Quietly Thinking Aloud

corinnajune:

I saw the video this refers to last week… but what really hit home were the comments on this page. Most of those phrases/experiences mesh with my life almost exactly- I’ve heard it all.

No, seriously- GO READ THEM.

I grew so tired of the constant barrage of derision that in recent years I built big fat (heh) walls around myself, and am VERY picky about who is allowed in. If you are a concern troll or just love to blatantly have fun at the expense of fat people, then GTFO. If you somehow manage to hide that side of yourself from me, but it slips out- I WILL say something to you. I’ll be nice about it, but I’m going to say something.

Enough. No, seriously, enough. The science is against you. You are listening to the propaganda of an industry that makes $60 BILLION dollars a year, and is therefore SUPER invested in amping up the hate and making you believe that treating fatties like shit is for their own good.

Track back most of their bullshit studies, and you will see the weight loss industry’s hands in nearly every fucking pie. The actual, scientific studies- they don’t get as much notice. They are not as much fun. Studies showing that fat people have the same average eating habits as skinny people? Or that fat people actually live longer than skinny people? Or that a former fat person who weighs 120 pounds and a person who naturally weighs 120 pound have drastically different metabolisms, and that the former fatty essentially has to practice severe eating disorder like restrictions in order to maintain at that weight. Or the studies that tell you the best to guarantee you will gain weight? Go on a diet. OR that it is much better and healthier for the body to maintain a weight than to yo-yo up and down because DIETING causes more problem that fat. Oh, and also apparently it’s been well-known for quite a while that fat people are NOT automatically at risk for heart disease (aaaand hey, while we’re at it, let’s tack on a bonus challenge of conventional wisdom about sodium intake as well).

You can disbelieve these things if you want… but just the fact that these results keep persistently popping up- to the point that researchers are scrambling to explain away an “Obesity Paradox”- should make you think. Question everything. Most DEFINITELY question things that ‘everyone just KNOWS’- where is the basis for these assumptions? What is really going on? Who does it benefit?

In any case, I’ve never understood why it’s SO hard for people to not be assholes to each other… I mean, really, people? Wtf?

I love how fatphobes say we are ignoring scientific evidence, but when they see studies like these they are all like “LALALALALA I can’t hear you!”