WHAT WE'RE ABOUT
We are constantly redefining our own perspectives, and therefore tend to write a lot about our personal experiences. Many followers and contributors are living with anorexia, bulimia, body dysmorphic disorder, depression, and a variety of other body image disorders or mental illnesses, so please be respectful and remember that health applies differently to everyone. Any and all potentially triggering content will be prefaced with a trigger warning.
RBI supports all races, genders, classes, and sizes. We try our best to make this a safe space for everyone. If we are not doing our job or checking our privilege, we invite you to please inform us.
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We are not health professionals. Any and all advice provided on this blog is supported only by our own research, studies, and personal experiences; nothing more.
This blog is part of the Safe Space Network.
Why It’s Okay To Be Fat: Golda Poretsky at TEDxMillRiver
Watch this. Up-vote it on Youtube. Share it. <3
This video has just been bombarded in the comments by a gaggle of anti-fat, healthist fuckers. Golda presents so much important info in this talk that is being overshadowed by hate and ignorance and its such a goddamn shame. If you have a moment, and the energy, to deal with combating these trolls…please consider helping out down-voting derogatory comments, up-voting constructive ones, and adding your own love to the mix.
Why It’s Okay To Be Fat: Golda Poretsky at TEDxMillRiver
Watch this. Up-vote it on Youtube. Share it. <3
it sucks that tumblr doesn’t let you share opinions on your own blog. now i won’t ever be able to post body positive things because i made one comment about how obesity is a medical disease which comes along with many health issues. same as anorexia. and being pobese is just as awful as prorexia.
Are you serious?
Like, are you fucking serious?
First of all, let me direct you to this post. You know what? Fat and obese are two completely different things.
Because “fat” is merely a descriptive word for a body type. And “obese” is a medically sanctioned buzz word that redefines a body type as a “disease” or “disorder” so that people like you can spew your fat hatred and tote it around as a way to feel justified.
You say you don’t “every single thing” about this topic? You obviously don’t know anything, if you’re willing to conflate an eating disorder with a body type. Having, as you self-professed, experienced neither, you should take a fucking seat.
So please, spare me the whinging about your “fee-fees” and how you’ll never be taken seriously as a body positive blogger because you have decided you get to choose the cut-off limit for who is allowed to be positive about their bodies. If you’re going to go around derailing other people’s body positivity because you’ve designated yourself the arbiter of how “healthy” (or more to the point, “healthy-presenting”) people have to be in order to participate in body acceptance, then you damn well will get called out on it, so don’t bother adding a disclaimer that you “don’t want to hear anything more about it”.
Your “opinions” do not exist in a vacuum. If you’re going to spout off about things you do not understand, you’re going to get called out on it.
Anorexia nervosa is a serious mental illness. “Obesity” is a made-up medical name for the state of having a fat body. Fatness is not a mental illness.
Fatness is not a serious psychological condition that causes people to damage their bodies in the name of achieving…
Look How Quickly the U.S. Got Fat (1985-2010 Animated Map)
25 brief, delicious year.(From The Atlantic)I was born in ‘85. Interesting to see just how fast things have changed.
Okay, cool graphic. But can we stop the bullshit discussions about how this is because people are too lazy to take care of their bodies? Can we finally address the ACTUAL root causes of this, like poverty (causing people to have no money for fresh foods, and NO TIME to prepare it because working three jobs is necessary just to pay the rent), food deserts (no access to healthy food), and lack of education (no, not that people think a Big Mac is healthy, but that they literally do not know how to cook and store food, because that’s something parents often teach and they have no time to do so - see above)?
Can we talk about how processed food is considerably cheaper and INFINITELY more convenient for working people than fresh food? Can we talk about how most agricultural subsidies underwrite the cost of processed food? Can we talk about the way physical education is being cut from schools all over the country, and many after-school sports are making the transition from free for all to pay-to-play? Can we talk about how free of charge safe places for children (and adults) to exercise are more and more scarce, especially in urban areas?
Can we talk about how BMI, the formula used to measure “obesity rates,” is patently unscientific and absurd? And for the love of all that is good in the world, can we finally talk about how you can be healthy and obese at the same time?
No, of course not. Because then we’d have to stop shaming people for their bodies - fuck off, Atlantic.
(via obeast book update |)
Okay. This woman is seriously blowing my fucking mind right now. Check her artist’s statement and get into what she’s doing because it is brilliant. - Haley
From her statement:
My most visible role in the project is performing as the North American Obeast, a fictitious genus of endangered mammals. I embody three species of male and female obeasts, which superficially resemble each other in the way that zebras, mice, crows, and other fauna do. This animalistic indistinction to the careless eye reflects and satirizes the socially perceived ‘all-the-sameness’ of fat people. This kind of dehumanizing, reductive thinking is brought to light in the MOCS project through exaggeration of the largely unexamined cultural perceptions and anxieties about fat. The obeast performs fat as our culture represents it: simple-minded, undisciplined, endangered yet threatening. By enacting the stigma and dehumanization of obesity literally, the everyday stigmatization of (and anxiety about) obese people becomes darkly humorous, rather than merely pitiable.The narrative’s absurdity mirrors the real-life absurdity of ideological thinking, and creates an opportunity to consider a more nuanced perspective of ascribed and asserted identity formation. By borrowing the trappings of legitimizing scholarly fields (e.g. archaeology, history, biology, museology) to teach viewers about the fictional North American Obeast, the project asks viewers to think critically about how facts and cultural identities are made, and by whom. In this way, the work plays upon not only the stigma and cultivated anxiety surrounding the so-called “obesity epidemic,” but also the conventions of information dispersion in American culture.
[TW: eating disorders, suicide]
Dear Doctor-I-Went-To-When-I-Was-a-Teenager,
I came to you because I was getting a yearly physical for the upcoming season of cheerleading I had ahead of me. You asked what sorts of things I did with the squad with a weird look on your face, and I told you that I do what cheerleaders do: I cheer, I jump, I use my voice a lot, too! For some reason, you didn’t believe me. You still had that weird look on your face.
You continued on to tell me that my weight was out of the range for my age, height, and sex. You continued on to tell me that by the time that I was in my early 20s, I’d be so fat that I wouldn’t be able to move. You continued on to tell me that I would gain 50-100 pounds a year if I continued my ‘habits’. You told me that I would die. I thought this was weird because you were a woman, and you weren’t thin like people on tv. I didn’t understand why you were saying these things to me. I cried. I was roughly 200 pounds.
Then, you went on to ask me about my sexual experiences and you didn’t believe me when I told you that I’d never had sex. I told you that my periods were uncomfortable, heavy, and annoying—like any teenage girl would say. You told me that the best thing to do would be to give me a pap, right there. I felt violated by the simple thought of it, I didn’t know anything about pap smears, no one had ever touched me there, I was terrified. I cried. I wanted my mom.
You calmed me down as much as you could, and then went on with getting my blood pressure and blood work. I was confused as to why you were just now doing these things, after you’d told me how unhealthy I was already. You had a surprised look on your face when I was in the normal “healthy” range for my blood pressure, yet you still told me that I was unhealthy based on the measurement that the scale took of me. I was an active girl. I was a cheerleader which meant I had practice about twice a week and then two games on the weekends. You said the blood-work would most likely show a thyroid condition, and that would be an explanation for my weight problem. You told me that once we got that fixed, I’d be thin. (I have no thyroid problem)
I left your office that day feeling horrible. I felt like I had somehow lied to you, that you were a doctor and you knew what was best and maybe I just didn’t realize what I’d been doing all my life. Maybe I did have sex with someone and I didn’t know it. Hell, maybe my diet did need some work— and it did, but I didn’t know what healthy was because no one taught me. To me, healthy was being happy and loving the people around me and grasping onto them with all that I had. To me, comfort was food because when my dad died people gave us food. To me, comfort was food because when my sister died people gave us food. I was happy sometimes, sometimes my OCD roared its ugly head up. It had been a few years since my last bout of eating practically nothing in order to lose weight, and I thought I’d gotten better because I could eat again without feeling like I was going to throw up. I thought I’d gotten better because I didn’t need the anti-nausea medication anymore. I thought I’d gotten better because I didn’t want to kill myself anymore.
I left your office that day feeling ashamed of myself. I was a smart girl, I got good grades, people loved me, but I was fat. How could I have done that to myself? I walked out to my mother who was in the waiting room and told her we were leaving. I was starting to tear up again, and my mom put her hand on my shoulder and we left. We walked out of your office. I couldn’t tell my mom everything, but I told her some of what you said. I felt stupid, I cried the whole way home. To this day, I’ve probably been to the doctor a handful of times since this instance. You made me want to stay clear of doctors, you made me terrified of doctors, which in turn made me less healthy. I’m still terrified of going to the doctor and what they might say to me. Luckily, I never get sick.
Little did you know, I went on to have more intense disordered eating. I counted every last calorie I ate—including gum, I got an estimate for how many calories my body burned by just existing, and I worked my hardest to make it so that I would be burning so many calories each day to lose a pound in two days. I still ate crappy foods, but counted them into my calories. I worked out, I had a personal trainer at the gym that I worked at, and if I didn’t work out one day, I just wouldn’t eat anything. I didn’t know what healthy was, I just knew that I needed to be thin.
If it wasn’t for you, I probably wouldn’t be roughly 300 pounds today. Your shame against my body made me hate my body the way you hated my body, and I treated it terribly. I tried counting calories, I did Atkins, South Beach, Weight Watchers, I even fainted at a cheerleading practice because of how unhealthy I was. But you know what? I was still fat. I still never got below 200 pounds. I had this dream number, you know? I so badly wanted to be 160 pounds. I had a journal online that was dedicated to tracking my calorie intake and outtake, and I was in a community with other people who wanted to lose weight by any means possible. This group was an anorexia group. I figured they knew how to do it because they were the thin ones. But I got confused when I was doing the same things that they were and I still looked like me.
Food has been a constant friend to me, even when it was the enemy. It was something I feared, something I yearned for, something I could have when I was skinny. Now, I sometimes still go a day without eating and remember how happy I used to be when I felt the hunger growling up inside me. Now, I sometimes binge eat, because I don’t know what the feeling of full is because of how fucked up my eating habits have been in my lifetime. I can blog day in and day out, I can do research on fat/body politics, I can read Health at Every Size cover to cover and go on websites dedicated to it, and I still have disordered eating. You are one of the reasons. I hope you’re happy.
I’m still alive. I’m at the peak of my life, and it’s only getting better. If it wasn’t for people like you, I wouldn’t be researching what I’m researching, I wouldn’t be going to grad school, I wouldn’t be talking about body-positivity, I wouldn’t have gotten to lecture in classes at my college, I wouldn’t have gotten to do anything that I’m doing right now. I am the person I am today because of people like you.
Instead of telling your patients how terrible they are and how they’re going to die (which is a lie), tell them how to be healthier. Tell them that being active can be fun, not a chore and not only to lose weight. Tell them that fad diets don’t work. Put the energy of love into your patients, not hate. You don’t care about something that you hate.
xo Cortnie
Because it is. What we consider “healthy” is not the same as what is considered healthy in other cultures, nor what was considered healthy at other times in history. Hell, our own definition has changed considerably just since I was born. (This is also how we can tell that things like gender and childhood are socially constructed.) And we know that much of what the public considers healthy right now does not actually give the benefits people think it does (such as the fact that people “overweight” and “obese” by the BMI chart actually live longer than people it lists as “normal” weight). How would you not consider that a social construct? “Healthy” in our culture is constructed from a lot of false ideas and false assumptions about people’s bodies. This isn’t just a HAES idea. (Indeed, there are a lot of parts of the popular idea of “health” that HAES subscribes to.) If you read the actual medical and scientific literature that’s out there, you’ll find all kinds of things that contradict our idea of health.
And, of course, the popular idea of health leaves out a lot of people, especially people with disabilities, and makes it something they can never attain, but are told they should strive for constantly.
-MG
rebloggable by request
Woah woah woah.
Yes, the definition of WHAT IS HEALTHY FOR YOU is a “social construct,” but what is healthy for your BODY is a construct based off research, experimental results.
Other cultures may have differing opinions on what’s healthy /for someone/, but they absolutely cannot dispute science and what is physically healthy. What bloodletting healthy? Were lobotomies? Trepanation? You can’t just DEFINE what is good for you physically — in that case, why don’t we just throw all medical research that’s ever been done away.
Okay, so, to be clear: what you’re SAYING (I hope) is referring to the /idea of what is healthy/, not what is ACTUALLY, medicinally, healthy.
Is gastric bypass surgery healthy?
Weight loss diets, especially yo-yo dieting?
Consuming large amounts of fake sugar?
Over-exercise to the point of repetitive stress injury, in the name of weight loss?
Spending a quarter-time job on dieting and exercising in combination with a stressful full time job, family, and other obligations?
Putting kids on diets?
Diagnosis #1 of all fat patients being fatness, and Treatment #1 to lose weight, regardless of their complaint, regardless even of whether weight gain was caused by an underlying factor?
Being told to lose weight during pregnancy if you’re over a certain BMI?
Being labeled as high-risk and oftentimes banned from every birthing practice except surgery because you’re over a certain BMI?
Because these (and many more) are all things that are currently considered ‘healthy’ by modern medical ‘science.’
Our collective scientific handle on what is ‘healthy’ is not anywhere near accurate. It’s largely skewed by political considerations like the vast amount of funding available for anti-obesity research, and the agendas of certain politicians who want to link unhealthy lifestyles with whatever kind of lifestyle they personally oppose, moral panics like the obesity epidemic, commercial interests, and private biases.
If what we know about medical science was the size of a frisbee, half of that frisbee would be under dispute, and what we do NOT know would be the size of the entire fucking planet.
I know people who buy into the cult of healthism are prone to buy into this ridiculous worship of current medical science, but please, PLEASE, think a little more critically first.
-ArteToLife
[Sassy boy on crutches wearing a shirt that reads “SORRY MIND CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE”]
Fourteen-year-old Kaleb Provis had to undergo emergency surgery because of an infection in his knee after a doctor initially told him the pain was possibly caused by his “morbid obesity”.
The infection could have been cured with antibiotics if picked up earlier.
“If it wasn’t treated a nurse said his bones would start breaking,” his mother said
Fatness has dangerous implications for your health because of doctors’ fat discrimination.
Fat does not mean unhealthy.
Deaths and illnesses are ‘caused by obesity’. Just not how they tell us.
There are a number of very real direct “costs” to individuals, communities, and societies resulting from the current “war on obesity.” The direct consequences of this “war” include disordered eating practices, weight cycling, body dissatisfaction, bullying, weight stigma, bariatric surgery, insurance exclusions, and a general reinforcement of fat-phobic, weight-centric health ideas that don’t really serve to improve anyone’s health or wellbeing, regardless of their weight or size. These consequences are costly indeed in both economic and human terms, and collectively have a profound impact on health.
But what about the opportunity costs? Opportunity cost is a term of art from the field of economics, and may be defined as:
“A benefit, profit, or value of something that must be given up to acquire or achieve something else. Since every resource (land, money, time, etc.) can be put to alternative uses, every action, choice, or decision has an associated opportunity cost.”
A key feature of opportunity costs is that they do not appear on any balance sheet. However, according to economic theory, they should be taken into account in any sound decision-making process.
It’s high time we started to account for the opportunity costs of our culture’s declared war on obesity. In other words, what do we forego as a society when we allocate precious social, economic, cognitive, emotional, and physiological resources toward pursuing and maintaining our weight-based paradigm of health?
To read the rest of this blog, click here!
I see so many people talking down to fat people about ‘stop trying to lie and say obesity is healthy’ yada yada.
Ok. Fine. I won’t talk about that. Because that shit doesn’t matter in the end.
Why aren’t we talking about the fact that doctors are disrespecting patients with their anti-fat…
The latter is a reaction to the cost of the former.
Any so called “segregation” between fat and slim happened when folks decided people could be re-classed as disease and when fat people accepted that as valid.
Unwittingly, because that was the only right thing fat people could do. The emphasis was on owning up. On seeking to recover one’s honour by making amends according to instructions given by professionals and those around us.
The distance started from there. You have to distance yourself from fat people’s humanity for the idea of them as disease to bypass its implausibility. And the upshot of fat people’s focus on making good the error of fatness was to create distance from our own selves.