I just left a comment on a BoingBoing post.

The post (about some hugely calorific dish at Outback Steakhouse): http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/11/worst-food-in-americ.html
The comment (not sure if it’ll be approved, so I can’t yet link it directly):

I’m thinking you guys (the creators of BoingBoing) probably don’t care, because you are hip and probably all thin, cool type people (whether this is because you count calories/diet, I do not know).

But you must know that there is a significant membership of yours, or passive readers of yours who are fat, and who, further, do not diet, and have no interest in doing so, nor in counting calories.

Surely a blog as cool as yours has noticed the growing national awareness of the fat acceptance movement recently. And the growing numbers of studies coming out that do not attribute fatness to laziness or other synonyms, or necessarily to one’s diet.

We (as I am one of these people) are probably tired of your posts like these, where you talk about calories, which leads to talking about eating patterns and dieting and healthiness. Why? Because I think we have had enough of those sorts of discussions in public fora.

I’m not discounting the great discussion of foods (that sound sometimes interesting and sometimes not) that also derives from this original post, but I think it’s possible to get there via other means, and not just decrying how bad for you a particular food is.

Just a datapoint for you. I don’t wish a flamewar and I’m not trying to troll, just trying to give you honest feedback about your post topics.

Anyhow. Onward.

The other point I wanted to make about fat/fit/health/medicine is that we have now achieved the status, in U.S. medicine at least, of turning medicine into a technical support interaction. In this kind of interaction, because it is statistically sensible to do so, (wherein 95% - 99% of all complainants can have their health concerns addressed, as a technical issue, by a set number of very well understood - if not characterized - procedures), everyone gets treated as if:

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After doing a lot of fat activist blogosphere reading, joining the Big Fat Blog (ain’t commented yet, though) with full disclosure as to my relationship with Hanne Blank, the great evil-doer of the Fickle Finger of Fat blog, and of course being and staying on course for increasing my own personal level of fitness-related activities and examining and being careful about my diet (and my “relationship to food”), I find myself Very Pissed Off.

(read on for some of my details, including an enumeration of some of the top issues I have with what people say about how diets work and how science works)

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