Jezebel 
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New York, 12:37 PM
Sun Nov 29
17 posts in the last 24 hours
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09/02/09
09/02/09
That fitness, that childhood of playing and swimming, it saved my life when I was hit by a car. Anyone with less muscle on them would have been hurt a fuckton more than I was. I suffered multiple fractures to my left leg around the knee, and a completely shattered left shoulder. A couple years later, I had to get my right knee surgically broken to stop my growth, as my growth plates had fused together in my left leg, and I was growing like a god damn weed. All of my height is now in my torso.
Unfortunately, my injuries while not life-threatening, were still severe and many of those things I loved doing before were all but impossible to me. My knees popped easily, twisted easily, my left arm lost much of its range of movement, I couldn't run anymore as my gait is altered uncomfortably, I lost my sense of balance, and I gained weight.
By the time I got to grade 9, I was 5'5" and 160lbs, which is not obese but is still classified as overweight. I didn't think much of it, I didn't have many body issue images, I was pretty comfortable in my own skin until my grade 9 gym teacher made us all weigh each other for some "fitness module." I was the heaviest in the class. She took one look at my chart, gave me the "body check" with her eyes, anyone whose ever been called fat knows that look, and announced to the class while holding me by the shoulder that THIS is what happens when you eat junk food and don't exercise. I was absolutely shocked, and my self-esteem crumbled. People started calling me fatty, I stopped eating. I would pretend to eat my dinner at night so my mom wouldn't know, and I was so ashamed of myself for the first time in my life.
There were no pools near where I lived in my teen years, no bike paths, everything was spread out... While I can walk all day, I have to take frequent (every 20 minutes or so) breaks so my knees don't twist. I was anorexic through high school and didn't get over my "disordered eating" as it were until I moved in with my partner at 18.
Shaming "obese" children is not the way to advocate healthier lifestyles. I have never eaten any worse than my skinny friends and skinny partner, I come from a long line of hardy stock. People with dense bones, big frames, and lots of muscle. I'm bigger because I'm meant to be. Even when I was eating a handful of peanuts every day as my only meal, I never once went below a size 14. That one stupid fucking bitch, that god damn gym teacher who was 5'2" and slim and blonde and gorgeous, ruined my self image for nearly a decade.
Why can't we just want people to be healthy and happy with how they are? Why must we lace in "fat loss" and "weight loss" with healthy lifestyle programs? There is no fucking ideal weight, no ideal body type. People are different, people are always going to be shaped differently and weigh in at different weights. I'm so fucking sick of this "war on fat" bullshit.
09/02/09
The thing is, BMI measurements and those goddamn overweight/obese/normal categories are only a PROXY for health, a PROXY for fat to lean mass ratios. Having my body fat tested by my trainer was the best thing I've ever done. Sure, I may be carrying more fat than your average gym bunny, but I'm also carrying 123lbs of lean mass (bones, muscle, blood, etc.), which clearly illustrates it would be nigh on impossible for me to be 120lbs without sacrificing a lot of beneficial tissue in my body. Perhaps if I starved the muscle off, but then I'd be just flabby and weak - but I'd be less effected by gravity? Something like that can put things in perspective.
But those charts? Forget it.
09/02/09
I'd much rather be labeled fat, and be able to play with my dog and eat good meals and enjoy life. I think I'll stick with my 190lbs.
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It is not healthy to smoke, but I do.
It is not healthy to drink too much, but I probably do.
It is not healthy to ignore exercise, but I do.
That's why my kids have heard "Do as I say, not as I do."
09/02/09
1. Would you be willing to have your right arm removed 3" above the elbow if the procedure guaranteed you would be thin for the rest of your life without having to diet or (not for fun) exercise?
2. Would you be willing to have a non-fatal heart attack at 45 if you were guaranteed to be thin throughout your lifespan without dieting or (not for fun) exercise?
3. Would you be willing to weigh 350lbs if you were guaranteed to be healthy, feel great, have perfect mobility and live to be a minimum of 80 years?
I think that it would reveal, once and for all, that it's NOT about health. It's about looks. It's about looks. It's about looks. The pundits DON'T care about your health. It's about looks.
Did I mention that it's about looks?
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And 3, in all honesty, I can't answer. Because I'm having such a hard time reconciling the idea that I could be 350 lbs and feel great about myself, and not have things I wouldn't be capable of doing. Which is not to say that it couldn't be TRUE, but that it's odd I have this mental block against considering it. The bias runs deep, even when you believe all people should be able to live without being judged by their appearance. I'll have to examine this in myself...
09/02/09
Actually, if I remember correctly you are going through an issue similar to this, no?
09/02/09
Even if the outcome is that you decide you do not agree with the tenants of FA, I think it is fucking awesome that you are willing to examine yourself like that.
09/03/09
"given perfect health and mobility were assured."
Most 350-pound people do not have perfect health and mobility. If you want people to consider a hypothetical, for the sake of illuminating an argument point, it has to be SOMEWHAT reasonable.
09/03/09
09/03/09
09/02/09
not into fat-shaming, but yes, I do think it's appropriate for the government to promote healthy, obesity-combating policies. being overweight may not pose all the risks that people associate with it, but being obese does.
why is it wrong to want to help children not become obese?
09/02/09
Anyway, the gist of my old comment was that sometimes people are so caught up in their insecurities that they can't really see the forest for the trees when it comes to obesity and health. Fat acceptance means rejecting everything and everyone that posits that being fat is "not okay", including, in this case, every major foreign and domestic medical and health body that associates overweight and obesity with a plethora of health concerns. This is how I've always perceived this issue, as a fight between feeling slighted as a fat person living in a society that purportedly values thinness as the ideal, and the current medical belief that being above a certain weight category is known to precipitate a number of health problems.
In this case, keeping kids from becoming obese or helping chubby kids try to lose weight is like a complete rejection of the fat body or something, and that's why fat acceptance people can't get behind anti-obesity initiatives. I guess their position would be to let the kids be obese and overweight because they think there's nothing wrong with that. The medical view and the fat-acceptance view are at odds with each other in this regard, however. Obesity and health are not believed to coexist in the current medical view, and fat acceptance people tend to reject this.
Anyway, I'm just thinking out loud here. I am not fat so I don't think I have a dog in this fight, although it is clear that she is not actually against encouraging good nutrition and good exercise habits in children, she only rejects it when the goal is weight loss, so it really isn't causing any harm. But I really don't think that these health initiatives are all about "looking good" and not about being healthy. I don't think that's supported by the evidence at all. The focus is on preventing health problems by preventing obesity, not to produce a bunch of buff boys and size 0 girls just because they would look good.
09/02/09
Not exactly.
In Kate's own words: [kateharding.net]
09/02/09
If you do everything in your power to be healthy as a means to lose weight and you don't lose an ounce, what do you do? Even if your LDL level went down, and you lowered your blood pressure, and improved your flexibility, and you can climb a flight of stairs without getting out of breath, but you still have to squish your ass into the same jeans as before.
09/02/09
Is this something that you have read somewhere or did you come up with this definition of fat acceptance on your own?
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09/02/09
Also note that it was invented around 1830-50. But you are correct in that the inventor wasn't envisioning it being used as a health index, but more of a way to categorize populations in general. He was rather obsessed with the idea of the "average man" and how to calculate it.
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09/02/09
I think the most vitriol is in the piece itself, when Ms. Harding quotes her own writing from last year about Europe.
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09/02/09
If, however you are wrong, and healthy changes do not, in fact, cause childrens' weight to go down, but do make them healthier, than marketing the changes as a "War on childhood obesity" will cause great damage. It will unecessisarily target overweight children, it will cause anger and disapointment when the changes are followed and no weight loss is seen and it will ignore the section of children that are thin but not healthy.
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09/02/09
I guess the real problem is that this country is so sick on so many levels that we're reduced to responding to our most pressing and extreme needs. We have so many issues that we can't even afford to focus on preventative care - we're in full on crisis-response mode, and that's plain sad.
09/02/09
The problem with tieing in healthy habits with weight loss is that it singles out people who qualify as "overweight" and higher on the BMI scale and it ignores the thinner folks who need to change their habits. Also, there is the opinion that adopting a new lifestyle is working only if the person is losing weight, even though some research suggests that one can have major benefits even if they don't lose a single pound: [www.ars.usda.gov]
As another commenter stated, the problem is that a program like this might lose funding if there isn't major weight loss, even if there are other benefits.
Another thing to remember is that while we may say, oh it's just a health thing, we want the kids to be ok, but intentions can get twisted very easily. Fat kids are treated like shit--by their peers, by gym teachers (yeah, I know not all of them are sadists, but a heckuva lot of them are), by doctors (check out the blog First, Do No Harm--it includes mistreatment of fat kids and teens: [fathealth.wordpress.com]) and sadly, even by their own families.
So the last thing they need is to be nagged about dropping the Twinkie and picking up the celery stick, especially if they aren't eating junk. Yeah, it's good to encourage kids to eat their veggies and such but a lot of the time, this gets twisted to focusing only on weight, and the fat kids in the room get singled out, either subtly or directly. Unfortunately, people have biases and a lot of the time, it's the fat=unhealthy couch potato who eats junk food.
Now I'm not saying there shouldn't be efforts to improve nutrition for children and adults, but it has to be done in a way that is weight-neutral. Focusing on weight will pressure fat kids to lose and let thin kids think they have nothing to worry about. Also, this will lead a lot of people to think the only measure of health is weight (yes, I know it's not the intention, but you have to factor in how people will interpret things, and a lot will use very simplistic interpretations).
And finally, like Kate pointed out, kids grow weird, like puppies. A short fat kid may be a tall thin kid next summer, and a thin kid may become a fat kid. Weight gain can precede a growth spurt, so freaking out about it would be silly. Some kids are steadily fat or thin (I was quite thin throughout my childhood and teen years and only gained a lot when I went on certain meds), but others can be all over the place size-wise when they're growing. You can't focus on the numbers as much as you would with an adult (and even then, weight should be considered only one of many factors).
So yeah, yay healthy initiatives, but if weight is a part of it, eventually it'll be the only focus. It's part of our society to treat weight as the be-all-end-all measurment of health, so that's why Kate is unhappy.
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09/02/09
I was raised by hippie, extremely health conscious parents and was eating organic, whole-foods in moderate quantities before it was trendy to do so. I was well-informed about nutrition from an early age.
I was, and still am active. My childhood consisted of biking, swim team, gymnastics, crew and summers hiking in the mountains. These days I hike, bike, do yoga and weight train, and eat the same kinds of foods I was raised on.
My point of all this above is that I do everything such anti-obesity programs would recommend, and I'm still obese.
Obesity can for some people be an indicator of poor nutrition or a sedentary lifestyle, but not for everyone. Skinny people can also have poor nutrition and not enough exercise, but in the "war on obesity" these people are being neglected.
I find your generalizations about the health of obese people to be extremely misinformed. The size of my body is not "dangerous" and I'm not some special unicorn, there are many people like me.
09/02/09
09/02/09
1. Change takes time 2. Many doctors and scientists are already trying to change the way obesity is seen and bmi is calculated
09/03/09
09/02/09
Have you heard of diabesity? It's a real problem. And it disproportionately affects poor minorities.
09/02/09
So encouraging people to move around more is good. but this better not be the start of more government-sanctioned nutrition fads and food blacklists (or if you really go down a slippery slope, restrictions on how much of government-determined "unhealthy" food people can buy).
09/02/09
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09/02/09
@colormeroutine: The old food pyramid allotted a much larger section to grains than it did to dairy and protein. The problem was, it didn't really distinguish between whole grains and the Wonder Bread-type carbs that anya mentions. I think she might be saying that our concept of "bad food" is mutable... fat was "the enemy" in the '80s (Ornish diet, focus on cholesterol), now it's sugar (Atkins, South Beach, focus on diabetes).
09/02/09
@AnatomyFightSong: Here's the new pyramid for comparison (kind of an eyesore):
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09/02/09
Based on my own work experience with bureaucracy, I would guess that approximately 452 people had to weigh in on this design and it had to go through 79 stages of approval before it was issued.
09/02/09
I went to juinor highschool with a girl who lost all of her hair because of a serious vitamin deficiency. (At least that was the story) She was skinny and addicted to junk food. It was like crack for her; she was born in a country that didn't have it. And don't get me started on my friend who actually managed to get SCURVY. SCURVY!!! He too was skinny and obviously a pirate...I mean, seriously....scurvy.
So yeah, maybe instead of BATTLING CHILDHOOD OBESITY, aka War on little Fatties., they should focus on teaching children and adults about good nutrition and why its important to eat a balanced diet or you might get SCURVY! Argh.
And don't get me started on exercise. As someone who spent the first half of my teens depressed (not clinically) I wish I had known how much better I would have felt it I'd just gotten out and took a dance class or a walk.
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Funny, because on the rare occasions that medical doctors have commented on posts like this that's what they've claimed.
09/02/09
09/03/09
Sorry, the last time Jezebel ran a post like this (I should learn) I tried to find them, but it took much time. If you go through all the "weight" posts, you will find them. The comments ran between May and now.
09/03/09
More important, it was two doctors who independently posted anonymous comments. They weren't selling any program. They simply said that in their lengthy experience beving seriously overweight was an irrefutable health hazard.
I realize that nothing I say will satisfy certain people here, but they truly were not jerks. They understood that weight loss is difficult and requires profound, life-long changes.
In my experience, doctors don't bullshit patients. They have better things to do. They don't tell an MS patient that the problem can be "fixed" by a behavior change, because it can't; they have no clue what causes it. They don't tell a person with a terminal brain tumor to eat better; they try to prepare the person for death.
When did you hear a doctor say: "Losing weight would be highly beneficial for my patients, but I don't recommend it because it's a medical impossibility for 99% of them."?
NEVER.
Because it simply isn't true.
09/04/09
You clearly have never visited