In a post featured on the feminist website you can’t believe is not satire, Everyday Feminism, a fat and proud mother explains how she plans on raising her months-old daughter to be “fat-positive.”
Feminist blogger Marie Southard Ospina outlines an insane list of “small things” that she intends to impose on her daughter to reach peak “fat-positive” living. While most of the tips embody typical feminism, merely laughable and essentially useless, other tips are examples of downright bad parenting.
Ospina is seemingly attempting to condition her child into poor health in the name of “body diversity.”
Blogger Marie Southard Ospina
The feminist’s most unsettling tip is to never frame food or food choices as “good” or “bad”:
There’s a super uncomfortable thing many people are known to do when discussing body types, or food: many often bring in morality-fueled words like “good” and “bad” into the picture. For example, a thin body is a “good body,” while a fat one is a “bad body.” Eating a cupcake means someone has been “bad that day,” while eating a kale salad means they have been “very good.”
The feminist adds that “food will never be framed with terms that imply morality, much like body types won’t be, either.”
This is horrific parenting advice. Food choices, some being better than others, must be guided by parents. If there is no difference between a carrot cake and a carrot, then presumably Ospina would be fine with allowing a young girl to eat the former as opposed to the latter for a daily snack.
When it’s politically incorrect to tell your child that eating cookies for dinner is “bad” for the sake of “body diversity,” we’ve officially jumped the shark.
Another troubling tip from Ospina is to frame working out in the context of health, not weight. This sounds well and good, but upon reading what the feminist has in mind for this tip, it’s clear that she’s pushing junk science to promote obesity while ignoring the major risks, particularly for females, associated with it.
Ospina writes:
Because fat of any kind was framed as an inherent negative (rather than a thing we all need to survive), I spent a lot of time as a kid legitimately believing that I had to lose weight unless I wanted to die at 25. I don’t want the same fate for my own child.
I plan on introducing her to the research behind the notion of Health At Every Size, and the radical work done by medical professionals like Dr. Linda Bacon and Michelle of The Fat Nutritionist. I want to make sure she knows that BMI (the scale that determines whether you are “overweight” or “obese”) has repeatedly proven to mean nothing of substance at all. I need her to know that, even if she is fat, the number on the scale should never be reason for doctors to dismiss her symptoms, misdiagnose her illnesses, or otherwise mistreat her.
This is silly. Being obese puts us at huge risk for often fatal diseases.
Here’s Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on obesity and the risk for type 2 diabetes:
The condition most strongly influenced by body weight is type 2 diabetes. In the Nurses’ Health Study, which followed 114,000 middle-age women for 14 years, the risk of developing diabetes was 93 times higher among women who had a body mass index (BMI) of 35 or higher at the start of the study, compared with women with BMIs lower than 22. (2) Weight gain during adulthood also increased diabetes risk, even among women with BMIs in the healthy range. The Health Professionals Follow-Up Study found a similar association in men. (3)
On obesity and the risk for cardiovascular disease:
Body weight is directly associated with various cardiovascular risk factors. As BMI increases, so do blood pressure, low-density lipoprotein (LDL, or “bad”) cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugar, and inflammation. These changes translate into increased risk for coronary heart disease, stroke, and cardiovascular death[.]
And the connection between obesity and depression:
The high rates of obesity and depression, and their individual links with cardiovascular disease, have prompted many investigators to explore the relationship between weight and mood. An analysis of 17 cross-sectional studies found that people who were obese were more likely to have depression than people with healthy weights. (17) Since the studies included in the analysis assessed weight and mood only at one point in time, the investigators could not say whether obesity increases the risk of depression or depression increases the risk of obesity. New evidence confirms that the relationship between obesity and depression may be a two-way street: A meta-analysis of 15 long-term studies that followed 58,000 participants for up to 28 years found that people who were obese at the start of the study had a 55 percent higher risk of developing depression by the end of the follow-up period, and people who had depression at the start of the study had a 58 percent higher risk of becoming obese. (18)
The feminist also offers laughable “fat-positive” tips like hanging “fat-positive” art work in one’s home and finding “fat role models” for a child to admire.
Although Ospina claims to be advocating for “body diversity” and “acceptance,” this whole guide reeks of a mother conditioning her daughter into obesity.
To read the full, fat feminist guide, click here.
