Study: ‘Weight-ism’ Is Bigger Than Racism (via emilyposts)
… weight discrimination is spiraling upward, and that’s a dangerous trend that could add fuel to the obesity epidemic.
The study argues that discrimination against fat people should be illegal, just like discrimination based on race, age, or gender.
Personally, I don’t see the connection… being overweight is just as much of a lifestyle and personality decision as smoking, being annoying, or listening to bad music. Sure, it’s hard to change it once you’re there. But it’s not impossible, and it’s not the world’s fault that you got there in the first place.
People shouldn’t be prohibited from thinking negatively of people who are overweight because of their decisions.
(Also, this picture… they couldn’t have picked a better representative? Is that a pair of 2-liter soda bottles in that shopping bag?)
I find Marco’s analysis disturbingly ignorant, but unsurprising in light of how the article only tangentially talks about the science of weight loss. There are many things to remember.
1) For a small portion of the population, they have diseases that make them hungry all the time. As in they are missing parts of the loop that tells us we are full. Some of these are treatable, some not. They stop eating when it’s physically painful to eat. Although a small portion of the population, we can’t ignore their existence. Point number 2 is more important to remember though.
2) For those who have gained a large amount of weight and it is their fault, it is harmful to encourage them to lose weight quickly. The article mentions NIH recommendations without getting into the science behind it. Generally, if you try to lose weight too quickly, your body enters nonlinear oscillations with your weight (shown in many, many studies and modeled by leading mathematicians like A. Goldbeter).
Adding to the problem, the oscillations result in weight going above where the person was originally and losing and gaining weight quickly increases the health impacts of being obese. If the person exits the oscillations, it is normally when they are above their original weight and depressed, so they give up. Thus, someone trying to lose weight quickly does not typically result in them losing weight. The article blames discrimination for the depression that results in the final weight gain. I don’t know whether I agree with that. I think the people would be depressed whether or not they were judged by society.
One way to break out of the oscillations is to modify biology. The most common way is bariatric surgery. People are viewed by society as weak for getting their stomach stapled or getting gastric bypass surgery, but the nonlinear dynamics of the body shows this is a (science-based) way to break out of the oscillations. Sometimes people are so far stuck in obesity they still oscillate despite this change to the body and still gain the weight back.
I agree that it is people’s fault they became obese, but saying that losing weight is a matter of choice and resolve is ignorant. You will hear doctors who disagree with me, but I consider them to be no better than Roy Meadow. Roy Meadow got the statistics of cot death completely wrong and is personally responsible for the ostracizing of many women in the UK from society. Smart doctors recognized what he did and stripped him of his license to practice as a rebuke for offering “expertise” in an area he was not familiar with.
If you trust that climatologists know what they are doing in modeling climate change, you should trust the mathematicians that instead model obesity and have shown that losing weight isn’t a matter of will or perseverance. Denying this fact is the same as denying climate change.
