Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.
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.
I assume the argument might be related to the amount of people who relapse to their old lifestyle, but then that's not really about diet or exercise not making you lose weight.
Edit for the next person who's gonna misinterpret me and then get incredibly hostile over something I didn't write: I don't agree with this argument. I don't think being overweight is comparable to addiction, the "relapse" terminology is what I've heard used in defense of this argument however, which is why I used it.
i think you should really do some introspection on why you think fat people should be obligated to diet forever or else they’re “relapsing”
I don't think that, but thanks for the accusation. Diet culture is just another capitalist money market, it's fadbased and meant to make money. Which is why I wrote "lifestyle changes". I'm getting so sick of people here willfully misinterpreting something so they can assume bad faith and then get aggressive immediately.
It’s not about “dieting” forever, it’s about concrete lifestyle changes which is why diet culture fucking sucks and so many people are unsuccessful.
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!!!
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).
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
Not my experience. People will have a clear positioning on where they generally stand on trans issues, but what that actually means when we're talking about human bodies is often lackluster even among our trans comrades. Recognizing that trans women in sports actually isn't a complicated issue or that gender affirming care is a human right doesn't mean you can't have brainworms about what a woman is supposed to look like, even if you are a woman who is affected and harmed by that every single day. The brainworms run deep and ridding yourself of a lifetime of cishetnormative, misogynist, ableist and racist body propaganda is a fairly demanding task.
I need to stress that i do not mean this post (or my previous one ITT) as a callout. I'd say that you actually can't just shoot the cop inside your head, it's more like slowly strangling that fucker. It's a process, it takes time, and i try to be generous here. But you need to start somewhere and you don't do that by babystepping people, you need to make it clear that some stuff just doesn't fly.
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! 
finding myself already wanting to bow out of this thread too tbh. big salute to those in the combatting fatphobia posting mines, all your time and energy is really appreciated 
Same. It is giving me such anxiety. Like, jesus christ it's so bad. I have sometimes tried to muster the energy to effort post about this on hexbear, but it is in full display now why I never dared do it.
People need to do better. This fucking sucks.
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.
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.
The reason I suggested the “Maintenance Phase” podcast is that they dive into a lot of the scientific “evidence” about how being fat is bad for you and suggest that anti-fat bias in medicine is actually the cause of poor health outcomes for fat people. And I do want to help people understand but it’s honestly exhausting to have the same conversations over and over.
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.
"Eat less and exercise" is faulty not only because of different bodies. Firstly it departs (edit: maybe a better term is "stems"? Sorry, not Anglo) from a "fat is worse" mindset, and secondly it ignores the reasons why someone who may want to change weight can't actually achieve it. As others have pointed out, it reinforces the bullshit neoliberal "personal responsibility" framework. Like, just compare obesity rates between countries, it's OBVIOUSLY societal if you think for more than 0.3s
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.
This site has triggered the fuck out of my eating disorder and people do not put trigger warnings on their shitty diet advice. 🙃
GOOD post
edit: worth noting that there are a lot of women on hexbear, your phrasing may imply exclusion of trans women which I assume isn't your intention; ofc the chauvinism you describe affects trans women as well, including i'm sure many trans women who use the site.
Diet culture absolutely is a problem in our trans community, as it is in any trans community i've ever been in. Trans women on this site are both affected by the chauvinist policing of women's bodies by other users and engage in such policing themselves. Disordered eating is much more common among trans people than among cis people. Fatphobia, gender dysphoria and patriarchal standards intersect in incredibly nasty ways, and a lot of us fully internalize these pressures.
your phrasing may imply exclusion of trans women which I assume isn't your intention
You're use of the word 'may' is being very generous here.
Like half the site is women lol
And trans women will experience anxiety about the size of our bodies very acutely for obvious reasons
This is something I really want to work on as a mod and I’ve brought it up to the mod team (also I brought it up on hexbear before I was a mod.) I think this is a serious issue on this site for sure.
Thank you and I do appreciate you posting links about anti-fat bias in medicine.
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.
This thread is really disappointing. I really hoped to find better in here. I'm sorry you had to put up with this OP.
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.
Fatphobia is rooted in anti-Blackness
What? Please explain yourself.
I assume OP is referring to in the US/NA, depicting the bourgeoisie as obese in Europe and AES states developed independently of US racial relations.
I don't know enough about it as I have never been to the US nor do I ever intend on going there.
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.
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.
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.
As a fat person I think this entire thread and many of the existing mod reactions are already an overreaction.
I'm not sure what to say, but for one this isn't currently a very fruitful discussion because the comments that are made are exactly the same tired ones that are always made everywhere and have been adressed a million times over. Sadly this is what these discussions always tend to turn into.
The issue I suppose is that the othering of fat bodies is seen as a valid opinion and it is so deeply ingrained in our culture that this discussion always ends up going in circles around itself. There is very little empathy towards fat people and concern trolling is the norm. The way people refuse to engage in investigating this in themselves is hard to combat. The way fat people are dismissed is visible even in this thread imo.
If people can't see how relevant the issue of body size is to the issues of gender, norms, capitalist control, I don't know what good it does to read the endless debatelord comments about deficits, habits or whatever people think it is about. It also puts us fat people in positions where we have to justify ourselves existing in our bodies over and over and I hate how even I justified my fatness as the good kind by stating how much I exercise.
The thing is that every human has the same value, this includes fat people who do nothing at all to fit into norms. It is a norm at the end of the day. The discussion around this should be a lot deeper then what someone does or doesn't eat. This goes so much deeper into everything and would require the kind of educational discussion where people are ready to listen and take on board the experiences of those who are harmed. First people would need to see that harm is being done and without solidarity this is very hard.
I am sorry I don't have any good answers, but the thread is nonetheless currently very painfull.
Thank you very much for this. This thread is indeed painful and I regret posting it already.
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
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.
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.