TW for discussion of dieting and, in the comments, eating disorders.
Let us grant for a moment that being fat is unhealthy. (I’m not really sure whether it is, as I haven’t looked into the subject, so I’m stuck with the heuristic of “well, a lot of people with impressive-looking degrees say one thing, and a lot of people with blogs say the other.”)
The thing is that sustained weight loss is really hard. Of the people who have lost more than thirty pounds and sustained it for more than a year, 90% exercise at least one hour a day and 78% weigh themselves at least once a week. I think that overweight and obese people could very reasonably look at these results and say “actually I would rather not exercise that much, thank you, I’ll take the health risks.”
At the same time, focusing on weight loss means that some people will choose demonstrably unhealthy methods of losing weight, such as juice fasts, fad diets, eating so few calories that they’re literally starving themselves, smoking, etc. On a less disastrous level, a weight loss emphasis also results in really terrible advice about diet in women’s magazines (“eat candy canes, not cheese, candy canes contain fewer calories!”– this is not a straw man, this is an actual article I read).
On the other hand, a lot of advice typically given as weight-loss advice is still good for you even if you’re not looking to lose weight. It is not like eating lots of vegetables, cutting down on your sugar consumption, and exercising regularly are suddenly bad ideas if you happen to do them and still be obese afterward. For that matter, it’s not like eating nothing but cupcakes and refusing to exercise are mysteriously good for you if you happen to be thin.
So I am puzzled about why we continue to emphasize weight loss as opposed to “eat more plants and less sugar and do some form of exercise on the regular.” Why do we say “do X to lose weight!” as opposed to “to live longer” or “to be stronger” or “to be healthier” or “to be happier”? Other than diet industry profits, of course, because people trying and failing to lose weight buy lots of diet books and unused gym memberships. Which is just sad.
There was a really interesting study that came out a few years ago – IIRC, the researchers actually looked at, you know, how healthy obese people are, and divided them into three groups:
1 – People who are obese and healthy;
2 – People who are obese and have some health problems related to their obesity and some risk factors for other potential obesity-related conditions; and 3 – People whose obesity caused major health problems.
For people in category 1 and at least some people in category 2, the researchers suggested that weight loss may actually be LESS HEALTHY than maintaining their current weight, as losing weight puts a lot of stress on your body.
All medical interventions should be subject to a risk/benefit analysis, and in an ideal world a doctor would be able to look at an overall picture of your health and say “Yeah, judging based on X and Y and Z you’re better off maintaining your current weight”, but doctors are humans and no less brainwashed by FAT=BAD and THIN=GOOD than lay people. I actually AM one of those unicorns who’ve maintained a 30 pound + weight loss, and I STILL have had medical practitioners urge me to get my BMI down (it hovers between the top end of “normal” and the bottom end of “overweight”). I’m like DUDE I’M A GODDAMN VEGAN WHO RIDES A BICYCLE EVERYWHERE AND IS CURRENTLY LACTATING I HAVE GENUINE METABOLIC NEEDS HERE. Sheesh.
Is it actually possible to eat well and exercise and be obese? Genuine question, I’m curious. I only have anecdotal evidence, but all the people I know who are overweight either don’t care about their diet and make no pretenses towards exercising, or they “eat well” by eating gigantic servings of whole wheat pasta instead of white pasta and the like, and they “exercise” by walking 20 minutes three times a week.
@bgaesop69: Genuine question: if you read your comment again, do you find it possibly a teensy bit condescending?
It seems like everything happens sometimes. If you eat little enough and exercise enough eventually your body will have to get energy from somewhere and lose weight, but sometimes maintaining that level of energy flow imbalance might be really unhealthy. Metabolism is really, really fickle, but it still bows to limits in processing efficiency and the like.
Personally, I can’t ignore weight loss since it’s neccesary for being conventionally attractive and I value that. But I am making sure to not loose sight of stuff. And setting a damn stopping condition.
I know that there are some people who can eat way too much and not deliberately exercise and not get fat. They just subconsciously fidget more and more.
bgaesop: …what’s wrong with choosing whole wheat over white, or taking a twenty-minute walk three times a week? Those are both (AFAIK) healthier choices. Seriously, what’s your argument here? “You are not making sufficiently healthy choices to please me, therefore you are not REALLY making healthy choices and I am allowed to be contemptuous of you on the Internet”?
speaking as someone who has been glared at by her whole family for getting more butter to dip my crab in, I have thoughts on this.
policing other people’s weight is a modern way of policing their morals.
being “healthy” because “science has proved that bluh is healthy” is the same mind set for most people as being “pure” because “God says only pure people go to heaven” only it’s for secular people who would never voice the second thought and just want to live forever in their physical bodies as they have no faith in the persistence of the soul after death.
I say this because my stepmother is constantly talking about scientific facts that I’m pretty sure she doesn’t actually know how to fact check. most of them to the effect that I am too fat and this fact offends her because I’m not “taking care of myself” or “looking after my health” which is bullshit. such bullshit.
I was crippled pretty badly for a bit more than a year by a slipped disc, I also lost a lot of weight because I spent all my money on art supplies and could not walk to the grocery store to buy food, nor stand in a kitchen to prepare it, and so I was a pathetic skinny cripple. getting constant feedback about how healthy and good I looked on the rare days I could stand up straight.
so they don’t care about health. they care about conforming to morality but they don’t want to call it that. if you are thin that “shows” or is assumed to show that you care about conforming to society enough to put real physical effort into it. an out of control body belies an out of control mind. (see also: unruly hair, and unconventional clothes)
my sister has “food problems” and I guess I would too if I didn’t see through all this bullshit. also, I like being active and working out, and I enjoy eating fresh food. now that I can do those things I am not as skinny as I was and quite frankly I like it that way.
also you can get most of the benefits of physical activity just by walking for a half hour every day, (source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUaInS6HIGo ) and you don’t even need to do it all at once. that hardly interrupts my busy schedule of work and being a nerd on the internet.
Maybe. It depends on what your goals happen to be. ‘Physically fit’ is undescriptive.
Want to run an extremely long distance in the shortest possible amount of time? It won’t do to be carrying around more mass than necessary.
Want to fling a large amount of weight over your head and keep it there? As long as your weight doesn’t impact your flexibility, more mass means more muscle.
Want to know you can carry someone out of a burning building, double-time? Got to be somewhere in between the two.
Want to reduce your risk of heart disease and so forth? Walking might be enough.
An hour a day of exercise is not actually that much, when you realize it can include things like housework and walking and so forth. I remember a blogger who was involved in that kept-at-least-30-pounds-off-over-a-year study. They didn’t believe the number of times she reported going up and down stairs every day — that counted as exercise, in their book, and they didn’t think anyone would spontaneously do over 20 flights of stairs a day. Well, if you live in a three-story house (or counting the basement it’s three stories), and you’re chasing a toddler, that’s just how it works.
@ozy: the issue is that they’re doing something that will predictably not have the results they claim they want, then complaining about not getting thinner, then often giving up on the idea of healthy food and exercise being able to do anything about weight, and declaring loudly via blog posts that it is impossible to lose weight &c &c.
@picklefactory tone argument much?
@bgaesop69
I completely agree. I would also like to add that declaring loudly via blog posts that losing weight is impossible and downplaying the health risks of obesity is unethical because it discourages somebody who may otherwise be motivated to put forth the effort to improve their health situation.
A lot of obese people have EATING DISORDERS. I think fat shaming clouds the issue: You can’t cure an eating disorder by losing weight. It’s the other way around. And, generally, it’s far better to be obese without an eating disorder than to be thin with one.
There are all kinds of true statements about weight loss (e.g. “you lose weight if you eat less than you consume”) that aren’t really very useful for people who have complicated issues with their diet. They’re more useful for people who eat normally and for some reason or other have gained a little weight. If you’re not obsessed about your diet to begin with it might not be a big deal to cut out some of the energy-intensive foods and maybe take up some kind of regular excercise.
People with eating disorders should be encouraged to learn to eat without shame, and to have a healthy, not obsessive relation to their diet.
Somehow I think fat people get enough reinforcement from the media, their families, their doctors, and their coworkers that being fat is bad and wrong and terribly unhealthy that you probably don’t have to worry about a few blog posts undoing the Righteous Shaming Agenda. I’m all for not oversimplifying issues, but even if you aren’t on board with HAES I’m pretty sure the anti-fat crowd is far, far more guilty of spreading damaging lies.
I believe this is the article people were looking for about fitness vs. fatness. General scientific consensus appears to be that being overweight is an indicator of poor health rather than the cause. If the person says “actually, I get an hour of exercise every day”, then give it up on the fat-shaming, please.
Goddammit people keep responding to asshole comments before I can delete them. >.>
bgaesop: Yes. That is the problem I am attempting to solve by arguing that we ought to de-emphasize weight loss and emphasize people making whatever changes to their lives that they want to to improve their health, regardless of whether it leads to weight loss.
Abubaca: What Gametime said. If shaming people into not being fat worked we wouldn’t have any fat people. Also, why are we assuming that Arbitrary Fat Person is necessarily less healthy than Arbitrary Thin Person? When I spend all day on the computer and eat cookie dough for dinner, is it somehow healthy because I’m borderline underweight? o.O
Well, the answer to the question of why we keep stressing weight loss rather than just advice that we know make people healthier regardless of weight, it’s probably that even people who genuinely believe themselves that it’s health they care about, even lots of doctors and so on (since these people are also merely human and prone to bias), actually care more about prettiness. And thin=pretty.
This is why thin unhealthy people (doesn’t describe me NOW, since I’m thin and healthy nowadays, but totally described me when I was young) are ADMIRED for their unhealthy lifestyle rather than shamed; people say stuff like “oh wow, incredible how you can eat like that and never exercise and still be thin”.
I’ve totally gained a new respect for people who make the choice to stay fat rather than struggling like mad to keep thin after my own experiment in weight GAIN. I’ve always been thin, but I wanted to be bigger. And yeah, I got bigger, put on seven kilos over a course of two years, by lifting heavy weights at the gym and EATING LIKE MAD. I ate regular food but TONS of it, so basically, all day and every day I felt super full all the time. It was like “uh, time to eat again” and then forcing down some more food three-four hours since the last gargantuan meal; I ate three BIG cooked meals a day plus sandwiches and fruit in between, and never felt hungry during all that time.
Then I fell ill and lost it all again. Regained a little bit of it after I got well again, but I just couldn’t be BOTHERED with going on that weight gain road again, since it took SO much effort and required me to constantly think about food.
Now, I guess that losing weight is probably WORSE in terms of effort than putting it on; constantly having food urges is probably much worse than constantly feeling really full. So I totally understand why people stay fat rather than go through whatever it takes to go thin,
I also think it’s understandable that people talk about losing weight while not taking drastic enough measures to do so. There’s super-heavy social pressure on fat people to lose weight. So it’s comprehensible that some people a) don’t take the steps necessary to really lose weight, since that would be super hard for them, b) still makes some kind of show of taking those steps, because of social pressure.
More thoughts: Sometimes people set up this dichotomy that either GENES are the sole cause of your weight, or it all depends on CHARACTER, and thin people have good character while fat people have bad character. That’s a totally false dichotomy.
“At the same time, focusing on weight loss means that some people will choose demonstrably unhealthy methods of losing weight, such as juice fasts, fad diets, eating so few calories that they’re literally starving themselves, smoking, etc” Totaly agree I am seeing it all the time!
A really nice discussion up there, pretty much as always on Ozy’s blog:)
Anyone here saw the documentary by comedian and former health writer Tom Naughton “Fathead” http://www.fathead-movie.com/index.php/about/ ? It might be that the whole weight loss industry, including conventional dietologists (those in favour of low-fat diet) are doing quiet the opposite of actually helping people who want to lose weight. There is a community in reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/keto that bases their healthy eating life style on different than contemporary conventional approach which is based on the ideas expressed in the above mentioned documentary and scientific research grounding it. My partner who lives by keto diet says it is like “diet atheism”. People here who struggle with obesity and haven’t found their own way of keeping their body mass the way they like it, might want to check the links above and see if it is of any use to them.
Uh… Isn’t the standard method for weight loss nowadays low-carb high-fat? It’s been years since I last met someone who did a low-fat diet. If LCHF is really as magical as its adherents claim it is, pretty soon the entire western world is gonna be thin.
Ughhh…
I’d start by saying that the whole shaming thing is indeed a huge problem. I’ve never really understood it.
@Picklefactory: You. Forgot. Looking. Nice. Or being able to unfakeably signal one or more of the above. It’s still a legitimate goal.
@Pencilears: That is sometimes accurate but I’d be a lot slower to ascribe motivations to people. If I had a friend or family member who kept doing things I believed to be self-destructive, I would try to do something about it. (although it does sorta sound like they are being righteousness-optimizing rather than health-optimizing.) Also, there are reasons for the whole conforming thing. Not always good reasons, but they exist.
- I’d add that prettyness (including in some significant non-weight ways) is not completely orthogonal to health.
@bgaesop69: tone argument much?
Not usually, but I couldn’t bring myself to take you seriously.
@Engineer Krause: You. Forgot. Looking. Nice. Or being able to unfakeably signal one or more of the above. It’s still a legitimate goal.
It certainly is, but also I think “looking nice” is even more difficult to define than “physically fit”. I feel like people get real busy policing each other and forget what a huge difference individual preferences make in this area. For instance, if there’s a picture of a woman that I find attractive in one of your lowest-common-denominator areas of the Internet the usual thing I’ll see in its comments is “HAW HAW LOOKS LIKE A DUDE”.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘unfakeably signal one or more of the above’, care to elaborate?
@Tapio Peltonen: A lot of obese people have EATING DISORDERS.
Or they simply have habits that are not conducive to weight loss. Habits are freakishly powerful and difficult to re-train. Doing so requires a great deal of willpower, and some folks have their willpower fatigued by the other things that are going on in their life.
@bgaesop69 tone argument much?
I don’t think you can call “tone argument” when you’re arguing for the privileged position. Also, the answer to your first question is yes.
I feel like people get real busy policing each other and forget what a huge difference individual preferences make in this area.
I didn’t say this quite right. I didn’t mean to imply that YOU were policing — I mean that I think the policing is so continuous and prevalent that it feels like there’s only one way for men / women to be conventionally attractive.
closetpuritan: Why not? The problem with a tone argument is that it’s a logical fallacy– the tone an argument is said in has nothing to do with whether the argument is true. The sky is blue even if I say “FUCK YOU ASSHOLE THE SKY IS BLUE.” The tone argument doesn’t become less fallacious when it’s used to support an pro-SJ position. (Also I hate rules that are like “it’s okay for Us to do Thing X but not okay for Them to do Thing X.”)
When I was growing up my mother wanted me to lose weight. I was around ten when the conversations about eating too much and being too fat began. The reason wasn’t my health. I was a healthy little girl with some body fat. The reason was, of course, that I would look so much prettier if I lost weight.
When I finally lost weight my senior year my mother said I could stop because I finally looked pretty enough. She also added that if I needed to see a doctor about depression she’d be willing to take me.
My mother loves me a great deal and I love her. But like so many people in today’s society my mother thinks that the only way to be beautiful is to be thin.
It’s taken me a long time to deal with the lessons my mother taught me. I make sure to teach my daughter that being healthy and eating right with occasional treats is more important than being perfectly thin. She gets a lot of garbage shoved at her from all directions. I try to help her keep perspective on the garbage. It isn’t easy.
The morbid irony is that people don’t give this much shit to smokers. “It’s their choice” and “if they want to kill themselves, fine.” and blah blah blah. Yet smoking is far, FAR worse for you than obesity ever could be, and although it’s declined since we realized it was bad, that decline has largely plateaued lately.
If it were truly about health and long life, rather than appearance, smoking and excessive drinking would earn far more social condemnation than over-eating and not-exercising. But it’s not. It’s about conforming to social norms, being “pretty”, or similar trivial crap.
I’m fond of saying that anyone who would respect me even slightly less if I were just a brain in a jar isn’t someone whose opinion matters to me.
Does anyone have any good (supported by evidence) explanations as to why it is that obesity is such an exclusively modern phenomenon that don’t clash with the idea that if you don’t eat too many calories and do exercise then you will not be obese? (for instance, is it the case that there are people who are much less efficient at extracting nutrients from food than they are calories, so to get enough vitamin c would have to eat ten oranges where someone else may only need one, and so before the modern surplus of food era, they had approximately the proper amount of calories and were chronically malnourished nutrient-wise?)
@ozy: thank you for the tone argument response. +1 respect.
@MCA and others: is it okay of me to wish we had a smoking-shaming cultural norm the way we do a fat shaming one so I didn’t have to smell it? Or rather, to wish we treated tobacco the way we do marijuana (on college campuses)-it’s fine to smoke it, so long as you do it in an inconspicuous location where no one can see or smell you doing it.
@MCA and others again: do y’all just not care about physical abilities at all? I mean, is running and climbing on things and exploring nature and urban environments and being able to go outside and do fun things with your body just not something you value?
bgaesop69: I think you do get obese from eating more calories than you burn, but I also think this rarely has anything to do with character. In modern societies there are bigger meals at restaurants and cafés than there used to be, more food everywhere, and people walk less. It’s still the case, for instance, that Swedes are thinner on average than Americans, which could easily be explained by the fact that Swedes go by public transport more (which doesn’t take you from door to door) and Americans go by car more – but it seems implausible that Swedes simply have better characters than Americans.
I also don’t think that some people are thin and some obese in the very same society because some people have good character and some bad. I think all kinds of circumstances probably play a part here – including metabolism, but also whether you get an apartment on top of the underground station or five blocks away for instance, and very much whether you have a bigger or smaller appetite. Some really thin people feel that they eat whatever they like and whenever they like – but if you look at what they eat, it’s actually not that much, at least not spread out over a day or a week. They simply have small appetites by nature. (This isn’t the explanation of why I’M thin, but it seems to fit lots of thin people I’ve met.)
@Dvärghundspossen: I’m not sure what you mean by “character.” If we’re going to try the virtue ethics experiment on this blog, as that one post about personal piety suggests, then I can see a lot of virtues that would make a really big difference. Heck, it can even come as a side effect of other virtues: if you want to not pollute, and so consider it virtuous to bicycle instead of drive a car, that will have advantageous health and weight related side effects, as you point out.
Well, I see this thread exploded before I got a chance to state my case. I realize I could have been more tactful, but I stand by my previous comment.
Anyway, I never said shaming fat people into losing weight works. I also never said that being thin is necessarily healthy.
All I said is that telling people that it’s impossible to lose weight in a healthy way (it totally isn’t), and telling people that obesity doesn’t have health risks (it totally does) is unethical because neither is true. In essence, I said lying to people is unethical. I didn’t think my anti-lying stance was a controversial opinion and I don’t think it’s fair to call me an asshole for it.
If a fat acceptance person were to say “I understand the risks of obesity, but I really like eating pizza so I’d rather take the risks than give up pizza” I have no problem with that. I use this logic myself to justify partaking in my many dangerous hobbies.
But if a BMXer was telling everyone BMX is perfectly safe, nobody ever gets injured, and wearing a helmet doesn’t really do you any good, that would not sit well with me.
bgsaeop: Okay, put it this way: I don’t think the difference between most thin people and most obese people is that the thin people put a mental effort into doing the right choices whereas obese people don’t. I rather think it’s more common among obese people than among thin ones to put mental effort into eating and exercising.
First of all: Thank you, Ozy, for writing this post. I don’t think I have commented here before, but I certainly have followed the blog. As a fat person (BMI of approximately 45 for what it’s worth) the heading made me anxious at first because I did not know what to expect. The content made me quite happy, though.
It’s hard for me not to ramble about this topic since it is so personal and emotionally charged for me… however some of the comments here seem to steer in a direction that make me really uncomfortable. I am one of those fat people with an eating disorder that Tapio Peltonen mentioned – except that my eating disorder does not exactly look like the eating disorder that most people imagine when they think of a fat eating disordered person, and the recovery that I have been working on is not measurable in lost weight. I have certainly had bouts of full blown binge disorder in the past, but I also have restricted quite severely and the only thing that has kept me from purging is that I am either stupid to make myself puke or that I really do not have a strong gag reflex. The thing is: Being fat makes it almost impossible to get treatment for my specific brand of disordered eating. Every single treatment program for binge eating disorder I have ever found has to some degree focused on weight loss – even though weight loss does NOT always follow a normalization of eating habits in binge eaters, and even though there is some research that suggests that dieting for weight loss can actually cause binge eating disorder.
As a former chubby girl who grew into a fat woman, I cannot remember at time in my life when I was not told to restrict my food intake. As a kid, I wanted to please the adults, and tried to comply – which usually meant eating less than I was hungry for. As a result, I started to sneak food and developed full blown binge-eating disorder by the time I was around 13 or 14. There were other factors that probably contributed – the constant bullying by my classmates at that time did not really help, for example. Yet, from what I can tell my eating disorder and my resulting very high weight was very much a result of being encouraged to restrict food in the first place. (And for the record: I lost between 80 and 100 pounds at least four times in my life. And I gained back more than I lost every single time.)
This goes hand in hand with the way that fat people are treated in general. We are supposed to exercise, yet exercise instructors often have a) no clue how to adapt a given exercise for a fat body and b) are quite often very fat-phobic. There are hardly any exercise clothes in my size, either. In addition people have totally unrealistic expectations what I can do at my current weight and what I cannot do. For example, I live on the fifth floor in a building without an elevator. Getting up the stairs is really not a big deal, even though I would not describe myself as physically fit, and even though I do not get half the exercise I probably should get. I do not want to set myself up as an example of a “good fatty” who is somehow the “exception”. The point is: My relatively unfit fat body can still do a lot more than the stereotype of a fat person (who also has asthma!) would suggest. Yet, those stereotypes actually harm me whenever I do go exercise. In every single exercise class I have taken I felt as if I had to proof to people that a) I am not lazy and b) I am not weak. That is some really fucked up shit right there.
Eating is another topic. I do eat more than a lot of thin people I know – at least when I am not restricting but eating according to internal hunger signals. Yet, I usually do not eat the mountains of food that a lot of people think someone of my size is eating. And I have gotten harassed in public for eating – pretty much independent of what I was eating. The thing is: Fearing the next negative comment whenever I eat in the cafeteria, or just thinking what my colleagues might think when they see me eating is not really conductive to enjoying my food or to tuning in with hunger and fullness signals – both things that in my book are part of non-disordered, normal eating.
The thing is: All that I want from people is to not interfere with making peace with my body. I have reasons when I choose not to go on the next diet. No, my body will not automatically lose weight when I eat according to internal hunger signals and exercise regularly, at least not enough to make me not “obese” anymore. And I am not automatically uninformed about nutrition just because I am fat. I am trying my very best to live as healthy as I can in the body that have, and I really would appreciate it if the people around me would stop making that harder for me. Sure, my choices might be unusual, but I have reasons for making them considering my specific background. It’s okay for other people to make other choices. But I think I at least deserve the respect to have my choices considered as valid. However, right now this rarely is the case.
I have some issues with this whole fat people are fat because they’re happy being fat and don’t want to bother losing weight by doing healthy things.
Some people are overweight because of health issues. Some of those issues affect them in such a way that their bodies store fat or don’t process food in a good way. Some overweight people gain weight because they have to take medication for other health issues and one of the side affects is weight gain. The initial good of medication that fixes one issue can often override the need to be the thin that is socially acceptable. For some people they cannot lose weight because of health issues that would be made worse by exercise and their diets can be restricted only so much.
There are reasons that fat people are fat and it’s not just because they want to be fat or they don’t care if they’re fat or they’re angry because fat isn’t socially acceptable.
However, if there are people out there like that, I see no reason to chastise them if they are aware of their health and are ensuring they are the only ones affected by their dietary and exercise habits. (One example would be parents who force their children to eat as they do and thus put the children’s health at risk. This includes parents that starve their kids or parents that force their kids to over eat.)
Also, these papers might be useful when discussing how much sense it makes to encourage people to lose weight/diet (as opposed to encouraging them to eat a varied diet and to exercise):
http://www.indiana.edu/~k536/articles/behavior/failure%20Garner%201991.pdf
http://motivatedandfit.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Diets_dont_work.pdf
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0026049584901306#
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/40/2/193/
In essence, we can argue for ever if it is possible for the majority of fat people to lose weight and keep it down or not – fact is, the majority of them won’t. Plus, the ones that do succeed (temporarily or permanently) will actually need significantly fewer calories to maintain their new weight than people who have always been thin, and the ones that do not succeed might end up being heavier and/or develop an eating disorder. So while I support each and every individuals right to try to lose weight, I really do not see why it is so hard get (professional) support for weight-neutral approaches to health.
Maybe fat isn’t about deciding to be fat or completely unchangeable for life. They can both be true!
Just like how someone can be born poor, but earn lots of money later in their life–so it’s changeable, and it does relate to effort in some degree–but a poor person can’t just make a decision to get rich and then it happens.
It’s a bad analogy in many obvious ways, but maybe that gets the idea across?
Actually, given the evidence that I am aware of, Cliff is right. However, the question remains which factor is more important. It is quite usual to hear the argument that, “of course some people have to work harder, but than that’s just what they have to do” while I would argue that for some (many) people losing weight and keeping it off is so hard and associated with so many unwanted side effects that it is just not worthwhile or even close to impossible – even if the respective person would like to be thinner. (Which is pretty much in line with what Dvärghundspossen said earlier).
Re: tone argument: I think I’d be more willing to go with “everyone should be polite” than “no one should be polite unless they feel like it”. My internal thinking is something along the lines of, “everyone should make some effort to be polite, but people who are dealing with frustrating shit will have to expend more effort to be polite, and although I can’t tell the internal state of everyone on the interwebz, people for whom the topic is more frustrating should get more leeway on politeness. Being on the non-privileged side is a heuristic for this.” I’m a little leery of “our side gets to do X” as well, but I think there’s an argument to be made that goes beyond “side X gets to do this”.
Getting to this thread evidently late and highly bemused…
About a year ago, I got into roller derby. Derby’s sort of unique in several respects; one of which being that it’s very physically demanding, but several different body types are ideal for various roles within it, and another of which being that thanks to the combination of subcultures it came out of, body policing is Very Socially Unacceptable. Commenting aloud that someone’s hot pants make their ass look fat will probably get you beaten to death by the entire team as a light warmup; there’s not a lot of pressure to be *thin*, though the league will pour it on to be *fit* and athletically capable. Nobody who’s so heavy and out of shape they can’t become fit will even pass the skills test, but it was a surprise to me how little that correlates to even my own ideas of what that actually LOOKS like.
So, yeah. One of the things I learned is that women who at a glance in street clothes would be “obese” can be vastly more physically fit in terms of speed, power, stamina, and agility than even the average “I avoid junk food and exercise three times a week” person, and eat just as well or better besides, and still be big even after years of this. Sometimes big is just your body type, and as with Dvar’s example, will take enormous effort beyond “eating reasonably well and exercising some”, to change.
I’ve also watched the physical changes that happen to women who come into our league, including in myself. Five months after I joined I went to a party with friends I hadn’t seen since well before, and several exclaimed at how different I looked. One close-but-physically-distant friend asked me how much I’d lost- thirty pounds at least? Truth was I’d lost maybe five. I LOOKED different, and I’d lost clothing sizes, but all I’d done was trade off fat for muscle mass. My body likes being the approximate size it is, though what I do and how I eat will change what proportion of my mass is what.
If anyone wants to see a pretty complete list of the influences on obesity, there’s a nice chart here. Hint: there are more than “calories in” and “calories out”. DebraSY also has some interesting discussion (limited to causes for the “obesity epidemic”, not why individual people are fat who may still have been [less?] fat if they’d been born 30 years earlier) here.
Ozy: Let us grant for a moment that being fat is unhealthy. (I’m not really sure whether it is, as I haven’t looked into the subject, so I’m stuck with the heuristic of “well, a lot of people with impressive-looking degrees say one thing, and a lot of people with blogs say the other.”)
There are also a lot of people, both people with blogs and people with degrees, who say that fat does have, or probably does have, an effect on health, but fat’s effect on health tends to be overhyped by the media. (What? The media sensationalizes stuff?) And tends to be given more emphasis than other things that have an equal or greater effect on health but are less easily visible/less moralized.
Abubaca: All I said is that telling people that it’s impossible to lose weight in a healthy way (it totally isn’t),
Impossible? No, although I almost never see FA people saying it’s “impossible to lose weight”, whether the “healthy” qualifier is added or not. (Maybe occasionally in comments? I don’t think any prominent bloggers have argued that.) LOSING weight is the “easy” part. I DO see a lot FA people say that it’s highly unlikely that someone who loses weight, however it is lost, will keep it off for 5+ years, because that’s what the science says. And if you do regain the weight, you’re worse off health-wise than if you’d stayed at the same high-but-stable weight. I guess looking backwards, if you lost weight in a way that would be healthy if you hadn’t regained it, but you did regain it, you could say that you didn’t lose weight in a healthy way. But I don’t think that’s what you meant.
telling people that obesity doesn’t have health risks (it totally does)
This one is more mixed, but there are FA bloggers who believe that fat does/probably does have health risks.
@bgaesop69
@MCA and others again: do y’all just not care about physical abilities at all? I mean, is running and climbing on things and exploring nature and urban environments and being able to go outside and do fun things with your body just not something you value?
Are you talking about being a brain in a jar or being fat? Because being a brain in a jar would exclude doing those things, but for most people being fat would not. I mean, yeah, I’d probably run faster/with fewer walk breaks if my BMI was <25, but I can explore nature just fine right now, thanks. I can certainly walk fast enough that I'm going too fast to notice little nature-y details.
Okay, here goes my opinion.
1) We fall into the same trap whether we argue it’s better to be fat, thin, or even somewhere in the middle. We’re making people wrong/bad/unhealthy PERIOD. There is no answer because judgment is 100% constructed. Even the science that supports any given argument is constructed – i.e. http://jezebel.com/5960255/how-to-have-the-best-pregnancy-ever (though this article ridicules pregnancy advice, it could easily be about diet)
2) If people really take themselves on in a big way and live into their possibility of being the great, powerful, amazing people they already are, and they shed fear/doubt/pretense/whatever that holds them back… what would they look like? would they choose what they’ve been choosing? no one can say. it’s a personal choice. i know for me that means i get my butt to the gym 5x a week whether i feel like it or not (feelings = not who i am). to some people, going to the gym daily may not be part of their greatness, and i get that. who am i to judge them? for me, getting to the gym isn’t about actually going to the gym and being physically fit. for me, it’s an expression of gratitude that i have 4 working, healthy limbs and who am i not to be thankful for my body and care for it as such? and it’s the integrity – i’m committed to keeping my body that way so i can continue to be my greatness. i’m not condescending to people who don’t feel moved to be at the gym or eat their vegetables – it’s their choice. if they don’t feel moved in the same way, what does move them? that’s what i care about. what are you about? what are you up to in the world?
health isn’t solely physical appearance. it isn’t exclusively physical fitness or only diet. it isn’t based entirely in how we feel, either. it’s all of those things, together, as they call you into being the amazing person you already are.
Oh, also, I’d like to bring this up as the single most significant (to me!) reason that weight loss is so hard: Why Change Is So Hard: Self-Control Is Exhaustible.
In the spirit NS,WATM, I’m gonna bitch about the opposite situation for male weight!
I’m one of those fucking assholes that is slim and can eat one large human family per day without putting on any weight whatsoever. Apparently this is some kind of superpower (it’s not, I’m hungry all the goddamn time and can’t put on muscle to save my life).
Even then I’m getting weird shit from all kinds of people:
1) my mother, who tells me I’m “very thin” every fucking time I see her (as if this is literally news to me)
2) women my own goddamn age saying “get some meat on them bones!” while I’m trying to eat my friggin lunch and would probably throw an absolute shitfit if I countered with “you could probably give me some of yours”
3) the media in general asserting that if you don’t look like you’re made of giant lego then not only will women not find you attractive, not only are you Not A Real Man, but you should also expect to be pushed around/physically threatened from time to time by men who have put the effort in (well what do you expect, pansy?)
4) Doctors constantly assuming I exercise a healthy amount (I do ZERO, ZIP, NADA) and not doing much to convince me I should do more as a result. I can’t blame them entirely for my total lack of motivation to exercise, but I’ve never been sat down and told I’m going to die early if I don’t start.
I’m almost 26. I have seriously only recently started feeling okay about my body (I’m not even that skinny, you can’t even see my goddamn ribs “:|), and that’s totally off my own back. There’s seriously nothing in the way of support for this kind of body image problem unless you’re literally anorexic. There’s no fucking TV-lesbian version of Gok Wan telling skinny guys they’re sexy; skinny-chaser ain’t even a concept. In fact, the only word ever gets applied to this form of attractiveness is “prettyboy”, a word made from words usually applied to women and children, respectively.
Really couldn’t give a shit about them, sorry. I’d rather develop skills and train my mind than my body. In fact, if we all did that the world would be a lot less shitty. Physical fitness is massively overrated.
Now imagine how lame it would be if I shamed you for not knowing how to play guitar, write a computer program, dismantle a 9/11 truther argument, understand anything in a popsci magazine or write a short story. Those are all weird, arbitrary things to base one’s self-esteem on, right? Let alone force others to live up to? Well, that’s precisely how I feel about other people’s biceps, body fat ratio or lap times.
I want to show my support for trying to get people to stop worrying about weight as the be-all and end-all.
I’m not a fat person*, but I’m probably *less* healthy than most fat people posting. I end up in the hospital on average once a year. I cost lots of $$ to the insurance company and I’m NEVER going to be healthy. And some of the hospital visits could be prevented, or at least delayed, by more self-control about what I eat. (my guts don’t work properly) Few people hassle me about what I eat, and even so, they don’t hassle me about things that would make a difference. So the “health” argument is obviously BS by counterexample.
Basically I hope that people can focus on trying to be happy and less on conforming to other people’s views on “healthy.” Fat Acceptance and Health and Every Size have helped me start come to terms with my personal struggles with eating and body image, even though I’m not the intended audience. So yeah, trying to show support and stuff and being anti-diet-culture.
*Fat person is intended to be a descriptor, not a value judgement
@Volte: Physical fitness is massively overrated.
How would you know? I think it’s awesome.