Tuesday, June 14, 2011

No More "Fat Talk?"

Quick post. I've been contemplating...one of the activities I often do with young women in body image workshops is aimed at ending "fat talk." Or in other words, it helps them gain the tools needed to both stop themselves from making negative weight focused talk and to neutralize the situation when their friends engage in negative weight focused talk about themselves and others.

However, the more I write and think about HAES, the more I realize that this is not enough. It's not enough to tell girls they can no longer engage in "fat talk."

The real solution is to remove the negative spin on the descriptor "fat" (as I've argued before.) Because, let's face it, some of us are fat. And that's ok.

I mean, I think that getting girls to stop engaging in all kinds of negative talk is great, but we should also be able to use the word "fat" without it having the negative connotations it has. But we gotta start somewhere, I suppose.

Baby steps, people.

2 comments:

  1. loved the thought. what alternative would you suggest?

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  2. That's a pretty big question. The solution is a whole societal shift, which goes well beyond one time or even one year long programming. It's the end of fat shaming and body policing. It's the end of weight based discrimination. It includes a HAES perspective, shifting the idea that weight is THE indicator of health, to weight as ONE indicator of health. Getting people of all sizes represented in the media. And getting people (like our first lady) to be FOR childhood health and not AGAINST childhood obesity (just to name a few!)

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