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Fatphobia - Blog Posts
"For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.
The second big lesson the medical establishment has learned and rejected over and over again is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people."
A surprising article to find on the Huffington post. I think, especially towards the end, there's still a saturation of healthism and diet talk (just of the "clean eating" variety), but the information about weight discrimination is absolutely on point, especially within the medical field ignoring decades of research.
Not only do we know that weight loss isn't sustainable or possible, we also know that weight discrimination kills, in a myriad of ways. If you actually care about "health" then start unlearning your weight bias NOW and realize that fat people are just people who are a different shape.
And this article doesn't even touch on "the obesity paradox"(the fact that fat people survive heart attacks and injuries BETTER THAN thin people) or the fact that dieting, especially "yo-yo dieting," is a better predictor for heart disease than weight, and that many of the fat people who have cardiovascular diseases have a long history of dieting that (understandably) didn't work.
encouraged to rb but fatphobes will just be blocked.
Say it louder for the people in the back.
stop drawing nezarec skinny you fucks.
Hey did you know that you can’t escape fatphobia even after death? The article talks about how these donated bodies are used for first year anatomy students to study the body, and how the 'perfect' body for that should be 170-180 pounds.
Yeah, bc OF COURSE that's how it works 🤡
OF COURSE showing fat characters
=
Glorifying obesity 🤡🤡🤡
OF COURSE making plus-sized characters to help people accept themselves (it's totally not that it's literally what MH is about in the first place, about ACCEPTING OUR DIFFERENCES) is the same as brainwashing someone to gain weight and become fat🤡🤡🤡
(she's not even that big in the first place, wtf was that user on when they were writing this)
Ableism and fatphobia spin around in circles. Can't say this enough.
Many people gain weight after becoming disabled/chronically ill due to being forced into a less active lifestyle, and losing weight becomes harder and harder when physical activities become more and more challenging. We get put on medications that have weight gain side effects. Some of us women go into premature menopause, which also leads to weight gain and slower metabolism.
The next fatphobic ableist who tells any of us to diet and exercise owes my dog a femur to gnaw on.
SORRY FOR THE VERY PERSONAL COMIC!!
This is my half of “Unhealthy”, an essay comic double header with the lovely and talented Sarah Winifred Searle. She and I both wrote about our personal experiences as overweight ladies with eating disorders, and her story is breathtaking! You can buy a physical copy of the book here: https://topatoco.com/collections/abby-howard/products/ah-unhealthy
Or buy a digital PDF here: https://abbyhoward.itch.io/unhealthy