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.
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!!!
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Na this shit is so real. Why the hell is it ok for people to just tell you about what they think you should do whenever it’s about body weight. Bro, we aren’t talking about that.
Hey so I have a question as someone who was morbidly obese last year, around 260 pounds, and I’m now currently at 190. I’m still overweight and I don’t view being “thin” as some optimal goal or anything especially nowadays, in where body standards are more open.
Anyway, my question is more about acceptance, I’m lucky enough to never deal with anything explictily fatphobic, though I think we have a different definition of what fatphobic is. Is a CW on discussions of how to lose weight, dieting, calorie deficits really necessary? By all means, none of us should be forced into one body type but I think we already see a growing acceptance of said body types. In the sense that, since we won’t likely see the systemic change needed to address all the corn syrup in our food, isn’t it on us as a community to support each other to be healthier? Not for an ideal aesthetic but for us to avoid the negative effects of obesity.
