Read Online Half-Assed by Jennette Fulda - Free Book Online

that made millions of dollars without making millions of customers thinner. If society put importance on being fat there would be a different list of bad things: binge eating, forced feedings, and poorer gas mileage. Either way, there
were many things about being fat that simply sucked, my surgery bill being one of them. My knees had only so much cartilage left.
    I also had the nagging feeling that this was about more than just fat and thin. It was about a philosophy toward life. The members of the fat-acceptance movement were encouraging me to give up hope of ever being smaller. It was as though they had decided I’d be locked away in fat prison forever, so I should just hang some drapes over the steel bars to make the place homey. My body was like a prison, isolating me from relationships and experiences that I so desperately wanted. I kept hearing the subliminal message, “Stop trying. You’ll never make it. Forget about digging an escape tunnel. It’ll just add six more months to your sentence.” Underlying all the adipose tissue was a philosophical debate greater than fat or thin, pretty or ugly. It was the battle of whether it was better to strive for the impossible dream or to settle for what I had. Which one would cause more casualties?
    Many fat-acceptance members believed obesity wasn’t a choice but a permanent life sentence handed down by your genetics and metabolism. After reading the most recent research, I agreed that it was much harder for some people to lose weight than others. 3 Factors you had little control over could make you fatter. People struggling to get by couldn’t afford the lean meats and fresh vegetables that the middle class could. 4 Some people seemed to gain weight if they ate half a cookie, while others couldn’t bulk up no matter how much cake they ate. Some scientists speculated obesity could even be caused by a virus. 5 None of this was fair, and it created a very uneven playing field, but that didn’t mean it was impossible to lose weight. Deciding it wasn’t a choice sounded like a choice itself.
    Simply believing you could do something was essential for success. The placebo effect is well documented. If you give sick people a pill they believe will make them better, it will usually improve their health
even if they’re just chewing on a Mentos. In one study, girls who took a math test after being told boys were better at math scored worse than girls who didn’t hear this information. 6 The very act of believing you couldn’t do something made it less likely that you could. It was a selffulfilling prophecy.
    If there were simply a self-acceptance movement, maybe I could have joined that.
    The rebukes I got from FA members for wanting to lose weight were strikingly similar in tone to the criticisms fat people got for being fat. In both instances people claimed to be criticizing me for my own good and wanted to know why I couldn’t see the error of my ways; they just couldn’t agree on what the error was, getting fat or trying to get thin. The members of the FA movement were promoting what they thought was the best life philosophy for fat people, but I also knew that it would really piss them off if I lost 200 pounds and kept it off for the rest of my life. Many of these people truly believed that fat people could never permanently lose weight. If I did it anyway it would strike a blow to their personal philosophy. While they probably believed getting me to give up before I even tried was in my best interests, it was also in their best interests to defend the worldview they depended upon to keep themselves sane. I didn’t need them to look out for my own good. I didn’t like being told what I could or couldn’t do. I didn’t want to give up.
    I liked the FA movement best when it was promoting things I hadn’t believed to be possible, like wearing a bathing suit in public without being ashamed. I wanted to continue focusing on possibilities, not limitations. I wanted to