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.
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Fun fact, that my spouse and I learned recently, this is not a fact.
Calorie restriction can also cause your body to panic and start turning anything you consume directly into fat if calorie restriction triggers a "holy shit we must be going through a famine!" metabolic response.
Spouse has been feeling like crap for years, very low energy and run down even after taking naps in the middle of their day. They're pretty active as their job is doing physical farm work. Doc recommended taking a month of recording food eaten/drunk with one of those bluetooth blood glucose monitors. Turns out, they needed to be consuming more calories than they had been, and more often.
So, eating smaller "meals" in during mealtime but also eating something about every 3 hours during the day along with keeping a small containter of watered down juice by the bed to take a sip on after the "middle of the night get up to take a pee" have leveled out their blood surgar fluctuations, evened out their nightly sleep, they feel less run down during the day, they've lost 1~2 pounds a month and several inches around their waist. All of this after increasing the amount of calories conusmed in a day.
Remember, humans aren't robots. We aren't peices of machinery stamped at a factory with the same tolerances with very simple reactions to our environment that can be easily mapped out and predicted. We're complicated and messy bags of meat and bone that don't need to conform to simplistic ideas of what "should" make sense.
I want to thank you for providing a concrete example of the complexity of biology, which tends to be too abstract for people to understand and accept easily. Elsewhere in this thread I made this argument from a purely abstract standpoint, and it was much less well-received than this.
I'll take what you've said in mind. I won't really reply beyond that because my stuff is just getting removed anyway and I think that's a sign for me to move on from the conversation.
Thank you all for providing your alternate experiences. I will think about them a lot.
I was also a CICO person until I watched an episode of PBS NOVA called The Truth About Fat. Turns out our bodies are very good at trying to stay at the same weight even if we change the calories we consume.
That's really cool, both the fact that things can work that way and also the fact your spouse is feeling better
Ok so this is just anecdotal, but I'll give you a real life example of what this "management" can look like.
I was told during pregnancy that if I would not lose weight, I'd leave my child motherless. I reacted to this medical violence by engaging in self hate fueled dieting that I did for two decades.
This was a lifestyle where I spent well over 10 hours per week in vigorous exercise. I broke my spine, knees, got myocarditis. Was always sick with everything. Yet my bodysize remained obe,*e, like it has since I was a small child.
I counted every calorie. On a scale. I kept a food diary, I was always in an outrageous deficit. At the end I had to fully fast every other day to maintain my still fat weight. I am not talking just a bit fat, but bmi properly in the high end.
I made it into a profession. Coaching was the only way to sustain the ridiculous amounts of exercise I needed to stay thinner. My entire life revolved around it. I definitely did not read leftist books or engage in education for myself, I was just maintaining that weight.
I am an autist who will follow the rules I make for myself all the way to the bitter end. When I say I counted calories it means I wrote down everything. I still have those diaries, they are the story of starvation by choice.
And none of this was considered an ED. I was celebrated for it. For trying to force my body into the norm.
Then someone said to me that you don't have to live like this so I was finally given room to stop. I stopped looking at thin pictures of other women, I started looking at diverse bodies. My mental health and self-esteem got so much better as my body went back to the size it clearly likes to be. My hands and feet that were always cold are now warm.
I studied a whole new profession after this, I am so much freer now. I realized a lot of my internal fat stigma was gender norm related. I embrace my masculine body now.
It isn't cico. Bodies are more complex than that.
I explicitly asked that people not make this type of comment in the thread but thank you for proving my point.
Yes, CICO is a basically thermodynamics, and is, fundamentally, true.
But, I don't think anyone really thinks CICO is basically wrong? Only that its an unhelpful framing. And, there's a lot of other problems in your comment here.
Biggest one is the implication that fat people aren't eating healthy, aren't exercising. Many are! And, 'healthy' vs 'unhealthy' foods I don't think is generally a helpful framing either. Like, I know what you're trying to say with it, but you can lose weight on mcdonalds and gain it eating salads, and its not really the 'unhealthiness' or 'healthiness' that causes weight gain or loss.
Just look at the mess of 'diet info', where there's so many diets whose explanations are directly contradictory with one another, yet some people lose weight doing one, and other lose weight doing the other.
Yes, in short, plenty of us do believe that CICO is inherently flawed and grossly oversimplified.
Yes, I agree, sorry if I didn't make that clear or condemn it strongly enough. It is a generally harmful way to frame things.
My point was just that it is 'fundamentally true', and I don't think anyone disputes the core physics of it. The dispute is about its practical applications and usefulness (which, again, is that it is impractical and harmful).
Fun fact: a lot of the sports people do are some of the most unhealthy behaviors we human animals can engage in. Especially at the professional end it just breaks you.
Yet that is celebrated without question. When a fitness dude breaks a knee lifting, he gets it fixed and is celebrated for it. When a fat woman breaks her knee while lifting, she is told the reason the knee broke is her fatness.
And the mandatory mention that even if someone does not eat healthy or exercise at all, they deserve to be treated well. We aren't here to earn a right to exist by eating whatever it is that is called healthy in a current moment. Which in itself is a helluva muddy thing if you scratch the surface even a little.
There are around 10,000 professional athletes in the United States. This makes them around 0.003% of the population. If you were to compare the health of those 0.003% with the health of the heaviest 0.003%, I'd be confident to guess which group is healthier.
For the rest of us in the 99.993%, sports are a good thing for your health. Running strengthens joints and greatly increases cardiovascular health (currently, cardiovascular issues are the largest cause of death in the US), weightlifting reduces risk for injury and improves mental health. Even when looking at runners, a group who are constantly injured, have better joints and longer lifespans than sedentary people.
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Yeah, overweight people aren't stupid and are well aware of CICO. Reducing the understanding of why someone might be overweight to "well, you need to eat fewer calories" is just as reductive as "poor people are lazy".
That's not what I was doing though. I said that life makes it difficult to do so. At the base though, some factors need to be established as a base to work from.
I guess because my stuff keeps getting removed nobody can see the original point.