not let them stand without rebuttal.

If I get caught up in devoting my time to the same arguments I have had repeatedly for the last ten years (all of which ultimately boil down to the question, “Is it okay for fat people to be fat? Is it acceptable for fat people to exist?”), I could use all of my energy doing that and never progress in doing what I am trying to do, which is to help people who are looking for ways to care for themselves at their current weight, and to offer a different viewpoint in the largely negative, punitive, controlling and orthorexic discourse around eating, health and nutrition.

The right of fat people to exist as fat people is assumed here, and it is the foundation on which I am attempting to construct something larger. Continually questioning that foundation at the request of new commenters spoiling for a fight undermines my work.

I may touch on the basic arguments in my writing, like whether or not fat people are unrepentant gluttons, or whether food is poisonous and killing us all, or whether safe, permanent weight loss is possible for most people, or the health risks of being fat and what to do about them, but I am not going to engage in those arguments with commenters who come here with the agenda of proving, once and for all, that fat people are less than other people, and need to be forcibly re-educated into complying with the prevailing aesthetic standard.

Everyone else may stay.

Thank you all for the support you’ve given me, and all the sharing of personal stories and experiences, and the support you’ve given each other.

Carry on, and be excellent to each other.

Posted in Fatness, Random Shit | 146 Responses

Why dieting works (for some people, some of the time.)

By Michelle | Published: October 17, 2012

I don’t actually want to talk about the weight-loss aspect of dieting in this post, even though that is what you’re most likely to think of when you think of whether or not dieting “works.”

If short-term weight loss were the sole barometer of success, then just about every diet you can think of, including the completely nonsensical ones involving cabbage soup or apple cider vinegar + a healthy dose of pseudoscience, works. They will all induce short-term weight loss.

For a very small number of people – those who were going to lose weight anyway because they were somehow temporarily above their body’s naturally-defended weight, or those who have the good fortune to both not regain while still dieting, and have the emotional/physical/financial/temporal resources to devote themselves to the full-time, lifelong project of controlling their weight – they can even trigger long-term weight loss.

That number has never been very high in any diet plan, so it’s hard to count it as a success. By the same marker of “success,” you could say that chemotherapy works, dysentery works, smoking works, methamphetamine works, and chronic alcoholism works – because they all induce weight loss, and yet they are all pretty terrible for one’s nutritional health.

What I’m talking about when I say “dieting works” for some people, some of the time, is the fact that I hear stories from lots of people about how a particular diet approach (which they often insist Is Not A Diet! despite the fact that it comes with a strict meal plan, food rules, or some counting mechanism) helps a person eat normally and feel in control of their eating and feel healthier. To me, these are more important barometers of whether or not something “works” than weight loss ever will be.

So, being a person who is pretty anti-dieting, how can I reconcile the stories I hear about various diet plans making people feel happy and healthy, with what I know to be true about eating competence?

I’ve noticed two common denominators about many of these stories: structure, as in structured meal times, combined with a form of blanket food restriction, like one forbidden food group, counting points or controlling portions, or even a set of complicated food-combining rules. I’m going to talk about structure first, and restriction second.

All by itself, having regular meals at set times, and respecting the non-eating times in between those meals, can give a person a really helpful sense of control over their eating.

In the eating competence approach, structured meal times work for a few reasons:

They are set at reasonable intervals, allowing a person to get comfortably hungry, but not TOO hungry, in between eating times.

Within those times, you are allowed unconditional permission to eat what, and as much as you want. This allows you to have a sense of organization about your eating, but without it feeling restrictive.

Since many cultures, the world over, seem to have organized their eating into mealtimes for much of human history, when you practice eating at meal times, you and your body will fall into a rhythm of hunger and fullness that feels damn near instinctive.

It is also way more convenient if, like most people, you work a day job and don’t have the luxury of simply choosing to drop everything and eat whenever you feel like it.

The second common denominator in many of these stories is a set of food rules or a type of food restriction. Despite the fact that lots of people find rules and restrictions immediately threatening and unsustainable, there are plenty of other people who find them comforting, because they set helpful limits on a world of seemingly endless food choices.

If you just know that you are never going to eat bread (or sugar, or wheat, or meat, or whatever) again, because that’s the universal food rule you’ve decided on, it can making choosing your food much simpler than having to go through the internal mental struggle of asking yourself what you want from the entire universe of foods available, and then filtering your desire through a lifetime of internalized, half-remembered nutrition theories picked up from friends, magazines, family members, Dr. Oz, and diet books.

Similarly, portion-measuring and calorie-counting, while still technically allowing a person to eat any type of food they want, can be comforting because they eliminate the need to decide internally how much you are hungry for, and what level of fullness you want to reach, and then filter that decision through a lifetime of internalized, half-remembered rules about how many calories is too much, what people will think if you eat two sandwiches in one sitting, and whether or not you are a bad person for wanting dessert on top of a really big meal.

Most diets, in fact, attempt to combine a sense of permission within comforting limits, just like eating competence does – low-carb diets pull you in with promises of endless steak while prohibiting mashed potatoes, Weight Watchers says you can technically eat anything you want as long as it stays within your Points allowance, and food combining plans claim you can eat any food as long as it is combined properly with other foods (the upshot being you can never again eat a tuna sandwich or other common food items) – but in my opinion, they fail miserably.

The permission they offer is conditional and incomplete, and the limits they offer are arbitrary, artificial, and sometimes downright cruel, because they disrupt people’s foodways and traditions, and encourage them to override the internal appetite signals that actually are trying to steer them in the right direction.

Unconditional permission to eat food that you truly want, that is meaningful to you (and it might sound silly to say that tuna sandwiches or mashed potatoes have meaning, but they do), in amounts and combinations that feel right in your body, is true permission. Anything less is counterfeit permission.

The helpful structure of predictable, routine eating times interspersed with non-eating times where you are not left hungry or unsatisfied and longing for more, and can actually devote your attention fully to other matters – which requires you to devote enough time and thought to food that you get fed and nourished, but also gives you a break from needing to think about food – is real structure. Other forms of structure are often restriction in disguise.

So why do people find these forms of restriction appealing and helpful? Well, aside from helping people to negotiate a varied, complex, and ambivalent food world, I also believe these things feel comforting because we have been trained to distrust our own appetites.

This is often expressed through the idea of food addiction, which I will talk about in the next post.

You’re welcome to share your experiences, but I request that you not promote dieting or certain diets. People find it triggering, myself included.

Also – apologies in advance if I get a bit overbearing in comments. With the increased traffic and new readers, I’m being extra vigilant, so I may get over-explainy at times.

Posted in Diets, eating, Humane Nutrition | 157 Responses

Your friendly neighbourhood plague rat.

By Michelle | Published: October 11, 2012

French version of this post here, courtesy Stéphanie Potin-Grevrend.

I like to go on walks. I live in a good neighbourhood for it, near the beach.

During the summer, I spent a fair bit of time swimming at the beach. I have a lot of anxiety about going outside at all, thanks to about twenty years of sexual harassment and fat bashing from strangers, so it took me a couple of summers of living here to work up to that point. (And I still got exhorted to consider polyamory by some dude on the boardwalk. This world is just one big ambivalent boner, sometimes.)

I got a swimsuit that covers me nearly head-to-toe. I practiced going down to the water on my own and putting my toes in, and then walking back home. Then I practiced going down to the water and wading around and then walking home. Finally, one day I cannonballed into the lake from a pier, and this summer I went swimming several times and enjoyed the absolute shit out of myself.

I was aware, the entire time, that the people around me (it’s crowded) were very likely judging me. Or at least, some of them were. Maybe some of them pitied me, maybe some of them thought I was “inspiring” for being a fat lady exercising in public (maybe I was on a Weight Loss Journey ™ !) Probably some of them just thought I was gross, disliked having to see my fat body in tight swimwear, and wished I had stayed at home under a blanket. Such is life.

It is painful to know that people make judgments like this, and that they sometimes directly tell me all about it (WOOOO FAT BITCH!!!), but ultimately I have decided it is none of my business until they make it my business. And despite being an oversensitive sadface whinybaby, I work hard to fight against the impulses that tell me to just stay home forever, or at least until everyone else has been killed in the coming zombie apocalypse.

(No shit, sometimes I fantasize about a world where I am blissfully, peacefully alone, and can walk down the street without anyone looking at me or thinking anything about me; where my body and my time are not subject to the whims of strangers. I watched the first twenty minutes of 28 Days Later with morbidly rapt attention.)

Now that the weather has cooled and the fall colours are out, there’s no more lake swimming to be had, but plenty of lovely walking to do. I have a complicated relationship with exercise, due to a history of overdoing it and hurting myself, but since I work from home now, I have to be extra mindful of making the effort to get out.

I make that effort as often as I can, because it makes my legs feel awesome, because my knees get cranky if I sit around for a couple of days in a row, and because I love the slight burn and tingle in my lungs and heart from going up a really good hill. I love having an excuse to listen to loud, obscene music through eardrum-killing headphones, and to be as close as I can get to blissful aloneness. I love coming home and peeling off my sweater and letting the sweat dry and feeling the happy warmth in my chest while I drink delicious cold water.

But when I stood up to go for a walk on Tuesday, I hesitated more than usual. The conversation of last week – about how fat people need to be shamed and harassed for their own good – came back to me. I was hyper aware that, if I went out, people would be judging me, pitying me, or wondering if they should speak up and point out to me, for my own good, that I am fat.

I went out anyway. Almost the entire time, I felt like a plague rat. I felt that people would look at me and assume I was diseased, and shudder and move away. And even though I was doing something ostensibly good for my health, this understanding and awareness that people find me gross did not make it easier or more rewarding to care for my health.

The emotional risk of being fat in public makes it tempting to not care for yourself by going out and getting some fresh air and walking around like you deserve to be in this world. The emotional risk of being fat in public makes it safer to stay home in your dinky, 90-year old city apartment with creaky floors and a tiny living room in which it is not fun for you, or for your downstairs neighbours, to exercise.

Eventually, though, I got home and enjoyed the lovely feeling of having moved my body in a way that wasn’t punishing. I took this picture and reminded myself, once again, that I deserve to exist and to take care of myself in the ways I deem most appropriate. And that, even though people will question me and judge me, they are wrong. They are on the wrong side of history, and until the sea change happens that will show just how ridiculous our culture was for stigmatizing people based on appearance, I need to survive.

I went out again the next day, and I’ll go again today. It’s stupid that it has to be an act of rebellion, but for now, in this world, that’s exactly what it is.

Since this is a post about my personal experience, either play nice or don’t play. Suggestions of noisy music are welcome.

Posted in Fatness, Liking Yourself, Moving | 156 Responses

Happy Thanksgiving

By Michelle | Published: October 8, 2012

Hi Americans – it is a holiday weekend here in Canada. I am sitting around with my sore wrist in a brace instead of blogging.

For those of you hate-reading my blog right now, welcome and carry on. People do so love to be slightly irritated. I probably won’t approve your comments, though.

About that video.

By Michelle | Published: October 3, 2012

French version of this post here, courtesy Stéphanie Potin-Grevrend.

Yesterday, the video of Jennifer Livingston (and here’s a transcript of the video), a fat news anchor responding to an email about how fat and unhealthy she was, went viral. I figured I should probably talk about it, rather than just making oblique references to it.

Here’s the email:

Community responsibility.

Hi Jennifer,

It’s unusual that I see your morning show, but I did so for a very short time today. I was surprised indeed to witness that your physical condition hasn’t improved for many years. Surely you don’t consider yourself a suitable example for this community’s young people, girls in particular. Obesity is one of the worst choices a person can make and one of the most dangerous habits to maintain. I leave you this note hoping that you’ll reconsider your responsibility as a local public personality to present and promote a healthy lifestyle.

A lot of people have tried to make the argument that the email was not bullying, since it referenced concern for her health.

Health is always and forever the argument weight bigots lean on to give a socially acceptable veneer to their harassment. Marianne has something to say about that:

If you gave a good goddamn about the health of fat people, you’d shut up about our fatness. You are destroying our mental health — and that can kill a person just as surely as anything else.

Every single fat person in the world already knows they are fat. They may not know their exact BMI, or where that BMI falls on the ridiculously arbitrary classification system from overweight to obese to morbidly obese, but it is very difficult in this culture not to be aware when your weight is higher than average, or higher than the cultural ideal.

Telling someone that they are fat, even when couched in expressions of “concern for their health” is not giving them any new information. It’s not helping them. And, especially when that person is a perfect stranger, it is most likely a transparently aggressive maneuver to shame and put them in their place.

Women in the public eye are held to ridiculous and gender-specific scrutiny for the way they look – their hair, their clothes, whether their faces are pretty, and the size and shape of their bodies. While people have the legal right to say whatever they want about any woman in the public eye, that doesn’t mean that it’s not a total dick move, that it’s not an expression of one of the most insidious forms of entitled misogyny.

And that means we are going to call you out on it, just to make sure everyone knows what an asshole you just revealed yourself to be.

This issue, despite the protests of the emailer and some of his defenders, is not really about health at all. It’s about making sure there is always an underclass of people who can be readily identified, and that identity used as the foundation on which to prop up hackneyed stereotypes and value judgments (lazy, smelly, gluttonous, stupid, low-class), which ultimately results in an entire group of people being devalued as human beings for having one, relatively unimportant characteristic in common.

Welcome to appearance-based discrimination 101.

Humanity seems to revel in this. We have done this to so many different groups of people over time. It is our calling-card as humans, and it is complete and utter bullshit.

Oppression hurts all human beings. It hurts civilization itself, which requires the contribution of many and diverse people to remain strong and to grow in sophisticated and sustainable ways. Oppression effectively prevents, or marginalizes, certain people’s contributions to society, often based on nothing more than a surface characteristic. It squanders their talents, lives, health, intelligence, and humanity by arbitrarily deciding that, because they look a certain way or their body does or doesn’t do certain things, they are simply not good enough to contribute.

A psychiatrist named Claudia Howard coined what are sometimes referred to as Howard’s Laws of Human Worth, summarized below:

All have infinite, internal, eternal, and unconditional worth as persons.
All have equal worth as people. Worth is not comparative or competitive. Although you might be better at sports, academics, or business, and I might be better in social skills, we both have equal worth as human beings.
Externals neither add to nor diminish worth. Externals include things like money, looks, performance, and achievements. These only increase one’s market or social worth. Worth as a person, however, is infinite and unchanging.
Worth is stable and never in jeopardy (even if someone rejects you.)
Worth doesn’t have to be earned or proved. It already exists.

Weight is not an indicator of human worth. Weight is also not a behaviour; you cannot accurately assume behaviours or health status based on appearance.

Healthy people come in all shapes and sizes. Health is not a fixed, one-dimensional commodity; good health looks different to different people, and it encompasses factors from every area of a person’s life, not just their weight or blood pressure or how fast they can run upstairs. Even people who are “unhealthy” by conventional definitions deserve respect and equality, and not to have their private affairs questioned by strangers. Every single person in our society has inherent value as a human being.

Telling fat people that they are bad examples for daring to have jobs and exist in public spaces is eliminationist rhetoric – it suggests that fat people have no place in this world, that they need to just go away, hide at home with the lights off, and starve themselves until they are fit to be seen in public again.

Fuck that. Fat people exist, we have existed, we will continue to exist. We have as much right to this world, and our jobs, and the public eye, as anyone else.

Our bodies and the status of our health are not public property. Our existence is not open to debate or discussion. We are here, and our health is between us and the people to whom we’ve given informed consent to make judgments about it. It is not a handy club for you to beat us with. And if you cared one iota for fat people’s health, you would shut the fuck up and let us handle our business. The constant pressure and questioning and needling and harassment fat people get from family, friends, coworkers, neighbours, and perfect strangers all combines to increase stigma, and that stigma materially hurts people’s health.

Ragen had something brilliant to say:

Everybody has the right exist in the body they have without shame, stigma or oppression. That right is inalienable and not yours to confer. This is not up for discussion, debate, or vote. There are no other valid opinions. Fat people have the right to exist in the bodies we have now. Period.

Next time you are concerned about a fat person’s health, consider that the best thing you might do for them is to treat them like capable adults and let them sort it out for themselves. Don’t add to the unhealthy storm of negativity and pressure and fear-mongering that is already surrounding them.

Until we ask for your advice, just hush. Let us be.

Hey all – I’m getting too tired to respond properly/nicely/in-depthly to commenters. I’ve got my actual day job to attend to for the rest of the night, so for everyone’s sake I’m just shutting them off until tomorrow. Have a good night! It’s been fun. Here, have this video about fat trolling to tide you over. Comments are now closed. It’s been three weeks. Time to move on.

Posted in Fatness, News | Comments closed