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I recently (and by recently, I mean two weeks ago) started water fasting, and to displace the constant feelings of food cravings I started watching food-related videos, most notably: TLC's 600lb Life. It is extraordinarily trashy TV, but illuminating.
Before I describe the negative observations, here's the positive ones: A) All of the successful patients had a good attitude to begin with (they wanted to lose the weight, and were willing to commit) B) They followed the doctor's instructions (important.) C) They had friends and family who were supportive and were generally affable individuals to begin with (likeable!)
As a representative slice of the people who get really, really fat, they're about 5% of the population. The rest that follows is the generalizations of everyone else.
Now. For the hot takes:
THE OBESE ARE IGNORANT
Do you remember the much-maligned food pyramid from your health classes, the one that put way too many grain carbs at the bottom? At the very least, it puts vegetables on the second tier, and fast food at the very tippy top. And these people don't even know that. The very concept of CICO they stubbornly defy. They don't seem to know anything about basic nutrition that even a kid would know. And it's not like they're getting fat off good cuisine, either. (A fat gourmand with a diverse palette would be, at the very least, a good friend to have to ask for recommendations.) They're just eating fast-food slop paid by their welfare checks. And speaking of...
THE OBESE ARE ENTITLED
There is a certain childlike narcissism that accompanies each and every one of these patients, that demands the world bend around them: that they should be fed, bathed, and cared after without giving anything back in return. They frequently manipulate their family members and spouses to look after them, hand and foot, even their children. They're rude and throw tantrums, and their ignorance only strengthens their stubbornness. (They even disagree with their own doctor, a man they're self-selected to seek out!) They continue their bad eating habits - even in the hospital itself! - and have food snuck in for them to eat. This inevitably leads to...
THE OBESE ARE STUPID
In wrestling, where the tiers are segmented by weight class, in order to hit the weight limits, athletes often go to extraordinarily lengths to temporarily lose 5-10 pounds before weigh-in to get as much of an advantage as they can. In the show, in order to qualify for bariatric surgery, patients need to lose a certain amount of weight so that it is safe for them to go into surgery. Now, admittedly, going to 1200 calorie diet when you're used to 10k+ is pretty hard, but even going to 5,000 - twice the amount of a healthy adult - would guarantee weight loss without significant dietary changes, other than portions.
Do they do this? Of course not.
In fact, I'm pretty sure they don't even weigh themselves beforehand. It's always a surprise and a shock when - surprise of surprises - that eating the same amount as you did before would maintain it. (In fact, some of them even gained weight.) The tantrums, the lies, the threats - all are laid bare before the uncaring measure of the livestock scale.
Of course they don't get the surgery. And they're always left wondering why, the poor buggers.
So, in conclusion, I have come into belief that you should judge people for being obese. Not to say that all fat people are ignorant, entitled, and stupid. But they definitely have at least one of these traits, and should be avoided at all costs.
One of my guilty pleasures is trash TV, including My 600 Pound Life.
Your observations are generally true for the people on that show. But I think you're being rather uncharitable.
First of all, the patients on that show are extraordinarily obese and unhealthy. They are not your "usual" fat person, but people who've literally reached the point of "lose weight or die." They are also, of course, selected for dramatic and disagreeable personalities who will make for good TV. (You can even see viewers complaining when the season is "too boring" because the patients are cooperative and not dramatic enough.)
You also neglected to mention that most of them are suffering from severe mental illness. The food addiction that has rendered them nearly immobile is clearly a mental illness in itself, but most of them have all kinds of other problems. Most of them are impoverished and come from abusive backgrounds. Childhood sexual abuse is a very common theme. You say they are stupid, entitled, and ignorant; there's a reason you don't see many of them who come from stable and supportive middle class families. Most of the time, when we see family members, they are as fucked up as the patient, if not as fat.
And it's a reality TV show! You know that shit is heavily edited, right? My 600 Pound Life, like most such shows, has been accused of staging confrontations, feeding the "participants" their lines, crafting "storylines" to make them more dramatic, and so on. The patients may be real and their issues are too, but I would not trust the show to be giving you a really accurate picture.
Now, more generally I agree that fat people (even "normal" fat people) have a strong tendency to be in denial about how much they eat and how little exercise they do, or about the health effects of obesity. But it should be obvious that making broad generalizations based on the personalities who appear on a reality TV show is just taking cheap swings at easy targets.
Me personally having mental illness makes me profoundly unsympathetic to others in that regard. I admit it is a personal flaw that I judge such people without the characteristic liberal softness: I have seen too many people get away with baldly unsympathetic behaviour because of trauma and I never feel more sympathy when it is brought up.
Even with the caprice of reality TV, the shit they do boggles the mind. (Stranger than fiction comes to mind.) And the food addictions on display (even when they know they are being observed and filmed, like in Secret Eaters) are so shameless, it is depicting the real thing, baldly and unsympathetically.
I don't think mental illness is an excuse - you are still responsible for getting yourself fixed. But people who literally aren't in control of themselves can't be expected to act "rationally."
Well, yes, if you screen people for their high levels of craziness, they will do crazy things on camera. My 600 Pound Life, for all that it purports to be "helping" its patients (Dr. Now probably really does care about his patients, at least somewhat) is very much a modern freakshow. "Point and laugh at the freaks and then wonder why they don't just stop stuffing their fat faces..."
If the threat of their imminent approaching deaths isn't enough to establish even a modicum of self control they're not really human beings, but automata who have lost their will to live. But it doesn't matter, in any case: because although they claim to have no self autonomy, they are very good at wheedling out benefits and favors from the people around them. It all smacks of bullshit in the end.
The number of people who weigh more than 600lbs is a vanishingly small number. It's not like in the Jersey Shore, where fake tanned sluts and himbos compete to be the stupidest on camera. Being very fat is comorbid with something very wrong with you and it's a pathology that is rapidly spreading in the Western world. They don't need to pick out the crazies and the exhibitionists: they just need to turn on the cameras and watch them do their distorted routines.
If it makes you feel very superior thinking that, okay. But people who are severely depressed, delusional, schizophrenic, and suffering from various other mental illnesses often do, in fact, lack even a modicum of self control. They are human beings. Broken human beings are still responsible for their actions. Yes, they can also be abusive and manipulative.
The reason we have more morbidly obese people is that (a) we have the medical technology to keep people alive in conditions that would have killed them sooner in earlier times; (b) we have a hyperabundance of extremely cheap, calorie-dense food made to be hyperpalatable; (c) we have no real mechanism to force people to stop self-harming in this way except in the most extreme circumstances.
And here's where I have a fundamentally different worldview than yours. There's a turn of phrase... 'makes you feel superior'. That would be incorrect.
That would imply that it is a subjective, egotistic feeling rather than objective fact.
There's nothing wrong with judging people better or worse than others. That may be a mortal sin to a progressive, liberal worldview, but to me it is simply the basis of any ideology that makes meritocratic judgement of worth. If you're a fat person because you were sexually abused or have some sort of mental illness or what have you... that's a sad story, but in the end, you're still being pushed off the bridge into the path of the runaway trolley.
I probably would not survive in the governing ethics of which I prefer... and that's fine with me. But that's probably too personal to debate on, so I'll chalk this one up to a disagreement of values.
We do have different worldviews, but not in the way you think.
Objectively, yes, you and I are probably "superior" to people who are eating themselves to death, at least on most axes.
What I think is a character flaw is feeling some kind of gratification at being such a superior person. Admit it is what it is; you like watching human trainwrecks. (That's why I watch the show.) You don't have to feel sorry for them or have empathy. But I wouldn't take pride in how superior I am or how it makes me a clear-eyed rationalist that I can deny them sympathy.
We wouldn't watch a show called '160 lb people eat healthy food in regular amounts', now, would we? :P
I believe what the West gets wrong is that it attempts to shift the pride of superiority to obviously inadequate people (and eliminate any pesky shame that came along with it.) But that fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of such emotions. You should feel pride in doing something good (and shame when you do something bad.) When you give pride to the weak-willed and shame the strong you upset the incentive structure of society and chaos ensues.
Or, to put it simply, false modesty benefits no one, and false pride harms everyone. To do otherwise to spare feelings is no good.
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