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So I think we're all aware of the tidal wave of fat that seems to be flooding most of the planet by now. Its spreading into areas where obesity was never an issue in decades past, especially non-first world countries, for example poor Mexico has been fatter than America for the last few years. It also hasn't stopped spreading in places that are traditionally seen as generally overweight, such the United States where more than a third of adults are now considered obese. Obesity has become a bane for poorer, older people, especially racial minorities such as Blacks and Hispanics, and despite being a concern for decades there has been next to no progress in reversing or even slowing the trend in the overall population. There are some success stories though, obesity seems to have fallen among young children in the United States. Through all of this there have been suggestions that we need to rethink our stances on fat. There have been studies performed that suggest dieting simply does not work and telling people to sort themselves out and go on a diet is totally ineffective, 95% of people who go on diets fail to actually keep the weight off in the long term, and the effects of your weight fluctuating wildly over the years as diets come and go can have its own negative health effects. Effectively, if you're overweight its going to be a life long problem for the vast majority of people. Even if you do lose weight it probably won't really help with the health problems associated with obesity, such as heart disease. That doesn't even touch on the Genetic aspects of weight. Out of this comes the suggestion that thinness is practically an impossible thing for most overweight people to achieve in this day and age, while fat is also heavily associated with Gender, Class and Race, as such Thin privilege is a phenomenon comparable to white or male privilege and must be fought alongside them since it penalizes people for their appearance and body,especially women, despite it being mostly out of their control and thinness being a reflection of wealth and power. Shame, in any event, doesn't seem to be having any impact on obesity and probably makes things worse Following on from that is the idea of 'Health At Any Size' HAES, where it is suggested that the effects of fat on health are exaggerated and that health concerns should be less fixated on trying to get people to lose weight and instead avoid putting too much emphasis on their weight, writers like Linda Bacan (heh) point to evidence that overweight people might live longer. As many a GBS thread may suggest both of these ideas of Thin Privilege and HAES have been controversial. Thin privilege is often derided as appropriation of the language of oppression to justify an unhealthy lifestyle by the worst of 'Tumblr activism', while HAES has come under particular fire downplaying the health dangers of weight gain and manipulating evidence to suit their claims, for example the suggestion that overweight people live longer ignores much context, such as terminally ill people losing a ton of weight before they die and the low quality of life an extremely overweight person may have to deal with. Medical professionals often denounce the movement as ignoring the problems of obesity and spreading bad information. On the whole the medical establishment has been very clear about the bad effects of excessive weight gain and the problems it causes for society. So I was curious as to what DnD would think of these issues and how seriously we should take them, is there anything at all of value in HAES? Is there really serious discrimination against the overweight comparable to racial or sexual discrimination? How should we approach the issue of obesity in light of this in the future? For the record, before anyone asks, no I'm not a fat disgusting slob looking to avoid personal responsibility and shovel hamburgers into my mouth day in day out. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Nov 23, 2015 |
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Nov 23, 2015 03:39
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:This paragraph is a good example of the terrible misinformation that gets spread whenever weight-loss is discussed. To be clear I don't actually have any respect for HAES, I was trying to show the arguments from their perspective but I think that they've generally shown to be more about taking evidence and studies out of context to beef up their arguments while sowing suspicion about medical professionals that really do know better, I probably didn't make that clear enough later in my post. Here are some other studies that deflate any idea of truly healthy obesity: http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1784291 http://content.onlinejacc.org/article.aspx?articleID=2087915 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24794119 http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn/2013/680536/ That said there are a small number of things that they bring up that are difficult to ignore, the point about long term weight loss from structured programs is one of them: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/5/579.full The 95% weight loss failure rate is a massive exaggeration but most people simply cannot keep the weight off after a period of about five years of initial loss, most of it is coming back on. To keep it off most people need to get themselves into a state of permanent lifestyle change WRT exercise and diet, which is at odds with the tendency for diets to be seen as a temporary thing. The average person is reducing their weight by a small percentage from where they began. Now admittedly this concerns a number of diets without distinguishing them in terms of quality (as does most of the public), here's a study concerning better dieting practices, they're quite successful but are very intensive: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3183129/ quote:Really This is what annoys me more in this debate, its incredibly easy to just tell people to stop eating and that weight loss is self-directed and easily controllable, we've been doing it for decades and evidently it hasn't made a lick of difference on a large scale. People are getting fatter just about everywhere, we'll always get somebody like the poster above me saying 'Well I did it easy enough, why can't you?' but people are just not losing weight at all effectively despite vast amounts of time and money spent on diets or similar programs. Evidently its a lifestyle problem and we're failing to address it, what gives? Fister Roboto posted:Absolutely not. It is a problem that getting and staying healthy is overly difficult for some people, but the solution is to make it easier for them. Not to encourage them to give up and say it's impossible so just be happy the way you are, or entertain the delusion that they're not going to die of a heart attack before 50, or accuse others of having "thin privilege". The correct solution doesn't preclude treating people with equal respect regardless of their weight, but I guess at someone point, people felt that wasn't enough. You seem skeptical about the notion of thin privilege, but there seems to be something going on, for example fat women are usually treated more harshly by male jurors, and fatter women seem to earn less than their thinner counterparts, it seems to more harshly effect women, probably as a side effect of notions of attractiveness, though a lot of this could also be related to class and race factors that haven't been taken into account here.
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Nov 23, 2015 09:09
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:
In fairness, I think its worth keeping in mind that any kind of fat discrimination falls harder on women and minority women at that than anybody else, something like 55% of Black adult women are now obese so the problems of fat discrimination can't be disassociated from the race and sex elements of it. Additionally the poor state of education, lack of availability of good cheap food and lack of time to exercise makes it very difficult for them to easily fix the problem.
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Nov 23, 2015 10:02
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Budzilla posted:Has there been any sort of campaign on a widespread scale that actually reduced obesity rates? I can't think of anything in terms of reversing obesity on a big scale, though I should say, there do seem to have been some successes preventing really young people from fattening up, notably in France which has somehow managed to keep obesity rates closer to Sub-Saharan Africa as opposed to North West Europe, though obesity is still rising there: http://www.oecd.org/france/Obesity-Update-2014-FRANCE_EN.pdf
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Nov 23, 2015 10:45
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computer parts posted:Hence historically. In both cases the issue isn't "people forgetting their food culture in favor of capitalism" or whatever, it's them not being as active as they were in the past. The diet of a lot of people in Mexico has gone under a huge amount of change in the last few decades.
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Nov 25, 2015 02:00
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Brannock posted:
Hooooooly poo poo, look at Saudi Arabia, fully half of its adult female population is obese.
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Nov 25, 2015 02:25
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Cole posted:If you don't think it has an effect on fast food intake you're being willfully obtuse. You know who you're talking to don't you? Question for people here, does anybody have any idea what plausible programs governments could put forward that they think could make a serious impact on this situation? It just keeps on getting worse, everywhere, what the gently caress is about this that makes so unsolvable? I'm not looking forward to this future of heart disease and busted knees.
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Nov 25, 2015 06:11
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SlipUp posted:We could eliminate poverty and provide comprehensive mental health services. How is mental health effecting things in this case? Do you mean like food addiction or overeating as a salve for depression and stuff like that? khwarezm fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Nov 25, 2015 |
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Nov 25, 2015 06:53
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computer parts posted:Eh, on the other hand it's culturally acceptable to take home half your meal here, while in Europe you get weird looks if that happens. No you don't.
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Nov 25, 2015 17:51
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Ervin K posted:And why is that exactly? I'm really curious because it's seems like a perfectly fine argument to me. I mean it's not a magic cure all that will solve all problems but at least it's grounded in reality. What magical solution do you have that will save all these people who apparently have no control over their lives? There seems to be a handful of people in this thread who seem to be absolutely terrified at the idea of personal responsibility and just cant accept that some solution that doesn't involve some massive government intervention is all we have. So please do let me know what you have. Are more than a third of people lacking personal willpower, has personal willpower diminished over the last fifty years and why continue to make personal willpower the main way to sort this out when its made absolutely no impact on obesity rates anywhere in the world in last thirty years?
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Nov 25, 2015 19:21
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I decided to look at some of the worst offenders of HAES and I was curious if somebody more well informed than me could look at a post like this and its links and tell me if there's anything that sets off alarm bells. http://thisisthinprivilege.org/post/132510708280/bigfatscience-youhateyourfat-uppity-broad-i#notes (There was already stuff posted up thread about the metabolic health thing I believe)
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Nov 26, 2015 09:41
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enraged_camel posted:On the other hand, more than half the adults in New York City are either overweight (34%) or obese (22%). Keep in mind that that's better than the US as a whole.
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Nov 28, 2015 07:01
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McAlister posted:Significantly better. National average obesity rate is 35 % per the CDC. You got the statistics a bit wrong, New York's 34% overweight rate and 22% obesity rate are separate, the overweight statistic is discounting the obese one so together its 56%. So its still better, but not half.
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Nov 28, 2015 09:36
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silence_kit posted:Frankly, I'm not convinced that the scientists studying human nutrition really understand all that well their subject or can actually make non-vague prescriptions about what is a healthy diet. I maintain that all of this study name-dropping and appeal to scientific fact is kind of a waste of time. Do you apply this kind of cynicism to other areas of scientific research, climate change for example? I mean that's pretty complicated too!
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Nov 29, 2015 18:33
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Solkanar512 posted:Now folks are bragging about training themselves to "enjoy" under seasoned food and extremely bitter drinks? Do you voluntarily abstain from sex and spend hours meditating on cold concrete floors as well? 'I've been trying to avoid eating the taste equivalent of a disco ball constantly' ≠ 'I'm going to remove all earthly pleasures from my life and move to a Himalayan monastery'. You goon.
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Dec 10, 2015 14:10
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What do people make of this article? Obesity isn’t the half of it: fat or thin, our eating is disordered
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Dec 14, 2015 19:33
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I was reading a bit about the obesity paradox, and I was wondering if anybody had any insight on it? I read this article, and the woman who wrote that has written other stuff concerning weight that seems to be of a HAES slant. I don't really know how to sort the crap from the truth when I read stuff put out by HAES people, does anybody have suggestion s for good resources to cross reference them against? Here's an excerpt from her book, which argues about a lot of familiar topics such as yo-yo dieting and BMI problems. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Dec 26, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 07:51
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Discendo Vox posted:The "obesity paradox" and the other empirical claims she makes were discredited within weeks of their initial discovery, Do you have any more information on this?
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Dec 26, 2015 16:45
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ToxicSlurpee posted:But then the miracle diet that worked for me when I was starting to pork up was "quit eating so drat much cake you dumb poo poo." I changed my eating habits to be healthier (less meat, less junk food, no cake, no soda, little candy, more vegetables) and have been non-fat ever since. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOyebcrVWb4
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Dec 28, 2015 13:32
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ToxicSlurpee posted:One of the issues with the conversation is that you can't seem to say "being fat literally kills you" without pissing certain people off. While I'd agree that we shouldn't be shaming, shunning, and casting fat people out because some of them genuinely can't help it this active hostility toward actual, legitimate medical research is insane. Being 500 pounds is absolutely not healthy but you're getting piles of people acting like we shouldn't even mention weight ever or do research on it. It seems to me that its that the HAES crowd is not so much about the 500 pound people, but the less extreme weight categories that a massive fraction of the population is in at this point. There's lots of questionable studies and quirks that they can point to, look at the obesity paradox stuff that was brought up earlier and it manages to keep the water muddy enough that some otherwise intelligent, well-meaning people go along with it. Like there's lots of people who look like they know what their talking about who peddle the kind of stuff that HAES laps up, and the general perception of nutrition among the general population tends to be one of utter confusion, so if you read an article in a relatively reputable place like Time or Slate that aligns with what the fat acceptance or HAES crowd says about the evils of dieting or whatever you might end up going along with the whole thing.
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Jan 24, 2016 03:18
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bartlebyshop posted:Back in the day (like 10 years ago) I was reading fat positive blogs when HAES was (I think?) just getting going. As I remember, and I could totally be wrong here, the idea was: Everyday Feminism is a popular site among social justice minded people that seems to go in for fat acceptance particularly hard and their articles can end up getting really weird as a result. Here's one such article that talks about exercise and body image, the main trust seems to be that you shouldn't exercise if your main goal is weight loss because that's being beholden to the body image standards that society has set. This article is pretty good at displaying the most obnoxious things about the movement actually, particularly its appropriation of terms that other social justice movements have used in the past ('passing' as a I think this part gets to the heart at how the movement looks at exercise: quote:Just yesterday, a man told me that over the past few weeks he has been watching me run on the treadmill, and that if I’m wondering why I haven’t lost any weight, it’s because pure cardio doesn’t burn enough fat. Like its fair enough that if you exercise purely to lose weight you probably won't enjoy it, which makes it more likely you'll stop exercising fairly quickly and probably end up feeling depressed, and the guy who came up to her was way overstepping his boundaries. But at the same time there's this intransigent attitude that weight loss for its own sake must be a negative thing. At the same time though they at least accept that exercise is good for you.
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Jan 24, 2016 18:44
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