Fat has four letters...

Have you seen the Nightline Face-Off "Is it OK to be Fat?" I watched the 20 minute Nightline summary of the event, posted over on Roni's Weigh and plan on watching the whole shabang soon but I've got the jist of it pretty much now. A lot of people are voicing their opinions on the subject and I've been chewing on my thoughts on it for pretty much the whole day now and want to get them out there.

Back in my early 20s I was a pretty active girl. I worked in NYC and would, weather permitting, walk from the PATH station from New Jersey to the office, 2 miles away (so 4 miles daily). After work when it was nice outside I would walk another 4 miles or so down to the village or the lower east side to go to the parks. On the weekends I would go out with my friends to bars and dance all night long. I could jog up five stories to my friends walk up apartment and not be too winded to speak. I could run the 10 blocks between my apartment and the train station when I was late for work. I did this while weighing 200 pounds. I was fat, yes, but I was healthy. I was more active and healthier than some of my friends who weighed significantly less than I did.

A few years ago I had my gall bladder removed due to a horrible horrible attack of gall stones that almost killed me. After the surgery a doctor came in to talk to me about my health and life style and explain to me what I needed to do now that I was without the organ. But when we talked and he found out that I exercised regularly, that I'd been a vegetarian for years and that I don't tend toward sugary sweet foods (as confirmed by my mother, a practicing nurse) he said that I had probably avoided getting sick for a few years because I was so healthy. I was 240 pounds at that point. 

In MeMe Roth's world I am not and can not be healthy because I was fat and not just fat but obese. 

But I was. Am I still healthy now? No, that's the purpose of this blog, but I was and can be again and I can be while still being over weight. I will never be as skinny as MeMe Roth is and you know what, I don't want to be. If her vision of a perfect world is that all women ate just 1300 calories a day (or 1600 if they jog) then that's a world that I don't want to live in. 

I want to be healthy but I don't want to be skinny, in my mind the two aren't always analogous. But even saying that I've always had a hard time supporting FA (fat acceptance) and HAEW (Health at Every Weight) because I'd wrongly seen the two as fat promotion, but reading the comments over at Jezebel and other places got me thinking about what the two are really about. 

 I think fat acceptance is all about the depathologizing of fatness, not about a dismissal of health concerns related to diet and exercise.  - pichou @ Jezebel

Do I think there's a problem with the way that this country eats? Yes. Do I think obesity is an epidemic? No. I think the causes are endemic and THAT is what should be addressed. I am obese because I have an eating disorder. I am unhealthy because of this eating disorder. I am not unhealthy and do not have an eating disorder because of my obesity. Do you see the difference? 


Shaming fat will not help anyone, ever. Embracing health (mental and physical) will. And health? It isn't always a size 0.