Kate Dailey
|
May 11, 2009 12:36 PM
Love—don't just begrudgingly accept—the body you're born into, say authors Harding and Kirby. Photo: Corbis
After
years of battling the bulge, conquering cravings, fighting fat, and
waging war on weight gain, Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby were tired
of the struggle. "Think about the language of dieting," says Kirby.
"All of these things set you up as a disconnected being, as an enemy of
your physical body." Both Harding, founder of the blog Shapely Prose, and Kirby, who created The Rotund blog know that life's too short to worry about weight (yours or the person sitting next to you on the plane).
Their sites--along with several other pro-fat blogs--make up the
“fat-o-sphere,” an online world dedicated to fighting anti-fat bias and
promoting “Health At Every Size”, a weight-neutral approach that advocates healthy behavior over an obsessive focus on the scale.
In their new book, Lessons From the Fat-o-Sphere: Stop Dieting and
Declare a Truce With Your Body, (Perigee Books, 2009), Harding and
Kirby try to help men and women learn to love the bodies they've
got--even in a world that pushes them in the other direction.
NEWSWEEK’s Kate Dailey spoke to the authors about life in the
“Fat-o-Sphere” and what they mean by the term “death fat.” Excerpts:
Dailey: Before we get started, let's talk about language. You don't say "overweight," you just say "fat." Why?
Kate Harding:
Overweight implies that there is a particular weight that I should be
or that anyone should be, and we don't think that it's as simple as a
BMI [Body Mass Index] chart, or an insurance health and weight chart.
If this is the weight that your body consistently ends up at, if you're
eating a balanced diet and exercising moderately, then that's probably
the weight that your body was meant to be.
Marianne Kirby:
Fat is such a loaded term. There are so many negative connotations, and
it's kind of ridiculous. Fat means fat. It doesn't mean ugly, smelly,
lazy. It means fat.
And people who are not fat?
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