@Cowbells
Being overweight is surely healthier than being underweight though. People can be ten or even fifteen stone overweight and still alive. But most underweight people can only get to about two or three stones under the lowest recommended BMI weight before they become seriously ill and die. If I were as much underweight as I am overweight people would be horrified and worried. In my current state of fatness, I am completely unremarkable.
Perhaps it would be better if people stopped using strawman arguments to justify to themselves that it is ok to be underweight or overweight. There are significantly more health consequences for both. I was reading an ONS survey on life expectancy for men and women last week based on economic demographics and what i found was shocking was not simply the difference in life expectancy between the most and least deprived. It was also the quality of life. Women in the most deprived areas are spending the last third of their life in poor health. Even in the least reprived women were spending up to 10 years longer in poor health compared to men. I suspect this is almost certainly going to be related to higher rates of cognitive decline and dementia in women.
This morning i've seen this article:
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/obese-young-are-piling-on-memory-risk-along-with-the-pounds-8rs7gwrl2
Obese young are piling on memory risk along with the pounds
People who are overweight in their twenties and thirties are more likely to suffer a swifter mental decline in later life
Millions of young people are likely to have problems with basic thinking and memory skills later in life because they are too fat, a landmark study suggests.
Those in their twenties and thirties who are obese or have high levels of blood pressure or glucose will suffer a swifter decline in their mental ability decades later, according to the research published in Neurology, a leading medical journal on disorders of the nervous system. More than four million young adults are officially obese in Britain, a new analysis of data reveals today.
“These results are striking and suggest that early adulthood may be a critical time for the relationship between these health issues and late-life cognitive skills,” said Dr Kristine Yaffe, of the University of California
The minimisation of being overweight and obese has increased due to more people being overweight and obese. It doesn't help anyone to say 'well its better than being too thin' and it doesn't help to be 'body positive' about a health issue.
There are a multitude of reasons for it. Some are marketing, some are mental health, some are genetic, some are an inactive lifestyle. This is an issue that needs confronting properly rather than being normalised. Encouraging people to do nothing because its difficult or 'there isn't enough support or understanding' is part of the problem. Theres enough people in this situation to create political pressure and to create support groups and networks with others in similar situations. So why isn't this happening? People dont want to face up to this and instead make excuses and create strawmen.
Ultimately the issue here is people don't want to take it seriously for a multitude of reasons and anyone who confronts this is put down as 'fat shaming' rather than spelling out reality.
This is part of a wider culture where people want to live in fantasy land and pretend problems don't exist as it clashes with their ideological view of the world. This doesn't even stop the wall of reality and people eventually colliding with it.
It would be helpful if we all opened our eyes to material reality and took action to acknowledge its existence even it tells us some uncomfortable things which don't fit neatly with what we would prefer to believe.