If anything, America is too accepting of being fat, it’s not treated like a negative health condition. It’s treated more as something to be proud of, something to be accepted, if not celebrated. I think for awhile there, there was a push in pop-culture more towards skinny women, but if that exists anymore it’s been toned down or it’s non-existent.
treatments for obesity exist. self-hatred is not a treatment for obesity. in fact, self-hatred has the opposite effect. individuals, like yourself, who harp on the “too accepting” attitude of the culture, are operating without regard for the established medical framework for effective intervention, preferring to rely on an unsupported framework of hatred instead.
Nobody is saying that people with obesity need to be self-loathing, that's never a treatment that's recommended for any other medical condition. However, it still is a medical condition that leads to worse health outcomes across the board, we don't glamorize cancer patients or drug/alcohol abusers the way we glamorize obesity in America. At least with alcohol/drug abuse, friends & family sometimes feel the need to stage interventions, there's measures in place to let the person know that their behavior is self-destructive. Even smokers aren't made to feel bad about themselves, but society does step in with various hints to encourage stopping. Calling out obesity as being unhealthy is not about making people feel bad about themselves, it's about letting people know that they're going to have bad consequences if they don't change their lifestyle.
With obesity, it's just accepted that somebody is putting on weight, it's spun in a positive light and paraded around in the media, and there's really no push to help people. People are taught to love themselves no matter what, "It's all about the bass", they don't need to do anything different. If any other drug or activity existed that caused things like cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke), type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, musculoskeletal disorders, cancers (endometrial, breast and colon), and just generally made people unhealthy the way obesity does, it would be demonized in a heartbeat (similar to how cigarettes/drugs/alcohol are demonized).
I will accept though, that potentially making obese people feel good about themselves may be part of the treatment. I'm assuming there may be an element of depression that's contributing to the weight gain, whether it's over-eating or lack of physical activity, and it creates a hard-to-escape feedback loop. They feel bad about their weight gain, which causes them to eat more or not go out as much, which increases weight gain, rinse and repeat. So potentially the "feel good" culture around obesity in America is a subtle way of helping them to break out of that feedback loop, but I'm not sure how effective it really is, it just seems like it normalizes an unhealthy medical condition more than anything.
literally! lame redditor brains love to barge in on posts like this and act like fat people somehow… don’t know they are fat? as though they don’t live carrying that burden (literally and figuratively) every day?
body shaming has been demonstrated to cause worse medical outcomes. it’s absolutely fine for people (especially medical sources) to inform overweight folks of the risks of obesity and to encourage them to build an intervention plan.
whats not okay is the reaction to this post. most of the comments here are proving OOP’s point, like, “how dare you not visibly hate yourself every moment of the day for your body.” i’m high key disgusted by the knee jerk reaction here.
If I told you things I ate before.
Told you how I used to feed.
Would you munch some twinkies with me?
If you knew my menu word for word.
Had all of my ring dings to see.
Would you have some cake with someone like me?
And we don't care about the fat folks
Talkin' 'bout the big style
And we don't care about the fat fucks.
Talkin' 'bout the big style, too
And we don't care about their own foods.
Talkin' 'bout our own snacks.
All we care about is eatin'
Eatin' only me and you.
Usually when things has got this fat
My feet tend to disappear
No one will weigh me unless you do
I can tell there's chocolate goin' on
Cookies seem to disappear
Everyone is leaving, I still like cheese fondue .
And we don't care about the fat folks
Talkin' 'bout the big style
And we don't care about the fat fucks
Talkin' 'bout the fat style, too
And we don't care about their own foods
Talkin' 'bout our own snacks
All we care about is eatin'
Eatin' only me and you.