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I’ve never considered either side of the debate “hatred”. I don’t hate fat people or lazy people or whatever other outgroup we’re talking about. My issue on a lot of this is about normalization — that the movement in question is encouraging society to treat as normal and neutral things that are generally harmful either to the people in question or the larger society. I don’t think problems get solved by pretending they don’t exist. We have a lot of these kinds problems. We have a lot of people who are too poorly educated to really understand and interact with modern society. We have people who have been made so emotionally fragile that they find coping with things not going their way is impossible for them.
I agree that in most subjects and movements there’s a pop-version of the main subject. Even for religion, there’s the high version people learn in official ministerial training full of very complicated theology, theodicy, and cosmology. Then there’s the pop-religion where not only are the ideas vastly simplified, some pop beliefs tend to contradict the official dogmas of the religion.
Not a defense of 'fat acceptance', but by normalization I think you mean positive acceptance? Obesity is, in any objective sense, normal in many communities in the United States.
Arguably obesity needs ... not necessarily more shame, it was and still is incredibly shameful in the eyes of most. I think a combination of explicit coercion, both towards the obese and towards those who create the conditions that lead to it (i.e. those who sell the food), is justified.
One of the arguments of the fat acceptance people is that shame doesn't work. Being fat isn't exactly desirable in our society, and they regularly get badgered to lose weight by doctors and skinny relatives. The whole point of the fat acceptance movement is to remove what they see as an unfair stigma.
It does work for some people, you can definitely find cases of people losing the weight, and they often frame their motivation in terms of self-image and shame.
It works for a tiny minority of people. For almost everyone else, long term fat loss through diet is impossible.
Which really shouldn't surprise us. The global obesity epidemic didn't start due to a global reduction in shame or increase in laziness. It affected every country and population on the planet that started consuming the modern industrialised country diet. There is clearly something in this diet (or some other environmental stressor) that is causing obesity. Personally, I think it's the vegetable oils, but whatever is causing it, approaching the subject moralistically is a pointless distraction.
What? Human bodies are not excempt from the laws of thermodynamics. If you burn more calories than you take in, you will lose weight. Period. And you won't gain weight if you don't put more calories in than you burn. You have to actively do something in order to stay or become obese.
Now, is weight-loss extremely hard psychologically? Oh, absolutely. My own weight struggles can attest to that and I'm not even obese.
But it isn't weight-loss that's impossible. It's getting people to not overeat that's impossible. Two very different things. To pretend they're identical is irresponsible.
If getting people to stop overeating is impossible, and the only way to lose weight is to stop overeating, then yes, losing weight is impossible. I don't see why making that distinction helps apart from allowing us to cast moral aspersions on fat people.
Like sure, it's technically possible to lock someone in a cage and feed them the exact number of calories they need to lose weight. But then their bodies will fight back by reducing their metabolism, increasing their food cravings and generally making them miserable. Not only that, their reduced metabolisms won't even recover after the (inevitably) regain the weight back.
So I stand by my original point, weight loss through diet is impossible. Once weight is gained, it's essentially permanent. A more interesting question is why obesity came out of nowhere in the mid-20th century and exploded from the 1970s onwards. There's really only one likely culprit in my mind.
Really?
It is not even per person. It is not compared with total callories change. Not compared with say sugar production.
If you look at the chart Trends in Daily Calories from Major Food Groups on this article, you'll see that vegetable oil consumption per capita has almost tripled since the 1960s. There are dozens of other sources online saying the same thing. Literally nobody is arguing that vegetable oil consumption has fallen. The only debate is whether the gigantic increase in vegetable oil consumption has anything to do with the gigantic increase in obesity that happened at the exact same time.
Meanwhile both sugar and grain consumption has actually been falling since the late 90s.
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