week was Body Confidence Week in the UK, a social media marketing campaign led by Dove (obviously). I watched on Sunday because the UK body positivity organization Shape Your Culture got the hashtag #fatisnotafeeling to trend on Twitter in response to Facebook adding “fat” and “ugly” as emotions for status updates.
And then, obviously, yesterday I saw this:
If you won’t want to read it, and that i don’t blame you if so, it’s 4chan’s /pol board getting offended over the concept that body positivity exists and trying to find techniques to troll two body positivity guest speakers in a college in Hartford. “Fat bitches can not be permitted to tell people being fat is healthy or attractive,” the OP opines. “In 2 yrs they’re going to elect one of their own President,” another user complains, doing a great job of pretending it fucking matters how much body fat Hillary Clinton has (it didn’t matter when it was Taft, obviously, but WHATEVER FACTS). “Crush all of them with logic,” another responds, “logic” being understood to be proclaiming that body fat puts you at risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and stroke.
Which are true statements, but are not the reality inasmuch because they are definately not as being a whole and finish representation of fitness and well-being. It is not as simple as fat = unhealthy, as athletes Louise Green and Wendy Welsher can tell you. “Fat and fit” is a real thing – research has suggested that moderately obese people live longer than non-obese people, and that when an obese person’s blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar are within a healthy range, they are at no greater risk of developing cardiovascular disease or cancer than other people. Quite simply, fatness by itself isn’t a risk. Lifestyle is really a risk, and fatness is actually not a very good indicator of lifestyle choices, the fact is. Human bodies are complex. Imagine that!
To these incredibly smart and critically sharp (read: neither incredibly smart nor critically sharp) people on 4chan, though, none of these facts matter and the answer to all female fatness is straightforward: Stop eating, fatties! It just takes a little self-control! Why don’t you have self-control? God, you are a useless individual.
This whole thing sent me into indignation mode. Some people think I’m fat plus some individuals don’t. I’d a whole mob of people saying that the cellulite on my small thighs in some of my self-portraits was burning their eyes from their skull (Hopefully generally is true). I’ve said enough that in my opinion, I don’t care – I’m 5’10”, 176 pounds, 25.3 % excess fat, I ran a marathon at a 12:25 pace last week and never once felt out-of-breath, I like lifting heavy shit, I mainly want to improve my balance and flexibility. That’s my body the bottom line is.
But all the fitness shit I actually do, I do half since it makes me antsy not to be doing something challenging with my body system, and half since i love eating more than I love my boyfriend (i.e. if he told me to not eat so much it’d be over) and working out is conducive to eating a great deal. It’s not to state that I would purposefully eat less basically wasn’t exercising a lot – LOL, yeah right guys – but when you consume a lot, it’s nice to have somewhere for all that excess energy to go. This means that I did a four-month marathon training program and didn’t lose any weight and didn’t shed more pounds than the usual few tenths of the percent of my body system fat.
I stopped dieting in February. I had been only dieting because 1) when you’re into fitness, people Want you to track your macros and a pair of) I had been within the habit of dieting from the time I was a younger, less secure person. I eat everything now and do not think about it much except after i haven’t eaten enough – and that i will easily notice, because I feel sick, dizzy, and weak. That whole “nothing tastes as good as thin feels” thing is bullshit. The fact is that nothing tastes badly as low-fat, low-carb desserts, nothing tastes as good as a ripe mango or perhaps a really fantastic torte, and absolutely nothing feels just like either a climax or whenever your clavicles happen to be tight and also you crack them into place.
And nothing – absolutely nothing – is more fun than using a delicious meal with people you like. Or on your own. Every religion which i are conscious of has a food ritual: Christians have communion, Jews have seders and kosher laws and Shabbat meals, Buddhists fast and provide food and have chants for food, and Hindus and Muslims have fasts and feasts. Most religions have some kind of prayer for meals and frequently different prayers for different eating occasions. If religion is exactly what decreases towards the core of human faith and belief and emotion and imagination, human faith and belief and emotion and imagination have always had a special spot for eating.
That’s why I hate it when someone tells people to give up eating, or to eat less. No, sir. Preparing, sharing, consuming, and savoring meals are part of what makes humans human. For me – and this is just my opinion – dieting makes people anxious because they are excluding themselves from a beautiful, emotional, sustaining a part of human existence. Being thinner than you presently are won’t get back the meals you might have shared with your pals or even the pleasure of smelling chocolate wafting from an oven in a bakery that you simply passed by because you’re dieting. It’s not self-control, it’s masochism.
It’s self-control and self-awareness to know what your system needs and give that to yourself, to not deprive yourself of food because some dick on the internet states that health is a monolithic concept that’s necessarily exactly the same for you personally as it is for him. Never, ever, ever, stop eating, and fuck the body-shamers.
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