Marilyn, I love the idea of celebrating people who aim to celebrate their current embodiment. I have a lovely exercise for supersized bodies tape Kelly Bliss made with Lynn McAfee
https://kellybliss.com/store/product_details.php?item_id=162
where Lynn talks about getting IN TOUCH with your body by actually touching it before moving it, particularly the parts that you may feel alienated by, and respecting your body as it is right now. She addresses the issue that “my body size may change and that’s all right,” But her point, very gently demonstrated, is to value all parts of our bodies as they are now.

At one point she talks about celebrating a large belly and the strength it requires to move it in daily life. I thought of that yesterday while balancing a heavy box against my own large belly to heft it to where I wanted it, using my body as a counterweight. Later I thought about it again while one my shy, formerly feral girl cats climbed up, with little anxious meows to rest on the very top of my belly, purring at the warmth, half nervous and half really wanting to be held. The top of my belly was a destination for her.

I very much appreciate how the fat acceptance movement has taught me to value and celebrate the power, the warmth, the substance that I embody today.

No, I don’t celebrate gaining weight. I oppose weight-gain goals just as vehemently as I oppose weight-loss goals. I joined the NAAFA board several years ago with the goal of convincing that organization to adopt an official policy against feederism. Here’s the current version: http://tinyurl.com/y9lwe6j.

While I’m aware that research data links a stable weight to lower risk of morbidity/mortality (illness and death), I don’t celebrate stable weights for myself or others. I can’t really imagine a situation where that would happen.

I find this urge to control or change what we weigh unpleasant and damaging. I deem that it participates inevitably in beliefs that I oppose.

What I do celebrate is weight diversity. I think it’s natural and wonderful that human beings come in so many different sizes and shapes and colors and genders and sexualities and abilities. I don’t expect everyone to be the same skin color. I don’t expect everyone to conform to a 2-gender system. I don’t expect everyone to be able to run a marathon or even to be able to walk. I certainly don’t expect everyone to weigh the same, any more than I’d expect us all to be similar in height.

I also celebrate people who aim to celebrate their current embodiment, whatever weight that happens to be, fat or thin. I imagine that such people expand the liveable space for all of us. (And if our bodies change as we go through life, I imagine we would still celebrate our current embodiment, not the fact that our bodies happened to change.)

I appreciate that people who lose weight anticipate being congratulated and that pretty much everyone they meet will readily offer such congratulations. I do not.

You said that you would be unable to share anyone’s celebration fo losing weight. Would you similarly be unable to share someone’s celebration of gaining weight, or of maintaining exactly the same weight?

I think a lot about thinking the way that someone who came back from paralysis thinks a lot about moving. I still remember the extra energy I had when I was a religious fanatic, and my observation is that, as a fanatic, I had learned how to switch off the part of my brain that weighed information, analyzed it and made decisions. The decisions had been made for me and all I had to do was carry them out. There’s a Brecht quote along the lines of “When a good soldier gets an order, he gets a hard on. When he carries out that order, he comes.”

Getting my brain going again took work. But I would never go back. Ditto with the food craziness. If my body tells me something, I listen.

Last night on the local news, one of the young female anchors started talking about how, “after the holidays you might come home and feel hungry,” and how you should fight this temptation to eat when you’re hungry. She went on about this for a couple of minutes (“we all know what works, eat less, move more & etc., & etc.”), sharing her eating disorder with the viewing audience.

After yelling at the TV, “Here’s a novel idea, when you come home hungry–eat something” I turned it off.

We live in a sea of misinformation, it’s a miracle any of us get out of Brainwash Land and into Fluff Dry City.

I ask because of personal experience. A relative of mine went on a “lifestyle change” program several years ago. She changed the way she eats, exercised a lot more, and talked more openly about a lot of hard emotional things. Her blood pressure went down, her energy level went up, and she lost a lot of weight. She was thrilled, and talked a lot about how it wasn’t really about weight loss, it was about health and lifestyle.

Five years later, she is still in that program. She is still exercising; her blood pressure is still down; the other benefits still accrue. But, she slowly regained a good bit of the weight she had initially lost. And as that has happened, she has become more stressed, more singleminded, and has been restricting her calories more and more to try to stave off the weight gain. She no longer talks about the lifestyle change or the benefits she still sees from exercise– she talks about how she needs to lose the weight again. Oh, and how she’s starting to have memory issues which of course can’t at all be related to the fact that she is eating less than 1,000 calories/day now.

And that is what I see most often in other places too. That exercise, in and of itself, for its own sake, is not enough; nutrition, in and of itself, for its own sake, is not enough. Weight loss always seems to be the most important part of the equation, and the benefit that everyone is truly pursuing.

That is where my objection lies, and what I take from Marilyn Wann’s comments as well– that the fact that wellness can be for its own sake, and does not have to entail weight loss, gets drowned out. Even in communities that are supposedly focused on that very insight.

I don’t actually care what anyone weighs or whether people’s weight changes. In my experience, my own weight and other people’s weights change a lot over the course of a lifetime. I care whether people *care* that they’ve lost weight and I care when people identify the change in weight as a thing that directly causes other desired changes. I have a deep level of skepticism that when people eat differently or exercise differently or adopt any number of other behaviors that it’s useful to attribute 100% (or even any percent) of whatever benefits a person may be seeing to weight loss. As an ethical matter, I am not willing to say that the *only* way for any person to enjoy some benefit (improved health, various subcategories of health measures, etc.) is to lose weight because as we presumably have all noticed and perhaps experienced ourselves, longterm/lasting weight loss is highly unlikely. I don’t deny that some people manage it, just that given its rarity, I’d rather recommend to people that they go catch a unicorn because *that’s* the only way to health improvements.

So, Patsy, I think it’s perfectly lovely to have a goal of improving health measures, so long as people recognize that these numbers are not always available for total control and so long as we don’t imagine weight loss is necessary for reaching such ends.

Patsy, I can celebrate with you any of the other changes you describe in your life but I’m completely unwilling to share your celebration of losing weight.

I opened my post above with the preface about the moment of history that we occupy because I believe that if we lived in a moment of history when it is less prevalent to blame all bad things on fat and attribute all good things to weight loss, then we wouldn’t need to have this discussion. But in that lovely moment, we also might not need to spend time arguing against weight-based prejudice and discrimination, either!

Well, I’m sorry that you disapprove of my difference of opinion, Marilyn. I still support the goals of the fat-acceptance movement — loving one’s body no matter what, respect for all sizes, not blaming fat for all evils — but I will not stick my head in the sand and deny any connection between weight and health or people’s right to make their own informed choices about their bodies.

Lynn, I totally agree — weight loss is HARD, and harder for some than others. I know that from personal experience and I sure as heck haven’t figured it out. I think one thing The Biggest Loser shows is that diet and exercise DOES work — but who has six hours a day to spend at the gym, personal trainers, catered 1,200 calorie a day meals, exclusion from temptation, medical supervision, group support, weekly televised weigh-ins and a $250,000 carrot?

Debbie, that is a really good point about activism being somewhat extremist by definition. I can see how dedication to a political cause requires unbending commitment to one’s principles.

I guess, for me, it’s about trying to find balance — a realistic, positive, healthy, self-loving way of living in this body and this crazy world.

First to Stef: Yes, you’re right, it really wasn’t a dialogue. I was certainly hoping Lynne would continue the conversation in comments, but I could have used a better phrase, like her “time-lapse” conversation.

I think it’s useful to distinguish what’s activism, what’s community, and what’s personal choice. I disagree with Patti that activism is best served by rational analysis: activism is best served by passion and commitment. Activism, by its nature, is at least somewhat about extremism, and I completely understand why fat activists don’t support dieting, WLS, or other weight loss measures.

Community is about mutual support and like-mindedness, shared interests, and trust. Some people need their communities to be in agreement on basic issues, others thrive on conflict. One is not better than the other. We choose the communities that feed us, we leave the communities that don’t. Again, I think this is fine. I’ve been in many communities in my life, and expect to be in more before I’m through.

Personal choice is just that: it’s personal. If I make a personal choice that goes against my previous activism, or isn’t in accord with my community, I have to expect to be criticized for that choice. I believe it’s possible to criticize someone’s choices, and even to decide that I don’t want to hear their arguments, and still support their right to make that choice their way. The example I always use is that in the 1970s, when I was a draft counselor, I used my knowledge of the military medical regulations to help a friend get into the army, for his own reasons. Many other draft counselors would have made a different choice: I don’t think they would have been wrong. I know that, for who I was then and still am, I did the right thing.

Finally, Marilyn, I personally like “size acceptance” and “fat celebration.” I don’t find them mutually exclusive.

I’m currently on a serious binge of embracing exercise as a tool for achieving some health goals. It turns out that it’s having the side benefit of helping me lose weight slowly, and I’m both happy and not-surprised about that. More importantly, my blood pressure is down. My blood sugar (which has always been good but has started rising in the last few years) is down. I’m sleeping better. I have more energy. And yes, I’ve lost five or ten pounds in the last few months. I really have a hard time seeing the whole thing as anything other than a great big bucket of win.

I guess I really don’t understand why fat activist means “you must stay fat” rather than “it’s OK to stay fat.”