Fat Shaming, Health, and the Atlanta Ad Campaign

So there's a little scuffle going on at the moment, because Children's Healthcare of Atlanta has been running the ads above, ostensibly as part of the fight against childhood obesity.

Fat activists are upset, but they don't seem to be the only ones distancing themselves from this. As the just-linked article comments, Dairy Queen approves this ad campaign, while Kaiser Permanente disclaims it, an odd pair of reactions if there ever was one. I can see why, though.

The Balabusta, having successfully lost ten pounds since the beginning of 2012, would like to report that she is still bothered by the degree of fat-shaming and blaming, and the ham-handed crappiness of these ads.

Caperton, over at Feministe, has a very good analysis of the ads, and I think it is well worth a read. My key problem with this, aside from the fact that I sincerely doubt it was a good use of funds, is that that, as always, people who like the 'fat will kill you, fatties' approach seem to have no clue or care what an already desperately negative environment for fat children they are projecting their additional, hopeless crap into. The idea seems to be that if you can make life bleak enough, with constant mockery, chiding, reminders that you're ugly, and reminders that this is all your fault, people will change.

How's that working out so far, Georgia?

"Fat children turn into fat adults" Fat adults get the same blaming directed at them. My interactions with doctors as an overweight adult have ranged from the mildly annoying to the horrifying.

(I especially cherish the woman who, along with a variety of other bizarre behaviors, many of them directed at my size, told me, when I called her office to ask if I should be concerned that my upper arm was double its normal size following a tetanus shot, that it was probably because of 'the fat on your arm preventing the vaccine from being absorbed'. Since you're supposed to shoot the stuff into muscle, I always kind of wondered about that. Luckily, I haven't gotten tetanus.)

I've been nearly yelled at, and told that I couldn't be helped when I expressed a distaste for Weight Watchers' program. I've suggested exercise ideas and been told they were 'too dangerous', and that I should take 'short, gentle walks'. (This to a twenty-something with the health of a horse.)

I've been dismissed for picking target weights for weight loss the doctor felt were too high, apparently on the theory that someone who decides to diet down to 120 pounds is more likely to do so that someone who targets 180. I've been shamed, insulted...and offered help exactly once. When I was in a graduate program at USF, I mentioned wanting to lose weight to the doctor there, who nodded agreeably and offered at once to set an appointment up with a nutritionist who could discuss my goals and help me put together a good food plan. The memory of that kindness still seems utterly startling.

In general, much of the 'healthcare community' seems to think that offering any kindness or hope to fat people will only encourage them to continue being fat. You know what kids do, Healthcare Atlanta, when their pediatrician tells them they're going to die, the TV tells them no one will ever love them, and the kids at school call them whales?

They go home and eat all the Hostess cupcakes they can get their hands on.

Think carefully before perpetrating this cruelty that pretends to be helpful into another generation. The obesity situation in the US is real. We no longer have the leisure of trying to fight it by attacking people.

Children of War--Two Pictures

If you spend enough time reading and writing and speaking about Israel and her neighbors, shocking pictures of children become old hat. Children in mock suicide belts, children dressed in miniature martyr garb, children gaily playing with cartoon characters that praise terrorists--these are shockingly common. So are the wrenching pictures of dead children, wielded by both sides of the situation, the children killed in air strikes on Gaza, the children, like the Fogel family's, murdered in the night by teenage terrorists making their bones.

But this photograph still stood out to me.

This was taken by Reuters. Their caption reads: Palestinian boys dressed in uniforms of Palestinian security forces and holding plastic toy guns take part during a rally marking "Nakba" in the West Bank city of Nablus May 15, 2011. Palestinians on Sunday mark the "Nakba", or catastrophe, to commemorate the expulsion or fleeing of some 700, 000 Palestinians from their homes in the war that led to the founding of Israel in 1948.

Well-fed, chubby-cheeked little boys, wearing matching little costumes and holding toy guns, march in the streets of Nablus, ready to grow up and become real soldiers in a war their leaders fully expect to end only with the complete destruction of Israel. What catches my eye here is how abnormally normal they look to my American eye...fidgety, sleepy, playful. Photos of these children will go into albums at home, and be looked back at fondly, like the pictures of me in my Brownie uniform that probably still lurk in one of my mother's photo boxes.

It makes me think of pictures of little boys in scout uniforms, because it is, except for the big toys guns, so like them, and it makes me think of other pictures of young boys with guns--because it is so unlike them.

  

These boys are child soldiers in the hideously misnamed Democratic Republic of Congo. They're not well-fed, their uniforms were not ordered up for them by the neighborhood parade committee, and the guns they fire are real. Look at their watchful, controlled faces. Look at the thousand-yard stare on a child who should be worrying about his math homework in a sane world. These photographs will not be going into a photo album in a neatly swept apartment with food in the refrigerator and a television and computer in the living room. There is no home. There is no family.

If you run around accusing Israel of creating a humanitarian crisis 'beyond imagining', look at these photographs, and be ashamed. The Palestinians and their leadership have options beyond conflict, and have consistently rejected them. They have sent their children in harms' way, and justified the murder of Israeli children. Those little boys in Nablus could have a future of peace. Those little boys in the Congo could tell you that a chance like that is treasure you don't throw away.

Apricots, Poetry and Children

A little late, but this appealed to me:

A Newborn Girl at Passover
by Nan Cohen

Consider one apricot in a basket of them.
It is very much like all the other apricots--
an individual already, skin and seed.

Now think of this day. One you will probably forget.
The next breath you take, a long drink of air.
Holiday or not, it doesn't matter.

A child is born and doesn't know what day it is.
The particular joy in my heart she cannot imagine.
The taste of apricots is in store for her.

Copyright © 1998 by Nan Cohen