How old were you at the time?
This thread raises what to me is really the most fundamental question about obesity. How do we encourage people to be healthy without buying into the fat-shaming nonsense? I feel like there needs to be a hard and distinct line between fat acceptance for beauty and fat acceptance for health. The beauty standard is just one of a hundred ways society imposes (often unreasonable) standards for physical attractiveness, along with thinness there is symmetry and whiteness and how tall you are and whether you have a tan. It’s fine for you not to be attracted to short pale women but it’s sort of dumb to judge short pale women for not fitting your particular ideal of beauty.
The health thing is important, but it shouldn’t be just another excuse for shaming a person. Especially because fatness is so arbitrary a thing to single out compared to all the other unhealthy things people do to themselves. We might as well also judge people who don’t get more than 6 hours of sleep at night - those poor sleeping habits are, after all, taking years off of their life. Let’s also judge every person who works a desk job, because that’s probably one of the worst things you can do to yourself, whether you’re overweight or not. Why is obesity so special?
Then there is the fact that while obesity may be predictor of chronic diseases, it certainly doesn’t predict illness in every fat person, or even most fat people. Or you may judge the 250 pound man who comes in for a job interview but what you don’t know if he used to be 400 pounds and has been taking extremely good care of himself for years.
So I think if you hate fat people, you should stop trying to hide behind the bullshit reason that it’s because of their poor health, and just admit it’s because you don’t like how they look.
What’s your evidence that obesity per se has no deleterious effects on health?
brazil, that ain’t how causation works. If you want to say being obese causes health problems, you have to show the mechanism for how it causes it. You can’t prove a negative.
First of all, that’s not true. For example it’s possible to be reasonably confident that smoking causes lung cancer even without demonstrating or even understanding the underlying mechanism by which it does so.
Second, you are the one who is claiming with certainty that obesity per se does not cause health problems. I myself have some doubt on the issue, at least as to the extent to which obesity is causative.
Therefore you bear the burden of proof. And I gather that you are unable to produce any evidence at all to support your position.
My problem is not that this woman is fat, the problem is that I hate it when people make these “statements,” which ultimately go nowhere. Plus, it’s fucking rude to sit around in public in your underwear. I don’t want to see a thin person I don’t know in their undies. I don’t want to see a fat person I don’t know in their undies. The only people I don’t mind seeing in their undies are my husband and children, partially because they’re not stupid enough to do it in public.
Yeah, people have the “right” to treat their bodies however the hell they want. Sometimes, though, people treat their bodies poorly. Celebrating someone because they’re dealing with the consequences of a lifetime of treating their body poorly seems, I don’t know - anticlimactic? Stupid? Just another person trying to make a point?
There are so many other things to make a statement about that fat acceptance is like a little kid in the back yelling, “Oh, me, too - notice me, too!!”
I once interviewed a woman who was visibly fatigued from the walk from the reception desk to the office (50-75 ft). Yes, her circumference was about equal to her height.
She seemed about average for the position, but:
This company occupied 2 buildings, both 2 stories. They had 1 elevator in the front reception area, and a stairwell in the work area.
My users were on the 2nd floor. The work was on the first. The next building held people who occasionally needed to be consulted, and we don’t have the luxury of time (the company was bankrupt, but was still dancing on the edge).
There was no way she could have walked to stairs 3-4x/day, let alone meet with the folks next door.
Hell yes, I discriminated based on weight and its effect on her ability to do the work.
No, I was not going to tell management that they would need to pay everyone she needed to see to come to her, nor am I going to wait 10 minutes while she catches up.
I knew some overweight people I’d hire in a heartbeat - they could carry the weight (one had to quit consulting because her knees were failing, and she couldn’t get an individual health insurance plan - she took a huge pay cut just to get on an employer’s plan).
That’s my biggest problem with this woman. Instead of doing some hard work to deal with her weight problem, she decides that it’s society that needs to change and consider her beautiful. Yea, we’ll get right on it.
As for judging obese people, I don’t think it’s wrong. We judge people all the time whether we like it or not. And when we judge people, we use whatever evidence we have available. If we didn’t, then we wouldn’t be able to make any decisions in life regarding people.
I don’t think it’s wrong to judge people based on anything as long as you’re making a good judgment. You can even judge people based on race if you want. I normally make the judgement that black people have more experience with racial discrimination than I have.
If someone is obese, then I will make whatever reasonable judgments I can about them using their obesity as a factor. What I won’t do is disparage, insult or shame them for being overweight.
I said absolutely no such thing.
You are being ridiculously nitpicky.
It’s well established scientific fact that obesity and poor health are highly correlated. It’s also well known that obese people’s behaviors, dietary and exercise habits are highly correlated. It is also known that skinny people with poor dietary, exercise habits are highly correlated with poor health as well.
Does obesity cause poor health? I don’t know. Nobody has found any mechanism for such. Is it possible? Sure! But until a mechanism is shown to actually cause poor health in obese people, you can’t just say that it exists because of correlation.
Correlation is not causation, and when there are other important factors to consider, you must consider them.
Smoking had decades of research go into it where they looked at all the other possible variables that could go into determining someone getting lung cancer. So by process of elimination, they found that smoking alone could account for the rise in lung cancer (among other things) in smokers.
But I’m not familiar with any research that has been exhaustive on the issue of obesity and health.
If YOU are familiar with such research, YOU show it to ME and CONVINCE me that I’M wrong.
I think people need to be comfortable and accepting of who they are in order to be healthy…and I thin that everyone should be constantly striving to be a better version of themselves.
Self loathing isn’t healthy
And I think that works externally as well. I have a friend who, even after gastric bypass, is still a large woman. And I love her as she is. And I want her to be a better, in this case thinner, version of herself. Do I judge her for being overweight. Yes. Do I accept her for herself, yes.
It’s odd because she has nieces that she judges similarly. She knows they have the genetics to be morbidly obese, and she hates watching them gain weight. So, in a way, even she judges.
A few summers ago, I was in a Target parking lot and saw a young couple, both of them at least 60 pounds overweight, likely much more and I’m being nice about it. It sticks with me years later. Two young people, in love, with their whole lives ahead of them…lives that will be made that much more difficult with the weight - health issues, discrimination, and likely much shorter.
Yes you did. Here’s what you said:
You stated with absolute certainty that fat per se does NOT cause poor health.
So please show me your evidence for this claim or admit that you have none.
Again you are wrong. One very common sense example is osteoarthritis of the knee. The mechanism by which obesity damages your health is pretty obvious.
So you now concede that it is possible to be reasonably confident that X causes Y even without demonstrating the underlying mechanism?
No, because YOU have the burden of proof. YOU claim with absolute confidence that obesity per se does not cause poor health. It’s not my responsibility to go searching for evidence to disprove your claims. Please either show your evidence or admit that you have none.
I’m an average woman - I’ve never been overweight - though I’m five pounds into losing fifteen to put me from near the top of my appropriate weight range back to the lower end. Its slow going. In part because my non-dieting base caloric intake a day is about 1600 to maintain. I wouldn’t call that a little more - you are talking about almost half again the calories I take in when I’m maintaining (which I don’t always do, which is why I need to drop 15), almost twice what I take in when I’m actively losing weight.
I’m at about 1200-1300 now. When I was younger, I could eat a little more - peri menopause sucks.
I’m not happy with the premise that people are significantly obese by choice. The phrase “by choice” is very tidy linguistically but we are using it to make a distinction that is anything but tidy. I think it is more accurate for most people to say that they have some kind of weight regulation system that is somewhat visible to themselves and somewhat amenable to conscious choice, but largely comes from someplace else within, which we don’t understand.
I am pretty obese and know people who are even more so, and find not the slightest thing to fault in any of our choices or our dedication. I think the primary story is evolutionary maladaptation, and the main effect of the judgement piece is to increase hurtfulness and shame between people. I also understand that recent research indicates this makes obesity itself a bigger problem.
I agree to a large extent. By way of analogy, breathing is a combination of the conscious and subconscious. You can consciously choose to breath faster or slower, but if you don’t give it any thought, your subconscious will control the breathing rate. If for some reason your subconscious was causing you to breath too fast or too slow, in theory you could correct the problem with conscious thought, but it would be pretty challenging since you would have to think about your breathing pretty much all the time.
I don’t think it’s that bad with eating, but it’s still pretty challenging. Generally speaking, people who lose weight and keep it off must give conscious thought to what they are eating and how much pretty much all the time, day after day, week after week, year after year. A short time of inattention could easily start them down the road to weight regain.
I also agree that the phrase “by choice” obscures the situation since it puts weight loss in the same category as choices which are far more constrained in time and complexity, for example what color pants to wear tomorrow.
I wouldn’t be surprised if shaming people who are already fat is counterproductive. But at the same time I would guess it is likely to be helpful for people who are thin but headed in the direction of being fat.