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Diet and Exercise
Reply to "Can we have an honest, good faith conversation about fat acceptance and body positivity?"
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[quote=Anonymous]I'm a thin, middle class person of color with rather left leaning politics. I've been grappling with a lot of friends online and IRL over body positivity and fatphobia, fat acceptance, and body positivity as a kind of identity. I know this conversation usually gets derailed, or it just goes back and forth between people saying that body positivity is glorifying obesity, promoting unhealthy lifestyles, and making the obesity epidemic worse vs people saying that fatshaming does not work, it's not other people's business, and that fat-shamers don't *actually* care about health. My own take on this is that I find that body positivity, which was once oriented to people of ALL body types trying to be healthy and love themselves, is now primarily led by people who are actually shaming obese people for LOSING weight and getting healthier, because it's "diet culture" and "the patriarchy." From a social justice and health perspective, what concerns me the most is how obesity is being handled with respect to Covid, and the politics of it. With the pandemic, the social justice, progressive position has been to mask up, social distance, and take maximal precaution - even unnecessary, symbolic precautions, like pulling up a mask when you cross someone's path - to show solidarity. If we are that vigilant about Covid, why aren't we as vigilant and obsessive about obesity, which kills a lot more people, especially low income POC? I know you can't "catch" obesity from a passerby, but the socioeconomic and cultural conditions that lead to obesity are indeed contagious. What bothers me as a progressive, social justice-oriented person is that instead of applying the hypervigilance and health-aware measures from the pandemic onto the obesity epidemic, we've instead addressed obesity or "size diversity" or "Fat acceptance" as a social identity. As a person of color, I initially resented the idea of equating "size discrimination" with racism. Racism in this country has a long and violent history. Race is an immutable characteristic and to equate it with obesity is to assume that being POC is inherently negative characteristic. However, someone else made a VERY GOOD POINT: Ableism. If ableism/discrimination against people with physical handicaps is bad (it is), then is "size discrimination" along those same lines? Is discrimination against the obese - like requiring obese people to purchase the two seats - the same as not being wheelchair accessible? I think body positivity in its original form is good and can also be applied against ableism. People with disabilities should love themselves as they are and should live their best lives regardless of beauty standards. Likewise, with obesity, I think economic and societal conditions should be considered before judgments are made, and medical discrimination (doctors dismissing and reducing all health concerns of overweight people to just being fat) is as real as medical racism. So body positivity has a role. But somewhere along the line, it seems like body positivity is being used as a message to say that we've given up trying to address the obesity epidemic, and even shamed others for trying to lose weight, saying it's "the patriarchy" or "white supremacy" or whatever. [/quote]
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