Do you realize that being fat isn't always good? I mean if you're still healthy it's fine but once it gets to point it starts becoming a health problem. It's not good for that to happen right? Do you want people to slowly waste away and die of heart disease? They're basically killing themselves and it's not a perfect comparison but if you meet a self garner do you want them to stop?
HUZZAH! This is my first psuedo-intellectual anon hate. And my-oh-me, it’s a doozy. I love the condescending “gotchya” tone in this, as if anon is asking ground-breaking, mind-blowing questions and not the same bullshit concern-trolling that has been debunked over and over again. But I’ll indulge anon’s ignorance for the moment, if only so that I have a comprehensive response to link to other fatphobic assholes in the future.
Put simply, my dear anon, your questions are silly, and you should feel bad about how ignorant, hateful, and fatphobic you come off in this ask.
1. Health is a complex concept that is dependent on many individualized factors. Similarly, weight is complex and depends on many factors completely out of an individual’s control, including genetics, poverty and food insecurity, and trauma history. Neither exercise nor a “healthy” diet result in long term weight loss.
2. Weight is a really inaccurate, non-evidence based proxy for the concept of health. Hate to break it to you, but the BMI is bullshit, and overweight and obese people actually have lower mortality rates than people in the “normal” category. Yes, you read right, evidence shows that being fat can be good for your health.
3. Heart disease has links to several risk factors, and “overweightness” by itself does not reliably predict heart disease. In fact, some evidence suggests fat people are better able to survive cardiac events than thin people. Correlation is not causation, yes, even with conditions such as type 2 diabetes mellitus, so it is incorrect to say that having a lot of adipose tissue directly causes illness of any type. Being fat is not per se unhealthy. Additionally, invisible disabilities and illnesses exist, which precludes you from knowing whether ANY given person, whether they are thin or fat, is “healthy”.
4. Based on 1,2, and 3, it’s clear that you have no idea what someone’s health-status is simply by looking at them. You have no idea whether someone’s weight is “killing them” or causing them to “slowly waste away”, and all the evidence suggests that it’s simply inaccurate to say being fat is enough, by itself, to kill someone.
5. Linking someone’s health to their moral goodness or worth is inherently ableist. If someone is fat and unhealthy they are still a human being worthy of love and respect. If someone is fat and disabled they are still a human being worthy of love and respect. If someone is fat and eats nothing but “junk food” and never exercises THEY ARE STILL A HUMAN BEING WORTHY OF LOVE AND RESPECT.
6. Shaming people into the weight loss you deem to be “appropriate” does not work and actually leads to increased weight gain and a myriad of negative outcomes (more discussed in 7 and 8). For example, the “War on Obesity” has been linked to increased disordered eating in pre-pubescent children. Harm reduction and trauma-informed, client-centered care works better than the shaming, 12-step, crash-diet, “I know more about what’s better for your health than you do” bullshit.
7. Mental illness kills tens of thousands of people in the United States every year, and shaming someone’s body size under the guise of “health concern” has empirically proven negative outcomes on mental health. 8. Fat stigma in the medical establishment and society at large arguably kills more fat people than fat does. Attempts to “correct” fatness such as repeated dieting and “lifestyle changes” have been shown to have negative health outcomes. 9. Of all the complex health and mortality risk factors that exist, fat seems to be the only one that you care about. Why aren’t you yelling at people you see driving cars or smoking? Probably because your “health concern” for fat people is just thinly veiled fatphobia.10. THE HEALTH STATUS OF OTHER PEOPLE IS NONE OF YOUR GODDAMN BUSINESS ANYWAY. Right to privacy in personal medical concerns is like, one of those inherent human right things that we have all these laws protecting to the point that it’s a crime to share someone’s private medical information without their consent.
In conclusion, this fat ass is off to eat some cake, cuddle my cats, kiss my partner, and love my fat body just the way it is.
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