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.
What you said was not fine, for the record. Frankly, formerly fat people are some of the worst about this.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5764193/
Again, I highly recommend the resources listed above as a starting point. u/khizuo listed some great info as well.
That article doesn’t claim any numbers and only discusses the physiological and psychological responses that cause people to stop maintaining their diets - the central concept is that diet and exercise will result in long term weight loss, but issues around perception (both of self and how much they’re consuming), appetite, support, coping mechanisms and more make it difficult for many people to maintain the diet and exercise long term without additional intervention. Literally, they put the weight back on because they stopped the dieting and exercise.
Health is more complex than just your weight, and going on a diet isn’t an easy or simple undertaking, but we’re not doing fucking calorie-denialism here.
Ok it says 80% of the weight lost was gained back in 5 years and it’s a meta-analysis of 29 different studies so that’s a huge dataset. There’s also some anti-fat bias in the study, but regardless, the implication here is that all the people in all the studies fucked up because they couldn’t stick to a diet and exercise plan longterm. As a leftist, that explanation comes up short for me.
But frankly, this is what I didn’t want to do in this thread.
“We’re not doing calorie denialism here.”
This is the problem. You think my body burns calories at the same rate as your body? You think the human body is a simple machine where you input 500 calories into my body and your body and our bodies process, store and burn them the same way? It’s far more complex than “CICO” and I’m fucking sick to death of thin people preaching about the SiMpLe sCiEnCE. I’m not doing it. Don’t bother responding, I do not have it in me to do the back-and-forth.
The OP specifically asked thin people to STFU, listen, do some self-crit, and do some fucking reading. It’s not an invitation to debate weight loss shit with me. Read the responses from fat people in this thread and fucking do better. It’s exhausting.
What do you mean “as a leftist”? It’s incredibly immaterial to just disbelieve that large lifestyle changes are extremely difficult to make and maintain. Ask anyone who’s broken a simple habit like nail biting - it takes a lot of time and effort to make small changes to unnecessary habits, and reducing your food intake and doing more exercise are incredibly big changes with lots of material conditions to get in the way. How easy do you think it is to stick to your diet when you’ve had a really shitty day at work, or go out and exercise when it’s cold and raining? That’s exactly why the study recommends maintenance visits - people checking up, advising, and encouraging them so they can overcome the many obstacles in their way. Just because “diet and exercise” are 3 words doesn’t mean they’re easy to stick to.
Hey, I don’t mean to make this thread more unpleasant for you, but as a thin person myself, and one who absolutely hates the CICO garbage bullshit argument, I would like to point out that this is less about thin vs fat and more along the lines of the trans debate, where one side, which knows absolutely fuck-all about biology, tries to insist that its oversimplified understanding of the biology at issue is the One True Answer (and in case I’m being unclear, in this analogy the CICO people are the transphobic “muh chromosomes” types).
As someone who has studied biology, I would like to point out to these people that the body reacts to its own energy state (rich, poor, somewhere in between) in a wide variety of ways. One of the most important cellular signaling molecules is cyclic AMP, which is the depleted version of ATP, the basic energy storage molecule of life. When there’s a bunch of cyclic AMP around, the cell (and by extension the body, if this is the case in other regions as well) adjusts its energetic behavior accordingly.
The idea that this doesn’t work in reverse is, frankly, very silly.
Also, to all you nonbiologists arguing here: if it’s entirely diet and exercise, why is Ozempic so effective in comparison to such a regimen, hmmm? Maybe it’s because CICO is and has always been bullshit, eh?
