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Answering the thread question, I feel it's unnecessary, cruel, and unhelpful to be rude to fat people's faces or act like they are moral failures. There are also a ton of mixed messages and confusion about the difference between the "ideal" body and an average healthy body. It's fine to look chubby if you are within a reasonable weight range and healthy, and people diagnosing others as obese based solely on the fact that they don't find them physically attractive do exist and only add fuel to the fire of the "thin privilege" types. That's about all I agree with from the movement. We should be focusing on reducing obesity and helping people lose weight healthily, as others have said, while acknowledging that having a problem with weight doesn't make one a failure in all aspects of life. A lot of fat people end up hating themselves and giving up because they label themselves as failures. The assertion that being overweight is not associated with ill health is just denial. The idea that there is systemic discrimination against fat people doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. Many people are very rude about fatties, but they are not barred from any kind of job or public social scene as long as they are physically able to participate. They aren't forbidden to reproduce or marry, although occasionally doctors will advise against becoming pregnant or health reasons. Clothes, furniture and public transport don't cater to fat people as much as average-sized people, but this is more of an issue with supply and demand- and as the obese population grows, businesses are catering to them more and more. They don't suffer from elevated levels of abuse, incarceration, homelessness or violence. As for the oft-cited medical discrimination, it's not just overweight people who are affected by any potential overfocus on weight. A 98-pound friend of mine with high cholesterol was told to lose weight by her doctor, even though she was clearly underweight and the cholesterol levels were due to being sedentary. Sometimes doctors are just lazy. meristem posted:Anyhow, one thing that I haven't really seen mentioned in the thread yet, and which I think really deserves to be mentioned, is early-life starvation leading to accelerated adiposity rebound. Basically, if someone experiences a lack of nutrients as a fetus/infant, they are programmed to have a tendency to stay overweight, if not obese, later in life. That would mean, first of all, poor people, wouldn't it? Doesn't this throw a bit of shade on the whole 'it's a choice' thing? It did, for me. It's more of a psychological issue than being "programmed" by malnutrition. Poor people grow up with a scarcity of food and are told to clean their plate or they'll go hungry later. You can give them a huge plate full of bad poo poo and they'll still really want to clear that plate. That doesn't mean it's a "choice" or anything. It's also not a choice to have a predisposition to gain weight easily. We should be putting more effort into giving people the tools to overcome their unhealthy attitudes and habits regarding eating, through psychotherapy and training as well as initiatives to educate. It's possible to be compassionate about the hill some fat people have to climb and still encourage them to make progress.
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Nov 30, 2015 05:23
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katlington posted:I remember a story about old ladies in england handing out shame cards to women they thought dressed like hussies. Does england have a tradition of handing out cards like this? It vaguely reminds me of handing out white feathers during war time. Seems like you just answered your own question? English people (in the south especially) hate interpersonal conflict, so cowardly methods like giving someone an insulting piece of paper and running away are preferred to heckling.
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Dec 1, 2015 05:26
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ProperGanderPusher posted:Has anybody suggested fat shaming harder? I dunno, I lost weight during the period I completely embraced fat acceptance. Now I'm more skeptical, but I kept the weight off. I don't think there is causation in my case. The main cause is that I moved up from secondary to further education in a different institution (much smaller lunches that I prepared myself at home and more frequently walking back and forth to the place). However, I was generally happier with myself and more optimistic about the future at the time, which was partly related to my "live and let live" attitude towards everyone. What personally makes me negligent about my diet and exercise regime is the feeling that I'm a worthless person and there is no future for me or society at large. More information about the dangers of obesity is definitely a good thing, but as others pointed out, it isn't "fat-shaming" in and of itself. If coupled with messages about how having a problem doesn't make you a pariah and you can change, it can help. The problem is partly that we see obese people as "fatties" that will never change. Most of the worst obesity cases are in people who have had issues with their weight their entire life- it's not hard to see why they have such a defeatist attitude. To them, they will always be a fatty, so why not join this subculture that exalts that thing that has now become part of their identity? quote:I hit the gym 3 times a week and I know where I see an overweight person there I think to myself "Good for them". For every car that threw trash, there were hundreds that didn't. lol this is absurd reasoning and it could be applied to literally anything bad that happens to anyone ever.
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Dec 4, 2015 01:58
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SlipUp posted:How is it absurd? I think expecting cars to cheer joggers on as some sort of moral obligation is absurd. They don't have to cheer joggers on. People have the right to complain if something bad or unpleasant keeps happening to them, even if its only caused by 1 in 100 people. I also think it's just as weird to attribute a positive attitude to people as a negative one. Forums poster SlipUp may be thinking "good job, fatty" when he sees one on a treadmill but that doesn't matter at all to the fat guy, who can't read minds. Zodium posted:you're literally advocating base rate neglect as valid reasoning while explicitly rejecting actual valid reasoning You've misread my post, I'm not saying anything about the rate of fat shaming. SlipUp implied that the person should somehow be happy that only 1 in 10 people insulted them, and also that the fact he was thinking nice thoughts could somehow impact their self-esteem despite their not being able to perceive it. I don't disagree with the fact that fewer people will insult than say nothing; I disagree with the notion that this makes the insults no big deal. Thanks to human psychology, 1 in 10 people insulting you at the gym will generally discourage you from returning, though there's always the choice to push through it and go back anyway. Most unpleasant events and crimes have a fairly low incidence, but this is little comfort to people who have just experienced them.
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Dec 4, 2015 10:39
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ChairMaster posted:Being overweight is different from being obese. There is no benefit to being obese, you will always die younger and you will always be a useless fat lump of poo poo. Yeah the obesity paradox poo poo has been discredited time and again. What you have to remember though is that when we leave aside the 400lb tumblrinas arguing obesity isn't a health problem, most of the people complaining about standards of beauty and unwarranted concern trolling about health are talking about people who are only like 20lbs overweight. The scientific literature might be clear on underweight vs mildly overweight, but personally speaking I got a lot more questions about my weight when I weighed 140lbs (not even in the "overweight" BMI for my height, but chubby-looking) than I do down at 105lb ("underweight" according to BMI). I wish there was some way to separate the wheat from the chaff when speaking about this topic.
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Dec 26, 2015 22:04
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Literally everyone, if asked as a child, would say "you lose weight by eating less and exercising more". It's what almost every country on earth tells kids in school, for good reason. The problem is more that when people get older, they start seeing the wealth of information and misinformation out there that contradicts that maxim, or insists you need to do a weird fad diet to accomplish it. A combination of willful self-deception*, not knowing how to separate the bad information from the good, and the attitude that "I'm an adult now and can disregard the information I was taught in school for the REAL TRUTH that Big Pharma/Michelle Obama/Whoever doesn't want me to know" allows bullshit to take precedence over fact. There are already government programs telling you the truth about diet and nutrition. A focus on critical thinking and the media in school might help a bit. Really though, misinformation and self-deception is probably not as big a part of the problem as we tend to think. High-calorie food tastes good, is widely available, and is often easier to reach for. That's why so many intelligent and non-deluded people are still fat. Other than taxing the poo poo out of this stuff like most countries have done with cigarettes, which would be more problematic for several reasons, it's difficult to envision a solution coming from the state. *I.e: Wanting it to be true that they can't control their weight, so they don't have to put the effort in.
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Jan 20, 2016 03:43
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fishmech posted:It's not even high calorie food though. Lots of people get fat because they simply eat a bunch of low calorie food. I think there's even a name for the effect where if someone knows that a food is low calorie, they think they can eat more of it, and often eat more calories worth of the low calorie food than they would have a similar high calorie food. Well that's true, as is the thing you brought up earlier about orange juice having as much sugar as soda in it. There are fat people who guzzle a litre of apple juice and have chips made of dried vegetables instead of potatoes and think it makes a difference. I was specifically talking about people who are aware of what will make them fat, though, and compulsively overeat anyway. Maybe they even count their calories for most of the day, but then go on a massive binge at the end because they start craving food and the desire for it seems more important than the long-term goal until the binge is over. Whether they binge on high or low calorie food is unimportant, but they knowingly go over their target. I suppose when I actually use the words "compulsive" and "binge" to describe the behaviour of those people, it does suggest that making treatment for binge eating disorder widespread could help with them while the campaigns to educate people about food deal with the misinformed.
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Jan 20, 2016 12:17
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fishmech posted:I have seen fat people at the college cafeteria down 3 pounds of grilled chicken breast, which is somewhere between 1800 and 2200 calories depending on precisely how you prepare it. And this after seeing the same people eating a full breakfast earlier in the day. There are people who do this, sure, but just a few pages ago you were complaining that someone was saying a fat person can eat two boxes of pop tarts before lunch. I know you want to drive home the point that you don't HAVE to eat high calorie food to get fat because you're tired of people advertising fad diets and saying certain types of food are bad, but you're going overboard. Personally, I would find it way easier to eat 2000 calories worth of pop tarts than 3 pounds of baked chicken breast. In fact I think most people would. Yes, it's hard to get statistics on this, but there have been studies done suggesting that foods with a high amount of both fat and sugar don't satisfy people/rats as quickly as foods with only a high amount of one or the other (or neither). The fattest of the fat might eat too much of absolutely everything, but there's no point pretending that there aren't a ton of moderately overweight people who eat regular-sized meals but then derail everything by compulsively eating high-calorie snacks. I find it almost unbelievable that you didn't grow up surrounded by people who wanted to lose 10-20 pounds but then kept going "ugh, I've been good all day but I really want this slice of cake/glass of wine/bag of cheetos" each evening.
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Jan 21, 2016 05:39
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fishmech posted:Because eating two boxes of pop tarts before lunch is still something people don't do. Not only have you provided no evidence for this assertion, but you are ignoring that I'm actually talking about all food in similar composition to pop tarts, such as cake and chocolate. Eating 1000kcal of cake on its own and still wanting more is very easy for even me to do, and I weigh 105lbs. In fact at one point at least half of the calories in my 1300kcal diet were provided by milk chocolate, and I still wanted to eat more of it at the end of the day, with only my willpower stopping me. I didn't want more of the fruit, veg and meat that was making up the other half of my diet. I virtually don't know anyone who couldn't eat an endless amount of junk food. When helping my husband gain bulk, I had to start giving him giant bags of Cheetos along with the 4-5 high protein meals I was already serving him: he would leave the rice and pasta in the meals because he was "too full" but suspiciously never get tired of eating Cheetos. I realize this evidence is anecdotal but so is yours, and I at least provided one study as well. Virtually every fat person complains about having low willpower with chips, sweets and fast food, not broccoli. Yes, they COULD overeat on broccoli, but they generally DON'T, because that's not what they get the overpowering craving for. quote:Plus your argument doesn't make sense, because say 2000 calories of the average pop tart is only 80% of the 2000 calorie recommended fat, while 120% of daily carbs (only half being simple sugars). It'd also be 50% of your daily protein. So it ain't got a high amount of sugars in it compared to the fat, nor is the fat particularly high on its own. It doesn't have to be a perfect ratio of sugar to fat, it just has to have "not a low amount" of both. The study showed rats will stop eating pure lard or pure sugar after they fill up on calories, but basically never stop eating food such as cheesecake, ice cream and chocolate even when they've had a lot more in terms of calories.
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Jan 22, 2016 05:29
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