Five Pounds of Horseshit
My bear’s workplace has started a health contest as some sort of education/motivation/happiness mash-up. People are put into teams. Everybody gets a little scorecard that lists a variety of healthy behaviors, and each behavior has a point value attached. Every day, you record your total points and the total points for your group. At the end of the contest, there will be group prizes for the highest-scoring group, individual prizes for the highest-scoring individuals, and individual prizes for the people who managed to make the biggest sustained and positive change in their point value. The points are assigned for actually healthy things with realistic and incremental effects. You get points for eating five servings of fruits and vegetables. You get points for taking a walk. You get points for a full night’s sleep. There aren’t negative points – nobody gets penalized for eating a cookie.
From what my bear says, this has actually inspired some neat changes in the workplace. Suddenly, people who used to bring in frozen meals or go out for lunch are swapping recipes in the breakroom, or making collaborative stews that simmer in a crockpot all morning. People are reading labels and talking about vitamins and fiber. A juicer has shown up next to the coffee machine, and people are stocking the fridge with communal fruit (my bear, ever the individualist, eschewed the fruit and DRANK A FUCKING ONION. His conclusion: nasty-ass shit cleared up his allergies for DAYS). A little group has instituted a lunch powerwalk in the wooded area near the office. People are biking to work.
Somebody at his job has a friend who has just recently gotten whatever degree you need to get to be a nutritionist. To get practice, the nutritionist volunteered to come in and set up shop in the breakroom, teaching people about portion sizes and creating a meal plan and yadda yadda. So my bear wanders into the breakroom one day to see her setting a big doughy pile on a table. “What’s that?” he asks her. “That…” she says with a practiced snake oil sheen. “That is five pounds of fat.”
Bear picked up the offending mass and looked it over. “Oh,” he said, finding the label. “It’s vinyl.”
“Yes,” the nutritionist said, “but not really. It’s the equivalent of five pounds of fat.”
Bear found a place on his body where he is pretty sure there is more chunkerbutt than five pounds and held up the hunk of beige vinyl. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess this is flattened out when it’s in a body, but this is about the size of my torso. Three of these would make up my entire body.”
“Well,” the nutritionist said, “you could weigh it and see if it’s five pounds.”
“I could weigh it,” Bear said, “and it might be five pounds. But that would be five pounds of vinyl.”
“Yes, but it’s five pounds of fat.”
“Made out of vinyl.”
“It’s meant to represent five pounds of fat.”
“Is vinyl the same mass as fat?” Bear was willing to believe this – he does not know what the mass of vinyl or fat is.
“Well, that was made so it would be an accurate representation of five pounds of fat.”
“So vinyl is the same mass as fat.”
“It’s an accurate representation.”
“So vinyl isn’t the same mass as fat.”
“That’s what five pounds of fat looks like”
Some other people came into the room and started making, “OHHHHH! DISGUSTING!” noises at the fat mass. The nutritionist preened at finally getting the proper reaction. Bear decided to stop arguing. He’s often been the lone guy having a feminist meltdown at work, and just didn’t feel like being Fat Guy vs. Everybody Else’s Fat Shame today. He also figured, this is just what they taught this nutritionist; she’s parroting back the shame she’s supposed to ladle out about the DISGUSTING MASS OF VINYL in your fat, fat body, and she thinks that’s a healthy thing to do. Though, as he pointed out later to me, one would hope that a person smart enough to acquire a degree is somebody smart enough to apply critical thinking, and one would hope critical thinking would include a basic understanding of mass and volume.
Instead, Bear got out a post-it and wrote down the name of the manufacturer and the product number. When he got home, he googled them up. Sure enough, he found the FIVE POUNDS OF FAT “educational” tool, along with a FIVE POUNDS OF MUSCLE product that was, from what he could view, a much more reasonable hunk of vinyl. He pulled the two products up in separate tabs to compare the product specs. Can you guess what he found? I am betting, with your critical thinking skills, that you can:
FIVE POUNDS OF FAT: Approximate shape and weight of five pounds of fat.
FIVE POUNDS OF MUSCLE: Exact shape and weight of five pounds of muscle.
This is not to say I really believe the muscle hunk is exact – the business that sells LOOK LOOK AT YOUR DISGUSTING BODY tools does not seem to be a business that employs a rigorous scientific principle. I’d be just as willing to bet that the muscle hunk was toned down significantly, so no enterprising fatty could get it in their heads that they could possibly be large AND healthy, for god’s sake.
In the space of the day, Bear met one individual (let’s set her intentions aside) and one business that wanted nothing more than to make a living off stoking his self-hatred into pathological levels, unmoored by the basic physics of reality. Make no mistakes about it: fat hate is profitable, it is an industry floating atop tears of shame and butter. If you wonder why America is suddenly in a terror about the VINYL EPIDEMIC, follow the goddamn vinyl money.
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Point to your head. “Three pounds of brain. Out of which, two pounds are fat.”
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That… how… what? No. What?
No!
I’m sorry, that was ludicrously inarticulate. Let me try again: I was not aware until now that it was possible for a physical object to be a vicious lie. Thank you for once again showing me (as your posts so often do) how the world operates outside my tiny, idealistic hexagonal mind.
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Your bear sounds like the exact kind of feminist onion-drinker I want to be when I grow up.
I’ve seen that sort of “five pounds of fat” demonstrative tool as well- in a pharmacy, although it was measured in kilos. Under normal circumstances metric instantly raises the credibility bar for me, but here not so much. It had a weight-loss supplement/drug name stamped into it. (This was in a country where prescriptions are pretty much optional. Seriously- you can just ask for Valium and get it if the pharmacist chooses to believe you need it) People’s squeamishness is easy to exploit. Stick a pile of bloody entrails on the table and if people didn’t know how necessary they are, I’m sure they could be convinced to remove them.
Fat’s kinda tricky- to really know how much visceral fat is in the body you need an MRI, and people like Sumo wrestlers may have a great deal of fat on the outside but be healthier than someone with “less disgusting” fat on the inside (cholesterol, etc.)
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I first came across the idea of a physical representation of 5lbs of fat to horrify fatties in the book Fat!So? and was amazed at the length people will go to to SHAME YOU TOWARDS HEALTH. Calling it 5lbs of horseshit sounds about as accurate as possible. Also it’s a pity that something that was so obviously a positive influence at work had to have that shame tactic brought in. Failsauce all around. Great post. Also I don’t see anyone complaining about my lbs of fat that make up my fantastic DD tits. Apparently nipples make all the difference. Twats.
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Well crap. I don’t suppose you could post the link to the website that sells the pounds of various bodily tissues? I want to use SCIENCE! (^_^) to figure out how overblown the vinyl-fat is.
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Oh holy hell, your Bear is pretty freaking awesome. I would LOVE to have sat in on that argument.
Seriously high five the guy.
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I’ll ask the bear, I think he still remembers what it was.
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Oh, that would be great if you could! Thanks so much.
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I’ve had similar questions ever since I saw a ‘five pounds of fat’ display at my gym almost ten years back. This has inspired me to try and figure it out, and I did some checking:
The ‘average’ density of a human is about 1.01g/ml (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28density%29)
The density of human fat is about 0.9g/ml
Using google for my measurement conversions, I find 5lbs of fat should be about 2268g, which is 2520 ml, or about 2.5 liters or 2/3rds of a gallon.
I’m bad at estimating things, but I’m pretty sure the ‘five pound’ example at my gym was rather larger than 2/3rds of a gallon.
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Well, oh my. I think I would have held fat blob up and done a size comparison to my ass. And then declared that I can’t lose any weight or I’d have no ass left. I wonder if weight vs mass would have suddenly gotten more dicussion?
And over at Tiny Cat Pants, Aunt B. has a post up about how under WHO guidelines more than half of US women will be considered obese. Soon just everyone will be considered obese and maybe we can get over it.
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This is unrelated but I need some words of wisdom/advice and this seems like it has some intelligent, thoughtful people who will be able to help me out.
I’m a freshman at a very large university. Lately, the school administrators have started saying they are going to make serious efforts to address sexual assault on campus, the health center got a grant to set up a women’s center/sexual assault crisis center… all things I’m happy about (even though these are things that should already have happened…better late than never). since it’s kind of a current issue on campus, I’ve been in lots of discussions about it lately, and I have one friend who consistently brings up a point that really unsettles and upsets me. He always, always goes back to this idea of: “what if a girl is drunk and gives consent?” To which I say, consent given under the influence is not actually consent. He says that so many people, especially in college, have sex while both drunk anyway, and for a woman to say she was raped after that kind of incident is ridiculous. I find this comment offensive and upsetting, but I don’t really know how to respond to it. Can anyone direct me to some information or share their ideas?
Thank you.
-Cassie
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From Wikipedia:
—
Adipose tissue has a density of ~0.9 g/ml [22] [0.9 kg/l]. Thus, a person with much adipose tissue will float more easily than a person with a lot of muscular tissue, since muscular tissue has a density of 1.06 g/ml[22] [1.06 kg/l].
—
Let me emphasize that: the difference is *0.16 kg/l*
So, fat is ~0.47 pounds/cup, and muscle is 0.55 pounds/cup.
5 pounds of fat is 10.6 cups in size, and 5 pounds of muscle is…drumroll…9 cups in size.
Not so much of a difference, there, is it? Having googled the 5 pounds of bullshit teaching tools, they look way more than 10% different in size. Gah, idiocy.
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And now I have made myself hugely infuriated by finding tons of BS online saying things like “fat takes up 5 times more space than muscle!”
Holy crap, people, it’s not like I had to look this up in a complicated research text, it’s on WIKIPEDIA and I did 30 seconds of basic math.
Argh online idiots spreading a fat-shame myth as fact, argh.
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Also I don’t see anyone complaining about my lbs of fat that make up my fantastic DD tits.
Beat me to it. Hell, the ladies are most of the reason I’m over my “target weight,” anyway. Anyone have a good source for “how much a boob weighs”? (Actual boobs, of course, no vinyl substitutes.)
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Your Bear totally deserves some extra love for that. And I am totally jealous of his office’s attempts to create healthier lifestyle opportunities for its employees without breaking out the blame-n’-shame.
*sadly eyes the juicer-less coffee machine on the counter*
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Your bear cracks me up.
I was thinking about a previous post of yours (FA) while watching my PBS affiliate’s fundathon the other day. I thought they were going to show me that kind of weird “breathe your way to happiness” thing that they like to show me around the time they decide to ask me for money. Instead, to my ultimate horror, was a man explaining how fat makes people stupid. Not no exercise = stupid. Not lack of nutrients = stupid. Not poor health = stupid. Fat = stupid. It was stunning.
The “doctor” had a bunch of computer models of “brains” that, like the fat chunk that horrified the bear, seemed to be based on good wishes and artistic flights of fancy rather than science or, you know, reality. That was what made me think of that. Fit people’s “brains” looked like melty marshmallows. Fat people’s “brains” looked like marshmallows that had been tunneled into by worms. The self-satisfaction of the studio audience was equal only to their horror.
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Great post, full of win!
I’m just curious, what industry does the Bear work in? I understand if you can’t reveal this for security reasons, but I just thought I’d ask.
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Everybody has had sex that went clumsily, or embarrassingly, or regretfully, and most people have had drunken sex, too, and it’s horrifying to imagine that the next day you could be accused of rape (or you can replace “accused of” with “find out that you actually committed,” because that is a possibility, too).
But it’s comparing apples and oranges. EVERYBODY KNOWS WHAT A CONSENSUAL SEX PARTNER LOOKS LIKE. Even if you’ve never sat down and really thought it out, you know, because you don’t want to have sex with anybody who isn’t. This isn’t just a “no rape” moral button, but normal human beings don’t want to have sex with people who hate having sex with them. It feels bad. The only people who like that are rapists.
A consensual sex partner is active, engaged, happy, excited, reaching out to grab at you. If you were having sex with somebody who didn’t want to have sex with you, YOU’D KNOW. A “misunderstanding” in consensual sex looks nothing like rape. Drunken consensual sex looks nothing like rape. Nobody who isn’t a rapist is going to mistake consensual sex for rape, because nobody who isn’t a rapist wants to rape. Rape is fundamentally so different from sex, because it involves having sex with somebody who is not engaged, not active, not touching you, not happy, not excited, not liking you, not liking your body. Normal people do not want that. They do not pursue it. They avoid it, if sex starts edging that way. If you were having sex with somebody, and they were unengaged, lying still, not touching you, not moaning, staring at the wall, flinching, or just completely passed out, YOU WOULD NOTICE THESE THINGS. And if you were a rapist, you’d keep going, because that’s the kind of sex encounter you want. Somebody who wants a consensual sex encounter does not keep going when sex becomes nonconsensual, because it’s not sexy. There is no way to “oops” your way into rape unless you like having sex with somebody who hates having sex with you. You can have sex that gets wacky or you bump them in the eye or you pinch them and they are like, “uh, no, I don’t like that,” but throughout all the drunk or regret or accidents that can happen during sex, your partner is still engaged and actively trying to sex you if it’s consensual sex. That’s not rape. Rape may involve sex, but eating rusty nails involves eating: that doesn’t mean we call it dinner. You would notice if you were eating rusty nails; you wouldn’t mistake it for real food or enjoyable food. There is no way to accidentally shove that shit in your mouth. You would only do it if you wanted to.
I think (total presumption here) that when your friend is talking about drunkeness or mistakes, he’s imaginging perfectly reasonable things. He’s thinking, “What if my best friend’s girlfriend and I have sex and then later she feels bad for cheating?” Or, he’s imagining, “What if I’m at a club and there is a super drunk girl I like and she drags me back to her house where we have wild energetic sex all night?” That’s sex that’s a mistake. That’s drunken sex. That’s not rape, and women don’t call that rape. If your friend thinks they do, he needs to check out the stats the government puts out about false accusations: women falsely accuse men of rape at the same rate that (surprise!) people falsely accuse other people of any crime. It’s somewhere in the range of 1%-2%.
He’s assuming that everybody has this definition of mistakes or drunken sex, but rapists don’t. To a rapist, sex that is a mistake is a girl who was flirting with you and doesn’t scream and run and hit you when you rape her — obviously she wanted and deserved it because she was flirting, and that’s what he’ll say to make bystanders call her a liar. Bystanders will believe this, because they’re imagining what they think “mistake” means instead of realizing what definition the rapist is using. To a rapist, drunken sex is spiking a drink or finding a girl who is voluntarily so drunk that she’s blacking out or passed out and raping her while she’s unconscious or unable to move. She’ll call it rape, he’ll say “she was drunk!” and bystanders will think about the times they’ve had drunken sex with a consensual partner, and how HORRIBLE it would be if they were accused of rape later, so obviously THIS couldn’t be rape, never realizing that the rapist has a very different definition of “drunken sex” than they do. A rapist and your friend could have a conversation about mistaken sex and drunken sex and think they were talking about the same thing, but your friend would be talking about active, engaged, consensual sex, and the rapist would be talking about sex where the woman wants to die.
The fact that your friend thinks it’s possible to “accidentally” rape a woman is a perfect illustration of “rape culture,” and how his life and ability to reason has been damaged by it. This is why your school is creating these new resources — because otherwise intelligent and probably well-meaning people like your friend are walking around under the impression that rape can ever happen by accident. If he were to examine his own personal sexual encounters, it would be obvious to him that consent was given and maintained throughout, and that it was OBVIOUSLY there — no questions, no confusion, no difficulty ascertaining. It’s not a fuzzy concept — it’s a girl who is active and engaged and enjoying what’s happening. He would probably also find the idea of having sex with a woman who isn’t active and engaged and enjoying what’s happening repugnant. He could not accidentally have sex with a girl who was reacting that way, anymore than he can accidentally eat nails for dinner. He would know there was something wrong. Only rapists can have sex with people who do not want to have sex with them. Only rapists can enjoy sex like that. Only rapists can look at a person who is unengaged and dissociating from sex and say, “Oh, she’s just regretting it.” Normal people — non-rapists — they know what regret looks like. It looks like a girl calling you the next morning and saying, “Yeah, we can’t ever do that again, you’re really nice, but I don’t know what I was thinking,” and then looking a little embarrassed every time she sees you in public. When rapists say, “She just regretted it,” we’re imagining the concept of regret we have in our minds. But that’s not the definition the rapist is using, and it’s testament to how badly rape apologism has fucked your friend up that he, a reasonable fucking person, couldn’t see through that shit without a careful explanation from a third party.
As for resources, I would recommend the Feministe article on Predator Theory, and the research behind it. This shows exactly what I’ve been saying, and then some. Rapists specifically target women with whom they can use these pre-made excuses — drunk! regretted it! — because they know that people like your friend will support them and consider the woman to be a liar. When your friend says this shit out loud, a rapist is going to hear him and think they are BFFs. And that rapist is going to feel perfectly comfortable raping any friends of his who ever get drunk, because they already know that your friend thinks that’s okay.
You could put it this way. “If I got drunk and somebody raped me, would you tell me it wasn’t rape?” If the answer is yes, then this is easier: this guy isn’t your friend anymore. If the answer is, “No, of course not!”, then you can tell him, “So stop saying this shit out loud. If you want to believe it, in your head, fine, your head isn’t my business. But when you say these things out loud, rapists hear you, and they’re going to think I’m a good target. They’ll think that if they get me drunk, you’re going to call me a liar, because that’s what you say out loud. Women who are drunk aren’t getting raped because they’re drunk — they’re getting raped because guys like you go around saying drunk girls deserve it, and a rapist realized he could rape drunk girls and get away with it.”
You are the best!
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Here it is! He actually had a little trouble finding it — my blog post has already gummed up the google hits.
http://www.simulaids.com/WA08836.htm
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Sorry! I feel comfortable vaguely referencing my line of work, but I think he prefers more privacy.
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Thank you!
Holy cow are they expensive. Maybe I can call the company and get the numbers I need.
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Next time someone starts freaking out at me about the EPIDEMIC, and it’s obvious that logic and courtesy are making no impression on them at all, I am totally going to start babbling right back at them about VINYL, and confuse the shit out of them instead of letting the hate get to me.
Tell your bear that he is my hero.
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Speaking of following the money, what’s the price of one of these fat replicas on Amazon?
88.75.
Awesome.
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that was 10 kinds of awesome. can you PLEASE repost this comment as a separate blogpost?
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That was sort of scattered and shot-off. I’ll see if I can’t clean it up nice.
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+ Like, a million!
I second the request for a separate blogpost. I totally wanted to tweet this comment right away, but I’ll wait.
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Wow! I am totally all over the 1 oz. fat magnet, and by “totally all over” I mean I’m seriously pissed off by it. It’s right up there with that thing you can install on your fridge door to oink whenever you open it. DO NOT WANT.
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Cassie – To add to Harriet’s excellent response, you could tell him that lack of ‘no’ does not equal ‘yes’. It’s why having sex with someone who is asleep is rape. If somebody is not able, for whatever reason, to give a sincere, enthusiastic and un-coerced ‘yes’, then that in itself is a ‘no’. Having sex with someone in the state of not being able to give consent is therefore rape.
Also, consent isn’t a one time thing; it can be revoked at any time. I think decent people would agree that if a sex partner suddenly asks to stop, says ‘no’, in any way indicates that they no longer want to continue – or that they at least want to pause – that the other partner should stop immediately, and if they don’t, it’s rape. So, going with what I said above, if a person falls asleep, passes out, becomes so confused, disoriented, or non-responsive that they can no longer give consent – affirm that ‘yes’, as described above – then to continue having sex with them would be rape.
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Also, LOL vinylsuction.
“I know you’re a size 26, but you’re actually only ten pounds overweight. It’s just that eight of those pounds are vinyl, and you know how big vinyl fat is!”
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Miss Minx – I kind of want to turn it into a brooch, so that I can wear it on my fatty fat fat jackets and make all the fat haters be confronted with ~extra~ fat.
Is that really, really wrong?
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– the fact that your friend CAN’T SHUT UP about “but what if we get drunk and she calls it rape OMG OMG” is, at least to me, a big honking red flag. It sounds like he’s really hoping that women he’s with will have much lower inhibitions because they’re drunk, increasing his chances of getting some, and he’s terrified this will come back to haunt him.
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@ DBN – lol! I’d want one of those!
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. The best resource I’ve seen on consent is Teh Portly Dyke’s piece ‘A Modest Proposal: The Thorny Issue of Sexual Consent ‘
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I always counter the “eeewwww, fat!” argument (such as it is) with the information that without fat, you will not be able to think. Fat is vital to brain function. VITAL (caps for how awesome fat is).
I love my fat. It make me smrt.
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