Chris

The spur for this was someone making that goddamn simplistic "burn more calories than you take in, the end!" argument.  I could find it, but it was ages ago, and as it's not just that commenter who's made this sort of argument…

Anyways.  If "just burn more calories than you take in!" is the entire definition of how people should lose weight (and therefore how certain people are failing to lose weight), please explain how I am thin, society.  For lo, I eat garbage, and I don't move much.

[1] Garbage: McD's, ramen, and spaghetti with Parmesan cheese.  That is very nearly the entirety of what I eat daily.  I am not exaggerating for conversational effect.  (I don't like change, what can I say?)

[2] !Moving: I'm a computer geek and a hermit, hello.

For extra credit, explain a past boyfriend of mine, who ate more than any three people I knew and was bloody skinny.  At my most underweight, he weighed less than me and was my height.

You're not allowed to use "maybe he had a thyroid condition" or "maybe you have anxiety and ADD and therefore vibrate across dimensions", because if you're going to explain this-all away in that fashion, why are these explanations out of the question for people who are fat?  Leaving aside the part where I can't recall any correlation being made between anxiety or ADD and weight.

*is so very patient*

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And now I have a reminder-to-self post if I find people using that argument.

Originally posted at Xtinian Thoughts.  Comment here or there.

I just had a bit of a duh-n00b moment whilst reading a blog elsewhere, so I'll put my comment here.

The various dieting programs (WW, Jenny Craig, whatever the hell) market themselves as being Awesome Like Whoa at providing weight loss.  They don't disclose the real numbers or do any real long-term studies, so all the public has to go on is how they market themselves.  And then said public sees fat people.  So naturally, they're not going to even know, necessarily, how nigh-impossible it is to lose weight – they're just going to assume that these people are lazy, otherwise they'd be thin right now, as per WW's (and others') advertising.

I got this notion from that link and from a post at Alas, A Blog: "If anyone could reliably make fat people thin, they'd soon have more money than Microsoft and Haliburton combined."

Originally posted at Xtinian Thoughts.  Comment here or there.

Today's pile of awesome is all in this paragraph:

And do you know what? If you're going to leave a comment that all those tiers would make you look OMG FAT!!!!, please don't bother. There is more to life than the bogus imperative to minimize your apparent body weight at all times. Just for a minute, put down that burden, okay? Think about how that gorgeous fabric would FEEL. Think about how it would SOUND. Think about how you would MOVE in it, where you would GO in it, what you would put in the POCKETS, even, and not on some imagined optical illusion of a few more inches here or there. Now imagine feeling like that all the time — imagine the question "Does this make me look fat?" didn't exist. How would that change your life? What would you do differently? Would it get you to wear this beautiful dress?

For some reason, I hear those last three lines spoken in the voice of the female lead from Chocolat.

Originally posted at Xtinian Thoughts.  Comment here or there.

I wanted to worry that I'm using this journal just as a repository for links… but then I stopped.  Because they're good goddamn links.

First, the fat-related links.

* [LJ] A friend sent me this link, about what being fat means to this one woman.

I take pleasure. I don't exist for the pleasure of others, I don't deny myself pleasure to please anybody. I give pleasure, when it pleases me to do so, but I am not taken. When a lover said, "Wow, I can't believe you let me do that to you, and I didn't even have to buy you jewelry," I snapped, "I didn't let you do that to me. I made you do that to me." When I'm hungry, I eat; if it's in public, it's not a performance of ordering half-helpings and the sauce on the side to show off that feminine denial of desire. I eat what I want. I eat like a man. And it's fucking ridiculous that eating is gendered in this culture, but it's a fucking ridiculous culture, okay?

I am a mover. I am not moved.

I am an agent. I am not an object.

* She who sent me the previous link runs The Rotund, a "Body Acceptance and Politics Blog".  I absolutely highly recommend this blog.

* Junk Food Science – a terrific blog about "the truth about food, fat and health".

Next, a feminism-related link.

* At Pandagon, Chris Clarke writes How not to be an asshole: a guide for men.  I can't single out a line or three that I love; I love it all.

Originally posted at Xtinian Thoughts.  Comment here or there.