Look, you clearly have some personal shit going on with weight. Maybe being in a community where everyone treats you with condescension and disdain is therapeutic and helps you lose weight, but maybe the rest of us kinda just wanna live our lives without you bitching about The Bad Fatties. (Edit: spelling)
Reviving a conversation that's been 100% dead for literally two and a half months so that you can explain how the people who disagreed with you were just mistaken and actually you were right this whole time... strikes me as pretty darn tasteless.
so i'm gonna dip again in a minute because this conversation is.......Not Great for me, but: https://highline.huffingtonpost.com...tm_source=women_fb&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000046 just some stuff to think about, and a round-up of a lot of recent research
Tilts head. Having read through all of this thread, I have a couple of questions I guess? Greallan, what's the goal here? Do you want people to debate you about the topic? Or to just tell people that what you've read in that reddit zone is correct? Non-hostile, genuinely curious. Losing weight often is not impossible, that's true. But if you read the article latitans linked with the roundup of all the recent science, you'll see it's not so easy (as a major understatement) to keep it off, even if you do everything right. A thing for communication that you might want to bear in mind is that a lot of us are chronically ill, some may be struggling with weight, and approaching your audience with what often reads as hostile and condescending put downs is not only not effective for any message you want to convey, but disinclines them from listening to you in the future. A thing about the reddit itself - it has a very hostile name. They can claim they aren't aiming to insult or put down anyone all they want, but by naming the zone 'fatlogic', ie 'logic that only fat people apply to themselves lmao', any of those claims immediately ring false.
greallen im going to drop the hottest take of your life, okay? please stop trying to tell fat people how to live. a very small percent of us ultimately appreciate it. you very clearly have issues with fat people, and i really think that perhaps you need to work on that, instead of spending your time on reddits that directly serve to mock and prescribe solutions to other people's percieved weight problems. on top of that, i really do think you need to stop trying to find ways to prove somehow that you are Ultimately Right, and that everyone else is Wrong and Misinformed, when multiple people have told you, over and over that your sources are off or outdated, and your research and opinions are based on harmful assumptions. a lot of people in this thread have provided links and resources that reddit will purposely ignore, because they would much rather mock fat people. i really suggest you read some of the links and try to understand that being fat isnt inherently bad or a failure on anyones part. sometimes its genetic, sometimes its how the body works, sometimes its illness. it often cant be "solved" by any means, either due to diet restraints, energy levels, illness, or the means provided just dont work, and thats not even the tip of the iceberg! there can be any number of reasons why someone can find it hard or even impossible to lose weight. fat exists. fat people exist. and thats okay.
For debate. But also to have people realize that fatlogic is not a hate-sub against people, and by extension demonize me about it. Maybe even to see if there is a way to have people do more than dig their heels in and declare me an evil person that should be shunned. For the things I don't want to touch on, it's because I'd rather gloss-over how nasty people were being to me. Give me the benefit of the doubt that I'm not evil, and I won't be able to generate any fresh grievances. The article latians linked was long, and mostly off-topic. Fatlogic is not about making fun of people just for being overweight. It took me a couple of hours, so I forgot most of the relevant bits. I should have been going point-by-point. One thing sticks out is how people gain back weight after they quit dieting. I was trying to come up with a metaphor, and the best non-offensive thing I've got is to pretend that some myths are true. Let's pretend that chocolate causes acne. This kid gets tired of being called pizza-face so he gives up chocolate. It clears up, he misses chocolate and hasn't been called names for a while, so he eats some and breaks out again. In a weight-loss forum, they talk about "maintenance calories." Basically if you stop controlling what you eat once you hit your goal weight, you're likely to gain again because you're back to what made you gain weight in the first place. If you develop a habit about eating just what you need to stay stable, you stay stable. There were other things in the article which were disturbing, mostly centered about the treatment of fat-people by the medical industry, but that's another issue. It also touches on listening to "random people on the internet" because general doctors aren't that better. Losing weight isn't easy, and some people might sensibly choose not to expend the effort, or not have a choice about how much effort they can do. The point is that they shouldn't drag other people down by saying it's impossible. According to that article, fat-people aren't even united as a minority, so what's the point in trying to keep people from leaving the crab-bucket when they're just going to get judged by other fat-people the same way as skinny-people would judge them? I don't read tone, so I really can't argue about whether or not the sub has a good name. I do think that "thyroid problems can cause a bit of weight gain" shouldn't be read as "I'm morbidly obese because of thyroid" because the metabolic impact is probably something that could be controlled. Same for a few other problems that aren't depression.
It's about "we don't believe this is right, and we're going to speak out against it." It wasn't a good fit because I disagreed with them on some points, and that's what I got treated with disdain about. One thing was that my goal weight is still in the "overweight" category and I didn't want to make a goal below that until I accessed how it made me look. I their eyes, it should have been better than being at the edge of morbidly obese, but not having a black-and-white attitude was punished. My thinking is that I would be very unhappy if I could regularly see my hip-bones, and I would have tried to loose the weight and then constantly pester them about how gross I felt every time I took my pants off.
I wish I could find the part of it that was supporting my argument, but I'm not up to reading the whole thing again in an attempt to remember.
I think you're trying to make this argument about something it isn't. You're trying to say that I'm against fat-people when I'm against fat-defeatism. The message doesn't have to come from a fat-person to be open to rebuttal. I would stop trying to prove I'm right if people would stop trying to convince me of points that I already agree with and then tell me I'm evil for not changing my opinion to match theirs when I have no solid reason to change. If you're accusing me of cherry-picking, why can't I treat those provided links with suspicion? Which brings me to "I wish you'd understand" which I don't think I said that fat itself was inherently bad. At least not outside of unlabled gluttony jokes; unlike other sins, they wear the mark long after they stop committing it. (A smoker stops wearing all signs of being a smoker about 2 weeks after quitting. Teeth-staining could be coffee, they don't smell, only the memory of people seeing them doing it remains.) All of those reasons are a bit rare in the population, though. It's a bit of appropriation for everyone to claim that they have that excuse, and I'd like for "good fatty" to not be a part of that, so the issue does get thorny about who actually can't lose weight and who just gave up. I'm sure that there is a depression vs lazy debate that covers it better. I went to a genealogy meeting a bit ago and had to ask why so many of us ended up with diabetes. The answer is that somehow native-american genes don't respond well to the European diet even though most of our ancestors were colonists. My mother's cousin lost a lot of weight because she got diabetes and went strict about what she ate. On an unrelated side of the family, my husband's mother was at-risk and didn't develop diabetes, probably because her husband did develop diabetes and she ate like a diabetic since then. I'm sure I would get support from hubby if I started using diabetic recipes most of the time. As an end note, losing weight is not impossible, but it is logistically impractical to the point of not worth trying.
:slowly rubs my face: how have we ended up here again after legit 2 months of silence, i thought this thread had finally died and been peacefully buried in the rubble where it belonged.
You're missing what people are trying to get at. 1. You're saying that fat is personal responsibility, and people make themselves fat though their poor life choices. The solution to that problem is education and willpower. That's the r/fatlogic argument that you're carrying out here, though with more nuance than I've seen from r/fatlogic. Others are saying that fat is an institutional problem, as outlined in the article. Society makes it basically impossible for most people to lose weight due to class and gender issues. To make an analogy- You: climate change is a problem, so car pool and recycle. Others: climate change is a problem that can only be solved by major societal restructuring. 2. You're assuming that fat is inherently a problem. However, the article also says that fat ISN'T obviously a problem in the same way climate change is. Health =/= weight. r/fatlogic does argue that health= weight . I know because I've been there and had these arguments with my anorexic wife. 3. I will have this argument with my wife because she has proven to me that she will listen with respect and compassion when I and others speak. You have thus far given no indication that it's safe to have this discussion with you. God could come down from heaven and declare you right and it wouldn't matter because you have not conducted yourself in a decent manner. Maybe if you dropped this and worked on behaving better people would be willing to engage you in discussion on these types of issues in the future, but right now no one is gonna. You nuked the well, and now you have to wait out the fallout. Maybe do some cleaning and containment and a few "hey I'm sorry I irradiated this water source" apologies.
Hm. Okay, so here's a thing I've noticed I think - once you've spent some time in a place and grown attached to it, you seem to hook into it really deeply, especially if there was something you wanted out of it. That other forum thing, and this reddit. It looks like you're trying to defend this reddit because it had something you wanted in it, even though you weren't treated very well by the people there? You can find better communities that fit your needs, I think. You don't need to stay in a place that distresses you, even if the information you'd get by doing so is helpful for you. As for fat people trying to convince other fat people they don't need to lose weight - that isn't what the vast, vast majority of body positivity is about. It's about the stuff in the article. About learning not to hate yourself, and then being able to take better care of the body you have, rather than feeling deep shame over one you don't. Here's the thing - shaming people will make them give up. Incredibly reliably. Do you know how hard it is to want to take care of yourself, to care about your body, when every message you get from society tells you that you're a disgusting monster who has already failed? Because if you empathize with that at all, then the next logical leap is realizing that things like fatlogic, fat shaming, being told by doctors that all your problems will go away if only you could lose weight, saps the spirit from people. And honestly life is better lived caring for yourself than policing the lives of others and casting value judgements based on appearances. Spoiler: personal anecdote, disordered eating cw Here's a thing: I'm overweight. I'm pro-body positivity. I have incredible difficulty believing body positivity directed my way, however, because all my life I have been shamed every time I gained weight. A year ago, I was the heaviest I've ever been. I was also starving. My kidneys were on the edge of failing, and I was getting about, iirc, 150 calories a day without help from friends. Due to my circumstances, I couldn't eat healthy food, there was nowhere safe for me to store it. I moved to a climate that fits me better, where I'm safe. I am now regularly eating three meals a day. I'm shedding weight at a gentle, even pace, because my body isn't cannibalizing my muscles to keep me alive. All of the shame and forcing myself to exercise while actually dying in the world didn't help me lose weight. The kind words of my loved ones, telling me that they don't need me to be thin to think I'm beautiful? Has kept me eating even when I was on the edge of becoming bulimic because I felt greedy for eating any food. But when I read fat-shaming comments? I'm filled with shame and a need to purge, and I have to be talked down and reminded that starving didn't make me lose any weight. I hope that helps a bit.
If everyone wanted to shun you, nobody would be here. People are here. They may not be very happy with you, but there is a definite lack of silence happening. If you personally want to lose weight, cool. There’s nothing wrong with that. Whether or not that’s reasonably possible or healthy for you is absolutely none of my business unless you ask my opinion, and if I randomly butt into your business you are entitled to tell me off about it. But I probably wouldn’t have much to say anyway other than good luck, I wish you the best. We’re not trying to pull you into any crab bucket to make ourselves feel better. You know what happens when someone loses weight and is happy about it around here? People congratulate them. Nobody here gains anything from sabotaging your weight loss. It just doesn’t matter at all to anyone here except you. There is no crab bucket.
