However, I think fat acceptance can accept people who are not yet able to resist the pressure to diet. But dieters can’t be consistently fat-accepting by virtue of being dieters. FA that diets is a flawed FA but it could develop into a more perfect FA.

Except, I don’t want hypothetically to tell people what to do if they find themselves on the extreme far end of the bell curve, where their fat is actually severely hindering them, rather than society’s shaming of it hindering them. Kind of the opposite side of the coin (the “I don’t want to tell people fatter than me that they are too fat” coin), I feel I don’t have a right to tell anyone fatter than me how fat is too fat, because I have never been fatter than me and can’t judge. I don’t know if this makes a difference in how feasible weight loss actually is, and I still think it’s important that they examine whether it’s the fat or the discrimination that’s the problem.

5′3″, 185-ishlbs, (UK) size 22, and 49 years old, squid. Want to race me up those stairs? ‘cos I can take you.

That doesn’t mean that I think ex-gay therapy is ok though. But it does mean that I never argue for GLBT rights from a ‘it’s totally inborn’ perspective.

Likewise, the argument you’re making makes sense to me from a specific scientific perspective: Fat is almost completely genetic and is not, itself, the cause of health problems. But my question was, and still is, can the same conclusion (dieting is antithetical to fat acceptance) make sense without that specific scientific perspective?

Although, after reading lots of different perspectives on the issue, maybe the question I should have asked isn’t about dieting, but about the movement as a whole?

I’m rambling a bit, but here’s what I definitely wanted to say. I believe you can support rights for fat people based on nothing but acknowledgement of their humanity. Whether fat acceptance can exist outside certain scientific parameters isn’t something I’ve figured out yet.

Also (and this is not just in reply to you, Piper), I totally support recommending books, websites, articles etc… to people in order to expose them to new ideas, but I am curious about people’s assumptions that, if someone expresses a contrary opinion wrt the health implications of fat, that they must not have read these things yet. I’m not sure where that comes from.

It is what it is: dieting means you want to change.
If you can’t handle it, then you probably don’t
belong in the movement. As long as dieters and
people who are okay with WLS call themselves
fat activists, then the movement won’t get
anywhere.

Why? Because it’s like the gay person who
hides in the closet, married and living a lie.
Or the black person who bleaches their
skin. It’s pretending to be something they
are not. I think the first poster that said
that being fat is unhealthy is wrong.

They obviously haven’t visited junkfoodscience.blogspot.com or read
The Obesity Myth. That poster along with
the 50-pound weight-loss troll don’t belong
here. It’s time for fat people to fight back
and stop apologizing for their size and stop
accepting these wishy-washy in-betweens
that are okay with OTHERS being fat as
long as they can continue to diet and try
to fit into some absurd “ideal.” It’s nonsense.

Tecumseh.

Our brains are built to make connections and associations just like most animals with highly organized nervous systems. This makes stereotyping easy and often true. Dieting in connection to the FA movement only helps reinforce the “fat people must WANT to be thin” stereotype. Though, it may be true for most it is not true for all and I think that any movement, for any minority, have a purposeful goal in removing its people from the stereotype. When the minds of everyone are removed from those stereotypes then the people within the minority are then free to truly become whoever they want to be without conforming and falling into their set place in society.

—————————————-

I really want to say this nicely but I’m not good with words (obviously and due to a saturation in science classes rather than liberal arts). So, I know that a lot of people have disagreed with me here but that does not mean that I am trolling or that my comments are just parody. ‘Cause I think you all are super smart and I have agreed with a lot of your rebuttals to my comments.

a) I believe the vast majority of people have more or less the same eating habits (in other words, fat people aren’t eating much differently from thin people), and I don’t think that overeating is what makes people fat. Sorry if it came off that way.

b) When I say “dangerous” I don’t mean that anti-dieting posts can be harmful to readers – I was referring the the effects of those posts on the FA movement itself.

Thanks for the responses on what a “diet” is and isn’t in FA

Dieting (in FA circles, it means anything — including over-exercise — with the intention to lose weight) is about as successful *in the long-term* as trying to will one’s eyes a different color.

Thin people overeat. Sometimes. Sometimes all of the time. For whatever reason (most likely genetics), they do not get fat from it. Neither do fat people. Fat people are born to be fat. Just how fat, from everything I’ve learned from this movement, has more to do with restricting eating, which then leads the body to readjust its set point upwards, than having anything whatsoever to do with “overeating.”

Btw, set point theory is that one cannot eat one’s weight more than 20 or 30 pounds over one’s set point. Cf. Ancel Keys. There are quite a few binge eating disorder recoverers who believe one can eat oneself hundreds of pounds above one’s set point, but there is also a theory that weight loss dieting causes BED.