[CW: Fatphobia, possible ED triggers] Yo can we deal with the rampant unchecked fatphobia on this platform ASAP?
[CW: Fatphobia, possible ED triggers] Yo can we deal with the rampant unchecked fatphobia on this platform ASAP?
Took a little break from the internet and touched some grass and it was great. Wander back in here after my hiatus and what do I find? Just a thread with a bunch of fatphobia.
Cute.
For a community that is incredibly careful about protecting its users from the -phobias and the -isms, there sure is a hell of a lot of unchecked fatphobia here basically any time fatness gets brought up.
It’s something I’ve noticed on the left in general as well. The leftist org I’m in has almost no fat people in it and something tells me that’s not because there aren’t any fat leftists out there.
Fatphobia is rooted in anti-Blackness and ableism.
I’d highly recommend the “Maintenance Phase” podcast with Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon, as well as Aubrey Gordon’s books “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat” and “You Just Need To Lose Weight.”
TL;DR: There’s mounting evidence that anti-fat bias in medicine is more to blame for poor medical outcomes in fat people rather than just the fat itself.
Diet and exercise don’t result in long-term weight loss for something like 95% of people. As a leftist, are you really gonna sit here and blame this on individual choices rather than systemic issues? Are you really gonna try to convince us that 95% of people are just lacking willpower?
Please note that this thread is not an invitation to convince me I’m wrong or share your own personal anecdotal story of successful long-term weight loss with the implication that others can do it because you did it. This post is a request that any thin person (or thin-adjacent person) reading this who wants to argue about how being fat is bad for your health do some research and some self-crit. This post is a request that this community rethink the way it engages with discussions about fatness, diet, fatphobia, and anti-fat bias.
Anti-fat bias literally kills people.
Just going to list links.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/552038
https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/spc3.12076
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26841729/
Too tired to offer descriptions rn. Just click through them. Also I’m locking this thread. Please listen to what fat activists are talking about. Read the links that have been provided. And fatphobia on the site will continue to be addressed.
I hope what I said was fine (I think it was). I was simply responding to the prompt and just relaying my own actual near-death experience with my poor relationship with food.
Diet and exercise don’t result in long-term weight loss for something like 95% of people
I genuinely don't believe this unless you're willing to present me a study on it. Everyone I've known that's lost weight and kept it off did so with said method. I genuinely don't know anyone that put the weight back on with creating a calorie deficit and exercising regularly. Please, by all means prove me wrong on this, but I just can't believe it until otherwise proven.
What really gets my goat about this is that everyone here seems to be hyperaware about the reasons and consequences of the policing of bodies when it comes to transphobia or racism (to a certain extent), but then turn around and say shit that would make Foucault blush. I know here people don't have the highest opinion of critical theory and postmodern thinkers, but y'all need to shoot the cop inside your own heads asap and start recognizing when you're reinforcing systems of oppression or just uncritically allowing them to reproduce (not you OP, the people being fatphobic and similar).
can't have a post talking about fatphobia without someone talking about unhealthy food.
can't have a post talking about fatphobia without someone wanting to concern troll about the "obesity epidemic".
can't have a post talking about fatphobia without someone wanting to promote losing weight.
can't have a post talking about fatphobia without someone wanting to position their experiences with weight and weight loss as universal.
y'all literally can't help yourselves!!! come to terms with how your implicit fatphobia is harmful and learn and grow from it!!!!! listen to the effort posting from people with marginalized bodies and look into to the sources they are kindly giving you!!!
just chiming in to say this is definitely a thing on here and it should be talked about more and addressed. glad you made this post! it's one of the more negative holdovers from reddit where it was very endemic in the site culture. as well as just being totally normalised still in mainstream culture of course.
yeah anytime fatness is brought up here i feel like i have to brace myself and i've been purposely avoiding that recent thread because i knew it would devolve into fatphobia. it's genuinely so demoralizing to see on hexbear.
thank you for calling it out cause i was much to anxious to and i'm really hoping people do self-crit about this.
anyways i love my fat queer body ok!
Thank you for posting this. For a leftist platform the neoliberal individual responsibility stuff that comes up when weight is discussed here is disgusting.
I know there has been discussions here on why not many women are comfortable here and this imo is one of the reasons. This is really not a safe space for people with EDs, body size trauma and medical trauma. I've seen medical experts valorized and people with said trauma belittled.
There is a reason I block the self-improvement and fitness coms. But it seaps out from those like the thread yesterday. Such reddity strong self-hating or just fat hating people who need to read Fearing the Black Body or any feminist writings on how policing body size is tied to pathriarchy, capitalism, protestantism, eugenism and how this neoliberal self-governance stuff they do is not the Maoist taking care of the body and mind they think it is, but upholds a system of othering. The way all this impacts people in marginalized bodies is a big deal.
I understand being overweight is a systematic and structural situation, I understand everyone is free to possess their body in whichever form they are comfortable in and nobody should receive unsolicited advice or unrequired criticism regarding their bodily autonomy, I understand at every turn there are circumstances beyond one's own control and responsibility regarding weight and weight loss. I also understand that it can be difficult to diet and exercise even if one is actively trying to lose weight and nobody is obliged to lose weight in the first place if they don't feel they need to. I also have seen examples of institutional and medical fatphobia on top of widespread fatphobia in popular cultural and media in general. I see all the time people give unsolicited advice with personal anecdotes independent of context of the interaction and abuse fat people receive just for existing and control others try to exert over their life and their situation.
However one thing that I don't understand here is the suggestion that being overweight doesn't cause any issues at all. I am not here to judge but it seems well-researched and readily apparent that being overweight is cause for great deal of health complications and losing weight can alleviate those complications that are caused by being overweight. This again is not a disagreement that there is fatphobia in medicine where people have their issues unrelated to weight or weight loss go untreated because any health issue is simply treated as caused by being overweight and fat people don't get same attention and care regarding their health by medical personnel. I am just simply not understanding how so much research regarding complications caused by being overweight can all be false independent of that. This is regarding specifically only things which weight loss has been documented to directly alleviate and no other correlational complications which may or may not be related to one's weight.
What people get wrong about weight sometimes is that it isn't just one thing. It can be for many reasons. It can be anything from the poor quality of capitalist food to being just how a person is, some people are healthier fat, some people aren't. It's complex issue and boiling it down to "Dur Hur just eat less and exercise" isn't a catch all because everyone has different bodies.
It's so bad here, it's actually sad. I've been avoiding discussions of weight as a rule for a while.
And thank you for the podcast rec. I'm at that stage where I know enough to know that I don't known shit, so I appreciate you sharing.
This thread is really disappointing. I really hoped to find better in here. I'm sorry you had to put up with this OP.
Na this shit is so real. Why the hell is it ok for people to just tell you about what they think you should do whenever it's about body weight. Bro, we aren't talking about that.
Fat comrades, I have a question to ask: I have so far left up the fatphobic comments because I thought that it might be useful for uninformed people to see these arguments get debunked and to see exactly what our counterarguments are addressing. However I also realize that this is much more distressing for you all than it is for me and I recognize I have thin privilege here. Please let me know if you believe we should take the comments down and if you have ideas for any other mod actions you think we should take to combat the pervasive anti-fatness issue on hexbear.
Thank you for this post. A few times I've seen fatphobic memes reposted on here and been surprised that nobody called them out. Hexbear 100% needs to improve in this
Something I’m not sure I’ve seen talked about yet is all the sugar and generally unhealthy food that is readily available. Especially in food deserts where the only food for 10 miles is ultra processed and unhealthy, not to mention expensive.
And the time, energy, storage, etc it takes to prepare healthy meals vs swinging by McDonald’s in 5 minutes.
Sugar is also addictive, and food companies know and exploit that fact. The amount of sugar in single can of Coke is like double the recommended daily total.
Edit: this is not the appropriate time or place to discuss these things, I apologize.
Fatphobia is rooted in anti-Blackness and ableism
https://pod.link/1082594532/episode/c78807defbd56662c2dc347be08c935e
Upstream did a podcast on this. Some of you should def listen.
I agree and I appreciate you posting this. I usually don’t talk about weight stuff with anyone anywhere, because I don’t think the discussion would be handled well, but maybe I/we should expect more when it comes to a site like this.
Please note I went into the following trying to challenge my assumptions and I was successful in doing so:
I went looking for proof that "mounting evidence that anti-fat bias is more to blame... than just the fat itself" for negative health outcomes and I found this study that I could not fully access: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797615601103
The abstract does seem to partially support the claim, although I don't know if the two factors are compared in strength of effect. But it is clear that weight discrimination does increase risk of mortality and negative health outcomes.
I also saw a different study showing that weight/size discrimination increases risk of suicide.
This article summarizes what we know from science about size discrimination and cites studies throughout.
A few more resources for anyone who wants them:
https://www.marquiselemercedes.com/
https://dashaunharrison.com/ Reading list: https://dashaunharrison.com/fat-studies-body-and-desirability-politics-a-reading-list/
Podcasts, blogs, studies, discussions can all be found from these great folks doing this work.
All I'll say to add to the discussion is I'm a bit fat for sure. Always have been. I also workout daily and climb mountains and hike backcountry environments in all seasons.
That is I have pretty clear evidence myself that being fit does not mean being not fat. I have friends far slimmer than me who couldn't conceive of spending a 12 hr day in the mountains comfortably.
Would I be faster hiker if I didn't carry more weight? Who knows maybe but it's not coming off unless I... I don't know... Maybe follow some strict diet?
But why I'm already capable of doing the things I want shaped like this.
Huh, guess I missed a lot of the fatphobic stuff.
I will agree that people have different metabolisms. That there is medical fatphobia. That there is society wide fatphobia. That eating healthy and exercising can be very difficult in this society, which works people so hard they can't exercise, and makes unhealthy foods so cheap and accessible. I can agree with all of that. I can sympathise with it.
At the same time, people do manage in spite of these odds. It's just important to recognise that it's often in spite of the 'lot' that society has given them.
What is also true, is that the simple calculation of calories in vs calories out is not an opinion, it is a law of energy dynamics. If you consume less calories than you burn in a day, you will end up losing weight. Some people might lose more, some might lose less - the key thing is that it is a law of the UNIVERSE that excess 'calories' will be stored as fat. Deficit calories will not and CAN NOT.
Exercise creates a large deficit of energy to be regained (or not regained). As such, if you stick to exercising more calories off than more calories you put on, you will lose weight, and you will lose it quickly and reliably.
Alternatively, turn it into muscle by making those calories protein calories, that will in turn repair the muscles you exercised.
For the sake of myself trying to be better, is (CW: potentially bad comment) this comment okay, or not? I edited it recently to be more clear, but this is something I want to make sure isn't harming comrades. I will absolutely edit the comment if necessary, but this is something I want to be sure is okay.
I'm a pretty thin person (used to be underweight) partially because of my mom's constant dieting and comments towards other people's weight (for me it used to be directed towards gaining weight until I told her I stopped weighting myself because it was worsening my anxiety)
The only situation where you should bring up other people's weight is if they suddenly start rapidly loosing or gaining it
People on both sides of the "healthy" spectrum are well aware that they are not the average, your comments won't change or help anything
Hey so I have a question as someone who was morbidly obese last year, around 260 pounds, and I'm now currently at 190. I'm still overweight and I don't view being "thin" as some optimal goal or anything especially nowadays, in where body standards are more open.
Anyway, my question is more about acceptance, I'm lucky enough to never deal with anything explictily fatphobic, though I think we have a different definition of what fatphobic is. Is a CW on discussions of how to lose weight, dieting, calorie deficits really necessary? By all means, none of us should be forced into one body type but I think we already see a growing acceptance of said body types. In the sense that, since we won't likely see the systemic change needed to address all the corn syrup in our food, isn't it on us as a community to support each other to be healthier? Not for an ideal aesthetic but for us to avoid the negative effects of obesity.
Maintenance Phase is good and I recommend it. I'll admit it's not in my regular rotation of podcasts, but I like it a lot :)
While everyone is entitled to basic respect and dignity can we not bury our heads in the sand about the health effects that come with excess weight?
TL;DR: There’s mounting evidence that anti-fat bias in medicine is more to blame for poor medical outcomes in fat people rather than just the fat itself.
While bigger people get worse medical care overall, it is not the only reason by far for poor medical outcomes. Even if we dismiss the correlations between excess weight and all manner of disease and negative outcomes as mere anti-fat bias, it still negatively impacts your quality of life. Excess adipose tissue in the stomach puts pressure on organs. Increased workload on joints can damage them. Increased vascular volume requires the heart to work harder just to maintain. None of this is up for debate or caused by medical bias, just simple cause and effect.
Diet and exercise don’t result in long-term weight loss for something like 95% of people.
Literally any major lifestyle change has a low success rate. That's why resources should be focused on early childhood education and prevention. It's hard to get someone to stop smoking, it's much easier to prevent someone from smoking in the first place. The vast majority of people did not make the choice to gain weight, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to create better outcomes.
As a leftist, are you really gonna sit here and blame this on individual choices rather than systemic issues?
No, I'm going to advocate for systemic changes so people can have better health outcomes, prevent food deserts, increase walkability in cities, support community fitness programs ban addictive/excessively unhealthy ingredients in food and doubly so if they're marketed at children, etc etc.
As a leftist, are you really going to sit here and accept the problem as some act of god while corporations continue to exploit it for monetary gain?