My own up-front reason for my lifetime diet struggle to lose weight and maintain weight loss is ... 
to avoid spending more time as an object of the abuse that happens due to our culture’s stigmatization of fat people.

I’ve called this “vanity”, but vanity is defined as the quality of people who have too much pride in their own appearance.  Is vanity really the word that describes avoiding abuse and seeking the comfort and protection of a positive status in our current culture?

It is currently popular to say we are working to lose or maintain weight “for our health” or “to be healthy”.  The opposite of “healthy” is “sickly” or “diseased”, and of course nobody wants to be that, but MOST dieters aren’t “sickly” or “diseased” and aren’t even in much danger of becoming that.  Of course, there’s also no guarantee that losing weight will make or keep anyone “healthy”.

I don’t believe “health” is REALLY the reason that most people diet.  I think saying that we diet to be “healthy” is often just another way to sell-ourselves-out and buy-in to our culture’s diet marketing industry … and make no mistake, the medical profession is a very active participant in this billion dollar marketing industry.

All fat people know that the article below is true, and yet strangely… (or not so strangely),  a great many fat people ..and formerly fat people… pretend that their struggle to be and stay thin has little to do with their desire to avoid being a member of this stigmatized group.

Drive-by Fat Shaming

            by Ragen Chastain, danceswithfat

Today I’m not talking about the kind of drive-by fat shaming where people moo at us from their cars (though they do, sometimes they even throw eggs, and it’s super messed up.) Today I’m talking about the small incidents of fat shaming that happen daily, often as casual asides.

This post was inspired by my attempt to watch the show Jessica Jones. Roughly a million people have recommended this show to me as being  amazingly feminist and all girl power-y. With the first few minutes there is an incident of fat shaming. It is apropos of absolutely nothing, it doesn’t “advance the plot”  she is surveilling someone in her job as a private inves...

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Health is not an obligation.  Nobody owes anybody else “health” or “healthy” behaviors by any definition.

Health is not a barometer of worthiness. Everyone deserves basic human respect. 

Health is not completely within our control. Health is multifaceted and includes genetics, environment, stress level, access to healthcare, behaviors such as food, movement, sleep, etc. Nobody is completely in control of all of these factors, and we overestimate the amount of control we have over our health outcomes.

Health is not guaranteed under any circumstances.  No behaviors guarantee a specific health outcome.  People get all kinds of illnesses regardless of their behaviors or body size.  Thin people get all the same diseases that are correlated with being fat, so being thin is not a sure preventative or a sure cure.

Here in 2015, much of our culture assumes that "Health" is a monolithic, universal good.  As Anna Kirkland says in her book: Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality (2010):

"You see someone smoking a cigarette and say: "Smoking is bad for your health", when what you mean is, "You are a bad person because you smoke."  You encounter someone whose body size you deem excessive, and say "Obesity is bad for your health," when what you mean is "You are lazy, unsightly, or weak of will."  You see a woman bottle-feeding an infant and say, "Breastfeeding is better for that child's health", when what you mean is that the woman must be a bad parent.

You see the smokers, the overeaters, the bottle-feeders, and affirm your own health in the process.  In these and countless other instances, the perception of your own health depends in part on your value judgments about others, and appealing to health allows for a set of moral assumptions to fly stealthily under the radar."

The following article also addresses this issue.

Important note on
“healthy is the new skinny…”
                by Isabel Foxen Duke

In many ways, healthy IS the new skinny — in the sense that, for some, it has become a new, politically correct way for women to shame, judge and fear themselves (…and others).

Unfortunately, this is to the detriment of a growing list of women I hear from regularly saying things like “I ...