Posts by Danielle
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This is from someone who doesn't feel safe posting here, but wanted to contribute.
WTF. Seriously what fate hate? Nobody was deriding people for being obese. For some reason (and I know offense is always in the eye of the beholder) someone felt offended by others saying obesity is a major health problem that will harm the lives of those suffering the disease (and yeah I know those are hard words).
I am going to assume good faith and explain why the people here - and reading this and not feeling safe to comment - are feeling and seeing fat hate.
Because to be fat is to see fat hate everywhere. From the people staring anytime you put anything in your mouth, to the kindly strangers commenting on your body. From feeling like everyone is staring at you when someone makes a joke about fat people, to the woman who stopped me in the street two weeks ago to tell me my skirt was too short for "a woman like me."
So when you describe the "obesity problem" you're not talking about a health problem like lung cancer from smoking. You're talking about my body. I'm obese, therefore I am a problem. As Deborah and others have already said, you can't separate the person from the body. Believe me, I spent most of my twenties and thirties trying to do exactly that. Were it possible, I'd have figured out a way.
For what it's worth, I've been fat all my life. My parents are fat, so were my grandmothers. We didn't have very much money when I was a kid, and the habits and tastes I developed then have absolutely had an impact on my body. So I am not suggesting we do nothing. But a sugar tax is an incredibly blunt tool that will harm the people it purports to help. We need food. It's what we live on. No one needs tobacco or alcohol to live - there is a difference, and the policy responses need to be different. The most positive change I have made in my own life is to move my body - but being a fat person, that's incredibly hard. It's hard for me to buy workout clothes, buying bras is an exercise in masochism, and the patronising or outright threatening responses from other people make it more and more difficult.
We're not going to fix this until we figure out a way to separate bodies from lifestyles, and to stop judging and diagnosing people based on how they look, instead of on their actual medical status. We're not going to fix this when you all continue to treat "obesity" like it's an abstract problem, and not what everyone thinks when they're confronted by my thighs.
When I was 13, someone put a weightloss pamphlet in my locker at school. It is to this day one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. I've spent most of the rest of my life doing everything I can to avoid that feeling - which, yes, includes eating my feelings on occasion. I don't know what the person who put that pamphlet in my locker was thinking, but I imagine they thought they were helping. Like you guys do, I imagine they thought they were being kind. She wasn't. You aren't. And you aren't helping.
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It comes as no surprise that a moderately worthwhile thread dies at your hands again.
Yeah Gio, stop ruining our consensus with your pesky disagreement! What do you think this is, a discussion forum?
It should be noted that it's not only Jackie who's noping on out of here. There are plenty of others, mostly women, with worthwhile knowledge who aren't posting. But they're reading and talking about it in safer spaces.
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I hesitate to post here again, Bart, since you seem to be railing against things I've said that are urging compassion and empathy for children, and children's bodies. Being careful how we talk about and to them. I can't tell you how discouraging that is to me.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Rob Stowell,
What if every cent was doubled or trebled and put back into (let’s say) winz benefits and wff?
Indeed. What if. (It's all part of my new book, "How To Fix Poverty By Giving Poor People More Money".)
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Among the things I had in mind was the CDC page on child obesity:
Is there a point at which you accept that "a greater risk of" is not the same as "a sentence to a blighted, impaired life", or are you going to keep blockquoting me into submission?
The reason I am annoyed by this, Russell, is that once you start using language like that, and there's a fat kid who is getting healthier but doesn't manage to lose the "right amount" of weight, then that kid has literally nowhere else to go, mentally or emotionally.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I don’t think it’s doomsaying to perceive a significant public heath problem developing
That is rather different from "a sentence to a blighted, impaired life", which is what I objected to in your earlier post.
These bodies are the only ones these kids have. They can't change bodies. They might be able to change, to a certain extent, how healthy those bodies are, but they might still grow up to be fat people even if they're healthier. I want us, as a society, to be really careful about how we other and problematise fat kids. So careful. Because hating yourself is no way to live.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I'm not entirely sure why anyone thinks I am advocating "doing nothing". I'm advocating "not doing this as it is currently proposed". I'm also advocating for less emotive doomsaying and more sensible, encouraging, logical things that might actually work.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
It’s a sentence to a blighted, impaired life.
No, according to the link you posted it increases the RISKS for impairments and health problems. I think it’s really really important to a) be very careful about what you’re predicting and b) treat and talk about fat people – and PARTICULARLY fat kids – as humans rather than a social problem to be “solved”. It’s actually very difficult to not be obese once you become obese (see that article Lilith posted upthread, which notes that people who lose large amounts of weight actually burn about 500 fewer calories per day when at rest than people who have not dieted), and so this is less about making fat people cease to exist, and more about making them (and, in fact, everyone else whatever size they are) less likely to develop health problems.
I’m fat. I’m in my 40s. I currently don’t have any health problems. I never really have (except the ones caused by pregnancy). THE FATTIES WALK AMONG US. We all need to think about how we talk about this. You know?
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Sacha, you seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that I take any sort of orders from you about how to conduct myself.
The "we" in my post meant "New Zealand society in general", fwiw.
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A few months ago, Giovanni Tiso said something to me that really stuck: education campaigns about healthy eating and exercise can only go so far, because at a certain point in those education campaigns all we're doing is telling poor people how nice it would be if they had more money and time.
James said "end poverty", but apparently that's so hard for us that all we can think of doing is being punitive to poor people. Again. Colour me surprised.