alt Hacker NewsI agree with a lot of this. For context, I'm very fat, so I feel a bit more that it's OK to say this, but yeah the body shaming stuff is a very interesting topic.
Obviously, if you feel that your whole life you're being bullied, then it's definitely right to be empowered someway to get someone to stop bullying you that way.
But we seem to have gone way beyond stopping body shaming and to promoting body positivity, which I think is dangerous. We shouldn't be teaching kids that it's OK to be fat and that's just a personal choice and not to change.
The simple fact is that being overweight leads to a lot of health issues. I'm fortunate that my body still tolerates being able to run, but at my BMI that's by no means a guarantee long term. I know that realistically, I need to drop 1/3 of my body weight ASAP and keep it off, or the chances of me living another 20 years is actually quite low.
I know exactly the issues with weight loss and how hard it is. At least 3 times in my life, I've lost 25% of my body weight through dieting, but it's always a constant struggle to keep that off if I ease off even a little bit. Most of the times I've regressed, it's been a combination of factors - an injury so I can't go out running for a few months, maybe winter so it's cold and wet and I'm also avoiding my daily lunchtime walk, and maybe my work is really boring so I'm comfort eating a bit more than I need each day, and suddenly before you even realise it, all the weight has suddenly re-appeared, and each time it's harder than the last to get rid of it and keep it off for good.
But definitely, we want a bit of that stigma to remain. Knowing that I'm fat and that most girls don't even look twice at me, or knowing that the health risks are very real and every day I stay fat, it's doing even more damage to my body... it all sucks in the moment, but it's all helping the motivation that something needs to change. It's not OK to just do nothing.
Yeah I think we agree. Clearly being overweight is not good and should be disencouraged, even apart from your own health, an overweight or obese person in a society just takes more a lot more resources go support, either causing a burden on the person themselves or on the society in which they live in. If that person gets to a healthy weight they can be more productive and require less healthcare support, this is true in almost all cases, and so it's just a win-win if we can get as many people as healthy as possible. This should include not just being "not-overweight", but also being very underweight, being sedentary, having an unhealthy diet, or bad mental health. All of those things if improved cause wins to everyone involved. I'm not 100% on board with the idea to measure people's inherent value by their productivity, but I believe most people tend to enjoy being productive and contributing to their community. There's no downside in decreasing the amount of people who are an unhealthy weight.
I think the issue with stigma is it's so hard to keep in balance, I want people to care of their health, and that'll take knowing that being a healthy weight is in fact good, but doing so in a non damaging way is super hard. In my mind I kind of see smoking at an okay "shame-level" (though you can correct me, maybe I'm straight up wrong on this). Nowadays everyone knows that smoking sucks (let's avoid the whole vape thing for now), it destroys your lungs, and eventually it kills you. But the stigma I saw in relation to smoking just seems more normal and proportional, people generally don't really like being around cigarettes, which is fair, and some people silently judge you, some will tell you to stop smoking, but... there's just not this need to denigrate people for their smoking habit the way it is for being overweight. Now, in the end you'll still feel miserable when you'll start trying to quit/lose weight, but there's nothing really to be done about that, that's just nature.
Honestly I think the underlying cause for this is some of the innate human behavior we still have as a species. We often view being unattractive (which being overweight usually is for most people) as a big moral fault, which gives you a pass to punch down on the person for this transgression. I think we kind of view overweight people in the same lens as someone who did something disgusting, and this might happen completely outside of our conscious comprehension. It then takes conscious effort not to feel that way by default. Honestly this might not be fixable, and maybe there is no way to fix shaming of overweight people on the societal level. All I know is if we help as many people as possible to lose weight, the amount of people shamed will go down that way, too.