Can We Please Stop Fat-Shaming?
It’s like a bunch of end-stage alcoholics making fun of sobriety
I just saw another man fat-shame. A public figure commented on Twitter that insulin was too expensive and as a life-saving medication, it should be offered very low-cost or free.
“More freebies for those fat tubs of lard,” the man declared. Here is more of their opinion:
We are telling people in society that its beautiful to be a fat tub of s**t, Now we have to pay for the medication that resulted from them being a fat f**k. Unbelievable how we create moral emergencies that help the left jerk themselves off. [Quote from Twitter rage-farming account that will likely have their account suspended] — asterisks are mine — Twitter allows right-wing trolls to use any language they choose.
So, I told this gentleman that 75% of U.S. people over age 12 were overweight or obese. On the odd chance that this person is not overweight (unlikely) or obese, three out of four people they know are. In their ignorant mind, all of those people, in every place they go, 75 out of 100, have “no willpower” and are “sitting at home stuffing their face with Twinkies.”
The Real Cost of Fat-Shaming
As a survivor of a bad eating disorder, I know what fear of fat cost me. I know that I did not want to go to the doctor for any health concern because the first thing they’d do was weigh me. Unless I’d been starving for weeks, the second and only other thing they’d do would be to tell me to lose weight. Why go for help for anything when this is all you’re going to hear in the first place?
“Doctor, I have a 104 degree fever and can’t swallow.”
“Have you thought about losing weight?”
This is why the American Medical Association (AMA) has recently changed its guidance for clinicians on how to use BMI. Basically, the AMA has said “stop using BMI” in preference to actual health assessments and holistic care.
I know that years of starving myself, overexercising — and eating faux foods like sugar-free Jell-O and SnackWell’s that I believed were “good” because they were low fat and low calorie — not only led to what is probably a pretty severely damaged metabolism and weak microbiome. I’ve had irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) since age 16 or 17. This disease that many still deny even exists, goes along with faux food consumption, anorexia, and overexercising.
But that’s just me, personally.
Hundreds of millions of people have been dieting for decades: and they are just getting fatter.
Fat-shaming troll and his brethren repeat over and over that it’s a “lack of willpower.” All that money, all that time, all the fitness programs, all that dieting: people are fatter than ever and growing fatter by the day. All ages, all groups. No one is getting thinner and fitter unless they follow regimens that genuine wellness and health enthusiasts and athletes (amateur and professional) follow.
To the fat-shamers, I can respond easily: I’m not fat, I am fit — but few people are willing and able to follow the five years of daily actions, research, and education I’ve taken to be that way. Unless someone never got fat and unfit in the first place (and a certain number of people, maybe 5–10%, are able to eat the Standard American Diet and not suffer rampant inflammation and massive undesired weight gain) — they’re not likely to have my advantages and access to information that have allowed me to establish holistic wellness. Because food and responses and microbiomes are completely individual, it is very challenging for people to find their best diet of nutritious whole foods. It takes daily effort to make and adhere to a routine of daily mental and physical wellness.
So are the ignorant and cruel fat-shamers out there following a holistic wellness plan that incorporates nutrition, regular exercise, regular healthy activities with friends and neighbors, and avoidance of unhealthy activities, attitudes and beliefs?
Yeah, that’s for pansies!
If these people were doing all these things, they wouldn’t fat-shame. They wouldn’t blurt to others that people are fat because they lack willpower and eat too much.
They would know that it’s what we eat, not how much. It’s how we pursue wellness daily, not crash diet and exercise programs like The Biggest Loser (which has made nearly all participants fatter and less-healthy because of their participation).
It’s also about mental and spiritual wellness.
Now that I am much more well, I can also cope with verbal and other forms of abuse in a much more effective, positive manner.
It’s About Money For The Most Appalling People And Businesses
Sometimes I think about old-time Western movies and TV shows that featured “snake oil salesmen” or quack doctors promising miracle cures. I recall the old televangelist shows we used to watch. The famous televangelist Ernest Angley used to “faith health” people by smacking them on the head and yelling, “Devil Come Out!”
This is what goes on today with calorie-based diet programs no matter what they are. It’s the true nature of the endless series of weight loss and wellness apps and programs. It’s the same mentality that wants to tell people that medications like Ozempic are the answer to obesity: except you have to take these injections for the rest of your life and it’s really expensive.
Our entire economic system is “feeding” off the results of the terrible food system which has arisen during our lifetimes. My daughter never knew any other type of food: she and all younger generations have only eaten real food if they became meal preppers or if they ate it with family and friends at traditional gatherings. Otherwise, the foods they grew up on come from fast food, fast-casual, box/bag chain restaurants and junky recipes made from prepared foods from the center aisles of the grocery store.
From the $224 billion weight loss and diet industry to the $555 billion U.S. segment of the pharmaceutical industry, at least $1 trillion in economic activity is fueled by the sentiments expressed by the foul-mouthed fat-shaming right-wing Twitter troll.
It’s difficult to get a handle on the U.S. food industry in terms of size and volume and nature. At least 80% of the U.S. food industry is controlled by mega-corporations from ADM and Tyson to Kraft-Heinz and PepsiCo. These companies practice industrialized agriculture and make and sell highly-processed foods (HPF). The total industry value may be as great as $1.8 trillion.
So, the U.S. healthcare industry, often called “sick care” reached $4.3 trillion in 2022 according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Together these industries are pretty much responsible for 75% of people being overweight and obese. The foods that are grown in the massive monoculture fields or gigantic feed lots or factory farms with millions of animals are the foods that fuel obesity and metabolic disease, as well as related diseases like cancer — including fast-growing formerly rare cancers striking people under age 50.
And fools like Right Wing Fat-Shamer continue to blame individuals — when the reality is, until we free ourselves as I and other wellness enthusiasts have done — every single one of us is just a human version of the poor pigs in the factory pig farm or Perdue sharecropping chicken house.
Over a decade ago, when I first saw films of how pigs were handled in modern industrialized pork farming facilities, I sat with my mouth open at the unnecessary brutality and filthy, unhealthy conditions. I grew up in an orange grove, hunted and fished with my grandfather, and we had real chickens for eggs and meat. I had many friends in 4-H. I knew that farm animals did not have to be raised in cages right next to each other with slats for their feces. I knew that it was unnecessary for a sow to give birth to a litter in a cage so small that she would crush and kill some of them.
I knew that pigs did not need to be raised in massive pig houses that look exactly like the concentration camp barracks at Auschwitz — with their feces and urine draining into huge fetid ponds of pig shit and urine that the owners would occasionally spray into the air, where, aerosolized, it would land on nearby homes. Of Black people.
People like this fat-shaming fool call me a “liberal” or “leftist” because I object to animals being raised in such horrific conditions: unnecessarily — without reason.
“I am not eating Smithfield bacon or pork,” I told myself. Before I realized how unhealthy and not just gross and unpalatable factory pork is, I did fall off that bacon wagon a few times. Every time I had bacon and eggs while eating out, I was eating food made from an animal whose life was miserable from start to finish.
I look back at my old legacy blog from the 1990s and 2000s and there was a whole section called “Culture of Abuse.” I truly did not realize the interconnectedness of all of these systems.
The people who abuse women and children in their home because they feel entitled or maybe because it boosts their weak and feeble egos and self-esteem, are no different from stupid, mean fat-shamers who comment with ugly, unwanted insults on images of female celebrities. These people — mostly men — are small, individual versions of the culture that can create a food system that treats animals and the land so horribly that any sane human is utterly disgusted by seeing where their food really comes from — a process that has accellerated with technology to the point that it’s almost mind-bogglingly awful in every regard, from start to finish, from artificially-inseminated chickens to pigs held captive in metal cages hardly bigger than their bodies, force-fed hormone and antibiotic-laden foods, implanted with growth hormones and raised to provide profit as quickly as possible.
Only an abusive and vicious mind would create and defend the unnecessary, cruel, and disease-causing factory farm and food environments. The mind that would create the system of contract farming used by Perdue and other similar big Ag businesses is equally vicious and abusive.
And, like the home-based abuser who always tells the abused child or spouse that everything must be kept secret — these businesses also want to keep their unsanitary, cruel, and destructive practices a secret. I only recently learned that there were “Ag-Gag” laws that assess criminal penalties on anyone who takes photos or films inside industrial animal facilities. Big Ag producers have worked hard for decades to pass these laws, with mixed success: they have been struck down by courts in many states, but as of right now, six states have them.
The only reason for these laws is the fact that the producers and operators of these facilities know that significant numbers of people would stop eating their products if they saw where the food came from and how it was raised and processed.
There’s no way to say that allowing a chicken or pig to live its entire life sitting in its own feces is “sanitary” or healthful and that the solution for such conditions is to pump the animals full of antibiotics from birth to death (80% of antibiotics made in the U.S. are used in factory-based farming — that’s why we have so many new disease-resistant bacteria, like the famous “flesh-eating” MRSA).
The home-based abuser also uses economic tactics like blackmail and threats to control the family members that they abuse.
Every abused child can repeat the threats told to them by their abuser. “If you tell anyone, you’ll get in trouble. Don’t say anything: no one will believe you anyway.”
To this day, ignorant fat-shamers blame the three out of four people over age 12 in the U.S. who are overweight or obese for their own disease, which simply results from eating the foods provided to them in school lunchrooms, nearly every restaurant of every type, and 80% of the aisles in the grocery store (100% of the racks in any convenience store). Diet foods and extreme dieting make people even fatter and less-healthy.
Well — I could go on.
Even though I’m not fat, I’ll never be completely well because I did too much damage to my metabolism and microbiome by following socially-recommended and encouraged practices like being anorexic, overexercising, and eating no- or low-calorie foods that marketers told me were good for me and healthy.
I also grew up in a highly emotionally and physically abusive environment.
I didn’t raise my daughter that way and I will not accept this type of abuse being applied to my grandchildren.
I don’t want it to be applied to anyone’s children or grandchildren anywhere around the world.
I think we can safely start with shaming and ostracizing and demonizing the fat-shamers.
They are like a bunch of hardcore alcoholics making fun of someone who is choosing sobriety. And are even less-worthy members of our society.
As others have noted about everything our capitalist hellscape has created: the cruelty is the point.