OPEN FORUM FOR DISCUSSION
stupidityinmyhead wrote in saying the following:
”Women do not need to be SKINNY. But we DO need to be healthy. Articles, media etc. encouraging unhealthy people to stay overweight and unhealthy in order to “be comfortable with themselves” annoy me just as much as the media encouraging weight loss.
Eating healthy does NOT equal a diet where you have to starve yourselves and live on carrots and lettuce and work out for 8 hours a day. It means staying active, resting and eating what you want without completely living on McDonald’s.
Why is it that people only see the two extremes (skinny, ED’s vs fat, unhealthy etc.) and not the middle position of this argument? “I personally will not comment on this one. The only reason being because I want to make this an open forum for you to voice your own opinion on what was said. If I say more I’ll muddle the begining opinion. Ready… GO!
This. This. This. Fuck “thinspiration”, fuck “fat pride” it’s all about being healthy relative to your body type.
I say this as a person who has a hard time finding pants because places don’t make clothing for women who have derby thighs. I say this as someone who’s overweight but watches what they eat and exercises regularly.
Everyday I strive to be HEALTHY above all. Some days I succeed, some days I make bad choices.
OP hits the nail on the head.
~thinspiration~ and fat pride are two totally different ballparks, though. The fat positivity movement is a response to society’s treatment of the obese (who are obese for a variety of different reasons that can’t all be treated through diet and exercise) as subhuman.
There’s also a pretty prevalent phenomenon of folks policing and criticizing fat bodies with the pretense of concern (i.e. “concern trolling”), when really a stranger’s health habits are absolutely nobody’s business but the person whose body is in question. Seriously, all this “everyone needs to be healthy” bullshit is invasive and, according to a lot of fat activists I’ve read, pretty detrimental. Nobody needs to be healthy if they don’t choose to be.
I think the recent events about the topshop model being accuesed of anorexia show that “concern trolling” can work both ways.
Fat activists who don’t work towards the goal of overall health at every size from both a personal and medical-treatment standpoint don’t make sense to me in the least bit. I don’t want to advocate people starving themselves or eating themselves to death. Or, if they’re overweight or underweight for medical reasons, not seeking treatment simply because they’re “accepting themselves for who they are”. But, since people have free will, they can choose to do so. However, I’m not going to stay silent to avoid hurting someone’s feelings if discourse is underway. That’s not saying that I would go up to a stranger, assume I knew anything about their life, and make a value judgement. It’s not my place to do so.
We may just disagree on this issue. That’s fine.
I agree 100%. Being healthy is not what Fat Acceptance is about. Once I read several FA blogs I saw how they believe that being healthy is not anyone’s business but that of the individual, as if they lived in a desert island. Never mind the well documented costs, they want to be “as fat as I want to be”.
This post was reblogged from We go, we go, we go, BAM!.
