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.
Please note I went into the following trying to challenge my assumptions and I was successful in doing so:
I went looking for proof that "mounting evidence that anti-fat bias is more to blame... than just the fat itself" for negative health outcomes and I found this study that I could not fully access: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797615601103
The abstract does seem to partially support the claim, although I don't know if the two factors are compared in strength of effect. But it is clear that weight discrimination does increase risk of mortality and negative health outcomes.
I also saw a different study showing that weight/size discrimination increases risk of suicide.
This article summarizes what we know from science about size discrimination and cites studies throughout.
Self-crit follows:
My first reaction was to take issue with the claim about fat-phobia causing death, before I decided to actually check if there was evidence. I think that my attachment to fatness equaling negative health outcomes is from my own fat-phobia. I was able to hide it behind science. But the people designing experiments and drawing conclusions are on average just as fat phobic as the rest of society. Not to mention that I had a hand in deciding which studies I read, by using search terms guiding me to fat-phobic conclusions.
It's honestly fucked up that I would have preferred fatness itself to be unhealthy rather than medical fat-phobia, despite the fact that eradicating fat-phobia is more achievable than systematically making all fat people thin.
Thankfully I had the good sense to keep my mouth shut about OP's lived experiences.