You can be healthy at any weight, say fat activists

by Martha Edwards (Subscribe to Martha Edwards's posts)
Oct 6th 2008 6:19PM

Being overweight is unhealthy -- is this a fact? Or merely a common assumption? Considering the bad rap obesity has these days -- as an epidemic and national emergency, among other disastrous associations -- most of us will accept the overweight/unhealthy connection as fact. But according to The New York Times, a new movement out there is pushing for the acceptance of fat and the end to so-called false fat assumptions.

The movement, generally known as fat acceptance, is lead by a group of activists and academics who want to change the way the world sees fat people. What do they believe in? That someone can be healthy at any weight, and assuming a fat person is unhealthy is as mis-guided as assuming a thin person is healthy. And instead of focusing on weight loss, the diet industry should be emphasizing nutrition, fitness, body image and measures of health other than the numbers on the scale. Read the full article for more info.

What do you think? Can you be fit and fat? Healthy and hefty? Is weight alone an accurate prediction of health?

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Comments (1)

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

... 10-06-2008 @ 8:43PM

Weight and fat are not the same thing. Muscular people will weigh a lot but not have that much body fat. So, people who weigh a lot aren't necessarily fat. Furthermore, fat can appear on top of the muscle. People might be primarily muscle underneath, but if they have an average layer of fat on top of those muscles, they might still look very fat overall because the muscles might not be visible.

I think it's possible that people can be healthy at any weight if the weight is made up of lean muscle, even though people might not necessarily be healthy at high levels of fat. It sounds like the "fat activists" might be forgetting this distinction and confusing weight and fat.

Still, I agree with the "fat activists" that the goal of "losing weight" (as opposed to "being fit and healthy") leads a lot of people do many destructively unhealthy things, like eat insufficient nutrients. For example, if people set a goal of trying to "lose weight" or even "lose fat", then the numbers on the labels indicate that it should be better to drink a diet soda than have a handful of almonds because diet soda has far fewer calories and grams of fat than almonds. However, almonds provide more nutrition, and that's what matters.

Being undereducated is what's unhealthy.