It's a question of balance isn't it -- the majority of society has the firmly entrenched values "unhealthily thin == beautiful and sexy" and "unhealthily fat == lazy and ugly".

So in most situations the unhealthily thin person will be praised for her looks encouraging the self-destructive behaviour. On the other hand, someone who is unhealthily fat will be less often be praised for their looks and more often be insulted.

The problem is that you are looking at a very biased sample set. Those people who are concerned about eating disorders -- therefore you will be reading stuff by people who do reverse societal norms about what is a normal/healthy body shape.

However, there is also the issue "what is actually good for the person?"

I generalise wildly here but my experience of anorexics is that they WANT to be noticed for it. (Insensitive people call it attention seeking which kind of misses the point in my opinion). If that attention is not provided their behaviour becomes more extreme. On the other hand, people who are chronically overweight generally speaking do NOT want to be noticed for it -- indeed would shy away from such notice. I am sure that there are specific cases where the opposite is true obviously people being what they are -- difficult.

However, generally speaking, I don't see anything that wrong with the idea of telling someone overweight that they look fine (assuming they do) but that that it would be a good idea for them to lose weight for health reasons.

People do have some rather wild reactions to all these things of course. Callista Flockheart was widely criticised for becoming very thin to play a role which was of someone very thin. At the same time, Tom Hanks was widely praised for becoming quite fat then very thin to play the role of someone who lost weight (Castaway I think it was) and Robert De Niro was widely praised for similar devotion to acting.

I guess that castigating a society which encourages only the "very thin" look as attractive can spill over into criticising the person themselves.

However, I think that it's very important to remember that in asking "if a morbidly obese woman can be congratulated for loving herself as she is and not wanting to change, one who is delighted with her own skeletal appearance deserves the same acceptance?" you are totally reversing the normal way round that people experience these things.

In society as a whole the thin person is much more likely to be praised for their looks the fat person more likely to be abused for the same.

Yikes.

This sounds akin to the classic 'PC' conventions (he says using the terms incredibly loosely) that are overly prevalent in our society.

If you're emaciated and starving yourself, you're obviously brainwashed by the Patriarchal archetype of what womanhood is supposed to be = victim.
Therefore anything (for example obesity) that opposes that = a valiant stand against conformity.

I suppose that outside of the small fraction of obese people who have a compulsion to overeat, the majority are due to their lifestyle of poor food and lack of exercise (*cough, cough, ahem*).

I guess actually, that's the one thing that the pro-ana group has going for it - they're so much easier to sit beside on the bus - no seat & half to 2 seats being used by one person here. (Plus none of that horrid stale sweat aroma - even in mid-winter).

There is, indeed, a double standard. Eating onself into an ealry grave is as sad as starving oneself into it. An eating disorder is an eating disorder, whether you're fat or thin, that makes no difference.

I look back at photos of myself at 19 stone and think ugh. I can never be 'proud' of that type of body. That isn't Goddess-like, as far as I'm concered, that's obese and unattractively so. It's a body that I'd let go, and not cared about enough to fix. From my own personal point of view, there was a weight that I reached when I felt comfortable that I was doing enough to keep healthy, if not to be as slim as I was 'meant to be'.

When I see girls far larger than I am, wheezing and in pain from their aching joints and backs bowed by their breasts, it hurts ME. To tell them to be proud of their weight and to glorify in it? No. Self loathing is also not to be encouraged but when you help someone to glorify and treat what is killing them as a fabulous thing? No way.

"Oh look at me I'm fat and beautiful!" Well yes, you are dear but your knees are crumbling and your spine is about to break. Not to metion all the sore places and the breathlessness.

I should stop. Oh dear.

I think that eating disorders where the sufferer is thin tend to be seen as needing care, understanding, therapy, being seated in emotional trauma etc. Because fat people are seen as being comical or viewed with disdain, being very obese is usually seen as being a choice or active decision on the part of the obese person - laziness, greed, stupidity are all associated with being obese.

'Love your curves' when related to vast heaving rolls of fat is just an attempt to sound with it and non-judgemental anyway.

So on average, all's well in the world!

It's to do with society's perception. Anorexia is percieved as disease, with both physical and mental effects, making the sufferer a victim that requires treatment and understanding. Obesity, by contrast, is perceived as self induced through gluttony, sloth and a lack of self control. It doesn't matter that over-eating may be a symptom of an underlying mental or emotional problem.
Put more simply, the ignorant masses that make up the general public can readily identify sympathetically with the concept of an anorexic, after all, everyone has experienced not wanting to eat at some point, and it's easy to extrapolate that into "imagine feeling like that all the time", which I suspect is the way said masses think anorexia feels like.
By the same token, almost everyone has experience of exercising self control over what they eat, so an attitude of "and if I can do it, so can they" pervades, regardless of the actual cause of the problem.

i completely agree.

The whole thing bothers me. I'd try to explain my precise stance in an eloquent and concise manner, but I'd get too annoyed and might end up bursting my spleen again.

I will say, however, that every time I pay a woman a compliment regarding their appearance and they reply with "oh no, I'm fat/skinny/short/lanky/ugly etc." a little piece of me bangs its head against a wall until it dies. As a rule of thumb, women are easy on the eye. Unless they look like John Prescott, have facial necrosis, or are Paris "I survived ten years in a Japanese concentration camp and all I got was this stupid face" Hilton.

1) Love your curves" does not mean "love your life-threatening obesity that means you can hardly walk unaided".

2) When Dawn French said "Fat women are sexy" she was talking crap. As much crap as someone saying "thin women are sexy". There are people attracted to particular body shapes, there are cultural "norms" about what body shape is meant to be attractive, but SEXINESS IS ABOUT THE PERSON. Hattie Jacques was damned sexy, but then so is Kristin Scott Thomas. Pauline Quirke is not sexy, but then neither is Renee Zellweger.

3) many of the girls on these "Pro Ana" websites aren't anorexic. If they were they wouldn't look at themselves and see thinness and want to be even thinner, they would look at their skeletal frame and see fatness (as far as I'm aware). In a lot of these cases it seems to be less of an eating disorder, and more body dysmorphia.

Well said. I used to be very underweight (7 stone 6 at 5 foot 9. I didn't have any eating disorders and didn't want to be that skinny, that's just the way I was.) It was somehow ok for people to make comments who would never have dreamed of commenting on a larger person's size.

I didn't realise this debate was raging here as well. I feel rather late to the party!

I agree with you (and many of the comments too) - society does display annoying double standards on the issue. It's an area where I also find myself in strident disagreement with certain feminists. "Fat Is A Feminist Issue" has a lot to answer for. Surely thin is an equally pressing feminist issue. Whilst completely understanding that many anorexics and morbidly obese women owe their condition to psychological or physiological problems, many more at the less severe end of the spectrum are reacting to cultural norms/expectations. They starve themselves in an attempt to attain the "lollipop lady" attributes the media peddles as desirable, or they stuff themselves and are persuaded that this is somehow empowering and fighting stereotypes. Both are, of course, misguided, and demonstrate how damaging the continuing objectification of women can be - and how apparently PC attitudes can exacerbate the problem. In less superficial and decadent societies, of course, we wouldn't even be discussing this...

I realise that your point applies to both genders, and hope I've not gone into feminist rant mode. It's just that the majority of the censure does seem to be directed at women in particular (although sadly, equality in this instance appears to involve more men suffering the same kind of problems with body image).

I just clicked the first link, and I think we need to create a kind of nerve gas that only kills skinny idiots. I realise this isn't in keeping with the mature discussion of the other eighty-odd replies, but as far as I'm concerned, any debate that can't be settled with nerve gas isn't worth the effort.