cw for weight/body image, of course
Usually discussions about this get overrun by chuds so I think it'd be nice to hear what people here have to say.
Personally I think it's some good and positive ideas but they're mixed in with potentially harmful medical misinformation.
being fat sucks and people should be better educated about how their diets affect their weight so they can make a more informed choice about whether eating that extra food is worth gaining that extra weight
on the other hand, being shitty to fat people is a huge problem in society in various different ways, so a fat acceptance movement is necessary to solve that problem. im not sure id say it's the fat acceptance movement which we need, though, because the one we have is absolutely full of people saying incredibly dangerous and stupid stuff, like that for a lot of people it's "impossible" to lose weight or anything along those lines, or of course the "healthy at every size" group who spread nonsense about how being overweight actually doesnt suck at all.
i see overweight people the way i see people with any medical condition. like, im not gonna be rude to someone because they have a disease or something, but im absolutely not going to say "actually having diseases is cool and not unhealthy at all"
Fat people shouldn't get shit on for their weight, shit's exhausting. But at the same time, I don't think we should necessarily promote obesity with things like "fat is beautiful" because I'm in the boat of people who'd rather promote the idea that you don't need to be beautiful to be a good person, instead of trying to spin everything as beauty. My line is that we shouldn't encourage and look favorably at being fat, and we should try to lower the average weight and augment the overall health of society. However, this doesn't mean that we should shit on fat people, if they're comfortable with their own weight and aren't dying to it, then live and let live.
I'm sorry but that kinda reads like a backhanded compliment, at least when I encounter it in the wild. The "Oh people don't have to be beautiful to be good" stuff, fat people are fucking beautiful and deserve to feel that way, swerving into "why do we even care about beauty in the first place" whenever this is brought up unintentionally just reads as "fat people aren't beautiful but its mean to say that so lets just ignore the whole thing".
Fat people can be beautiful, sure, but fat itself doesn't make them beautiful. In any case, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and we'd do better not to police a subjective idea.
Idk how you're not policing shit when you start saying that saying "fat is beautiful" promotes obesity, like its not a literal meaning of fat cells are beautiful but that fat people are beautiful. Either way this kind of concern trolling is basically exclusively reserved for fat people when it comes to "Oh we shouldnt promote health issues" but people pretend that like a tiny text on a ciggarette packet that says "smoking kills" is equal to a global culture of bullying and dehumanizing people for being fat.
like its not a literal meaning of fat cells are beautiful but that fat people are beautiful.
Yeah obviously, for fucks sake. Let's not pretend for a second that all fat people are beautiful, and that fat is the determining factor that makes them beautiful as your sentence suggests.
Being honest here, obesity has no upsides and instead of seeking to mimic how smoking is treated in popular culture and have people fetishize the act and killing themselves, maybe the thing to do is to discourage both but don't dehumanise people struggling with either.
I don't find trans people attractive, and most people don't either
See how it sounds?
Love to use trans people as objects in my misleading arguments
Just saying that as a fat guy I feel like shit a lot for being fat, and I don't need more
Also being fat has helped me understand trans issues. Dysphoria is not exclusive to my trans comrades, I understand what it's like to hate the body you have too.
Fair, as I said before, there's no reason that fat people should get shit on for their weight. But the point is that as a polity we should stay away from that any weight is healthy, being obese is perfectly natural bullshit. Fatness should be regarded as just another disadvantageous characteristic some people need to deal with, like having short-eye sight or being unable to eat spicy foods, nothing more or less.
fat people are fucking beautiful
I assure you that I am not.
Body positivity is good. Nobody should have a complex because of how they look, and we should strive to create a society where absolute acceptance is the default. Fat acceptance is part of that, though I would prefer a more holistic approach to just focusing on one aspect of it.
I find the way that people react to the idea of fat acceptance to be extremely revealing. There's lots of concern trolling, even ITT, about the movement - I'm sure some people attached to it have had some bad takes, but the mainstream position is not about denying medical science like some people would have you believe.
Body positivity is good. Health is also good. The line should be for people to be healthy in their bodies, whatever that looks like, a position that is hard to achieve under capitalism.
Many common health issues are primarily due to capitalist alienation, including the rampant obesity in western countries. I'll never judge anyone for that, ever. I have to fucking sit at a desk for days on end and many others do too. The most affordable food options for me are both disgusting to my taste as well as the cruelty they inflict on both animals and people. "health" has become a commodity mostly accessible by the bourgeois
Check out some lentils and beans, they're the cheapest food possible
I once heard a radio interview with an obesity researcher who told that counterintuitively becoming fat didn't have that much to do with overeating. His point was that people becomes obese over the course of several years. If excess calorie consumption alone was responsible for the weight gain, the excess weight accounted for a daily excess food intake equal to a teaspoon of sugar.
His findings were that the human body is capable of either storing or shedding energy reserves and that the body will store as much energy as possible if it predicts a shortage of food. This capability evolved back when food was scarce and survival and flood gathering depended on being part of a group and he claimed that although the mechanism had not been studied in detail there was evidence that suggested a link between obesity and mental well-being.
To me it makes sense. Fear of being excluded is ultimately fear of death. It wouldn't be that surprising if that fear had physiological impacts by triggering survival mechanisms.
The professor didn't make a directly anti-capitalist argument but I think there is one to be made. Under late capitalism you don't have the sense of security in your position in society you had at previous iterations. Back in the old days if you became a mailman you could count on being a government employee for life and it was common to stay in the same workplace for decades. Unions provided networks of solidarity, community and security.
Today neoliberalism has ravaged the welfare state. Unions are a shadow of their former glory and workers are constantly monitored and assessed. Meanwhile capitalist propaganda paints an image where you have to live up to ridiculously high standards of beauty, wealth etc. to be acceptable.
All this leads to people feeling insecure and feeling they're not good enough. I don't think it is unreasonable to think that this contributes to the obesity epidemic.
TLDR: Capitalism makes you feel like shit and that is making you fat.
Hand wringing about "the science" while the world still bullies and dehumanizes fat people literally just contributes to the bullying and dehumanization.
Hand wringing about "anti-intellectualism" also doesn't help in the slightest when it comes to actually making fat people more comfortable.
But me am get upset when it not about me, me problems exactly same as all problems
I'm kind of with you. there's of course a couple of real negative health outcomes of having too much body fat, but for the vast majority of people - including probably the majority of all people that Western medicine would call "obese" - are just fine at their current weight and don't need medical assistance. Also body shaming is literally never an acceptable solution for any problem or reaction to any action.
But the bottom line is regardless of size and shape, solidarity with ALL of our comrades :red-fist:
Of course I'm with you on the body shaming aspect, but what makes you say
for the vast majority of people - including probably the majority of all people that Western medicine would call “obese” - are just fine at their current weight
?
Having an unhealthy amount of fat can't be determined by a ratio of weight to height. Having an unhealthy amount of fat can't even be determined by body composition testing and finding body fat and muscle percentages by mass. The only way to know if someone has too much body fat is to take a holistic approach and evaluate their health concerns as they arise, finding root cause for all complaints and diagnoses, whether that may be body fat amount or something else.
Almost like how every other health condition is or should be diagnosed :thinkin-lenin:
I hate all this concern trolling about "fat isn't healthy, we can't let people promote the idea that fat is healthy, it's dangerous." Do you think people get and stay fat because they have rationally decided it's good for them? Do you really think they're not told constantly by others, in big and small ways, that their body isn't acceptable? Do you really think that if we make a big stink about how unhealthy fatness is, it's gonna help people maintain a lower weight? I question whether this urge to inform people on the health consequences of fatness comes from a place of compassion at all - it really demonstrates that a person has no idea what the experience of fat people is today, and no clue about what actually causes people to get and stay fat.
Gonna drop a hot take and say its fine to be overly positive or even "promote" obesity like some people in here warn about, cause the fucking global fatmisia that permeates everything is so overwhelming and inescapable that doing this milquetoast centrist shit of wringing your hands and going "hmmm well its not technically scientifically healthy to be fat and it really ruins your health but you know, we cant be mean about it we should be nice about peoples bodies" barely even registers as an actual counter to the hate and mockery on a daily basis, like it doesn't help in the slightest and is just masturbatory bullshit.
I totally agree with this, I hear people say that fat shaming is good actually because it "promotes health" and it's like, even if that were somehow a good way to make people healthier, it's not as if there's anyone who doesn't already know that society looks down on fat people and elevates other body types.
As someone who fits into the morbidly obese category I have very mixed feelings about the Fat Acceptance movement.
On the one hand body shaming is horrible and should be fought. There is a lot of nasty prejudice attached to being overweight that does no good for anybody. The social emphasis we put on being thin does a lot of damage to people who cannot live up to ridiculously unattainable beauty standards and ultimately leads to dangerous eating disorders.
I also like the message that you shouldn't let your weight hold you back but rather live your life to the fullest now instead of waiting for that elusive point in the future where you've lost enough weight to be allowed to dance, dress nicely, get married, feel sexy etc., etc.
But on the other hand I really don't like the tendency the fat acceptable movement has to gloss over all the negative aspects of obesity. At the end of the day obesity is a fucking health problem — a disability even in the worst cases. The fat acceptance I've been exposed to has been very hostile towards attempts of losing weight and I believe that mere acceptance is doing obese people a disservice.
As a morbidly obese person getting rid of the prejudice will be an improvement but it won't keep my legs from swelling at night. It will not make me die less early. It will not protect my joints from being overloaded. It will not make it easier for me to get up from the couch. It will not make my movements less restricted or the mechanical possibilities of my sex life less limited. Being fat would still suck ass if everybody accepted and celebrated it.
What I really want is to not be so fat any more. And that is hard. To lose weight you have to fight your own body's survival mechanisms. Being genetically wired to store every available calorie was a winning strategy back when humans evolved and food was scarce and starvation was the norm. But in a modern society where food is readily available it just makes you fat.
To lose weight you have to fight your own body’s survival mechanisms.
Don't forget capitalism ramming as much sugar as possible in to everything then packing it in to brightly colored cardboard and strategically placing it to be highly visible when you go to buy a freaking light bulb.
But yeah, I agree with you. Am fat, nothing morally or ethically wrong with being fat, but I don't want to be fat, and it's not fashionable to be fat and not want to be fat in some circles.
My thoughts are, scientific data supports typically lower weight being healthier for some reasons but not for all reasons or in all cases, it's not a guarantee of health but it can serve as a rough marker, good nutrition and regular exercise should be encouraged and supported across the board, shaming is terrible and should be banned. Studies show shaming is equivocal at best for motivating and outright harmful far, far more often, with the added health issues of eating disorders, anxiety disorders and suicide accompanying shaming. On the other hand, binge eating itself may be a sign of escapism or a coping mechanism, a symptom of another illness which should be treated carefully -- I'm probably not alone in having ballooned in weight while being terribly depressed because fuck it, another bag of chips and a sitcom on rerun is the only pleasure my goddamn brain is getting. But you don't attack the person for being fat, it's a delicate situation. Trigger warning, something around a third of people who qualify as medically obese were found to be sexually assaulted.
And insofar as it goes, around here if people are binge drinking or doing drugs to unhealthy levels it's rare we get moralizing about "what they're doing to their body." Even if it's harmful, question your own motivation in how you approach and the information being presented. More understanding, more positive support, less judgment, full communism
Its nice. I am a fat guy, but I don't care.
I have some thin friends who are scared of being fat. Fat acceptance would do them more good than me honestly. Would just make their lives a little easier they ddin't have to worry you know?
There was an entire multi-week, multi-thread series that somebody did here debunking harmful myths about fat phobia.
Edit - found it : https://hexbear.net/post/83994
