I recently encountered a statement along the lines of “No one has ever been killed by fat hatred.”

SeaFATtle’s A Place at the Table Memorials* asks us to reconsider if such a statement is true:

“A Place At the Table” honors the memory of people whose lives were needlessly shortened by size prejudice, discrimination based on weight, or fear of fat, and whose deaths were caused (or significantly contributed to) by such factors. Some of these people include:

• those who have died as a result of weight-loss dieting, including the immediate effects of crash diets, as well as the long-term harm caused by yo-yo dieting;
• those who have died from side effects and complications from weight-loss drugs like “fen/phen”;
• those who have died from weight-loss surgery and its complications, after having their health ruined and their lives shortened by its long-term effects;
• those who have died from eating disorders, which happen as a direct consequence of this culture’s phobia about fat and the resulting pressure to be thin at any cost;
• those who have been misdiagnosed, or received misguided or inadequate medical care, by practitioners and insurance companies who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see beyond their size and treat the real problem in time;
• those who had been so mistreated and abused by the medical profession because of their weight that they lost all faith in it, and so failed to go for diagnosis and treatment for a problem until it was too late;
• those who were refused medical insurance because of their weight, or were denied jobs because of the size prejudice of potential employers, and were therefore unable to afford necessary medical treatment that could have prolonged or saved their lives;
• those who died in abusive relationships, whose abusers focused on their weight or used it as an excuse to continue their battering;
• those who, in moments of pain and despair when the fatphobic ridicule and rejection became too much to bear, have taken their own lives

The exhibit has 13 memorials thus far.  Each one is heartbreaking. Here is Kelly Yeomans’:

Kelly Yeomans was a thirteen-year-old girl who lived in Allenton, Derbyshire, a working-class town northeast of London. People described her as kind and caring, bubbly and charming. She played the tambourine in the Salvation Army Band. She visited with the elderly people at a local senior citizens’ home.

Kelly was teased and bullied by her schoolmates about her weight for years. They called her “fatty,” put salt in her lunch, and dumped her clothes in the garbage. Kelly tried to escape the abuse, to avoid giving the other kids the opportunity. She would wait until everyone else had gone before she’d leave gym class, so no one would see her in her gym clothes. She told school authorities that she was being harassed at school and at home, but nothing was done.

In the summer of 1997, the harassment got worse. For several nights running, a group of mo[r]e than a dozen teenagers gathered outside her family’s house. They shouted taunts, made jokes about lard and fat, and called her “Smelly Kelly.” They started tossing eggs at the house, and someone threw a package of butter through a window.

Kelly told her parents, “It’s nothing to do with you, but I can’t stand it anymore. I’m going to take an overdose.” Her family knew she was unhappy, but they didn’t believe she really meant it…but she did. On the night of September 28, Kelly Yeomans took an overdose of painkillers. Her parents found her dead in her bed the next morning.

*The site is currently down, but I’m linking to the Internet Archive’s cached version(s). Not all links may work, but I will update with a current link as soon as/if one becomes available.

Again from Pattie Thomas’ “Top 10 Things I’m Tired of Discussing” (PDF) (well worth a read if you haven’t already):

Number 8
Whether it is fair to compare other stigmatized groups to stigma placed on fat people.

African Americans have a history of slavery and oppression that shapes their experiences in a way that no other group in this country can share. Native Americans have a history of cultural and literal genocide that no other group in this country can share. Homosexuals have a history of repression, criminalization and medicalization that few other groups have experienced. Women, poor people, various ethnic groups and so forth all have unique experiences as social groups that shape their lives and limit their life chances. These differences in culture and history create differences in group experience that both enriches and limits members of those groups.

But all these groups have stigmatization in common. The social mechanisms of stigmatization are shared with any group or persons that face a cultural belief that they are not human.
Making comparisons between fat people’s experiences and the more well-known experiences of other stigmatized groups is useful in order to illustrate how stigma works. One of the most insidious aspects of fat stigma is the assertion that fat people can help being fat and therefore are worthy of scorn. I reject this belief and often use comparisons with other groups to illustrate that the plight we face as fat people has parallels to other groups.

Making that comparison an issue because it somehow is insensitive to the unique experiences of other groups is a quintessential straw man or red herring. If someone wants to debate on that level it is obvious that they really don’t want to address the issue at hand and just want the discussion to end.

[And just my own afterthought. I believe fat hate is the last acceptable prejudice. Note I did not say "the last prejudice." There's a qualifier there.]

When I feel like a bad practitioner (or even non-practitioner) of HAES, I try to keep in mind four things:

1. Mental health is a part of health. Kind of duh when worded that way, but (IIRC) I saw this first articulated by fillyjonk. It was one of those eureka moments. Avoiding the crazymaking dieting causes is priority number one in trying to be mentally healthy. Not stressing is another good strategy. Trying not to get depressed about things beyond my control — like my size — is another.

2. I don’t smoke. I drink maybe one glass of wine a week. I don’t do drugs. Avoiding smoking, drinking (to excess, I’m guessing), and drugging are all higher on the pursuit of health checklist than avoiding junk food. (Source coming soon … I hope … if I can find it in my labyrinth of bookmarks.) And if you do smoke? I know how challenging it is to quit. E-mail me if you’d like support on that front. Definitely not judging anyone who smokes. But the only FA blogger who I know for certain smokes also eats way healthier than I do and exercises more/more consistently. So it’s a trade-off, isn’t it? We must suit ourselves.

3. “Exercise” can be a dirty word to those of us tortured in gym class and encouraged to diet. Even though I use the word, I think of it as activity. I bet a lot of guilty-feeling fat people are doing more activity than they think. IMO, activity should be construed as broadly as possible. And I’m not yet convinced (see point 4) that activity has much to do with health outside of, you know, making you feel better/more confident/less stressed. Ultimately it may be just another way to attend to mental health.

4. Health is probably mostly/all genetic. I got to say, I was flabbergasted when I first read Pattie Thomas say in “Top 10 Things I’m Tired of Discussing” (PDF) that lifestyle probably doesn’t determine health. I made a note to research that further, but Junkfood Science’s analysis of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) Dietary Modification Trial went a long way toward convincing me.

In the end, guilt and worry about what steps you do/don’t take to be healthy could be the worse thing for your health.

Secrets of the naturally male …

Secrets of the naturally white …

Secrets of the naturally straight …

Coming soon to the TLC channel?

Whenever I feel adrift in the fat acceptance community and tempted to go to war against my body, these are the points I return to and that keep me anchored:

1. Fat people eat the same amount as thin people do. This is a fairly radical idea, but well documented in Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin. Junkfood Science talks about it, too. My mind often comes back to the woman who performed a size zero diet experiment and who pre-diet consumed around 2500 calories a day. The obesity experts would call that a good eating plan to get/stay fat. Yet, she is not fat.
2. Fat people are not fat because they under-exercise. In Glen Gaesser’s Calorie Myths lecture in 2007, he mentioned the results of a study that showed the difference in weight between the least active subjects and the most active was five to seven pounds. Laura Fraser, author of Losing It, puts the figure at four to seven.
3. Fat people are not fat because of psychological problems. From Rethinking Thin, pp. 93-94:

   The conclusion reached by Stunkard and others who were doing similar experiments was unmistakable: There is no psychiatric pathology that spells obesity. And there is no response to food that is not shared by people who are not fat. You can’t say you got fat because you, unlike thin people, are unable to resist temptation. Both fat and thin people are tempted by the sweet smell of brownies or the sight of a dish of creamy cold ice cream. You can’t say you got fat because there is a lot of stress in your life. Thin people are just as likely to eat under stress. You can’t say it was because you used food as a reward. If that is the reason, then why do thin people, who also use food as a reward, stay thin?

4. Fat does not equal unfit. Covered extensively in the Fatosphere, plus see the last paragraph under “About this blog”
5. Normal eating has zip to do with calories, carb count, and fat grams. See the Ellyn Satter quote here.
6. Fat is not an aberration; it’s a variation. Again, from Rethinking Thin (forgive me; it’s sort of become my FA bible), p. 115:

   The Rockefeller researchers explained their observations in one of their papers: “Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this study was that the removal of obesity by means of caloric deprivation led to behavioral alterations similar to those observed in the starvation of non-obese individuals. It is entirely possible that weight reduction, instead of resulting in a normal state for obese patients, results in an abnormal state resembling that of starved non-obese individuals.”

   Eventually, more than fifty people went through the months-long process of living at the hospital and losing weight, and every one of them had these physical and psychological signs of starvation, Hirsch reports.

7. My most successful weight loss attempt killed my gall bladder. Even though for years doctors had recited the risk factors for gall bladder disease as “forty, fat, and female,” they never factored in the most important part of that equation. Fat females in their 40s are highly likely to have dieted repeatedly. Dieting is linked to gall bladder disease. I know we are expected to function without it, but I think the removal of my gall bladder has made digestion more difficult for me. If for nothing else, I vow not to harm my body and its organs again by dieting — a “prescription” that’s never been proven safe or effective yet ironically is looked at with inexplicable forgiveness when it comes to side effects and complications.
8. Exercising for fun and eating normally — NOT for weight loss — makes me feel good.