Wow. Sopme people really suck.

reminds me of when i was first told that i was “borderline diabetic” and instructed that i could only have one carbohydrate item per meal. how i was told that means one tortilla and i gasped “it takes two tortillas to make one taco! and we eat three or four tacos!”. how it meant that i had to teach my Nicaraguan/Guatemalan/Mexican brothers i lived with to make a meal that didn’t include tortillas AND rice AND potatoes AND yucca AND corn on the cob… even though those things are a whole lot cheaper than the vegetables or meat – they are what stretches the meal. and at least we lived in walking distance of Dominican, Mexican & Korean owned stores that sold some fresh vegetables.

i’m sure that when i die it will be said that it’s because i’m fat. because all the yoga and walking and eating Lean Cuisine for lunch and dinner because it’s relatively cheap and low in calories and not buying chocolate and everything else has not caused me to lose one pound. on the contrary, no matter what i do i keep getting bigger. and it must be a choice, right? i must love that i have to buy new bras every three months and that i own only one pair of jeans and that all my dress pants for work that i already wear big are too tight. i must enjoy being called an “ugly fat b****” by kids on the bus. love being hit in the hips by the edges of people’s shopping carts and they look at me like how dare i take up so much space in the aisle. love being told that all the illnesses, including mental, are tied to being fat – even the illnesses that existed when i was a semi-starved 120 lbs. yep, i’m choosing this and loving every minute of it. being fat is a lot of fun, don’t you know?

but that same liberal/progressive will see Tim Russert die and go—ooooh, if only tim wasn’t so fat! We would still have him here with us! You know? And then maybe that progressive will start up a “anti-fat” campaign or 501c3 that works to end “youth obesity” by sending kids to camps. All so that Tim’s memory will be honored. and we’ll all know–you die from being fat.

So it’s not that I’m dismissing where you and sanabituranima are coming from by *any* means…I’m just thinking in a different direction, I think, than you two are–because I’ve been told once too often by people of color that “going to mc donalds’ is traitorous to ‘our cause’ even as the classism in that statement and every other ism in that statement. (think bill cosby here). i am thinking mostly of the horrific irony in the fact that it’s traitorous to ‘the cause’ for *esp* black folks but also other people of color to eat at fast food (mexican latinos have had huge issues with diabetes/high sugar related eating)—and yet–for so many of us, our bodies *are a symptom* of *being colored*–you know? diabetic overweight problems are happening *because we are Latino* and systematic racism is violating our bodies–

and when did any of us ever “have a choice* to not be subjected to racism?

And I hear u on all the structural issues that we have built this whole “get fit” industry around to hide it. And that part of that industry is making “fat” a choice even as more and more prescription drugs include weight gain as a “minor” side-effect. But I’d also say the deaths sanabituranima and I mention aren’t as obvious as one might think. The whole thread on my post is a beat down between the “fat aint fit” folks (ie the ppl who hide behind health rhetoric to spread hatred of normal sized and large(r) women) and the women who love their bodies no matter what size; a woman died & ppl came by to make hamburger jokes. So it seems like all part of the same blindness & I think it is getting worse as a whole generation (or 2) have no grown up with this rhetorical blindness to oppressions written on our bodies.

FYI – Adios Barbie is looking to expand its writers/readers on the subject of healthy bodies no matter what size from intersectional perspectives.

Maybe she died because gym classes mostly serve to make everyone feel bad about sports and their body.

Of course, the maybe she just died, and was fat works too.

Bee Wilson’s Swindled is a great book that exposes how garbage has been passed off as food for a lot longer than 40 years. Highly recommended.

also, using the word “queer” tends to signify that the speaker rejects the language that people are “born gay” and have “no choice.” That doesn’t mean that it is wrong to think of oneself as “born gay”. Rather, it means that the political strategy is to de-emphasize the notion that people can’t help it and insist that there’s utterly nothing wrong or weird about a queer lifestyle since it isn’t any more or a less a lifestyle than a het lifestyle. http://www.queerbychoice.com/

http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/queertheory.html

of course, the word’s been co-opted and is used by everyone now which is a shame. i preferred it when using it signified a particular political approach and rejection of the older gay / lesbian studies/theory approach which sought accomodation and assimilation. *sigh*

fatphobia acts in a very similar way–people are making the *choice* to be fat, right? so if you legislate things like “no fast food restaurants within three miles of any school” or “no soda advertising directed at children under 18″ then that means there are *repercussions* for the *real* persecuted group–the corporations that are losing out on their god given right to promote their product.

because it’s all a choice, right? and you have the choice to be fat or not to be. there are no structural inequalities that fatness is used to hide.

and isn’t it swell that fatness is a choice–unlike, say, blackness. social inequalities based on something that you can’t do anything about (like skin color) are a sin and should be legislated against, right?