The surprisingly harmful aspect of the body positivity movement

Totally! I fully agree! Plus, unhealthy behaviour comes from unhealthy thinking, so it has to start with mental health anyway!

I agree, too, about basic maintenance eating being unhealthy. Sometimes you just have to make a big change!

First of all, I'm 72 years old. So there's that. Nonetheless, I'm pretty hip about cultural issues and cultural change, having lived through about a dozen cultural "revolutions."

Speaking purely about myself, I never wanted to be fat. It wasn't MY aesthetic standard. Nor did it align with my standards of what I considered a "full life" and what its activities of daily living included and didn't exclude. I didn't give a hoot whether anyone else was fat or not. I just didn't want to be fat because it cramped my style in every way.

I also think there's considerable evidence that human evolution has not favored obesity and certainly not morbid obesity. Therefore, I've never imagined that healthy human bodies ranged in size from 120 pounds to 600+ pounds. The only people who've thrived economically or reproductively as obese or MO were rich enough or powerful enough to require others to deliver all the resources they desired and needed.

Therefore, I view obesity, and definitely morbid obesity, as a very recent consequence of human "civilization," created in large part by easy availability of very high-calorie food, much lower physical exertion required to earn a living and access to food, a growing amount of recreational time, and dramatically more sedentary ways in which most of us now entertain ourselves.

The recent body positivity movement seems (to me) an understandable response by some obese and MO folks to the negative reaction society continues to have about obesity in general, based on the not-irrational calculation that obesity isn't a long-term viable condition. Young people who are obese and haven't yet experienced the longer-term downsides of MO understandably feel oppressed by society's negative reaction to their larger body sizes, which may be as much as twice or thrice the size of a "normal-sized" human body. (I use the term "normal-sized human body" to mean human body images produced for as long as humans have produced human body images.)

As I said before, I never wanted to be fat. I wanted to be slim and healthy. And now after WLS, after working hard to change my lifestyle, and greatly improving my self-care, I am both slim and healthy, which I was not 105 pounds ago. And I am very happy about my choice to have WLS. :)

I wish everyone were happy and satisfied with their lives. But I'm the only person whose happiness and health I can attempt to control. If anyone wishes to criticize me or others for having WLS, they are certainly allowed to do so. All of us are free to live our lives as we wish and to enjoy (and suffer) the consequences that come with our choices.

Every word of this makes so much sense! Absolutely.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately! I have followed and supported the BoPo movement for a while now. People often confuse it with self-love, which it is not. As you said, it's about bringing an end to the marginalization and mistreatment of people who are fat/disabled/of color/etc. I think it's important to advocate for equal treatment and to call out the billions+ per year diet industry for the damage it's doing.

that being said, I feel frustrated that half of the BoPo accounts I follow feature people eating junk food all the time (as a means to stop the moralizing of food choices). The fact is, some foods are better for our bodies than others. It's a fact. Who is it helping to tell people to eat "intuitively" and to "listen to their body" while constantly posting pictures of yourself eating donuts. Prior to surgery I was listening to my body, and it was craving sugar 24/7 and telling me to lay down and stay there. They're calling out the diet industry while supporting the equally damaging food industry, which is knowingly poisoning us for profit. One of my favorite BoPo activists said you can eat healthy and be BoPo, but you can't "be restrictive, count calories, log food, count macros, etc." ???

My weight was going to put me in an early grave. I did not want surgery and my choice to have it did not have anything to do with appearance. Now that I need to carefully monitor what I eat I feel like I'm breaking the BoPo rules. I didn't even realize just how much pain my weight was causing until it evaporated so quickly and I felt such relief in my joints and muscles! Weight loss surgery was an act of self-preservation for me. Why can we not honor that as self-care?

Totally. I used to always say things like, "when I'm eighty, will I wish I had eaten more chocolate cake or less?" and used it as my justification of living a free, happy, quality-rich lifestyle. For me this change is about separating the notion of quality from things that lead away from it, like making yourself obese. I used to be so much more energetic and enjoyed being active, even though the majority of my interests (writing, arranging music for my choir, academic research, etc) are pretty centered around sitting. Now, the concept of turning this ship around and eventually being able to do things like, say, kite-surfing, which I've always wanted to learn, is tremendously exciting! At first when I started my 1200 calorie diet, I wondered miserably about losing one of the few things in my life that make me happy, but had to remind myself that with this weight loss, doors to other forms of happiness that I've shut off from myself will open again. There won't only be food as the last resort to turn to, etc. I could actually become properly athletic again, enjoy long walks, be able to hike and enjoy it, etc. There's a whole world of things that make for quality of life that aren't just eating chocolate bars whenever you feel like it, and I'm determined to give myself that!

I don?t believe anyone can or should eat 1200 cals a day t o be athletic... my advice ( as a certified personal fitness trainer, ex- gym floor manager is ) : just move . Daily. First thing in the morning if you can possibly do it... for only as long as you ENJOY it.

The most important thing is having a positive happy exercise experience you cant wait to return to. ( the endorphin high helps ) .

Basically were deliberately addicting ourselves to health enhancing daily exercise ! (((())) good luck

No, I agree with that - and one of the reasons that I'm undecided as yet about WLS is that I want to be able to be properly athletic, which would be difficult on such a limited caloric intake. I have a lot of time to think about it, so the plan is to see what I can do on my own first (because I have to wait a long time, anyway!), see if I can maintain it, etc. I'm working at resetting my body's internal metric of how much it should weigh, trying to get my insulin and cortisol levels down, etc - there's a whole process here! Ideally, after major weight loss, if I can manage to speed up my metabolism and reset my body's notion of what I should weigh, then I would increase my calories back to a cautious and healthy one, more like 1800-2000. My doctor even said that I should give up swimming for the first month of 1200 calories per day, and then try it and see how I feel. I usually swim first thing in the morning, so I'm used to going on an empty stomach and then just eating a regular breakfast after (before I started this diet, my regular breakfast consisted of two eggs, two slices of toast (buttered), a small container of Greek yogurt, and a piece of fruit, usually an orange, with black tea with milk). I would change this to just bacon and eggs, maybe, plus green tea. It's been a month now, so the plan is to try it out this week (like, once) and see how it goes. I don't think I'll pass out in the pool, though!

I'm not sure why you think that being "properly athletic" is difficult on a limited caloric intake? While I'm currently recovering from surgery, so my exercise isn't where it used to be, for a while I was doing 5 hours of fitness classes a week, 5-6 hours of running a week, 2 hours of yoga at home a week, and 3 hours of weight lifting. All on a post-VSG diet. But... maybe that's not properly athletic? I've also run a half marathon with my post-VSG diet.

That sounds amazing, and I don't think that anything I said should be taken as salt toward what anyone else is doing. I'm literally just following my own doctor's advice. Going from probably more like 3,500 calories a day to 1,200 has been a big adjustment and it makes sense to me that it would take a bit of time to adjust. I'm brand new in this whole weight loss thing - it's been exactly 4.5 weeks now. It's cool that you can do all that and it gives me hope that I'll be abe to down the road, too.

Did your doctor lead you to believe you wouldn't be able to exercise after WLS? You might want to check out the Exercise forums - a handful of us post our weekly exercise plans there.

Whatever you do, though, please don't listen to "quutgurl" and her claims that we're somehow all liars. It's challenging, pre-op, to imagine how you could ever function well on so few calories, but once you get there, it's not so unimaginable :D