"I may be fat, but I beat my eating disorder"

[Napoléon]

She's calling herself "fat" when she looks pretty healthy to me ... perhaps she hasn't really defeated that eating disorder just yet.

Exactly, and I think this is why Napoleons post reinforcing that pissed me off a bit even though he may be right in principle.

I think you guys are in denial to be honest. I don't look at that image and see someone who looks like an image of healthiness. I see someone who looks a tad overweight.

I'm not saying she looks disgusting, or that she's obese, or that she looks massively unhealthy. Just that she isn't the ideal of health that kids should, at least in my opinion, be aspiring to.

I could easily, and probably quite cheaply, play the 'Americans are used to seeing more fat people, so it's considered more normal' card. I honestly think seeing super fat people on a daily basis, even in places like the UK (we're the fattest nation in Europe if I'm not mistaken) can warp your ideas of what should be considered as healthy. I mean, by today's standards, she's not like some super lard arse, and I wouldn't by any means say she particularly needs to lose weight or say she's anything but normal. But I would be lying to myself if I said she looked 'perfectly healthy' like you guys are.

What I can criticize about her post is that she's calling herself "fat" in the first place. She looks perfectly fine, she is lightyears away from being pathologically obese. She herself, but also you, by calling her fat in that picture, are actually both promoting an unhealthy message to young women about what kind of body shape you have to achieve. So that's the main problem I have with her post then. No, promoting being fat as the healthy alternative is a terrible idea. Labelling the woman in this "after" photo as "Fat" with a capital F is even more problematic, and that she calls herself that is not a good sign.

Oh c'mon. I'm promoting an unhealthy message to young women because I called someone who is clearly overweight to some degree, fat, but you guys aren't when you're saying someone who is clearly overweight looks perfectly fine?

Is this really happening?

The denial here pisses me off. She's fat. Period. Calling her that isn't promoting an 'unhealthy' message. It's just stating fact. Get over it. Maybe it differs where you're from, but if you're overweight you're liable to being called fat. It's not a nice word but it's one that applies. CD says it's not representative of an unhealthy degree of fat. Would you then say it's a healthy degree of fat? Do you think a doctor would agree?


Also, whether someone who might be 500lbs aspires to be the weight/size of the gal in the after pic is besides the point completely. In fact, I think a lot of this whether or not she is actually fat is besides the point.

Neither message, promoting anorexia or promoting being 'fat', is healthy. S'all I'm saying. And it grinds my gears how one form of promotion is seen as far worse than the other. Then we wonder why there's obesity epidemics? We wonder why so many people don't give a shit about getting supersized? We look at an image of a mildly underweight person and say things like "eat a cheeseburger", but an image of a slightly overweight person and it's "oh they're just curves". From what I can see, people's perceptions and reactions to an overweight person are far less harsh than seeing underweight people.