Kiss My Permanently Fat Ass

Weighty issues.  Fat lot of good.  Other fat-related puns inserted here.

No matter how you find a way to bring it up, it’s been on my mind lately:  FAT.  There have been many reasons for this.  One was the fact that a good friend’s husband made an extremely insensitive (and idiotic considering the fact that she’s gorgeous) comment to his wife regarding her size.  But more than that, yesterday, my blog world was crushed a bit when one of my blog crushes, Mysterg, pulled a Debbie Downer on everyone and decided to be FatHaterChampion 2009.

As many of you who have read this blog for a long time know, I’m a fat positivist and health at every size activist.  I believe that fat people can be healthy and that fat, in and of itself, is not a bad thing.  I believe that diets are wastes of time and only hurt people in the end.  And I know that there are facts out there to support me…because studies have proven them to be true.  But yesterday, Mysterg decided to pull out the idiot card of all idiot cards–the fat hating card.

See it’s easy to hate fat people.  You can call it a condition of our generation.  You can call it the side effect of our society.  You can damn well do anything you please, but the hard part is to think about the issue critically.  Because once you do, you realize it’s harder to lose weight and keep it off than it is to pull down a star from the sky.  And once you realize that, you come directly to the conclusion that making fun of someone for a situation that they can’t change, even if they wanted to, is just about as cool as kicking someone’s wheelchair, spitting on someone’s book of faith or beating up someone for the color of their skin or their sexual orientation.

The fact is that once you learn to change your definitions of beauty, your whole world opens up and makes life that much more vibrant and alive.  Fat people can be and are beautiful.  And if you want to do something that harms beauty, then you my friend are sicker in the head than you once thought.

Would I chose to be fat if I had a choice?  Probably not.  But I’ve tried my damnest before to lose weight and it just doesn’t hold.  I see too many women, in particular, killing themselves trying–doing 30 day shreds or diets that say to eat this or not that or claiming they’re just trying to be healthier when really what they want is to loose pounds.  It’s a billion dollar industry that plays off of ideas that fat people are inherently bad and must be stopped.  But it’s an industry that is sick and wrong.

The subject of Mysterg’s post, to be fair (though I’d like not to), was whether we should have a fat tax or how we should “solve” the “problem” of “obesity”. (God, I get really quotation mark happy when I get angry!)  The fact is that such a tax would hardly do any good.  Many of the people that are fat are that way, at least in part, because the availability of cheap good food is shitty whereas the availability of cheap crap food is plentiful.  Creating a fat tax only taxes people out of their respective brackets and forces them to eat processed foods, killing them with sodium, carbs and fat not to mention all the unpronounceable preservatives that go along with such things.  It’s essentially another way to ghettoize people again along socio economic lines.  And it, too, is sick and wrong.

It also ignores the role of genetics, not to mention the increasingly sedentary lifestyle that has become the hallmark of our technological genius as a society.  Solve those problems first and then get back to me about wanting to starve myself.

While I know there are people that can lose and have lost weight, the fact is that the vast majority of fat people simply cannot do that for one reason or another.  Those of us that are truly fat have gone through the trials and tribulations of being fat knowing full well that if all we had to do was crawl through barbed wire while being lit on fire and asked to solve the mysteries of the universe just to be thin, hell, we’d probably do it.  This just isn’t an option.

The fact of the matter is that we’d be a lot better off if we just started loving our bodies the way they are and doing healthy things because they’re healthy–not because we want to change the way we look.  I know it’s hard, because I struggle with it every single minute of every single day of my life–and I have been dealing with it for nearly my entire life.  There are days when I can’t be positive about being fat, even though it is ever-so-clearly part of who I am.  There are days when I can’t be positive about anything.  But the fact is that I’m fat and my fat is here to stay–no matter what I do (believe me, I’ve tried).  So I can either learn to love myself or I can turn into a self-hating machine.

The truth is that a fat tax, mandatory dietary or exercise programs and the diet industry as a whole won’t prevent people from being fat.  It’s been proven.  But yet people still try to solve the proverbial problem.  And if you haven’t been there, then you don’t really know.   That’s the problem with people who try to solve problems that they don’t understand…they end up making assumptions about solutions that they can’t possibly comprehend.

And you know what they say about assumptions…they make a fat ass out of you and me.