r/fatlogic derail

Discussion in 'General Advice' started by Athol Magarac, Jul 8, 2018.

  1. Athol Magarac

    Athol Magarac I prefer reading posts without a lot of topics.

    Can of worms. It means that this one is going to turn into another big argument.

    The bloggers who do that are completely the whole point. The best you're going to get from me out of that is apathy, and I almost started there.

    The diet industry is a completely different beast, and I think we can be on the same side about that.

    That's the thing. Even if my problem is that I've been figuratively living most of my life under a rock, I have trouble telling what is innocuous.
     
  2. ChelG

    ChelG Well-Known Member

    Fat people aren't trying to tell anyone being fat is "healthy" either. We're trying to tell you that it's none of your fucking business and we're allowed to exist without fitting your standards.
     
    • Agree x 12
  3. rigel

    rigel in a line of late afternoon sun

    greallen, people are trying to help you. time and time again, people keep trying, even when you double down, even after you've threatened someone. your responses to a lot of things have been either incredibly dismissive, or have involved you comparing it to another bigoted thing, which leads into many people putting exhaustive amounts of emotional labour into explaining to you how and why what you are saying is bigoted and wrong, and you won't even entertain the possibility that perhaps you were in the wrong, for the most part.

    there is an actual health care professional telling you that you are wrong, that you blaming workplace accidents on fat patients is extremely fucking wrong, and you don't even give them the time of day or take their response seriously. what the fuck is wrong with you.

    i'm going to make this blunt and concise for you. listen to the people affected by the bigotry you've been saying. you do not know more than they do about the harm your statements and beliefs and actions have caused. if you want people to stop believing you don't have empathy, if you want people to believe you when you say you care about other people, if you want people to stop bringing up your racism and fatphobia, shut up and LISTEN. ask questions if you're confused. put your pride aside and talk to them on equal footing. treat people like PEOPLE. stop saying "but [x website] says this, or what about this random incorrect fact i remembered". it's not helpful and largely has been extremely offensive. don't expect head pats for doing the bare fucking minimum. you should be doing this ANYWAYS.

    you know what makes the situation worse. time and time again you choose to. you are more than fucking capable of doing exactly the opposite.
     
    Last edited: Jul 14, 2018
    • Agree x 20
  4. BaseDeltaZero

    BaseDeltaZero Shitposting all night.

    Oookay. See, the thing is, people have things that they need or want to do, that aren't dealing with every PRATT* you list. People have graciously taken the time to explain *why* you're wrong, but this is not an obligation on your part - and moreover, is actually irrelevant. You specifically stated your metaphor wasn't going to be helpful. So why did you use it?

    Do you genuinely not see the difference between 'I like pie' and 'fat people don't make an effort to be decent human beings'? As a general rule, statements that put down an entire class of people are not going to be perceived as neutral conversation fillers.

    Technically, no. However, 'these human beings deserve to be treated like human beings' is an obvious tautology, and thus, doesn't really add to the conversation. Much like 'I'm not racist, but', such a statement is almost inevitably followed by something that contradicts it. 'Fat people are lazy and need to lose weight' isn't actually improved by adding the 'of course they deserve to be treated like human beings but...' fig leaf.

    *: 'Point refuted a thousand times'; in this particular case, many of them in this very thread.
     
    • Agree x 9
  5. Athol Magarac

    Athol Magarac I prefer reading posts without a lot of topics.

    I think I have heard "being fat isn't automatically unhealthy" in this thread.

    I really doubt that I have been focusing on standards here, except maybe to denounce the chart. Have I touched on aesthetics much, or beyond what I want to look like?

    And going back to the fatlogicians, part of the core message seems to be "stop making excuses" which "none of your business" would mesh with quite nicely.

    I'm working on it, and this has been very helpful. I'm still getting over the thing where I think I'll be mercilessly attacked for outright saying I'm wrong, and I'm also checking for why I'm wrong or else I'll really get messed up.

    I'm still figuring out what went wrong there, with the whole interpreting things in the complete opposite of my intentions and I get yelled at for it. I recognized that it was going to turn into a big debate. I took a stance of willing to back off, but not against engaging if he wanted to.


    So I should listen and not ask questions, and ask questions and talk to them.

    I mostly get it wrong when I second guess myself, and get it wrong when I either don't second guess myself or then go on to triple guess myself.

    I think you're overestimating my current capabilities.
     
  6. Athol Magarac

    Athol Magarac I prefer reading posts without a lot of topics.

    I get yelled at for most comparisons. In this case, I couldn't find that one significant difference between not improving physically and not improving mentally.

    That second one is an untrue extrapolation. Let's just cut it down to you hearing "fat people don't make an effort" because you dragged the rest of that subtext from outside of the conversation. What I was saying was more like "people make excuses to be fat when they don't need to be because they don't want to confront how they're not making an effort."

    Invisible illness awareness isn't where it should be, but it just makes it harder for them with fakers-- every person who claims to have "conditions" when they're clearly doing things that would make the weight gain worse. Getting the psychological part treated is effort.

    Someone is unhappy because they're fat... One side says work on the fat and the happy will come. The other side says work on the happy and ignore the fat. Both are wrong because you can work on both at once.

    I'm barely aware of the Supernatural fandom, but I'm guessing that "I like pie" could either have the subtext about Dean's sexuality, or it could be about him getting put through the emotional wringer.

    Yeah, this conversation has gotten to be more about fat people in general, instead of about people trying to fix the minority problem by adding numbers.
     
  7. ChelG

    ChelG Well-Known Member

    Being fat ISN'T "automatically unhealthy", as has been proven many, many times in this thread. What you SAID was that people were telling you "being fat is healthy". There is a difference between "people who are fat are not automatically going to die horribly" and "being fat is healthier than being thin".
     
    • Agree x 9
  8. haha no

    haha no New Member

    you... you literally said 'decide to give up on being more like a decent human being'
     
    • Agree x 8
  9. KingStarscream

    KingStarscream watch_dogs walking advertisement

    Here's the problem with that: the people who actually have invisible illnesses are almost always called fakers no matter what. If every single person who claimed to have hypothyroidism walked around with the diagnosis from a legitimate doctor pinned to their shirt every day, they would still get called fakers, whiners, and lazy slobs by holier-than-thou randoms on the internet and in real life.

    How about a different approach, which is "maybe people have the conditions they say they have, and it's not really our place to make sweeping judgements about 'laziness', because the medical system is so insanely hostile to fat people and chronically ill people that most of them get ignored by actual doctors because of this rhetoric too."

    Or, here's one better: if fatlogic really cared about Poor Eating Habits (and not, y'know, Making Fun Of Fatties) maybe you should recommend starting a petition outlawing Bad Food. Because Poor Eating Habits are endemic to thin people too, so if it's really about health and making an effort, we should be haranguing every single person we see with a soda in hand, and not just the ones that are fat enough to make great reddit titles.*

    *Don't actually do this. "You're too fat to be chronically ill" and "You're too young/thin to be chronically ill" are two sides of the ableism coin, where invisible and chronic illnesses get treated like some strange and mysterious Condition that you should be able to pick out on sight, and not... various ailments that are often private and personal and affect way more of the population than most people realize. People don't need to disclose their medical history to justify their existence, and what seems like an obvious contradiction to you isn't always the case. (Great example: giving a celiac a nutritional chart that is 80% "Eat Whole Grains!!!" and "Bread Fills You Up So You Eat Less!!!!!!!!!!!". Yeah, that'll really help them when they're in the hospital because they're puking up blood from Whole Grain Breads!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
     
    • Agree x 14
  10. rigel

    rigel in a line of late afternoon sun

    this.... makes zero sense? why would we attack you for admitting that you're wrong? that's the first big step to getting better? if you can admit that you ARE wrong, then we would likely be much more open to helping!

    this whole thread and nearly everything you SAY has become a big "debate", aka you being horribly misinformed and doubling down, and everyone telling you that you're being hurtful and offensive.

    you know what i meant. you should listen and not patronize, not read a few words and then ignore everything else so you can stretch it out and offend a few more people.

    im sorry you think being a decent person who is open to change & doesnt bring up inflammatory statement after inflammatory statement is beyond your capabilities?
     
    Last edited: Jul 14, 2018
    • Agree x 6
  11. seebs

    seebs Benevolent Dictator

    Given that there's significant populations where being at least somewhat "overweight" is positively correlated with survival chances, I think I'd agree; there are certainly cases in which it's healthier (as in "you will live longer on average") to have "extra" weight. It turns out, biology isn't as stupid as you might think; "storing reserves as fat" isn't some kind of horrible bad idea that is never beneficial. It exists because it's actually useful sometimes.

    This is probably the core of why you seem to give off narcissist vibes, because that mindset is pretty much a thing that tends to come from narcissists, or from being around narcissists. Narcissists view all admission of weakness as cause for attack, and are terrified that if they admit weaknesses, people will use that against them. Other than narcissists, though, people usually won't do that, and will react much more negatively to difficulty admitting errors, because that's usually a strong predictor for people who will act badly in other ways.
     
    • Agree x 4
  12. BaseDeltaZero

    BaseDeltaZero Shitposting all night.

    Probably because they have a tendency towards 'Okay, I was wrong about (subset of offensive bullshit), but we all can admit that (offensive bullshit), right?
     
    • Agree x 9
  13. Re Allyssa

    Re Allyssa Sylph of Heart

    Then why not just say that, instead of a vague remark that people are likely going to misunderstand?

    People have already pointed out that you're more confusing and you're more confused by figurative language than not, so why not just say things plainly?
     
    • Agree x 5
  14. Vierran

    Vierran small and sharp

    Okay, going back and re-analyzing this:
    What I got from it was that you were using my field as a situation in which people being fat does hurt other people. That was upsetting to me because it seems like it's blaming the patient for the provider or the institution's problems. I don't believe that's an accurate representation of how workplace injuries in health care happen, and I do know that safe patient handling equipment and techniques exist for all sizes of patient. I would really prefer you not misrepresent my field as a way to support a position you know is otherwise unsupportable.
     
    • Agree x 8
  15. Athol Magarac

    Athol Magarac I prefer reading posts without a lot of topics.

    Where did I say that?

    I do remember someone saying that a certain BMI was actually better, but that was with contradicting the chart and I already dislike the chart.

    https://kintsugi.seebs.net/threads/r-fatlogic-derail.7144/page-7#post-803495

    Sorry, I forgot to indicate new context better. Other people picked up on what I meant. The decent human being bit was about the stuff I tried to address in "trying to be a good autistic"... Apparently I'm not autistic and all I have to do is not bully that other forum. /s

    Sorry about the difficulties in parsing, but I'll try to drunkard's path into get to all of your points. (Drunkard's path is a quilting term.)

    Fatlogicians who are on-message don't go after random fat people. If nothing else, you never know when you'll run into the random person who's having a cheat day to celebrate losing 100 pounds. They're also supposed to acknowledge just how hard it is to deal with hypothyroidism even through believing it's not impossible to control weight with it.

    Fatlogicians were upset about the soda tax being fought. It wasn't fair that it went after sugar-free as well, but that was something else to be concerned about. They also complain about how it's easier for some people to try to live on crisps and McDonalds than get real food. In itself, drinking soda is fine if you can make it work with CICO. Restaurants posting their calorie information is a good thing.

    Fatlogicians are against morbidly obese people who claim that they don't want to see the scale or be weighed at all because of anorexia fears. I did try to make them aware of atypical anorexia. (Medical knowledge only moves so fast, so having "atypical" as an available diagnosis is a bandage until the actual diagnosis change propagates.) With doctors being quick to look for weight-related problems in overweight patients, not stepping on the scale might set the tone to talk about problems not related to weight. (Or it might disguise a drop in weight.)

    If a celiac doesn't want to say anything, they still know to go to the nutrition chart that their doctor gave them.

    I do have a tangent about how great it is that GF was a diet fad that destroyed the reason why it works. There used to not be GF junkfood or more sensible packaged foods accessible. Now the companies that were marketing their GF status have no reason to change their packaging to remove the blurb.

    The problem with evolution is that the fat-storage mechanism relies on immobility (interfering with the ability to eat) as a regulatory force instead of killing the appetite when the stockpile does more harm than good.

    One thing I've read is that sometimes a narc has been abused themselves. In my case, it was bullying. I also picked up some things from dealing with the PPC. (I really wish I hadn't fallen for listening to Neshomeh's advice. I'm not going to have to break this nasty habit of giving people the benefit of doubt.) This whole thread got started because I admitted I was wrong and people started rubbing my face in it.

    I'm still getting used to the idea that I'm around people who won't find blunt statements rude.

    I will admit to not being well-versed in what's happening. (This is why I decided not to argue without your input.) I'm sorry for the oversimplification and generalization that leads to misrepresentation. I'm also sorry for the harm of your hurt feelings, though I'm not quite sure exactly how to generally avoid it in the future.

    I'll go with most of the blame being on the institution, like in that airplane case, though that's still an oversimplification. There is also not much that a person of size can do about their weight once they learn that it makes it more difficult to treat them.

    Maybe I can get you to debunk some details so I can internalize the truth.
    - Do the procedures for moving a person of size without special equipment rely on having more people available or taking more time?
    - Are staff able to say "it is unsafe for me to deal with this patient" without endangering the patient or their jobs?
    - Is there something specific I should look for to learn about healthcare workers getting injured?
     
  16. Re Allyssa

    Re Allyssa Sylph of Heart

    Okay, cool.

    But the comment you made was still rude, and made ruder by the way you said it, because it sounded dismissive.

    Between the two, if you're going to be rude, I think blunt is better. Also blunt does not always equal speaking plainly.
     
    • Agree x 5
  17. haha no

    haha no New Member

    nobody said you werent autistic, they said youre blaming stuff on autism thats not about autism

    if i had depression and autism and i said autism was making me sad all the time i'd be wrong but i'd still have autism
     
    • Agree x 8
  18. KingStarscream

    KingStarscream watch_dogs walking advertisement

    I'm going to be completely fucking real with you: skimming the front page of r/fatlogic makes me feel like it's pretty common for them to be off message, at which point the message is lost.
    Asparatame and other sugar substitutes can cause a variety of health problems outside of diabetes, and wouldn't solve the underlying issue of "drinking too much soda". Though here's a thought: do they organize for local co-ops and community gardens that help combat the problems of food deserts, or is it just pointing out how terrible it is that so many people are in areas with poor food availability (and then mocking people who eat fast food anyways)?
    Quick question: how big do you think "morbidly obese" is? Because based on the BMI, which gives us the term "morbidly obese" in the first place, it's... most linebackers. Pretty much any champion weightlifters of note. Your average plus-size woman at 1x, if she isn't also six feet tall.

    If you don't like the charts, you need to also drop some of the terminology associated with them. And, I'll be honest, the usefulness of a scale is only so much--once you start putting on muscle instead of fat, it'll just tell you that you're gaining weight, which is like... the whole problem with the BMI in the first place. Hell, my stepdad lost weight when he moved to a mostly sedentary lifestyle... because he lost a lot of muscle and replaced it with fat instead. But hey, the numbers went down!
    The nutrition chart is fucking useless if it recommends a celiac person replace most of their diet with food that will kill them. Which is the point, actually--being handed a chart that cheerily goes "eat moar bred!!!!" by every doctor in a practice, apologetically, as they are looking at the chart that says 'gluten-allergy' and 'celiacs disease' on it is clearly not an actual attempt for the medical profession to Solve The Underlying Issue. It's a paper taped over it, with no regard for anything that could be causing it, because a lot of medical professionals apparently suffer sudden and irreparable brain damage when looking at an overweight person.

    Also, by the way? GF food was never supposed to be a "health thing". Healthy GF foods frequently contain much higher caloric values than their glutened equivalent, because wheat is a lighter calorie ingredient that still contains sizable amounts of necessary nutrients than most of its usual substitutes, like quinoa. It's why going gluten free to lose weight is absolutely moronic unless you have an underlying condition--junkfood aside (lol fucking as if there's anywhere near enough of that too, Fucking Where Bitch) almost every GF equivalent is going to be higher in calories for an equal nutritional load, and you're more likely to gain... unless celiac has been starving you for years and the sudden ability to actually digest and get nutrients from food means your body is no longer in starvation mode.

    Hippy dippy health food being the only options for someone with celiac just makes it that much harder to eat--having your food restricted to two particular brands of quinoa and granola doesn't actually make you healthier, it makes it harder to properly hit the vitamin values you need. Having more GF options is a good fucking thing, even if they're options you think are unhealthy. That's not part of a fad, that's people having access to food they can eat.
     
    • Agree x 7
  19. ChelG

    ChelG Well-Known Member

    Aspartame solved the problem of me personally drinking too much soda because it tastes completely fucking terrible. Apparently not everyone can taste it though, so the point stands.
     
  20. Aondeug

    Aondeug Cringe Annoying Ass Female Lobster

    there are people who can't taste it

    wtf
     
    • Agree x 6
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