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.
Just going to list links.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/552038
https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/spc3.12076
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26841729/
Too tired to offer descriptions rn. Just click through them. Also I’m locking this thread. Please listen to what fat activists are talking about. Read the links that have been provided. And fatphobia on the site will continue to be addressed.
I hope what I said was fine (I think it was). I was simply responding to the prompt and just relaying my own actual near-death experience with my poor relationship with food.
Diet and exercise don’t result in long-term weight loss for something like 95% of people
I genuinely don’t believe this unless you’re willing to present me a study on it. Everyone I’ve known that’s lost weight and kept it off did so with said method. I genuinely don’t know anyone that put the weight back on with creating a calorie deficit and exercising regularly. Please, by all means prove me wrong on this, but I just can’t believe it until otherwise proven.
I assume the argument might be related to the amount of people who relapse to their old lifestyle, but then that’s not really about diet or exercise not making you lose weight.
Edit for the next person who’s gonna misinterpret me and then get incredibly hostile over something I didn’t write: I don’t agree with this argument. I don’t think being overweight is comparable to addiction, the “relapse” terminology is what I’ve heard used in defense of this argument however, which is why I used it.
i think you should really do some introspection on why you think fat people should be obligated to diet forever or else they’re “relapsing”
I don’t think that, but thanks for the accusation. Diet culture is just another capitalist money market, it’s fadbased and meant to make money. Which is why I wrote “lifestyle changes”. I’m getting so sick of people here willfully misinterpreting something so they can assume bad faith and then get aggressive immediately.
It’s not about “dieting” forever, it’s about concrete lifestyle changes which is why diet culture fucking sucks and so many people are unsuccessful.
Assuming it’s all behavioral is one of the issues. Using the term “relapse” on this is so telling.
“Relapsing to a lifestyle”. What does this mean? What is assumed here?
500 calories a day is a massive deficit, why are you going into extremes? Changing your lifestyle is possible and living on a base caloric or running a slight deficit is not some herculean task.
Also diet culture is a fuck, which is why I mentioned life style changes, but hey thanks for misreading and flying off the handle.
Comparing weight loss to addiction.
No actually. While some obese people have some form of addiction to food, losing weight is not comparable to addiction. Addiction is comparable to addiction and people who are addicted need with a lot more than just a lifestyle change. They need healthcare, they need therapy to adress traumas, they need a lot of stuff. Following your logic you’re basically saying overweight people are sick, which seems very contrary to what you wish to advocate for.
Also in your analogy the 12-step program works? Part of it is to not be judgemental when you relapse, it’s part of the process.
I have a feeling this is gonna continue, so I’m gonna disengage here.
For what it’s worth, at the end of my few decade long “weight maintenance” the only way to maintain my then weight was opting to fast every other day entirely. Healthy? If you asked the experts, I was still too fat.
Eating is not an addiction. Eating is not the issue. Behavior is not the issue. The issue is the construct that there is some one size a body should be that everyone fits in. This is no different than other strickt categories we are being put in. The “normal” that keeps being brought up is a statistical curve that was made by an eugenist, using fit male bodies as the baseline. It is inherently a racist construct as well.
The way body size has been weaponized in pathriarchal culture and the way the medical and Western scientists took part in constructing the ideal is the issue. The way most people need to spend their lives on a diet to try and meet this ideal is the issue. The way these diets harm peoples health is the issue. The way this is used to control especially womens bodies is the issue.
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.
(I think it was).
Narrator: It wasn’t.
Because it was literally more of the same. You were also telling OP to [will themselves to] make lifestyle changes. The point plenty of others are making is that forcing oneself to act contrary to how they act without addressing the conditions that caused the original behaviour is often a road to disappointment. Recognising those conditions is vital, and a lot of people have very little real power over them.
I didn’t tell OP to do anything though. I was passing along my own experience. Unless you mean the closing statement, but that wasn’t telling them to do anything, but rather what is general knowledge of how to lose weight. It was only said as a counterpoint to my friend who does have a wildly high metabolism and what people generally do to lose weight.
I understand your intention isn’t to harm anyone, but just like with unintentional racism or unintentional transphobia, it’s harmful regardless. Fat people are not ignorant about the concept of “CICO.” Fat people have been on diets. Fat people have heard about the dangers of obesity from their doctors and probably from everyone else in their lives too.
What really gets my goat about this is that everyone here seems to be hyperaware about the reasons and consequences of the policing of bodies when it comes to transphobia or racism (to a certain extent), but then turn around and say shit that would make Foucault blush. I know here people don’t have the highest opinion of critical theory and postmodern thinkers, but y’all need to shoot the cop inside your own heads asap and start recognizing when you’re reinforcing systems of oppression or just uncritically allowing them to reproduce (not you OP, the people being fatphobic and similar).
What really gets my goat about this is that everyone here seems to be hyperaware about the reasons and consequences of the policing of bodies when it comes to transphobia
Not my experience. People will have a clear positioning on where they generally stand on trans issues, but what that actually means when we’re talking about human bodies is often lackluster even among our trans comrades. Recognizing that trans women in sports actually isn’t a complicated issue or that gender affirming care is a human right doesn’t mean you can’t have brainworms about what a woman is supposed to look like, even if you are a woman who is affected and harmed by that every single day. The brainworms run deep and ridding yourself of a lifetime of cishetnormative, misogynist, ableist and racist body propaganda is a fairly demanding task.
I need to stress that i do not mean this post (or my previous one ITT) as a callout. I’d say that you actually can’t just shoot the cop inside your head, it’s more like slowly strangling that fucker. It’s a process, it takes time, and i try to be generous here. But you need to start somewhere and you don’t do that by babystepping people, you need to make it clear that some stuff just doesn’t fly.
can’t have a post talking about fatphobia without someone talking about unhealthy food.
can’t have a post talking about fatphobia without someone wanting to concern troll about the “obesity epidemic”.
can’t have a post talking about fatphobia without someone wanting to promote losing weight.
can’t have a post talking about fatphobia without someone wanting to position their experiences with weight and weight loss as universal.
y’all literally can’t help yourselves!!! come to terms with how your implicit fatphobia is harmful and learn and grow from it!!! listen to the effort posting from people with marginalized bodies and look into to the sources they are kindly giving you!!!
Thank you for posting this. For a leftist platform the neoliberal individual responsibility stuff that comes up when weight is discussed here is disgusting.
I know there has been discussions here on why not many women are comfortable here and this imo is one of the reasons. This is really not a safe space for people with EDs, body size trauma and medical trauma. I’ve seen medical experts valorized and people with said trauma belittled.
There is a reason I block the self-improvement and fitness coms. But it seaps out from those like the thread yesterday. Such reddity strong self-hating or just fat hating people who need to read Fearing the Black Body or any feminist writings on how policing body size is tied to pathriarchy, capitalism, protestantism, eugenism and how this neoliberal self-governance stuff they do is not the Maoist taking care of the body and mind they think it is, but upholds a system of othering. The way all this impacts people in marginalized bodies is a big deal.
GOOD post
edit: worth noting that there are a lot of women on hexbear, your phrasing may imply exclusion of trans women which I assume isn’t your intention; ofc the chauvinism you describe affects trans women as well, including i’m sure many trans women who use the site.
Diet culture absolutely is a problem in our trans community, as it is in any trans community i’ve ever been in. Trans women on this site are both affected by the chauvinist policing of women’s bodies by other users and engage in such policing themselves. Disordered eating is much more common among trans people than among cis people. Fatphobia, gender dysphoria and patriarchal standards intersect in incredibly nasty ways, and a lot of us fully internalize these pressures.
your phrasing may imply exclusion of trans women which I assume isn’t your intention
You’re use of the word ‘may’ is being very generous here.
Like half the site is women lol
And trans women will experience anxiety about the size of our bodies very acutely for obvious reasons
