So there was a recent post of some right wingers standing next to a ballot box to intimidate voters. This is clearly bad. They also made questionable aesthetic choices, like wearing dad cargo-shorts and growing goatees. This is also clearly bad.
So, what did Chapeau.Chat focus on? The weight of these men of course!
Let's start with the basics:
--Everyone has a range of weights their body is comfortable at. If you try to go too low or too high in this range, your body will start sending your hunger and satiety signals to keep you within that range. While you can go higher or lower in that range by manipulating Calories-in-calories-out, this range is fairly fixed without medical intervention. In other words, some people are just fat.
--There are other uncontrollable factors that effect weight. In Texas, for example, there are fewer walk-able neighborhoods and more access to fast food than here in Portland where there are more new-seasons than mcDonalds or Manhattan where it's easier to take the train than to drive.
--Socially, weight is co-constructed with fitness and self-control. In the protestant value system (the dominant one in the U.S. even among atheists), self control is one of the most important virtues. Fat implies unfit implies poor self control. Thin implies fit implies good self control.
Protestant morality is, here, at odds with reality. Weight here is co-produced by environment, hormones, eating habits and movement habits. All of those things are only partially under our control, and a Portlander is always going to have an easier time being thin than an Austintonian. Moralizing weight the way this community did celebrates protestant morality over basic reality.
As communists, we are better than that.
Call them fascists, make fun of their ugly beards, offer to shoplift them better shorts, but don't fat-shame them.
This struggle session, like those that came before, comes from people who learned to socialize primarily via the hostile debatespheres of the internet, where a reply to your post is only ever an attack, and nobody is acting in good faith. Keep that toxic shit on :reddit-logo: , this is a place to communicate with COMRADES, not win silly little internet arguments via semantics and bad faith interpretations.
Well said,
the whole point of Hexbear is that we don't have to worry about anyone acting in bad faith and we can freely speak our mind.
Good post, OP.
As an additional point, remember that the chuds in question will never find their pictures posted on an extremely obscure bear website to see themselves get dunked on, but our heavier comrades will see your criticisms of them and will (rightly) feel personally targeted by the extreme negativity that comes with your insults of some chuds that will never know you exist. Even if they did have a chance to see the dunks aimed at them, body-shaming our comrades is not acceptable collateral damage.
Feels kind of odd to include shaming people for like...shitty shorts and beards then.
Those things are mutable. Weight is immutable (at least for the overwhelming majority of proletarians). This rule is remarkably consistent at deciding whether or not some trait is okay to make fun of.
edit: Without "pull yourselves up by the bootstraps" logic, how can the average proletarian exert control over their weight? Bonus points if you can explain away poverty being correlated with obesity. If people can just make the choices to stop being obese, why do poor people just decide not to make those choices?
Another edit:
Among many other factors, the risk of adult obesity is greater among adults who had obesity as children, and racial and ethnic disparities exist by the age of 2 (6). If nothing else is done in the United States beyond what is being done now, simulated growth trajectories that model today’s children show that over half (59% of today’s toddlers and 57% of children aged 2 to 19) will have obesity at age 35 (7). Early feeding patterns, including how babies are fed and how caregivers use food in response to an infant’s mood, affect acute growth, future eating patterns, and the risk of obesity (8). Similarly, family and caregiver modeling of healthy behaviors, food offerings, and active playtime, as well as characteristics of neighborhoods such as walkability and traffic volume, may affect children’s nutrition and physical activity habits (9,10). (Source)
Now I'll agree changing a pair of pants is easier than losing weight but having a style of what to change into doesn't come naturally to people either and is permanently changing anyhow. It takes a lot of effort to keep up with this shit.
What I find especially weird is how this post is about how protestant ethics change perceptions around overweight people, which I do agree, but then making fun of their fashion is okay as if that entire field doesn't heavily involve whats undearneath the clothes. I mean if you're conventionelly attractive enough you can basically pull of every piece of clothing. Being fat and stylish is a lot harder, due to the reasons OP mentions
yeah fashion sense also comes from societal position and priviledge
The obesity epidemic is caused by corn :corn-man-khrush: and I will fucking die on this hill. Corn growth was encouraged heavily in the 1970's by Nixon's USDA and was and is subsidized by the government. This is when obesity really started to jump. This cheap corn has lead to it being used as cheap feed for animals making factory farms profitable flooding the US market with cheap, low quality meat. Moreover corn is put directly in peoples mouths with things like cheap corn based food, such as chips, as well as cheap sweetener with high fructose corn syrup. This is what's making us fat, and I'd be willing to bet that almost any study that says otherwise or suggests any alternative is funded by agribusiness.
Moreover, all this corn farming is bad for the soil (it's what caused the dust bowl) and CAFOs are one of the biggest polluters in the world, and horribly mistreats animals (even if you're not :im-vegan: I think we can all agree that it's still bad to do). It's not just bad for our bodies, but for our planet and needs to be stopped.
I absolutely agree that industrial corn farming is a key factor. I do not want to ignore other factors like car infrastructure, fast food advertising, obesogens, etc. Most social phenomena are co-produced.
The drive through is also a product of the 70s and I'm genuinely convinced it did its part
Everyone has a range of weights their body is comfortable at. If you try to go too low or too high in this range, your body will start sending your hunger and satiety signals to keep you within that range. While you can go higher or lower in that range by manipulating Calories-in-calories-out, this range is fairly fixed without medical intervention. In other words, some people are just fat.
lol no
Look, everybody definitely has a different weight they feel comfortable at, based on the tradeoff of "effort thinking about food / pleasure eating food" vs "how much it sucks to be fat." I'm not going to judge anyone for making different decisions on that scale. But no one is "just fat." They overeat and become fat as a result.
"effort thinking about food" downplays how strong hunger signals can be.
Bullshit as someone that has suffered from food insecurity for much of my young life this is a super fucked up take.
Man, for fucks sake, of course I'm not talking about when you're actually not eating enough. But people who are actually not getting enough food are not fat. That's not relevant to this conversation, it's just bad-faith nonsense
Guess what some of my very poor friends in the same situation were also overweight.
There are extraneous environmental factors here and just saying "hunger pain goes away if you just ignore it" Is the same as saying "it's your fault fatty"
I never said it's not difficult to go from an unhealthy relationship with food in which one overeats daily to a healthy relationship with food in which one eats a healthy amount. Of course it's difficult, for a wide variety of reasons. None of those reasons are that you were destined to be fat. Making up bullshit about how some people are just "naturally" fat is harmful to people trying to learn how to get out of these traps.
I almost can't believe that this argument is being made in good faith.
Just to clarify real quick: people being born with "fat"/"not fat" genetics might be a factor to some extent but isn't the majority cause here. Seriously consider what car-centric culture, an over-abundance of fast food, the most advertising dollars per capita of any nation in the world, and prohibitively expensive medical care might do to a poor person's weight.
Eye-rolling emojis don't make it untrue :shrug-outta-hecks:
Hunger isn't a real thing. It doesn't exist. If you make conscious decisions about what to eat based on an informed view of nutrition, you will still feel hungry. It's not some magic signal telling you that you're not getting enough nutrients, it's a dumb feeling that exists in your head. You ignore it, and it goes away. The feeling of hunger cannot harm you.
The feeling of hunger cannot harm you.
It is, quite literally, pain. There is no point in talking to you about this topic, you've had this exact argument several times, and you always just have the take away everyone else is stupider than you and feeling hungry isn't a problem.
ah yes because psychological harm isn't harmful. because blowing your willpower on not eating doesn't take away from your capacity to deal with other stressors.
Lady, your attitude is terrible.
unharmful hunger pains.
You have just outed yourself to having no experience or understanding of what you are talking about.
I don't know, I personally feel better when I am physically unwell but in good spirits compared to when I am physically fine but in mental pain. Also, if the problem is you feel hungry, eating is the solution. "Just get over it" is not, it doesn't solve the problem.
Hunger isn’t a real thing. It doesn’t exist.
Reminds me of this. Please, I beg of you, do better to be in touch with the real material conditions of your comrades instead of trying to intellectualize struggles you don't experience. A leftism without empathy is not leftism.
Lmao I wish that's how it worked for everyone.
You're technically right that no one is "just fat" but hunger even when you just ate a massive meal a few hours ago, feeling full when you're actually not and just ate 1000 calories the whole day, it never really goes away for some people.
I still have to consistently "overeat" to keep the weight I put on that keeps my BMI in a healthy range. Even though objectively I'm eating a healthy amount of food, it still feels like it's too much for me. I imagine a lot of folks that have lost weight have to do the opposite to keep the weight off.
I still have to consistently “overeat” to keep the weight I put on that keeps my BMI in a healthy range
That's not what overeating is lol
Sure, you can just decide to call something "overeating" when everyone involved in the discussion knows that what you're describing is not overeating, and then you're exempt from people going :jesse-wtf:
They're just describing eating a healthy amount of food but misusing a negative word to describe it.
You're completely derailing this post, it isn't about semantics it's about not saying things that are harmful to your comrades that browse this site, and body shaming has been a consistent problem here for a long time.
Why are you so invested in defending body shaming? Fascists aren't going to see those comments only our comrades, and to some of them this is actually harmful.
"Fat" in the context of the OP just means not conforming to entirely unreasonable western beauty standards.
“overeat"
Even though objectively I’m eating a healthy amount of food,
obesity is invariably a marketing issue. i have a friend that has a normal diet until she sees an ad with food on it and she immediately wants to eat. has caused her to get very big. she knows that its capitalist bullshit but she sees something good looking, shes gotta have it. its like an addiction, but imagine if there were billboards for meth everywhere. in fact its pretty interesting that states that ban billboards also tend to have lower obesity rates.
This is ignoring all of the other environmental and material conditions listed in this post that have drastically changed since then.
Well, yes, but if the obesity epidemic is caused by pollutants that are now near ubiquitous, then obesity would be, in most cases, caused by how your body reacts to those chemicals, which is largely genetic.
Just like most medications, some people will be affected by it, some won't be, and a small amount will have a 'paradoxical' reaction, which we have seen. Anorexia has increased at basically the same rate as obesity.
I don't think 'horrible diets' explains obesity going from 1% historically, to 42% in the U.S. today, especially considering that dieting, statistically, doesn't work long term. Some people can lose weight and keep it off, true, but we have no diet that consistently works for most people to lose weight and keep it off.
People who could eat as much as they wanted, historically, didn't get this fat, now for many if not most, its a constant uphill battle versus hunger to not get fat. It feels obvious to me that something is fucking up the way bodies regulate weight (and I do say bodies, as animals have also been getting more obese in the wild if they live near humans), and it doesn't feel like its something as basic as sugar, as sugar has been around for a while for the elites, and they were, on average, not as fat as the average person is today.
I really don’t understand what you think the mechanism for gaining weight is then. I thought you would think that pollutants are increasing peoples’ appetites which ok, maybe. but you think diet has literally nothing to do with weight gain? like you could lock someone in a closet and not feed them for a month and they wouldn’t lose any weight because of pollutants or something?
No, obviously CICO will make people lose weight. But the lipostat theory, which I do recognize is a theory but I think is true, posits that the body has mechanism to maintain healthy weight, but something is disrupting it in chronically overweight people. In people who's lipostat is disrupted to 'make' them be overweight, they can still lose weight by dieting, but they will be tired and hungry constantly, like their body 'wants' to be overweight. In studies where people were paid to gain weight, most couldn't, and those that did overeat enough to gain weight effortlessly lost it after the study, as they just weren't that hungry for a few months until they were back to their weight previously. 'just use willpower and eat less!' has been the advice of the past few decades, and the obesity epidemic has only gotten worse. Is it just that people's willpower has gotten worse and worse, or is it something else?
there are about a trillion studies that show that whole food plant based diets, for example, work effectively for the long term.
Studies do show plant based diets help, but: https://www.nature.com/articles/nutd20173 by about 4kg. That'd shave some percentage points off of the obesity epidemic, but that will not remove it. On top of that, it is explained by the pollutant theory; bioaccumulation is the reason why predator seafood is more full of mercury, and easily could be the reason why the theoretical pollutant is more prevalent and meat. We already know beef has more microplastics in it than, say, corn.
Problem with diets is, more often than not, people fail to maintain it and return to their previous weight. Obviously, some people manage to adapt to a new normal, but by an large, standard dieting advice about eating healthier only makes you lose 10 or so pounds. Really cutting calories is what you need to do to drop from obese to not-overweight, and it is very difficult to sustain. Standard advice has been some type or 'use willpower!' 'conquer hunger!', which I don't want to say that never works, but that's been the advice alongside 'eat healthy!' for decades, and for decades the obesity rate has been steadily climbing and climbing.
I just don't think 'just bad diets' explains the global, rapid obesity gain over the last 50-100 years.
Unless you're defining "sugar" as a pollutant (which is not totally inaccurate lmao) I don't think there's much to that as a cause of the obesity epidemic. Much more heavily polluted areas than the US and Europe are much skinnier, and obesity most closely tracks with the prevalence of processed and sugary foods.
It's posited that the pollutants are in the water, which is why some of the highest % obesity areas are around river deltas, I.E. Alabama and Louisiana in the US, where the water has collected run off from lots of other cities, farmlands, and/or mining, while areas who's water is closer to the source have less obesity, like how Colorado is the lowest obesity state, and the west coast in general has less obesity, along with countries like Japan.
Because the material conditions of the American proletariat changed substantially about 70 years ago.
Waiting for hexbears to realize that "some people can't help what they eat" and "there is no excuse to avoid becoming vegan" are mutually exclusive. Then this thread can really take off.
Do it. Struggle my little posters, struggle. The battle for the soul of the left lies with this comment section. The wrong opinion could stunt the movement for decades to come.
It was already at 160+ comments before I got there. I think the cat is out of the bag in terms of starting trouble.
"Look officer, the house was already on fire when I threw this can of gasoline in"
It's ok to have impulse control issues. It's not ok to hurt animals. What's not to get? People don't have infinite self control but we should expect people to have self control when it matters.
"I can't stop masturbating" -> "thats ok buddy, nobody really cares"
"I can't stop kicking dogs" -> "what the fuck dude you need to stop"
"I can't stop eating sugar" -> "ok, that's fine"
"I can't stop eating animal corpses" -> "yes you can you piece of shit"
"I can't stop scrolling on the internet" -> "yeah me neither lol"
"I can't stop calling people the n-word on the internet" -> "fuck off racist"
This isn't that complicated.
I mean if someone can't stop eating chicken that is also fine.
Eating my shit is vegan because I told you to do it. Eat shit carnist
Don't argue with me, i agree with you. I agree it's okay to judge people's self-control issues based on a personal/group value system. I wasn't the one who said doing so was strictly protestant brainworms. Take it up with OP. People don't have infinite self control and they can't always abide by our values. It's silly to think that our collective ideas about what's right and wrong wag the dog and make people's self-control fall into line. As if they suddenly do have infinite self control when it comes to something that we think is wrong. Therefore it's purely a choice for them and they're doing it all on purpose just to be evil.
I'm not being funny, we do really agree. I just think it's wrong to chock it all up to a lazy social critique. Like yeah the protestants are definitely the only group who judges people and treats personal behavior as a moral failing. Says the site who does nothing but argue over which personal behaviors are the most egregious.
White people are the only people ever to have enforceable social norms, that's just a fact, actually.
They are not, but you care more about a gotcha than either issue
Everyone has a range of weights their body is comfortable at. If you try to go too low or too high in this range, your body will start sending your hunger and satiety signals to keep you within that range. While you can go higher or lower in that range by manipulating Calories-in-calories-out, this range is fairly fixed without medical intervention. In other words, some people are just fat.
While this is true, it's not the full story and we risk over-individualizing weight if we don't always remind ourselves that the obesity epidemic in America and elsewhere did not exist until modern times. We are products of our environment, and our capitalist food system floods us with far more sugars than our bodies are designed to handle, and the weight that you settle at as someone who is subjected to this diet is not the weight your body would settle on under other conditions.
I agree, absolutely. Industrial agriculture, obesogens, car infrastructure, fast food advertising, etc. all play a role.
i posted earlier but i'm here again for the struggle session.
ITT: :brainworms:, not surprising given how much social baggage there is around being fat. Shouting "CICO!" at people isn't productive and you shouldn't do it. Your weight is a combination of environmental factors and habits, and you have the power to change some of the habits though many of them (like driving to work if you live in America) and your environment are outside of your control. Also, being overweight is not a moral failing, but a lot of the weight loss rhetoric that we've been exposed to all our lives treats it as one. Lastly, while changing your eating habits is the most effective thing you can do to lose or gain weight, we need to recognize that it's also about as difficult as quitting heroin.
we need to recognize that it’s also about as difficult as quitting heroin
:doubt:
No one's saying it's easy, but come on.
I don't think he's wrong. Like you could quit heroin entirely and never do it again, that's not really an option with food
Generally about 5% of people who diet are successful in the long term. Generally about 5% of people who quit heroin stay off it. Unless I've misremembered these numbers, it's pretty fukken similar.
Yeah but only for "diets", as in "change your way of eating to some unsustainable bullshit for X Weeks then go back to how you used to eat".
That's set up to fail. If you wanna keep weight off you gotta actually change your diet, as in "what do you eat all the time" and lifestyle.
Picking up on the heroin metaphor here: pretending like it's biologically impossible to not be addicted to heroin, like OP purported in the much contestet sentence of some people just are fat, is also not a great way to go
Why is everyone in this thread so intent on defending their assumed right to body shame others? Seriously, everyone here blaming these people for being obese has almost certainly never helped a comrade through struggles through their issues with weight. I've helped comrades through breakdowns, and even heard that the difficulty in fighting obesity and the stigma attached to it has caused them to contemplate un-aliving themselves. It genuinely hurts my heart to imagine any of those comrades happening upon this thread and seeing what you all think about them.
Because hexbear has always been reactionary. That's pretty much what the "dirtbag" part of "dirtbag left" has shaken out to mean every time.
There's a real nice discord I'm in. Idk not for everyone.
Sorry, I'm just feeling a little disheartened today. I was hoping hb could make me feel a little better, but it is what it is
You agree with me! I said
Weight here is co-produced by environment, hormones, eating habits and movement habits
and
There are other uncontrollable factors that effect weight. In Texas, for example, there are fewer walk-able neighborhoods and more access to fast food than here in Portland where there are more new-seasons than mcDonalds or Manhattan where it’s easier to take the train than to drive.
This is an emotional topic and I want to point out that our stances are not as far apart as they might first appear.
Gonna b reel with chief, "chubby" in america is considered "wildly obese" literally everywhere else in the world. this is coming from someone who is fat and likes fatter bodies anyhow.
Almost as if uncontrollable birth circumstances (such as place of birth) can affect obesity rates. Wonder if there's anything to that.
Every comment chain in this thread:
Poster 1: Diet has nothing to do with body weight
Poster 2: yes it does
Poster 1: well of course diet has something to do with body weight, but nevertheless…
I'm just happy to be mad about something other than pro/anti-veganism.
make fun of their ugly beards
Goatee shaming is okay?
offer to shoplift them better shorts
[no text]
If you are in this thread talking about how it's fine to hate fat people, fuck off. Enter the pit, you're no comrade of mine.
