Co-opting.

28Dec07

Paul mentioned something about diet concerns co-opting the language of fat acceptance, and it put me in mind of a couple of things I’ve noticed recently and meant to write about.

And, before I go on to the meat of this, I’d like to offer a brief and completely nebulous apology for the lack of writing. For some reason, I’ve found the fat acceptance thing to be totally exhausting in the last year. I’m glad that other people have stepped up in 2007 to make a big noise in the field, and for the time being, I’m almost content to just sit back and watch the show.

This is something of a cause for celebration, but it can also be frustrating. People often defensively assume, since they don’t know me, that I am part of the mainstream opinion on weight and dieting, and what I say can be misinterpreted, and I often get this general sense of mistrust due to my connection with nutrition. People simply do not respect dietetics, and maybe with good reason. But damn, it’s hard to be a nutrition student with the mainstream in one ear telling you that you can’t be a fat dietitian because no one will take you seriously (and that’s only when they’ll even condescend to recognize dietitians as authorities on nutrition, but that is a rant unto itself) and with fat acceptance in other ear declaring that dietitians are orthorexic and neurotic about food and not to be trusted. (You’ll have to dig through the comments on that link to see some of what I’m talking about.)

Possibly I am crazy. But it is difficult to no longer be a neophyte in this world, and not yet a part of the old guard who’ve fought hard and struggled and advanced things and proven themselves. It’s a sticky position to be in, and one I’d rather avoid for now. (Can you hear Britney Spears singing “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman?” ethereally in the background? No? Good. Me neither.)

Anyhow, apologies, but it’s all very confusing at the moment, and I often find myself without anything concrete to say, just vague feelings of outrage and discomfort. I feel the best thing I can do, for myself and for any movement, is finish my damn degree (which has taken a lot longer than planned because I’ve been busy actually working in my field at the same time, and having the assorted personal crises that everyone seems to have during university), and then actually work in my chosen field some more, with a view to changing the fundamentals of how it is practised.

So. Back to co-opting. I noticed, when writing my earlier post on the “million pound strike” that a weight loss concern has actually taken over the slogan and idea of “the million pound march.” For those of you who may not know or remember, The Million Pound March was actually an event organized by the NAAFA in 1998 (itself somewhat co-opting the wording of The Million Man March of a few years before, but in an entirely different sense than the current co-option, if you will.) The original Million Pound March was a gathering to encourage people to live well at any size, and to let the diet industry eat itself. The current Million Pound March is an effort launched by eDiets.com to get people to pledge to lose weight to the tune of, collectively, a million pounds. Preferably with the help of their, er, services.

It’s almost too exhausting to even bother pointing out the differences, and the inherent irony of this particular attempt at co-opting the fat acceptance language. So, forgive me, but I won’t.

Another example of co-opting rudely intruded on me recently, when I saw a commercial with a woman dragging bathroom scales, attached by chains to her legs, down the street. It was for a weight loss company, and I curse my memory for not recalling which one at the moment, but I will update if I see it again. Anyhow, the image is directly taken from something that happened at an actual fat acceptance protest (was it International No Diet Day?) where a fat woman, someone recovering from anorexia nervosa, attached scales to her legs by chains and dragged them down the street. She had photos of herself during the worst part of her eating disorder pinned to her clothes. It was an image I saw either in a book or on a website, and it affected me and stuck with me. So when I saw it again, two days ago — almost the identical image — used in an advertisement for a diet company, I wanted to smash the TV.

These are only two examples. No doubt there are thousands more, and no doubt I also don’t have the energy to contend with them, either. But I do have a question: is this a sign of something bad, as it immediately seems — a sign that fat acceptance is dying and its parts are being cannibalized by opportunistic vultures — or is it a sign that the barest concepts and images and the words of fat acceptance are filtering down, on some level, to the general public? Could it be a sign of better things to come? Frankly, I don’t know.

P.S. If I could, I would marshal all of the fat acceptance shit-disturbers lurking on the intertubules to go fill out that Million Pound March pledge with “creative” information. Like this.

Filed under: dietetics, fat acceptance   |  2 Comments