FA 400 level
OK so y'all know I'm a Fat Acceptance advocate.
Usually when this comes up, and when I first encountered it, people can easily grasp the basic problem with both fad diets and our beauty standards. Pretty much everyone knows that the beauty standard is whacked and those fad diets don't really work, especially anything requiring monthly payments of "only $19.99!"
The harder thing to get is that all weight-loss diets fail. People can alter their food intake for medical reasons, or ethical ones, or general health ones, but 97% of people who go on a diet to lose weight fail in the long-term (meaning 2+ years). When people encounter this, it hurts a bit. I remember having some of the "don't take my hope away!" feeling when I first heard this. Because it does take away that hope of a magic bullet that will "fix" you, even as you know at the same time there is no way to fix anyone to make them completely 100% acceptable all the time, because society doesn't work that way. The next level from that step is how FA relates to feminism and humanism, that the reason fat women are so reviled is they are failing what's assumed to be the primary purpose of all women, to look sexy for all men, all the time. I have known for a while how wrong that is, and how deeply ingrained it is, but that knowledge doesn't help when I'm depressed because I'm terminally single and probably will never have sex again, etc. There's a difference between the personal and the political sometimes.
Anyway, after the "diets don't work" step, the sort of next level as I see it is the idea of not judging people when you see them, especially fat people. Trying to shed the value system that we use against all the people we see. Seeing a "headless fattie" type and reminding yourself you don't know this person, and you have no idea why they are that weight, and who are you really to judge them when you don't know them? This was actually a lot easier for me to grapple with than the "there is no magic cure, no fix" part, because it deals with other people rather than my own life. And it's fairly easy to extend. I think this is the FA step where people often start to understand the connection with Body Acceptance - that it's just as wrong to assume a fat person sits around eating baby flavored donuts as it is to assume a thin person must have an eating disorder. It all comes from the same place.
Melissa at Shakesville took that part to the 400 level today in a post
Because, the thing is, holding in judgment people who are fat by choice doesn't make a whole lot of sense, given our general tolerance for all sorts of things that people do which carry with them risks to their health (like being born, or giving birth, and things way more controversial). And people are going to be fat, or not fat, irrespective of your judgment about fat people. Letting go of fat hatred won't change anything-except, of course, to make the world a little bit better a place for its fat inhabitants.
It can be a hatred that's hard to let go of, even for fat people, because letting go of that hatred, and replacing it with acceptance, can feel akin to giving fat people permission to be fat.
But being in the position of feeling like permission is yours to give is a manifestation of privilege. And maybe it's all right to let that privilege go.
Emphasis mine.
And thus we see how FA is linked to anti-ableism, especially if you read the comments where people who defend treating fat as immoral or wrong rely on the idea that healthy, able-bodied people are the only ones who get rights. There's one particular troll in the comments who gets banned eventually who also manages to illustrate the "but don't you know fat is unhealthy?!?" mentality of those who cannot get their brains around this idea.
It's startling to think of someone being fat by choice. *I* don't even consider myself fat by choice. I'm fat because I can't change it - genetics and habit have dictated otherwise. If someone were to find that magic bullet - a real one, that works and doesn't involve risk of life or enormous amounts of money - I would totally take it. It may be weak but the chance to live without this stigma would probably not be one I could pass up. (It would depend heavily on any downsides to the magic bullet. If we're talking a pill or a shot, I'd be there. With bells on.)
So even if I've been immersed in FA for over 2 years now, I'm still not completely through the process. At this point I'm slightly stuck. As much as I try to accept my body and not diminish myself in any way, it's easier to not judge and to support other people. When it comes to myself, my lack of a romantic life or a sex life keeps ripping away at my self-esteem and keeping those wounds open. Which is a separate post entirely.
But Liss is right. When you think of the self-destructive or potentially harmful behaviors we don't blink about, choosing not to diet, even choosing to actively eat and be sedentary and be fat on purpose is hardly any worse than the others. And if it's not anyone else's business what my body looks like, then it's always not anyone's business, and you can't inject a good/bad binary onto people to assign shame or not.
Usually when this comes up, and when I first encountered it, people can easily grasp the basic problem with both fad diets and our beauty standards. Pretty much everyone knows that the beauty standard is whacked and those fad diets don't really work, especially anything requiring monthly payments of "only $19.99!"
The harder thing to get is that all weight-loss diets fail. People can alter their food intake for medical reasons, or ethical ones, or general health ones, but 97% of people who go on a diet to lose weight fail in the long-term (meaning 2+ years). When people encounter this, it hurts a bit. I remember having some of the "don't take my hope away!" feeling when I first heard this. Because it does take away that hope of a magic bullet that will "fix" you, even as you know at the same time there is no way to fix anyone to make them completely 100% acceptable all the time, because society doesn't work that way. The next level from that step is how FA relates to feminism and humanism, that the reason fat women are so reviled is they are failing what's assumed to be the primary purpose of all women, to look sexy for all men, all the time. I have known for a while how wrong that is, and how deeply ingrained it is, but that knowledge doesn't help when I'm depressed because I'm terminally single and probably will never have sex again, etc. There's a difference between the personal and the political sometimes.
Anyway, after the "diets don't work" step, the sort of next level as I see it is the idea of not judging people when you see them, especially fat people. Trying to shed the value system that we use against all the people we see. Seeing a "headless fattie" type and reminding yourself you don't know this person, and you have no idea why they are that weight, and who are you really to judge them when you don't know them? This was actually a lot easier for me to grapple with than the "there is no magic cure, no fix" part, because it deals with other people rather than my own life. And it's fairly easy to extend. I think this is the FA step where people often start to understand the connection with Body Acceptance - that it's just as wrong to assume a fat person sits around eating baby flavored donuts as it is to assume a thin person must have an eating disorder. It all comes from the same place.
Melissa at Shakesville took that part to the 400 level today in a post
Because, the thing is, holding in judgment people who are fat by choice doesn't make a whole lot of sense, given our general tolerance for all sorts of things that people do which carry with them risks to their health (like being born, or giving birth, and things way more controversial). And people are going to be fat, or not fat, irrespective of your judgment about fat people. Letting go of fat hatred won't change anything-except, of course, to make the world a little bit better a place for its fat inhabitants.
It can be a hatred that's hard to let go of, even for fat people, because letting go of that hatred, and replacing it with acceptance, can feel akin to giving fat people permission to be fat.
But being in the position of feeling like permission is yours to give is a manifestation of privilege. And maybe it's all right to let that privilege go.
Emphasis mine.
And thus we see how FA is linked to anti-ableism, especially if you read the comments where people who defend treating fat as immoral or wrong rely on the idea that healthy, able-bodied people are the only ones who get rights. There's one particular troll in the comments who gets banned eventually who also manages to illustrate the "but don't you know fat is unhealthy?!?" mentality of those who cannot get their brains around this idea.
It's startling to think of someone being fat by choice. *I* don't even consider myself fat by choice. I'm fat because I can't change it - genetics and habit have dictated otherwise. If someone were to find that magic bullet - a real one, that works and doesn't involve risk of life or enormous amounts of money - I would totally take it. It may be weak but the chance to live without this stigma would probably not be one I could pass up. (It would depend heavily on any downsides to the magic bullet. If we're talking a pill or a shot, I'd be there. With bells on.)
So even if I've been immersed in FA for over 2 years now, I'm still not completely through the process. At this point I'm slightly stuck. As much as I try to accept my body and not diminish myself in any way, it's easier to not judge and to support other people. When it comes to myself, my lack of a romantic life or a sex life keeps ripping away at my self-esteem and keeping those wounds open. Which is a separate post entirely.
But Liss is right. When you think of the self-destructive or potentially harmful behaviors we don't blink about, choosing not to diet, even choosing to actively eat and be sedentary and be fat on purpose is hardly any worse than the others. And if it's not anyone else's business what my body looks like, then it's always not anyone's business, and you can't inject a good/bad binary onto people to assign shame or not.