#anorexia blogs don't fucking touch my post or bastardize it for your needs

[bubbelpop2]

Being fat isn’t a bad thing. Being malnourished is.

Not only is obesity a problem in america because healthy food and access to good healthcare are super fucking expensive, but the amount of people that are both obese, and malnourished at the same time, is at a phenomenal record high. This is because processed foods are cheap and easy to make, and cheap and easy to consume. They have a lot of the energy your body needs, but none of the materials that your body needs to rebuild itself. So when you eat fast food, you’re likely to eat it in large amounts to make up for the lack of vitamins that it gives you. 

I grew up in poverty, with a shitty, neglectful dad. The only thing my dad knew how to make was spaghetti, and i was under his care. I ate so much spaghetti that I threw up. I ate so much spaghetti but was still hungry. Still tired, still not paying attention in class, still not nourished. Because spaghetti didn’t have the materials that my body and brain needed to thrive. I was surviving, but my brain’s ability to regulate thought, sleep, and emotion, was stagnated. All because the food that I had didn’t have enough nutrition. 

Let me explain further. Imagine you’re a fisherman. You fish at a pond every day. The big fish are hard to catch, but nourish you very well. The little fish are too easy to catch, there are a lot of them, and they don’t nourish you well at all. In this metaphor, the big fish are the foods that contain enough materials for your body to rebuild itself and keep up vital functions. Your brain also uses these materials to regulate everything. These materials are essential to your survival. Now, let’s go back to the little fish: these fish have way, way more energy in them than the big fish. But they have little to no building materials inside of them. You would have to eat hundreds of them a day for your body to get everything it needs. 

For rich people, who can pay people to fish for them, tell them which fish is better for them, prepare the fish, buy bigger rods and boats and nets, catching the big ones isn’t an issue. 

For poor people, who only have a stick, or their bare hands, or a net, can’t catch the big fish. They can’t afford to, and they don’t have the energy to do so. So what are they supposed to do? Just “work harder”? Go out of their way to get the big fish? Are they even able to do that? Are they disabled and physically incapable of catching the big fish? Can they just not muster up the energy to do it because of how tired they are already because their brain isn’t getting enough nutrients?

Do you see the problem yet, or should I continue?

What about rich people who didn’t use to be rich, or prefer the small fish because they aren’t used to the big fish, don’t like them, or are too lazy to go out of their way to get big fish?

Obesity isn’t a problem, it’s the result of a problem. Fat people should absolutely not be shamed. They shouldn’t be victim to jokes, and shouldn’t be afraid to be fat. In fact, someone who’s fat because they eat large amounts of “big fish” (healthy and nutrient dense foods) are far less likely to get heart disease than a skinny person who, when they do eat, eat small amounts of the little fish. Obesity isn’t a problem, at least, not all obesity. 

See, there are two different types of accumulating weight: 

gaining weight by eating healthy foods often, drinking fresh water, and exercising moderately (not exercising extremely to the point of being underweight, which has been shown to be very stressful on the body. You’re not supposed to use all of the calories you consume, you need to save some for your body to be able to think and sleep properly.)

And gaining weight because you have no other choice. You have to eat. You have to eat, and because the only thing you can eat is cheaply mass produced foods that have high amounts of energy but low amounts of materials, your body stores the energy it doesn’t need, and desperately soaks up any nutrition it can get. And not only is it cheap and easy to afford, it’s also easy to eat and easy to digest, which makes it addictive. 

The human brain is lazy, and so is the human body. The body doesn’t want to work hard for nutrients and energy. In fact, it’s designed to do it by expending the least amount of energy possible. So these foods, which are the only foods you can afford anyways, are easy to process. Easy to digest. Easy, easy, easy. Your brain likes easy. Your brain likes the word and concept of easy very much. Fast food is very addictive this way, and so are most of the cheap foods that aren’t from a restaurant but from a grocery store. Cereals, chips, bread, pasta, ice cream. All of these things are easy to digest. Which makes them very appealing, and very addictive.

And so a lot of people that have “problems” with their weight don’t understand that it’s not bad to be fat. It’s bad to be malnourished. 

Your brain needs materials to survive and think and work properly. A prison study showed that when supplements that provide the proper vitamins and minerals that they need along side of their unhealthy prison food reduced violence by a whopping 39%. But that’s not the only report of proper nutrition reducing emotional instability. 

The fast food industry is predatory. It takes all of the things that your brain is designed to love, and enhances them. Which causes enhanced reactions. Have you ever felt your mouth water at the thought of a deep fried chicken strip with cheese sauce and msg, and then moaned when you bit into it? It’s designed to be addictive, and a lot of fast food companies and even regular food companies like grocery stores add sugar and msg to everything. In case you don’t know what msg is, it’s a chemical that’s made up of all of the things that our brains love. It’s not harmful, but it’s very, very delicious, and very, very addictive. Hell, msg is in the official KFC secret recipe. 

“Colonel's secret blend of herbs and spices? It came very close, yet something was still missing. That's when a reporter grabbed a small container of the MSG flavor-enhancer Accent (how did that get in the test kitchen?) and sprinkled it on a piece of the fried chicken. That did the trick. Our chicken was virtually indistinguishable from the batch bought at KFC. (Does KFC add MSG? A KFC spokesperson confirms that it does use it in the Original Recipe chicken.)”

And the kicker? It’s not even unhealthy to be fat. It’s just unhealthy to consume products that have high energy (calories) but low building materials (vitamins, minerals, healthy fats). In fact, a lot of perfectly healthy people constantly work out to exhaustion and eat as little as possible to avoid being fat, when the fact of the matter is, that having a bit of a tummy, thighs, and hips, (for both men and women!) Is not only healthy, but we’re designed to be in that state. That’s why people keep gaining back weight time after time, diet after diet. 

Because some people? Are designed to more aggressively store body fat than others, regardless of diet or exercise. I know people that could eat an entire barn full of cows and still not have a single inch of fat on them, and I also know a lot of my fat friends don’t binge eat. They don’t eat fast food constantly, and they don’t have a lazy or unhealthy lifestyle. They’re fat, because they’re supposed to be. That’s what they’re designed to be. 

Let me repeat: being fat isn’t bad for you, unhealthy food is. You can acumulate fat, and still be healthy. Fat doesn’t NOT mean unhealthy, under any circumstances. And in fact, fat people often go on to lead normal, productive lives. My teacher, for instance, is fat. But she’s also a math genius that use to work for the National Nuclear Security Administration as an Engineer until she came back to teach in her hometown. And she was fat. 

To be honest, weight has zero to do with what you can accomplish. Nutrition, sleep, water, and a healthy mindset that comes from good coping mechanisms and therapy does. And the fact that poor people don’t have access to.. most of these? Is the cherry on the cake. Making us unable to think is the first step in us being complacent. The government not providing proper mental and physical care, and also not providing good and healthy food/supplements, combined with the negative stigma around being overweight, is a system designed not to hurt just the fat: but to hurt the poor.