OK. I have to ask...

...how come every fat person that has 'magically' become thin and who is reported about in the news always had a terrible diet before they decided to 'grow up' and eat healthily and go to the gym?

In The Scotsman today there is an article about a woman who went from a size 26 (UK dress size) to a size 8 in three years. What gets me is she apparently started at a size smaller than I am now and at the time she her diet included "snacking on countless biscuits and eating two desserts a night" and she "found it hard to walk short distances and was embarrassed to travel on public transport." In order to lose weight she just (just!?) changed her diet and hired a personal trainer. Oh! to be able to afford a personal trainer. If I could just do that all would be alright with my world.

Fuck off.

The point of this is not to slag off a woman who has done an incredibly hard thing, and capitulated to society's requirement for women to be a size 8 and I wish her the best in keeping it off and with being happy, but instead to ask... how come every fat person in the media has to have a bad diet? How come every fat person in the media has to have had no exercise and to have been unable to walk? How come every fat person who the media talk about has to have been miserable? I am a fat person. I eat plenty of fruit and veg. I rarely eat dessert (mainly because I don't care to have them all the time and when I'm out I can feel the disapproval... depending on who I'm with). I do eat biscuits, but not countless ones. Sometimes, instead of biscuits, I eat dried fruit sticks- healthy and delicious. I go to and participate in dance classes on a regular basis. I am a quite snazzy dancer. I walk everywhere (although I do use public transport if I'm going somewhere in a rush). And, yes, I am frequently miserable but that is less to do with my weight and more to do with my family, my lack of money, my confusion over my life path, my self-doubt and low self esteem, and my isolation at working from home.

So how come the media and the press insist that it is just being fat that makes people (women... how often do you hear about some brave and marvellous man who lost half his body weight in three years?) miserable?

Wait! I know the answer to this! It's because we deserve to be miserable for daring to not be conventionally attractive be female be fat. Because fat is bad. And fat people= bad/lazy/stupid people. I declare this Bull Shit and I repeat: Fuck off!

END OF POST. THERE IS NO MORE Click Here to Read More..

Things That Piss Me Off, Part The Second

The Pictures That Are Used To Illustrate Obesity News Stories.

We've all seen them, the unflattering pictures of fat people with their heads chopped off and that end mid thigh. If heads are visible the person is invariably miserable, or eating, or both.


[Image is of fat woman sitting down with no head and no legs below the knee. I assume they are pictured sitting down in order to remind people how lazy fat people are.]

I typed "obesity" and "uk" into Google new search and saved the pictures of people that came up (I didn't save the ones that were of boxes of pills). The majority of these pictures relate to the anti-obesity drug that was pulled by the EMEA last week after it was linked to a number of suicides and to depression. I'm sure, from the pictures being used to illustrate this story, the chemical effect of the drug wasn't the only thing helping to make these fat people depressed- the way they (or obese people in general) are shown in the media really doesn't help.

Below the cut is the rest of the pictures that I pulled from the net and links to where I got them from.





The BBC in particular seem determined to remind us that we should be monitoring ourselves, but that we're greedy (and not worth faces apparently, backs of heads only!)



And talking of self monitoring:

(Is it just me that wants to caption that first picture: "Measuring: You're Doing It Wrong!"?)

There are just two more images that I pulled from the search. The first is actually of a face that doesn't look particularly happy or unhappy to me but who I have no idea who it is of. The fact that it has a face on it makes me think it can't be just a random person:



While the second is a cartoon of a fat man dropping a pill into his mouth which looks like it is going to go into the mouth of the smaller, thinner man inside him. Because, as we all know, inside every fat person is a thin person dying to get out, or, alternatively, that a fat person isn't actually a person, the fat is, what, a mask? That a fat person can't be considered an actual person until they are no longer fat? FTBS.



And the links:[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]
Click Here to Read More..

Glamour Body Image Survey

Via The 'F' Word (US)
Glamour magazine are doing a survey regarding body image.

I went and filled it out in the hope of, as Rachel says over on The 'F' Word, "if Glamor knew just how much women hate and loathe their bodies, perhaps they’d offer more body-positive kinds of articles". I found it a bit triggering as reminding me of all the reasons I feel shitty about myself does make me want to run off and eat something. But, still, if it ends up showing them how miserable body image issues make people it can only be a good thing... right?

END OF POST. THERE IS NO MORE Click Here to Read More..