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.
Another weight factor that can't be controlled are the microbes in your body! Some people's microbiomes are less efficient at extracting nutrients from food, forcing them to eat more to be healthy, and putting on weight as a side effect. Leading researchers in human health and the microbiome will tell you straight up that weight is something most people can't directly control, but people continue to conflate it with a moral choice.
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While dies does impact your gut microbiome to a significant degree, it's also hugely impacted by which bacteria colonize your body in the first place. For example, babies delivered via C-section vs vaginal delivery are colonized by different microbes from their birthing parent's skin, and this difference has been shown to carry through adolescence. A lot of "pop science" has started to focus on altering microbiome composition as a treatment approach, but underplay how difficult it can be to displace established microbial communities.
Sure it can be changed, but how do you know what/how to change it for the better? I (and I assume everyone else) know neither my current microbiome content, nor what a healthier one would be.
do you have an article or something on that? I would like to learn more
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5867888/ Here's a good review which focuses on the connection between the gut microbiome and weight. Published in 2018 it's a good starting point, but we've already learned so much more in the past four years due to an increased research focus on this field (https://www.hmpdacc.org/).