Home
> Uncategorized > Fat shaming food columnist in WaPo
Fat shaming food columnist in WaPo
January 24, 2023
It’s kind of amazing but here we are: a food columnist writes about how diets are shams, how they statistically don’t work, and they play on people’s desires to live a different life – all good things to point out – and yet – yet!! – the piece ends with her describing how she, in fact, loses weight on diets anyway, because, and I quote:
My hat is off to the people who are comfortable at whatever weight they are and focus on other aspects of their health. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them; being fat made me unhappy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2023/01/23/weight-loss-diets-fasting-keto/
So, we are left to assume that it is after all a choice, and that dieting does work, but just not commercial dieting? Give me a break lady.
When you admit that diets don’t work, stop with the fat shaming.
Categories: Uncategorized
mathbabe 
imo a much more interesting article would be reflection upon knowing diets don’t work vs the cultural and emotional forces that make her still want to follow them.
LikeLike
Yup.
LikeLike
I copied and pasted this from Beacon Health and Fitness.
“Do you know the difference between dieting and a lifestyle change? The biggest difference between the two is that dieting is a short term process and a lifestyle change is long term. Although different, dieting and lifestyle changes have a common ground.”
I participated in a short term diet once in 1982, the only one I have ever tried out.
For health reasons, I decided to give a vegan diet a short term tryout. It started out as short term and I had decided that if I didn’t see any improvements in my declining health and weight gain within six months, I’d go back to my fast food and booze diet.
Forty-one years later, I’m still living a vegan lifestyle. That reveals the results of the only short term diet I ever gave a try.
The first year I was a vegan, I lost more than 60 pounds and my skin tone turned sort of orange (I was drinking a lot of organic carrot juice – probably to compensate for all the sugar laden foods I’d left behind.
I used to drink Dr. Pepper daily by the quart.).
During my 2nd year as a vegan, my weight stabilized, reaching about 180 pounds ( I was 6’4″ back then) and stayed there for decades with slight pound or two variations. I could eat all the organic, whole, vegan food I wanted and gain no weight. I should mention that when I transition my lifestyle to a vegan one, I also stopped consuming a lot of sugar laden foods and drinks. And I’m still drinking organic carrot juicer, but not enough to turn me orange again.
LikeLike
Dear Cathy,
After reading your email I wanted to share another interesting quote from the Washington Post regarding pregnancy as an”unusual condition” equivalent to dwarfism and gigantism. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/01/24/irish-giant-skeleton-museum/
Medical ethics were not really a thing back then, and surgeons and medical students on both sides of the Atlantic https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/in-need-cadavers-19th-century-medical-students-raided-baltimores-graves-180970629/ were notorious graverobbers. Typical targets were deceased prisoners and the poor — and, in the United States, African American cemeteries — but scientists like Hunter were also interested in bodies with unusual conditions, like pregnancy, dwarfism and gigantism.
Thank you for your writings, Madeleine
LikeLike
As someone who works on food and agriculture, and has had encounters with that columnist in the past, I would just say that it is not surprising that her piece would show her to be, let’s say, an unreliable narrator.
LikeLike
Sardonic comment: fat shaming as a linguistic dog whistle that irritated my inner warrior woman was effective enough to get me to read her OPINION article as a click through from your post. I hope the click helped your rank. Without doing a deep dive on her obvious and apparent self-reflective disrespect for the body given to her for stewardship in her lifetime, IMHO, I find her subtle focal point of “don’t believe the hype,” to be a worthwhile counterpoint to the calendar driven “’tis the season to consume fad diets as anxiety relief after the excesses of the year just ended,” advertising EYEBURNING CONTENT that comes from the dollars needed to keep the archaic and highly opinionated and supportive of almost EVERYTHING that is status quo in DC, WaPo on life support for a few more moments. Snark moment over.
LikeLike
Hi Cathy, I’m just so pleased that you appear to be blogging again, the world needs your wise and iconoclastic observations, on any topic at all!
Best, Bertie
LikeLike