“Fat Acceptance” is nonsense. A handful of people with web sites is meaningless. If you surveyed a hundred random people and asked them about Fat Acceptance, I would guess hardly of them would know what you were talking about.
Being fat is not an acceptable thing and people who are fat know it. Fat jokes are always safe to make. Fat people are lazy. They are pigs who just eat themselves to oblivion because they are weak fat asses. This is what the world thinks. Look at the tone of this thread. It proves my point.
And frankly, if I’m wrong and Fat Acceptance is a real enough thing that it makes someone briefly feel better about themselves, what do you care? Let that person feel good for a minute because, trust me, deep down, they hate themselves.
People are fatter now because modern society makes it very easy to be fat. Our food is worse for you and designed to be eaten in large quantities. Fresh food is relatively expensive and harder to get. People don’t have time or energy to cook like they used to or as much time for exercise. It’s not a coincidence that poorer people tend to be fatter. But that’s probably a different discussion.
Yes you can lose weight. I am in the process of doing it, but you know what? It is probably the hardest thing I have ever undertaken and it takes almost every ounce of mental and physical energy I have to keep doing it.
To reiterate something from my previous post, if you think someone is a fat slob, fine, but keep it to yourself. Let’s be nicer to each other.
It seems to me that it’s not so much that being fat is acceptable today, but rather, that the perceived line between “fat” and “normal” has blurred a lot. In both directions: there are many people who think they’re fat who aren’t, but also many people who don’t seem to think they’re fat while they are, at least somewhat.
And it’s not just self-evaluation. There are doctors who keep harping on a patient’s weight when they come in for something unrelated, and others that will never say anything about weight to a morbidly obese patient, even one suffering from something that is partially weight-related.
I disagree with you completely because 1) I have lived in other countries where being fat is simply not accepted as it is in the States, and 2) I am old enough to remember living in America when being fat was absolutely not accepted.
Today in America, being over weight is a acceptable. Clothes are specially made for big people. It is politically incorrect to say anything negative to someone who is fat. Maybe among young people, there is ridicule of over weight people, but not among adult society. At work, in office and other work environments, saying negative things to people who are over weight is not acceptable. You are probably too young to know how it used to be. Also, you may not have traveled or lived in other countries and don’t realize the difference in those countries as far as how culturally, being fat, obese, or even over weight is just not accepted, except perhaps for those who are on the far side of middle age. And even then, being over weight is accepted, not obesity.
While “Fat Acceptance” may not be a term in common use, the wider and deeper the epidemic of fatness, the more rationalizing that it is Morally Wrong To Not Be Accepting of Fatness. Unlike smoking or drinking/other drug use (if needed, but those behaviors are widely accepted), you can’t be a closet/secret fatty. If The Fat (who don’t already smoke) took up smoking, and smoking went from the current 20%* back to where it was, smokers would exit the Ostracized, Ridiculed (And Sometimes Pitied) Category into which they were shoved starting as of a couple of decades ago. … the same category that The Fat have been busting out of by virtue of sheer numbers for however long.
The just as important but ignored issue is the Drinking-And-Prescription-Drug Problem, but because the vast majority of people engage in **that **behavior, it will continue to be ignored.
We are Rome, and refuse to accept it.
Don’t kid yourselves about the statistics; too many “non-smoker” smokers out there because they don’t want to be ostracized.
First, let’s acknowledge that “fat people bother me because of their increased medical costs borne by society as a whole” is a post-hoc justification for an intuitive reaction.
In your mind you say “eww, fatty” and only when someone questions you on it, because that reaction seems too shallow or vulgar or what have you, do you come up with the “oh I have perfectly reasonable explanations for why I dislike/criticize/hate fat people” - you’re trying to sound more high minded than it actually is.
Sort of like how anti-gay bigots say “eww faggot” in their heads if they see a public display of affection between two men. But if you call them on it, and simply ask if they hate gay people, usually they’ll say “oh no, I’m worried about the sanctity of marriage and our traditional family structure and how this will degrade it”
Which isn’t to say they’re the same - obesity really is a threat to public health while gays probably aren’t a threat to the fabric of our society - but in both cases, a very intuitive “ewww gross” reaction is only turned into high-minded principles when someone asks you to articulate your disgust.
I just wanted to get that out of the way.
Anyway, I think the activity level changes in the last 30 years is overrated compared to the change of eating habits. Studies on decades-long increases in obesity indicate that diet alone is sufficient to explain the changing level of obesity, and that activity levels for the average person aren’t as dramatically different as you think.
On the other hand, our food has changed dramatically. Pre-packaged, instant (or ready-to-prepare) food has become far more common. People have less time to cook for themselves, and the stay at home wife has mostly disappeared because our society has changed to make sure that women have to work and the average person has to work their ass off just to tread water in a period of flat wage growth for the lowest 80% and increased costs.
Corn subsidies among other things has resulted in insane amounts of sugar being put into everything. Ironically, the attempt to make food sound healthier is also to blame for this to some degree - the craze with “low fat” foods, especially in the 90s and 2000s, have resulted in foods that are stripped of their fat content, only to be replaced by sugars. Not only do the foods lose their satiating potential, but they add dramatically to the boom-crash blood sugar cycle that triggers hunger.
Check out this site which visualizes the sugar content of food by placing the equivalent amount of sugar cubes to what’s in the food next to them.
Food scientists have been at work studying the biochemistry and neurochemistry of food consumption to try to hit the same centers in our brain that react to things like cocaine. They deliberately create foods that are not satiating, and that cause binge eating, a feeling of addictiveness towards that food, and a quick return to hunger. Combined with our absurd agricultural policies which incentivize the massive over-use of corn, HFCS is absurdly ever-present in our foods. I think this issue, more than any others, explains the rise in obesity over the decades.
It’s also a problem that gets worse over someone’s life, as the constant slamming of the insulin metabolism by extremely high-sugar foods leads to a decreased ability to regulate the body through insulin and secondary effects as mostly described by metabolic syndrome.
But it doesn’t satisfy people’s need to blame and shame others for their moral failings in the same way that blaming lack of activity or just asserting gluttony does. We see something that disgusts us intuitively and we want to be convinced of their moral failing and how much better we are than them. Any sort of high-minded concerns are meant to justify or mask that reaction rather than being primary motivators for most people.
Oh boo fucking hoo. You want to be a vile person and try to hurt people, but because our society has softened its view on those people, it’s no longer as celebrated and socially acceptable as it once was. You’re the victim now, not being able to victimize others like you want to. Why don’t you lament how it’s no longer as easy to get away with or even encouraged to bully like it used to be, too?
Their lives are bad enough. Being fat sucks. The fact that you can no longer add to that suffering in a way that other people will cheer you on does not make you the victim.
You also obviously have the cause and effect reversed. Fat acceptance didn’t cause obesity. We didn’t have some period, in, say, 1983 where we decided it was okay to be fat, and therefore society followed suit and started a decades-long trend of greater obesity.
Obesity happened, I suspect because of reasons I mentioned in the last post, and both because it affected more people, and in general because our society now is less keen on bullying and shaming people and just generally being a shitty person, it’s not as acceptable to be hateful and cruel to fat people as it once was.
Targeting your anger at the fat acceptance movement is ridiculous - it’s only a tiny movement that no one cares about anyway, but to suggest that somehow, a fringe movement that sprung up in the last 5 years is responsible for the last 40 years in weight gain is exactly the sort of mental contortions I’ve been describing that keeps you feeling high-minded about your hatred.
It’s not that fat people are a protected class so much as that our society has become less hateful, less prejudiced, and less tolerant towards bullying than it was in the past. That, and the general rise in the number of fat people make them harder to single out, and it’s harder to be hateful and prejudiced towards something that’s more common and more ubiquitous.
But I’ll tell you - the fact that you can’t be as cruel and hurtful as you used to be is not the cause of obesity. You weren’t doing a public service by being hateful before. People already struggle with obesity because it sucks being fat - it affects your life and it affects your health - you just added to those struggles by going out of your way to make sure those people had yet another way their life sucked. And I’m sure you thought you were a hero for it, keeping the great wave of obesity at bay by being mean to fat people, but you weren’t. People are already struggling to control their weight, they’re not going to redouble their efforts in order to please people like you, people who hate them and go out of their way to be cruel to them. If anything, your hatred makes them give up. It makes them say “fuck it, I’m struggling with this, and trying my best, and yet still people are casually cruel to me. What am I trying to do, make them happy? Earn their approval? Fuck those people”
I thoroughly disagree that human nature has changed at all. It is true, however, that it’s harder to be (openly and consciously) hateful and prejudiced when you or many loved ones and friends are part of the group in question. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Human nature and psychology are such that folks find it easier to misdirect the condemnation outward and yet overlooking X in one’s own group … to forget all about or view through entirely different lens(es) oneself or those close to you.
To say that someone’s free to blame other people’s views for their own behavior is a dangerous thing. People look for excuses to give up on themselves or a thing; they find it easy to lay the responsibility for it on someone else than do the work.
“Human nature”? What about culture? Do you think that we’re less racist and less homophobic than we were 30 years ago? If so, then has “human nature” changed? Or no, do you really not see that we’re less prejudiced and hateful than we used to be?
If a person is viewed as “fat” due to current fashion, but their weight in no way affects their health- why is there *any *concern?
Unlike smoking “second-hand fat” doesnt kill 50000 people a year. In fact it is harmless to any but the person who is fat. So- unless that person is a loved one- why the radical hate agenda?
A thin person saying fat people are accepted by society is basically the same as a white person saying there is no such thing as racism. You have no idea what you’re talking about because you haven’t been on the receiving end of it. It’s a perception that never enters your field of view because it doesn’t affect you.
Companies make clothes for fat people because people are fat and need clothes. Simple as that. No one is endorsing something by making a product that serves it. There is money to be made and a need being met. That seems like crazy evidence. I’m not young. In fact I suspect I am on the far edge of the bell curve as far as age on this board. It’s not “political correctness” to suggest being nice to fat people; it’s called being a decent human being. It’s possible to be nice to someone even if you think they are imperfect. Imagine that?
Agreed. Sure, we can have a publicity campaign, with public service announcements, urging people to be healthier. We can have the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. No real harm there.
But to say we shouldn’t “accept” the obese…that’s intolerance and bigotry.
Life is already pretty tough for the very obese; why add an artificial social stigma? That’s what tolerant people are trying to eliminate from our way of life.
I’d be interested in you defining exactly what you mean by “absolutely not accepted” - what did that look like? I’m 57 years old this month and I’ve been chubby-to-morbidly-obese since I was about 10, 47 years,so I’d really like to know what you feel used to be true, (and better, presumably) than what you think is true (and worse, presumably) now, in terms of “acceptance”?
:dubious:
I see. And what alternative do you think would be better? Not making clothes for them to fit in? Your mind works in very mysterious ways and I really do want to understand better what it is you think is wrong with providing “specially made” clothing, seeing as how all clothing is “specially made” to fit particular sizes, and in this case, it happens to be large sizes. Is clothing some kind of weird privilege in your mind that fat people are not entitled to?
Reminds me of My Little Bit for the Hurricane Katrina victims: seems there were a lot of large women among the refugees who without clothing and had to resort to garbage bags to cover themselves. It was one time I was deeply glad to be fat, so I could ship off a few boxes of clothes to people who were as good as naked. Is that more what you think would be correct? “Too fat for the standard sizes? Wear garbage bags like the garbage you are! No clothes for you until you are an “acceptable” size!”
FTR: in many, if not most, cases, if you and I buy the identical shirt in our differing sizes, I will pay more because mine requires much more fabric. So take comfort in that, at least.
If that is so, and I think not quite yet, thank Og, because its about damn time!
But of course I still have to ask: do you think it is a bad thing that society is starting to frown on people making unkind remarks to fat people about their fat? And if that is the case, can you expound on your thinking, help us understand the way you think it should be and why that would be better, negative remark-wise? Do you think the world was a better place when no one thought twice about publicly mocking the fat people? Are you under the hilariously misguided impression that abuse kept all the “gluttons” in check and prevented them from becoming fat? Again, the actual details underlying your statements are of great interest to me and I hope you will share them.
From this paragraph it appears that in your view, “not accepting” = “ridicule”, would that be an accurate statement?
I’ll ask you what I asked Esmeralda: what is your definition of “accepting”? Because I don’t think there is a significant number of people calling for the acceptance of fatness itself, but many, possibly most people are coming around to the idea that the condition of being obese does not define a human being’s character or value at all, much less do so reliably, and to treat them as if it did (which is invariably to treat them unkindly and disrespectfully) is unfair, unnecessary and unhelpful. More pertinent still, it is an ugly and low way to behave, period, never mind the effect one may have on others.
I think “ostracized” is painting it a little heavy. I was a near chain smoker for 26 years. I quit in 2000. There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the world had already become pretty hostile to smoking at that point and it was a very helpful situation. Not because I cared about being “ostracized”, I wasn’t…but my smoking was, which made it a real pain in the ass to service the demon, and a real relief when I no longer had to, which supported my remaining a non-smoker. Versus the world I was born into and grew up in, where people smoked virtually everywhere. Seriously. The market, dropping butts on the linoleum to grind under your shoe…absolutely the most common thing in the world. On planes <cough>, in the movie theater, in the hospital! In the rooms! That is a society that is making way too easy to be a smoker!
Ahem…
[QUOTE=Fallen]
Unlike smoking or drinking/other drug use (if needed, but those behaviors are widely accepted), you can’t be a closet/secret fatty.
[/QUOTE]
Obesity is not a behavior. It is the condition of having excessive accumulation of fat in the body. Nor can you extrapolate with any kind of certainty the reasons for anyone’s obesity or what they have done, are doing, will do for good or ill in relation to their obesity. Science will tell you this if you bother to listen: obesity is extremely complex, involving the gut, the brain, hormones, genetics, emotions, environment, etc, etc. it is emphatically not just “calories in, calories out!” for anybody, but particularly the obese. If you believe you can look at an obese person and know who they are, how they behave, and why, that is your mistake to correct.
Or she. Do you know many people who fit this description? I don’t. I know people who feel this way sometimes, including myself, and I know a pretty good number of smart, generous, funny, kind, interesting, loving people…and pretty much every single one of them battles insecurity on some level. So while I agree that the more secure and accepted a human being feels, the less likely they are to indulge in unhealthy behavior of all kinds, I’m at loss as to how to bring about such a species. We’re just an insecure lot generally.
A tad strong, perhaps, but close enough.
You don’t imagine getting a meaningful response to that question, do you? I daresay few, if any of the real fat haters have the tiniest clue about what is actually driving them, which is usually the case with people who are all about the hate/derision/abuse/dismissal of persons they have in some way deemed less than themselves. It isn’t really about the target at all, obviously.
yep. these pathetic shitheads just need someone to look down upon, and get giddy when society gives them an acceptable reason to shit on a group of people.
I would prefer we not have a proxy for “health” simply because it’s complicated.
People can’t see things like your cholesterol or blood pressure numbers, and society really should stop acting like we can. (I know, I know…and monkeys might fly out of my butt, too.)
because the average person doesn’t have the knowledge to assess “fitness” or “health.” To the average schmuck, some dude with 2% bodyfat and washboard abs is “fit” (maybe not so much.) while I- who can cycle 30 miles w/o a blink, lift weights, am 35 lbs lighter than I was a few years ago, but still have “pinchable flab” on my belly- am “fat.” Yes, I’ve been called such.
the average asshole doesn’t care whether overweight people are healthy or not. all they care about is being able to ridicule someone, and they get off on it when society has their backs. Calling me “fat” doesn’t give me an incentive to work harder, it tells me I should just stop giving a fuck because I’ll never be good enough to please the likes of you. shaming people for being imperfect is what schoolyard bullies do. not (supposedly) reasonable adults.
I sure hope this is just talk, I’d hate to think you wasted a minute of life looking for the approval of random judgmental asshats who have themselves done zip to demonstrate that their good opinion is worth having. Actually, the very fact that they believe it is acceptable and just to call you out for your weight, judge you for it, decide who you are and that you are somehow less, in itself says that this person is probably not someone whose good opinion is worth caring about, because they clearly have issues and are ill-mannered in dealing with them.
I think you are a fat person who is justifying why it is okay to be fat. I am saying there is no more justification for it than for smokers to justify smoking and the like. Your habits make you fat. It is highly unlikely you have some ailment that cannot be treated and that is why you are fat. You are indulging in the fat acceptance mentality. In the old days, you would not have been accepted. You want to be accepted and want people to think an obese body is normal. It isn’t.
Change your habits. Eat a healthful diet of reasonable proportions and exercise daily, even if it is just taking a walk or climbing stairs. Don’t try to fool everyone that you can’t do anything about it, that you’ve tried so hard, sob sob, and etc. Eat less, exercise more is a reality: there is no magic about being at a healthy weight. Go live in Europe and other countries around the world and you will see. People are not fat like they are in the States. It is all about your habits.
Don’t believe what some of the medical community is saying: half of them are obese too.
And if you think this is harsh: too bad. You can fool yourself and maybe some others. Your problem. You’ll end up with diabetes and/or a whole host of medical issue, including arthritis because your poor old bones have been carrying around too much weight for decades.
:dubious: