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.
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