Perhaps this belongs in the War Zone, perhaps not. I don't intend to "fight" about it, but the issue involves considerable differences of opinion.

On June 27, Dr. Yoni Freedhof, in his blog Weighty Matters, posted a link to a podcast from This American Life. Here is the link. I haven't finished listening to the entire hour. It begins with an interview and excerpts from a book written by a woman who has achieved self-acceptance while fat. Other views follow. See what you think.

I'm in favor of offering maximum empathy to all persons. Doesn't mean I'm not working on my own opinions and feelings all the time.

I heard that show as well, and it kept me thinking for a while. Like you, I have mixed feelings about it.

Wendy xxx (forget her last name) is pretty articulate in her book, Shrill. It sounds as if she's reached some peace with her body. She talks about her fear of breaking a chair in public at a weight of ~260 (based on an actual experience). In this day and age are chairs not built to withstand that amount of weight? She talks about how she is finally willing to order the food she WANTS, not the food she thinks everyone else thinks she should order, when out in public.

The most poignant story to me was the woman, a producer on This American Life, who had started about the same weight as Wendy, but had lost down to a normal weight under doctor's supervision, using amphetamines. She was to the eyes "normal" but keeping her weight down was a constant obsession and some years later she had to periodically resort to amphetamines to keep her weight down. She had several grueling surgeries (and recoveries) to remove excess skin. The saddest part is that she had met her husband after she lost all the weight (not quite - she'd met him before, but he didn't remember their extended conversation). She asks him if he'd still love her if she regained and his answer, vague, was pretty unsettling.

This is a really complex and moving piece of radio journalism. But that's what I expect from Ira Glass. I listen to him most every week.

Now that I have had a chance to listen to the entire broadcast (a little over one hour in all), I completely agree with this description.

This is not something to fight about in the War Zone. It's something to feel emotional about, no matter where you are right now in the weight management world. Chances are, if you're reading on this site, you're struggling with weight loss or maintenance rather than fat acceptance. However, this broadcast opens the hearts of several articulate fat people, and lets us see what the wounds and scars really look like. Maybe something like yours.

Hi Bkloots,

I am all for fat acceptance. I don't believe in judging others, and the overweight have been discriminated against for far too long. I would hope that self-acceptance would come with a desire to be as healthy as possible, but that's a tougher nut to crack than one would think. Depending on which study you read on which day, we hear all kinds of mixed messages about whether overweight/obesity is OK as long as your not diabetic, just a mechanical burden on joints, or a sure sentence to an early death. It is hard to know what to do no matter one's weight, but especially for the heavy.

I've certainly evolved on this issue -- When I was young I would essentially hide away for months while trying to crash diet my way to a new skinny person in order to "debut" back into society. You can imagine how well that worked. I was obsessed with my food issues, lack of discipline, self-loathing, etc.

Finally I got sick of it and decided I had spent too much of my life in the downward thought spiral. What did normal weight people think about all day? What could I do with all the mental space freed up by accepting myself?

I am still searching for the optimal health regimen that will also help me with some weight loss, but I don't think about it 24/7. I also don't hate myself for being my current size. Life is too short and there are too many amazing things to ponder and experience.

I suppose the counter argument is that we should shame the heavy as we have shamed the smokers, with the outcome that there are now fewer smokers. Unkindness aside, I don't think that would be effective because the obesity-health link (or lack thereof) is so dependent upon the individual involved and, so far, no one has proven there is a "second-hand obesity" rish to others. I know, I know, heavy people tend to have heavy friends, heavy parents pass on their habits to kids, but my weight will not harm the person sitting in the table next to me at a restaurant!

Just my two cents.

I am such a mix of emotions on this subject. I certainly struggled with my weight and was tormented by society. Without Atkins, I would be in the same boat as many of these fat-acceptance people: science has failed me, nothing works, I give up!

And certainly, any person should be treated with dignity.

On the other hand, I wasn't healthy. I had rising blood pressure and blood sugar along with my rising weight. Truly healthy eating has made me much healthier, in less pain, and able to overcome my current health crisis.

That is what throws a wrench into these stories, for me. There is a way out.

People should know that.

There is no doubt in my mind that all people deserve to be treated with respect. Discrimination against fat people is wrong, fat shaming is wrong, assuming that fat people are morally inferior is wrong. I don't much like myself when I find myself feeling like I am somehow better than all those fat people out there. I was once one of those fat people out there and I really was an OK person, just a fat OK person. Now I'm a thinner OK person.

I spent some time hanging around the fat acceptance movement as it exists in cyberspace. One thing that seemed clear to me is that the movement doesn't separate out the social justice aspects of the treatment of fat people from the science of fat and that finally caused me to stop frequentling or even supporting much of what I was reading on the fat acceptance websites.

This is such a complicated issue and this show did a great job of portraying some of these issues. There's a lot to think about.

Jean

Jean, you just articulated my discomfort with the movement.

Every human being surely deserves to be treated with respect, to be loved, to be valued for what s/he brings to the human table of skills and talents.

But, on the other hand, obesity carries so many health risks, if not today, surely in the future. Our joints did not evolve to efficiently carry weights 50, 100, 300 lbs more than a "normal" weight person. T2D is endemic in the obese population, and it's starting in childhood, a fact that is, or should be, shocking to all of us.

It's not my place to tell someone who is obese that s/he is endangering the chances for a long and healthy life, and that the risk of being wheelchair bound at a relatively young age increases with weight.

But people do need to hear it, and take it to heart. It's not enough for mainstream medicine to throw up its hands in despair, or to suggest that bariatric surgery could be a cure all for obese people.

There does need to be a revolution, as envisioned by Dr Atkins, where a truly healthy diet is embraced by the medical and nutrition community, and true assistance is given to people whose lives are endangered by the SAD.

Thanks Barb for sharing this!

I'm happy for Lindy West since she seems to be at peace with her weight.

I, on the other hand, have never ever been happy being morbidly obese. That would be the only part of my life I was unhappy about.

But I've never felt discriminated against for my weight or maybe I'm so thick skinned that I didn't perceive the discrimination? Who knows...

IMHO, we have to be comfortable in our own skin no matter what size or weight that is.

I think fat acceptance is a good thing. Bad diet acceptance... not so much. Resolving the bad diet thing will do a lot for your health and perhaps even take care of much or all of the fat issue. Jo recently posted this in her journal...

I agree with this 100%. We focus on the wrong thing. My doctor is always crediting my weight loss for all the wonderful improvements in my health over the past two years. I keep having to add that it all starts with what I eat. Not HOW MUCH I eat. It is WHAT I eat (and don't eat). Everything that has happened is a result of that. My doctor does not get it. I keep telling her that it all starts with the food I eat every time she says how amazed she is with what this weight loss has done for me. Maybe one day she will see that the problem and the solution is with the food.

I know 'fat acceptance' is a different matter. But I do see that movement as a disguise for 'poor diet acceptance'. If obesity wasn't the focal point, then perhaps we could see the forest through the trees and realize that the food we eat is the problem. Eating a poor diet every day should never be considered acceptable.

Something Gary Taubes said once, this is a paraphrase, but basically he said that something that concerned him was--what if the current paradigm of obesity being caused by too much food and not enough exercise--gluttony and sloth--were replaced by the Carbohydrate hypothesis, and instead of saying that fat people lacked the moral fiber to exercise and eat less, they started instead saying that they lacked the moral fiber to resist carbohydrate? If instead of judging the person ahead of me for having high calorie ice cream in his cart, I start judging him because he has high sugar ice cream? Quite aside from having no right to judge on a moral level--there are enough possible causes of obesity, that I can't really be certain that the ice cream is the problem. And just as an appetite for food in general can be seen as a symptom of the hormonal etc. drive towards weight gain--so could an appetite, or a craving for carbohydrate specifically.

That's why I believe I DON'T have the right to judge, teaser. Because I know the pull of carbs, and I know the forms of carbs that I am most pulled by.

It would behoove those who feel like they do have that right, like Dan Savage, to work a bit harder at understanding the way that carbs affect, not just own weight, but our brains.

My experience of the 'fat acceptance movement' is that they are really not very accepting. I want to try to learn to love and respect myself whatever weight I am, and naively thought that this is what the movement is about. It isn't. I belonged to an online group for a while, until I admitted that I ate low carb and wanted to be a lower weight for health reasons. I was completely rejected by the group members, everyone would no longer respond to any posts I made, and a moderator put a post up about what the accepted way to eat for fat acceptance was (moderation). So much for that.

Regardless of the above, I think fat acceptance is almost impossible to achieve while the world continues to tell fat people in no uncertain terms that they are bad, lazy, ugly, stupid etc. I try to positive and accepting of myself during my quest for health, but at this size it is really hard, particularly for a woman to fight the constant hatred of the fat from society.

This was what I thought about 5 minutes into looking at web sites for fat acceptance.

As a heavy person all my life, I thought that accentuating the positive of any size, sounded good. But what I got from the community online was something like "we should be able to eat and live like anyone else, but we get fat, and so what " ... it just looked like bad diet acceptance. No thanks.

Interesting experience. It doesn't surprise me. Folks who accept how they are (what they're putting into their mouths, never mind their size) rarely want to accept something different especially if it challenges their paradigm. I have a few friends on the larger size, many of whom are far more industrious than I
I also used to have a friend that looked like a Barbie doll and whenever we went out, I was 100% invisible. Male waiters looked at her, talked to her and I was simply not there. She wore tight and revealing sweaters, had the thick and long blond hair, etc. I'll never forget thinking how many people feel like that ALL THE TIME. I also remember getting more respect when I was married than when I was single.

People are such idiots. Seeing different as a means to feel superior is as old as the hills. Now that I've lost weight, I get some un-wanted attention from men. This morning while getting coffee, a guy just looked me up and down, real skeezy like. I asked him politely and real chipper, "are you a hick"? before leaving with my coffee. LOL That felt good. I think we can appreciate each other without being rude. Sorry I'm rambling. Regardless of weight, I think we all have so many thoughts firing through our brains at any given time, it's just SO important we see the soul, not the body.

I tried to stay sympathetic through this podcast, but happened to listen to it after one from Nutritional Weight and Wellness about How to Commit to a Healthy Lifestyle. The two presenters had lost 90 and 50 pounds (without using Speed! And only moderately LC). In their podcast, They mentioned another new study that shows Lifestyle, not just bad luck, has a big impact on cancer risk. This new one is from Harvard Public health, but there are others where diet, exercise and alcohol are found to increase risk. http://triblive.com/news/healthnow/...-risk-lifestyle

So I agree with Ken and others that her position was more "poor diet acceptance", and we, the critical observer, can't even mention health risks. At 28, we should just accept that her blood sugar and blood pressure is OK and she has the right to continue to drink beer with soft pretzels. And if the government ultimately has to pick up the medical costs of lifestyle choices, we should accept that too. I read both the praise and critical reviews of her book, and unlike Dr Freedhoff, this one did not make my summer reading list.