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.

    • Eris235 [undecided]
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      2 years ago

      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.

        • Eris235 [undecided]
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          2 years ago

          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.

        • Eris235 [undecided]
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          2 years ago

          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.