Skin deep

The aim is to behave as if you have reached your goal weight and to act on ambitions postponed while trying to become thin,everything from buying new clothes to changing careers. Regular exercise should be for fun,not for slimming.

Fat acceptance ideas date back to over 30 years,but have lately edged into the mainstream,thanks in part to public hand-wringing by celebrities like Oprah,Kirstie Alley and the tennis player Monica Seles,who said she had to throw out the word diet to deal with her weight gain. Oprah now cites her goal as being not thin, but healthy and strong and fit.

Even television is bellying up to the bar,with a show having its premiere this month on Fox,which stresses the reality in reality TV. The show,More to Love,matches plus-size dates with a bachelor boasting a big waist and an even bigger heart.

And elbowing the weight-loss guides is a spate of new,more diet-neutral books that track the sociology of obesity,including The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by David Kessler,the former US surgeon general,and The Evolution of Obesity by Michael L Power and Jay Schulkin.

FAT NOT BAD

Adding credence to the fat acceptance philosophy,are recent medical studies that suggest a little extra fat may not be such a bad thing. Among the latest is a 12-year Canadian analysis in last months Obesity journal that confirmed earlier findings that overweight appears to be protective against mortality, while being too thin,like extreme obesity,correlates with higher death risk.

Other recent studies have linked weight cycling or yo-yo dieting to weight gain,and to medical conditions often attributed to obesity.

Many appetite warriors have coalesced under the banner of Health at Every Size,which is also the title of a book by Linda Bacon,a nutrition professor at City College of San Francisco. Bacon ran a federally financed,randomised trial to compare outcomes for 78 obese women,who dieted. The results,published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association in 2005,showed that HAES participants fared better on measures of health,physical activity and self-esteem. None lost weight.

These pro-fat results are a trickle,admittedly,in a flood of contrary reports that condemn obesity as a health risk. But that doesnt worry the online denizens of the fatosphere, dominated by irreverent sites like fatshionista.com,Fat Rant and Big Fat Blog,as well as those of the booga booga bloggers,Kate Harding Shapely Prose and Marianne Kirby therotund.com. Fat doesnt equal lazy or ugly or even unhealthy, says another blogger,the Fat Nutritionist.

IS IT TRUE?

Find it all too much of a stretch? Youre not alone. Antidiet advice defies a 30-billion weight loss industry,a cultural obsession with thinness and the fundamental public health tenet that it is dangerous to be fat.

In Obesity Guidelines first published in 1998,the US National Heart,Lung and Blood Institute blames obesity for everything from heart disease to cancer. Within a month of the Canadian mortality report,University of Wisconsin researchers announced in Science that calorie-restricted rhesus monkeys seemed to be outliving an amply-fed control group.

Virtually everyone who is overweight will be better off at a lower weight, said Walter Willett,chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health. There has been this misconception,fostered by the weight-is-beautiful groups,that weight doesnt matter. But the data are clear.

What remains undisputed is that no clinical trial has found a diet that keeps weight off long-term for a majority. If they really worked,we would be running out of dieters, said Glenn Gaesser,professor of exercise physiology at Arizona State University and author of Big Fat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight and Your Health.

Both sides agree that regular exercise,at any size,improves health. If you want to know whos going to die,know their fitness level, said Steven Blair,a self-described fat and fit professor of exercise science,epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of South Carolina. His research indicates that obese individuals who are fit have a death rate half of normal-weight people,who are not fit.

Still,giving up dieting can be a tough sell in a society besotted with Kate Mosss skeletal build. In Lessons From the Fat-O-Sphere,a new book by Harding and Kirby,the authors suggest surrounding yourself with nonjudgmental companions and seeking out fat-friendly media.

So,if yo-yo dieting often leads to weight gain,does quitting ever lead to weight loss? Anecdotal evidence suggests that many ex-dieters do slim down,especially if they are young. But many who quit do not reduce.

Yet,more than size-acceptance may be involved in quitting. For many dieters,the pursuit of thinness as a dream is a place holder, said Deb Burgard,a clinical psychologist in Los Altos,California,specialising in eating disorders. It gets in the way of asking,What is it I am dreaming of?

A dieter may think, If I could just lose weight,all that will take care of itself, so they dont invest in getting what they want, she said. Instead,she said,they invest in weight loss.