My thin housemate believes if fatties REALLY wanted to lose weight and they were motivated enough they REALLY could lose it, by dieting forever (when she says this she only applies it to fat people who genuinely want to lose weight). I've tried telling her that diets don't work but all she retorts is "you HAVE to stick with it, if you can think it you CAN do it!". Idk what else to say to help her understand because she doesn't get it. I could use the help please, thanks so much for this blog!

Asked by

dimmadonewithyoshit

What, she thinks fat people haven’t thought of this before? That we’re not being sold a permanent eating- and exercise-disordered ¼ job where starvation, obsession, and self-loathing are the daily features?

We know this shit. The problem with these studies is they show that for the vast majority of people, permanent diets are physically, psychologically, and emotionally impossible. That after a while your choice is between an exhausting ascetic lifestyle and actually feeding your body or doing other things with your time than dedicating 2+ hours a day to heavy cardio. When you see your naturally thinner friends and family be able to actually enjoy their fucking lives instead of worshipping at the Diet Altar and you think, “That’s not fucking fair.”

It ISN’T fucking fair. The health risks associated with fatness are way overblown, misunderstood, misapplied, and totally ignore the health risks associated with having other bodies or genetic characteristics. Fatness is made out to be a controllable behavior when it’s largely genetically programmed. And the only reason this particular genetic program is called ‘controllable’ is because billions of corporate and public dollars are pouring into studying how it might, maybe somehow, with some permanent ‘lifestyle change’ or pill or procedure, be changeable — upon which researchers not affiliated with a source that stands to profit from finding fat bodies changeable discover that after half a century or more of trying to figure out how to permanently change fat bodies in a way that does more good than harm, we’re no closer to this answer than where we began.

A ‘permanent lifestyle change’ of starvation and overexercise does way more psychological and emotional harm than physical good, and perhaps might have adverse effects physically — there haven’t been enough people who have permanently (say, for longer 10 years) lost a significant amount of weight (like more than 50 lbs, that is, enough to make a small fat person thin) in a way that subverts their natural set point (so, they’d been at the same weight without doing anything to maintain it for many years before losing it) to even study this.

It’s the height of thin privilege and/or dieter self-loathing to think that fat people should live their lives half-starved and overworked in order to pay for the crime of being fat. Fuck anyone who suggests this, especially reasonable people who recognize that starvation and overwork is torture in prison and warcamp populations but somehow okay for fat people. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, oh and fuck you.

-ArteToLife