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

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Okay, some quick comments because we're ridiculously busy at work and that's all I have time for:

The Fat-Positive Diet uses the wrong definition of success, in my view. A 10% one-year "success" rate is already appalling - a drug or surgical intervention with this rate of success and the same physical mental health side effects as dieting would not be licensed - but the rate drops to 2% after another year. Statistics beyond that don't exist, because it's not even possible to recruit a large enough pool of "successful" dieters to do that study. My source for this is Paul Campos in The Obesity Myth.

The Fat-Positive Skeptic and the Open Letter are wrong about the science, and for that I repeat my suggestion to wildeabandon earlier in this thread. I would also add that even if I am wrong (and so is Paul Campos, and so is Sandy Swarcz) on (a) whether or not being fat is unhealthy and (b) whether or not diets "work", there is still AFAIK not a shred of evidence as to (c) whether someone for whom a diet has "worked" thereby acquires the same health benefits that someone who maintains the same weight, BMI etc without dieting ex hypothesi enjoys (and, given the problem with recruiting "successful" dieters, it is difficult to see any such evidence emerging any time soon.)

I do feel sympathy for her knee pain, having had similar problems myself in the past (at a much lower weight than I am now), and she is of course entitled to take whatever gambles she wishes to try to resolve it - just as she is entitled to try homeopathy, reiki, animal sacrifice or anything else that does no harm to anyone else. Perhaps the sense of taking charge of the problem will even produce a placebo effect that will do her some good, and I'm all in favour of that where medicine can't come up with anything better. But I believe it will be just that - a placebo, and one bought at the price of considerably more health risks than drinking water that may or may not have come into contact with a minuscule drop of herbal extract at some point in its history.

Edited for clarification of my view on placebos.

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

I am 100% on your side here, really, and grumbled about the posts in question when I first saw them a while back, but I am tempted to suspect that with things like this particular sort of knee pain losing weight might help a bit because of, well, gravity. Lighter body = less physical pressure opon knee = possibly less pain.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Yes, it probably does, but the point is we have no reliable way of helping people to lose weight in the long term, so the effects will probably be temporary - and the attempt carries other quite serious risks. Strengthening the muscles around the knee is usually a better bet, but I see that Greta Christina has already tried physio - hence my comments about placebo.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

I think one thing that both the fat-positive and anti-fat sides are both guilty of is assuming there is a weight and diet for anyone that will enable them to stay in optimum health and not in itself cause health problems.

I think this is most unlikely, given that our bodies are bodge jobs resulting from evolution. Which means most of us a lot of the time really should be thinking about which potential side effects of our diet or weight matter most to us, and remembering that there *will* be some.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Very true - not only is our environment radically different, but we're living far longer than we've evolved to.

Coming back to this after roughly a year.

[grendelkhan.livejournal.com]

Necromantic fascination with resurrecting dead threads aside, having recently reread the comments here and GC's March 2010 update on her diet and exercise regime, I have a question or two.

I can't see find the bit about diets having a 90% one-year and 98% two-year failure rate; could you cite that in the book more specifically? Google Book Search is being less helpful than I'd like. Does that include crash diets?

I haven't read The Obesity Myth (though it's now on my shortlist), but GC's update mentioned the National Weight Control Registry, a longitudinal study which takes participants starting from the one-year point, which currently tracks around five thousand participants. Here's a list of their publications. (http://www.nwcr.ws/Research/published%20research.htm) This is especially interesting because Campos does mention the NWCR (page 120 of the copy on Google Book Search). NWCR has at least one study on the exercise habits of always-thin and previously-fat people, but none that I see on the secondary health risks we're told are consequential to obesity.

And while I know that anecdotes are terrible for proving a point, they certainly can disprove one. If it's unspeakably rare to find people who have kept off thirty pounds (NWCR's standard) from their peak weight for more than two years, then why on earth do I count at least two among my immediate family and in-laws?

The overarching problem, I suppose, as has been noted elsewhere, is that there's no such thing as descriptive information here; it's all implicitly prescriptive. Like GC keeps saying, there's a particular confluence of factors that led her to count this as a net good decision, but without some of them--free time and privilege to get to the gym, supportive partner, etc.--it would have been a bad idea, and, despite how it'll inevitably be seen, the moral isn't "all you fat people are just too lazy to diet".