For Feisty Feminists

This article is a bit old, but it’s only recently getting some attention in many great sites around the fatosphere. (For those of you wondering what the fatosphere is, it’s the community of fat acceptance blogs. Fat acceptance = untangling our ideas of ‘weight’ from our ideas of ‘healthy’ and realizing that healthy is not a set weight, as well as critiquing the ’science’ that tells us that fat is unhealthy - which usually is funded by diet companies - and realizing the damage to your health that can be done by dieting. Well, it’s more than that, but there’s a quick explanation.)

The article is targeted at teen and pre-teen girls. It gives advice on how not to ‘binge eat,’ but the tips it gives actually promote incredibly disordered eating. It says that girls as young as 10 years old should:

• Write down everything they eat - clearly seeing the food their still growing bodies consume listed all in one place will shame them into eating less - when they actually should be eating whenever they are hungry to build muscles, feed their brains, and keep up with their high activity levels. This helpful ‘tip’ also suggests that looking at yourself naked in the mirror will cause you to realize how fat you are and stop eating.
• Wait 30 minutes before eating something when you are hungry. Hey, I had a friend who used to not eat until after she had had 40 ounces of water to drink, and she consumed maybe 1000 calories a day, that sounds healthy, right?
• Write post-it notes for yourself in visible places that say things like “How hungry are your really?” “Exactly why are you eating that now?” “What will the scale say tomorrow morning?” Those are direct quotes aimed at teenage and pre-pubescent girls to ‘help’ them with their eating.

The site has apparently been closed for comments, but includes a 13-year-old girl complaining about how she weighs a whopping 105 pounds, and a 12-year-old girl who says that everyone says she is not fat but she knows that she is.

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