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 is ignoring all of the other environmental and material conditions listed in this post that have drastically changed since then.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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.
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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.
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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.
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and environmental factors I didn't list, like Obesogens!