If only Fat People Knew they were Fat, they'd Do Something to Stop it.

Today I find myself mildly irked by this article over at the Telegraph urging us to "tell people they are fat". As if fat people don’t already know they’re fat.

GPs and other health professionals should tell people they are fat rather than obese, a health minister said today.

While I agree with a number of other people in the fatosphere that the word fat is preferable to the word obese, in this case they’re doing it for all the wrong reasons. The fatosphere prefers the word fat because is de-medicalises fat bodies, and does something to pervert fat people as being seen as “the other”. Instead of being “the obese” we become fat people. And at least then we are people.

But no, this particular health minister thinks we should be calling people fat to motivate them to lose weight.

Stressing she was speaking in a personal capacity, she told the BBC: ''If I look in the mirror and think I am obese I think I am less worried than if I think I am fat.''

Now I’m all for the use of the word fat to replace to word obese, but if that’s supposed to motivate me to get thin then they are very much barking up the wrong tree. I’m far enough into my fat acceptance that most of the time the word fat doesn’t bother me. It’s simply a descriptor. Other times it becomes a source of pride.

This minister wants to make out that fat bodies are still wrong and should be changed, made more normal. I’m all for using the word fat, but please let’s use it for the right reasons.

Contrary to what this woman seems to think, people who are actually fat know they are fat. All this “guideline” or whatever it is she seems to be issuing is going to achieve is increasing the anxiety levels of people classified “overweight” or “obese” by the BMI but don’t look it. In other words this is designed to punish people who are otherwise normal but are classified as “other” by a piece of faulty statistics.

Admittedly what this woman has said is on a personal level. What worried me is that people with these kinds of opinions are in our government, and potentially have the power to turn their personal opinions and prejudices into law.

This is definitely one to keep an eye on.

Reality Check

While on my daily rounds of the Fatosphere, I stumbled upon this post over at Round Shape.

The language we use to describe ourselves, especially when it comes to weight and age is very leading. We say "I am xxlbs" and "I am xx years old". It's almost as if there's a silent "currently" between the word am and the number we give. As if we can change whatever number to something more acceptable. Because people are always striving to weight less, look thinner, look and act younger. I swear that many people would actually become younger if it were physically possible.

So, in the style April D does in her post, I'm going to give myself a reality check. This is the real me. The real physical me. The whole, undiluted truth. This is me:

I have lived 21 years.

I wear a size 20-24.

My butt, my hips and my tummy are all large parts of my body.

I have a chicken pox scar on my forehead.

I have a scar on my lip from where I was punched.

I have cellulite on my hips.

I have stretch marks on my tummy and thighs.

I have permanent black heads on my nose.

I still get spots, and not just on my face.

I have crappy mousy brown hair, when I'm not dyeing it silly colours.

I have four tattoos, on various parts of my body.

I have seven piercings in my ears.

I have stretched piercings in my earlobes.

I look just how I'm meant to look; just how I want to look.

I am alive and I am happy.

It IS Possible to be Fat and Happy

Reading around the fatosphere, particularly in blog archives, I’ve found a frankly infuriating response to fat acceptance by fat haters. In particular fat haters and shamers seem to attack the idea that a person can be fat and happy. Even when a person states that they are fat and happy with it, they get shot down. These people tell them they can’t be telling the truth, they must be wrong about how they feel. As if fat people need more casers of being told they are wrong, that they’re lying, that they really can’t know how they feel, that they much be wrong because their statement just doesn’t make sense.

Now, I’m not quite ready to make the claim that I’m fat and happy. I’m fat and okay. I’m fat and doing not bad considering. I’m fat and while I still have issues and problems none of them are related to my weight or me being fat. I guess the short hand for that might be fat and happy. At the very least I understand how it is possible to be fat and happy.

So this is to you, fat haters and shamers. This is to everyone who believes you have to be thin to be happy. This is to everyone who ahs ever accused a fat person of lying, especially if you’ve accused someone of lying about being fat and happy. This is exactly how a person can be fat and happy.

It is possible to be fat and happy when you have a boyfriend (or girlfriend/other half/partner/whatever) who loves you for who you are and not your dress size. It is possible to be fat and happy when someone loves your body, exactly how it is. It is possible to be fat and happy when they actively love the curves your fat gives you, and would actually be a little disappointed if weight loss resulted in curve loss.

It is possible to be fat and happy when you have a group of friends who honestly don’t give a shit about social norms. It’s easy to be fat and happy when you have a group of friends who think you’re awesome as it. It’s easy when you have a largely supportive family, and a mother who came to the same conclusions as Fat Acceptance years before you did.

It’s easy to be fat and happy when you refuse to read women’s magazines.

It’s easy when you refuse to conform to any ideal whatsoever.

In short, it’s easy to be fat and happy if you’re determined to be so. And it’s easy when you know how.

And no, I’m sure as hell not lying, and I bloody well know how I feel, thank you very much.

A Plateau in FA development

So its been a while since I last posted. Partly its been due to computer and internet issues, but I feel it's also partly because I feel I've come to a plateau in my FA development. I haven't any new books to read, and I feel comfortable with the place I'm at right now. Over the summer I think I will turn the attention to general fat and FA issues that affect me, rather than my FA development. Keep an eye out for the next post.

Quick Updates

Quite a lot has happened since I last posted, so I just wanted to do a quick update.

• I finished my exams, so now I'm just waiting for my results. In theory this means I have slightly more time to blog.
• I finally got my hands on Lessons From the Fatosphere and devoured it in less than four days.
• I also downloaded a copy of You Count, Calories Don't which I'm currently working my way through. It's not as good as Health At Every Size and I don't agree with everything the author has to say, but it's worth a read anyway.
• I spent a weekend doing lots of exercise running round after kids at a St John Badger Camp. I felt utterly knackered but had great fun. Oh yeah, and I also pushed a minibus round a field.
• I got a new tattoo. It say's "No Day But Today" and is on my right inside forearm. It's a message I want to apply to my life and now the tattoo is a constant reminder of how I want to live my life.
• I've started packing to move out of the house I've been living in for the past two years. This is making me very sad and very nostalgic, but is also good exercise.
• I've not yet started the cycling every morning thing I wanted to try, but there's time yet. If truth be told I'm still recovering from Badger Camp. And I really need to go to bed before 2am to really get this going.
• I started a second blog, called the Chuck-It Cook. I plan for this blog to detail my adventures and misadventures on the kitchen, and I consider this a vital step on my path to Fat Acceptance. This blog is saying "I'm a fat woman, I enjoy cooking and eating and there's nothing wrong with that".

I think that's pretty much all for now. Hopefully I'll have another update for you in the next week.

On the Flaws of the Body Mass Index

I’ve been promising an essay on the BMI (Body Mass Index) for a while now. And I tried, I honestly tried. I wanted to write a fully comprehensive essay, with a balanceds argument for and against the BMI and its use. But I just couldn’t. There are too few pros for the system, and far too many cons. It left me wondering why it is used at all, but one of the two things I found in its favour explains exactly why it is used.

It’s easy to use.

It involves no expensive equipment, no complicated formulae, no extensive testing. It gives an immediate piece of quantitative data on how fat a person is, and therein lies its other advantage. It gives a number that can be quoted. Instead of a doctor simply saying you’re (and by you I mean a hypothetical fat person, not you in particular) fat, they can say your BMI is X, which means you are this fat. It also means they can tell you exactly how much weight that a person needs to lose to not be that fat any more.

That’s it. That’s the whole reasoning behind it being used.

Now compare that to ever increasing evidence that the BMI is an utter load of crap.

For starters it doesn’t take into account bone density or muscle mass, meaning that many incredibly fit athletes show up as obese on the scale. The Wikipedia page gives a list of exceptions to the BMI that makes me wonder why it is used at all.

Secondly, it was never meant to diagnose individual people. It was meant to study populations of people, so how the hell is that translatable to use on individual people? How the hell did this become the primary tool for diagnosing overweight and obese individuals?

Add in to this the fact that the cut off points are incredibly arbitrary. I’ve never seen any good reason why you’re suddenly overweight when you’re BMI hits 25. I’ll be happy to read anything anyone can show me that proves otherwise, but I will continue with my argument.

I know that the cut off points between underweight/normal/overweight/obese are arbitrary because in 1998 the USA changed theirs to fall in line with the World Health Organisation. Over night millions of people were suddenly reclassified as overweight without gaining a single pound, and without their health changing one jot. All because a committee of “exerts” saw fit to move the goalposts.

The BMI system is also incredibly biased against people at the higher end of the spectrum. Take a look at the chart on the Wikipedia page. There is a huge chunk of the chart taken up by overweight and obese, but only a tiny sliver taken up by the underweight category. That’s shows a clear bias and just seems plain wrong to me.

Speaking of plain wrong, the BMI is exactly that. The World Health Organisation defines overweight and obesity as such:

Overweight and obesity are defined as abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health.

That means that the BMI is rubbish. Studies have shown again and again that people in the overweight category have no significant health problems compared to “normal” people. I fact, they seem to cope better with certain diseases that the supposedly healthier normal category.

In addition to this, the BMI categories just don’t fit into reality, not mine at least. Check out this flickr stream, I hope you will find as I did, that the BMI overweight people looked normal to me and the BMI normal people looked too thin. That’s just my personal view, but those photos should definitely make you rethink how the BMI applies to real, flesh and blood people.

There are a whole host of other reasons why the BMI is crap, and it should be scrapped for use in diagnosing “overweight” and “obese” people. If you currently remain unconvinced of just how crap the BMI really is, may I point you to the links below. They cover similar ground to this post, and hopefully a few extra things.

Read the links and the comments over at this post at the Rotund.

This post at the Guardian's Comment is Free also takes down the BMI.

On The Ridiculousness of the Calorie

I've just had a thought.

Not a stupendous world changing though, but a thought none the less.

I've been thinking about how ridiculous it is that the diet and food industries rely on calories so much. For starters the calorie counts that appear on the front of food packaging is actually kilocalories. Meaning that a food with 100 calories in it actually contains 100,000 calories. Deosn't sound quite so small when pu that way does it?

The second thing that I realised, and the main point of this post, is that the way the energy content of that food is calculated, the method they use to find out that food has 100 calories in it, really shouldn't translate to the energy the human body gets it's energy from that food.

From the scientific knowledge and experience, the way scientists usually find out how much energy something has is by burning it.

I've done a fair bit of calorimetry in my time and the procedure is usually this; you take an amount of the thing you want to find the energy content of. Then you set fire to it, and use the heat from it to heat up an amount of water. The you use a formula to work out how much energy it gave out when you burnt it. Which is actually the amount of energy taken in by the water that was heated up, which is never going to be the exact amount of energy the flame gave out because heat escapes. Even bomb calorimetry, which is basically the above procedure with as much insulation as possible can't really be really perfectly accurate.

so that 100 calorie biscuit? That's how much energy it gave out when it was set on fire.

Can anyone honestly tell me that the energy given out on burning of a food is directly transferable to the energy that my body gets from eating it? I really don't think so. The way the human body gets energy out of food is far more sophisticated than that; it involves digestion, absorption, electron transfers and the making and breaking of chemical bonds. I honestly don't see how that can in any way be equated with burning food.

The body doesn't burn calories the way you burn charcoal for a bbq, it just doesn't work that way.

So my thought for the day: societies reliance on calories as a measure of how much to eat is utterly ridiculous. And I for one will no longer pay attention to them.