#there’s healthy fat people and unhealthy thin people

[milkandhoneyfemme]

being fat is morally neutral

hey LEFTISTS I’m TALKING to you, being fat is MORALLY NEUTRAL. Stop using fatphobia to “get back” at ppl you don’t like <3

[lilac-melody]

hm.

[overexciteddragon]

I need to fucking talk about this scene BADLY

The fact that DunMeshi actually depicts starving dwarves as ripped muscular anime boys is, to me, absolutely incredible. I can't stress how often fat people starving are depicted as either skin and bones or ✨️beautiful and healthy✨️ (the latter being a body shape that they are encouraged to maintain), it's straight up a trope in so much media for skinny people to be depicted as fat in the past as if it's some "dirty secret", or for fat people to be depicted as unhealthy/ugly until they starve themselves enough to become "attractive", and on top of that the depiction of the Dehydrated Adonis Protagonist has become more and more present in our day-to-day media

Meanwhile, it's becoming more widely known that this isn't how bodies work at all; that fat isn't inherently unhealthy and that ripped bodies aren't just impossible to maintain but often quite dangerous. All of that put together, the depiction of more actors and characters that are fat, chubby, large, etc and not used as comedic relief has been so, so important to really hammer home that lean, dehydrated muscular bodies aren't necessarily something to aim for

But especially, dwarves being shown to have the same physical features as these ripped muscly characters (lean, bulging muscles, sharp cheekbones, defined pecs and neck muscles, etc) when they're starved, and that being depicted negatively is such a huge deal. This is also coming from the same anime in which one of its male protagonists is the epitome of the hero-- an athletic tall man in a shining knight's armour with a big shiny sword-- and he isn't shredded, he's got a tummy, he's got soft arms, he's clearly strong and muscular but it's all protected by a healthy layer of body fat

I'm never gonna shut up about how Dungeon Meshi has been such an incredible vehicle of body diversity with neither insidious fatphobia/queerphobia/racism nor performative (and frankly harmful) allyship behind it. I'm excited for how many young people (and older too!) will be made to slowly but surely question their internalized and ingrained fatphobia or general medical misunderstandings about weight as they watch/read this series. These are such important details and not enough media addresses them in such subtle but clear ways.

Bless Ryoko Kui but also bless Trigger for not doing what a lot of studios do (thinning characters and lightening their skin colours)

[giddlygoat]

i hear a lot of people talk about how ford really beefed up and became this fit hunk over time, and like, i get where that’s coming from - he spent 30 years surviving dimension hopping and all kinds of other physically demanding stuff.

but i think it’s unfair to look at his trim waist and assume he’s healthy. i’ll level with y’all; ford just… isn’t. he doesn’t eat right [if he remembers to eat at all], he barely sleeps, and he’s always pushing his body to its limits in all the worst ways. sure, you look at stan’s beer gut and flabby arms and assume he’s the unhealthy one, but it’s not a matter of either-or here. neither of them take very good care of themselves.

and hey, regardless of whatever crap stan eats, at least he’s not notorious for skipping meals. i think it’s safe to say stan’s got his priorities straight when it comes to keeping food in the kitchen. also… did no one else see the episode where he climbed a mountain of scaffolding [while also punching literal eagles] and saved the kids from gideon’s trap? or that time he wrangled a pterodactyl? or fought off a hoard of zombies??

i’m throwing out these extreme instances to put things into perspective, but let it be said that even if he hadn’t done all that, even the ‘normal’ events in stan’s life keep him reasonably active. i guess what i’m saying is i’m tired of people insinuating that stan is the unhealthy or careless twin while ford is some kind of hunky specimen.

they both got issues, and they could both use some good, home-cooked meals. being thin doesn’t necessarily = healthy just as being fat doesn’t necessarily = unhealthy. you know the drill

[collaredkittyboy]

Well it's come up multiple times today so I'll make a post about it.

I think the popularization of the word "twink" has ultimately been really bad for people in general.

I know it's hard to track the positive and negative effects of language but I don't think it's hard to see how creating a word for a group of people wherein the most consistent qualifying trait is "being skinny" is healthy for people's self image. Obviously people have lots of ideas about what it means to be a twink- gay, lacking body hair, feminine, beautiful, young, white- but the most consistent descriptor I've seen is "skinny." Hell, it's even a body type on Grindr; the size below "average."

So it kind of functions as a code word in the gay community: anyone can say that they're only interested in twinks and they don't have to look shallow by saying they only like skinny guys. It's such an accepted attitude that no one really bats an eye when they hear it.

I'm not even going to get into how it's become part of the larger issue of people turning "top" and "bottom" into gender roles 2.0, but that is closely related, because people with any internalized homophobia can look at a skinny, feminine man and turn off their fag alarms by viewing him as a woman or not a "real" man, and it makes twinks more acceptable to society at large.

No, ignoring all of that, one of the biggest issues is that gay men are taught by society that they are only attractive while they are skinny. Just having the label "twink" reminds a boy that people are looking at his body and judging it. There were countless times when I was growing up that people would tell me, "You're such a twink," or argue about whether or not I qualified as a twink because I had body hair. People around you, unpromted, judge your body and give you a label based on it, and that label has a large influence on whether or not you're seen as objectively attractive. I know many other gay people who say they wish they were a twink so they could be more attractive to guys.

So think, you have all these kids growing up being told whether or not they qualify as a twink, and then we have the gay community as a whole where it's completely acceptable to say you're only attracted to twinks. I think its because of all of this pressure to be a twink (in other words, to have a below average weight) that many of the gay people that I interact with struggle with a negative body image or eating disorders.

I mean, people talk about "twink death" like it's an actual event that makes a gay man much less attractive, and no one thinks that, maybe, it's harmful to tell a guy that the very day he stops being young and thin and pretty, he will stop being attractive and celebrated?

I'm not qualified to speak on fatphobia in physical queer spaces because I don't have the ability to frequent them where I live, but I can't imagine that these aren't issues at social gatherings as well. I also can't speak on my own experiences with weight discrimination because so far in my life I have had a naturally thin body, but I have experienced a lot of outside pressure to be thin that have caused me to pick up unhealthy eating habits to reduce my weight in fear that I could become fat later on. Thankfully that is something that I've mostly been able to work past. I'm not an expert, but idk, I just wanted to rant on my silly tumblr blog.

Obviously it's impossible for a word to be inherently bad. I'm not trying to imply that saying "twink" is a magic word with evil powers. Obviously the real issues at play here are fatphobia and harmful beauty standards and body shaming. But in my opinion, the popular use of the word twink has made it much easier and acceptable to express fatphobia, etc, in the gay community by turning "skinny person" into a "type of guy that you should try to be so you can be attractive."

[transmutationisms]

@annevbonny yeah so first of all there's the overt framing issue that this whole idea rests on the premise that eliminating fatness is both possible and good, as though like. fat people haven't existed prior to the ~industrial revolution~ lol

more granularly this theory relies on misinterpreting the causes for the link between poverty and fatness (which is real---they are correlated) so that fatness can be configured as a failure of eating choices and urban design, meaning ofc that the 'solution' to this problem is more socially hygienic, monitored, controlled communities where everybody has been properly educated into the proper affective enjoyment of spinach and bike riding, and no one is fat anymore and the labour force lives for longer and generates more value for employers

in truth one of the biggest mediating factors in the poverty-body weight link is food insecurity, because intermittent access to food tends to result in periods of under-nourishment followed by periods of compensatory eating with corresponding weight regain/overshoot (this is typical of weight trajectories in anyone refeeding after a period of starvation or under-eating, for any reason). so this is all to say that the suggestion that fatness is caused by access to 'unhealthy foods' is not only off base but extremely harmful; food insecurity is rampant globally. what people need is consistent access to food, and more of it!

and [loud obvious disclaimer voice] although i absolutely agree that food justice means access to a variety of foods with a variety of nutrient profiles, access to any calories at all is always better than access to none or too few. which is to say, there aren't 'healthy' or 'unhealthy' foods in isolation (all foods can belong in a varied, sufficient diet) and this is a billion times more true when we are talking about people struggling to consume enough calories in the first place.

relatedly, proponents of the 'obesogenic environment' theory often invoke the idea of 'hyperpalatable foods' or 'food addiction'---different ways of saying that people 'overeat' 'junk food' because it's too tasty (often with the bonus techno-conspiricism of "they engineer it that way"). again it's this idea that the problem is people eating the 'wrong' foods, now because the foods themselves are exerting some inexorable chemical pull over them.

this is inane for multiple reasons including the failure to deal with access issues and the fact that people who routinely, reliably eat enough in non-restrictive patterns (between food insecurity and encouragement to deliberately diet/restrict, this is very few people) don't even tend to 'overeat' energy-dense demonised foods in the first place. ie, there is no need to proscribe or limit 'junk food' or 'fast food' or 'empty calories' or whatever nonsense euphemism; again the solution to nutritionally unbalanced diets is to guarantee everyone access to sufficient food and a variety of different foods (and to stop encouraging the sorts of moralising food taboos that make certain foods 'out of bounds' and therefore more likely to provoke a subjective sense of loss of control in the first place lol)

but tbc, when i say "the solution to nutritionally unbalanced diets"---because these certainly can and do exist, particularly (again) amongst people subjected to food insecurity---i am NOT saying "the solution to fatness" because fatness is not something that will ever be eliminated from the human population. and here again we circle back to one of the fundamental fears that animates the 'obesogenic environment' myth, which is that fatness is a medical threat to the race/nation/national future. which is of course blatant biopolitics and is relying on massive assumptions about the health status of fat and thin people that are simply not borne out in the data, and that misinterpret the relationship between fatness and illness (for example, the extent to which weight stigma prevents fat people from receiving medical care, or the role of 'metabolic syndrome' in causing weight gain, rather than the other way around).

people are fat for many reasons, including "their bodies just look like that"; fatness is neither a disease in itself nor inherently indicative of ill health, nor is it eradicable anyway (and fundamentally, while all people should have access to health-protective social and economic conditions, health is not something that people 'owe' to anyone else anyway)

the 'obesogenic environment' is a liberal technocratic fantasy---a world in which fatness is a problem of individual consumption and social engineering, and is to be eliminated by clever policy and personal responsibility. it assumes your health is 1) directly caused and indicated by your weight, 2) something you owe to the capitalist state as part of the bargain that is 'citizenship', and 3) something you can learn to control if only you are properly educated by the medical authorities on the rules of nutrition (and secondarily exercise) science. it's a factual misinterpretation of everything we know about weight, health, diet, and wealth, and it fundamentally serves as a defense of the existing economic order: the problem isn't that capitalism structurally does not provide sufficient access to resources for any but the capitalist class---no, we just need a nicer and more functional capitalism where labourers have a greengrocer in the neighbourhood, because this is a discourse incapable of grappling with the material realities of food production and consumption, and instead reliant on configuring them in terms of affectivity ('food addiction') or knowledge (the idea that food-insecure people need to be more educated about nutrition)

there are some additional aspects here obviously like the idea that exercising more would make people thin (similar issues to the food arguments, physical activity can be great but the reasons people do or don't do it are actually complex and related to things like work schedules and exercise doesn't guarantee thinness in the first place) or fearmongering about 'endocrine disruptors' (real, but are extremely ill-defined as a category and are often just a way to appeal to ideas of 'naturalness' and the vague yet pressing harms of 'chemicals', and which are also not shown to single-handedly 'cause' fatness, a normal state of existence for the human body) but this is most often an argument about food ime.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

WIBTA if I told my girlfriend to lose weight?

Okay, so that sounds horrific, but bear with me.

To be clear, I (23M) could not care less what weight she (27F) is or what she looks like. I love this woman with my whole heart and none of it is about her appearance. We’re pretty much engaged in all but name, the only reason it’s not official is because we don’t have money to even think of weddings right now, and I plan to spend the rest of my life with her.

Thing is, she’s obese. Like, medically, not in a derogatory sense. This is massively affecting her health. She’s constantly out of breath, constantly in pain, constantly struggling, and it’s leading to other conditions such as sleep apnea. She thinks she has asthma because she’s always struggling to breathe, but I’m 95% sure it just comes down to weight and her doctor has said the same, but she tends to write it off as doctors being fatphobic.

Much of this is due to the fact that she used to struggle with binge-eating disorder. She no longer binge eats, but she does overeat in general because her body is so accustomed to constant food, so she gets painfully hungry and dizzy after 2-3 hours of not eating.

I’ve tried to encourage her to exercise with me, diet with me, count calories etc., but she gives up super easy when she doesn’t see immediately results. She also says herself that she finds it very difficult to see herself accurately - she has the reverse of “typical” body dysmorphia, where she sees herself as thinner than she is, so she genuinely sees herself as thin or like slightly curvy. (To be clear, she is very visibly obese, people comment on this often, and while I’ll be the first to go fists up if someone’s a dick to her about it as people have been I also am genuinely worried about her health.) Because of that she has no motivation to lose the weight because she just doesn’t see it. It’s bad enough that she’s been told by doctors she WILL likely struggle later in life with heart failure, diabetes etc if she doesn’t lose weight, yet her POV is more, “It can’t be that bad because I’m not that big so I don’t need to worry about it”. She has occasional reality checks, most recently she put her measurements into some site that shows an image of what you look like from a third person perspective, and she was completely shocked like “I can’t look like that. Do I? This is a wake up call”, but days later it’s completely lost and she’s back to saying she’s not that big again.

She wants kids with me, and I just absolutely do not want to commit to having children with her when I know there’s a not-insignificant chance she’ll have serious health issues in the future that could mean she’s not with us for as long as she could be. Both for the kids’ sake, and selfishly because I want her around! I don’t want to think about something happening to her earlier in life and being without her.

But I just don’t know what to do. Gently suggesting it hasn’t worked, saying I’m worried about her health hasn’t worked, saying I don’t want kids until she’s healthy hasn’t worked (even if she’s still overweight I really don’t care as long as she’s not in a “danger zone” y’know?), trying to meal plan with her hasn’t worked, trying to get her to keep track of calories hasn’t worked, trying to exercise with her hasn’t worked.

People I’ve asked in the past have told me to be firm about it, but I’m incredibly reluctant to do that - I struggled with anorexia for most of my teenage and adult life and I know how deep it can cut to have your weight criticised or commented on. I don’t want to be that dick who basically calls someone I love very much unhealthy and fat and tells her to lose weight or no kids or some horrible shit like that.

But I just. Can’t work out what to do. She does express a willingness to lose weight, she says she wants to, she just doesn’t have that motivation to do it. I don’t know what else we can try.

AITA for focusing on this in the first place? Like am I actually just being fatphobic, or is my own past with EDs influencing my thinking? Am I going about it all wrong? Should I just accept it as something that’ll be a potential issue in future and deal with it then or am I fair to worry about it early on?

What are these acronyms?

[mitskijamie]

Where's that one post you had months ago talking abt how healthy s3 Jamie's body was. Sooo true, a character's body filling out/getting fatter as a sign of growth/happiness/self-actualization is so 👌🤌👏🫶

Ugh I can't find it, tumblr's search function is genuinely the worst 😔

But I do remember exactly what I said so I'll say it again here - I was talking about how having ~washboard abs~ like Jamie did in s1-2 is (contrary to popular belief) actually pretty unhealthy, because you have to be dehydrated and undereating for the muscles to pop out like this -

Even thin, muscular men who work out incessantly won't naturally look like this on a day-to-day basis if they're hydrated and actually eating enough, because muscles are supposed to be protected by a thin layer of fat. Men who are going to do shirtless scenes for TV/movies will often stop eating/drinking enough water in preparation so that they'll eliminate that protective layer.

Jason Momoa in Aquaman vs after Aquaman is a great example. He's still super fit and muscular, but when he's not actively doing a movie that requires his skin to be practically transparent, he doesn't have the washboard look.

Jamie looks healthier to me personally in the latter half of season 3, because he doesn't have that shrink-wrapped skin look -

and I like to think it's because Roy made him put aside some of the unhealthy habits he'd formed out of vanity or social pressure (or both imo) in favor of doing what will actually equip him for the strain he puts on his body every day as an athlete.

People always write Roy as having Jamie eat less during their training era (which is totally understandable, because he canonically wouldn't let Jamie eat his dessert at Ola's or get a kebab), but realistically I tend to think he was restricting what Jamie eats a lot more than how much he eats, because soccer players need an insane amount of calories and Jamie probably needed even more if he was doing extra workouts and bulking.

Losing weight is not necessarily a part of becoming a healthier person or better player, and if anything, Jamie might have benefitted from gaining a little weight!!!!

[genderqueerdykes]

Hello, I’ve got a long winded request for advise that I’d like to ask from you (if you’ll give me a year in advance to ramble lol).

Would just like to state first off that this was something I spent half an hour on cycling between the thoughts of “this is horribly offensive” and “who better to ask” due to some of your posts and because I commonly enjoy and trust your opinions to be at least honest. I know you aren’t obligated to answer this ask but I’d really appreciate it even if it’s simply just a “AITA?” “YTH” situation.

I’ve had an issue recently where I am being ridiculed for making choices for my body and its appearance. The choice is losing weight. I’ve lived my entire life so far as a fat person, for the last 13 or so years I was well above the “class 3 obesity” threshold, right now I’m sitting in the low end of the first class. I don’t really like it, but when I was in the overweight category (I haven’t been an average weight since I was 5, a little more on that later) I got told that by losing weight I was being inherently fatphobic and making other fat people uncomfortable.

I know dieting and the likes can be an uncomfortable topic in general but I never brought it up except for rare mentions of my weight loss, mostly because I was proud of my progress. I’m not wanting to be “thin, “skinny,” whatever etc etc, I would just like to be in the middle of the average category with some visible muscle mass. I was shamed so much that I put myself back up into the obese category, and I’m all for body positivity but it’s not working for me when I know what I want my body to look like. I’m neutral on my body and its functions in general but I’m uncomfortable with the gain I didn’t want and the knowledge that I was on my way to a point of comfort.

As I said before, I haven’t been an average weight since I was 5. That’s because I developed severe binge eating disorder due to trauma. My weight gain was uncontrollable and made me uncomfortable for over a decade. Now that I have some control and a sense of body neutrality, I would like to lose what I gained from my disorder. Not all of it ofc, I’m an adult now and I want a healthy adult body, but I want to be able to make the choices and changes to put my body back into the average weight that I feel was “stolen” from me.

I suppose those thoughts could be considered fatphobic from a certain viewpoint but to me my binge eating disorder and obesity are/were things that I feel the need to heal from. I don’t have these thoughts about anyone else. I don’t want anyone to lose weight if they don’t want to. I love fat bodies. I just want to have the choice to lose weight myself without being considered a bad person.

Do these thoughts and feelings make me a bad/fatphobic person? Does losing weight make me a bad/fatphobic person? I genuinely just want what I believe is best for my body.

Thank you for your time. Stay well.

i have a lot of feelings on this sort of topic, so i appreciate you sending an ask like this, because it's one of the most nuanced, complicated discussions i've tried to have with people recently and a lot of people do not understand the distinction. i'm going to try to break this down to have it make sense to as many people as possible

first of all, people have the right to choose what weight they want their body to be at, so long as it's not causing genuine harm, especially permanent harm. losing weight is not inherently evil, the thing is, a lot of people either need to lose weight or choose to do so for good reasons. i was very heavy at one point, 360 lbs, and i was starting to get new pain i hadn't experienced before. it was hard to stand for any period of time. i couldn't walk much.

after i started walking around the neighborhood and losing that extra weight, that pain went away. i feel a lot better having less of that weight on me. i gained weight in a very unhealthy manner during this time, mostly by not eating well for my dietary needs, sleeping excessively, no exercise, and so on. the thing is that we have to take care of our total health and not everyone who is fat is unhealthy, but some people can and do put on weight that impairs their functioning or health and it's not good to ignore that this is a thing that can and does happen

you're allowed to decide what you feel your body should look like especially if you are not taking this to extremes. i like to keep my weight below a certain range, myself. i keep a close eye on it. fortunately it's easy to stay around a certain healthy range for my body because i cook a lot of meals at home and i mostly eat vegetarian food and fish due to allergies and digestive issues. i'm still about 311 lbs but it's in a much healthier configuration for my body

weight is a complex conversation. both thin and fat bodies are stigmatized. we need to drop our obsession with body image and let people be the arbiters of their own weight, at least, letting people express what they want and helping them reduce harm and find ways to achieve that goal realistically in a healthy manner. shaming people doesn't work. we've proven this decade after decade. shaming skinny people doesn't work. shaming fat people doesn't work. shaming anyone doesn't work

dieting is a very specific thing. everyone's diet is 100% unique to their body. your digestive system works different than the person next to you's. you may not metabolize nutrients as well as someone else. you may process fats and proteins differently. you may need a lot of electrolytes. you may not be able to digest fiber. you may struggle with fructose, glucose and other sugars. you may not be able to eat any meats at all. you may need lots of fruits. it will depend greatly on who you are

it's best to work with your body than against it. you are allowed to decide what weight range you want to be within. best thing you can do is attempt an elimination diet to see if there are foods that just don't do your body any favors, these can and should be done very slowly with one food at a time. but i'm not a health professional, so that's just a suggestion.

either way good luck, i don't like when people try to boil this down to "this is good" or "This is bad". there are good and bad things to all of this. it's worth discussing both sides of that. i hope this helped you in any way

[kikueatgoo]

ngl the whole 'think before you sleep' and 'illymation' shit is so stupid, like the second you either fact-check the dude or use critical thinking skills you realize how ... nonexistent the issue is.

because what he claimed illymation made doesn't even sound bad, "fat acceptance" ( as he puts it ) isn't even an inherently wrong thing. how someone looks or their possible health, since weight isn't generally a way to tell most of the time, doesn't mean anything. it doesn't impact whether they're a good person or not.

that's not even really true, the video's actual focus was on body image issues, body neutrality, and diet culture. even when discussing that, there is an acknowledgement and understanding of health conditions, specifically diabetes, and how that can effect someone's diet restrictions and/or rules. something he specifically cuts out, it's what makes me think he's just a mean spirited and intellectually devoid critic.

it's been proven before that making fun of someone's health doesn't make them lose weight, it doesn't motivate them or help them, it usually does the opposite. in most cases, the only people who need to care about someone's health is themselves and whatever medical professionals they may be seeing. that's it.

someone just ... being fat doesn't mean anything. there are people who are considered fat and are healthy. there are also people who are thin and are really unhealthy. i would know. weight does not directly translate to health, it can sometimes be a byproduct of quality of health. but by itself, it doesn't work.

someone's health or weight means nothing outside of that. it implies nothing morally about that person, and unless you're a medical provider they're seeing, it's none of your business. simple as that.

tldr. if you're bullying fat people for being fat, you're a mega loser and idiot. pick a struggle.

[0l-unreliable]

ramblings on twinyard body types

I think if you look at how I draw the foxes and ravens, there is the possibility of misconstruing the reasoning behind their body types as something strictly 'sexy' or 'diverse' or what have you. But I really truly do try to reason out their bodies, and they are sexily diverse because that's just how people are.

The reason I was thinking about this was because of how I draw the Twinyards vs how I see others draw them. It makes me feel like I'm treating non-thin bodies as something to ogle and fetishize for the explicit reason that they are 'larger'. But I draw them that way because to me it makes the most sense for them to look that way. So they are attractive not because they aren't skinny, but because they ARE hot (in my head, everyone has at least one attractive/pretty/wonderful thing about them).

To me, Andrew and Aaron are chubby. Not considering muscle or diet or exercise or whatever, to me their healthy weight is 'chubby' (though this chubbiness can also be linked to their height) like I drew below.

But adding in lifestyle, diet, Exy roles, statistics (with Andrew being The Goalie of all time and Aaron constantly working fluidly with Matt on court) health standards, goddamn feelings about Exy I cannot see them as anything but tiny brick shithouses. They are packed with muscle, they just have to be. Andrew especially. And over that muscle is fat, because that's how real strong bodies look/are and because the Twinyards don't give a shit about being healthy. They drink, smoke, eat like fuck, they don't care! At the end of the day if their body does what it needs to that's a job well done. For freak's sake THREE people had to hold Andrew down at Kathy's show!

And absolutely none of this is to say fat=unhealthy, there is just no way they can be shredded twinks. not to me. Obviously, if that is how you see them I'm not kicking your ass about it, but my early easter post has got me feelin' like a freak who objectifies non-skinny people instead of a freak who objectifies blonde guys.

Anyways muscle Minyards 5-ever 🧡

[liquidpaperfoundation]

Is there a middle ground between toxic diet culture and fat activism? I'm really sick of the only sides of discourse being either "IF YOU HAVE EVEN THE SLIGHTEST HINT OF BELLY POOCH OR GOD FORBID CELLULITE YOU ARE A DISGUSTING PERSON" or "ACTUALLY OBESITY IS ALL GENETICS AND BEING 400 POUNDS IS HEALTHY ACKSHUALLY". Like, You Are Both Insane.

Yes, obesity is unhealthy. It increases your risk of so many problems, like heart disease, stroke, diabetes, arthritis, skin infections (from moisture trapped under fat rolls), blood clots, infertility, and so much more.

No, shaming people is not kind or helpful in any way.

Yes, genetics, chemical exposure, mental illness, and so much more can make it difficult to control your weight. Yes, different people have different natural body types.

No, weight loss is not impossible. No, you are not "genetically" 300 pounds.

Yes, society's beauty standards for women and men are ridiculous and even contradictory and have nothing to do with what a healthy human body actually looks like. Yes, you can't necessarily tell if somebody is healthy just by looking at them. Yes, BMI is BS. Yes, the ghouls are always making up some shit about cellulite or buccal fat or hip dips just to make you feel bad about having a perfectly normal body.

No, that doesn't mean that all bodies are healthy. Eugenia Cooney is too goddamn thin and Tess Holliday is too goddamn fat.

Toxic diet culture tells us that our bodies are bad and morally wrong and we should be willing to do anything to get thinner. That's bad.

Toxic fat positivity tells us that becoming addicted to junk food and getting morbidly obese is "self love" and that wanting to eat healthy or exercise at all is tantamount to anorexia, and that if you don't want to be hundreds of pounds overweight you are a bigot. Also bad.

People really need to stop spitefully taking the most extreme opinions. It helps nobody except the jerks who want to sell us stuff.

[undead-moth]

I have just discovered the existence of Jamie Lopez, a body-positive activist, because at the age of 37 she has died of heart complications.

Here are some of the results you’ll find if you Google her death:

Unsurprisingly, fatphobes are taking the tragic death of a young woman as an opportunity to shame fat people and spread hate. They lack both empathy and compassion for her. They find her death vindicating, and even comedic. She is not even a human being to them. 

But most importantly, they are using it as an opportunity to insist, as many fatphobes do, that this is the inevitable future all fat people face. They are once again arguing that all fat people are unhealthy and all fat people will die young because of this. In doing so, they are also accusing the fat acceptance movement of claiming that all fat people are healthy and all fat people will live long lives.

This completely ignores a few things:

1) If Jamie Lopez had been thin and died of the same health complications at the same age - which is the case for some thin people (remember, there is not a single health condition that exclusively fat people get or die of) - this would not therefore be indicative that their weight caused their death. Everyone would agree that it was the heart complications, not the weight that killed that person. Heart complications have been “linked” to fatness but never indisputably proven to be caused by it, and so it does not make sense to say that her weight, rather than heart complications killed her. And if someone wants to argue that it’s still her weight that killed her, because her weight put her at risk for heart problems, remember that being tall, being old, and/or being a man are risk factors for heart complications yet when a tall person, old person, or a man dies from heart complications we don’t insist they actually died of being tall or being old or being a man.

2) Had Jamie Lopez lived to be 100 this would have never proven to fatphobes that you can be fat and healthy. This is evident when other fat people live long healthy lives, even really fat people who live really long lives, and no one ever holds them up as “proof” that it’s possible to be fat and healthy. Even if millions of fat people, even very fat people, live to be very old - which millions do - it means nothing to these people. Statistically, “morbidly obese” people and underweight thin people have the same mortality rates, and people in the overweight and obese categories actually live the longest, longer even than their “healthy weight” counterparts. This has never changed the minds of fatphobes. But one single fat person dying young confirms their preconceived bias that all fat people are unhealthy and die young.

3) Neither the fat acceptance movement nor HAES advocates claim that all fat people are healthy. In fact, HAES advocates only argue that it’s possible to be healthy or unhealthy at any size, meaning that it’s possible to be fat and healthy, just as it’s possible to be thin and unhealthy, or vice versa. They are not insisting on a black-and-white dichotomy that puts one group in Always Unhealthy or Always Healthy. That’s what fatphobes are doing. They’re the ones making blanket statements about the combined health of entire communities, placing one in “Always unhealthy” (fat people) and one in “Always healthy” (thin people).

And the fat acceptance movement is not even about health. Fat acceptance advocates for the acceptance of fat people REGARDLESS OF health, meaning that fat people have the right to baseline human respect even if every single one of them is horribly unhealthy. Yet Fatphobes continue to debate fat acceptance activists by attempting to prove that all fat people are unhealthy. This is because they think that this gives them the right to hate and ridicule fat people. That is why it is so important that fat people be unhealthy to them, and why they never acknowledge that fat acceptance isn’t about health anyway. They need their excuse.

But it isn’t an excuse. It doesn’t matter if every single fat person is fat because they eat too much and exercise too little. It doesn’t matter if every single one of them could lose weight and maintain that weight loss if they simply worked hard enough. And it doesn’t matter if every single fat person is unhealthy and going to die at the age of 37 of a heart attack.

Fat people are people and people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. That is what fat acceptance is about.

Jamie Lopez died young which is already unfortunate. And now she will be mocked for who knows how long by people who despise her for, essentially, being imperfect in a way they personally don’t like. Whether it be because she was fat, or because she was unhealthy, that’s the reason people will use to justify the inhumane ridicule of a human being who never harmed them, never wronged them, never even spoke to them - and now, isn’t even alive to defend herself against them. 

I can’t describe the grief I feel for this person who, until a couple of hours ago, I didn’t even know existed, who was dead before I’d ever even heard her name.

I hope she rests in peace while the people who shame her rot in hell.

[sitronsangbody]

First of all BIG no on the "always at all times". But yes, a number of health conditions correlate with fatness or the so-called obesity category of the BMI (the same is true for the underweight category, but we never hear much about that for some mysterious reason). This does not mean that fatness is the root of all these conditions. In some cases, fatness is another symptom of a common root cause. In some cases, the condition causes the fatness, not the other way around. In some cases, health issues trace back to minority stress and discrimination. In some cases, people really just happen to also be fat. All the health conditions that correlate with fatness also occur in thin people. There's no health issue that's exclusive to fat people, just some that are more prevalent. To say that fatness must be causing the issues makes no sense when plenty of people who have them aren't fat.

Should these conditions be treated? Of course! But why would you "treat" a completely healthy fat person? If they aren't engaging in any behaviors that are unhealthy to them, there's literally nothing to treat but a slight, statistically increased risk of certain things. Normal checkups are all the treatment you need.

It's clear to me that a lot of thin people feel like their thinness is the ultimate protection from health problems, and I'm afraid that's just not true. We can do our best to stay healthy, we can absolutely have an impact, but the (understandably scary) truth is that ultimately we're not in control. Genetics, outside impact and sheer coincidence all go in the mix too.

As for the discouragement: fatness IS discouraged at every turn, friend..! Fat bodies are shamed, vilified and excluded in countless well-documented ways and there's a massive industry dedicated to the pursuit of weight loss! If "discouragement" actually prevented fatness, SWEET LORD would it have worked by now!

At the end of the day, you can't meaningfully "discourage" a way of being. Fatness is not a behavior. You can encourage healthy eating and exercise habits - behaviors - but fatness isn't something you do. You can't wake up one day and just stop fatting.

It should also be noted, while we're talking health risks, that 1)there are a whole lot of those associated with intentional weight loss, and 2) research consistently shows that the majority of people who lose substantial amounts of weight, gain it back. Getting thin and staying that way just isn't a viable option for everyone, and many are going to be less healthy if they try. The bottom line is: leave it up to the individual and the medical professionals they put their trust in, and get rid of any notion that you can prescribe the right life choices to people who aren't you.

[egberts]

i hope you take this as the genuine question it is and not someone trolling or trying to be obtuse. i think i just spent about an hour writing this! 😅 i am fat, i first learned about and “became a part of” so to speak the body positive/fat liberation community my senior year in high school (8 years ago now). i cannot stress enough how much this question is coming from a well meaning place i just am curious your thoughts on it.

(re:girl dinner)

when we talk about body positivity, it’s understood your health is not determined by your size, no one can look at you and determine how healthy you are. your health, as well as the amount of food you eat, also has no bearing on your moral character. eating a conventially unhealthy amount of food doesn’t give anyone the right to try and shame or silence you, no matter their personal feelings or discomfort for various reasons (“you’re glorifying an unhealthy lifestyle!!” etc).

these principles are not even a question, so why do they not apply to people eating smaller quantities of food? why is the knee jerk reaction to call out how unhealthy it is and how they’re glorifying an unhealthy lifestyle and encouraging others to do the same, especially when that’s what fat people have been accused of forever? it seems so, so disconnected from and counter productive to the entire point of liberation from societal body/diet standards.

if it’s purely concern for the possible encouraging or egging on of harmful eating behaviors, even that could be said to go both ways. i struggle with binge eating disorder and have horrendous troubles with impulse control. to the point that concepts like intuitive eating would leave somebody like me lying in pain on the floor after a triggered binge. i know i personally have to be careful with what i eat because trigger foods could end with me sick. yet how downright inappropriate would it be to make that the problem of someone just enjoying a larger meal? someone who goes about their diet in a different way and has different limits than me? or god forbid even just also struggling with binging!? i mean, underlying eating disorder or not, whether they eat that way frequently or not, none of these things really make it okay regardless to comment on how much someone’s eating or propose that showing the amount of food they eat is not okay.

something i personally have had struggles with in my journey of self acceptance and navigating life in a marginalized body is having to unpack the aspects, and what i believed to be values, of my body positivity that i clung to for reasons that weren’t truly in line with fat liberation. so much of my activism was just me serving my insecurities because i hadn’t truly worked through them yet. just remember to check in on yourself sometimes and really dig into the root of some of the values you hold and make sure they’re coming from a place that’s beneficial.

tldr; someone showing off their small meal is fundamentally and healthwise no different from someone showing off their large meal. neither is inherently bad nor good, it just is. so why do we show double standards(on an across the board principle)?

I cannot stress enough just how flawed your comparison of fat people existing to people promoting two almonds and some water as "girl" dinner is not the same thing. yes, fat people are ACCUSED of glorifying disordered eating, but they are not actually doing that. people who use the term "girl" dinner are actively linking the act of eating small amounts of food or no food at all with being a girl, that's the major takeaway from this discussion. this isn't about shaming big meals vs small meals, either. this is about calling out actually actively advocating for eating nothing for dinner and going to bed. nobody is looking at the thin people promoting girl dinner and calling them out for being unhealthily skinny, we're calling them out for promoting not eating, which is something your body needs to do to function or your brain will shrivel up and you'll die. "girl dinner" is a depression meal, it's food when you can't afford groceries, it's a snack between something more substantial. also, how can you actually come to me and think that defending the slippery slope into eating disorders is a logical thing to do? tiktok is full of teenagers, dude, somebody needs to tell them that it's not fucking healthy to eat a slice of cheese and nothing else for dinner. this also isn't about shaming people at home living their personal lives and eating what they can to get by, this is about people actively posting to thousands of young impressionable followers that it's cool and fun to eat nothing, and in some cases it's literally being used to justify weight loss and being skinny. I would legitimately be just as critical about this if it was fat people eating piles of donuts and calling it lard dinner. but ultimately none of this even matters to either of us, I'm not going on tiktok and telling the teenagers that they're learning dumb shit, I'm not going and personally calling out the women responsible for corrupting a harmless trend, I'm just here sitting on my couch giving my opinion on my blog, and while you might not be on your couch you are certainly here giving your opinion in my ask box, at the end of the day we are just two clowns honking around 🤡

[fatcultureis]

if you talk to a fat person and tell them "you know this isn't good. but you probably tried 1000 ways of losing weight and nothing helped", then maybe, just maybe, you should realise that diets and long-term intentional weight loss don't work and that it's not our bodies that are the problem. but thin people would rather behave that diets don't work for us because we "lack discipline" or something. yeah, we lack discipline so much that even the people who had weight loss surgery gain back weight after 2 years.

there's no such thing as healthy weight loss. "working to keep the weight off" is code for "having an unhealthy relationship with food for the rest of your life", and i'd rather not have an eating disorder. if weight loss is achieved by counting calories and obsessing over food, it is not healthy.

thin people are so close to getting it, but then choose to believe that all fat people have the lazy gene or something.