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Michelle Allison
Michelle Allison
35.2K posts
Michelle Allison
@fatnutritionist
she
registered dietitian
your body belongs to you
instagram.com/ogfatnutrition
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Michelle Allison’s posts
today I saw a toddler in a snowsuit with animal ears on the hood
then the dad lowered the hood to reveal the toddler was also wearing a toque with a second set of animal ears and I nearly lost my shit
This point in the pandemic reminds me of when I went camping with friends in an area where I'd previously run into bears. One friend kept a bag of caramels in her tent overnight though I begged her not to. No bears came overnight. She took it as proof that there was never a risk.
the big error I hear a lot in casual conversations about COVID is that people think once they catch the virus, they "get it over with" and idk man, it really seems like the reinfectious potential of this virus has not been communicated well to most people
I think a lot of people have never heard of the link between infectious illness and chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, autoimmune illnesses, etc. It's real and has been known for a long time in health care. Everyone needs to know and understand this now.
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People are really, really bad at assessing risk and probability, and apparently our leaders have chosen to exploit that vulnerability as a means to cover for their deliberate decision to expose us to unacceptable risks and harms in a global pandemic.
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Even if you don't experience a bad outcome, whenever public health measures are removed, it means dice have been thrown that effectively gamble your life and safety. And they are thrown by people with the power to weight those dice in their own favour, regardless of yours.
If the point of having a society *isn't* to care for each other, to ease suffering and realize each life's potential, literally what is the point? To hoard wealth? To build empires on other people's throats? Life is brief, nothing lasts. Wealth and empires are pointless violence.
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it was the greatest reveal I have ever witnessed
thank you again to all parents who dress your toddlers like teddy bears in the winter, you are doing god's work
hey guess what happened when I lost 30 lbs through "moderate" diet and exercise? well,
first I lost 30 lbs
then I got pneumonia, various overuse injuries, and even worse body image
then my brain started doing weird things around food against my will
then I regained 80 lbs
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Weight, diet, and exercise are the neoliberal substitute for actual public health. There's a reason we're so obsessed with them: because we're not allowed to have a systemic public health response that cares for all of us from the ground up. That's not what our society is for.
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There will be hand-wringing articles about how a wave of chronic illness is entirely due to the weight people gained, the food people ate, the exercise people didn't do, during the pandemic.
I want you to remember that infection itself, stress itself, causes chronic illness.
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I want you to remember that, in a society not actually organized around caring for people because money is more important, there is a huge incentive to get people to blame themselves for their individual "failures" and "choices" during a massive, system-wide public health crisis.
if fat people were allowed to exist in their full humanity, it would rob thinness of its meaning and power
thus, any attempt to bring this about is deeply, deeply threatening to anyone who relies on thinness (even just the hope of it) to give them meaning and social power
it's okay if you gain some weight while surviving a pandemic
Quote
Shira Rose
@theshirarose
When the main concern about #COVID19 is fear of weight gain, it’s yet another testament to how pervasive and strong diet culture is.
But please remember that bodies change throughout our lives. Focusing on surviving right now is plenty enough!
I feel like I wrote a thread on this in the past, but I can't find it. So here's a brief recap: I used to think fatphobia wanted fat people to exercise, because it is always yelling at us, "You should get some exercise!" But I no longer believe this is what fatphobia wants.
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Taking care of long-term health concerns and delaying or preventing chronic illness is NOT just about exercising, eating, taking vitamins, or whatever we all usually think about. A huge component of it is also avoiding infection.
if you're thin and someone calls you fat, you can ask "so? what's your point?"
follow up with "what do you mean?"
"why is that bad?" etc.
reeeeeeally make them spell it out...in detail
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A lot of people will probably blame their eating habits, being sedentary (during a global pandemic when people were literally told not to leave their homes at times) rather than the massive public health failure that has exposed us all to a contagious vascular disease.
people get so mad when you just bluntly say that unhealthy people are allowed to exist and have rights because you're taking away their free pass to dehumanise a bunch of different groups of people they dislike under the guise of "caring" and "responsibility"
the damage that starvation does to higher-weight people is substantively the same as in lower-weight people: organ damage, GI disruption, cognitive losses, etc.
this is counterintuitive to everything the culture tells us, but please bear in mind the culture itself is disordered
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it took 5 years to learn to eat normally again
and 10 years to stop associating physical activity with punishment
just in case you were confused about why we say dieting doesn't work
I don't think the very rich people who control the levers of power don't believe in climate change; I think they are banking on the fact that they have the resources to survive it while the rest of us perish. I think this is actually their preferred outcome.
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It will be interesting (read: tragic and heartbreaking) to see the statistics on the incidence and prevalence of conditions we usually call "lifestyle" illnesses, in the next few years since the pandemic, compared to the years prior. There will probably be a notable increase.
unfortunately, I'm afraid what's gonna happen is that, if you continue wearing a mask when most people around you have stopped, the cognitive dissonance you cause for them re: whether the pandemic is truly over or not is going to turn into anger (directed at you) right quick
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I cannot help but conclude that fatphobia doesn't actually want me to exercise. I think, "You should exercise!" is code for, "You shouldn't be fat!"
But the real tricky part is, I no longer believe fatphobia wants me not to be fat, either.
I believe it wants me to suffer.
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I know people on twitter seem more aware of this, so I'm not telling you anything new, but I'm hearing this assumption expressed all the time by folks generally in favour of vaccines, masking, and other precautions
where the hell is the STRONG public health messaging on this?
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You were likely also having a massive stress response for those two years, trying to balance work with preventing exposure in the small ways you personally could and trying to find ways to relax while the world fell down around your ears. No wonder our bodies might have changed.
The desire to have no biological needs or emotions is what my therapist calls "having the goals of dead people."
The only way to completely transcend your biological body is to die.
This seems to be the ultimate goal of much disordered eating, and of diet culture itself.
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and that is not a particularly rare outcome
my cardiometabolic indicators were improved the most, and the improvement was sustained the longest, by
refusing to hurt myself
feeding myself enough food to feel peaceful and satisfied
and finding joyful things to do in my fat body
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If you end up with diabetes, you were injured by a failure of public health. You were either exposed to the virus OR you were harmed by a response using only the bluntest strategies (lockdowns) REPEATEDLY instead of more targeted ones (ventilation, respirators, vaccine mandates.)
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, nutritionists and food reformers in the US flogged the idea that seasoned, spiced, and/or "mixed" foods (so anything other than plain boiled meat + 2 veg presented separately on a plate) perverted people's appetites and were addictive.
just wanna reiterate how absurd it is to live in a culture obsessed with exercise and "active living" but that treats you with suspicion if you show up anywhere remotely sweaty or breathing hard
we are supposed to exert but never betray proof of exertion...how exactly? t.co/ULDz4M3Bft
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If you gained weight, it's partly because the entire "lifestyle" apparatus that supposedly helps to regulate weight was turned upside down and lit on fire intermittently for 2 years because no one in power could figure out a way to distribute respirators and vaccines to everyone.
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I wouldn't have done these things were it not for the efforts of fat people to resist a system that tells us we must starve and harm ourselves in order to achieve "health"
I was helped by both a dietitian and a therapist who worked from a non-diet, weight-inclusive perspective
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Fatphobia yells at us, "You should get some exercise!" and then ensures that there is no exercise equipment rated for our safety above a certain weight. There is no road we can walk down without being shouted at. There is precious little activewear, and only very recently.
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my theory is that the goal of any institution that seeks to make dieting mandatory for everyone over a certain weight
is not to make them thinner
(since it's not effective)
but to exert power
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Why would fatphobia need fat people to exist in misery? Because fatphobia is a project of significance that allows the people who believe in and benefit from the dominance structure of weight stigma to feel significant, worthy, and like their lives have more meaning.
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now I'm a dietitian who does this work myself
and I also do things like this:
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if you know that anti-fatness has its roots in white supremacy
you start to understand
this is not a story about a profession wanting to make fat people thin for their "health"
this is a story about social and political dominance, wielded by a profession of mostly white women
hi it's Christmas and I just had a verbal altercation with a man in front of my local Chinese restaurant bc a lady with a chronic illness asked him to put his mask on and he told her she would to die of her illness before COVID and I wish I'd punched him in the fucking throat
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the suffering of fat people is necessary
to make thin people feel important, normal, and good
the exclusion of fat people and anyone allied with them is necessary
to secure a profession's, like dietetics', place in the power structure by demonstrating allegiance to it
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Fatphobia needs fat people to exist, but it specifically needs us to exist in misery. Misery might take the form of cyclical dieting, exercising in self-punishing ways, hiding our bodies out of shame, exclusion from cultural events and public life, rejection by loved ones.
today I discovered that keto people literally think they discovered the effect of carbs on blood glucose and I am FLOORED
also, basically everyone with disordered eating had their disorder get much, much worse during the pandemic, so if we can just lay off criticizing each other's eating and/or weight changes and/or anything to do with surviving this total nightmare, that'd be greeeeeeat
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When fat people deny you this path to heroism, when they block your way by walking down the street in leggings, or threaten this whole tedious hierarchy by showing up at your dance class, it makes you mad. Because maybe thinness is existentially meaningless. Maybe you made it up.
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Fatphobia does not want us to exercise joyfully and comfortably, because it does not want us to experience being fully alive, doing things that build us up and give us pleasure. It erects barriers around us, and then yells at us for staying inside. The hypocrisy is the point.
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I can do this entirely because I was encouraged to stop underfeeding myself
to stop hiding and hurting myself
any attempt to define non-diet approaches as "not appropriate" for fat people is not about protecting our well-being
it's just another way to keep us suffering
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this story is very 101 and not big on critical health analysis
all of the issues go way, way, way deeper than this
but these are basics that I need people to grasp:
dieting doesn't work.
it can hurt people.
it often produces a result opposite to its stated goal.
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Fatphobia wants to sell me diets that don't actually work, and pills with horrific side-effects, and invasive gastrointestinal surgeries that, when they do cause significant weight loss, are written off by fatphobia as "the easy way out."
I've spent the last year and a half kicking myself for choosing terror management theory as a framework to analyze popular diet culture, not because it doesn't work (I think it does), but because it applies so well to our current political situation that I can't sleep at night.
observation: if you go from not exercising much or at all to exercising A LOT, you eventually move into a zone where you're constantly battling injuries, big or small
this is a health risk, and it's not morally better than whatever risks you incur by not exercising
just saying