I’m writing in response to Georgie Silvarole’s well-intentioned but misguided opinion piece about the Fat Acceptance Movement, in which she expresses her “concern” over FA and perpetuates some myths about what FA is and isn’t.

Silvarole grossly misrepresents both FA and “Health at Every Size.” Neither of these social justice movements proclaim that one can be “healthy” (whatever that means — who’s judging, and what are the criteria?) at any size. They do promote the fact that people can engage in healthy behaviors at any size. (And don’t we want to encourage positive, life-affirming behaviors from everyone?) They promote good health, which can look different for different people.

You cannot tell how healthy someone is by looking at her or him. Many, many thin people do not get regular exercise, eat well, etc. Many, many fat people do. Including myself.

The links between weight and health are far more complex than Silvarole’s commentary suggests. For instance, the lowest mortality rates (chances of dying prematurely) are found among people whose BMI is considered overweight or mildly obese.

Another example: People who are overweight or obese actually fare better and live longer than “normal-weight” people with certain chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes and heart failure.

In this country we spend more than $61 billion a year on weight-loss. That’s big business. And your chance of losing weight and keeping it off long-term is the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. We do more harm to ourselves by losing and regaining weight (yo-yo dieting or weight cycling) than we’d do by remaining at higher but stable weights. So when Silvarole writes that being obese is “in most cases changeable,” she is simply parroting the popular but inaccurate notions we’ve bought into. 

On this campus, many students struggle with anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder and other eating disorders. A lot of those were triggered by the longing to be thin and by dieting. And, ironically, one long-term effect of dieting is obesity. Every time you lose weight and regain it, you wind up heavier than when you started.

For most people, significant long-term weight loss is not possible. But improving health is, whether you’re thin, fat or in between. That’s what both the FA movement and Health at Every Size are all about. 

 Harriet Brown
Associate Professor, Magazine Journalism
S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications

Published on September 29, 2014 at 12:31 am