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]

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.