So there’s been a dust-up between a guest blogger named Monica at Feministe and fat activists (mostly on Twitter that I’ve seen), with Maia actually posting on it. I’m not interested in getting in the middle of it. I think both sides make good points. FAs are right that Monica is out of line suggesting their negative experiences with health care providers are figments of their imaginations, but Monica is right that the “but some highly muscular people are technically obese!” is a disingenuous argument. I think people were too hard on Monica, but also that she was incredibly unfair in some ways. I want to talk about the most glaring unfair assertion she made, one that was pulled out by Kate Harding on Twitter in particular.
Weight can signal a lack of activity or too many donuts, and that shouldn’t irk anyone. Yet, it does.
This was unfair, for the very simple reason that fat activists are 100% right that 95% of fat people are going to stay fat. Drastic weight loss that stays off is incredibly rare, and is usually the result of weight loss surgery or a complete 180 in personal habits that is the sort of thing that is really not in human nature. And when I say “180”, I mean 180—-the only fat people I’ve ever known to get un-fat without WLS went from being people who didn’t get much exercise to people who turned into jocks. Moderate exercise—-which I still have no idea what that supposedly means anyway—-just isn’t going to cut it. Losing weight is really, really hard. I put myself on a gym regime when we moved to New York, on top of all the extra walking you do here, and I’ve lost weight, sure, but it wasn’t the kind of weight loss rate that would turn a fat person thin. I can’t imagine what it would take to lose 10 times as much weight as I’ve lost, much less the 20 times that some people would have to lose to go from being fat people to not-fat people. I hear people make cracks about soda and donuts all the time, as if merely giving up overindulgence would magically turn a fat person thin. If you sit down and calculate the calorie shortages someone would have to endure to lose a whole lot of weight, you should see the mathematical issues in play.
But it wasn’t just the “drop the donuts, lose 100 pounds” simplicity that was off here. It was also the invocation of the concept of personal responsibility that makes me more than a little queasy. Not to say that I think that people don’t have personal responsibilities to look after their own diets or exercise regimes, but to write it off to that and not look at the big picture is to miss the point. Americans have been getting fatter in recent decades, and there have been rising rates of diabetes and heart disease to go with it. To imply that the cause is simple lack of self-control is to suggest that Americans have magically become lazier or more impulsive. I would argue that the culture has changed dramatically and puts immense amount of pressure on people to have habits that are simply counter-productive to their diet and exercise goals.