The folks at Big Fat Blog have put together a great page called Big Fat Facts:

The overall goal of Big Fat Facts is simple: to get information out there that directly combats “conventional wisdom” on fat, diets, weight loss, and health.

As the credits for BFF indicate, this is a good summary of the work of Paul Campos’s “The Diet Myth” (formerly The Obesity Myth) and J. Eric Oliver’s “Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic.”

I tend to agree with the thesis here. I think that fat is a corrolation, not a causation. Fat is a symptom, not the disease. And I also suspect that dieting not only doesn’t help, it can make it worse.

That said, while I agree wholeheartedly with the BFBers that fat acceptance is essential, that doesn’t mean (to me anyways) that where we are now is where we must stay. But I think that most of the people who are out there trying to “help” us are doing so from a position of ignorance at best (there is just so much that we don’t really understand), and malice (or greed) at worst.

But the truth is that diet and exercise behaviors have gotten most of us here. If we can change those (a big if, I admit), then not only can we improve our health and reduce our changes for lifestyle-related diseases, we can lose weight.

But that brings us back to how. For me, eating for health is working pretty well. More later. I gotta go to work.