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As someone who had a fair share of trauma from being overweight/obese throughout childhood, its a really difficult question. Getting in shape saved my life, brought me out of a lethargic self hatred and has given me the self confidence I never knew I lacked.
I think its fair to say that the obesity epidemic in the United States is a direct result of all that we seek to abolish, a society that promotes everything but the health and prosperity of the people. Not to say that obesity will disappear in a socialist society, but I think its fair to encourage comrades to get in shape, for both themselves and the movement. Happiness and self care is important, and everyone has their own path and their own timing to get to their own healthy balance. It's incredibly difficult to do that in the current situation for many people, and so obviously we can't hold that against anyone. But we can't lie to ourselves and say that promoting physical fitness isn't incredibly important for human beings psychologically and in the realm of the struggle.
EDIT: Also, for anyone that is currently overweight and looking to change that, I'd be happy to give some advice on what worked for me. It might feel like you're doomed to not like your own body forever, but thats not true, and except in rare circumstances, it will be easier to get to a place you'd be happier at than you might think.
Therapy and honestly a lot of luck/privilege. Took me years after getting in shape to get past the idea that I was untouchable. I had fucked myself up so bad mentally over childhood, avoiding mirrors and taking pictures. Definitely still dealing with the reprocussions emotionally/psychologically. My self consciousness about my weight led to me burying any sexuality until late in college, which made it tough to mature in that regard. But once I got in shape, honestly just getting on dating apps and putting myself out there did wonders. Perhaps I would have found the same even before I got in shape, but I'll never know for sure.
Regardless, it's a fucking struggle, has been and probably always will be there to a degree. If you have any more specific questions feel free to ask lol.
It's never too late. There's so many like each of us out there, it's simply about allowing yourself to be vulnerable enough to fully connect with the other people, to allow them to understand you and take you as you are. You might be surprised to find that you're more valued to other people than you think :)
I'm in this boat. It wasn't easy but now that I look back it also wasn't all that hard either. It's unbelievable how much better I feel and I'm still technically at the edge of "obese" but I've also put on a ton of muscle. I would rather just die then loose the progress I've made and go back to being like that. It's a terrible way to exist regardless of social stigma. No one ever said anything negative to me about it either. I just felt bad living like that.
Some of my scattered thoughts on the subject:
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Treating people poorly because of their health and/or appearance is reactionary and has no place in
fascistsocialist spaces -
Obesity is largely a modern phenomena that disproportionately affects the poor and people of color.
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Obesity is one of the most serious risk factors for an enormous number of health issues and generally leads to lower quality of life
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Being visually fat is not automatically an indicator of poor health, however
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A socialist food and health program would reduce obesity and improve quality of life without ostracizing or alienating fat people
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Socialists should focus on their health first for their own sake and as a political goal second
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We have seriously fucked up body images in our society largely as a result of advertising and, more recently, the explosion of superhero media with unhealthy depictions of supposedly ideal bodies
Uhhhhh you might wanna check the wording on the end of that first point 😬
I almost accidentally recommended Black Pigeon Speaks in the breadtube thread because I also rewrite stuff too much. I like how you handled it.
"There is no place for reactionaries in fascist spaces!"
And just like that, fascism was no more
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I think obesity is a real health condition that has real world causes - mental health problems, lack of access to healthy food, lack of access to healthy activities to name a few. Most of these can easily be attributed to our mode of production. I don't think you should shame anyone for being fat. It's not particularly helpful. Change the material conditions of people's lives and their lives will change.
That being said, I would encourage anyone who is able to lose weight if they are clinically obese, simply because it's not healthy. Healthy people are happier people, generally.
Totally agree about the questionable jokes that sometimes make the rounds on this site and in other Chapo-adjacent spaces. The edginess thankfully isn't so bad these days, but it can be cringe at times.
There is acceptance, and then there is complacency. We should definitely strive to make everyone happy with themselves as they are, but we must be able to own up to our own areas of lacking, to both ourselves and to those around us/our comrades. We should accept ourselves regardless of these shortcomings, as we are humans in incredibly difficult circumstances. Though painful, through voicing aloud our shames and regrets (think Maoist Self Criticism), we disarm them in our psyche, and allow us to move forward from them. We all must seek to better ourselves through recognizing and overcoming our shortcomings. We will all need to be our best selves through and following a revolution.
This is a much needed perspective. The connection between mental health and obesity cannot be overstated. Here's one of the things I read that really opened my eyes on this and proved to me that it's much more than just an issue of education or discipline - it's an excerpt about a study in which morbidly obese patients underwent medically supervised fasting to rapidly lose weight, with broad initial success:
The people who did best, and lost the most weight, were often thrown into a brutal depression, or panic, or rage. Some of them became suicidal. Without their bulk, they felt they couldn’t cope. They felt unbelievably vulnerable. They often fled the program, gorged on fast food, and put their weight back on very fast.
[The doctor] began to ask all his patients these three simple questions. How did you feel when you lost weight? When in your life did you start to put on weight? What else happened around that time? As he spoke to the 183 people on the program, he started to notice some patterns. One woman started to rapidly put on weight when she was twenty-three. What happened then? She was raped. She looked at the ground after she confessed this, and said softly: “Overweight is overlooked, and that’s the way I need to be.”
When five of his colleagues came in to conduct further interviews, it turned out some 55 percent of the patients in the program had been sexually abused—far more than people in the wider population. And even more, including most of the men, had had severely traumatic childhoods.
Trauma is deeply connected to mental illness, to physical health, to obesity.
I think anyone that supports bodily autonomy would support people being overweight. If you choose the body type you want and work to achieve it, you should of course have the right to do so. But I would guess (no source) that the vast majority of overweight people do not want to be overweight. No doubt they do not want to be overweight partially due to societal pressures to be thin, but also health reasons. Being significantly overweight is bad for your health, in almost every metric. Your life will be harder, and you will die earlier, but if someone chooses that, who am I to stop them??
And of course poor people( in western countries) are more likely to be overweight.
I am 6'3" and 230 pounds. I am 15% body fat. Thanks to stupid statistical BMI calculations, I am considered obese. I fucking hate this subject, and it's because our concern troll focus on fat as a health issue is simply a justification to make fun of fat people. When I weighed a lot more (specifically, 285 pounds), I was actually overweight, but I had no health issues. My blood pressure was fine, all my tests came back normal, and I was fairly strong and had good hemoglobin levels.
Acceptance has never been encouragement. That is a false claim. And if our real concern is that people who are overweight need to lose weight, they will not do so if we shame them. They will only lose weight if they are treated well. Obesity is also due to the preponderance of cheap calories in the form of sugar, which is heavily subsidized. If healthy, easy meals were as easy to access as junk food, we would see weight levels shift as a consequence. Also if our cities were laid out to encourage walking rather than driving, the problem would largely fix itself.
This. And acting like acceptance is encouragement ignores the very real way society fuels eating disorders. Fat people aren't applauded for being overweight, they are shamed into developing eating disorders.
Everyone deserves a healthy relationship with food, being shamed for the way you look (lets ignore for a moment that fat people are abused in society) won't help that.
Fatphobia traumatizes and kills, body positivity (or neutrality) doesn't.
Exactly! Fat acceptance is about society more than anything, as in, accept that fat people exist and stop being dicks about it.
Should all fat leftists be dropping the weight and joining the swoletariat?
Yes.
Is that a realistic expectation?
No.
Being overweight/obese is such a difficult battle, it consumes you physically, mentally, emotionally, biologically and compounds on itself.
I see people saying we shouldn’t be telling people that being overweight is good, I really don’t think we’re at risk of that. The heaviness on your body and pain are a constant reminder that you’re overweight and it’s bad. The comments people say and the way they treat you are also a constant reminder no matter how many body positivity influencers there are.
I think what we need to do as a community is be welcoming of people who are willing to make themselves vulnerable by talking about their size and understanding of people who are not ready or able to do that yet.
If there’s an obese Proud Boy assaulting someone, there’s plenty negative we can say about them before talking about their weight.
Basically, I think it’s something that doesn’t need to be brought up unless you’re talking about yourself or were specifically asked for advice.
The vulnerability aspect is so important in this. The body positivity movement was born out of this necessity for a place to speak about it outside of the immense personal/societal shame of being overweight/obese, we need to have an alternative setting and to empathize, humanize, and encourage
Unhealthy food is cheap and easy. A healthy, active lifestyle requires time and energy.
It's similar to mental health, which also takes time, money, and energy to deal with. Telling someone that it's okay to struggle with mental illness isn't encouraging them, it's letting them know that there's nothing wrong with them as people, that they are suffering because of a fundamentally unjust societal structure which exacerbates their condition.
It's not just similar, it can be closely linked. If I'm too depressed to leave the house do you think I have the energy to regulate my meals?
Healthy food is also cheap and easy, we just don't have big-health advertisement being constantly shoved down our throats like junk food advertisement is.
My father is a big man, edging pretty close to 400lbs. He has a lot of mental health issues from it and that compound it. External to himself, I see a lot of fatphobia with his health care.
I know being so heavy can be the cause of a lot of issues, but his care boils down to just exclusively telling him to lose weight. They've missed all sorts of issues with him by just assuming every complication he has is from his weight. I hate it for him, I do.
I don't encourage him to gain weight or anything, but I just really try to make a distinction between how fat he is, and improving the quality of his life. It's hard because I think he looks fine, but I just want to encourage him without embarrassing him.
I'm not sure what the solution is. I work out consistently, and in a strange way I feel it my communist duty, but not everyonemis capable for a variety of reasons. But we can encourage good health while not writing off the chunky among us as slobs or unhealthy, as it's not true.
Material conditions, etc.
Single parent working two jobs and taking care of their kids, preexisting medical conditions, and other situations prevent people from getting fighting fit. But fighting fit is a word of difference from just being healthy. Changes in caloric consumption, getting a fuller nutrient profile, drinking water instead of soda/alcohol, and so on aren't as difficult to accomplish as being able to marathon well and deadlift well.
Counterculture is always going to have a contrarian element. Some people see muscular people on TV and think they're enacting a private rebellion by... being overweight. This isn't a rebellion against capitalism, it's the same logic as "I'm going to eat all the bacon I can to trigger the libs." Focus should be placed on people having measurable solutions (strength, speed, bodyfat percentage, testosterone levels, etc.) as opposed to looking at celebrities and models and wishing they looked like that ("thinspo" garbage).
Everyone in here is talking about fatness being unhealthy. While it certainly can, the science is actually that diet and exercise determine health, not body fat percentage. This is an important distinction for a lot of reason. There are people who eat exclusively fast food or frozen meals but remain thin, and their health outcomes are just as bad as obese people with the same lifestyle.
So if you really care about health, talk about diet and exercise, not body type. Or else I’m gonna think you’re just concern trolling because you have a problem with fatness.
My mother was "obese" according to her bmi when she rode her bike from LA to Florida a number of years back. Bmi is hot garbage.
I was once obese. It was not fun. I felt like shit, sweated through my clothes constantly, and, quit frankly, the alienation of it all led me down the reactionary/ incel pipeline for a bit. Then I cut out soda and ate less (but not better) and lost 60 pounds. My life improved tremendously after that. Should we discriminate against someone because they are obese? No. Should we encourage healthier lifestyles within the left? I would say yes.
