Fat and Fitness, Love and Hate

You know how sometimes you stumble upon something interesting on the internet, and it links to something else interesting, which links to something else... and then 2 hours later you come to your senses and now you're an expert on some completely unexpected topic? Of course you do. And as one of the distinguished few who holds a black belt in Time-Wasting, it happens to me all the time. The most recent journey I took along the well-worn side paths of the internet is one I been thinking about a lot, so I wanted to share it with you.

It all started with a post by Black Hockey Jesus, who has run at least a mile every day since January 1st of this year. At the risk of oversimplifying, the gist of his post was that if a person is overweight or obese, they shouldn't waste their time trying to achieve "fat acceptance." Instead, he or she should muster the "courage to change," because no one will ever be proud to weigh 300 lbs, nor should they be. BHJ believes that his disgust with himself is what motivated him to change his life, and his post seemed to suggest that others should also try to harness the energy of their self-hate and use it to power an ambitious fitness regimen.

While I don't fully agree with that standpoint, I found that in the comments on the post, many people did. Some even commended him for having the courage to state the unpleasant truth. Someone speculated that if a woman had written the same post, it would have resulted in a much more vitriolic free-for-all. BHJ agreed and referred to this post, which was written by a female fitness blogger named Kristen, who I had never read before. That post (the second stop on my tour of the internet) didn't say quite the same thing as BHJ's. Kristen did say, however, that she didn't buy the argument that anyone was genetically predisposed to being a certain size. She seems to feel that anyone can be fit provided they put in the work, and anyone that isn't putting in the work is just making excuses not to do something that they unquestionably ought to be doing.

From that post I bounced to this one by Swistle (who was also new to me), in which she "came out" as a plus-size woman. Swistle's post itself was, in my opinion, kind of uplifting. But once someone in the comments started criticizing Sundry (perhaps my favorite blogger) for joining the "religion of fitness," it all devolved into the same old genetics versus laziness debate.

Finally, at the end of my journey, I found Shapely Prose, which is a very well-written blog about feminism and fat acceptance, among other things. The stance at SP is that genetics do play a part in determining a person's size, that diets don't work, that exercise (not weight) determines one's health and fitness level, and that people should practice an approach to diet and exercise that emphasizes Health at Every Size.

So, now that you know what I know (and have been subjected to more links than you could possibly get through in a month), allow me to share my take on all this. From where I'm sitting, the subtext of a lot of this back and forth is that the people on the side of fat acceptance are saying, "This is just who I am" while the people on the side of concentrated fitness efforts are saying "It's hard, but I did it and so can you. If you're not fit it's because you don't want it badly enough to work as hard as I do." The fitness people are offended that fat people are discounting all of their hard work and chalking the results up to genetics; the fat people are offended that the fitness people judge them as lazy and unambitious. As far as I can tell, people on both sides are pissed because they feel as though they're being judged by people who really don't know anything about them.

What's interesting is that a lot of these arguments, when not read carefully, can lead the reader to think in terms of a false dichotomy, wherein you either a) love yourself and accept your imperfections and are therefore doomed to languish in mediocrity and obesity, or b) hate yourself for your imperfections and use that self-hate as motivation to work really REALLY hard for self-improvement.

I simply don't believe that these are our only options. For instance, the worst case scenarios are the people who truly do hate themselves because of their alleged faults, but don't find this hate to be a source of motivation for self-improvement. For some, self-hate isn't motivating at all; it's a reason to give up entirely. On the other hand, it's also possible to truly love yourself while simultaneously working to better yourself. I think that ultimately, the sincere belief that you are a valuable person who deserves good things in life can be a far more powerful impetus for change than any amount of self-loathing.

I want to point out, too, that when I say "better yourself," I'm not necessarily talking about losing weight. In my opinion, this isn't just about fat or fitness or obesity or health or however you choose to refer to it. In fact, it almost seems laughable that so many people are yelling at each other on the internet about calories and exercise, when the ways of thinking I've outlined here are really related to everything we do.

Instead of focusing exclusively on fat acceptance, as if the only people that need to worry about acceptance are fat people who've tried everything else, I think it would be far more useful if everyone focused on simple acceptance, period. Acceptance of ourselves as we are, and acceptance of others as they are. I think that rather than dooming you to mediocrity, self-acceptance makes it possible for you to work with what you've been given and make something beautiful from it. If you love yourself for who you are now, you're working for happiness now, as opposed to working tirelessly toward some abstract future in which you'll be thin/successful/awesome enough to deserve love.

And as for accepting others? I think it's really our only option. After all, is there any way you could ever truly understand the factors contributing to someone else's decisions? And whether someone chooses to work out 7 days a week or weigh 300lbs or live somewhere in between, do their personal choices really affect you at all?