Acceptance

This is the question posed in the Nightline debate linked to in withoutscene's posting below. The way I see it, when we ask "is it okay to be fat?", we're really asking a bunch of other questions:

• Is a person allowed to have and maintain a body that is larger than average?
• Is being fat a health problem?
• Is a person with a health problem allowed to choose to not treat that problem?
• Is fat caused by lifestyle choices?
• Is a person in a group health plan allowed to make choices that might cause them to need more health care in the future?

When you break it down to what we're really talking about, I don't see how any rational person could conclude that it is not okay to be fat. What are your thoughts?

This humble article on The Adipositivity Project over at Sociological Images has spurred a hell of a good discussion on fatness. There are a few folks beating the fat=unhealthy drum, but there are so many other thoughtful comments it's totally worth it. Check it out!

This article just broke my heart. Samantha Clowe didn't want to be the dreaded "fat bride", so she dutifully got permission from her doctor and started following the LighterLife diet plan. It certainly seemed to work...in her eleven weeks on the diet Samantha decreased her BMI by two whole points. Then she collapsed and died.

My heart goes out to Samantha and her family. I can only imagine the thoughts that might have driven her to choose the plan, like longing to fit her body into society's favored mold, the idea that whoever she was now wasn't good enough to stand up in front of her friends and family and get married. Maybe, like many dieters, she believed that this fat thing was only temporary and if she could just find the right plan and just try hard enough, she could finally be "normal" and, therefore, "happy".

I will confess, I have had these thoughts too. Some not even all that long ago. You know why Samantha and I and millions of other people have felt this way? Because somewhere along the way as we were growing up, enough people told us that our bodies were wrong that we started to believe it. Some of us believed it so much that we tried whatever we could to make our bodies behave and were thwarted when they fought back and grew even bigger, further outside of the realm of okay. Eventually, some of us were so freaked out by being fat that we gladly paid someone to cut into our bodies and mess with the way our digestive systems worked, all so we could finally be..."normal". The thing is, there are a million different kinds of bodies out there. "Normal" doesn't really exist.

The thing that really incenses me about this article is that the LighterLife people are blaming Samantha's death on the fact that she started out all deathfat so she was probably just a ticking timebomb anyway. So it seems we are doomed to death even if we go along and do as we're told to conform. What a load of crap.

Samantha was only 11 weeks into the program but on the LighterLife website they say women should do it for 14 weeks or even more if they want to lose more weight at the end of that time. This is at least the third death linked to LighterLife. I wonder how many more people have to die while following their program before someone finally shuts them down.

Update: As suggested by MichMurphy, I've started a photo gallery for fat brides on flickr. Feel free to join, post any and all fat bride photos and pass on the link to all of your fat bride friends! Here come the Fat Brides!

By now I think most of you have probably heard about the NWA flight attendants who are demanding that they be allowed to wear the same "sexy" red dress as their thinner counter-parts.

And I'll give you one guess as to who thinks it's an outrage and that fat women shouldn't be allowed to be flight attendants anyway?

That's right, via Jezebel, obesity's arch-enemy, MeMe Roth, is on the warpath again. This time she's on Fox News. But there's a twist: The anchor, Stuart Varney, publicly shames her for her indulgent hatred!!

We have seen MeMe Roth and her special brand of crazy before, but this time she's got a crazy look and crazier antics than I remember. She acts like a two-year-old desperate for attention, holding up a pair of size 24 pants, laughing uncomfortably...and this guy tells just keeps on her and tells her, "That, madam, is a disgrace."

Who could've predicted that the taming of MeMe would have happened on Fox News?

(Go to Jezebel for the video. Can't imbed it at this time.)

Postscript: Granted, he goes way overboard and is out of line to say fat discrimination is "one of the most hurtful forms of discrimination," as if other forms of discrimination are somehow less hurtful. I'm pretty sure all forms of discrimination suck pretty badly. Oppression Olympics are unnecessary, sir.