To call out friend on 'body positivity' delusion?

[treesandflowers95]

My bestie (i'll call her 'J') and I have been friends since primary school. She's godmother to my DD and we almost see each other as sisters as friends.

J has always been a curvier girl but as we've gone through our 20s, she's steadily put on more and more weight. She's 5ft 2 and now a size 30. Over the last couple of years its been noticeable how much into the 'body positivity' movement shes got. Her socials are full of shared posts about it, and she'll often bring it up in conversation.

Its not something i've ever really made an issue of with her before as though it worries me for her, i've always been of the view that everybody's body is their own business.

However we were on a hen do a few weeks ago, and honestly it was a real eye opener to just how big she's got and the impact that's starting to have on her health. The first one for me was that she needed a seatbelt extender on the flight and she seemed to think it was hilarious. We stayed in a villa on the edge of a little area with a strip of bars and restaurants. It was 350yds (i put it into Google maps) and slightly downhill on the way there and uphill on the way back, but nothing major. J was struggling to keep up with us on the way there, and on the way back was having to stop at least once because she was so out of breath. Bear in mind this was a group of girls quite a few in heels etc so its not like we were sprinting, and shes sweating and bright red. Aside from that, even basic stuff round the villa like walking upstairs (it was over 3 floors) and she struggled climbing up and down the ladders in and out of the pool. I didnt say anything to her at the time but its played on my mind.

This weekend there were four of us (all close friends) who'd been on the hen do out for drinks in the pub. We were talking about the hen do and i can't remember how it came up, but she started talking about the walk back to the villa and how steep the hill was etc. I said to her something along the lines of 'Oh it wasn't that bad' to which she replied 'Are you joking, it was so steep!' and was basically trying to get the other girls to agree and I just left it.

A bit later in the conversation she was talking about some body positivity stuff and how its about how you look after yourself and not how much you weigh. I've bit my tongue at stuff like this loads of times, but this time i said 'I think that's true to an extent but there's a point where you can't argue that you're healthy'. She didn't look happy and said 'what are you saying?'. I basically said that the fact she thought that walk on holiday was so difficult that she should have struggled with it so much was worrying, and might suggest her health wasn't as good as she seems to think it is. The reality is (and I didn't say this to her) that she eats really badly and drinks quite a lot. She spends loads on hair, make up, nails, etc which she considers as looking after herself.

She got really frosty with me, and has been funny in texts since, not her usual self, so i know i've annoyed her.

Fully accept it may not have been the best way to bring it up especially in front of others (but it wasnt like it was strangers, we're all mates back to primary school) but i just felt like it wasn't a time where i could just say nothing in the moment.

So i guess question is AIBU to have brought this up with her, and any advice on how to handle things next.

I massively disagree. She was being honest. The hill was not that long or hard to climb. She challenged her friend about it because the friend was kidding herself. The issue was not the hill but her extreme unfitness due to being morbidly obese.

A good friend does not stay quiet when morbid obesity is being shrouded in 'body positivity'. Body positivity is about putting on your leggings or swimsuit whatever your size and going for a run/to a yoga class/swimming and not having preconceived notions of how you should look before you allow yourself to do these healthy things. It is absolutely not about becoming size 30 in your early 20s when you are 5'2 and thinking wearing false eyelashes and giggling about being 'a big girl' make that okay. There is nothing positive about that scenario.

While it is true that we know we are fat and don't need to be told (been there, felt that shame and know it is counter productive) having a friend concerned about our fitness level is something else.

@treesandflowers95 If I were meeting your friend for coffee, I would find a way to say - I am not judging your size, your shape, your body. I care about your health. I want you to be able to walk in the park with me. I miss that. I don't think it is body positive to be unable to do that. Please will you get fit with me, That is not about weight or how women should look or feel about their looks. It is about participating in life and looking after your internal organs - your heart and lungs and muscles.

@Meadowwild I imagine that studies look at average weight gain so there’ll be people who gain more or less. I can definitely relate to the drowsiness! I find it best to take mine just before going to bed so it doesn’t matter. When I tried taking them in the morning, I wanted to go right back to bed!

I agree with the OP

Massive difference between being fit but having a naturally bigger frame (like my size 16 marathon runner pal) and just being overweight and unhealthy

Luckily for the op, her friend has since agreed to meet for a coffee, and is clearly willing to forgive and listen.

You are massively projecting about the op.

@FredericC i could also be here all day! Not only aligning themselves with minority groups and disabled people but rejecting medical science and redefining what health actually means. The entire thing is just toxic and frankly embarrassing.

I also have huge empathy for people who cannot change their body through their genetics, or an accident or your sexual orientation, or colour of their skin who really can experience prejudice, racism, ill treatment and oppression, seeing these women online, and it must be awful to be aligned with these women who believe ‘health is just how you feel in your mind’ and that medical science is just oppressing you. Can they even imagine how hard it must be to get around in a wheelchair every day or are they comparing it with walking up a flight of stairs being challenging?

Problem is there are little truths in there - doctors do overly focus on weight when you might be there for something else, and people do treat you differently when you are larger but they drown these real issues in so much other nonsense.

You will hear these people say you can’t judge their health visually but you can, and you can judge their risk factors and high chance of future problems. You don’t need to be a doctor or stand on a scale or know a BMI to see when someone can’t breathe walking up a slight incline or a few steps, or that their walking gait is badly affected by their weight or they are all red in the face. These are all obvious indicators of something being wrong and it’s hard to ignore just so you do not hurt their feelings.

When I was a lot larger I had to sit in a seat next to another similar sized lady for many hours and we were both in agony because the seats were too small for us, we were bulging over onto each other with a small armrest between us I had bruises all over one side afterwards. It was humiliating, even though no one said anything. My DP told me after I lost weight he was worried how out of breath I got when I was obese but he didn’t say anything for worry of how I would react and hurting my feelings. But I wish he had because maybe it would have been awful to hear, but also what I needed to hear to enact change. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love me or fancy me, he worried for my health.

It’s great that she’s agreed to talk. Joining in with the body positivity and agreeing that you can be heathy when massively overweight is just feeding into the comfortable lies she tells herself everyday. A good friend will help her face the uncomfortable truth that she’s killing herself. You tell her that if she doesn’t want to talk about it that is fine, you won’t mention it again but you are there to help if she wants to start confronting the cause of her overeating and lose the weight.

Wow. What ignorance and nastiness.

it’s my scientific field. Not saying I agree with it but there is some (not enough) research into ‘healthy obesity’. Also - have you heard of the obesity paradox (I think largely explained away now but still comes up now and again in my reading so some people seem to be standing by it)? Obesity has NOT been categorised as a disease in the UK. It is a hefty risk factor for numerous poor outcomes, but the fact is many people living with obesity do not experience these outcomes.

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@HRCsMumma Do you talk about weight with your friends? I don't think I’ve ever discussed weight with mine, because it’s a sensitive subject like politics- except to say something trivial like I need to lose a couple of pounds as my jeans are getting tight. As you say, don’t raise a subject unless you’re prepared to hear differing opinions.'

@BruFord

Well it wouldn't be my place just for any old mate, but my close friends (especially like sisters as the OP) I have definitely raised, even when asked, concerns which concern their health. It's an uncomfortable conversation at times but I can hand on heart say I've never lost any friends because of it. One friend I supported through her alcohol addiction. I raised that with her. If I had a friend in her late 20s who was grossly obese and a size 30, I would gently tell her my concerns. Tell her that I'm here to support her. If they choose to ignore it, then I've done my bit and I'll carry on supporting them. But at least they know I don't agree with what they're doing if their life is at risk. It doesn't mean it's a friendship ender. Only people who are professionally offended, end friendships because someone said something out or concern and care.

'FredericC
What bothers me is their attempt to align themselves with genuinely marginalised communities who CANNOT change the thing about them that others are prejudiced about. Pretending that being fat means you experience the same oppression as someone who is black in a white area or as someone who requires a wheelchair in an environment suited only to people who can walk is frankly disgusting.

As someone with lifelong chronic pain, I would do ANYTHING to get rid of it. Anything. To see someone who has made choices that mean they are in pain and have less mobility claim that that's inevitable and nothing to do with their size or how many calories they eat is infuriating. As a white person I cannot even begin to imagine the rage someone who isn't white must feel when they see an obese white woman whip themselves up into a tizzy over the oppression and prejudice she experiences because she... ate too many donuts.

It's insulting. You can tell when there's no substance behind their rhetoric because they will try piggy back themselves onto other oppressed communities to try glean a little bit of social capital that way. Trying to align themselves with people experiencing racism, ableism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia because they hope listeners will be too dumb to take a second to think wait a moment... one of these things is not like the other lol.'

@FredericC

I completely agree with this.

Healthy obesity is more common in younger people, someone under 40 will not necessarily be suffering from health conditions yet. However like you say it increases their risk and the outcomes become more and more poor for them as they get older, and quite rapidly far earlier than in other generations. It is like smoking, the more you continue to do it the more the risk increases. Not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer. Obesity in younger people is a ticking time bomb. Yes we are seeing relatively healthy 30 year olds with ok blood pressure but that has a higher risk of declining faster in their 40’s and 50’s.

This is the problem with accepting obesity as a static never changing state, you will be well until you are not well, and it’s far harder to reverse. If you are obese but fairly well now, you could consider that that isn’t likely to stay the case for very long rather than just hoping you aren’t one of the statistics.

I believe the obesity paradox is that if you are slim then become overweight as you age, your health outcomes are still pretty good. The study showed that if you are overweight as an adult and then become obese, the mortality rate dramatically increases. The OP and many others are talking about morbid obesity rather than being overweight. Being overweight (not obese) can be better for certain age groups in terms of frailty, falls and recovery as your body has more fat stores to aid your recovery or stop you from becoming very frail very rapidly. Women naturally hold more fat stores than men and live longer. This is not the case for morbid obesity is it? We can’t conflate the two things really in terms of health. Being overweight can mean you are more likely to become obese, however you can stay overweight and could be healthy, but being obese is not healthy and if it is, it’s only for a short time

OP, have you seen the Mounjaro threads on here - they are injections for weight loss and many of us have found them incredible. If she did decide to do that there's a whole community online dedicated to weight loss and how they've achieved it, so if she wants community involvement she could still have it.

I really think this would be lifechanging for her.

She is morbidly obese, which is not good. But, it has to be her choice whether to deal with it or not.

Holding adverse views of someone just because of a physical characteristic you've taken against is pretty much the definition of prejudice?

It is mostly a choice. Obesity due to medical reasons only accounts for less than 5% of obese people. It takes a LONG time to get to size 30. Maybe not decades but it doesn't happen overnight. There is plenty of opportunity to nip it in the bud or get help before it gets to that stage. It absolutely is a stage.

It doesn't help to look at that percentage in isolation @HRCsMumma. Underlying causes are one thing (underactive thyroid etc) but recent scientific research is showing physiological factors at play, particularly in relation to the satiety hormones leptin and ghrelin. I recommend reading 'Why We Eat Too Much'. It is eye opening. Telling people they need to buck up their ideas and quit eating is becoming an outdated idea. Some day, I hope, we will look back and be utterly appalled at how we as a society treated obese people and made them feel like failures for something towards which they were biologically predisposed.

Sure - healthy obesity, if it exists, may only be an interstitial period. But we cannot automatically equate obesity with ill-health - especially because BMI is a crude and (on an individual level) unhelpful metric of adiposity/health risk.

The obesity paradox has been ‘found’ across a range of outcomes, specifically pertaining to obese individuals or an elision of the obese/overweight in some studies. It has largely been explained away, but even recent papers still allude to it.

I understand the difference between overweight and obese - and have only ever described my thoughts in terms of obesity. However, I do think the split between the two is somewhat spurious. There are much better ways to define adiposity/health risk, they’re just more expensive and less accessible.

I never commented on the friend’s BMI or health, I'm just cautioning against saying that obesity is unhealthy without any thought. She may store all her fat in a gynoid rather than android pattern and have amazing insulin sensitivity. Who knows.

Are you joking? I'd say there are fairly evident signs that someone is addicted to hard drugs...

Well, no, not at all. If they're having an open and honest conversation, it's time for OP to explain where her comments came from - out of concern for her friend.

That's not judging, that's expressing concern. Which any good friend would do.

'I hope, we will look back and be utterly appalled at how we as a society treated obese people and made them feel like failures for something towards which they were biologically predisposed.'

@Funnywonder

I do wonder where the biological predisposition was in the 80s 90s and early 2000s then..

Go and have a look at all the city boys taking cocaine twice a week then.

It’s really not what a good friend would do . OP doesn’t need to express her “concern” - her friend didn’t ask for it. It’s a massive boundary cross- huge .
Her body isn’t up for scrutiny and judgement just because you and others think it is.

100%

Being visually out of breath on slight exertion, red in the face and visibly struggling is enough of a sign some elements of her health is poor though isn’t it.

Oh, weight gain on ADs is totally a thing!

Think I gained nearly 1st! I wasn't big by any means (have always been very slim) but I was big for me. I could just tell by how my favourite well-worn jeans suddenly didn't fit.

So, I bought a treadmill, started eating whole foods and, most importantly, cut out snacks, UPFs, refined sugar, caffeine (which, I later discovered, intensifies the amount of the drug in your system!) and I lost all that weight in no time.
Am still on them - but happy now all round! 👍

Sure - I’d also say desperately clinging onto body positivity in the face of these things is a measure that maybe she is not mentally healthy either. But as I said I was never commenting on her as an individual.