Friday Food For Thought

I'm a big fan of Jezebel-in fact, if I had the ability to blog while doing my other full-time job, I totally would want to blog for them or Bitch Magazine--and I tend to link back to a lot of their posts on this little blog o' mine.  Today, during my afternoon brain-break, an article on the argument between the "you're fat because you aren't good enough" and the "you're fact because it's what your body was built for" weight schools-of-thought caught my attention, as I'm not only someone who grew-up with family members who struggled with their body image and struggled with my own before I actually had any weight gain to speak of (!), but also find that "fat hate" is as much a social justice issue as feminism is.  I'm also interested in the issue because I'm currently trying to get my activity level back to what I feel is best for me after several years of eating my feelings and attempting to deal with other foundational issues first.  Perhaps this means I'll lose a bit of the weight I've gained or perhaps not.  To me, it's somewhat beside the point (on most days), though as you can see from the comments featured in the article, it's certainly important to some out there what other people's weights are.

Anyhow, you should definitely read the post, regardless of where you stand on "will power," if only to hear a very strong voice speak about her struggles.  But I'll go ahead and share the paragraph that struck me the most:

If you're a regular reader of mine and you feel like you've heard everything in this post a million, billion times, you have my apologies. I am so sick of making these arguments, I cannot even tell you. Unfortunately, people can't even get it through their heads that diets don't work — despite both a mountain of scientific evidence to that effect and a friggin' "results not typical" disclaimer on every ad — let alone that it is possible to be fat and healthy, that it is equally possible to be thin and unhealthy, that correlation does not equal causation, that there is strong evidence that obesity is highly heritable, that calories in/calories out is a ludicrously simplistic equation unless you think human beings are Bunsen burners, and that, above all, fat people are human beings. Which means we can hear you. And our continued fatness is not a personal attack on you or our country or our healthcare system, but the result of complex factors science is only beginning to understand, and in very many cases, something we have already tried our damnedest to change.