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

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".