AN E-DISCUSSION WITH ANGEL
Angel,
I'm so glad you took the time to write. You have been my muse this week (or, at least, your question has been my muse) as I sort through some important stuff. I am grateful for a chance to dialogue with you about it directly. I'm going to write below in response to your text in [a different colour] to distinguish between your text and mine.
BTW, with your permission, I'd like to reprint this e-mail in my blog. I think it is an important exchange and if you are kewl with me doing that, I think it would be a good thing to share it with others. If you'd rather not, I will respect that. Please just let me know one way or another. Thanks
Hi, I just seem to be following you all over the 'Net, don't I? I can't post on your blog, I'm not sure why, so I decided to write an e-mail, instead.
Sorry about that -- I'm coming to the conclusion that [my comments program] is not the best comments program. It is often down.
I understand where you're coming from when you say, "If you change the words "red hair" to "dark skin" and if that dark skin were something she was trying to lighten, then the sentence would take on a whole new meaning. It is in that meaning you can find my sadness." I have to say, I am black (mixed really, but whatever, right?), and although I've never tried to whiten my skin (I love love love my complexion), I have straightened my hair. Again, not because I think that it's ugly, because I don't. Because I also like having straight hair. It's a big change from curly curly curly to stick-straight, and sometimes it amuses me to have straight hair for a week. That's it. No self-hatred. Just one more adjustment to the way I look.
I understand the desire to experiment and be creative with way we look. I have dyed my hair every colour imaginable and I get it curled regularly (I have naturally straight, thick, coarse hair). The question I am addressing is to what extent does changing hair, skin, facial and body characteristics represent a form of passing. Most of these activities do not. I don't believe that your weight loss attempts or your straightening of your hair are attempts on your part to pass for something you are not. I believe you when you say that your intentions are about beauty and health. However, even if you were motivated by the desire to "pass" I would not blame you. Passing says more about the power relations between white and black or between thin and fat or between heterosexuals and homosexuals than it does about any one person. My point is that I believe that trying to change one's body through losing weight is more akin to trying to change one's skin colour or facial shape than it is simply a fashion statement about hair. I'm posing the question, "what if we are doing something that is against our nature (or genetics or physiology)?" Dieting makes this difficult because there is some evidence that the act of dieting actually contributes to weight gain in that many people gain back more than they lose after a diet. So am I as big as I am now because I was "meant" to be that way or am I as big as I am now because 14 years ago I took diet pills and screwed up my body in some way? I will never know. Actually, I should qualify that, I will never know unless the current line of research about fatness changes. No one studies fat bodies. They study the "disease of obesity" and that slants the findings immediately.
Another part to that argument is skin lightening is dangerous. Period, the end. Those chemicals suck. There is *no way* to lighten your skin without damaging something. I mean, really, what you're doing is reaching into your skin cells and changing the pigmentation in each and every one of them. That takes some heavy-duty chemicals. Losing weight is not *necessarily* unhealthy.
It is not necessarily healthy either. No one knows right now. In a 1992 report by the national institutes of health on weight loss and weight loss methods, the following statement was made:
"Although there seems to be little doubt that overweight individuals have increased risk for morbidity and mortality, it does not immediately follow that weight loss reduces that increased risk." (SEE http://consensus.nih.gov/ta/010/010_statement.htm - 3_What_Ar)
You see it might be true that there is a correlation between fatness and certain diseases. This connection may or may not be causal. But even if you can demonstrate that the cause exists, very little has been done to demonstrate that the weight loss fixes the problem. The assumption is often made in these studies that if fatness is associated with the disease, then weight loss will reduce the risk. That assumption is rarely tested. I've attached an e-mail I received earlier today regarding the correlation of height with prostate cancer. Nowhere in this article does it suggest that height reduction will reduce the risk of prostate cancer. The fact that such a suggestion about height would be ridiculous and a similar suggestion about weight would be acceptable, and maybe even mandatory, is a social fact, not a medical or biological one. As Paul said on Big Fat Blog, this is a grey area. I merely point out that the statement "weight loss can improve health" is just as grey and has just as many problems as "weight loss never improves health." The current cultural context of research stands in the way of knowing.
Dieting, starvation, vomiting, yes. But that's not the only way to do it.
But many "good" diets end up in weight gain and loss of health as well. Let me pose a question: if a person eats healthfully and exercises regularly and doesn't lose weight, have they failed? If the purpose of the behaviour change was to improve health, then I would suggest that the person would not feel like a failure. If the purpose of the behaviour change was to lose weight, then I would suggest that in spite of their improved health, the person will feel like a failure and will redouble efforts to produce weight loss. It is at that point that many people turn to the unhealthy behaviours. So my thought is why make weight loss part of the equation at all. If eating healthfully and exercising regularly lead to weight loss, it will do so whether that is the specific goal or not. This is why I have my doubts about any effort to lose weight. However, I came to this point in my own life after many, many attempts (both "good" and "bad") to lose weight. Each attempt was sincere and not motivated by hatred of fat people at all. After years of trying, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that because of the culture we live in, each and every effort I made was informed by fat hatred. I hope you can understand the difference. This is the sociologist in me coming out. There is the micro-level decision and the macro level context. On the micro-level, the decision to lose weight can be made for a multitude of reasons and certainly these reasons are personal and should not be judged by others. But the macro-level is a different story. On the macro-level we are bombarded constantly with the message that we should be thinner. On the macro-level we are told by "experts" that our health is in danger if we are fat. On the macro-level we are encouraged to hate ourselves and morally judge ourselves and others if we are fat or are not attempting to get thinner. Thus, fat hatred exists and is evoked when the decision to lose weight occurs no matter what the intention of the dieter. It isn't about our intentions; it is about how the action is read by the greater society. We don't have a lot of control over that message other than to challenge it outright.
One last point: I don't think this matters one way or another, to be honest, (except maybe to cause fat acceptance people to discount me--I hope you won't), but for the sake of my argument I'll say it--I'm not fat. I'm not skinny, but I'm not fat either. I have a slim bone structure, and I've never been fat in my life, so being thin isn't going against my body type. I look at my friend Sarah, and she is a little ball: she's short and round, and even if she did lose weight (which she has no intention of doing), she would still be short with the same kind of body. Trying to be slim for her is going against her body type. It's not the same for me.
First, let me say that I believe that size or fat acceptance is good for all women and I believe in it, in part, because I think the pressures women face (and increasingly men) to be something they are not in order to be acceptable in our culture is detrimental to the person. As Jennifer mentioned on big fat blog, women who spend inordinate amounts of time trying to change their bodies are women who are too preoccupied to do the really great stuff that women do. So not only do I not wish to discount you, I welcome the discussion with you. Visual discrimination and oppression hurts everyone and I am happy when I see someone think about these issues no matter what their size.
I agree re: body types and trying to be slim. I think that this is why the illusion of control over weight exists. I find it interesting that many people report their weight with a single number. I don't know about you, but I actually weigh a range of weights depending upon the time of day and my activity level of late and so forth. That range is about 15 pounds. It was a smaller range when I was thinner, but the range has always existed. Modest weight gains and losses are probably natural fluctuations that can be influenced by behaviour. It is the attempt to lose large amounts of weight that lead to particular problems. However, the rhetoric around weight loss is that if you can lose 20 pounds, you can lose 50 or 100 pounds in the exact same way. My experience with my body and the experiences I’ve heard from other women who have attempted to lose weight is that the first few pounds are fairly easy to manipulate, but we hit a wall of sorts when we attempt more than 20 or 30 pounds. I am guessing that the range is different for men and women. I am also guessing that smaller women who have smaller weight loss goals will experience weight loss differently than women who attempt to lose large amounts of weight. This accounts for some of the feelings that bigger people are not trying hard enough. Btw, it is even possible to change our height and other physical features in small amounts without damaging ourselves. (I honestly don't know about skin lightening.) So this weight fluctuation and small changes theory of mine makes some sense, I think. (No one has studied this or, at least, I haven't found a study that differentiates between small weight losses and large weight losses.)
I hear you saying "I understand that *your* losing weight may not be fat hatred", but I also hear you saying, "But I think it probably is."
What I am trying to say is that every effort to lose weight cannot help but be connected to the general fat hatred in North American culture. This is not a moral judgement of any one person, but an observation of the culture. It is about power and who gets to interpret behaviour and the meaning of behaviour. Going on a diet contributes to the general consensus that dieting is good for everyone and that is why I am sad when others talk about losing weight. I know that somewhere, someone is going to use the behaviour to continue fat hatred. I really mean it when I say that no one particular weight loss effort is the problem. The problem is the general discourse around weight loss.
Comparing it to race really only makes me feel more strongly about my point. I've been told I'm trying to "be white" "look white", that I'm an "Oreo" lots of times in my life, and it's not true. I can straighten my hair and not want to be white. I can speak proper English without wanting to be white. I can lose weight without disdaining those who can't, won't, don't want to.
I have lived in predominately African American neighbourhoods a good part of my adult life in New Orleans, Tampa and Gainesville, Florida. They were usually working class neighbourhoods. I felt comfortable in most of those places. However, I was keenly aware of the fact that while I had black friends, acquaintances and neighbours, we could never fully escape the background of white and black power relations. Sure, we forgot about race relations in given moments and we shared feelings and experiences as people rather than as races, but invariably something came along to remind us that there were differences in our experiences. Sometimes we cried together and other times we felt very uncomfortable. I do believe that you can lose weight without disdaining those who can't, won't, don't want to. I just believe that your weight loss will carry some cultural baggage with it no matter what you intend. As I said in my blog entry this morning, the words to talk about this don't really exist. When you try to say "I want to lose fat, but I don't really hate fat" and when I try to say "when you try to lose fat it evokes fat hatred" we are both limited by the culturally informed word "fat" and "weight loss." In our culture, fat is something you want to lose, would lose if you could and happy to lose if you do. (I mean the generic "you" not the angel "you".) In the fat acceptance culture, we are limited by this language. So when we say "fat-hatred," do we mean personal hatred, cultural hatred? Are we making value judgements? Are we making social analysis? Fat is such a personal and moral question in our society that talking about it carries with it those overtones. When is said "weight loss = fat hatred, IMHO and I don't see any way around it." I was thinking about it in cultural terms. I did not think about it in personal terms and I ended up offending some people like you that I did not intend to offend. But how can I say that weight loss is about fat loss and fat loss in our culture evokes fat hatred? Can I say so without conveying a moral overtone? I'm stuck with either being quiet or offending people I didn't mean to offend. I'm sure you are not an Oreo, but the Oreo "type" exists nonetheless and the question will come up in public discourse about race and class relations. It doesn't point to anyone's fault, it points to flaws in the culture. Only marking those flaws and discussing them will work to change them.
I think this will be the last time I speak about this particular point, but I would like to hear your response. I've spoken to other people about it, and the general consensus is, "Maybe it's not fat hatred for *you*...but it probably is." I hope to change that to, "You say it's not fat hatred, and I believe you, and I believe you can be wholly into fat acceptance nevertheless."
I have no problem with that. I can type the following with total sincerity: you say it's not fat hatred, and I believe you, and I believe you can wholly into fat acceptance nevertheless.
In fact, I believe you think this is an important issue because you took the time to write about it both at BFB and in this e-mail. You were respectful of me, and my experience, and seem to have no desire to convince me to lose weight whatsoever. So I would say there is ample proof that you are wholly into fat acceptance.
I've committed to writing about this at length this week. Afterwards, I, too, am going to put it down for a while. It is exhausting stuff to think about. But again, I thank you for your original question. I am learning a lot about myself and feeling stronger as a result.
Angel
Take care,
Pattie
THE STRESS OF STIGMA
There is a simple realization to which I came about two years ago. I am fat. Now, I've been fat almost all of my life. I have been on every kind of diet that has existed, and at the end of each of them, I gained back all the weight and then more. I used to think this was a moral failure on my part. I wasn't good enough. I wasn't disciplined enough.
I am a disciplined person. I wrote a 350-page dissertation in a little less than 15 months--that's the total time from when I proposed the idea to when I defended it, including all the little steps in between. I actually did the writing itself in less than three months. When I have a goal, I usually accomplish it. I know how to approach a project, and I know how to complete a project. I can do so with little supervision.
So I knew that my yo-yo weight losses and gains being about my laziness was a load of crap. I'm a perfectionist, and I have done every diet I've ever done with the same enthusiasm with which I approach any other project. The most I ever lost was 130 pounds, which at the time was half my body weight. I did so with diet pills, and after being on them for over a year, I found I couldn't quit them. A doctor gave me valium to offset the diet pills, and I became addicted to the valium as well. I lived a crazy life of not eating and drug abuse, and I did so with the approval of my family physician. Despite the fact that he and every other doctor to whom I had been at that point in my life had said that I was healthy, it was more important to lose weight than it was to enjoy the healthy body I had. I walked or rode a bike almost everywhere I went. I went dancing for hours every weekend. But I was "overweight," and that meant I had to lose those extra pounds or my world would never be right. So I did. I'm even a success story for some bariatric clinic in New Orleans. I'm not sure if they still have it, but I submitted before and after pictures and a testimonial.
But then the drugs started ruling my life, and I decided I had to get off them. Once I was off the drugs, I started gaining back the weight. It took me 18 months to lose it. It took me three years to gain it back. I was determined to lose it again, but this time in a healthy way. I exercised and ate next to nothing, but I gained weight. During this time, I was introduced to the idea of fat acceptance and even joined NAAFA. But I still dieted. I still kept hoping that somehow I'd lose the weight. But now I couldn't lose it. If calorie charts were anything more than a reflection of a few lab experiments, I should have been losing rapidly because I was eating 1000 calories a day. Instead, I remained hungry, grouchy, sickly, and I maintained or gained weight. I thought maybe my metabolism was fucked up from the previous dieting, so I read that exercise was a way to increase metabolism. I exercised fiercely. I also read about herbs and took some of the more dangerous ones. I stopped taking them in the summer of 2000 after experiencing what I thought was a seizure. All of this effort just made me sicker.
My last diet was TOPS (Take Off Pounds Sensibly). I put on ten pounds eating sensibly. In February of 2001, on the way back home from a TOPS meeting after having gained three pounds in one week, the thought occurred to me that I was fighting a battle that couldn't be won. What if I could never be thin again? This thought was depressing at first. Then it was liberating. If I really could not be thin, if it was somehow about my body type and not about my willpower, then I could let go of all this dieting stuff and learn to be myself. I realized that I am fat.
There are few words in the English language to describe this experience. That is why fat people use analogies to ethnicity or homosexuality. But it is true that doing so is inadequate. Being fat has aspects that are unparalleled. It also has a lot of cultural baggage that makes talking about it difficult. Two very large multi-national industries exist on the basis of describing my body as ugly (beauty industry) and pathological (medical industry). I have a phenotype that supposedly denotes an aesthetic that demands redecorating, denotes an illness and demands a cure, denotes an immorality that demands contrition. Because of this ugliness, this sickness, this sin, I am given few words to express what I know about my experience and my body.
It is an experience of liberation to accept oneself as one is. But being fat comes with a burden as well. If I were fat and quiet, I would be accpetable. But now that I understand that I am fat and I talk about it, I invite conflict and criticism. Complete strangers believe it is okay to tell me things about my body. Friends are standoffish. A couple of people have written comments at Big Fat Blog and Fatshadow that fat is about choice and storage of energy. Perhaps this is true. Perhaps being fat comes from having an efficient body that stores energy well. Starvation and deprivation triggers this mechanism even more. But this understanding of fatness is irrelevant to the discussion of culture. It doesn't really matter why I am fat when I interact with other people. What matters to others in this social interaction is that I have not done something about being fat. Until I do something about being fat, I am supposed to keep my mouth shut, period.
Stigma is defined as follows: "a symbol of disgrace or infamy. ... Synonyms: mark, brand, stain"
This symbol or mark is visible so that others can see it and react.
Fatness carries a stigma. I live with the stress of that stigma everyday. I know that when I walk out the door there is a better-than-even chance I will be ridiculed in some way. Of course, I may never know for sure. Is that person laughing at me? Did I hear the comment of the couple at the next table correctly? Did the hostess seat me in the back of the restaurant because she thought I looked gross? Part of the problem with being stigmatized is that you are never sure if the social interaction you are having is tainted (stained) by the marking. Sure, there are lots of people who treat me like a person. But even close friends have said to me that they were surprised to find out that I was smart. Colleagues have made comments about how it is a shame that someone so talented can't lose weight. Despite all my accomplishments, I live with the fact that the first thing someone notices about me is that I'm fat. That fatness colours everything they learn about me afterwards.
Then there are the structural boundaries that hold me back. I can't go to a theatre or an office without having to ask for a chair without arms. There are places where I am simply not welcomed -- the bus, the subway, the airplane. Up until a few years ago, I couldn't get swim suits and exercise clothes that fit well. I couldn't dress for success because fashion and fatness were incompatible. Some of this has changed, but I still live with the stress. I can't find clothes that fit in second-hand shops, so I have to pay full price no matter how limited my budget. I have to arrive early at theatres to ensure that I have a place to sit with which I can live, and it is a humiliating process to make sure of it. I have to grin and bear any comments made at the poolside when I arrive in a swimsuit ready to exercise. I have to bear the brunt of idiotic people yelling things at me when I ride a bike or walk in public. I'm discovering I can't even be fat in cyberspace without ridicule.
As long as fatness is something that is regarded as merely needing willpower to change, then it will be regarded as okay to treat fat people this way. But the evidence is building that diets don't work and that fatness may not be a simple reflection of food choices and levels of activity. If fatness is something about which most fat people cannot do anything in any kind of long-term manner and if fatness is more about their inherent physiology than about how they choose to behave, then the stigma attached to fatness is prejudicial and mean-spirited.
I know the party line at this point. Obesity is a disease, and it is the responsibility of the afflicted to make every effort to find a cure. Not dieting is a way of giving up on oneself. Fat acceptance is okay as long as it doesn't critique beauty standards or medical standards. Fat is unhealthy. Everyone just knows that. Fat people deserve to be fat because they are lazy and unfit.
The bottom line to all of this is that I have come to believe that being fat is a part of who I am. It is not something that I could change healthfully or naturally. Despite this realization, I must live with the stigma afforded fat people. I put up with the subtle ways that people tell me I'm ugly, I'm sick, I'm immoral. Any attempts on my part to suggest otherwise are met with stringent objections from people who think they know me, my history and my body better than I do. I am supposed to do something about the ugly, sick, sinful me before I speak.
The original question for the week was why I felt sad when other people talked about their own weight loss. In part, it is because dieting evokes all this in me. Dieting is rarely successful, often harmful and always contextualised by this stigma. I don't blame people for trying to lose weight. Why live with this pain if you don't have to do so? But the painful, yet liberating, realization to which I came is that I don't have this choice any more, if I have ever had it. When I dieted and tried to fit into these impossible standards, most of my pain came from within me. I hated myself and my body. At least now, most of my pain comes from without. I now have a confidence about who I am that helps me deal with the oppressing fallout of stigmatization. From my point-of-view, this is a better life than blaming myself. But it is still painful, pervasive and largely outside my control. That is why I speak out.
RADICAL AESTHETICS
I chose my words carefully on the question of other people losing weight. I said "When someone loses weight, it saddens me, but it is their business and I don't hate it or them."
One of the responses to this statement was the defence was "I think it's like red hair. I don't want it on me, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate it on someone else." If you change the words "red hair" to "dark skin" and if that dark skin were something she was trying to lighten, then the sentence would take on a whole new meaning. It is in that meaning you can find my sadness.
I'm sure fatness can be and is regarded like hair colour. Many see the question of weight loss as something people change at will and for pure aestetic reasons. This is an acceptable cultural understanding of fatness. But after years of attempts and screwing up my health through those attempts, I have come to the conclusion that while a certain amount of change in body weight is possible and sustainable, it is a rare thing when someone can go against their body type successfully. It requires a lot of technology, a lot of commitment and a lot of vigilence. Even with those things present, I wonder if it can be successful for very long.
I believe this is true whether you are thin or fat. At my aquatherapy is a woman who is recovering from a broken hip. She has tried to gain weight all her life and can't do it. She takes supplement shakes and eats vast amounts of calories and yet she remains thin. Her doctor told her that her thinnness contributed to her broken bones. She and I connected on an emotional level because she is so tired of hearing how great thinness is. She lives with some of the consequences of having her body type and she tires of people telling her how envious they are of her thinness. "I just want to learn to accept my body as it is," she told me. I understand.
Like my choice of Starbucks, any preference seems simple and personal on the surface. However, no matter what the intention of the person, intentional weight loss and diet talk carry with them a whole lot of cultural baggage. I feel sad every time I see black women trying to look as white as they can because I know that it signals that whiteness is preferred. They often talk about it and feel about it other terms, but the ways in which "white" is marked as "better" in American society still informs the interpretation of their actions.
"Thin" is marked as "better" and "getting thinner" is marked as an honourable activity. That is why so many places exist where people can say "I'm on a diet" or "I lost weight." If this were a value-neutral activity, then people wouldn't brag about it or compliment others on its accomplishment.
To really appreciate the beauty of a fat person is not to declare simply that some of your friends are fat or that you don't discriminate against fatness or that you look past the fatness to the "real person." Insert the word "black" for "fat" in that last statement and you will see what I mean. In the 1960s when the slogan "black is beautiful" was coined to assert the aestethic was political. Black people trying to look whiter by straightening their hair, having their noses fixed and finding ways to lighten their skin was more than a fashion statement. It was a betrayal of their own bodies, their own histories and their own cultural identities. (By the way, if you think these radical procedures didn't exist and weren't available to black people, I recommend two books on "passing" -- the last chapter of Lawrence Otis Graham's Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class and Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall's The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans.)
So let me say it clear. Fat is beautiful. The technologies that exist to change fat are instruments of the fat hatred politics. The individual decision to lose weight may be experienced as just that, an individual decision. When I said I don't hate the decision or the person who made it, I meant it. I have made such a decision many times in my life. I know the surge of will-power, the feeling of control, the self-doubt, the fear of failure, the determination to succeed. I know that the intention is one of making myself "better" or "healthier" or "cared for." But now that I know more about bodies and politics and culture, I feel sad when I see or hear this declaration in public spaces because I know that despite whatever the intentions, this decision is just one more micro level move that helps create a culture that says fat is undesirable.
So let me say it again: Fat is beautiful. If someone can learn to believe that (and I believe they can because all aestethics is learned to a great extent), then they can open their minds to a lot of things that remain hidden under fat hatred.
OTHER PEOPLE LOSING WEIGHT
At Big Fat Blog, (in comment 36) I wrote that it saddened me when someone "decides" to lose weight. I put "decides" in quotation because it doesn't sadden me that they lose weight--bodies do that sometimes. It bothers me when people lose weight intentionally.
I also put "decides" in quotation because in a culture where so much emphasis is placed upon weight loss and dieting, I have to wonder what freedom we have to make such a decision. I like Starbucks coffee and drink it a couple of times a week. It feels like a preference to me, like I've decided to like Starbucks. But I recognize that in a world of advertising and trends, the fact that I prefer Starbucks can't be seen as a singular decision. It is contextualised by all the symbology that Starbucks creates. When I contemplate the "decision," I often realize that I may not have made a decision as much as followed a pattern. Like any other culturally contextualised decision, I have to wonder if the decision to lose weight can actually be called a decision at all. It feels so personal, but with all of the subtle and not-so-subtle pressures to lose weight, or at least to be on a diet, I really have my doubts that anyone these days can make a pure and personal decision to lose weight. So It bothers me when someone says they've decided to lose weight.
But the question that was put to me was why I felt this way about other people's efforts. On the surface, this seems like a perfectly legitimate question. Why should I care what other people do their bodies? I reject whole-heartedly the concept of passive obesity and I do so on the premise that weight gain is not a public health issue. Part of that argument is that the size of my body is not a burden on other people the way second-hand-smoke is. So why should I care at all when someone makes the decision to lose weight? In truth, I don't care if someone loses weight around me the way I care if someone smokes around me. I get physically and dangerously ill with asthma in the presence of second-hand smoke. I get very angry when the threat occurs.
So I'm going to spend some time this week and write about why I feel sad when other people talk about their weight loss efforts. This is a big topic in my mind and I want to take some time to sort this out for myself as well as for anyone who would like to read.
so, more later...
ENCOURAGEMENT
I've been going to a physiotherapist to help with pain management and to exercise well this time (usually hurt my joints in some fashion that works against my keeping up with the regimen). I had a great talk with this guy today and he is interested in the health at every size concept.
He isn't quite there yet. He talked about watching calories and had some "diet tips" about eating in moderation. But he is more fat friendly/fat neutral than anyone I've ever worked with and it felt good to have someone say to me "You've come this far, Pattie. Don't start worrying about weight now. I know lots of fat people who are fit and lots of thin people who are not. It isn't what you look like, it is the health of your body that counts."
Yep, it felt good.
TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES AND HAPPY ACCIDENTS
On the one hand, we didn't get the new episode for First Person, Plural done today. Too many things to take care of this week and too little time to do it right. So we decided better to do it right than to do it fast.
On the other hand, it is a perfect week to remind everyone about Scott Ritter's discussion of unilateralism and international law and how W is blowing it. We re-aired Episode 22: "A War of Words".
We added some new links to the site.
THE PROBLEM WITH FAT HATRED...
This is what aggrevates me (among other things). I was recently in hospital and was told that my blood work indicated that I was borderline hypothyroid. I was asked if I had recently gained any weight. I don't weigh myself because it is usually a meaningless number. But here is an example where knowing would help. It is one of the few things for which weight is a symptom. I told the doctor I didn't think I had gained any weight. The last time I weighed myself was August of 2001. Well, I weighed myself today and it looks like I've gained about 25 pounds. I was surprised. My clothes don't seem tighter. But now I have a dilemma. Well, not so much a dilemma as a painful task. I'm going to have to tell the doctor about this and talk to her about whether I should take medicines or do further tests.
In a fat neutral world, this would not be a big deal. This would be a symptom that I would report to my doctor. I would discuss this like the intelligent woman I am. I would receive all the information I needed to give informed consent. Then she and I would work out a treatment that made sense.
But I don't live in a fat neutral world. Fat hatred is going to complicate this. So far with this particular doctor I have not been told to lose weight. My weight has been irrelevant to the treatment recommendations. When she asked me if I had gained any weight recently, she did not ask me how much I weighed and she has not asked me to weigh in her office. I've been happy with this. She seems more concerned with my health than my weight, a refreshing change of pace. But I'm concerned now that if I bring this up, my weight will become the issues.
In addition, hypothyroid is a "fat person's disease" and I will have trouble trusting the information I'm given. There have been abuses in the past. Lots of fat people have been given thyroid treatments when they didn't need them. I'm not sure that I will be able to obtain clear and truthful information from which I can make a wise judgement. Informed consent may not be possible even if my doctor has the best intentions.
This is the price of stigma.
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