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People who are fatphobic don't know anything about medical science
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Unpopular Opinion
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People in general struggle with empathy and being objective. It's extremely easy to assume that your own experience is universal, and overcoming your biases is probably about as hard as changing your eating habits.
Sure, I agree but eating habits have little to do with weight. And being overlyskinny or dehydrated to the point where you have no fat and can see muscle is more unhealthy than being out of shape and fat.
I'm sorry, but there is a very great disparity between this statement and reality.
I agree somewhat with your post but this comment is utter nonsense. Diet has everything to do with it. Calories in, calories out is an immutable fact. The law of conservation of mass. However, not all calories are equal.
Obesity IS unhealthy. There are no two ways about it, but people just blame the individual, saying you just need to eat less, or or exercise more, are genuinely stupid.
There are many root causes. Modern diets are absolute garbage for one. Mass production of foods, fast foods, sedentary lifestyles from young ages, poor eating habits, etc... has absolutely fucked a lot of people.
Cravings can be addictions.
The body can quite literally work against itself. The brain can be so self destructive (which seems so ironic to me).
The world compounds that by creating body dysmorphia, either through transphobia, or celebrated body types that are unobtainable without great genetics and constant training (whose got time for that, do I really need a 6 pack?).
You don't need to be fit to be beautiful, but don't conflate that with "obesity is not unhealthy", because it is.
Extra weight on your your hips and legs will wear them out quicker. It pushes on your lungs and makes it harder to breathe. It makes your heart work harder to pump blood throughout your body.
I know from personal experience. It was terrible.
High cholesterol, high blood pressure... these things WILL kill you.
Being a healthy weight, everything just feels better. More energy, moving around, getting up, sitting down, I go on and on.
My point is:
People are fat phobic and super fucking ignorant about it. There are.mamy causes, and sometimes people get given a really unfair dice roll, both environmentally and generically.
But obesity is still unhealthy, and if you are obese, I hope you can find something that works for you.
I agree with your overall message that "most modern diet advice comes across as more insulting than helpful" (at least that's how I interpret it), but this reply isn't doing it for me.
Source? "Calories in, calories out" gets repeated to the point of redundancy during conversations like this, but it's really all there is to it. If you consume more calories than you burn, you'll gain weight, and vice-versa. The exceptions to this rule are so rare and medically-anomalous they really don't fit into such a broad conversation as this.
Again, source? This is also the extreme opposite spectrum. No one (worth listening to) is saying that this is preferable to obesity. What you call "fatphobia" is only so common now because obesity and obesity-linked pathologies is the most common cause of death in America. It makes sense that more people would be focusing on curbing these deaths than focusing on something that, speaking candidly, affects a much smaller percentage of the population.
The problem is our society has these ideals that are unachievable by most individuals. There are people out there who can have abs without effort and those who never can, but our culture doesn’t account for that and always views the skinnier person as healthier. We have never been good at catering towards individuals.
TBH, most of the time you just don't see the effort. While there's certainly a genetic component, most of it is what you eat, how much you eat, and your activity level. Having worked as a personal trainer for a brief period of time, I can tell you that there are a lot of people that are entirely resistant to any real, serious changes to their diet, that refuse to track what they're actually eating, and think they're putting in the effort when they're barely getting their heart rate up. When you tell a person to track every single thing that enters their mouth for a single day, 99% of the people simply won't, because the idea that they need to change their relationship with food is too scary to them.
Diet and exercise work for a lot of people but it’s just not always viable given what we’re expected to do with all our time. Also we celebrate by eating so there’s a level of enjoyment with food for many people. If people could have time and money it’d be easier but for most it’s just not feasible.
...But that's not actually relevant to the initial opinion. From a strictly medical perspective, the overwhelmingly vast percentage of people that are overweight are overweight because of how much they eat, and what their activity level is. You're talking about factors outside of that, and that's simply not what the person that posted the original unpopular opinion was claiming.
Sorry what I mean is that the explanation goes beyond just science. These other factors are real and affects a broad swathe of the populace. I’m saying that fatphobics are bigots for more than their misunderstanding of science. I’d say that’s supporting the original argument.
The original statement refers only to not understanding medical science, and that they're bigots because they don't understand that science. I refuted that argument. Now you're saying that there are social and cultural factors rather than just science. You have moved the goal posts of the argument.
Oh I didn’t realize you were refuting the original argument as it’s clear from years of research that population level guidance (AMA recommendations) has been both wrong and ineffective. Even in the scientific community there has been bigotry against fat: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033062021000670 which is why some of these recommendations have remained for so long.