To wonder if ‘body positivity’ has gone too far?

[WildUmberScroller]

While I fully accept supporting everyone for who they are, sometimes I feel like the body positivity movement is promoting unhealthy lifestyles. AIBU to feel like there should be limits?

@LostFearlessLeader
a world full of intelligent skinny people who have been injected to be such.

Sounds wonderful.

To be fair, tall and muscly people also impinge on me on public transport.

This is also my experience. I think the average size in the UK is a 16? So a size 20 really isn't much bigger than that. When I used to talk about how I needed to get drastic changes, people would tell me I was fine as I was.

You can’t be objective! We must all be, think and look the same with the least amount of effort! Magic in pills, injections and bottles!

And my point is that unreasonable people exist everywhere and they say things. It doesn't mean that no one 'is allowed' to talk about health and weight, it just means people will argue with them. And when someone posts in a way that suggests fat people can live happy and productive lives, they find people argue with them too. If you post things online, people will argue with you. Some of those people will make good points, some will be insane. There isn't a universal consensus that this doctor is wrong; it's just that not everyone likes his message or thinks that he's right. Plenty of people do, which allows him to be successful online.

Fat phobia is real - on this thread there are one or two posters expressing visceral disgust at fat bodies and mocking them (eg someone posted that they don’t want to look at skimping dressed fat people and put laughing emojis on their comment) - that's straightforwardly unpleasant and unkind. But sure, some people will say things that you consider are not fat phobic and yet they'll be accused of fat phobia. That doesn't prove anything - just that there are a wide range of opinions out there and lots of people are prepared to argue their point. That doctor isn't a helpless victim, it's still entirely possible for people to talk about health and weight in all sorts of ways, no one is being silenced on this just because they get some pushback. We all have to be resilient to the fact that people will disagree with us sometimes.

You're right. The amount of times I have heard overweight people say they think slim people are lucky, they can eat whatever they want, etc. Utter crap. Maybe that's the case for very rare people. Most slim people eat right, exercise and work hard at it. The TV show Supersize vs Superskinny was very telling in the amount and type of food each group ate.

When there are a few high profile health professionals trying to indoctrinate people with the idea that even if you can't climb the stairs or tie your own shoe laces without breathlessness due to obesity we know it's gone too far.

Being morbidly obese is not beautiful - it's a one-way ticket to various cancers, joint and organ failure and an often limited life. Being skeletal is not beautiful either. We need to be looking at attaining a happy medium that is an ideal rather than seeking to emulate people who are extreme.

Yup, I'd get exactly the same. "Don't worry you're fine! " Even now people don't believe me until I show them pictures! They say they can't remember me being that big.

Im also astounded at my 600lbs life how many patients are not prepared to make the small lifestyle change the doctor requires before he will let them undergo gastric bypass surgery.

those women are now being offered injections I’m sure as a solution

Sure! I don't argue with progress and medical advancements. Society is always striving to make life easier and better for the future. I'm happy we have antibiotics and vaccinations and universal education and a welfare state. I don't look around and go 'ok that's enough, we need to stop improving things now'. If injections for weight control improve public health, that will be wonderful for everyone as far as I can tell, though that's hardly guaranteed.

An intelligence injection is really hypothetical, but whenever we discover a barrier to learning - maybe a recognition of adhd or autism for example - and we can medicate or otherwise accommodate it so that everyone can access learning, I celebrate that. I don't think those people should have it harder when we can make it easier.

I also think you might not know very much about the injections - they do have a wide range of side effects and patients can really suffer with vomiting, diarrhoea, fatigue and more serious risks as well. Also people do have to change their diet and activity level in order to lose weight with the injections. If you think they're magical, you haven't actually looked into them at all. I wouldn't call them an easy option, but it's clear that they're making weight loss achieveable for more people more quickly and that seems like a positive benefit for society overall.

Reality tv is not actually a reflection of real life. The people on that show were not representative of most fat or thin people. They were selected for shock value. Those shows are deeply unethical and pander to the lowest common denominator. They're not useful in any real discussion of weight or lifestyle.

Slim people do eat less than large people in general, but it isn't necessarily a huge effort. At least not to the extent of the recent poster who started a thread about weight loss injections who said she never eats toasties.

I think they were representative of super large and super skinny, not just fat and thin. They were on the extreme side.

I think very few people will aspire to be obese, but I do think people are losing sight of what's a 'normal' size.

It's tricky. dt's not healthy, but I don't think people who are overweight or obese should be forced to wear a sackcloth and ashes and made to feel terrible, either.

You can read more about the making of those shows and how reality tv contestants in general have been manipulated, misrepresented and exploited. There were people on that show who had severe and dangerous eating disorders (both the fat and thin participants), being presented for our entertainment. They weren't offered any kind of meaningful help, and the premise of 'swapping diets' couldn't possibly serve any kind of useful purpose for either of them. It was a really shocking, disgusting show and not evidence in any way of anyone's life, including the people who were on it.

What someone does to their own body is their own business. "Influencers" preaching to vulnerable women, telling them that it's fine to be morbidly obese, resulting in those women dying prematurely is grossly irresponsible. You wouldn't accept a "bulimia positivity influencer", would you?
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/10/fat-pride-obesity-public-health-warnings-dangerous-weight-levels

There’s so much on social media that isn’t healthy:

Promotion of cosmetic surgery
fixation on makeup
too much pressure to buy useless shit
over exercising to point of obsession
fixation on celebrity
fixation on looks generally
too much travel on planes
obsession with “luxury”

Do you have issues with all these things too?

I doubt there’s a fat person alive who doesn’t know it’s unhealthy to carry too much weight. But so many people struggle to lose weight, That I think it’s important to ensure people aren’t feeling victimised because of something beyond their control, and often obesity is a disease like any other with multifaceted causes.

I think it’s really interesting how the success of weight loss drugs are forcing people to rethink the causes of obesity. These drugs work by effectively making certain hormones more efficient. So by making these hormones more efficient then people who have struggled with diets most of their lives are suddenly seeing weight drop off. Therefore, it really appears that there is no real option than to say obesity is caused physically by the thing these jabs are fixing. However, there are multiple reasons behind these physical causes which need to be addressed in order to cure society of the pressures of obesity.

Interestingly , there seems to be increasing numbers of the “righteous thin” still clinging to the Christian concept of the seven deadly sins in order to demonise those who are overweight and clinging onto the “gluttony and laziness” rhetoric that is now as outdated as creationism in an attempt to maintain their feeling of superiority over the lazy gluttonous fat people.

This is such a great post.

These threads are like crack to MNetters. 10 pages already. How many times has this been "debated" on here and the same stereotypes rolled out. Bet the OP is excited though, they've found their people ...

She can add total invalidation of her own account of her own experience to the difficult life events too now. Well done.

I take body positivity to mean the idea that people aren’t lesser because of their size and should not be treated as if they are. With that in mind, I think we still have some way to go rather than it having gone too far.

Yep. Loose Women’s Nadia Sawalha does
it all the time but its obvious it’s just an excuse to get her unfit body out for the views and likes. She oddly claims she has body dysmorphia but likes to whip out her breast at any given opportunity. I don’t think that’s empowering or encouraging.

A subsection of body positivity has gone too far, such as claiming morbid obesity has no effect on health and if you actively try to lose weight it's fat phobic.

But, there is a flip size, health at any size for example, was the idea you CAN be healthy, and strive for health, despite being bigger, which in turn actually seemed to be more motivating factor for positive lifestyle changes than shame & self hatred. I get the concept, that its never going to be optimum for health to be bigger, but making people feel segregated, ashamed, and humiliated isn't going to help, and there's a potential to be healthier, at any size - however, this message has been lost on the before mentioned subsection, who have intepretated this to mean that obese = no health risks.

I also had problem with many of them lying openly about what they eat and exercise. And they do lie because there is no way 200kg person can workout daily, eat very little of low cal food to tune of 1200cal and still be 200kg. If that is absolute true, they should be and would be in medical journals.

When I was obese, verging on morbidly (probably dipped in) , these influencers and many on weightloss forums simply demotivated me, gave me"hmm I probably have that metabolism thing too" "what's the point of trying for me when no one on diet seems to lose anyway" etc. I lost to nearly healthy only after leaving all this I thought was supposed to support.

"I am healthy, you can be healthy any size" makes me want to scream "temporarily, you dimwit, you are 20..." and that goes for really underweight underweight as well as obese/morbidly obese.