cw for weight/body image, of course
Usually discussions about this get overrun by chuds so I think it’d be nice to hear what people here have to say.
Personally I think it’s some good and positive ideas but they’re mixed in with potentially harmful medical misinformation.
being fat sucks and people should be better educated about how their diets affect their weight so they can make a more informed choice about whether eating that extra food is worth gaining that extra weight
on the other hand, being shitty to fat people is a huge problem in society in various different ways, so a fat acceptance movement is necessary to solve that problem. im not sure id say it’s the fat acceptance movement which we need, though, because the one we have is absolutely full of people saying incredibly dangerous and stupid stuff, like that for a lot of people it’s “impossible” to lose weight or anything along those lines, or of course the “healthy at every size” group who spread nonsense about how being overweight actually doesnt suck at all.
i see overweight people the way i see people with any medical condition. like, im not gonna be rude to someone because they have a disease or something, but im absolutely not going to say “actually having diseases is cool and not unhealthy at all”
Fat people shouldn’t get shit on for their weight, shit’s exhausting. But at the same time, I don’t think we should necessarily promote obesity with things like “fat is beautiful” because I’m in the boat of people who’d rather promote the idea that you don’t need to be beautiful to be a good person, instead of trying to spin everything as beauty. My line is that we shouldn’t encourage and look favorably at being fat, and we should try to lower the average weight and augment the overall health of society. However, this doesn’t mean that we should shit on fat people, if they’re comfortable with their own weight and aren’t dying to it, then live and let live.
I’m sorry but that kinda reads like a backhanded compliment, at least when I encounter it in the wild. The “Oh people don’t have to be beautiful to be good” stuff, fat people are fucking beautiful and deserve to feel that way, swerving into “why do we even care about beauty in the first place” whenever this is brought up unintentionally just reads as “fat people aren’t beautiful but its mean to say that so lets just ignore the whole thing”.
I don’t find trans people attractive, and most people don’t either
See how it sounds?
Fat people can be beautiful, sure, but fat itself doesn’t make them beautiful. In any case, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and we’d do better not to police a subjective idea.
Idk how you’re not policing shit when you start saying that saying “fat is beautiful” promotes obesity, like its not a literal meaning of fat cells are beautiful but that fat people are beautiful. Either way this kind of concern trolling is basically exclusively reserved for fat people when it comes to “Oh we shouldnt promote health issues” but people pretend that like a tiny text on a ciggarette packet that says “smoking kills” is equal to a global culture of bullying and dehumanizing people for being fat.
Body positivity is good. Nobody should have a complex because of how they look, and we should strive to create a society where absolute acceptance is the default. Fat acceptance is part of that, though I would prefer a more holistic approach to just focusing on one aspect of it.
I find the way that people react to the idea of fat acceptance to be extremely revealing. There’s lots of concern trolling, even ITT, about the movement - I’m sure some people attached to it have had some bad takes, but the mainstream position is not about denying medical science like some people would have you believe.
Body positivity is good. Health is also good. The line should be for people to be healthy in their bodies, whatever that looks like, a position that is hard to achieve under capitalism.
Many common health issues are primarily due to capitalist alienation, including the rampant obesity in western countries. I’ll never judge anyone for that, ever. I have to fucking sit at a desk for days on end and many others do too. The most affordable food options for me are both disgusting to my taste as well as the cruelty they inflict on both animals and people. “health” has become a commodity mostly accessible by the bourgeois
I once heard a radio interview with an obesity researcher who told that counterintuitively becoming fat didn’t have that much to do with overeating. His point was that people becomes obese over the course of several years. If excess calorie consumption alone was responsible for the weight gain, the excess weight accounted for a daily excess food intake equal to a teaspoon of sugar.
His findings were that the human body is capable of either storing or shedding energy reserves and that the body will store as much energy as possible if it predicts a shortage of food. This capability evolved back when food was scarce and survival and flood gathering depended on being part of a group and he claimed that although the mechanism had not been studied in detail there was evidence that suggested a link between obesity and mental well-being.
To me it makes sense. Fear of being excluded is ultimately fear of death. It wouldn’t be that surprising if that fear had physiological impacts by triggering survival mechanisms.
The professor didn’t make a directly anti-capitalist argument but I think there is one to be made. Under late capitalism you don’t have the sense of security in your position in society you had at previous iterations. Back in the old days if you became a mailman you could count on being a government employee for life and it was common to stay in the same workplace for decades. Unions provided networks of solidarity, community and security.
Today neoliberalism has ravaged the welfare state. Unions are a shadow of their former glory and workers are constantly monitored and assessed. Meanwhile capitalist propaganda paints an image where you have to live up to ridiculously high standards of beauty, wealth etc. to be acceptable.
All this leads to people feeling insecure and feeling they’re not good enough. I don’t think it is unreasonable to think that this contributes to the obesity epidemic.
TLDR: Capitalism makes you feel like shit and that is making you fat.
But me am get upset when it not about me, me problems exactly same as all problems
