Took a little break from the internet and touched some grass and it was great. Wander back in here after my hiatus and what do I find? Just a thread with a bunch of fatphobia.
Cute.
For a community that is incredibly careful about protecting its users from the -phobias and the -isms, there sure is a hell of a lot of unchecked fatphobia here basically any time fatness gets brought up.
It’s something I’ve noticed on the left in general as well. The leftist org I’m in has almost no fat people in it and something tells me that’s not because there aren’t any fat leftists out there.
Fatphobia is rooted in anti-Blackness and ableism.
I’d highly recommend the “Maintenance Phase” podcast with Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon, as well as Aubrey Gordon’s books “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat” and “You Just Need To Lose Weight.”
TL;DR: There’s mounting evidence that anti-fat bias in medicine is more to blame for poor medical outcomes in fat people rather than just the fat itself.
Diet and exercise don’t result in long-term weight loss for something like 95% of people. As a leftist, are you really gonna sit here and blame this on individual choices rather than systemic issues? Are you really gonna try to convince us that 95% of people are just lacking willpower?
Please note that this thread is not an invitation to convince me I’m wrong or share your own personal anecdotal story of successful long-term weight loss with the implication that others can do it because you did it. This post is a request that any thin person (or thin-adjacent person) reading this who wants to argue about how being fat is bad for your health do some research and some self-crit. This post is a request that this community rethink the way it engages with discussions about fatness, diet, fatphobia, and anti-fat bias.
Anti-fat bias literally kills people.
I hope what I said was fine (I think it was). I was simply responding to the prompt and just relaying my own actual near-death experience with my poor relationship with food.
I genuinely don't believe this unless you're willing to present me a study on it. Everyone I've known that's lost weight and kept it off did so with said method. I genuinely don't know anyone that put the weight back on with creating a calorie deficit and exercising regularly. Please, by all means prove me wrong on this, but I just can't believe it until otherwise proven.
I assume the argument might be related to the amount of people who relapse to their old lifestyle, but then that's not really about diet or exercise not making you lose weight.
Edit for the next person who's gonna misinterpret me and then get incredibly hostile over something I didn't write: I don't agree with this argument. I don't think being overweight is comparable to addiction, the "relapse" terminology is what I've heard used in defense of this argument however, which is why I used it.
i think you should really do some introspection on why you think fat people should be obligated to diet forever or else they’re “relapsing”
I don't think that, but thanks for the accusation. Diet culture is just another capitalist money market, it's fadbased and meant to make money. Which is why I wrote "lifestyle changes". I'm getting so sick of people here willfully misinterpreting something so they can assume bad faith and then get aggressive immediately.
your comment is reinforcing fatphobia and i am pointing that out. do you consider thin people who quit a diet and go back to eating junk food all day to be “relapsing to their old lifestyle”.
really the fundamental question here is: do you think fat people should need to lose weight in order to be treated with the same respect as thin people?
Disengage
It’s not about “dieting” forever, it’s about concrete lifestyle changes which is why diet culture fucking sucks and so many people are unsuccessful.
not all fat people live the same lifestyle, as i’m sure you’re aware. many fat people live incredibly fit and active lifestyles and are still fat. and even if a fat person lives an “unhealthy” lifestyle, so what? the premise i’m operating on here that fat people should not have to lose weight in order to be treated with respect.
I’m not arguing fat people shouldn’t have respect tho, I’m just explaining that the concept of dieting is not helpful for weight loss.
I’m not even saying it falls completely on the individual.
There are so many societal factors that play a role: cheap unhealthy foods, the entire confusing industry of fad diets and all that misinformation, people being too overworked to stick to or make healthy changes, the unhealthy food culture of the US in general, people going untreated for medical conditions etc etc.
I’ve suffered from plenty of these, I’ve been overweight…I’m still a bit overweight.
I have a lot of physical factors that make it harder for me to lose weight than other people.
For a long time I was just awash in a sea of conflicting information about what you should eat, how you should eat, how you lose weight.
It felt hopeless.
So…maybe I have my own personal issues with all of this, but I just don’t really appreciate the talking point of “95% can’t (as opposed to don’t) lose weight or keep it off” as if it’s just a scientific impossibility.
It feels very defeatist, very crab in a bucket.
I’m at a point in my life where I feel like I finally have some control, some clarity over things and it kind of rubs me the wrong way to see stuff that could potentially keep others in that same pit I was in.
Maybe I’ve got my own issues to work on, but that’s how I see it.
I’m sorry if it feels defeatist, but I do think knowing the data is important. And again, I’d really recommend the “Maintenance Phase” podcast
That's an odd premise to engage me with, considering I didn't say fat people had to lose weight to be treated respectfully.
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I find this confusing, what's the definition of the forever diet here? If it's diet (lifestyle) it kind of precludes being forever
It’s about diet and exercise not keeping the weight off long-term. People lose weight from diet and exercise all the time, the vast majority just don’t keep it off.
Assuming it's all behavioral is one of the issues. Using the term "relapse" on this is so telling.
"Relapsing to a lifestyle". What does this mean? What is assumed here?
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Edit: just saw you disengaged from this, my bad
I see that now, thank you.
Edit: no worries, I didn't tell you to disengage (it's not a magical "last word" spell, it can't be part of a post) so you don't have to. I appreciate the clarification of the language because I missed it.
Thank you for the clarification. I am sorry I misinterpeted you.
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500 calories a day is a massive deficit, why are you going into extremes? Changing your lifestyle is possible and living on a base caloric or running a slight deficit is not some herculean task.
Also diet culture is a fuck, which is why I mentioned life style changes, but hey thanks for misreading and flying off the handle.
No actually. While some obese people have some form of addiction to food, losing weight is not comparable to addiction. Addiction is comparable to addiction and people who are addicted need with a lot more than just a lifestyle change. They need healthcare, they need therapy to adress traumas, they need a lot of stuff. Following your logic you're basically saying overweight people are sick, which seems very contrary to what you wish to advocate for.
Also in your analogy the 12-step program works? Part of it is to not be judgemental when you relapse, it's part of the process.
I have a feeling this is gonna continue, so I'm gonna disengage here.
The 12 step program also does not work. Literally every intervention for substance use has an abysmal long-term success rate.
Yes I was just making a hasty comparison of the poor efficacy of 12 step programs to the poor efficacy of long term diet and exercise programs, when other better alternatives exist for both scenarios. Didn't want to imply eating as an addiction. Apologies for the poor choice
For what it's worth, at the end of my few decade long "weight maintenance" the only way to maintain my then weight was opting to fast every other day entirely. Healthy? If you asked the experts, I was still too fat.
Eating is not an addiction. Eating is not the issue. Behavior is not the issue. The issue is the construct that there is some one size a body should be that everyone fits in. This is no different than other strickt categories we are being put in. The "normal" that keeps being brought up is a statistical curve that was made by an eugenist, using fit male bodies as the baseline. It is inherently a racist construct as well.
The way body size has been weaponized in pathriarchal culture and the way the medical and Western scientists took part in constructing the ideal is the issue. The way most people need to spend their lives on a diet to try and meet this ideal is the issue. The way these diets harm peoples health is the issue. The way this is used to control especially womens bodies is the issue.
This exactly. Once they’ve lost weight, formerly fat people are expected to engage in disordered eating forever to remain thin. Expected, encouraged, and celebrated if and only if they keep the weight off. “Health” isn’t really a factor in the conversation because people have “thin=healthy” so deeply-ingrained.
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Hi please put all of these calorie deficit suggestions and frankly all calorie talk behind a spoiler tag as it can be triggering to those with ED.
Edited to add: Please give an actual, helpful, informative spoiler tag that includes a content warning about ED triggers.
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This is breaking the disengage rule and you know it.
What you said was not fine, for the record. Frankly, formerly fat people are some of the worst about this.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5764193/
Again, I highly recommend the resources listed above as a starting point. u/khizuo listed some great info as well.
That article doesn't claim any numbers and only discusses the physiological and psychological responses that cause people to stop maintaining their diets - the central concept is that diet and exercise will result in long term weight loss, but issues around perception (both of self and how much they're consuming), appetite, support, coping mechanisms and more make it difficult for many people to maintain the diet and exercise long term without additional intervention. Literally, they put the weight back on because they stopped the dieting and exercise.
Health is more complex than just your weight, and going on a diet isn't an easy or simple undertaking, but we're not doing fucking calorie-denialism here.
Ok it says 80% of the weight lost was gained back in 5 years and it’s a meta-analysis of 29 different studies so that’s a huge dataset. There’s also some anti-fat bias in the study, but regardless, the implication here is that all the people in all the studies fucked up because they couldn’t stick to a diet and exercise plan longterm. As a leftist, that explanation comes up short for me.
But frankly, this is what I didn’t want to do in this thread.
“We’re not doing calorie denialism here.”
This is the problem. You think my body burns calories at the same rate as your body? You think the human body is a simple machine where you input 500 calories into my body and your body and our bodies process, store and burn them the same way? It’s far more complex than “CICO” and I’m fucking sick to death of thin people preaching about the SiMpLe sCiEnCE. I’m not doing it. Don’t bother responding, I do not have it in me to do the back-and-forth.
The OP specifically asked thin people to STFU, listen, do some self-crit, and do some fucking reading. It’s not an invitation to debate weight loss shit with me. Read the responses from fat people in this thread and fucking do better. It’s exhausting.
What do you mean "as a leftist"? It's incredibly immaterial to just disbelieve that large lifestyle changes are extremely difficult to make and maintain. Ask anyone who's broken a simple habit like nail biting - it takes a lot of time and effort to make small changes to unnecessary habits, and reducing your food intake and doing more exercise are incredibly big changes with lots of material conditions to get in the way. How easy do you think it is to stick to your diet when you've had a really shitty day at work, or go out and exercise when it's cold and raining? That's exactly why the study recommends maintenance visits - people checking up, advising, and encouraging them so they can overcome the many obstacles in their way. Just because "diet and exercise" are 3 words doesn't mean they're easy to stick to.
Hey, I don't mean to make this thread more unpleasant for you, but as a thin person myself, and one who absolutely hates the CICO garbage bullshit argument, I would like to point out that this is less about thin vs fat and more along the lines of the trans debate, where one side, which knows absolutely fuck-all about biology, tries to insist that its oversimplified understanding of the biology at issue is the One True Answer (and in case I'm being unclear, in this analogy the CICO people are the transphobic "muh chromosomes" types).
As someone who has studied biology, I would like to point out to these people that the body reacts to its own energy state (rich, poor, somewhere in between) in a wide variety of ways. One of the most important cellular signaling molecules is cyclic AMP, which is the depleted version of ATP, the basic energy storage molecule of life. When there's a bunch of cyclic AMP around, the cell (and by extension the body, if this is the case in other regions as well) adjusts its energetic behavior accordingly.
The idea that this doesn't work in reverse is, frankly, very silly.
Also, to all you nonbiologists arguing here: if it's entirely diet and exercise, why is Ozempic so effective in comparison to such a regimen, hmmm? Maybe it's because CICO is and has always been bullshit, eh?
The reason Ozempic is used for weight loss is because it slows down your digestion and reduces appetite and cravings. It literally just makes you eat less. How is that an argument against CICO?
Ozempic slows digestion and increases satiety in the brain, yes, but it also stimulates secretion of insulin and suppresses glucagon release (you know, the energy signaling molecules, of the sort I mentioned above--I daresay those are playing a role here). Those molecules are critically important to the way the body processes energy, and we still don't understand that system very well (if we did, we'd be able to cure diabetes).
And even if your oversimplification here was accurate, how would that be an argument that CICO is useful? That argument amounts to telling people to ignore their biological drives, all the time, and basically forever. It's like telling someone they need to pee less, as if that's an easy thing to just do.
It's useful because for most of us it's the only way we can realistically regulate our own body weight, which a lot of people want to do. For people who struggle to do that, as well as obviously for people who chose not to, I agree that it's completely useless and somewhat insulting medical advice. But there's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I'm glad you recognize that, but nonetheless, "the baby" in this case is a falsehood. See here for a real-world example: https://hexbear.net/comment/5779945
Edit: better link
Calorie tracking can be useful for some people, yes.
but, that's not the same as CICO. We cannot know nor control actual calories in and actual calories out. Anything we do to estimate them is just that, an estimate. Sure, for some people, those estimates are close enough to be useful. But to bandy CICO around as an absolute is insulting. Unless CICO can be actually measured, it's simply not an absolute rule in any useful sense.
And, its also pretty insulting to say for 'most of us' CICO is the only way to regulate body weight, when that's not really true. There are many many other ways of losing weight outside of tracking or caring about CICO. Yes, technically, at the end of the day, it must be because of CICO, but like, why should we care enough to track that, when we can't accurately track that?
CICO is true. But, it's not useful; we can't measure the actual calories your body absorbs, the actual calories your body burns, nor can we control them. Yes, some actions influence it, but there's many, many reason why 'eating 200 fewer calories and exercising 200 calories worth of work a day' may not lead to 400 calories worth of 'fat loss'.
Ozempic's most important aspects seems to be its effect on the brain (not to say its effect on digestion are unimportant). See the research showing Ozempic helping people with the gambling addictions.
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Thank you. I’ll give this a look over on the other side of my shift.
I honestly didn’t see it as being potentially harmful. Just…giving my experience. :\ Sorry.
Narrator: It wasn't.
Because it was literally more of the same. You were also telling OP to [will themselves to] make lifestyle changes. The point plenty of others are making is that forcing oneself to act contrary to how they act without addressing the conditions that caused the original behaviour is often a road to disappointment. Recognising those conditions is vital, and a lot of people have very little real power over them.
I didn’t tell OP to do anything though. I was passing along my own experience. Unless you mean the closing statement, but that wasn’t telling them to do anything, but rather what is general knowledge of how to lose weight. It was only said as a counterpoint to my friend who does have a wildly high metabolism and what people generally do to lose weight.
I understand your intention isn’t to harm anyone, but just like with unintentional racism or unintentional transphobia, it’s harmful regardless. Fat people are not ignorant about the concept of “CICO.” Fat people have been on diets. Fat people have heard about the dangers of obesity from their doctors and probably from everyone else in their lives too.
Yeah, that is something that can be forgotten sometimes. I can scarcely forget all of that from back when I was much larger than I currently am. It was damaging to an extent. But my motherly instincts of sorts kinda kick in without thinking cause, well, my poor habits did almost kill me and it was an invisible issue until the last second. Hells, I was lucky the problem was caught in the first place cause a semi-related issue is what brought it to surface. Idk, I remember how terrified I was in the doctor’s office that day. Still scares me to this day. I just don’t want to see others deal with that terrifying ordeal.