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.
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.
…and yet your first reaction to a post simply about women who don’t hate themselves for their bodies was to say society needs to be less accepting.
do some internal thought because you seem to be getting closer to truth with your last paragraph but you are still way off base.