Beautifully stark, best sentence in the whole piece. This article does a great job at illuminating just how complex of a problem obesity has become. I don't want to say that I'm sympathetic to fat shaming, but I will admit that I find the counter movement (I'm looking at you, Tumblr) pathetic. I'm not going to demand legislation forcing anyone to become thin, but if people don't understand that their lifestyle is killing them and cry foul when confronted with that reality, whether from internet trolls or their physician, that's when I throw up my hands and walk away. Primarily, the burden on the healthcare system and taxpayers concern me. Second, people are missing out on undeniably more fulfilling lives. Third (oh god, these are selfish), they're robbing the world of attractive people, and fourth, they're spilling over into my airplane seat. And no, I'm not a perfect person... please see the above paragraph, for starters. I'm sorry if this offends anyone, discussing this is more difficult than tip-toeing on eggshells, but I'll give it a go.What if your house is empty and your stomach is full, but you have a bowl full of crunchy somethings sitting in your lap that will make the nothing on television seem bearable?
Let’s just eat and eat, get fatter and fatter, and work out how best to live with it. This is where we are heading now: fatness, outside of morality, as an accepted consequence of the world as we have made it.
Sometimes it's hard to accept something as a reality, even if you know it's true.
In my case, I didn't really concern myself that much with my extra weight, until I noticed that after dropping about 30 pounds (from my heaviest-ever weight), my recently-developed arthritis-like pain in my hands went away. That's what it took to make it real, for me. I'm still too fat, but I'll never be that fat again.
I definitely agree that we (still) idolize unhealthy levels of thinness, especially in women, and the issue is far from being put to rest. I'll also point out that there is an entire spectrum of people participating in the "fat acceptance" movement. Many of them have generally healthy physiques, and just aren't toothpick thin, but there are also many examples of people clearly deluding themselves. It is the latter that I find pathetic. People claiming a strictly genetic disadvantage, who would like me to believe that their BMR is <1,000 kCalories per day when they weigh >250 lbs. The jury is still out on genetic predisposition to obesity, but to divert all blame into something beyond control is textbook "playing the victim". Personally, I find that women's bodies distribute weight much more favorably than men's, but I will admit some bias there. The female figure is just so much more... aesthetic, in general. Of course, physical attractiveness is a quality more sought out by males than females, hence why some women police themselves so vigilantly about it.
As someone who did his masters in an obesity lab, I have to disagree. The general opinion was that the rise of obesity is due to a mix between us eating too much out of our own choice (food tastes too good, there is so much to each) and the corporations manipulating us into eating more through messing with us pasychologically and by adding excessive sugars etc. Genetic predisposition and others factors are exactly that, only additional factors that could lead to a person being more prone to become obese. They don't turn you into an obese person (unless you had mutations in your leptin/leptin receptors, which are very rare cases). An interesting niche in obesity research was the existence of "healthy obese" patients. Recently shown in a group of Finnish twins. Where one had a normal weight and the other obese, but both had similar metabolic values etc.In current medical research obesity is often conceptualised as an unavoidable disease. It’s your genes, your metabolism, the chemicals in your environment, what your mother ate when she was pregnant, whether she fed you at her breast. It is everything but what you choose to put in your mouth.