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0 pointsMelonai3d ago0 comments

I'm also quite anti "body positivity" as it is usually espoused online, especially in relation to weight, which is by far the main focus of the movement. It feels quite self-destructive, you accept that your weight is unchangeable (even though I would say that in 75% of cases, and probably even more, it definitely isn't), and try to feel "proud" of it, even though there are piles upon piles of quite definitive research which proves that being overweight is horrible for your health, and you essentially start preventing your improvement, by choice this time. You start eating more because now you decide that you actually like being fat, now thinking that that's who you are and always will be, and you should feel proud of yourself (which is quite silly all in itself), and you just end up in a worse state than before. Body positivity will not help you get healthier.

But, we also shouldn't forget that the idea of body positivity didn't just pop up out of a vacuum, it's inherently a reaction to the culture. And here I disagree with you, if your peers and society in general just slightly nudges you to be healthy then that'd be okay, but that's not really what happens from my experience. I used to be quite overweight, especially while I was a teenager, and it was tough. People didn't really treat me like a peer, everyone avoided me, and made fun of me constantly for my weight. Random people would tell me how fat I am (by the way, I wasn't even that fat, far from obese). And in the end it fucked me up quite badly, I had no self-respect, no confidence, and I didn't really want to live at that point. I managed to turn it around, I stopped eating properly for days, often just snacking on a package of nuts for an entire day, I would start passing out when standing up, I would exercise so much until I couldn't walk anymore, and in the end it helped! I lost a ton of weight, people stopped tormenting me, and I started to be perceived as quite normal. I even had my first real boyfriend, nobody even looked at me before. But I was still miserable and felt way more unhealthy, at that point I was underweight and eating one portion of rice a day, maybe with some vegetables. No snacks or sweets of any kind. What was essentially bullying did help me to lose weight, but it did not make me healthy. That's just my personal anecdote, I bet there are people who used people making fun of them to start a journey of healthy self-improvement and honestly that's great, but I know most overweight people can't take it well. This is kind of the issue with using shame to get people to improve (though most people who hate on fat people definitely do not have that as their goal), as that shame often messes with your mental health, and makes progress way harder. Many overweight people straight up turn to food to try to feel good, just making the issue way worse. Or they get better in a self-destructive way like me. Ironically I was definitely not healthier when I was underweight, I felt physically awful most of the time, but because I looked quite normal people thought I was more healthy! Weight isn't a perfect metric for health itself, and we shame overweight people disproportionately more than underweight people (especially for women, though I bet for men it's different).

And I think a lot of people who try to follow body positivity have a similar experience to mine (at least I think so, I don't really have proof!). They have endured a ton of meanness for their weight, and often started to hate themselves because of it, and then they turn to body positivity as a sort of "Fuck you!" to the people who made them feel subhuman for their weight. And it's obviously also not productive, it's just a heavy swing in the opposite direction. It's caused directly by the shame society places upon being overweight. It's just the opposite side of the same coin, where I believe both sides suck.

- "Being fat is morally bad!"

- "No, being fat is morally good actually!"

It's kind of tough to find a good solution for this, I think we all agree that we should try to prevent as many people being an unhealthy weight as possible for the good of the people themselves and society as a whole. And I 100% don't think we should encourage people to be and stay obese just because it's easier, but making fun of people who are overweight does not actually help them either. I don't really have a solution for this. I personally try to stay "body neutral" in a way, I try to avoid putting a moral value on unhealthy weight, and I try to view it as any other health issue. But as a society, I think it makes more sense to avoid bullying fat people in the hopes that they take the bullying and turn it into nice and productive improvement, and just make being a healthy weight easier, make healthy food the easiest food to access, put value in sports and walking, and just make it easier to live a healthy life by default.

Sorry if this response kind of turned into a sob story, I thought it was important to try to offer what my own experience was like when I was experiencing the pressure to lose weight, as I know a few people who were or still are overweight who felt similarly, even if it's not universal! :)

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ralferoo2d ago

I agree with a lot of this. For context, I'm very fat, so I feel a bit more that it's OK to say this, but yeah the body shaming stuff is a very interesting topic.

Obviously, if you feel that your whole life you're being bullied, then it's definitely right to be empowered someway to get someone to stop bullying you that way.

But we seem to have gone way beyond stopping body shaming and to promoting body positivity, which I think is dangerous. We shouldn't be teaching kids that it's OK to be fat and that's just a personal choice and not to change.

The simple fact is that being overweight leads to a lot of health issues. I'm fortunate that my body still tolerates being able to run, but at my BMI that's by no means a guarantee long term. I know that realistically, I need to drop 1/3 of my body weight ASAP and keep it off, or the chances of me living another 20 years is actually quite low.

I know exactly the issues with weight loss and how hard it is. At least 3 times in my life, I've lost 25% of my body weight through dieting, but it's always a constant struggle to keep that off if I ease off even a little bit. Most of the times I've regressed, it's been a combination of factors - an injury so I can't go out running for a few months, maybe winter so it's cold and wet and I'm also avoiding my daily lunchtime walk, and maybe my work is really boring so I'm comfort eating a bit more than I need each day, and suddenly before you even realise it, all the weight has suddenly re-appeared, and each time it's harder than the last to get rid of it and keep it off for good.

But definitely, we want a bit of that stigma to remain. Knowing that I'm fat and that most girls don't even look twice at me, or knowing that the health risks are very real and every day I stay fat, it's doing even more damage to my body... it all sucks in the moment, but it's all helping the motivation that something needs to change. It's not OK to just do nothing.

MelonaiOP2d ago

Yeah I think we agree. Clearly being overweight is not good and should be disencouraged, even apart from your own health, an overweight or obese person in a society just takes more a lot more resources go support, either causing a burden on the person themselves or on the society in which they live in. If that person gets to a healthy weight they can be more productive and require less healthcare support, this is true in almost all cases, and so it's just a win-win if we can get as many people as healthy as possible. This should include not just being "not-overweight", but also being very underweight, being sedentary, having an unhealthy diet, or bad mental health. All of those things if improved cause wins to everyone involved. I'm not 100% on board with the idea to measure people's inherent value by their productivity, but I believe most people tend to enjoy being productive and contributing to their community. There's no downside in decreasing the amount of people who are an unhealthy weight.

I think the issue with stigma is it's so hard to keep in balance, I want people to care of their health, and that'll take knowing that being a healthy weight is in fact good, but doing so in a non damaging way is super hard. In my mind I kind of see smoking at an okay "shame-level" (though you can correct me, maybe I'm straight up wrong on this). Nowadays everyone knows that smoking sucks (let's avoid the whole vape thing for now), it destroys your lungs, and eventually it kills you. But the stigma I saw in relation to smoking just seems more normal and proportional, people generally don't really like being around cigarettes, which is fair, and some people silently judge you, some will tell you to stop smoking, but... there's just not this need to denigrate people for their smoking habit the way it is for being overweight. Now, in the end you'll still feel miserable when you'll start trying to quit/lose weight, but there's nothing really to be done about that, that's just nature.

Honestly I think the underlying cause for this is some of the innate human behavior we still have as a species. We often view being unattractive (which being overweight usually is for most people) as a big moral fault, which gives you a pass to punch down on the person for this transgression. I think we kind of view overweight people in the same lens as someone who did something disgusting, and this might happen completely outside of our conscious comprehension. It then takes conscious effort not to feel that way by default. Honestly this might not be fixable, and maybe there is no way to fix shaming of overweight people on the societal level. All I know is if we help as many people as possible to lose weight, the amount of people shamed will go down that way, too.

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