Shriver writes that her older brother is "a sadly good test case for the claim that one can be 'healthy at every size.'" He weighs 330 pounds, and suffers from compressed vertebrae, diabetes, emphysema, and heart problems. Shriver says he received serious injuries that left him unable to exercise, but that "he also eats too much." And while she has "buckets of sympathy for the obese" and "respect [...] for their feelings, for their humanity," she also writes,

I won't simply accept that my brother is fat. And his only chance at a future is to refuse to accept himself that his weight gain is irrevocable. [...] My brother is only 55, and without drastic intervention – gastric bypass surgery or a sudden resolve on his part that I fear is unlikely – I doubt he'll see 60. My brother is eating himself to death. I love him dearly, and I can't support any political movement that would have him believe he can be "healthy at any size."

Shriver's piece is heart-wrenching to read in light of its coda — her brother died of cardiac arrest soon after it was written. Even without this information, Shriver's concern for her brother's well-being is palpable — she's not that family member who says "I'm just worried about your health," but really wants you to fit into a size 4 dress. Not all fat people are healthy, and it's possible that losing weight would have improved Shriver's brother's life.

But. Health At Every Size did not kill him. First of all, fat acceptance doesn't mean believing every fat person is in perfect health — fat people with cancer obviously still have cancer, no matter how you feel about their weight. Being fat does seem to raise the risk of some health conditions — but so does being thin. Ultimately, the message of Health At Every Size isn't that fat people suffer no health problems, it's that the way to combat health problems (usually) isn't major weight loss — because most of the time it doesn't work. Would weight-loss surgery have extended Shriver's brother's life? Maybe, but the surgery carries risks too. And whether or not he might have benefited from some sort of drastic intervention, the message of Health at Every Size isn't that he was healthy, or that he should have simply ignored his diabetes or heart issues. In fact, it's possible to believe in fat acceptance and have weight-loss surgery. What's not possible: that a movement that teaches that you can be healthy and fat made a man unhealthy.

The trailer for Fat Girls Float, currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, is a good place to get the truth about fat acceptance. (Thanks to the tipster who sent it in this morning.) The film, by self-described "300lb. filmmaker" Kira Nerusskaya (pictured) lets "fat women from four countries (England, France, Russia, and the United States) tell their tales of sorrow and success, wow and woe; discussing size discrimination, political activism (fat and size acceptance), and social networking communities." Interviewees include Velvet D'Amour, who points out that fat characters in Disney films are always evil, and asks, "when is fat Cinderella?" But the real show-stealer of the trailer is a woman named Colleen (pictured above), who says,

If anyone thinks that they are so important and so special that I will give them the power to change my life, to change my attitude, my smile, my frown, if you think you are going to have any effect on that whatsoever, you're mistaken. You have no power. You have no power over me.

Shriver's essay is more moving and personal than the mainstream media's typical anti-fat screeds, but at bottom, its message is an old one — that if we don't keep harping on the idea that fat itself is unhealthy, fat people are going to keep dying. Unfortunately, this is true. Fat people are going to keep dying no matter what we say to them. So are thin people. Everyone dies. While Shriver's brother's death is tragic, stigma definitely wouldn't have saved him. When Shriver calls HAES a "political movement that would have him believe he can be 'healthy at any size,'" she misses the point — nobody could truthfully call her brother healthy when he wasn't. All HAES and fat acceptance aim to do is to decouple health from fat discrimination, and to help fat people protect the self-respect that society tries to take away. Shriver says she has "buckets of sympathy for the obese," but Colleen doesn't need her sympathy. She's secure enough in herself that stigma can no longer hurt her — and she is the real face of fat acceptance, not some notional fatty feeding a sick man lies.

Lionel Shriver: My Brother Is Eating Himself To Death [Guardian]
Get In The Pool! With Fat Girls Float [Kickstarter]

Naturally, NAAFA has its critics. Time magazine pulls a quote from Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at Harvard's School of Public Health. Recently he told the New York Times: "There's been this misconception, fostered by the weight-is-beautiful groups, that weight doesn't matter. But the data are clear." The thing is, that's not even what NAAFA is about. The group is more into defending overweight Americans on issues like Simon Cowell's fat jokes on American Idol or obese airline passengers who have to pay for a second seat. Willett seems to think NAAFA is promoting fat. But as we've said before: There's a difference between promotion and acceptance. It's ridiculous to think that overweight people are out there pressuring people to gain weight.

NAAFA's public relations director, Peggy Howell, says her group doesn't endorse leading an unhealthy lifestyle: "We don't encourage people to get fat." She's more concerned with weight discrimination, which studies show is now as prevalent as race or gender discrimination. "As a citizen of the U.S., just because I carry more weight on my back doesn't mean I should have any fewer rights than anyone else."

What's interesting is that the fat acceptance movement started in the late '60s, when issues of race, sex, war and feminism were also in flux. Since then, the draft became a contingency plan; the Equal Rights Amendment was passed by the U.S. Senate; we went from getting past segregated lunch counters to a black President. But despite the rash of plus-size TV shows on the air right now, the NAAFA convention today in Washington, D.C. will surely meet with opposition, like the commenters on Marianne Kirby's piece about More To Love, one of whom wrote:

It is time to stop giving people a pass by using politically correct terms such as "plus-size or full-figured."
Enough already.
You are obese. You are fat.
There is NOTHING healthy about " your lifestyle. "
Overeating is NOT a " lifestyle. "
Nobody forces you to enter that fast food restaurant.

That comment was met with a barrage of responses from enraged overweight people swearing that they are vegetarians with low cholesterol who do not overeat, but the attitude of the original poster persists. This is a battle not easily won.

A Brief History Of The Fat Acceptance Movement [Time]
Earlier: On Beth Ditto, "Promoting" Obesity & Fat Shame
More To Love Premieres Tonight; Two "Fat" Writers Weigh In
Related:
Really Big Love [The Daily Beast]

Writer Mandy Katz's analysis of the zeitgeist is a little silly (is the show More to Love really an example of Fat Acceptance? Is Oprah, with her public confessions of "embarrassment" about her weight, really a paragon of Health At Every Size?), but the basic message of her article is worth repeating. "A loose alliance of therapists, scientists and others," she writes, believe,

that all people, "even" fat people, can eat whatever they want and, in the process, improve their physical and mental health and stabilize their weight. The aim is to behave as if you have reached your "goal weight" and to act on ambitions postponed while trying to become thin, everything from buying new clothes to changing careers. Regular exercise should be for fun, not for slimming.

It's not a new concept, as Katz acknowledges, but it's still a controversial one. Katz quotes Walter Willett, chair of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, who says,

Virtually everyone who is overweight would be better off at a lower weight. There's been this misconception, fostered by the weight-is-beautiful groups, that weight doesn't matter. But the data are clear.

Leaving aside his dismissive tone, Willett doesn't mention how "everyone who is overweight" is supposed to get to "a lower weight" and stay there, probably because there's no reliable answer. Given the fact that trying to change your weight often leads to yo-yo dieting (Kathryn Griffith, interviewed in the article, has been through Weight Watchers 27 times), it's no wonder a variety of people have decided to just eat what they want already — that is, to choose "intuitive eating." A companion article, also by Katz, defines intuitive eating thus:

Intuitive eating involves returning to basic drives, dispensing with the notion of "good" or "bad" foods and rules about when to eat. Absent a fear of deprivation, the philosophy holds, one's hunger and taste cues - rather than cognitive rules - provide the most trustworthy guide toward balanced, healthy eating.

Some claim (this is Corinna Tomrley's critique of Susie Orbach) that this kind of eating will make you thin. But Kate Harding of Shapely Prose tells Katz that when she quit dieting,

I thought, ‘O.K., maybe I could be a size 10, and it won't be so bad.' As it turned out, I ended up as roughly an 18, which was exactly where I started.

Really quitting dieting may mean not just letting that Weight Watchers subscription lapse, but also giving up thinness as a goal. It's still incredibly difficult, because people like Willett (and every women's magazine ever) continue to insist that it must be everyone's goal. But psychologist and eating disorder specialist Deb Burgard says, "the pursuit of thinness as a dream is a place holder. It gets in the way of asking, ‘What is it I am dreaming of?' "

This may be true not just for individual dieters, but for our diet-obsessed society in general. Also in the Times, Roger Cohen writes about the recent study that shows that calorie-restricted monkeys live longer. The child of a primate expert, he examines a now-famous photo of two monkeys, Owen and Canto — and thinks Owen, the well-fed one, is probably happier. He writes,

It's the difference between the guy who got the marbleized rib-eye and the guy who got the oh-so-lean filet. Or between the guy who got a Château Grand Pontet St. Emilion with his brie and the guy who got water. As Edgar notes in King Lear, "Ripeness is all." You don't get to ripeness by eating apple peel for breakfast.

"When life extension supplants life quality as a goal," he continues, "you get the desolation of Canto the monkey." Long life and even health have become goals in themselves, and we seemed forgotten that a long healthy life is for something — enjoyment. When we take health, longevity, or thinness for that matter, as ends rather than means, we get our priorities screwed up. We think it's acceptable to tell people to starve themselves so that they can fit Willett's definition of what's healthy — or Vogue's definition of what's attractive. We'd be better off remembering that health is about being able to do things with your life — including eat — and that thinness is about, well what is in thinness about exactly? If you look at a women's magazine, it's about health, yes, but also attractiveness, happiness, and personal empowerment — all of which can be achieved at any size.

Tossing Out The Diet And Embracing The Fat [NYT]
To Eat Well, Be Instinctive [NYT]
The Meaning Of Life [NYT]

The commercial was produced by the Sydney advertising agency The Foundry for a challenge on a show about advertising called The Gruen Transfer. On the program, two advertising agencies pitch an ad to (as a tipster describes it) "sell the unsellable."

For the show, scheduled to air last night, two agencies were asked to come up with a campaign for the idea of Fat Pride, to as Gruen's producers explain, "end shape discrimination and make overweight Australians feel less humiliated by the constant public disapproval of anyone who isn't a size 10 or under." The ABC network decided the commercial was too offensive to air on television, but the producers were allowed to post it online, along with a panel discussion with its creator about the thinking behind the ad.

The black and white ad features people telling the extremely offensive jokes:

"How do black women fight crime? They have abortions."
"How do you stop a poofter from drowning? You take your foot off his head."
"What's the difference between Santa Claus and a Jew? Santa Claus goes down the chimney."

Then after the final joke, "Why did God create alcohol? So fat chicks could get a root," the line "Discrimination comes in all shapes and sizes," flashes on the screen.

The 15 minute debate about the ad makes it clear that creator Adam Hunt's intentions were good, and gives some interesting insight into what advertisers consider when making public service announcements (it's hard to imagine the debate airing on U.S. television, as the panelists all remain respectful and let each other talk).

Hunt explained that the idea he was trying to get across was, "if you discriminate against somebody on the basis of their shape then you are no different to someone who is racist, homophobic or anti-Semitic." He said he came up with the idea when his friend told him a "fat chick joke" after he received the assignment from the show. "I literally choked on that laugh, beer went everywhere and I had an epiphany about shape discrimination starting with laughing at a fat chick joke."

The agencies usually produce funny ads for the show, and The Foundry's competitor, JWT Melbourne, made an ad that celebrated fat people as voracious consumers who could save the economy, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Hunt said, "Any idea that made you laugh at people was actually going to celebrate shape discrimination, not end it."

Todd Samson, a regular panelist on the show, explained that the ad failed because viewers were so shocked by the first racist joke that they missed the point of the ad. Samson added, "I dont think you need to offend one group to help another."

The Foundry's Anti-Discrimination Ad
Discrimination: Gruen Ad Ban Sparks Online Debate [The Sydney Morning Herald]

Harding tells Schoenberg:

"Maybe what I'm most angry about is the assumption that we're ignorant," Harding says of fat people (her term). "All these people are saying, you just need to do X, Y and Z. As if we've never thought of X, Y and Z! As if we haven't all tried restricting calories and exercising our brains out.

"A lot of us have lost weight — and gained it back. Everyone thinks that there's a simple solution we've somehow managed to be unaware of. Or we're not aware that fruits and vegetables are better for you than fast food. A lot of these things assume that you're downright stupid or living on another planet."

I have a feeling that some of the lovely women I stood in line with to try out for More to Love feel her on that one.

Harding has an entire manifesto for the people who just can't stop themselves from reminding her that she's going to get sick and die if she doesn't get back down to the more socially-acceptable size 4 she once managed to squeeze into. Go read the entire thing yourself the next time you feel that familiar urge rising in your throat to tell someone who isn't perfectly thin that they'll die — as though skinniness is some fountain of youth that will stave off death itself— but it goes more or less like this.

7. Human beings deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. Fat people are human beings.

8. Even fat people who are unhealthy still deserve dignity and respect. Still human beings. See how that works?

9. In any case, shaming teh fatties for being "unhealthy" doesn't fucking help. If shame made people thin, there wouldn't be a fat person in this country, trust me. I wish I could remember who said this, 'cause it's one of my favorite quotes of all time: "You cannot hate people for their own good."

And for all that, Harding doesn't point fingers in the way that I am about to: people who feel it necessary to mock, shame or embarrass people who don't conform to a socially acceptable body type are simply acting out their own insecurities and self loathing. There are lots of ways to be beautiful and lots of ways to be healthy — and Harding is both, by all accounts — but none of them involve spending one's time mocking the bodies of others. That's just sort of always ugly, no matter what the package.

The Queen Of Fat Bloggers Takes No Prisoners [Chicago Tribune]
Behold The Queen of Fats [Shapely Prose]
Don't You Realize Fat Is Unhealthy? [Shapely Prose]

Related: Kate Harding [Salon]

Earlier: Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places: A Reality Show Audition

Casey Schwartz writes for The Daily Beast:

Studies suggest that changes in the state of the economy can influence what men find sexually attractive in women— and when the economy's bad, it's good to be fat. Or, at least, a tiny bit fatter.

Researchers polled students about the size of their ideal woman. Male subjects who were made to feel insecure about their finances reported a preference for women who were, on average, roughly two pounds heavier than their financially confident counterparts. Subjects on their way to lunch wanted a woman who was three pounds heavier than guys quizzed when they were full. Whether or not any of this actually translate into the real world, whether or not dudes are actually accepting of women with three pounds more on their frames is not the point. This story is designed, really, to make a woman carrying some extra weight feel a little better. Like her time has come. And in a world where we're bombarded with diet ads and skinny models, some soothing is welcome. (Schwartz writes: "Pass the enchiladas.")

But on the other hand, Mindy Laube penned a scathing piece for a blog associated with Aussie paper The Age, in which she writes, "The human body is meant to be lean and fit." She claims "the fat lobby" attempts to "re-rate our body shape standards to suit an unattractive mean."

The average Australian woman is 5'4" (163 centimetres) and a size 14. These dimensions may be typical but they do not make a woman normal, they make her FAT. […] A fat body is not a normal body. It's an aberration that we countenance to the detriment of our looks, health and self-esteem. Shifting the aesthetic goal posts to normalise a disproportionately high fat-to-muscle ratio on the basis of that figure type's ubiquity is equivalent to rewriting home building regulations to accommodate shoddy workmanship. Prevalence is no justification for acceptance.

Laube references the bestseller Why French Women Don't Get Fat and argues that the real reason French women are not chubby is because they don't let themselves get fat. "French women - and men - prize looks and style over gluttony and sloth," she says. Don't you love it when being fat is equated with being lazy?

While it's true that humans were not designed to eat fast food and sit at a desk all day, this is the reality we live in. Times have changed, so the human body has changed. And some of the most industrious, hard-working people are overweight. Our environment is not what it was in the 1950s, so why should our waistline be?

So which is it? Should overweight women be proud and happy of their size, especially in a recession? And since each generation keeps getting bigger and bigger, will we eventually have an "average" size that is 20 or 24? (Wall-E, anyone?) And is there anything wrong with that? Or is the average (overweight) woman doing herself — and the world — an injustice by keeping the pounds on?

Hot And Heavy [The Daily Beast]
The Pudgy Country [The Age]

Unless she's trained them otherwise, Harding says, people tend "to respond to any mention of my weight with 'You're not fat!'" But she says what they really mean is, "You're not a dozen nasty things I associate with the word fat." She lists the nasty things, and they include ugly, unhealthy, smelly, lazy, ignorant, undisciplined, unlovable, and just plain icky. Harding says "I want to be called fat because it's the simple truth" and points out that "the vast majority of people classified as obese are about as fat as I am, in the BMI 30-35 range." But her larger point is that being fat shouldn't actually associated with any of the nasty things she lists. It should be a neutral descriptor, like "tall" (not that this, or any visual descriptor, is actually entirely neutral), not a value judgment. "I am a kindhearted, intelligent, attractive, person, and I am fat," she says. "There is no paradox there."

But there's another side to the reflexive "You're not fat!" response. We're trained to say it, not just because we have negative cultural associations with fatness, but because saying, "I'm so fat" has become part of an ingrained cultural script. When someone complains that they're fat, they often mean that they feel unattractive or undisciplined or any number of the other qualities on Harding's list. And so we learn to contradict them, because we want them to know we don't think they are any of those bad things. If you grew up in America, no matter what your BMI, you're probably not used to people like Harding who speak of their own fatness in a value-neutral way.

Harding is awesome for teaching her friends that fat ≠ gross, but in order for the lesson to work, we all have to watch the way we talk about our bodies. Just as we shouldn't assume that a fat person is smelly or lonely, we shouldn't complain about our bellies or our thighs when what we really mean is that we're feeling down on ourselves. There's a world of difference between "I'm so fat!" and "I'm feeling bad about my body," and we'd all do well to learn it.

Does my butt look fat? [Salon]

Remember that eating disorders are inherently an existential struggle over the very notion of free will.
You can worsen them, and you can encourage them, but you cannot singlehandedly instill them in your kids, nor can you prevent them. The coolest thing about my mom is that she kind of got this. Her reaction to my adolescent 800-calorie-a-day diet was one of concern but also, exasperation; she had specifically taken such great care to rear me on healthy food and ABSOLUTELY NO MENTION OF MY WEIGHT; I was not even at all overweight, and now, as my big display of free will and rebellion I'd chosen anorexia? She made it clear she thought it was fundamentally shallow, and intellectually, I agreed, but by that point I had almost given up on free will when it came to eating; food issues were just my DESTINY, my curse and fate and blah blah blah. Anyway, that was probably mostly depression. I didn't medicate it, but eventually I suppose it subsided, and my intellect took the wheel again, which was lucky.

With that in mind, ask yourself, are you shallow?
What do you most want for your kid? Happiness and some sort of fulfillment, right? People of all sizes achieve that! The negative correlation between happiness and excess pounds, such that it exists, is totally all in your head, as the field of duh studies has recently confirmed. So if your kids think they're fat, you need to chew on this question: does that have anything to do with you? (Chewing on said question, btw, is a good way to stop yourself from nagging your poor kid!) Like I said, are you shallow? If so, is that the trait you'd most like to pass onto our progeny? (Please, for the good of the country, answer "No.") Conversely, are you so dogmatically un-shallow that they think you just don't have any idea what sort of world world they're living in? That was sort of my problem. In the end it was a good one to have. It was like, hey, the one genetic advantage I have here is that my parents are bright people with strong moral values who don't give a shit how fat I get, except inasmuch as they know I don't exactly have health insurance.

Be honest and remember it's not a big deal.
Acting like a kid's chubbing out is a grave issue that must be discussed in hushed tones is probably not the best idea, especially if they have the sort of grandfather (mine) who will go up to them and play the "Pinch an inch" game. While the Pinch an Inch game is annoying, I never really doubted that my grandfather loved me. I think he just thought kids today spent too much time watching the idiot box and not enough playing elaborate war games in the woods. And he had a point! I asked my friend Don, a former fat kid, whether his mom (a personal idol of mine) had ever said anything to him about his weight, and he recalled a time one summer at the age of 13 when he was eating a piece of pizza while wearing a swimsuit and somehow the topic of his blubber came up. Laughing, she agreed, "Yeah, you really have to do something about that." A few years later, when he stopped eating meat, she worried she'd scarred him; but seriously, Don was picked on his entire childhood for being a fat kid, and she basically played it perfectly, choosing to encourage his positive traits (such as he is fucking hilarious) and accept that he was never going to be as physically attractive as she is. (She is, to be fair here, really pretty.)

Don recommends this movie.
It is, he says, his "Exile in Guyville."

Earlier: Sometimes A Parent's Words Can Bear The Weight Of The World

Image via Skip To My Lou