A few year’s ago, I tried to mobilize people to get Julie Gerberding’s co-opted [deleted] fired. Is it time to give it another try?

Start here:
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/07/weight-of-nation-we-have-plan.html

That was nauseating and frustrating. Awesomely enough, I recently had an opportunity to speak with a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Policy Fellow.

At their joint conferences this weekend, NAAFA and ASDAH arranged for a day-long visit to Capitol Hill, where we each met with different members of the legislature (their staff at least) and spoke to them about our concerns regarding the way that health is approached by the government (weight centered rather than behavioral centered), about the discriminatory horrors of the CDCs Lean Works Project, about removing references to weight loss as goals of government sponsored health programs in the latest Health Care Reform Legislation and many more issues besides.

My group went to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, and though we thought we would only get to speak for 5-10 minutes with a 23 year old member of her staff, we also spoke with a Policy Fellow from Robert Wood Johnson, Deborah Trautman, who wanted to be there and understand what we had to say. She was surprisingly interested and receptive and spoke with us for nearly an hour. Granted, it’s her job to be polite and listen, but she was actively engaged by our comments and understanding about our concerns in a way I definitely wasn’t expecting.

This meeting was only the beginning of speaking with her and others on the Hill, but by everything I heard, 17 legislative visits went incredibly well to all different members of Congress. I’ll speak more about this in the NAAFA forums where talk about the conference belongs, but after reading that article I had to mention my recent visit with a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow.

Interesting. Did Trautman say anything about why Robert Wood Johnson is still making decisions based on mythology? It’s pretty bizarre that people with advanced degrees and who claim to be evidence-based can’t even begin to understand that fat people are not “overeaters” in the first place. Until they get that, so long as they keep basing all their actions on the calorie theory, they’re never going to do anything but oppress.

Honestly we kept it pretty civil (though I did mention my disgust with LEAN Works, which she hardly even seemed aware of). We were pretty grateful to be getting so much time. We were prepped to have 5-10 minutes, and when she gave us nearly an hour - and an engaged hour at that - we realized that getting aggressive wasn’t going to make her listen (though I definitely understand your frustration - I think I was the least ‘restrained’ of our group, continually bringing up the more ‘risky’ issues that may have turned her off of listening).

In any case, in her attempts to sympathize with what we were saying and connect with us, she continually reverted to food, which I thought was an interesting direction to take. I don’t think that was her way of implying that we were overeaters or anything; it was just her way of saying, I understand there are health problems because we don’t eat right in this country. The problem of generally poor dietary habits (amongst fat and thin) was only a fraction of our overall point that health initiatives need to be behavior- rather than weight-centric, but I still think enough of the message got through to make her reflect thoughtfully about what we were presenting her with.

I think she was surprised to learn that we knew people in her organization who subscribe to HAES rather than ‘obesity prevention’ and that may have caused her to think about the myths on which much of accepted research is based on. Significantly, too, she seemed very opposed to the idea of using BMI as a measurement of anything useful, recognizing that the body is far more complex than a silly correlative like that and that we can’t base science and government health programs on something so undemonstrative. That was a great relief.

Telling the TRUTH is not being “adversarial”. So, you wasted the hour letter her control the conversation. THE REASON SHE KEPT TALKING ABOUT FOOD IS BECAUSE SHE BELIEVES FAT PEOPLE ARE GLUTTONS. SHE KEPT TALKING ABOUT FOOD BECAUSE SHE’S CONVINCED THERE HAS TO BE SOME REASON FOR AN “ABNORMALITY” LIKE FATNESS TO EXIST. Where was the part where she acknowledged that fatness is a normal human characteristic? Whether they decide to kill me based on the BMI, or a dress size, or the numbers on a scale makes no difference—they’re still dedicated to killing us for our own good.

No, telling the truth is not being adversarial - you’re right. However, yelling the truth at someone who has spent her life thinking that it’s something else would be foolish and actually WOULD have been a waste of that hour. That makes people feel attacked, and when people feel attacked they shut down and don’t hear anything you say. By speaking in a civil manner and with tact we allowed her to hear something with which she was unfamiliar and try to identify with it.

So, no, the hour was not a waste, and, no, we did not allow her to dominate the conversation. It was a very useful hour in that we allowed her to see and understand that what she conventionally believed was not all there was to know. More than that, it was only the beginning of the conversation. She was very vocal about wanting to know more, very excited to get the copy of Linda Bacon’s Health at Every Size that we gave her, and very forthcoming with the desire to stay in touch to discuss this further and learn. Had we yelled the truth at her, she would never have heard what we had to say and wanted to talk again in the future.

It takes a long time to change somebody’s understanding of a huge part of their worldview, and if she had to identify with us on grounds that weren’t our entire point in order to start to understand us and want to get into our worldview and know more, then so be it.

Is the world changed because we talked to her? Not in the slightest, but short of an armed revolution, it wouldn’t be in an hour. I think the talk was productive and a start - the opening of a channel of communication. I appreciate that you’re burnt out on activism because you don’t think anything will change - it’s an exhausting process and so hard to see come to fruition - but it’s that struggle that I want to help take up for those who no longer have the energy or patience (understandably) to fight the fight. Telling me I wasted an hour is not the way to encourage me to continue to do the work I want to do - however slow and pointless you consider it. Please offer constructive criticism and support me. It’s been such a pleasure to exchange thoughts with you, but it’s hard when I feel attacked for making efforts - even if those efforts didn’t lead to the immediate destruction of the BMI system.