I saw a recipe on Facebook today from a fitness company called “Set Your Fat on Fire Fitness.” It made me think of all the things the diet companies have told me to do with my fat:
Let’s Start with Setting My Fat on Fire
Then another favorite of weight loss schemes, often those that involve exercise: Torching my fat!
How about the ever popular melting my fat away:
I saw an ad for a cosmetic surgery that wanted me to let them freeze my fat:
Of course this is about the idea that I’m supposed to think of myself not as a fat woman, but as a thin woman covered in fat. I’m supposed to hate the fat which, in turn, is supposed to make it ok for people to sell me “self improvement” with language suggesting that I should burn, melt, freeze away or otherwise dispense with the part of me that is fat so that I can start living my glorious life as a thin woman.
Except that’s complete and total bullshit. I’m not a temporarily inconvenienced thin woman in need of some kind of overwrought, hand-wringing, fire and ice intervention. I’m a fat woman and I have no interest in trying to become a thin woman – I love my fat body and I’m not interested in melting it, freezing it, or setting it on fire. I’d rather hang out with hot body and do cool stuff.
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Brilliant 🙂 I love you’re blog, you’re brilliant 😀
That was so funny, Ragen! We do hear these things all the time.
My fat is not a wart or a pimple that goes away, making my life better. It’s an integral part of me.
this reminds me of how, in the US, poor and disadvantaged folks are taught to think of themselves as temporarily not-rich. keeps ’em fighting the WRONG TARGET. 😉
^this is incredibly insightful. I know several people (including family members) who totally get sucked into this mindset.
Not quite on this subject, but I just had to think of you and your message not to hate our bodies, but love the great things that they do. I’m reading a book – which is much discussed in Germany at the moment – about digestion. It’s not a book giving health counseling or anything, even if it often is announced as such, it just explains in a veeeery funny and easy to read way how our digestion works. While reading I thought all the time: Wow, all these complicated things my body does all the time without my even noticing – that’s truely amazing. And I myself am lucky, because I can eat anything, no intolerances, my digestion always works. And I used to hate my body because it gains weight so quickly – but actually that just means that my digestion does amazing work, I should adore it for that.
Sorry, just had to tell that, I’ve just fallen in love with things in my body I never thought of.
(just found, it will be out in english also: Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ – if it’s ok to tell the title)
This reminded me of another book about the digestive system that I read, it’s called Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach. She really approached this very sort of disgusting topic in a funny and lighthearted way. You might enjoy it! I thought it was great.
I’m really enjoying your blog! I’m a licensed counselor in PA and I run a support group for students with eating disorders. Helping students develop more body-love is so important to me! Thanks for all of your advocacy and wisdom!
I’ve studied the human body. Fat does not “melt.” It’s not like exercise or dieting is the equivalent of putting butter or lard in a pan and seeing it liquefy. Which brings me to my other point: some science speculates that matter cannot be created or destroyed, just changed in form. So if body fat did literally melt, or freeze or burn…we’d look like something out of a horror movie!
Maybe people think heat can make fat vaporize into the atmosphere like water…but wouldn’t everyone else in the gym have to wear respirators to avoid all the free floating fat particles in the air?
My point is, people are stupid illogical when it comes to the human body, and diet companies are counting on that.
I also have read that, short of an invasive technical intervention like liposuction (which btw removes fat cells by pure chance as the equipment as well as our anatomy mean the process does not discriminate in what bits of your insides get hoovered up), you can’t actually get *rid* of fat cells – only shrink them. So any weight loss plan who claims to “get rid of” fat doesn’t understand human biology.
I never believe any proponents of diets and/or weight loss, because they always show a terrifying lack of scientific knowledge, or even common sense.
I was just thinking that. If our fat “melts” then we’d be all gooey.
Plus this isn’t Rumpelstiltskin turning fat into muscle, that’s not possible. The cells only grow or shrink.
I like those respirators!
And legt’s not forget the women’s magazines that feature Dr. Oz on the cover every other week, it seems, with another headline on how to “BLAST your belly fat!”
It’s like Mortal Kombat.
Personally, I would rather blast Dr. Oz!
There ya go!
I’d leave the exam room if he showed up as my doc. Just can’t take the guy seriously.
And just who was it who died and appointed Dr. Oz Chief Medical Officer For Planet Earth anyhow?
Not me-fer sure!
Mon dieu, those adds are amazingly bad. On the plus side, the pictorial makes you look like the new superhero battling supervillains who are in fact terrible diets who became sentients. And this would make for a great comic.
Rise against the imperialist slash and burn campaign. You have to lose nothing but your chains!!!