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.
Yes, CICO is a basically thermodynamics, and is, fundamentally, true.
But, I don't think anyone really thinks CICO is basically wrong? Only that its an unhelpful framing. And, there's a lot of other problems in your comment here.
Biggest one is the implication that fat people aren't eating healthy, aren't exercising. Many are! And, 'healthy' vs 'unhealthy' foods I don't think is generally a helpful framing either. Like, I know what you're trying to say with it, but you can lose weight on mcdonalds and gain it eating salads, and its not really the 'unhealthiness' or 'healthiness' that causes weight gain or loss.
Just look at the mess of 'diet info', where there's so many diets whose explanations are directly contradictory with one another, yet some people lose weight doing one, and other lose weight doing the other.
Yes, in short, plenty of us do believe that CICO is inherently flawed and grossly oversimplified.
Yes, I agree, sorry if I didn't make that clear or condemn it strongly enough. It is a generally harmful way to frame things.
My point was just that it is 'fundamentally true', and I don't think anyone disputes the core physics of it. The dispute is about its practical applications and usefulness (which, again, is that it is impractical and harmful).