We need to start seriously treating the concepts of "obesity" and "weight loss" as a dangerous pseudoscience and I'm not kidding.

It's some shit that everyone thinks they can understand based on vibes but science just doesn't work that way. Real scientists have proved time and time again that it doesn't work how people assume. Many medical conditions where it's assumed weight is a "cause", something to blame the patient for, it's often actually a symptom.

Body size is based on so many individual possibilities. genetics, upbringing, wealth, what type of food you eat, what type of work you do, where you live, etc etc etc. it is impossible to control for all of these.

I was a child born to fat, impoverished, labourer parents, and I grew up doing farm labour, gaining muscle - I will never ever be thin. It's just how my body developed. And no matter how much weight I were to hypothetically lose, doctors would still push me to lose more. Family would push me to lose more. Society would push me to lose more. It will never ever ever be enough. You will never be thin enough, there is no bmi low enough to satisfy them, there is no "progress" that won't just make them pity or shame you even more. Your personal circumstances aren't important to a pseudo-scientific practice, the variables don't matter that much, it must be a one-size-fits-all solution.

Every weight loss pill, every low calorie shake or meal replacement, every weight watchers frozen meal, it all contributes to the pseudo-scientific cult of thinness. Every ad that says you're not good enough, it pushes you to drop your critical thinking skills. We have created a world where people think shitting themselves into thinness using potions with untested ingredients is healthier than having some fat on their bodies. But it's not! That's absurd! You're sending your body into a constant state of gastric shock!! And one day, when you get bored of eating tasteless nutrient paste and decide to eat something with some flavour in it, your body will react with a starvation response and store every little bit of fat that it can, because it's so used to being fucking starved. Which sends people into a panic response, buying up more pills and trying to crash-diet and lose their meagre protective layers.

Your body stores fat because that's your reserve energy. Fat is protective. I thank my body every day for storing so much energy for me, fuck knows I need it! That's your blubber!! You are a large mammal. Your body is designed to keep energy in reserve so you can sleep and stay warm and keep your brain alive. You should research the human metabolic process. You should research the cow metabolic process. You should research bear metabolic process. YOU NEED FAT!

And just like so many other pseudosciences, fatphobia and all that it entails is deeply rooted in racism and specifically antiblackness. It is not a mistake that the ozempic-chic era is coinciding with one of the biggest waves of open, globalised white supremacy we've seen in decades. Whiteness needs to perform & police whiteness constantly, maintaining appearances is THE way to stay part of the ingroup.

You must commit to removing yourself from that ingroup. Do not allow it a single toe in the door. A pseudoscience, no matter how comforting and easy to digest it may be, is not your friend. It is feeding you lie upon lie upon lie.

Looked up something about menopause symptoms the other day, and I had to take a screenshot of options for symptom management:

You can see that weight loss is in the comparable company of hypnosis, acupuncture, and chiropracticity. Absolutely pseudoscience.

Feel free to reblog from the source and ignore this addition but I just wanted to add to this for people who truly do not get it:

Society tries to trick fat people into thinking their lives will get better when they’re skinny because “you’ll feel better skinny because your body is healthier” and shit like “you’ll act more confident and people respond better to confidence.”

This is to absolve themselves, on a personal level, of fatphobia. It is to say FAT PEOPLE make their own lives harder and skinny, midsize, even other fat people do not make it worse. The fatphobia is made up, not real. Not systemic. Not a constant in interpersonal relationships.

This is a lie.

I lost about ~40% of my body weight. Some of the kindest, least judgmental, socially aware, anti-discrimination people almost immediately started treating me better. I could even just MENTION that I was trying to lose weight, that I had only lost 1 pound, 5 pounds, 10 pounds (while still being “obese” by arbitrary medical standards) and people would treat me better.

Again, these are people who never, ever used fatphobic language. Who never shamed me out loud for being 214 pounds. Who I thought loved me to the best of their ability.

And it made me realize… everyone is fatphobic until they actively unlearn fatphobia.

If you think you aren’t fatphobic, I assure you, you are. And I think you need to mentally check yourself when you are interacting with fat people.

Are you withholding affection? Are you avoiding touching them when you’d touch someone else? Do you immediately try to avoid certain activities with them? Are you PUSHING activities onto them that you think will make them less fat? Do you avoid clothes shopping with them and going to stores with clothes for fat people? Do you avoid gifting them clothes because you don’t want to ever talk about sizes with them?

What do you avoid talking about with fat friends?

Do you complain about your own weight, “feeling fat?”

Do you push YOUR insecurities onto your fat friends?

Do you avoid being seen with them?

What are you excluding fat people in your life from?

Do you have internalized biases? Do you quietly think to yourself that they’re eating too much, that they’re lazy or selfish? Do you assume they’re unhealthy? Do you blame them for what they’re going through?

Do you make it clear you’re willing to listen when they want to talk about this?

What do you do to make sure the fat people in your life know you love them AS IS?

#i don’t think ppl realize just how oppressive fatphobia is#and leftist spaces haven’t quite caught onto it yet outside of explicitly fat liberationist spaces#so literal left wing communist social justice people will be horrifically fatphobic all while denying systemic fatphobia#meanwhile there are SIGNIFICANT hurdles in employment and pay and medical care for fat people#we are less likely to be employed#less likely to be in positions of authority#make less than our thin peers#and are literally more likely to die bc a doctor just didn’t feel like treating us#so many fat ppl have died from completely treatable illnesses bc a doctor decided they were just fat and didn’t need tests or treatment#i will never forget the story of a fat woman who went to the doctor for shortness of breath for like 5 years until they FINALLY did tests#and found out she had stage 4 lung cancer#or the story of another fat person who’d been seeking treatment for difficulty walking#only to be ignored for a decade#and it turned out it was a massive spinal tumor that eventually paralyzed them#like#fuck y’all just truly do not realize how severe fatphobia is#especially when you’re not cishet and white

your fat activism posts should include people who are not healthy at their current weight or have an eating disorder where they eat too much btw

like YES there are plenty of fat people who ARE healthy and that is a super important thing to say but fat people who are not currently healthy (especially fat women) are treated like dirt by both camps. like i dont know how to explain to you that unhealthy people dont deserve to get treated like garbage

I think the thing that drives me the most batshit about the medical fatphobia conversation is that the burden of proof feels so exactly backwards. Just from an obvious best practices standpoint???

Things like intentional malnourishment, intentionally incapacitating vital organs through surgery, denial of potentially lifesaving medical care until those things are done, etc.

Those are all pretty extreme. The kinds of things it feels like a “first do no harm” system should have a lot of solid evidence for before recommending or implementing them.

But they’re so bog standard and accepted and everyone from doctors to your own family will look at you like you’re a flat-earther when you suggest maybe we shouldn’t be defaulting to that.

“We have proved there is an association between larger bodies and certain illnesses!”

Okay, have you proved the fat caused the illnesses?

“No.”

Have you proved people have better long term outcomes from losing weight?

“We can’t.”

Right. And why is that again?

“Well to measure that, we’d have to compare the health outcomes of three populations - thin people, fat people, and fat people who became thin through weight loss.”

So do that.

“But there actually are not enough people who became thin through weight loss and kept it off for us to do a long term study on how that impacts their health. The sample size is too small.”

So you can’t prove that changing fat people to thin people would change their health outcomes to those of thin people.

Because you can’t prove that fat people can become thin in the first place.

But you’re still telling them to do that as your primary prescription.

Even when the recommended and unproven methods to do so are potentially very dangerous.

“Yeah, but”

What if as a doctor I found out pale people get skin cancer more often than darker skin people, so to prevent skin cancer, started recommending tanning to my palest patients? Would that be good health care?

“Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not what we’re doing.” Isn’t it though???

I’m dropping the bit. I’m losing my shit. I get so used to living in bizarro land but sometimes I just want to shake everyone. Calories are bad science! They are nearly meaningless! The BMI is bad science! It’s nearly meaningless! The presumptions made in weight loss studies are so bad!!! And we’ve known this for decades!!! And we just keep!!! Ruining lives!!! Why are we so invested in this clearly unfounded ideology about bodies???

'association between larger bodies and certain illnesses' yeah bc fat people come to you complaining of symptoms of those illnesses, and you refuse to do any tests, and tell us to extremely drastically modify our entire bodies, and then come back once we've succeeded. We can't manage it, our illness worsens until it's fatal, and then it shows up positive in the autopsy. 'wow fat people die of xyz a lot! we should tell them to not be fat, so its less likely to kill them' what's killing us is medical neglect. you only diagnose us of anything other than gluttony when we're corpses on a metal fucking slab.

[edit: i say 'you' at shitty doctors and the medicine system, indirectly, NOT at anyone on here - sorry, just realized how confrontational and violent that could've come across]

Body image vs. anti fatness

TRANSCRIPT:

I think because we talk about body image and fatphobia together so much, we sometimes forget those are separate things; and it is actually exhausting being someone who talks about anti fatness frequently to have those conversations be misunderstood and derailed into being about body image.

When I am talking about systemic anti fatness, I'm not talking about how I feel about my body.

I love my body with the best of them, but I cannot love my body out of employment discrimination or medical discrimination.

I can't love my body into equal pay or equal access to healthcare.

Fat people live in a world that pays us less, charges us more, denies us healthcare, openly ridicules and excludes us, and then tells us the solution is to love our bodies.

But it's not.

The solution is to give fat people access to the same rights, resources, and services that thin people get without question.

The solution is activism and policy change.