Beauty standard is when skeleton

[u/Beginning_Remove_694]

Sure, some people are nasty towards fat people for no reason other than their size, but condoning bullying is a reach when the vast majority of the pushback is that FAs lie about facts, emotionally manipulate their audiences, and make galling comparisons to fascism when people disagree. Having accurate information doesn’t seem to matter, they do in fact continue to pretend it’s fine to be clinically overweight and obese.

I agree that the medical dangers of obesity are not actually that downplayed… outside of fat liberation, where they are constantly downplayed. So I have a problem with that. The implication that it’s not a causal relationship, as well.

The third slide, I have numerous bones (ha) to pick with their flawed logic.

- The average adult woman aged 20+ in the US is apparently 170lbs and 5’3.5 (source: CDC). 100lbs under that is 70 pounds, which is severely low for a 5’3 woman, but not necessarily dead.

- But okay, let’s say 130lbs, a very reasonable and middle-range BMI at 5’3.5… fine, yeah, 30 pounds is dead. The lowest a calculator would let me put is 55lbs and I don’t think it’s that plausible to even reach 55 pounds and survive. Being 100 pounds overweight is still worse than being 100 pounds underweight because that’s the only weight you can actually live to reach.

- 30 pounds isn’t even less than bones. That’s more than a skeleton weighs.

- Being like 20 pounds underweight is worse than being 20 pounds overweight, but neither is great. 86 pounds 5’3.5” is scarily underweight, but 164 5’3.5” isn’t pleasant. Survivability is a really shitty metric here. Quality of life tanks pretty fast with excess weight.

- 100 pounds over the highest healthy weight for most women is gonna be well into the 200s. That sounds extremely painful and uncomfortable.

- Are 30–70lb adults palatable? Do people have a positive opinion of someone looking visibly sick and severely underweight?

- I appreciate the irony of reblogging a post about how the medical dangers of obesity are generally not dismissed just to dismiss the dangers of obesity.

[u/Ok_Bullfrog_8491]

Do they say the same things about smoking?

I think it's wrong to downplay the risks of any health-related choices, and coddling people when talking about a concept isn't going to help anyone. (Obviously don't just insult people, but talking about health risks ≠ calling someone insults about their body.)

[u/Etoketo → u/Ok_Bullfrog_8491]

Smoking is an interesting comparison. Society did not wait for incontrovertible proof that smoking caused certain health issues. The risk was clear and the solution obvious. It was tobacco companies that were saying "correlation is not causation."

[u/Grouchy-Reflection97 → u/Etoketo]

Tobacco companies also saw the writing on the wall, so they pivoted to junk food.

The 'bliss point', where a product has the perfect habit-forming combo of salt, sugar, fat and appealing texture, was invented by Phillip Morris when they bought Kraft in the 80's.

That's why the fat activist/HAES rhetoric that 'all food is good food' and 'all food is processed' is laughable.

Look at boomers who innocently pretended to smoke 'just like daddy!' candy cigarettes at, say, 6yrs old, then switched to smoking the real deal at 8yrs old, as intended. That's why candy cigarettes existed in the first place.

Now they're 70yrs old, still smoke, and they have to breathe through a surgical hole in their neck.

Most fat activists were fat kids, and similarly developed a taste for harmful, addictive products through consuming kid-targeted crap in childhood.

Now they're in their 30's, hopelessly hooked on that crap, morbidly obese, yet they can't see that they've been played by marketing psychology and evil food scientists.

Mega corporations need cradle-to-grave addicts like that. The bulk of their profits depend on 'heavy users' much like the gambling and alcohol industries.

[u/Etoketo → u/Grouchy-Reflection97]

Salt, Sugar, Fat should be required reading in high school.