Today in fat hate

[sebastienne]

What is the "obesity crisis"? Every day I get more and more confused.

Today, I read an article in the Guardian that said "exercise protects against heart disease, type 2 diabetes, osteoperosis and high blood pressure". (Which I think has already been pretty well evidenced, to be honest, but it's still a useful thing to put out in the public domain, encouraging people to adopt healthier lifestyles.) But it said this in paragraph ten. The first nine paragraphs of the article? Maybe the headline alone will give you a clue - Exercise alone 'will not solve obesity crisis'.

So exercise has a positive effect on all of the illnesses commonly correlated with fat bodies, but doesn't erase those fat bodies, so isn't good enough. The mask is slipping; anti-obesity campaigners like to hide behind the idea that their determination to erase my body comes out of concern for my health, but here they show themselves encouraging dangerous behaviour (aggressive food restriction) over healthy behaviour (daily exercise) because the former has a perceived aesthetic benefit while the latter "only" protects against heart disease, diabetes, osteoperosis...

Well, fuck them. They want me to fight to be happy? Then I will fight and fuck and dance and laugh and scream and fight.







I'm just gonna keep calling it out when I see it, because I don't know what else I can do.

Comments

[chiasmata]

1. Yes, I know. The first nine paragraphs exclusively; the article as a whole (including that final paragraph) primarily. What's your point? :)

2. Does that rather depend on how many calories one is eating in the first place, and the period of time over which the restriction occurs? Reducing from 3000 to 2000 gradually over a period of weeks or months is scarcely aggressive, and as far as I remember, the article doesn't advocate immediate dramatic reductions.

[sebastienne]

1. My post was about the construction of the "obesity epidemic", and what exactly makes it an "epidemic" (ie huge-scale health problem) when the commonly-scaremongered negative health outcomes are repeatedly shown to correlate with diet and exercise rather than body type per se

2. As a result, your comment that calorie restriction for purposes of weight loss, as advocated in the article, could have the side-effect of positive health outcomes either reinforces my point, or is a pointless and offensive derail. I haven't decided what kind of mood I'm in yet this morning..

[chiasmata]

Um, all I did was describe the article - accurately - as being primarily about weight-loss. I was asking annalytica what her point was, because the first part of her comment seemed unnecessary. I know what your post is about!

[annalytica]

1. My point is that sebastienne's original post doesn't seem to me to be denying that a healthy diet does protects against illness. It's about a particular article which focuses entirely on the goal of weight loss, and on the comparative efficacy of exercise and food restriction in achieving that goal. Sebastienne claims that aggressive food restriction is dangerous, but doesn't say anything about the benefits of a healthy diet - because the author of the article doesn't say anything about that, either. The issue as I see it is not whether there are health benefits to changing your eating habits, but whether those health benefits are presented as being at all important in this article.

2. TBH I don't know what would be the physiological effects of going from 3000 to 2000 calories in a few weeks, assuming it were possible to do that in some kind of vacuum that protected you from the psychological effects. Perhaps if we regard the human body as a physical object with only physical needs, such a reduction would be healthy. But making calorie reduction - especially calorie reduction of that magnitude - a goal in itself has all kinds of psychological - and consequently physical - health problems, which I won't repeat because S has already done so.

[chiasmata]

1. And mine was that sebastienne seemed to be ignoring the benefits of a healthy diet. Healthy diet was not mentioned as a protective factor against illness in the article, and that is a weakness of it, in my opinion. Sebastienne also seemed to be ignoring its benefits, in my understanding of the matter because her reading of this article was different to mine.

2. I still know that, thank you :) I'm not saying it's necessarily a good idea, but nor will I agree that it's any more necessarily a bad idea.

As I said above, I'm going to stop replying to comments on this thread because it's getting frustrating and isn't at all productive.