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  #1   ^
Old Sun, Mar-27-22, 14:30
bkloots's Avatar
bkloots bkloots is online now
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Posts: 10,147
 
Plan: LC--Atkins
Stats: 195/162/150 Female 62in
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Progress: 73%
Location: Kansas City, MO
Default A Frontier of Justice

I'm posting the following essay, which now appears on my blog, as an alert to those here whom I appreciate so much for your courage and encouragement, your stories of success and not-so, your advice and information. We are here to celebrate each other, and I'm thrilled to be part of this community. You will see that I've seen another light--possibly in reference to the people who are NOT here. The line between prejudice and practical considerations may be difficult to see. But I hope we will continue to offer compassion, at least, and ordinary human rights to people of every size in our communities and our world.

A FRONTIER OF JUSTICE

How and when the book came to be in my Kindle library I don’t exactly know. Perhaps I noticed the bright red cover during a search for something else. My curiosity piqued, I clicked and bought it and forgot about it. So there it was, waiting, when I found myself “between books.”

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon turned out to be a stunning eye-opener. It’s about living, or trying to, as a conspicuously, immensely FAT person. According to Wikipedia, the author is a known podcaster and activist. You can look her up. Her passionate and well-documented book, published in 2020, details the issues confronting noticeably FAT people every day of their lives, beginning, in many cases, as children bullied in school. At no time and in no place, as Gordon recounts in detail, does a FAT person find empathy, accommodation, and care.

These days we are bombarded with conversation about civil rights afforded to people with differences ranging from color to gender identity to citizenship status to dis/ability. What we do not hear, let alone see, is the universal discrimination in every possible category against people described in medicine as obese or morbidly obese, in fashion as plus-size, and bluntly in everyday encounters as FAT. We watch them warily as they walk toward our row of seats on airplanes. We peer into their grocery carts. We look sideways at them as they eat a dish of Dairy Queen smaller than the one we ourselves are slurping, wondering how those calories are adding up on their enormous bodies.“Them” I say, for we non-FAT people may often be thinking, in our pleasantly zaftig self-satisfaction, “At least I don’t look like them.”

Reading Gordon’s well-documented chapters lighted up my brain with evidence of the manifold methods by which FAT people are rendered less than human by…everybody. Yes, everybody.

I used to think I had a dog in this hunt. From adolescence on, I’ve wrestled with what I call my “weight management issue.” That is, I have a strong hereditary tendency to accumulate fat on my body. I’ve been so successful with “weight management” that few people who know me would ever suspect that I consider myself a FAT person contained in a temporarily non-FAT body. At the age of 75, I have acquired dietary facts and habits, ingrained and sustained over literally decades, aimed at keeping that FAT person from ever showing up. Over the years, I’ve offered an educated and encouraging voice to other people who share what we call our “weight loss journey” at whatever stage we find ourselves. I have worked hard at not being a FAT person. What was my personal motivation? Well, that’s another story.

What I’ve missed, however, in my celebration of successes and my forgiveness of failures in this lifelong challenge, is this: being FAT makes no one less worthy of respect for their human dignity, appreciation for their talents and capabilities, and insistence on their civil rights, whether or not they are able to “fix” themselves as I (deeply, secretly) believe they should (read: like I DID!) In my heart, I have remained a Mean Girl to FAT people, oblivious to their human worth as is.

I call this blindness, in myself and almost everyone else, an unacknowledged frontier of human rights activism and justice–in employment, medical care, education, transportation, social and romantic expectations, and so much more. Next time you catch yourself glancing furtively at a FAT person, examine your thoughts. Like me, you may have missed the most pernicious prejudice of all that pervade American life today.
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  #2   ^
Old Mon, Mar-28-22, 06:27
cotonpal's Avatar
cotonpal cotonpal is online now
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Posts: 5,283
 
Plan: very low carb real food
Stats: 245/125/135 Female 62
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Progress: 109%
Location: Vermont
Default

All people should be treated with kindness and not judged. Our biases and assumptions, many of them unconscious or at least unexamined, are not based on reason but often stem from our own sense of superiority. Becoming aware of them is the first step in getting rid of them. I once had a bmi of 43. Now my bmi is "normal". I am still the same person, just no longer fat. Losing weight does not make me morally superior.
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  #3   ^
Old Fri, Apr-01-22, 12:30
Grav Grav is offline
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Posts: 1,469
 
Plan: Banting
Stats: 302/187/187 Male 175cm
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Progress: 100%
Location: New Zealand
Default

I'm perfectly okay with the use of the word "fat" as a descriptor for someone's physical condition, where it actually applies. I wasn't so much bothered by people telling me that I was fat, because it was objectively true. I was more bothered by the way in which some people would tell me, as if they felt I had consciously chosen to be that way, that I had made the deliberate decision to be fat, that I wasn't taking responsibility for myself, that it was all my fault. Because that of course, was false.

It's one thing to observe a person's fatness from a passing glance. It's another thing entirely to assume you know their complete life story on the basis of that same single glance, the reasons for their fatness, their personal set of circumstances, and what they have or haven't been doing about it.
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Old Sun, Apr-10-22, 05:43
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Benay Benay is offline
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Plan: Protein Power/Atkins
Stats: 250/167/175 Female 5 feet 6 inches
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Progress: 111%
Location: Prescott, Arizona, USA
Default

Thankyou Barbara
It reminds me of a story I heard many years ago at a medical ethics conference
An obese woman in the ER fell off her bed and was left on the floor to die
The staff thought they would hurt their backs by picking her up
but they claimed she died of acute alcoholism
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Old Wed, May-04-22, 10:50
WereBear's Avatar
WereBear WereBear is online now
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Plan: EpiPaleo/Primal/LowOx
Stats: 220/125/150 Female 67
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Progress: 136%
Location: USA
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by bkloots
A FRONTIER OF JUSTICE
..

I call this blindness, in myself and almost everyone else, an unacknowledged frontier of human rights activism and justice–in employment, medical care, education, transportation, social and romantic expectations, and so much more. Next time you catch yourself glancing furtively at a FAT person, examine your thoughts. Like me, you may have missed the most pernicious prejudice of all that pervade American life today.


Yes, it is, and well-said.

My only complaint about the movement's many good points are the people who dismiss the health concerns. Yes, a person can be healthy at any size, but only if that size was arrived at in a healthy way, no?

Metabolic health can be deteriorating under the surface while all the labs come back okay... especially when a person is younger.

That's when getting the simplistic fat-phobia message out of the medical profession works to get everyone better healthcare, and actually make them better.
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