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OftenBen  ·  2035 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong

    Do you think they intend to?

Shockingly I'm not that dense or heartless.

Intention has nothing to do with it. It's a thing that happens. It's a preventable thing that happens. Can everybody be a swimsuit model? No. Are there things that can be done to stop this particular problem from killing so many people, and making life living hell for so many others? Definitely. And there is a small but tenacious group of people who use the same kind of science denialism as the anti-vaxx crowd to say that obesity isn't dangerous or unhealthy. That kind of shit has to be stamped out with a vengeance. I was bullied for being fat until I was an adult, and even then didn't escape it fully until very recently. I'm allowed to feel strongly about the issue. Weightloss is hard enough without blatant false information being pushed.

    Do you think society has made it radically more acceptable to be fat?

Significantly. It sort of has to because so many more people are fat. It was almost inevitable really. That said, it's not a good thing. Somebody is going to leave a serious illness untreated because they saw a Tess Holliday or similar figure as inspirational. That someone is going to suffer serious, life altering consequences that will also cause their friends and loved ones pain. If this happens once because someone decided it would make a loud-mouth blogger feel good to be on the cover of a magazine, that's once too many times.

We've already had the problem of unhealthy images of women (and men!) in media promoting things like bulimia, anorexia, damaging amounts of exercise in pursuit of one extreme. Let's not try to correct that by pulling the wheel hard into oncoming traffic!

If an individual had poor impulse control with regard to food in the 1400's it wasn't really an issue because the spare and accessible kcals just weren't around. These days it requires an effort of will and careful vigilance to NOT buy dogshit food CONSTANTLY. It's not even as simple as making the healthy choice over the unhealthy choice, salad over burgers because guess what, Mickey D's salad will fuck you up worse than a Big Mac so you can't just make a good choice, you have to have the time and energy to make sure that you are executing that good choice.

Yes it's hard. It's fucking terribly hard. And the poorer and more stressed, and more crunched for time you are, the harder it is. My parents are both obese on the downslope of fifty and it takes a toll on them DAILY and it absolutely destroys me to watch it happen.