{"id":170,"date":"2008-06-13T00:22:21","date_gmt":"2008-06-12T22:22:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ultimatefatburner.com\/wordpress\/self-acceptance-not-fat-acceptance\/"},"modified":"2015-03-10T08:42:45","modified_gmt":"2015-03-10T12:42:45","slug":"self-acceptance-not-fat-acceptance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/self-acceptance-not-fat-acceptance\/","title":{"rendered":"Self Acceptance – Not “Fat Acceptance”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been aware of the “Fat Acceptance” (FA) movement for some time now…on occasion, I’ve\u00a0dropped in to look around\u00a0on sites like BigFatBlog<\/a> or Fatshionista.\u00a0 Sometimes it feels like visiting another planet \u2014 I have a hard time getting into these people’s heads.\u00a0 But believe it or not \u2014 I’m sympathetic to some of the points FA activists make, especially as they pertain to women’s self\/body image.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Let’s face it: it’s virtually impossible to be a woman in Western society, without internalizing images of female beauty that are impossible for real women to live up to.\u00a0 It starts early in life, with “Barbie” and all those Disney princesses, who \u2014 when scaled to human height<\/a> \u2014 would have\u00a0wasp-sized waists and ~38 DD chests (that never sag or bounce).\u00a0 Success and beauty are intertwined in our fairy tales: only “the fairest of them all” gets to live “happily ever after” with Prince Charming.\u00a0\u00a0It\u00a0never lets up, either: over the years, women\u00a0absorb those subliminal messages about thinness = glamour = success\u00a0at the movies, on TV, and, of course, in those ubiquitous fashion magazines.<\/p>\n

That’s fantasy. In reality, hormones and genetics make women more prone to adding fat \u2014 and not just in the “pectoral” area, either.\u00a0 The distance most women\u00a0have to travel to resemble their fashionably\u00a0emaciated\u00a0role models\u00a0is simply too great: many develop eating disorders as a consequence, or constantly beat up on themselves as they ride\u00a0a roller coaster up and down the scale \u2014\u00a0convinced that each diet failure represents moral weakness and lack of character.<\/p>\n

Is it any wonder that some women just give up?\u00a0 Doesn’t surprise me one bit.<\/p>\n

The FA movement takes surrender one step further, however.\u00a0 The Adipositivity Project<\/a> is a case in point.\u00a0 The site mission is to promote “size acceptance” and “widen definitions of physical beauty.”\u00a0 This is a good thing, in principle.\u00a0 Even thin women struggle to conform to fashion mag standards via liposuction, extreme diets, drugs, breast implants, etc.\u00a0 But it’s like chasing a rainbow: the media sets the bar so high, that even the models\/actresses\u00a0posing for the pics\u00a0can’t reach it, and the Photoshop artists have to step in<\/a>.\u00a0 That’s sick to the nth<\/sup> power, and FA activists are right to condemn it.<\/p>\n

The problem I have with the fat acceptance philosophy, though, lies in its knee-jerk rejection of physical self-improvement and perverse celebration of obesity. Efforts to lose fat are frequently derided as evidence of\u00a0self-loathing and caving in to societal pressures. FA activists\u00a0insist fat people are genetically programmed to be fat, thus, any efforts to be unfat are unhealthy (both physically and psychologically) and doomed to failure.<\/p>\n

I don’t buy it.\u00a0 For all the blathering about genetics \u2014 human beings weren’t meant to be fat.\u00a0 What many don’t understand, is that “genetic” doesn’t always imply “inevitable.” What we casually call “genetics” is actually a complex interplay of genes AND environment. \u00a0It’s true that we\u00a0have “thrifty genes<\/a>” (with some more thrifty than others).\u00a0 Our\u00a0tendency to store fat is an adaptation to an uncertain food supply:\u00a0humans evolved\u00a0to survive in the face of periodic scarcity.\u00a0 Early humans were also always on the move: they walked, ran, lifted, carried, climbed, danced, fought.\u00a0 And hunted:\u00a0they had to work\u00a0for their\u00a0food.\u00a0 Thus,\u00a0our remote ancestors\u00a0may have gained fat at times, but it would have been difficult \u2014 if not virtually impossible \u2014 to become obese.\u00a0 Now that food isn’t scarce, however, we don’t have to rely on our reserves.\u00a0 We don’t have to move very much either: thanks to technology, we sit comfortably \u2014 and passively \u2014 throughout the day.\u00a0 In such an environment, our genes work against us to store excess\u00a0fat in our bodies.<\/p>\n

Our modern environment is clearly obesegenic: but that doesn’t mean we must give up and give into it.\u00a0 An abundance of food means that we also have choices about what, how much and when to eat.\u00a0 We don’t need to embrace the food industry in the process of rejecting the diet industry. Nor do we need to kill ourselves in the gym to be fit, strong and physically capable.<\/p>\n

In other words, it’s not a choice between two extremes \u2014\u00a0with\u00a0obesity on the one hand, and futile starvation, pills, surgery, and\u00a0exhausting exercise\u00a0on the other.\u00a0 There’s a middle ground that leaves room for both self acceptance AND self-improvement.<\/p>\n

So let’s hear it for a wider definition of physical beauty: I don’t care for the bony look, either. But the Adipositivity Project’s definition is a bit too wide. It’s a fallacy to think that every woman\u00a0will be able to reach body fat levels in the mid-to-low teens, but we can all be fitter, leaner and healthier. Self acceptance – not Fat Acceptance – is the goal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been aware of the “Fat Acceptance” (FA) movement for some time now…on occasion, I’ve\u00a0dropped in to look around\u00a0on sites like BigFatBlog or Fatshionista.\u00a0 Sometimes it feels like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26,28,29],"tags":[196,1851,635,1863,1452,1867],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10058,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions\/10058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}