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(For those of you who haven’t followed the conversation, my in-laws are featured in next week’s New York Times Magazine for their significant weight loss and the more important fact that they have mostly kept the weight off. Read the article because it’s really important to this conversation, and be sure to see the slideshow. Wife brag: That first photo was taken by Tom! Look at mah sweetie, getting a photo credit in the NYT Magazine!)

I am in the unusual, though by no means unique, position of being an ardent proponent of Fat Acceptance, while also making a concerted effort to lose weight. 

If you’ve read the NYTM article (and you really should, not just to hear about Tom’s family), you’ll understand a couple of obvious problems:

- A person’s weight is only partially tied to factors within their control (ie: food intake and activity level) and is greatly controlled by biological/genetic factors they can’t directly affect. 

- And yet clinicians have been so hung up on those two behavioral factors that we have decided that fat must be a moral failing, which is both offensive and counterproductive.

Nonetheless, fat and how it accumulates on the body does indeed have health implications, and at the moment, behavioral factors are pretty much all we have to work with.

So, since there’s a lot of weight loss talk on Tumblr today from people whose well-being I care about, I make a couple of suggestions/observations (we’re all in this together, y’all): 

- Start from the perspective of loving your body, even while you want to change it. Your body is how you experience the world. You use it to work, to play, and to hug your loved ones. And after you lose whatever weight you end up losing? You’ll still be using the same body to do all that stuff. Yes, it does some things that are counter-productive, but all of those things are biological responses that evolved when our species was still living in caves and hunting woolly mammoths. Resisting weight loss is your body’s way of taking care of you in a way that worked for millions of years of human history and has only become a liability relatively recently. Don’t hate, appreciate. Your body is not the enemy; hating it won’t help you lose weight but WILL piss you off needlessly.

- Have multiple measures of success. You can control what you eat. You can control how much exercise you get. What you can’t control is whether that will actually result in weight loss. So if you’re meeting your “eat well and exercise” goals, let yourself take some satisfaction in that. And as you exercise more regularly, you’ll notice things like increased strength, endurance, energy, etc. Those are real, tangible health benefits, so appreciate them too. 

- Your ideal weight isn’t what’s on the chart, it’s what you can reasonably maintain. The NYTM article mentions that my mother-in-law is choosing to maintain her weight 30 pounds higher than her lowest weight. What it doesn’t mention is what she told me a couple of days ago when we were talking about it- when she was maintaining the lower weight, it took SO much more work and stress about slipping that it wasn’t really sustainable for her. So now, at 30 pounds above the original goal, she still gets plenty of exercise, still eats a healthful diet, still enjoys the health benefits of having lost over 100 pounds (which an extra 30 pounds do not at all erase), but without constantly feeling resentful about all the work she has to do or letting it crowd out her life. You know, the thing she lost the weight to enjoy better in the first place.