Greta Christina's fat positive manifesto

[ciphergoth]

I froze the discussion here because I thought it deserved a top-level post of its own, rather than being under a general discussion of Greta Christina. A few weeks ago she posted a very interesting series of articles on the fat-positive movement and her own beliefs; I'd be very interested to read more about what people think of them.

"I was frankly shocked at how callous most of the fat-positive advocates were about my bad knee. I was shocked at how quick they were to ignore or dismiss it. They were passionately concerned about the quality of life I might lose if I counted calories or stopped eating chocolate bars every day. But when it came to the quality of life I might lose if I could no longer dance, climb hills, climb stairs, take long walks, walk at all? Eh. Whatever. I should try exercise or physical therapy or something. Oh, I'd tried those things already? Well, whatever."

• The Fat-Positive Diet
• The Fat-Positive Skeptic
• An Open Letter to the Fat-Positive Movement

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I'd be willing to take a bet on what answer I'd get if we asked the head of a randomly chosen University medical department - and if I'm wrong about this I'd like to know very much.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Certainly the learning objectives here at St George's are keyed towards an understanding of BMI and the importance of lifestyle changes (including activity level, dietary restrictions and weight loss as appropriate) in controlling conditions such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and heart disease.

(I still think BMI is unreliable and shouldn't be the be-all and end-all, and that the lines for 'healthy' and 'overweight' are drawn in completely the wrong places. But that doesn't mean it's not an OK place to start when looking at overall physical health.)

[ladycat.livejournal.com]

I think maybe bodystat is a beter measure than BMI because it gives you a clearer overall picture of the composition of your body.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Indeed, but at the moment not all GP surgeries, hospitals, clinics and health centres have bodystat machines (which are quite new and expensive), whereas they do all have scales and height charts (old and cheap).

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

One thing that I have a suspicion is supported by the science, but is a long way from permeating through to the popular consensus, including medics, is the fact that diets usually don't work.

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

I think some of it has permeated, but most individual GPs seem to feel that the *reason* most diets don't work is that eithyer they are crash diets or the dieters aren't doing it right. Hence their tendency to just harangue people harder into following what they consider to be a sensible diet.

What I think they fail to take into account is the cognitive bias which can happily accept that 90% of something is crap and just assume that the thinker falls into the 10%, plus that even if they're right, pushing people harder also doesn't work.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lj_sucks_/]

"Diets don't work" is an oversimplification. Diets work fine if they are permanent lifestyle changes, i.e. permanently changing you diet. What doesn't work is dieting to lose weight and then stopping that diet and going back to what you were doing before. Which ought to be so obvious that it doesn't need saying, but clearly isn't obvious to customers of the diet industry...

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Oh, I think these days a lot of the diet industry talks about permanent lifestyle changes. But they generally don't work either, because they're very difficult to stick to. If they weren't difficult to stick to, then failure rates wouldn't be so high