The miraculous ever-receding goalposts

[owlectomy]

This is something I've observed in online discussions about fat.

Someone will say, if only fat people would walk moderately a few times a week, and not inhale whole buckets of KFC at a time, they would no longer be fat. It's so simple and easy!

I now know better than to engage on this point. And I know, too, that everyone deserves dignity and respect no matter how much they eat or how little they exercise.

But nevertheless. It rankles when someone is wrong on the internet. So often, someone will step in and say, "No; I eat a pretty reasonable amount of food, and I get a pretty reasonable amount of physical activity, and also I am fat."

At which point other people in the discussion treat this as either a request for advice, or an opportunity to nitpick the other person's exercise and diet down to the finest details. You should eat no grains whatsoever, and cut out rice and potatoes while you're at it! You shouldn't run, you should lift weights; you should do interval training instead of steady-state cardio; you should weigh your food and make sure you're eating no more than 1200 calories a day.

There are some people who think that eating 1200 calories a day of egg whites, chicken breasts, and spinach is a reasonable thing to expect of everybody (or else, a reasonable punishment for being fat). But most people, I think, don't even see the moving goalposts; they just see the "Well, they could be trying harder." And so no matter how many times it gets refuted, the next time the discussion happens, it's the same thing: if only people would walk around a little and stop inhaling entire buckets of KFC, they would not be fat anymore!



Now that I think about it, Eleanor & Park is one of the only YA books I've read in which being fat is not a symptom of people with terrible emotional problems doing a lot of emotional eating. Who is not getting enough to eat, and this is recognized as part of her abusive family life, not a noble character-building thing.

Comments

[meaghansketch]

UGH the discussion I was in/peripheral to today was, really, all of this. SO DAMN INFURIATING

I (not complaining about my weight; saying that not dieting has lead me to be happier w/my weight/body than I had been before) was told that that made me a passive observer on my life as it passed me by-- as if that statement even logically follows on any possible planet. Also that apparently that meant that I was not overcoming, but rather just ignoring, any body issues I had, and that YOU CAN'T IGNORE YOUR ISSUES, THEY ARE STILL THERE AND THEY WILL BE BACK.

Sorry, I am 12 levels of angry right now.

(this apparently started with a conversation wherein one coworker told another, 'Well, I wouldn't have had the (single piece of) toast).

[owlectomy]

It really convinces me that you can't honestly go in halfway on body acceptance like a lot of women's magazines try to do. If you are allowed to accept your body only if you prove you're doing everything right ... then no amount of proof is ever going to be enough to survive the nitpicking.

[meaghansketch]

Yes, I know what you mean-- for a while I thought you could go in halfway-- The 'love your body! By losing 5 lbs!' kind of thing. But the more you allow yourself to be exposed to messages that you could (and therefore should) be thinner, the further you inevitably get from the idea that there is nothing wrong with your body; that it is awesome the way it is, and that it's OK not to hate the way you look.

[deborah]

right, there's the halfway "if you love your body and stop freak dieting then you will be incredibly healthy and your body will naturally fall into one of these shapes from the Dove Real Beauty campaign, which by the way are all also gorgeous and quite possibly not what you look like at all."

You pretty much have to go all the way, or you end up there.

[owlectomy]

A lot of people I've known who were, like, part-of-the-way onboard with fat acceptance (and this includes me in the past, for sure) thought along the lines of "Well, everyone should eat healthy food, and everyone should get a certain amount of exercise, so if you do everything right and you're fat anyway that's OK I guess but there are some fat people who it's OK to judge." And that's pretty inconsiderate of classism and ableism and all that, but also -- you can never meaningfully draw that line between people it's OK to judge and people it's not OK to judge without ending up at "Well, I wouldn't have had that piece of toast."

[meaghansketch]

OK, I didn't want to invade my coworker's privacy too much, but this really needs more context. The paraphrase:

A: (complaining about not losing weight, 'I don't know what it is, I work out, I eat pretty healthy')
B: Well, what did you have for breakfast?
A: Two hardboiled eggs and a piece of toast
B: Well, I wouldn't have had the toast.

I mean, talk about moving goalposts.

[wordweaverlynn]

As the computer says in Wargames, "The only way to win is not to play."

[laughingrat]

*nods vigorously* Yeah, like, I don't even reply to that stuff anymore, or if I do it's just to give it a quick spanking. It's repellent, really. It's good to see it laid out in an organized way like this because it's all so sneaky and undercover when it happens out in the field, as it were, that their "good intentions" can often wind up distracting one from the main issue, which is that they're being bigots.