A response to “The Fat Whisperer”

coswhateverforever asked: •Obese people arent healthy •You can still love yourself at any size •There is no health at any size and it can cause many problems.. How can you love your body when youre slowly killing it? •Its ok to have some extra weight •I was once bigger but im at a good weight and im glad my body is in better conditions (could barely exercise, high cholesterol, sluggish) •Insulting and anti fat acceptance arent the same •Stop making excuses when your health knows the truth

I don’t know for sure, but I assume this ask comes in response to my cartoon “The Fat Whisperer.”

1) Obese people are not a single entity. Some obese people are currently healthy, some are currently dealing with illness or health problems. (Ditto for thin people). Either is fine. I’d rather be healthy than not, but being unhealthy is not a character flaw or a moral failing.

That said, I’d argue that the stress and lack of self-care that comes with self-hatred is a huge health problem among fat people. Attitudes like yours – which, regardless of intentions, are part of what causes fat people to learn to hate ourselves – are making us less healthy.

2) Agreed.

3) Of course there are healthy fat people, by any measure of health other than “are they fat?” That some people are fat and healthy is very well documented. (Also, I’m not “slowly killing” my body by being fat.)

4) Agreed. To which I’d add, it’s also okay to have a lot of extra weight. Or to be underweight. Or to be so-called “normal” weight. There is no one weight which is the right weight for all people.

5) I’m glad you’re feeling better.

6) Sure they are. For example, your comments here – such as “how can you love your body when you’re slowly killing it?” – are condescending and insulting.

7) “Stop making excuses when your health knows the truth” – wow, if I could rewrite my cartoon now, I would DEFINITELY have the “Fat Whisperer” character say that line – it’s perfect. So thanks for reassuring me that my cartoon was on target.

And also:

Even if you’re right that being fat is unhealthy – I don’t agree, but put that aside for a moment – so what? The vast, vast majority of fat and obese people will never be able to stop being fat or obese. So you’re like someone walking up to a seven-foot-tall person and saying “you’d be healthier if you weren’t so tall.” That’s not helpful advice.

In fact, telling fat people that they MUST! BE! THIN! and if they’re not thin then they’re just “making excuses” just makes fat people less healthy. Stress makes us less healthy. Being taught that we’re weak and flawed and that our bodies are ugly and not worthy of love, makes us less healthy. So if you actually care about fat people’s health, my recommendation to you is that you stop telling us your opinions about our health.

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24 Responses to A response to “The Fat Whisperer”

  1. 1
    Aapje says:

    A counterpoint:

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2015/01/06/is-healthy-obesity-a-real-thing-not-likely-study-says/

    Anyway, I think that there definitely is a point where over- or underweight creates issues. These can be health issues/risks or simply difficulties in daily life. I’d say that it’s especially wise for a person who is gaining or losing a lot of weight to try and stabilize their weight, which generally seems to be a lot easier than actually losing weight. Looking at your diet & exercise can also simply make you feel better & improve your health (whether or not those changes cause one to lose weight).

    But I agree that fat shaming is bad. My general rule is that people can raise the topic themselves and then I’ll talk about it (as you did now).

    PS. It is pretty clear that obesity is strongly linked to lifestyle (aside from the exceptions due to medical issues), but also that it is very hard for people to resist an environment that encourages an unhealthy lifestyle. So to truly combat obesity in the population requires us to make it easy for people to make healthy choices, rather than the opposite.

    PS2. Some people can make drastic changes to their lifestyle and may appreciate being ‘fat shamed,’ as it provides motivation for them to change their life. Others, who cannot do so for one reason or another, can get depressed from the same comments. Anyway, my point was that it is too simplistic to always portray ‘fat shaming’ as a negative force. It can have positive results.

  2. 2
    Lee1 says:

    I’d argue that the stress and lack of self-care that comes with self-hatred is a huge health problem among fat people.

    It’s also a huge problem among alcoholics and people suffering from severe depression, as I can attest to from personal experience (I hit the daily double there). Strong support from family, friends, loved ones is incredibly important, and anger or harsh judgement is really harmful in my experience, even though I can understand the motivations those thoughts might come from.
    I recognize Aapje is right that there’s a time for “tough love” for some people. But the default position should be support and encouragement for people who are dealing with weight issues, addiction issues, mental health issues, etc.

    ETA: I realize those issues aren’t all the same, as there are varying levels of personal control over them and among different people dealing with them, as well as different possible health consequences. But I think my general point stands. (In fact I think it’s so obvious no decent person could disagree with it and it probably didn’t need to be said; but that’s how I roll….)

  3. 3
    Lirael says:

    “Tough love” is so often – though not always – a euphemism for “I want to be an asshole to someone I disapprove of and throw a cover of moral superiority over it by doing it in the name of love.”

    The “The Fat Whisperer” comic resonated with me. I was a very thin child, I am now on the borderline of what is considered “normal” and what is considered “overweight” (so probably pretty average) and I know that I have a lot of this internalized about myself even though I’m pretty good at not projecting it onto others. Beyond that, though, these people who blather on about how it’s all about health really give their game away when you actually exercise in public while being not-thin. I was once on a four-mile run where some guy walking past me in the other direction glared at me and said “You’re too fat to jog.” I occasionally get people doing things like yelling “Fatty” out car windows if I’m running. And if I’m average and I’m getting this occasionally, people who are fatter than average who exercise in public are probably getting it a lot more.

    If these people gave a damn about health, rather than wanting to feel superior or impose their ideas of aesthetics on others, they wouldn’t be trying to discourage people they consider fat from exercising.

  4. 4
    Harlequin says:

    Aapje: That study (and reporting) is a bit flawed, IMO. They take the people who are healthy obese and ask how many are unhealthy obese some time later; then they take the people who are healthy nonobese and ask how many become unhealthy obese, that is, who have a weight category change in addition to having developed markers of metabolic syndrome. If you instead compare the fraction of healthy obese people who become unhealthy regardless of weight category and compare that to the fraction of thin people who do the same, the results are much more modest. (They do a matching thing before computing prevalence ratios so I can’t compare directly, but just dividing ratios from their table, HO->UO has about 8.6 times the probability of HN->UO, while HO->UN+UO is only about 1.8 times as likely as HN->UN+UO: still very concerning, but not nearly so strong a result. The matched prevalence ratio was more like 7.5 rather than 8.6, so dividing the percentages, while not correct, is not likely to be terribly far off–though it wouldn’t surprise me if it increased the 1.8 while decreasing the 8.6, either. Unhealthy nonobese people were more likely to become healthy than unhealthy obese people, too, but again the ratios are less extreme.) The authors also make a completely unsupported assertion about the stability of health outcomes using weight circumference vs BMI, but whatever.

    Perhaps fat-shaming has good outcomes for some people. But I expect they would be few and far between, and the assumption should be they don’t unless they explicitly request it from you. Even then, I’d be cautious. In general, when you want to support someone making a change, positive interventions (“Hey, this exercise class is really fun, we should try it together!”) are more effective than negative interventions (“Wow, you’re really out of shape”): negative interventions make people feel guilty/ashamed, and guilt/shame makes them not want to think about the thing, and you usually have to think about the thing if you want to change the thing.

  5. 5
    Mandolin says:

    Yay, 101!

  6. 6
    Aapje says:

    “Tough love” is so often – though not always – a euphemism for “I want to be an asshole to someone I disapprove of and throw a cover of moral superiority over it by doing it in the name of love.”

    Making people do what they are not naturally inclined to is a key part of our evolution as humans. It’s a crucial element of raising kids, school, etc.

    That said, there is the right way to do it and the wrong way. Nasty comments towards random people you see is not the right way. Knowing someone, seeing they struggle with a problem and pushing them when they want to solve their problem, but struggle with how, is the right way.

    In general, when you want to support someone making a change, positive interventions (“Hey, this exercise class is really fun, we should try it together!”) are more effective than negative interventions (“Wow, you’re really out of shape”)

    I think it depends on the recipient. Some people fight back after negative comments and others shut down. Some people respond to encouraging comments and others just don’t respond to them.

  7. 7
    closetpuritan says:

    @Aapje:
    I think it depends on the recipient. Some people fight back after negative comments and others shut down. Some people respond to encouraging comments and others just don’t respond to them.

    It’s well-established, from multiple studies, that fat-shaming doesn’t work, and in fact on average results in the targets weighing more. That doesn’t rule out individual exceptions. But you shouldn’t try something that generally does the opposite of what you want unless you have good reason to think it will work. And I would argue that aside from that, it’s immoral to yell at someone and be mean to them ‘for their own good’ unless they have explicitly said they want you to–even if you think it will work. Pretty much the only situation, therefore, where it would be okay to practice fat-shaming is with a friend who has assured you that they know how their mind works, and yes, they think it really will help them–that’s the only situation even if you think that being fat is super-unhealthy. (If you don’t think that being fat is super-unhealthy, you should respect your friend’s wishes, but you might find it too depressing to yell at your friend, whatever your feelings on fat, and you might find that it’s interfering with your own health projects if you are trying to practice health at every size or you have an eating disorder.)

    I don’t think that either the author or the potential readers of Barry’s cartoon are picturing that kind of situation. The goateed guy is pretty clearly not acting on a request from a specific person, based on what he says–he is talking about fat people in general.

  8. 8
    closetpuritan says:

    Also, FWIW, I’m the type of person whose initial reaction to “you shouldn’t eat that” is along the lines of “You can’t tell me what to do! I’m gonna eat five of them when I get home!” But I try to not let it influence me one way or the other.

  9. 9
    Ampersand says:

    Aapje, you didn’t say what in my post your “counterpoint” was responding to, but I’m assuming it was this:

    3) Of course there are healthy fat people, by any measure of health other than “are they fat?” That some people are fat and healthy is very well documented.

    Your link doesn’t contradict this claim. The study discussed indicates that even after 20 years of followup, 38% of the “healthy obese” remained both healthy and obese. Presumably over time some of those people will have less healthy metabolic measures (and over enough time, they’ll all be dead). Nonetheless, even this study – which is written by people who clearly have a preference for the “fat is unhealthy” position – empirically shows that over a 20 year study, a substantial portion of obese people remain healthy by every measure other than weight.

    That’s in addition to Harlequin’s points, which were excellent.

    Plus, this from my original post still applies:

    Even if you’re right that being fat is unhealthy – I don’t agree, but put that aside for a moment – so what? The vast, vast majority of fat and obese people will never be able to stop being fat or obese. So you’re like someone walking up to a seven-foot-tall person and saying “you’d be healthier if you weren’t so tall.” That’s not helpful advice.

    PS. It is pretty clear that obesity is strongly linked to lifestyle (aside from the exceptions due to medical issues), but also that it is very hard for people to resist an environment that encourages an unhealthy lifestyle.

    This is too simplistic. Yes, behavior matters to some exetent, but so does environment, and so does genetics. Lab marmosets aren’t getting fatter because of “lifestyle.” And it’s entirely possible (even commonplace) for a fat person to make “drastic changes to to their lifestyle” and remain fat.

    Some people can make drastic changes to their lifestyle and may appreciate being ‘fat shamed,’ as it provides motivation for them to change their life.

    As ClosetPuritan said, if those people specifically ask to be fat-shamed, that would make the moral calculus different. (Although still not a slam-dunk. Because while some of those people would be benefiting from the fat-shaming, others might just be recruiting their friends to enact their own internalized self-hatred in a destructive manner.) But that situation is really not what this cartoon is about.

  10. 10
    Ampersand says:

    Lireal, I have a comic in the pipeline about being fat and exercising in public, which touches on many of the issues you bring up. Thanks for posting.

  11. 11
    Ampersand says:

    Also, FWIW, I’m the type of person whose initial reaction to “you shouldn’t eat that” is along the lines of “You can’t tell me what to do! I’m gonna eat five of them when I get home!”

    And that’s why there is no longer any fake fruit in Closetpuritan’s home.

  12. 12
    Ampersand says:

    Also, about that study Aapje linked to, I think their way of measuring “healthy” is justifiable from a you-have-to-quantify-it-somehow-in-order-to-do-a-study perspective. But nonetheless, it’s likely that some of the “unhealthy” people, by that study’s measure, would be healthy for practical, day-to-day purposes. In other words, not everyone who has (say) high cholesterol is ever going to experience any practical health problems due to their high cholesterol.

  13. 13
    Mandolin says:

    (Although still not a slam-dunk. Because while some of those people would be benefiting from the fat-shaming, others might just be recruiting their friends to enact their own internalized self-hatred in a destructive manner.)

    Yeah, I would have loved to use “shame me any time you see me eating” as a tool when my eating disorder was at its worst.

  14. 14
    Aapje says:

    @7 closetpuritan

    Did you read the rest of what I wrote?

    Pretty much the only situation, therefore, where it would be okay to practice fat-shaming is with a friend who has assured you that they know how their mind works

    Because this is almost what I said, except I recognize that sometimes, other people are better at knowing what is good for a person than that person themselves. Although I recognize that people can’t know other people perfectly and sometimes will make incorrect judgement calls. We should be tolerant of that to some extent, IMO.

    @9 Ampersand

    Your link doesn’t contradict this claim. The study discussed indicates that even after 20 years of followup, 38% of the “healthy obese” remained both healthy and obese.

    Sure, but you don’t know whether that applies to you. AFAIK, being significantly overweight is a strong risk factor for many health issues. Your comment sounded a lot like: you can smoke and still die at 90. While technically true, I would advise people to stop smoking and severely overweight people to look into a lifestyle change (and/or a doctors visit to do a check up).

    Note that this is not the same as me claiming that it is somehow easy or that they can achieve a perfect result.

    And it’s entirely possible (even commonplace) for a fat person to make “drastic changes to to their lifestyle” and remain fat.

    And the person you linked to is most likely much healthier and has far fewer health risks, now that she is doing sports (and she did actually lose weight, while she seems to have been gaining weight before her lifestyle change). Although I would suggest non-weight bearing sports for overweight people, as that gives less wear on the body.

    As ClosetPuritan said, if those people specifically ask to be fat-shamed, that would make the moral calculus different.

    Have you ever been nagged about doing something, by someone you know, resisted that at first, then later gave in and were happy that you did?

    Just a yes or no is fine, no need to share personal info. I’m just wondering if you really never had this experience.

    Anyway, this discussion reminds me of discussions on other SJW topics, in that people take things so very personally. I feel that there is not much room for nuance in this discussion.

  15. 15
    closetpuritan says:

    And that’s why there is no longer any fake fruit in Closetpuritan’s home.

    There was never fake fruit in my home; I would only decorate with the freshest of genuine fruit. :)

  16. 16
    closetpuritan says:

    The peace lilies had to go, though. [In actuality I have several peace lilies, and many other poisonous houseplants.]

  17. 17
    closetpuritan says:

    Aapje:
    Did you read the rest of what I wrote?

    Pretty much the only situation, therefore, where it would be okay to practice fat-shaming is with a friend who has assured you that they know how their mind works

    Because this is almost what I said, except I recognize that sometimes, other people are better at knowing what is good for a person than that person themselves. Although I recognize that people can’t know other people perfectly and sometimes will make incorrect judgement calls. We should be tolerant of that to some extent, IMO.

    It’s almost what you said except that I think that respect for another person’s choices and autonomy are important, and recognize that not respecting those and making it clear to the other person that you think you know what’s good for them better than they do will damage a relationship, as well as how nagging and negging will damage a relationship.

    Frankly, I’m pretty skeptical, even if a person thinks being nagged and negged will help them lose weight, that it actually will–because yes, we agree that people don’t know themselves perfectly, but in addition to that, it’s quite well-established that for most people these tactics cause them to gain weight. But I put respect for other people’s autonomy above that, which is why I carved out that exception. (But thank you, Mandolin et al, for pointing out that there are some cases where we can’t respect people’s autonomy to hurt themselves.) I think even for a close friend, if both the friend’s own opinion of the way their mind works and those studies point one way, and your opinion points another way, it is the height of arrogance to think you must be the one who’s right, and you’re not just fooling yourself into thinking you have more control of the situation than you actually do. To not only decide that you’re right, but to decide that you’re so fucking sure you’re right that you’re going to go against your friend’s wishes for how they would like to be treated, and to do it using a method that you know causes collateral damage to your friend’s happiness (and to your friend’s health, for that matter, when we take into account the harmful effects of stress and the risk damaging the friendship beyond repair, because don’t forget that loneliness is deadlier than obesity)–that’s beyond hubris.

    So basically, the only reason our positions overlap at all in practice is because of my respect for people’s ability to make their own decisions even when I think those decisions are probably somewhat harmful; your position is that we don’t need to respect that if we think we know better than them.

    But you know what? I am guilty of not reading you closely earlier. Because I actually thought that maybe you just hadn’t thought through how what you were saying would look in practice, and hadn’t heard about or internalized the fact that fat-shaming doesn’t work. But this should have given it away:
    Nasty comments towards random people you see is not the right way. Knowing someone, seeing they struggle with a problem and pushing them when they want to solve their problem, but struggle with how, is the right way.

    This is the core of “The Fat Whisperer”–you know better than them, you’re bringing them new information despite your approach being something that’s everywhere, you know the right way to lose weight and they don’t.

  18. 18
    Ampersand says:

    Aapje:

    Your link doesn’t contradict this claim. The study discussed indicates that even after 20 years of followup, 38% of the “healthy obese” remained both healthy and obese.

    Sure, but you don’t know whether that applies to you. AFAIK, being significantly overweight is a strong risk factor for many health issues. Your comment sounded a lot like: you can smoke and still die at 90. While technically true, I would advise people to stop smoking and severely overweight people to look into a lifestyle change (and/or a doctors visit to do a check up).

    1) I never claimed I knew whether or not it applies to me. Obviously I can’t know my health 20 years from now; neither can anyone.

    2) I have no idea what being “significantly overweight” means to you. I can say, however, that for all but the most extreme weights (either under or over), the risk ratios are actually fairly modest, and comparable to the risk rations of being “normal” weight. (People who are slightly overweight live longer, on average, than those who are “normal” weight, according to many studies.) (This is an oversimplification, and thus not perfectly accurate; please read the link for a lengthier discussion.)

    3) “Your comment sounded a lot like” is nonsense. I didn’t say that; I didn’t say anything like that. You’re attacking a strawman.

    But, about the analogy of smoking to fat:

    There is universal agreement that smoking is incredibly unhealthy in legitimate, peer-reviewed journals. That’s simply not the case when it comes to overweight and obesity at all but the most severe levels. Peer-reviewed studies and journal articles showing that some people are fat and healthy aren’t at all the same as “the occasional smoker living to a ripe old age”; the former is evidence, the latter is anecdote.

    Also: Smoking is, even according to the studies cited by the “fat is dangerous” crowd, far more dangerous than being obese. For instance, the study I wrote about here found that being obese carried risk ratios that rarely rose above 1.9 (1.0 is no difference at all), and in many comparisons the “normal” weight people actually had higher risks of death than the “overweight” people. In contrast, for for smokers the risk ratio of death by lung cancer, compared to non-smokers, is 23.3 for men and 12.7 for women. You can’t reasonably claim that these risk ratios are similar.

    Finally, the success rate for quitting smoking is far, far higher than the success rate for “quitting” being fat, and carries virtually no health risks of its own. Telling people to not smoke, difficult as it is, is much more reasonable than telling fat people to become non-fat.

    Note that this is not the same as me claiming that it is somehow easy or that they can achieve a perfect result.

    But unless they stop being “fat,” they’ll still be criticized for being fat, assumed to never exercise and eat badly, and be given unasked-for “fat whisperer” type advice.

    Also, you aren’t claiming it’s easy, but I’m not sure if you’re acknowledging that statistics show that the odds of long-term success are incredibly small. Nor am I sure you’re acknowledging the possible bad health effects of weight-loss attempts that don’t work out, such as yo-yo dieting.

    And the person you linked to is most likely much healthier and has far fewer health risks, now that she is doing sports (and she did actually lose weight, while she seems to have been gaining weight before her lifestyle change).

    Yes, but I guarantee you that ignorant assholes still look at her and assume that she’s unhealthy and never exercises.

    Also, I’ve never once denied that exercise is, for almost all people, something that makes them healthier, or that in some cases it can make a fat person into a somewhat slimmer fat person. Obviously, exercise is good for nearly everyone (including but not limited to fat people), and also obviously some fat people can somewhat lower their weight with exercise and diet, especially if they go to extremes (like becoming a marathon runner). The claims you’re now refuting, are completely different from the claims I’ve actually been making.

    In short, your goalposts are moving all over the place.

    Although I would suggest non-weight bearing sports for overweight people, as that gives less wear on the body.

    A great example of a very obvious claim that I and most other fat people have already heard a million times over. With all due respect, no one on this thread has asked you for exercise advice.

  19. 19
    Aapje says:

    @17 closetpuritan

    Frankly, I find your views extremely dogmatic. There is almost no nuance in what you write. You paint the giving of unasked advice as a purely negative act. I consider it common sense that giving unasked advice that is appreciated and helps a person is positive (and not doing so is actually a negative). Of course I recognize the ability for people to make a mistake in their judgments. However, you are even unwilling to consider that some kinds of unasked advice may have good results. Instead, you only consider abstract (and simplistic) ideals as autonomy. This shows that you are an Utopian thinker, for whom ideological purity is more important than actual results.

    You treat autonomy as absolute, which ignores rather elementary issues like human interdependence. The choices that a person makes often have consequences for other people, so as you claim the right to make choices that you deem helpful to yourself, to not be a hypocrite you also have to respect the right for other people to make choices they deem helpful to themselves. This can mean giving unasked advice. Note that this cartoon is also unasked advice, so the fact that you have no problem with this cartoon shows your double standard.

    my respect for people’s ability to make their own decisions even when I think those decisions are probably somewhat harmful; your position is that we don’t need to respect that if we think we know better than them.

    It’s absurd to claim that giving advice is the same as disrespecting people’s ability to make their own decisions. This is like arguing that you are being silenced when someone disagrees with your views in respectful debate. This is not just a modest reframing of my position, you distort it so much that you are actually lying about what I believe.

    fat-shaming

    You keep using loaded terms like this, which associates what I say with the worst kinds of behavior. Effectively, you are accusing me of abuse, while my actual standpoint is one of respect.

    Like I said before, I would never just give unasked advice to random people and I would be sensitive about the way I would give it. Yet you feel legitimized in saying that my beliefs are similar to the ones displayed in the cartoon. So you are blaming me for believing that “fat people need shame and self-loathing” or telling people that “your body disgusts me and you should be sad.”

    Those are direct quotes from the cartoon that you claim my beliefs align with….can you understand why I find it offensive that you claim that the cartoon applies to me?

  20. 20
    Aapje says:

    @18 Ampersand

    Given the problematic nature of BMI as an accurate indicator of overweight, I don’t put too much stock in comparisons between BMI groups that are close together (as people with less fat can actually have a higher BMI). Especially since we know the risks also depend on where your body type stores the fat.

    I also believe that mortality rates are fairly poor indicators of health (in this context). We live in an age of chronic disease, where many medical problems are now ‘managed’. People still experience negative effects from their chronic disease, but they don’t die from it (or it takes a very long time). The government says that being obese greatly increased risk for many diseases.

    You’re attacking a strawman. […] Smoking is, even according to the studies cited by the “fat is dangerous” crowd, far more dangerous than being obese.

    It was a simile, which cannot be a strawman by definition. A simile doesn’t involve the claim that the things being compared are equal in every respect, just that there is a certain similarity that is elucidating.

    In this case, the similarity was that you claimed that not all overweight people will experience health problems due to their overweight. This is actually a very similar claim to: “there are people who do (dangerous thing) X and live to be 90.”

    The fallacy when it comes to smoking is that smoking does increase risk, regardless of whether any individual smoker will actually die from smoking. Similarly, severe overweight does increase risk, regardless of whether any individual person with severe overweight will have health problems due to their overweight. Again, my simile was intended to demonstrate the fallacy that you were using, not claiming equality, similar risk, or anything else that isn’t part of the simile.

    But I should probably stop using similes, since people seem to be totally incapable of recognizing them nowadays.

    But unless they stop being “fat,” they’ll still be criticized for being fat, assumed to never exercise and eat badly, and be given unasked-for “fat whisperer” type advice.

    Yes and this is not right.

    Nor am I sure you’re acknowledging the possible bad health effects of weight-loss attempts that don’t work out, such as yo-yo dieting.

    The thing is, in the absence of good advice to overweight people, they will still be targeted by companies that profit from weight loss products, media that ‘neg’ people for their own profit (women’s magazines are especially good at this) or simply experiment on their own.

    There is actual good advice that doesn’t have these negative effects that you mention, but your cartoon doesn’t acknowledge that either.

    And the person you linked to is most likely much healthier and has far fewer health risks, now that she is doing sports (and she did actually lose weight, while she seems to have been gaining weight before her lifestyle change).

    Yes, but I guarantee you that ignorant assholes still look at her and assume that she’s unhealthy and never exercises.

    Yes, that is the negative perspective on things. The positive way to look at it is that this person is now healthier and probably happier than before.

    The claims you’re now refuting, are completely different from the claims I’ve actually been making.

    In short, your goalposts are moving all over the place.

    I disagree. You made the claim that: “Even if you’re right that being fat is unhealthy – I don’t agree”.

    Yet I’ve gotten you to agree that being severely overweight is unhealthy. So you walked back that statement to something more reasonable.

    You claimed that it’s unhelpful to give lifestyle advice to people who are overweight, since “The vast, vast majority of fat and obese people will never be able to stop being fat or obese.”

    Yet you’ve accepted that lifestyle changes can make people healthier and can reduce weight gain. So you walked back to something more reasonable.

    You originally made a lot of comments that came across very black/white to me and in this discussion, you’ve shown that you actually have a more nuanced opinion and we found some common ground.

    I’m actually a bit shocked by your statement that I was moving goalposts, as I actually feel that relative to our normal interactions, we found a lot of common ground and that you did understand my arguments relatively well.

    A great example of a very obvious claim that I and most other fat people have already heard a million times over. With all due respect, no one on this thread has asked you for exercise advice.

    Yet this particular person chose differently and a lot of people seem to regard running as the default exercise option. So I thought it was worth mentioning, which would be worth it if it saved 1 reader from knee problems.

    Your accusation is actually very insulting to the runner from your story, as you are effectively calling her stupid. After all, you call it obvious that running can be a bad choice for overweight people, which insinuates that she made a very obvious error (= being stupid). I don’t think it is necessarily that obvious, especially since people differ a lot. Things that you (and/or I) heard a thousand times, may be new to others. So I’m not a big fan of judging that something is ‘obvious’ (especially since it implies a moral judgment on those without that knowledge).

    This is actually exactly what I talked about earlier: the difference between giving advice in a respectful way and being aggressive. Perhaps you should make a cartoon about that.

    PS. In my experience, “with all due respect” means that the words that follow are disrespectful. So some unasked advice: check yourself when you start a sentence with these words. That’s what I do and I find it helpful.

  21. 21
    closetpuritan says:

    Aapje:
    You paint the giving of unasked advice as a purely negative act.

    You didn’t mention advice-giving until your response to me, and I didn’t mention it until this sentence I’m writing right now. How do you come to the conclusion that I’m painting advice-giving in any kind of light at all? Did you remember Amp’s single instance of criticizing a single type of advice (don’t do weight-bearing exercise) as me criticizing all advice, or did you forget that you weren’t talking about advice in your earlier comments? In your previous comments you talked about the importance of nagging and the importance of using negative rather than positive comments if you felt that you knew the person well enough that you knew that that’s what they responded to best (in your response @6 to Harlequin in particular).

    That said, I’m not in favor of all advice-giving–presumably no one is–but most meaningfully to the cartoon, I’m not in favor of giving advice that I know the person has heard many times before. You mention that you would advise smokers to quit–do you do that on the assumption that they’ve never heard that smoking is bad for them? I will support smokers who want to quit, but I don’t tell friends who smoke, “Hey, did you know smoking is bad for you?” and expect that they might actually not know that smoking is bad for them.

    That is the kind of advice-giving represented in the comic. If you did not understand that the advice given in the Fat Whisperer comic was meant to be that sort of advice–the kind of thing that all fat people have heard many times before, whether in the media or in person–maybe we should chalk that up to cultural differences, maybe the comic only works for people familiar with the issue, I don’t know.

    This shows that you are an Utopian thinker, for whom ideological purity is more important than actual results.

    But you’re the one who’s clinging to, “Maybe making unasked-for negative and nagging comments to fat people can help some of the time,” regardless of the many studies showing that such comments most often result in weight gain, AND that most people are unable to maintain weight loss long-term. You seem so wedded to this method of “helping” fat people that you don’t care that it actually makes them fatter.

    Since most of the rest of that paragraph talks about all the things you “know” about me based on something you claim I’ve done but actually haven’t, let’s move along.

    fat-shaming

    You keep using loaded terms like this, which associates what I say with the worst kinds of behavior. Effectively, you are accusing me of abuse, while my actual standpoint is one of respect.

    Not respect for other people’s mental capabilities, surely, nor respect in the form of politeness, if you think that your belief that you know better than them justifies saying disrespectful things to them. Which is what the comic is about. The comic is about fat-shaming, that’s why I’m talking about fat-shaming.

    Making negative comments toward fat people about the fact that they are fat is fat-shaming. “Abuse” is not a word I used. Fat-shaming makes you a jerk, but not necessarily an abuser.

    Like I said before, I would never just give unasked advice to random people and I would be sensitive about the way I would give it. Yet you feel legitimized in saying that my beliefs are similar to the ones displayed in the cartoon. So you are blaming me for believing that “fat people need shame and self-loathing” or telling people that “your body disgusts me and you should be sad.”

    Those are direct quotes from the cartoon that you claim my beliefs align with….can you understand why I find it offensive that you claim that the cartoon applies to me?

    I never claimed that everything in the comic applies to you. So I can understand why you’d be annoyed at being misunderstood–I know that feel, bro! You don’t seem to understand me very well! And in trying to be somewhat brief, I may not have explained what I meant as well as I could have. What I said was,
    you know better than them, you’re bringing them new information despite your approach being something that’s everywhere, you know the right way to lose weight and they don’t.

    I’m not saying that you go around to random people saying the exact things in the comic, I’m saying that you think you know better than your friends what they need and will say disrespectful things to them–that you should know are obvious to them because they’ve most certainly heard them before (in the media, if not addressed specifically to them)–if you think it will help them lose weight.

    ***

    It was a simile, which cannot be a strawman by definition. A simile doesn’t involve the claim that the things being compared are equal in every respect, just that there is a certain similarity that is elucidating.

    But the simile has to be similar in elucidating, important respects, and I think what Amp is saying is that you two disagree on the importance of the differences he mentioned. Particularly since people so often take the approach towards fat of “fat is SO unhealthy, we are justified in doing these ethically-dubious things to make people not-fat!” [and I would put nagging/negative comments in the ethically-dubious category] I agree with him that the differences are meaningful.

    Yet you’ve accepted that lifestyle changes can make people healthier and can reduce weight gain. So you walked back to something more reasonable.

    All of those lifestyle changes would also benefit thin people, though, and aren’t specifically about the fact that the person is fat.

  22. 22
    VK says:

    Can I reccomend Emma Lewis’ BMJ article on this subject, specifically on fat-shaming at the doctors.
    It mentions how their exercise with weights has led them to become heavier, so that despite them testing healthy on every non-size based metric, cycling miles daily and being able to squat 100kg they are still constantly targeted with “you are not healthy enough” messages. Annoyingly rather than engaging with their statements, many of the responses simply declared them to be lying and refused to believe anyone severely obese could be a serious weightlifter.

  23. 23
    Ampersand says:

    Thank you, VK! That article was great. If I could find Emma Lewis’ contact info I’d send her the cartoon, but with a name like “Emma Lewis” she’s pretty hard to google. :-)

    Another recommended link:
    Let’s Talk About Intentional Weight Loss and Evidence-Based Medicine | Worse for the Fishes

  24. 24
    closetpuritan says:

    @VK and Ampersand: Thanks for posting those links!