On Fat, Beauty and Health

"I'm beautiful, and I'm also fat. And those two things aren't opposites." - a freind

I think that this should really be the take home message here. I cringe sometimes when I read articles about fat (both pro and con) because they rarely have anything to do with health and everything to do with looks and moral judgements.

There are three issues and I feel like it is harmful to *everyone* that they're not seperate and understood - the Fat issue, the Beauty issue and the Healthy issue. You can be fat, healthy and ugly; fat healthy and beautiful; fat unhealthy and beautiful; thin healthy and ugly; thin unhealthy and beautiful; etc. in any combination because those three things are related but not on a one-to-one basis.

By lumping those three categories together, fat people who are beautiful but unhealthy decide to eff their health because they are fat, gorgeous and proud of it, skinny people who are unhealthy but good looking do that exact same thing and to the same bad results for their health. Some fat people who think they're not beautiful but are in fact healthy put themselves on ridiculous, unhealthy diets (as do some skinny people who feel the same way) and that's equally damaging.

If everyone could seperate fat from beauty from health (the way those things are actually pretty seperate) it would make the whole conversation a lot easier and whole lot of people would be a lot better off.