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 don't understand how the first part disagrees with what I said? Many body builders do estimate it close enough to be useful, yes. But, it's still estimates. We have no way of tracking things like 'basal metabolic rate', and how that might change over time and under different conditions (which, isn't to say it can't be estimated). If you are working out or doing physical labor to a large degree, like body builders and professional athletes do, you can make those basal calories and their fluctuations basically negligible, able to be left as just a line item. When professional bodybuilders are eating 5000 calories a day, yeah, deviations in 'background calories' don't really matter.
I don't want to discount the math pros do as unimpressive, or not useful. But there's a lot of it that is 'napkin math', figured out second or third hand, from the data that is able to be tracked accurately.
but I don't think the 'average person' is expected to work out for 6 hours a day, nor would they likely be capable.
As one tracks one's own calories, and tracks and keep consistent one's activities, it can turn it from estimated to a hard science. That's what I mean. Just that CICO CAN be super accurate, more accurate than most biology we can do in simple "uncertainty" terms. But my overall point is that this is not effective at tackling desires/problems around weight at any larger scale than the "individual in trackable conditions". My only disagreement is linguistic here, I think, and partially a separation of levels of complexity.
I mean that CICO is very precise when isolated, but not precise with variation in a person or groups lives. And CICO is not useful in most of the cases, despite being perfectly scientific at the less complex-scale.
Disagree, that's not what hard science means, nor can it be isolated in such a way for a lot of people.