Fat-o-sphere classics: Just the fat facts, ma’am

The weekend ended up kicking my butt, and no playing-with-eyeshadow was achieved.  Still, I baked scones, so it wasn’t a complete write-off, depending on how the scones turned out.

Anyhow, I’m taking the night off.  So have some comfort reading instead (if, like me, you take comfort in reading things that fill you with righteous anger.)

Courtesy of Body Love Wellness, another great debunking of some annoyingly common lies about fatness.

But all of this goes against the conventional wisdom that fat is bad and deadly! Your “conventional wisdom” has been paid for by the diet industry and pharmaceutical companies for decades and decades. It’s time to get over it and start thinking critically.

Kinda-fat-o-sphere classics: You NEEDNT have

So, a new magical lists of The Bad Foods Which Will Make You Fat has come out in NZ, and bad news!  Fruit juice, honey and milk are now no-nos. Google it if you want to, I’m not llinking to that panic-mongering crud.

The foods are called the “NEEDNT” foods, in possibly the silliest, smuggest use of acronym-generation since the PATRIOT Act.

Fortunately, the listmakers also gave us suggested substitutions, which are heavy on the “artificial sweetener” front – funny, I thought artificial sweetener was also going to make us fat/give us cancer etc.

I’m going to let my own personal goddess Sarah Haskins take it from here.

Fat-o-sphere classic: the Hierarchy of Food Needs

Some more holiday reading for you!  Normal broadcasting shall resume … possibly shortly.

It’s a food pyramid, Jim, but not as we know it:

The idea is that, before we worry about nutrition (i.e., “instrumental food”) we’ve first got to HAVE food. Enough of it. Consistently. And it’s got to be acceptable to us (which, for some people, might mean not coming from the garbage, or meeting certain standards of preparation) and it’s got to taste reasonably good. A little variety is nice, too.

These are not silly little preferences that can be brushed off lightly — even “tasting good,” which seems to always be the first thing thrown out the window when someone decides to change their diet For Health Reasons.

Read the rest at The Fat Nutritionist.

Fat-o-sphere classics: NY Times’ “Bodies of Work”

My personal touchstone for fat acceptance is the weekly reminder I have of the wonderful variety in shape and form of the human body – while watching professional wrestling.

As far as I’m concerned, any species that can produce the Undertaker and Rey Mysterio and Zack Ryder, or Beth Phoenix and Melina and Kharma/Awesome Kong is a species that can quite happily naturally produce my fat ass.

But of course there’s some terrible anti-pro-wrestling stigma out there (specifically of the “but it’s all faaaaaaaake!” variety) so I’ve also always delighted in this rundown of several professional athletes, all at the top of their game, all presumably “eating well” and “exercising regularly” like we’re supposed to because hey, active professional athletes.

But wouldn’t you know it?  They come in all shapes and sizes too.  And shockingly, the “fat” powerlifter eats about as much as the marathon runner … and one would bet neither are particularly obsessed about “getting their best beach body” for summer.

Fat-o-sphere classics: The Fantasy of Being Thin

I mentioned this on my New Year’s post … and then figured out I hadn’t linked to it yet!  D’oh.

Anyway, today’s blast from the past is from Kate Harding, formerly of Shapely Prose, and pretty much illustrates how difficult it can be to defeat long-entrenched fat-hating bullshit.

We’ve talked a lot here about how being fat shouldn’t stop you from doing the things you’ve always believed you couldn’t do until you were thin. Put on a bathing suit and go waterskiing. Apply for that awesome job you’re just barely qualified for. Ask that hot guy out. Join a gym. Wear a gorgeous dress. All of those concrete things you’ve been putting off? Just fucking do them, now, because this IS your life, happening as we speak.

But exhortations like that don’t take into account magical thinking about thinness, which I suspect — and the quote above suggests — is really quite common. Because, you see, the Fantasy of Being Thin is not just about becoming small enough to be perceived as more acceptable. It is about becoming an entirely different person – one with far more courage, confidence, and luck than the fat you has. It’s not just, “When I’m thin, I’ll look good in a bathing suit”; it’s “When I’m thin, I will be the kind of person who struts down the beach in a bikini, making men weep.”

…
In light of that, it’s a lot easier to understand why some people freak out when you say no, really, your chances of losing weight permanently are virtually nil, so you’d be better off focusing on feeling good and enjoying your life as a fat person. To someone fully wrapped up in The Fantasy of Being Thin, that doesn’t just mean, “All the best evidence suggests you will be fat for the rest of your life, but that’s really not a terrible thing.” It means, “You will NEVER be the person you want to be! All the evidence suggests you will never find a satisfying relationship or get a promotion or make more friends or feel confident trying new things!”

Kate goes on to talk about how basically, we just have to accept at some point that this is our life.  I’m never going to be a quantum physicist or a chess grandmaster, I don’t have the temperament or nocturnal habits to be a sassy tattooed bartender, I seriously could not handle working in retail again even if it were my fantasy combined plus-sized clothing/feminist literature store. And no amount of starving myself and damaging my health to somehow transform myself into a “good” person would make those things happen.

On the “childhood dreams” front I guess I could one day be Prime Minister, but that would take … a pretty bizarre set of circumstances.

Fat-o-sphere classics: How we’ve come to believe that overeating causes obesity

Junkfood Science is an amazing blog, peeps.  And this post, which goes into the Minnesota starvation study of the 1940s and which you may not have heard about because it’s a little inconvenient for the weight loss industry, is an amazing post.

The 40 young male participants were carefully selected among hundreds of volunteers for being especially psychologically and socially well-adjusted, good-humored, motivated, well-educated, active and healthy. They were put on calorie-restrictive diets of about 1,600 calorie/day, meant to reflect that experienced in war-torn regions, for 3 months. They dieted to lose 2.5 pounds a week to lose 25% of their natural body weight. The calories were more generous than many weight loss diets prescribe today!

I hate to spoil the ending for anyone, but it follows the old tune: diets don’t work, people seem to have a natural genetic setpoint for weight, and that whole overeating => obesity equation is bollocks.

Fat-o-sphere classics: BMI Project

After seeing one too many OBESITY EPIDEMIC OMG articles focused on that most wonderfully pseudoscientific measurements of “health”, the Body Mass Index, the awesome Kate Harding, in her former haunt at Shapely Prose, created the BMI Project to illustrate (a) how ridiculous the whole BMI concept is and (b) how little you can tell, even about a person’s BMI (which is meant to be the holy of holy measures of Disgusting Fatness, right?), from looking at them.

I highly recommend the full Flickr photoset, for both blowing your mind on the topic of BMI and injecting some much-needed images of the diversity and hotness of all different kinds of human forms into my life.

Big props go to those who have submitted their photos and vital statistics, and many, many thanks to Ms Harding for leaving SP as a fantastic repository of fat acceptance work.

(My own BMI is quite solidly in the “obese” category.  Guess how many fucks I do not give?)

Fat-o-sphere classics: Joy Nash

If your lives have not been blessed with Joy Nash’s fat rants … get blessed!

I’ve long practised in my head the perfect, nonchalant “Nope, just fat” response to that classic put-down of sitcom cliche, “Are you pregnant?”  But happily I seem to walk through life just looking too damn confident (scary?) for anyone to try it (though I do get asked for directions a lot, which may stem from the same thing …)

Fat-o-sphere classics: Fat Nutritionist twofer

If ten words ever really changed my life, they were these:

Eat food.  Stuff you like.  As much as you want.

And they were uttered by the fabulous Michelle, aka The Fat Nutritionist.

So for today’s fat-o-sphere classic I’m linking to two of her classic posts:

The rules of nutrition

Now then.

Are there ways to eat which will (potentially) optimize your functioning while minimizing (your immediate and long-term risks of) certain diseases?

Probably.

Are there ways to eat which will (possibly) undermine your functioning while increasing (your risk of) disease?

Probably.

And why do I say probably instead of striking out with a sexy, definitive Yes?

Because, while these are likely results, they are not inevitabilities. They are not laws. This is not a² + b² = c².

It’s more like a² + b² = c ^{probably, maybe, if x, y, and z are also present}.

Because — let’s go back to being obvious again — people are different.

And the aforementioned Eat food.  Stuff you like.  As much as you want.

It should come as no surprise to anyone reading here that our culture views food as a moral issue. A potentially dangerous moral issue. And, setting aside the very-interesting-but-not-to-be-had-right-now discussion of ethical and religious foodways, food just…isn’t.

Food isn’t moral. It’s not immoral, either. It’s morally neutral.

But, sadly, we live in a time and a place where it seems Twinkies = Eternal Damnation. (Notice, here, how the supposed moral value of food pretty snugly overlaps its supposed nutritional value. This is not a coincidence.) And we tend to take the most pessimistic view of human nature.

So, when I say “Adult human beings are allowed to eat whatever, and however much they want,” what people actually hear is: “GO OUT AND CRAM YOUR FACE WITH BAD, BAD TWINKIES!!!!!!”

On the one hand I feel a bit trag just leaving other people’s words sitting there with no comment from myself; on the other, I just don’t see why you should be wasting any more time reading my mere mortal praise when you could be squee-gee-ing your third eye open at Michelle’s.

Fat-o-sphere classics: But Don’t You Realise Fat is Unhealthy?

While this blog is basically a forum for me to post hot pix of myself and offer entirely unqualified opinions on fashion and stereotypical feminine frivolities, it should become pretty obvious to any readers that there’s something odd going on here.

The odd thing is fat acceptance.  Symptoms include not apologising for the sweet ass and bangin’ figure bestowed to me by Nature, refusing to accept at face value statements like “but you’re obviously unhealthy!” or “no one should ever eat at KFC.  EVER”, and generally adopting a questioning attitude towards the constant stream of body-judging crap flowing through the media.

It is, you may be able to tell, a subject on which I have a lot to say.

But rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ve decided to take the route simultaneously easier and more acknowledging of my intellectual foresisters in the area.  That is, I’m going to link to good posts you should read instead of nicking their ideas and presenting them as my own.

The Shapely Prose FAQ has long been a favourite of mine, as a nice neat collection of links to smackdowns of the usual fathating bingo-playing trolls.

Q. I’m still confused — you want me to believe hating fat people is a bad thing?
A. Only if you’re a decent human being. If you’re not, no worries.

It also nicely covers the basics, so I don’t have to; and as such is according the high honour of Inaugural Fat-o-sphere Classic here at A Large Pink Woman.