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

[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