What’s your glimmer of joy?

There has been…well things have been quite horrific in the news of late.  Slaughtered children, bombings, fiscal cliffs, pending laws to remove rights.  It’s enough to make anyone pull at their hair in frustration at the world and the lack of effect one simple person can have upon it.

However, there are always those small glimmers of light and hope that shine through.  A teacher who, though herself slain in the process, saved the lives of many children. Heroes who bring food, water, help and hope to those in dire situations. Simple words of kindness or explanation to make sense of the horrible on a dark and dreary day.  Encouragement from people you didn’t even realize you HAD in your corner. Small victories, shards of brilliance, folks always striving to fight on and make this world a better, more respectful, more diversity-appreciative place.

Something I’ve found lately that allows my mind to travel thoughtful paths (aside from those of the pressing and important but, at times, overwhelming ones fronted by the media right now) is a set of videos by Mike Rugnetta seeking to explore various aspects of culture and entertainment.  He delves into some fascinating questions that have given my husband and I lots to discuss.  We especially found fun Rugnetta’s quick insight into how “Bronies” are changing our definitions of masculinity:

With the stress of holidays compounded with stressful national and world-wide events, I ask for YOUR shining moments.  What inspires you lately?  What gets YOU through the pressing S.A.D that the grey and dreary weather tends to bring to many of us?  What keeps YOUR head calm in the midst of the horror?

Also, otters. Otters make me grin and give me hope.

Awesome Olympians

I’m probably behind the ball by a lot on this but in case you haven’t seen it and still happen to be checking this lagging blog beastie for good news tidbits: check out Holley Mangold and her response to Conan’s rather crude and rude comments about this amazing weightlifter.

This woman is confident, amazing, strong, fat and completely fabulous.  One of her quotes that I loved:

“My parents just always told me I could be whatever I wanted to be,” she says, “and, silly me, I believed them.”

Swoon!  So read up if you need an uplifting moment for body positivity this week as the Olympics get under way!

When is a calorie: not?

Apparently when Harvard puts the time and energy into “discovering” that a “study” (which used ‘state of the art measures’) of a whopping 21 people for a few WEEKS shows that diets concentrated on fats versus carbs versus glycemic index are not all created equal! The human body apparently processes fats, carbs, proteins, etc DIFFERENTLY. At least, this obviously meaningful and rigorous study seems to think so.

In other “news”, the human body is not a bunsen burner. But, perhaps, I digress.

I think one of the most “amusing” parts of this is how they take this quote in the beginning (emphasis is mine):

Weight re-gain is often attributed to a decline in motivation or adherence to diet and exercise, but biology also plays an important role.

and yet go on to detail the virtues of non-biological means of making fatty people better able to STICK with those pesky diets. *eyeroll* It’s like they’re ALMOST there, ALMOST at the logical mind-step of realizing all this dieting crap is NOT a matter of simply willfully unmotivated people giving up…and then shake their heads against the logic anyway and go “Well, we’ll just have to try more ways to get those lazy bastards to keep on dieting”.

*le sigh*

OH: by the way: I’m back! Happy Summer/Winter y’all!

And then they’ll come for you…

Fierce Freethinking Fatties posted on a rather worrisome article in the Daily Nightly.  Not surprising, but worrisome if anyone is actually reading the subtext contained within.  The basic boil-down, as FFF deftly unwraps, is that all this hand-wringing over Fatness has made people In Charge even more inclined to move the goalposts of fitness so that even FEWER people qualify as Not Fatties.

The entire article is full of actual quote-gems along the lines of “without knowing how much fat you have, you can’t really save people from illness. It is the number one predictor of who’s going to live or die.” and is certainly far from one of the more encouraging small-steps towards sanity that I hunt for so desperately amongst the chaff of shitty articles like this.

The part that really pulled at me and makes me want to shake my head and poke those who continue to think bullying Fatties is a good idea with a gentle: “Uh…they’re coming for YOU next!*” reminder:

Of the 1,393 people studied, 26 percent were classified as obese when body fat was measured with BMI, whereas 64 percent of them were considered obese when measured with DXA. The misclassification was observed more often in women and increased with advancing age: 48 percent more women between the ages of 50 to 59 were classified as obese when measured with DXA instead of BMI, and among women ages 70 and above, 59 percent more were considered obese after getting a DXA scan. (Emphasis is mine)

Do you catch the significance there folks?  These people are advocating for new means of measuring for Fatness because now only 26% of us are counted as fat whereas this NEW method would show that nearly TWO THIRDS of us are all fat.  Anyone else feeling this is just a tad good for those folks in the business of selling weight-loss promises? Also of note?  The “misclassification” was more often found to be true for women.  Le Gasp!  You mean people want to make more people, more WOMEN, qualify as Fat And In Need Of Weight-Loss For Their Own Good? DOES NO ONE SEE THE PROBLEM HERE?!?  *headdesk repeatedly*

Instead of researching other factors related to the illnesses correlated with fatness (or, not if even the currently “normal” sized folks are still getting them, hence the hand-wringing about redefining who is “fat”) these people are more interested in just taking a big old brush to repaint the image of What Is Fat.  How about, instead, you look into actual measures of HEALTH?  Consider that Fats and Non-Fats alike get these diseases and figure out what ELSE is correlated. Perhaps the reason that fatness as it is defined now isn’t showing who is going to be ill because that is a PISS POOR WAY TO DETERMINE FITNESS!!  By basing everything on a simplistic calculation of Fat you do ALL of us a disservice. As so well put by FFF:

This really was the perfect opportunity for Dr. Braverman and Dr. Shah to make a dramatic u-turn and say “Hey, instead of focusing on fat and weight as a predictor of health, because let’s face it, those are pretty bad predictors, let’s work on this cool idea we heard about called Health at Every Size. Instead of stigmatizing certain numbers as good or bad, we focus on overall behaviours and attitudes towards food and health. Yeah! Great idea!”

But no.  Seems that lowing limits of what is an acceptable weight in a human body (no diversity allowed!) is so much more logical.  And if you can’t make your body fit the ever-narrowing image of healthy perfection?  Then why it is our right to bully humanity and its individuals to the point where they magically become thinner!  Yay! *sarcasm*

I came across an article in an older issue of the journal Science (Feb 10, 2006, page 759) in the course of my normal working day.  The article is about mice and bullying. The results of the observations described indicate that:

“after being bullied by a bigger mouse, mice experience brain changes that increase their fear of unfamiliar mice. Unlike typical mice, the cowed mice act frightened even when  caged with an unfamiliar, non-bully mouse. The changes were long-lasting: the ‘defeated’ mice maintained their phobic reactions even 4 weeks after exposure to the aggressors.”

It got me thinking about how much people seem eager to increase the pressure to bully fatties “for our own good”.  If the observations of bullied mice is at all translatable to humans (which these scientists seem to think it is in some way as they are excited about the potential for certain brain chemistry of these mice to help research new drugs for treating mood disorders), then as in bullied mice, so too in bullied humans: you remain feeling “defeated” and worthless long after the initial bullying event has passed.

Being bullied for your weight will certainly help if the end-goal is to make nearly 2/3rds of the population (with emphasis on us women) completely defeated, mentally paralyzed with fear of being seen in public, ashamed of existing and even more depression and illness-prone.  But as a means of actually increasing the health of our world’s citizens these folks are definitely barking up the WRONG tree.  Honestly, between things like this and the many ways that politicians are doing their darndest to remove rights from the female half of the population, I feel like I’m living in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and it is really making me fearful for our future as a nation and a planet.

 

*First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemöller (1892-1984)

Short, Fat, Female and In Power

Source: Wikipedia Commons

I have started getting the NAAFA Newsletter via email and the most recent update has an brief snippet about a woman from Ancient Egypt who has long fascinated me:  Hatshepsut. As I have of late been rather burnt out trying to maintain a constant level of rage against the many atrocities against fatness in daily life, not to mention those being even more forcibly and dangerously foisted upon the rights of women of all sizes, I found this brief mention of an amazing woman from the past to be a breath of fresh air. Not least of which because researching it lead me to the discovering of ANOTHER amazing woman…

Hatshepsut: Woman Ruler of Egypt (First of the few female rules to actually take the title of Pharaoh) for 20+ years (around the 1500s BC), established trade networks to rebuild the wealth of the 18th dynasty, commissioned the first recorded attempt to procure and transplant foreign trees (Myrrh), one of the most prolific builders in ancient Egypt with hundreds of works commissioned who was not shy about self-promotion of her amazing feats.

In short, she was powerful, intelligent, rich, important and knew her own value.  She was unafraid to not only use her connections and monies to the benefit of herself and her nation’s glory but she was out there for all to see: proud and fierce and female. Now, while researching the claims that she was also fat and short I was coming up…short.  Most representations of Hatshepsut in images or text refer to her beauty and blooming youth, etc.  I was happy to read that she ran the Pharaoh’s circuit in her 40s (go older woman!) but failed to find clear references to the woman actually being short and fat.

Source: Wikipedia images

However, I *DID* find references to the wife of Parihou/Perehu: Ati/Eti, the Queen of Punt (where Hatshepsut got her Myrrh trees to transplant).  This is where the true awesome rests.  The queen of punt, you see, was described as “short, fat, long-armed, and with a prominent behind”.  Rock on, Fatty Queen!

There is really not much written on the queen (or even her King for that matter) as records are more concerned with the goodies that Hatshepsut brought back from her expedition abroad to the still disputed location of the  Land of Punt than with the fat queen from the land they visited. However, she was certainly NOT the general image of a queen, so much so that artists depicted her vastly differently from other generic people images of the day.  Her non-thin appearance in such images is, to this day, discussed amongst those destined to find out, from such depictions alone, what was “wrong” with her body.  Me?  I’m just happily enjoying the idea that a woman was queen of a land abroad and left such an impression that artists felt the need to capture her image.

Perhaps they were doing what amounted to mockery at the time, you suggest?  I feel that would have been a waste of time and talents when crafting a relief for the queen’s huge temple of Deir el-Bahri.  To me, these images are a representation of a woman that people were impressed with, enough so that they refused to carve her as yet another generically similar body-shapes but felt compelled to portray her as she was.

I say: Rock on you fabulous women of ancient days!  You RULED!

Things to get excited about

I’m not talking arousal here, though who knows this might tickle that fancy for some.  I’m talking about some really good and promising news on the FA front as well as some great rebuttals going around that bash some Fat Tropes with an Awesome-sized Science & Common-Sense Hammer.  Let’s see what’s in our bag of goodies, shall we?

First:

Obesity Timebomb notes that a new journal (Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society ) has been published! While not the first journal to approach these issues from the more radical side of current thoughts on fatness, it is a solid peer-reviewed academic journal its potential is seen in its ability to, as Charlotte so aptly puts it:

“shift critical and scholarly discussions of fatness out of health or ‘Obesity Epidemic’ and into a much broader arena where things like culture, community, rights, embodiment can be addressed. “

Kudos to the editor (Esther Rothblum) and also to Charlotte (whose article “A queer and transfat activist timeline” appears in the first issue!

Second:

Ragen over at Dances with Fat does a fabulous take-down of the recent furor over Paula Deen’s announcement that she has Type 2 Diabetes. Not surprising to me is the finding that people love to get themselves whipped into a good self-righteous rant over how obvious it is that a fatty would catch the fatness disease. However, Ragen touches nicely on the myth of diabetes (particularly Type 2); the rampant erroneous assumption that weight loss, should it even be achievable long-term, is desirable; the body as public property; and the meme of Public Health as Public Thinness. One of my favorite (of many) great quotes:

“Being for public health means that you are for people having access to the foods that they choose to eat, safe movement options that they enjoy,  and affordable evidence-based medical care. If public health is important to you then you fight like hell for people to have access of these things, then you butt out and let people make their own choices.”

Really well done and worth reading in its entirety.

Third:

Big Fat Blog clued me into NPR’s recent acceptance of something we’ve known since at least 2003: Obesity rates have already “peaked”.  Otherwise known as “all you proponents of fat-shaming who keep asserting that Obesity Rates Are Rising are not only wrong but HAVE BEEN WRONG for many years now”.   Still, NPR’s admission is more cued as a “hmm, rates MAY have peaked! And it must be linked to all these awful behavior strategies in schools and such that studies have yet to show do anything other than increase the likelihood of persons feeling smug for hating on fatties”; especially given the lovely headless fatties gracing the article with a caption filled with scare figures of the “jump” in fatness since 1995.  (You know, before they changed the BMI limits on what is considered “fat”?).  A really interesting quote from the article:

“”Obesity prevalence can’t keep going up year after year indefinitely. Ultimately we’ll reach a state where those individuals who are susceptible to becoming obese for genetic reasons have already developed obesity,” Ludwig says.”

I love looking at quotes like the one above and replacing the word “Obesity” with “Fatness”.  Just try it.  Doesn’t it sound as ridiculous? However, while there is the usual fat-hand-wringing in the middle, the article ends with this rather awesome nod to body and size and perhaps even FAT acceptance:

“Others say the whole idea of an “obesity epidemic” has been overblown and that more emphasis should be put on getting more Americans to become fit rather than fixate on losing weight.

“Most people who lose weight will ultimately regain it. If you do this do over and over and over again you develop a nation of weight-cyclers, a yo-yo-dieting society and there are risks associated with yo-yo dieting that are every bit as hazardous as the risks associated with just being fat,” Glenn Gaesser of Arizona State University.

Fourth:

This is my favorite bit of activism in a while.  Ragen over at Dances with Fat (thanks to Unapologetically Fat for redirecting me to this post I missed!) has initiated something called “Rolls, not Trolls” a self-proclaimed Ninja Commenting venture designed to spread a bit of FA love into comment threads usually filled with hatred and shaming.  I love this not only because it has a Facebook group (which it now does) where folks can share ideas of things to post, not only because Ragen so nicely asserts that this is something to be used NOT for diet-centric spaces (because I wouldn’t want to see such messages in my Diet-Zone anymore than I want to hear their diet tips in my Diet-FREE-Zone), but because the passing of POSITIVE voices into what are usually negative threads online fills me with a fat, fluttery, hopeful feeling of warmth. THIS is one of the small moments of activism which will begin to creep in to tear down the walls of shaming and hatred. I love it!

As the Queen in Alice in Wonderland is known for saying, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”  I’ve got 4 here already; what else have you heard this week?

*ETA: This is, apparently, my 400th post!  So; maybe that’s a 5th great thing!

“Best Way for Girls to Lose Weight”

Above is a commercial which has been making the rounds on Facebook the last day or so. In case you’re not able to watch it; we see a line of electric bikes set up in a line (all colored pink you’ll notice). Slowly, people (mostly women) approach the bikes and start using them.  Doing so activates a digital pink line powered by the movement of all the bikes which shows a dancing man doing a “strip dance”.  At the end, the man “goes around a corner” to pull off those digital undies and comes back with a sign in front of his bits which says, in French: “Bravo!  You’ve burned 2000 calories! “.  The tag-line for this commercial at the end is  (loosely translated*, again in French):  “Losing weight would be easier if it was more fun”.  The ad seems to be for a water company “Contrex” which wants to be known as “your slimming partner”.

Okay.  First off, let me say that I LOVE the idea of making exercising, moving around, FUN again instead of a drudgery intended to bore and yet be endured for the sake of “less fatness”.  What I DON’T like and wish we could really REALLY move away from as a world; is the idea that even after making movement fun and a group activity that folks seemed to enjoy, the punchline is still:  Hah!  See, we made you (girls) work out and now you’ve burned such and such calories so forget all the fun, etc; it’s the CALORIE BURN that made it all worthwhile, amiright?  *sigh*  NO!  Just make moving FUN.  Period.  The end.

Also very problematic is the way this is STILL marketed as a way for “girls” (yeah, not even women though you’ll notice that most of the folks using the machines are far from “girl”-aged) to lose weight.  There is one older gentleman who climbs up on a pink bike at one point but overall the message is STILL that women, sorry “girls” will NEVER be accepted unless they lose weight.  No.  Never.  What’s that adage?  You can always still lose another 10% and be “healthier”?  Yeah.  Talk about setting the bar to “infinitely impossible”.

My thought? Set up video games that run on treadmill or bicycle power similar to this electronic dancing man.  I know there are already such devices out there.  Bring them to the limelight!  Also? Remind folks that all that work they do standing and moving about in their daily lives is ALREADY a great bunch of exercise.  Promote forms of movement that cater to people’s vastly different desires: group activities for those socialites, individual sports or games for those who would rather work on challenging themselves alone, different skill levels for varying levels of ability.  Fight for government subsidies to create safe spaces around each nation to DO these sorts of activities.

But, above all, STOP equating movement with a Smaller Body.  You set people up to ultimately fail and stop WANTING to move when the only goal is a smaller body which does not occur or does not last.  Make the goal: Have Fun, Get Your Heart Rate Up, Enjoy the Movements Your Body is Capable of Making.

When you REMOVE the conflation between health and weight; you end up with people interested in, instead, working towards fitness goals that don’t involve smaller pant sizes or tighter dresses (you know, since we’re all worried about these “girls” you know).  Fatness isn’t killing us sooner, isn’t taxing the healthcare systems more than actual illnesses, and is really only a measure (consistently and erroneously measured and analyzed) of how large your body is; NOT what it is capable of.  Weight is not a proxy for behaviors.  All bodies benefit from movement.  As the awesome Dances with Fat writer Ragen so aptly points out:

There are exactly two things that you can tell by looking at someone’s size:

1. What size they are
2. What your personal preconceived notions and prejudices about that particular body size are

That is just perfectly put.  Visual cues on fatness need to be disassociated from all the baggage we’ve attached to it.

We need to put our energies into efforts to spread the word that movement IS fun.  It isn’t a payment you make to the gods of thinness.  It is energizing and fulfilling and good for you body.  No matter WHAT size that body may be.

*Literally: “One would lose weight better if it was more fun”

Long-Term Weight Gain: Studies show that “Eat Less, Move More” too simplistic

Not as simple as Calories In, Calories Out? Don't worry; I'll figure out a way to bring it all back around to that by the end. Never doubt the Leaping Lemur my dears.

In case you haven’t heard the news yet; there was a recently released set of results from a set of three prospective cohort investigations.  The study’s aim?  Find out why that deceptively simple “Eat Less, Move More” mantra fails to explain the general human-wide tendency to gain about 1 pound of weight each year as we age.  So, for 20 years researchers followed over 120,000 US men and women to find out what was up.

While I have to almost laugh at such long-range work to find out why human bodies dare to have the audacity to gain an average of less than 1 pound of girth a year; I mostly wanted to point out a few things I noticed when flipping between an article describing the study and the actual study abstract.

Firstly, here’s an article that led me to the study: “Changes in Specific Dietary Factors May Have Big Impact on Long-Term Weight Gain”.  The sub-line actually really takes the credit for drawing me in: “Weight-loss Strategy to Only “Eat Less, Exercise More” May be Overly Simplistic”.  Huh!  Actually looking at how telling people they are just lazy food-stuffing assholes is useless, perhaps?  No.  Silly April.

In a series of three separate studies looking at how changes in multiple dietary and other lifestyle factors relate to long-term weight gain, Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers found that modest changes in specific foods and beverages, physical activity, TV-watching, and sleep duration were strongly linked with long-term weight gain. Changes in diet, in particular, had the strongest associations with differences in weight gain. (Emphasis mine)

Turns out it is just a re-packaging of the same mantra; with slight modifications to insist that (and I quote):

“The idea that there are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ foods is a myth that needs to be debunked.”

When has the idea of no moral judgments on food been something proposed seriously by anyone outside of this small realm of the internet known as the “Fat-o-Sphere” and related books?!

Not only that, but I point you again to that last line, which I’ve bolded.  Here’s where I take an even larger glance askew at this article.  Only 5 days out in the New England Journal of Medicine (despite these studies ending in 2003 and 2006; but I’ll leave more intense ripping apart of the study’s mechanics to others for now.  You know, where someone actually gains access to the entire study paper to read into the hows and whys, etc.  Is this self-reported data every 4 years?  Why so long a gap between the studies and the results being released?)  and already authors are clamoring that changes to diet and exercise were the most strongly correlated with that distressing 1 pound per year weight gain.  Here’s the kicker though.  Even taking just the information from the abstract I am currently able to access, Long Term Weight Gain is NOT highest for the demonized eaters of more potato chips and drinkers of more soda.  It is highest for newly quit former smokers.  And, depending on the number of drinks per day, alcohol drinkers.

Interesting how the focus, despite what the numbers show, becomes the way that we in the US are somehow Almost Unknowingly eating enough additional chips and sodas each year (yay!  Let’s look forward to more “Don’t you realize how much you’re eating, Fatty?!” initiatives to come!), bit by bit, to merit gaining an average of nearly an extra pound of weight each year. Perhaps this has a slight something to do with a few of the supports of the grant funds given towards funding this research?  (GlaxoKlineSmith, Aramark) Or perhaps a bit of conflict of interest might be seen in one of the researchers

“being listed as a coinventor on a provisional patent application filed by and assigned to Harvard University for the use of trans-palmitoleic acid to prevent and treat insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and related conditions” (emphasis mine)

Related conditions?  Like… obesity? Which is always fronted as the dreaded boogie-man of type 2 diabetes?  Maybe I’m digging too deep here.  Surely studies aren’t done and promoted as drastically important when they barely show the results you’re looking for; simply because you have a vested interest in studies confirming that levels of obesity are threatened (with risk of RISING) by that pesky 1 lb per year phenomenon.  Surely… right?

Wording is everything.  Here again we see that in a study focused on such a minute (in comparison with, say, the weight change needed to move from one end of a BMI range to another) gain of weight across human beings over time; the results can even indicate that bodies are not as simply broken down as “Calories In, Calories Out” and STILL the focus by the end of an article highlighting these results will boil it all down to :

“Overall, the weight-changes associated with any one lifestyle change were fairly small. However, together they added up, especially for diet. “Small dietary and other lifestyle changes can together make a big difference – for bad or good,” said Mozaffarian. “This makes it easy to gain weight unintentionally, but also demonstrates the tremendous opportunity for prevention. A handful of the right lifestyle changes will go a long way.”

That’s right.  The effect of any of the actions examined individually was small; yet cumulatively the effect can be monstrous! (Bring to mind the initial article’s declaration of changes leading to a “Big Impact”) Like… a whole pound a year people!  Change your ways before it is too late!!!  Isn’t it so wonderful that the researchers are optimistic that these studies reveal such great chances out there for more prevention initiatives?  Opportunities that no doubt they’d be willing to throw themselves out there under the push of well-funded initiatives to encourage and promote?

Perhaps I’m too cynical.  Still, anyone have any delusions that this will stop people from pinning weight gain on a laundry list of “wrong” lifestyle changes since obviously weight gain is not as simple as In/Out? Yeah.  Me neither.

The Search for Better Fiction: Leave out the Fat Tropes!

I was just happily perusing some notes from Strange Horizons (a magazine focusing on speculative fiction) on a few tropes that really are done to death in fiction (particularly speculative fiction) and I was so happy to see the following call to stop equating Fat with Evil:

Fatness is used as a signal of evil, dissolution, and/or moral decay, usually with the unspoken assumption that it’s completely obvious that fat people are immoral and disgusting. (Note: This does not mean all fat characters in stories must be good guys. We’re just tired of seeing fat used as a cheap shorthand signifier of evil.)

1. Someone wants to kill someone else, and that’s perfectly reasonable because, after all, the victim-to-be is fat.
2. The story spends a lot of time describing, over and over, just how fat a character is, and how awful that is.
3. Physical contact with a fat person is understood to be obviously revolting.

Yes!  Let’s move beyond such concepts: both in Fiction AND in real life!!

This wee bit was encouraging enough for me that it made me smile today.  How about you?  Any good recent fiction you’ve come across and wouldn’t mind sharing here?  Something which DOESN’T follow the above trope of Fat=Evil/Vile/Killable?

Your fetus, your diet, and you

I’ve been quietly (or not so quietly as my husband who has to listen to my various outbursts and scornful scoffs as I read) taking in the latest news on the dieting front.  Mainly the news of a new trial study to put overweight pregnant women on a drug intended to prevent their fetus from gaining too much weight.

I think Dances with Fat really did a fabulous look into the many reasons that this entire concept is just entirely disturbing.  A bit of that post which really keeps resonating for me is this:

Weight and Health are two different things and cannot be freely substituted for one another.  Health is multi-dimensional and includes things in our control and things out of our control such as genetics, environment, access, stress and behaviors, and being healthy is not the same as being thin. There are healthy and unhealthy people of every shape and size. (emphasis is mine)

I think that in all the fervor to ensure that our children and our general population masses stay healthy; we’re really focused on weight because it is perceived as far easier than focusing on the multi-dimensional reality of health. If you prepare a program intended to create weight-loss; that is far more easily measured than, say, determining all of the many variant factors tied into the concept of Good Health. Yet, as Dances with Fat and many others have pointed out time and again, Thin(ner) is NOT, nor should it be, a synonym for Healthy.

So much gets missed when size is  pushed forward as the best, nay the ONLY metric for measuring a body’s health.  My fear is that in this zeal and zest (and other “z” words) to Think About The Children, we’ve actually gone and forgotten all about them.  Children are merely another pawn in this War on Fat being waged.  Like the rest of us; they only stand to lose from such a position.

I don’t see how this sort of fetus-dieting study can possibly benefit anyone; let alone our children. These initiatives to drastically attack a body’s fat (or in this case a fetus’ potential to gain fat) can only serve to further reinforce already damaging stereotypes about  fatness, health and worth.

Michelle Obama’s “Fight the Fatties” mentality in addressing the United State’s “Obesity Problem” via the Let’s Move campaign seems ripe to instead (or additionally?) help INCREASE bullying and increase the prevalence of destructive behaviors (such as disordered eating); all in the name of fixing a purportedly drastically growing problem that DOESN’T REALLY EXIST!!!

In case you don’t click that last link, it leads to the CDC’s own admission that childhood obesity levels have LEVELED OFF. Since 1999! “Between 1999–2000 and 2007–2008, there was no significant trend in obesity prevalence for any age group”  Despite a recently released letter from the same CDC advising immediate actions to fight this disastrous scourge on our nation that is a fat body, there is NO EPIDEMIC of an increasingly fat nation. (PS: this rate has also been level for adults for a while now.)

Lifespan is at an all-time high in the US, and is increasing. Has been for nearly a decade.  Yet, why use such a silly measure of health as Life Expectancy?  That’s not a quick and dirty way to quantify an individual’s unique health profile! Weight is by FAR easier to track. Less work, easier to assign blame on the individual when efforts fail rather than on the initiative itself.  Hmm.  Some might think researchers and obesity experts were lazy or something?  Nah.  Only us fatties get that moniker: Lazy.

Deaths associated with fatness are being revealed to have less direct one-to-one Fat-to-Death correlation than assumed: “Overweight was not associated with excess mortality. The relative risks of mortality associated with obesity were lower.” Yet, despite studies cropping up with these and similar findings about the intricate (at the least) relationship between body size and health; initiatives continue to crop up destined to give us all the quick-fix marketers seem to feel we crave: that Get Thin Quick scam that we all know deep down (skin deep at least) is based upon shallow measures of appearance; not true measures of health.

Children, like adults, are not just bodies to be measured and judged.  They are people.  We are people. People  should not be judged Healthy or Not based upon the size of the bodily container they inhabit. Health should not be a metric by which a person’s worth is measured.