Respect Authority

Concentrated healthy eating hasn’t been possible since the birth of McDonald’s, so God gave us diets. But diets, with their rules and costs and weird approximations of chocolate-flavored things, were just too hard, so God gave us drugs. But drugs, which peeled off the pounds faster than you could say “my liver hurts, is that a side effect?,” were apparently dangerous, so God gave us surgery. And now, with layoffs mounting and health care coverage about as effective as an umbrella made of Swiss cheese, surgery is too expensive, so God gave us something new: denial.

If you can’t beat ‘em, eat cheesecake—or so goes the mantra of a group of fatties documented in a New York Times article today. The story outlines the sentiments of a growing movement, a so-called “loose alliance of therapists, scientists and others” (read: unapologetic fat people) who believe that people, “‘even’ fat people, can eat whatever they want and, in the process, improve their physical and mental health and stabilize their weight.” In other words, some cross between “If you stop obsessing about what you eat, you’ll probably eat okay,” and “It’s totally okay to order five cheeseburgers.”

To be fair, the Times does little to really explain the movement, which leads me to believe they’re purposefully sensationalizing it for a headline like “Tossing Out the Diet and Embracing the Fat.” But from what I understand of it, “fat acceptance” is about developing a healthy lifestyle that isn’t entirely based on the “need” to wear a size 0 bikini, as well as accepting that for some people, single-digit sizing doesn’t necessarily have to be in the cards. As evidenced by the wealth of fat-friendly television lately—ironically, the Times cites as positive examples both Fox’s totally exploitative More to Love and Lifetime’s Drop Dead Diva, which is about a thin person being reincarnated as a fat person and hating it—the paper suggests that perhaps “fat acceptance” is not quite so crazy, and may even be in line with a broader shift away from the days of heroin chic.

To be frank, it’s a nice idea. I checked out a few of the blogs mentioned in the article, none of which feature photos of 400-pound women in novelty “Big and Beatiful!” T-shirts. They’re normal ladies, with some extra pounds, who are undoubtedly exhausted with trying to squeeze into pants three sizes too small just so they don’t have to feel insecure about approaching the register with a size 18. But while I too long for a world where it’s okay to look bad in short shorts, the whole “fat acceptance” thing neglects what I consider two fairly important tenets of social perception.

The first is the most obvious: there’s a world of difference between wearing your plus sizes with pride, and eating so many French fries you need a forklift to leave the house. Though the Abercrombie culture might suggest being able to pinch some stomach is wholly unacceptable, the reality is that much of the weight-based backlash these days stems from the fact that Americans really have gotten fat as fuck. We’re not talking about pudgy, or chubby, or junk in the trunk: we’re talking people that weigh as much as baby elephants, people that can’t fit in plane seats, people that wear only Spandex. It may be socially and medically acceptable to carry around an extra 20 pounds, but never will there (nor should there) be a time when we resign ourselves to a nation of waddling Wal-Mart shoppers who get winded after a flight of stairs.

But secondly, and perhaps more honestly, the battle against weight, despite all the talk of self-esteem and self-confidence and “doing it for yourself” is never really about us. Being svelte isn’t something I do for me, it’s something I do for others: for judgmental women and would-be boyfriends, for chastising doctors and my overbearing mother. You can shout self-confidence from the rooftops, whilst creating bacon-scented smoke signals with an XXL sweatshirt, but at the end of the day, no one cares what you think about your being fat, just that you are. Consider the parallels: somehow the self-confidence of the ugly, poor, homeless or unemployed doesn’t seem particularly relevant to society’s opinion of their predicament.

I’m all for celebrating the human body, in all its various forms and preferably with some sort of cake, but though denial and acceptance are at opposite ends of the spectrum, at the end of the day they’re both stages of grief.