New Year’s Resolutions Promote Fat Phobia

The focus on weight loss promoted by a bloated and dysfunctional diet industry causes many New Year’s resolution ideas and media-based stories to focus on people of size in ways that promote fat phobia. Size and self acceptance would be a much more productive New Year’s resolution on the part of everyone.

New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day is such a time of reflection for many, whether there is celebration or a more contemplative and passive approach to the first day of each year. What about all of those New Year’s Resolutions?

It seems one of the most popular, or certainly most forwarded and media-driven New Year’s resolutions involves this notion of weight loss. Not just the idea that one should plan and promise to lose weight each year – whether or not this has ever been something that has met with success in your life or been a positive experience – but also the idea that certainly, in our thin-obsessed culture after you have done all of this crazy-holiday-eating you had better somehow atone for that.

I have two main problems with this. One, why the focus on weight? Why the focus on weight at New Year’s as a resolution and not a concerted effort, plan, and strategy of action through out each day of your life to accomplish the goal of weight loss if that is really something you want? Why such a focus on weight and body size that forward discrimination against those of us who are bigger than culture’s mass mentality has decided somehow that we should be?

And secondly, to whom is the media speaking and writing its articles when it assumes that everyone has engaged in some gorging rampage at holiday feasts for the month of December each year? Where’s that coming from? What stereotypes that promote fat phobia is  that mindset strengthening? The idea that each and every one of us who is fat, is fat because all we do or care about is eating. The idea that we are all supposed to be size zero? The idea that we are all supposed to be the same? The polarized and limited black-and-white thinking that declares that thin is good and fat is bad?

If, like me, you happen to be fat, does it make any sense to you that it was just that darn December that left you heavier? Say what?

And I use the word fat with all due respect as I believe it is important to take back that word and to disengage from the negative power that has come to be associated with it. Fat isn’t a four-letter word. Fat need not be a negative. Fat is not a descriptor that gives entitlement to discriminate or marginalize. Fat phobia is but one of many fronts in the war against individuality and personhood.

December weightgain as the reason for all the focus on validating efforts to diet and invalidating efforts to accept one’s self and one’s size – it doesn’t make sense to me. It seems to be more of a diet commercial designed to further line the pockets of an industry that already preys enough on the shame and guilt inducement of society today for those of us who are fat. How dare we? How dare we not have these resolutions every New Year?

Where’s my choir? The choir of my fellow fat friends who would join me in the singing of the song of been-there-done-that-diet-got-that-t-shirt-and-ended-up-fatter. Where are the fact-finding researchers who make all kinds of claims about the unhealthy risks associated with being fat who forget to weigh and balance those with the incredibly harmful actuality and/or risks of dieting that often causes one to go up and down in weight – something that is much more harmful than being fat by itself is.

My response is, it is simple to not have these resolutions every New Year. Not simple because I don’t believe in change or doing the best one can given the reasons one is fat, but, simple because most New Year’s resolutions – especially the “let’s loose weight one – are designed to get us to feel obligated to partake in them so that we will seek out a given product or service.

After all, what does it mean if you simply refuse to take part in this self-deprecation? What then? Could that mean that you have a high enough self-esteem and positive regard for yourself, yes, even if you are, fat, to not have media or society dictate to you what your goals for the year and generally in your life are or are not?

What ever happened to the celebration of individuality? What has happened to create this marketing-mania that has to shame certain people in society to make money? Two things, societal groupthink and fat phobia.

I was once told, the one and only time I actually went to one of those weight-loss-diet-type-places, you know, the lose-weight-or-you-can’t-have-a-life purveyors of shame-based marketing disguised as a “health philosophy”, that nobody would hire me and that I’d never work or amount to anything – that I’d certainly not ever be happy – unless I purchased their diet weight loss plan.

Imagine my horror – NOT! Imagine, more to the point, my outrage at being treated as if I was some fat commodity lacking personhood who couldn’t think for myself.

And, at the time of this experience of mine, years ago, I was really only 40 pounds “overweight” – 40 pounds. That was back in my skinny days for sure. But, I digress.

The point is that the shame-based manipulative guilt-inducing marketing of diet industry “services” that need those of us who are fat to feel bad so they can make money is disgusting!

I made one New Year’s resolution many years ago at the age of 17. I have stuck to that New Year’s resolution. It was a resolution to not ever have New Year’s resolutions.

While I am sure some New Year’s resolutions are positive and can be fun and many people actually achieve and enjoy change from them, the vast majority, especially around weight loss pitches may well be more harmful, in the long run, physically and psychologically, than they are helpful.

© A.J. Mahari, January 1, 2009 – All rights reserved.

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