Over here in the UK they're running a campaign to help get kids fitter, and there's a couple of really preachy animated adverts to illustrate the point of sitting around or eating too much. They show arteries with little splodges of fat dotted around, and then the word fat in big squishy letters, dripping and oozing like it's supposed to be from a horror movie. I know the intention is good, but that has to feel awful for any kid who is overweight.
"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!" D'oh! Oh right, UK, pardon my French (

) I mean "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
To show how little has really changed in nearly half a century, those of us "of a certain age" were traumatized as girls by another anti-obesity campaign that backfired. In 1961, President Kennedy and the President's Council on Physical Fitness were alarmed that our nation's youth were too fat, so they tried to make all the schoolchildren do more daily exercise. That led to the song "Chicken Fat" written by Meredith Willson and sung by Robert Preston (both of "The Music Man" fame).
WARNING: This toxic song will weasel its way into the deepest recesses of your mind! The horror... the horror...
Chicken Fat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=af2j59zzX3Q
Some of my older friends and relatives said it was a form of daily torture until the schools began to face rising mutinies and finally gave up. An older cousin of mine said high school during the Kennedy fitness craze was an ordeal because she was hounded by a physical education teacher/tyrant and never really got over it. She couldn't understand how we could beat the Soviet Union by being good at volleyball, pushups and situps, but it was unpatriotic to question that mentality.
I was only 4 years old in 1961 and not yet in school, so luckily I missed the full brunt of this assault on our nation's fat, but I was caught up in its reverberations a few years later. That might partly explain my low self-esteem as a girl. Methinx in high school a decade later I had that same cruel phys ed dominatrix, who confirmed our suspicion that she was psycho when her husband committed suicide and she had a nervous breakdown. A tragedy to be sure, but it was one of many pieces in the jigsaw puzzle of my life that made me realize that maybe the problem wasn't really me and my expanding fat. Maybe attitudes were more important.
It may be therapeutic for us to salvage the hateful terms for our own use, but to salvage the hateful terms for society, we have to exorcise the hateful thoughts behind them. You can't fully reclaim the word "fat" until it's actually okay to BE fat.
But it IS okay to be fat, at least the way I handle it. My husband handles my fat too, as often as possible. :smitten:
Maybe I'm a special case, but those teenage hyenas a few days ago reminded me how rarely I actually encounter disapproval about my weight from the general public. Obviously my size is the first thing people notice about me, but I seem to project an attitude that gives me special dispensation to be fat. To paraphrase a positive Rodney Dangerfield, "Wow, she sure is fat! But on her it looks good!"
Well if I'm only deluding myself, I hope I can keep it up.
