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.
The reason Ozempic is used for weight loss is because it slows down your digestion and reduces appetite and cravings. It literally just makes you eat less. How is that an argument against CICO?
CICO is true. But, it’s not useful; we can’t measure the actual calories your body absorbs, the actual calories your body burns, nor can we control them. Yes, some actions influence it, but there’s many, many reason why ‘eating 200 fewer calories and exercising 200 calories worth of work a day’ may not lead to 400 calories worth of ‘fat loss’.
Ozempic’s most important aspects seems to be its effect on the brain (not to say its effect on digestion are unimportant). See the research showing Ozempic helping people with the gambling addictions.
Ozempic slows digestion and increases satiety in the brain, yes, but it also stimulates secretion of insulin and suppresses glucagon release (you know, the energy signaling molecules, of the sort I mentioned above–I daresay those are playing a role here). Those molecules are critically important to the way the body processes energy, and we still don’t understand that system very well (if we did, we’d be able to cure diabetes).
And even if your oversimplication here was accurate, how would that be an argument that CICO is useful? That argument amounts to telling people to ignore their biological drives, all the time, and basically forever. It’s like telling someone they need to pee less, as if that’s an easy thing to just do.
It’s useful because for most of us it’s the only way we can realistically regulate our own body weight, which a lot of people want to do. For people who struggle to do that, as well as obviously for people who chose not to, I agree that it’s completely useless and somewhat insulting medical advice. But there’s no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I’m glad you recognize that, but nonetheless, “the baby” in this case is a falsehood. See here for a real-world example: https://hexbear.net/comment/5779945
Edit: better link
Calorie tracking can be useful for some people, yes.
but, that’s not the same as CICO. We cannot know nor control actual calories in and actual calories out. Anything we do to estimate them is just that, an estimate. Sure, for some people, those estimates are close enough to be useful. But to bandy CICO around as an absolute is insulting. Unless CICO can be actually measured, it’s simply not an absolute rule in any useful sense.
And, its also pretty insulting to say for ‘most of us’ CICO is the only way to regulate body weight, when that’s not really true. There are many many other ways of losing weight outside of tracking or caring about CICO. Yes, technically, at the end of the day, it must be because of CICO, but like, why should we care enough to track that, when we can’t accurately track that?
