[dark_crystal]

* this is copy pasted from my blog www.excusedfromthetreadmill.wordpress.com, and I may have copy/pasted an earlier version in the eating disorders or body-positive thread, for which I apologize for spamming the forums)

In recovering from anorexia, I had to accept that I was going to gain weight and that I could take no control over that and that I would just have to accept whatever size I ended up with.

I had to learn that every size is ok. Through this process, I became a "Fat Activist."

Even though my weight is “normal”, I am a Fat Activist because fat stigma hurts everyone.

When fat jokes are funny, when fat kids are bullied, when fat people face discrimination, all of that adds to the perception that fat is the worst thing in the world you could possibly be.

For “fat” to be the worst thing in the world that could happen to anyone is a problem for people of every size.

When getting fat is the worst thing you can do, avoiding fat becomes the best thing you can do.

(Not to mention how tragic it is to have an entire society working harder at thinness than at art, innovation, or justice.)

When avoiding fat is the most important thing anyone can do, too much is never enough.

This attitude encourages extreme rhetoric and behaviors about weight, diet, and exercise.

When extreme rhetoric and behaviors are portrayed as desirable, people get eating disorders.

I am a Fat Activist because I think that fat, in and of itself, is value-neutral. It is neither good nor bad, and for us to be waging a war this desperate against an arbitrary enemy is suicidal.

If a fat person has health issues that they want to fix, those health issues should be addressed directly. Rather than attempting to fix high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol, etc, through dieting; we should approach them through diet.

Wait, isn’t that the same thing? No. Saying “I need to get my blood sugar down, so I am going to lose fifty pounds” is very differnt from saying “I need to get my blood sugar down, so I am going to limit my intake of sugar and carbohydrates.”

The person with the first goal is likely to fail. The person with the second goal is likely to succeed. It seems like it is just semantics, as then end goal is the same, but it is much healthier psychologically to take the most direct approach, as approaching an achievable goal through a method that has a 95% failure rate is just asking for anxiety, depression, obsession and a whole host of other things that our modern lives don’t need any more of.

I am a fat activist because a person can address health concerns such as high blood pressure and high blood sugar through diet and have success without seeing any visible change in their size, therefore I cannot make assumptions about anyone’s health based on their size.

I am a fat activist because, actually, nobody’s health is my business. It sounds like I am saying “it is ok to be fat as long as you are still healthy,” but actually it is ok to be fat whether you are healthy or not.

We judge people for their “healthy” or “unhealthy” lifestyles without ever asking ourselves why. Objectively, how is an individual’s health “good” or “bad” for anyone but themselves, and if it doesn’t affect anyone else, how does it get to be a criteria we can judge by?

People say “but they are shortening their lives,” (which we have already said you cannot know from looking at them, but humor me), however, length of life is also value-neutral. We are all afraid of the unknown, so we want to put off facing it for as long as possible, which leads us to value long lives for ourselves– but this does not mean that a person shortening their own life has any effect on us or is in any way objectively “bad” or “good.”

We actually have more justification in judging people for their fashion choces than for their health. A really bad fashion choice can conceivably affect me if you are wearing zebra stripes with houndstooth and seeing you out of the corner of my eye is distracting me and giving me a headache. Sitting next to me while having high blood pressure? Not so much.