Truth more than happiness is the spur

Bri over at fat lot of good wrote about the relationship between fatness and depression. My issue with 'fat and happy' is that suggests that if you are unhappy and fat (or because you are fat), there's anything else you can do about-apart from changing your attitude to the fact that you are fat.

Or that this is an imperative that will somehow be parlayed into dieting success. I did not come to a fat acceptance mentality out of happiness, or the desire for happiness, anymore than I came to be agnostic/atheist. I came to this point because I could no longer pay the price I was paying for constant weight loss attempts. It was also, cumulative, my tolerance or capacity for it, gave out.

There are truths that you just have to recognise, regardless of whether that makes you happy or not. Yes it's true that this can make you feel good, removing an increasing burden of pressure that comes with buying into a lie, the rigours of calorie restriction on your mind and body, but to represent that as happy/unhappy gives the impression that if you've come to an FA way of thinking, you must be happy.

Sometimes yes, but sometimes it's devastating. The link between a sense of control and the (illusion of) control that weight control through dieting seems to give. It's important to say this so that people don't feel they are failing or somehow fraudulent if they're working through their conditioning-and these feelings come up.

This happy and fat thing, is a bogus line coming from those who seek to pressurize fat people into dieting. Even if you are happy and fat, they don't want you to be and will seek to attack that happiness, citing it as the cause of your fatness,  just the same anyway. We have no more duty to be happy, than we have to be 'healthy', though hopefully, we will experience happiness and get to a better more grounded place.