Quick Hit: Someone PUHLEEZE go and talk some sense to these people…
Sanity points required!
Blogger sees fat girl in icecream store apparently ‘drunk on sugar’ and decides that Fat Acceptance is doing none of us any favours…
Post accompanied by mandatory fatty pic, this time complete with head!
Enter at your own risk!
My response to her, in case it doesn’t get through moderation:
As a “morbidly obese” (I prefer DEATHFAT!) woman who does not go into trances over food, I’m having a few issues with this post…
What relevance does the image have? A random fat person having a drink (of what you don’t know – it might well be unflavored iced tea, or even ice water) and looking peacefully out over the world. Does that person have a name? Part of the Fat Acceptance movement is getting rid of the anonymous fat person in favor of giving us ALL names and identities because we are all people, not nameless (most frequently headless) statistics. Is that person how you view “obese,” because if so, you may need to think about BMI numbers and how they really look.
Secondly, you’re not getting Fat Acceptance if you think all fat people mindlessly eat and are “drugged” by sugar. Sugar is arguably not a drug (scientists still don’t know if you can truly be addicted to sugar). What we do know is that some fat people emotionally eat. Thin people do too. When I see my thin 3.5-year-old son rolling his eyes up into his head and murmuring “oh, YUMMY!” when he bites into a piece of cake, or some succulent salmon, or a bowl of coleslaw, do I think that he has a problem with food or do I just assume that he’s really enjoying something.
You compare her serving size with yours, as if your decision to have a kid size cone was somehow more virtuous than her decision to have an extra large cone. Why should her cone size matter? Do you think that no thin people purchase large cones? I assure you that my husband, who is “average” sized and I both enjoy large cones from our favorite ice cream place once or twice in the summer, when we happen to be close by. He eats his FAR more quickly than I do, with a voracity that sometimes shocks me. I, the deathfat woman, like to savor my cone and eat it as slowly as I can without having it melt all over me.
I could say more…but Fat Acceptance is about giving everyone a basic level of humanity that has nothing to do with their size. It’s about giving people the benefit of the doubt and allowing that, whatever their size, level of fitness, or level of health, they deserve to be treated like human beings and given the right to live as they wish. That woman in the shop? You may be concerned that she has an eating disorder of some sort, or that she doesn’t get enough exercise, but you cannot know either of those things from a single observation. If a thin woman were holding an extra large cone, which she was eating raptly, and texting on her phone, would you have the same thoughts about her body? If you wouldn’t, you’re not worrying about her, you’re imposing a notion of what YOU think fat people are on her.
There are unhealthy fat people and there are healthy fat people. There are unhealthy thin people and there are healthy thin people. The point of Fat Acceptance is to acknowledge that we all have value, whatever our size. Many of we fatties choose to live healthier lifestyles not because we want to lose weight but because we want to be healthy, at whatever size our metabolisms allow us to be. Even if we aren’t healthy, we want the right to make our own lifestyle choices, just as thin people, whatever their health, are allowed to make their own lifestyle choices, except that they are not subjected to the same mass hysteria and fingerpointing as anybody who happens to be outside of what the media says is beautiful.
I actually feel stupider after reading that nonsense.
You’re supposed to enjoy eating and plenty of slim people do.
What strikes me most is how much the writer got off on watching this woman, almost like porn or something, weird. How much of what she reported is projection and how much real is anyone’s guess.
But it is certainly acting as some kind of stimulant to the ‘obeserver/projector’ that’s for sure.
What drives me nuts is that the blogger knows nothing of the girl.
Maybe it’s her birthday and, like anyone would, wanted to celebrate: She bought herself a big ice cream (just as I might), sat to enjoy it and text messaged her friends about the party she’s having over the weekend.
Maybe she hasn’t had an ice cream in a month and decided to really enjoy one.
Maybe she just found out she was graduating early thanks to her phenominal grades and decided that she would like an ice cream.
Maybe she just saved the lives of 7 infant children and their grandparents and, in thanks, they bought her a big ice cream and she was just texting saying, “This really nice couple bought me an ice cream! They’re so cool!”
We don’t know! Therefore, no one can sit there and go “O god! She’s overeating! O no!” The blogger is allowed to get a kids-sized ice cream (which she self-rightously pointed out), I’m allowed to get whatever size ice cream I want and the girl is allowed to have whatever she wants! Weight shouldn’t determine what you can and can’t have.
You see a fat girl eating an ice cream and all of the sudden, you know everything about her and everything about every other fat person, and you realize that they should be hated, disgusted, and discriminated against. Smart, lady. Smart.
As soon as I read “she was most likely not just medically overweight, but obese,” I was done giving the author the benefit of the doubt. She clearly has absolutely no idea what those categories mean, and I’m assuming she’s one of those people who thinks “overweight” means “fat but not like a sideshow freak or anything” and “obese” means “really, really fat.”
I’m mainly horrified by how many of the kinder comments made comments like “love the person, hate the crime.” Since when is eating a freaking ice cream cone a crime?
Apparently, these days, it’s a crime for a fat person to eat ANYTHING, especially if they do it in public.
I remember as a teen and a young woman being embarrassed about eating in polite. I wasn’t even ‘overweight’ by BMI. All I knew was that a woman my height 5′2″ should weigh more than 110 and I was a huge 135 pounds so I felt huge all the time. I didn’t diet. I ate normally, but I still felt embarrassed eating in public.
I felt ashamed of my size and felt helpless to change it. Later, I learned that I wasn’t fat and I was just made to feel fat by others. You know those girls that weight less than you do and are always on a diet. Anyway, I don’t know why I believed them.
After I had my children, I slimmed down a little. My weight was in 120s and I felt thin and sexy. Still, it took me years to feel comfortable about eating in public.
I gained 30 pounds after my divorce and so my weight is now a constant 154 so now I’m overweight, again, but I like myself and I’ll eat anything I wish in public without feeling like people are staring at the fat woman eating a cookie.
Way for her to NOT get it in the end. She asks for people’s opinions, we give them. She says “thank you” all the way through, like she’s actually interested and even says “thank you” to the FA people and THEN goes on totally twisting our words, mentioning most of us by name and claiming we said things we DID NOT say! UGH! There was no hope for her in the first place, I guess.
I feel bad for wasting my words on her.
P.S.- I feel slandered.
I feel slandered, too.
But, honestly, given that most of the blog seems devoted to obsessing about body size, it’s not surprising. She wasn’t asking for real input; she just wanted a pile-on of fat hate, probably to make her and her readers feel better about the fact that, even if they don’t look as amazingly good as celebrities do 8 weeks after having a baby (which they no doubt think would be the best thing that could happen to them), at least they aren’t disgusting fatties.
@LexieDi, I felt really awful after reading her final comment, too. I did, actually, have this, “What’s really going on here” sense as she kept saying to “keep the comments coming”… I had the sense that she was not going to be open. I’m a bit shocked… having read the link she provided in that final comment… at just how closed minded she seems to be. The link was pretty awful.
One of the comments of mine that she deleted was perhaps one that I should have stated more gently… tone is so tricky, as we know, online… but I’m a bit shocked that after inviting comments and discussion, she makes no gesture of stating at least one or two good points in the FA arguments, no concession at all.
An ugly experience.
[...] about a fat girl “overdosing on sugar” or some such nonsense. (Thanks Bri, for the pointer to the discussion). The comments on the post are now closed because some uppity fatties have been taking her to task [...]
She’s closed the comments, but I’ve had a bit of a rant on my blog. (What did I say about too much going on to blog? Seems like it’s a 3am distraction.)