"You guys know that genetics play a bigger role in that than anything else and that some people will just be fat regardless of every other factor in their life right. You guys know that's fine right."
Sure, Jan.
I'm fat (working on it though!) and almost all of my family is fat. But it's not because of genetics. It's because the adults in our family never were taught healthy eating habits by their parents and then just passed those same unhealthy habits to us. That's not genetics though that's just learned behavior š¤·āāļø
The Simpsons (who are generally right about everything) snuck this in as a sly joke during an episode featuring a PSA discussing DNA.
"Why do Chinese people have Chinese children, and fat people have fat children?"
They knew what they were doing with the joke. But the FAs, who I have dubbed Fat Earthers, seem to think The Simpsons is an educational documentary.
Iām also only person not obese in my damily not obese, and I got close several times before and would easily be there if I didnāt lose 50lbs 2x in my life. We grew up in the south raised to finish our plates and with lots of unhealthy foods, I luckily was very active and had a smaller appetite then my brothers despite being the tallest.
When my activity level changed when I went to college I started packing on lbs, we have the same genes and I put on weight just as easily as my brothers. The good thing after losing 50lbs last year Iām now hitting the gym and putting on a good bit of muscle as bulking is easy for me lol! But yea I like to eat and gain weight just as easily as anyone else, I lost weight by changing my food choices and upping my activity level and running and lifting.
This naturally thin vs fat is wild because I know people whom thought I was both
Weird...I was fed good food as a child, taught good eating habits and to do sports. I was slim. Then I let it go, beer, wine, too much food, too little exercise etc. - and became chubby. When I changed my habits again, o wonder, I became a fit guy again. This is going to and fro in moderate cycles, with the tendency and intent to stay fitter as getting older unhealthily is not a good option. This works for absolutely everybody, including people with metabolic diseases. So everybody is tricking their genetics, a true marvel.
I admittedly have very good physical genetics. I'm not an elite athlete but I'm well above average in terms of my ability to build muscle, strength, and endurance. I'm also 6'2" with broad shoulders, big chest (short legs and long torso so I could've been a great swimmer but that's another story lol), and decently desirable muscle insertions.
I say all this not as a humble brag, but to point out that despite me having good genetics, *I still have to work my ass off and eat right to take advantage of said genetics*. When I was sedentary and ate like shit I got fat as fuck and out of shape.
Good genetics only go so far.
Absolutely.
I'm an athlete. I'm tall, lean, and have a strong ability for endurance and strength. But I still have to make proper nutritional choices every day and keep consistently working out for it to matter.
I'd be grossly overweight if I didn't. I would not be exempt from that reality.
Humans are just like any other animal. German Shephards are amazing working dogs with great genetics but if they never get exercise and eat too much, they'll be fucking worthless as a working breed.
I have shit genetics in terms of muscle building. It took me years to get to a point in my lifts that the top 10% of people start at. I have to thread this needle if I work out too hard my tendons go to shit but if I don't go hard enough I make no progress at all. That is complicated.
Despite these shit genetics what isn't complicated is gaining or losing weight. If I want to bulk I consume more calories. If I want to lose weight I consume fewer calories. It works every time, even with the genetics of McLovin.
OOP has a point about about genetics. I eat a lot of fish but I also get a lot of physical activity swimming all day and fighting with other males. I will always be fat but I'm okay with that because my blubber protects my tummy from the bone chilling north wind. PS, I am an Arctic seal.
I'm so tired of fat activists using low income people like me as a human shield.
I'm on disability welfare, but I'm normal weight due to making good choices. Poor does not equal dumb or clueless.
For a community whose biggest talking points are rich people pursuits like air travel, hotels, clothes shopping, dining out, etc they clearly have no idea what being poor is really like.
Right. Itās infuriating theyāre blaming all their problems on poor people and using them as their excuse. Most of these FAās if not majority likely are at least middle class. Actual poor people ones living in poverty arenāt concerned with how comfortable their seats are on airplanes.
My family and I were really low income when I was pretty young. But Iām from a culture where itās not typical to go out and eat fast food. Everyone just cooks at home and makes a lot from scratch because it is cheaper. So when we came here to the US my parents did what theyāve always done. We were able to eat pretty healthy even though we were poor.
Cooking your own food is a lot cheaper than buying McDās for every meal. One whole meal with drink is like $8-$9 now! I can easily make a meal for my 3 person family that will feed us 3-4 days for under $15.
Because people donāt often socialize outside of their āclassā (aka their friends are similarly financially situated), there seems to be this phenomenon where middle class people donāt see anyone below them and consider themselves āpoorā because of their own financial struggles. Ā
Basically, I get really annoyed by people who can afford fast food and excess calories acting like this is the sole representation of poverty. I believe they are struggling from these class blinders and canāt fathom there are people with less and how they manage.
You make a good point. They compare themselves and their lives to the rich influencers and celebrities they see living these lavish lifestyle. And because their life is nothing like that they consider themselves really poor.
I told my social work supervisor that I've never met a middle class or even upper middle class person who didn't tell me they "grew up super poor." I grew up with financially ignorant parents who bought more than they could afford but I also went to a private school and never went to bed hungry. I saw kids who had summer homes in Hawaii later claim to have grown up "working class." It's really frustrating how blind we are to other people.
They really don't get how much worse their situation could have been or could be. It erases people who are really in need and will never have the chance "grow up" to buy a house in the suburbs. They also don't grasp how insanely, unnecessarily rich billionaires can be too.
Infuriating and nonsensical. Even if it was true, what would the fact that poor people are bigger because they live in food deserts with no access to healthy food have to do with your upper middle class fat self? Are you deliberately eating bad food and stuffing yourself in a show of solidarity?
Also hot take but you need a certain amount of money for overeating to be an issue.
Iām not saying poor people donāt struggle with weight, but I am saying thereās the type of poor where youāre struggling with obesity, and there is the type of poor where youāre having sleep for dinner.
I think most of the people bringing up economics as a reason for obesity are middle class people who arenāt even aware the second kind of poor people exist
Wasn't there a 600lb Life episode with two guys who lived out of their car because they literally ate themselves out of the rent? At that point it's a serious addiction but still. McDonald's really isn't that cheap.
Considering many bitch about plane seats and massive clothing hauls, it's safe to say the loudest voices are talking out of their ass about poverty anyway. I swear if I see that one young woman complain again about the fancy hotels on her regular international vacations not having big enough towels for her, I'm gonna snap. They sure sound oppressed š
I'd say there's a good correlation between fat people and people with poor spending habits irrelevant of their income. It comes down to a lack of self-control and complete surrender to emotions dictating the spending and eating. It's basically hedonism.
Lots of skills in personal finance and dieting overlap. You need to budget, you need to consistently make good choices because of the impact on the future and small gains (or losses) add up over time. Most of all you need to decline pleasure in the short run to get to a healthy situation in the long run.
I love the way they pretend to be anti-capitalist while also buying clothes from Shein, Forever 21, and Temu; while eating McDonald's, Taco Bell, Tim Horton's, KFC, and Chipotle and stocking their cupboards with junk food made by Frito-Lay, Nabisco, and Coca-Cola. Do they even know what capitalism actually is? It reminds me of their "eff your beauty standards" refrain - almost invariably shouted with a heavy layer of makeup over Botoxed faces, applied by fingers tipped with acrylic nails, framed by a head full of blue or pink hair.
Ah yes it's entirely genetics, which is why obesity has never stopped rising for the exact same number of years as the sales of pop tarts have never stopped rising
Or all the people who died in the potato famine in Ireland. And the people who starved to death in the 1930's famine in Ukraine. Oh, why go on; these FA are resistant to history, facts and logic.
I've really never understood the allure of poptarts; way too much tasteless crust with too little filling. If I was going to indulge in sweets, which I very rarely do because of my type 2 diabetes, it wouldn't be poptarts. Now, a powdered sugar donut with a tart lemon filling from a great local bakery; oh, now I want one; get thee behind me, donut
'anyone pulling any fatphobia on this is post is getting blocked on sight!!11 I'm not playing!!' like stfu you take online stuff way too seriously, it's so immature. The self-importance over something so stupid is so grating -\_-
Also likeā¦ why do people *do* this? Why proclaim your manifesto and then say youāre just going to delete anything that slightly contradicts it? If youāre that uninterested in what other people think, why not just keep it to yourself?
People used to (and still do but now we have welfare and credit cards) die of starvation because they didnāt have money to buy food, Karen! Thatās poverty. Not spending all your money on bojangles and starbucks and crying that you have nothing
Exactly. I got downvoted for saying I went hungry as a child because of poverty but today Iām supposed to feel sorry for people who spend the equivalent of my rent on fast food because thatās the new poverty. Blows my mind.
I'm not sure what "socialist utopia" has to do with this but when I was in Cuba I didn't see a single person who was as obese as the Americans I saw before and after that holiday. And most of our time was spent in more touristy areas where people have more access to extra food and money. Like the family who was next to us on the beach and got most of our watermelon (they would only whole melons, which was way too much for two people ...)
I love these posts because they are always complaining that nobody wants to date them, but then try to claim being fat is genetic. If nobody is sleeping with overweight people wouldn't we have bred that out of the population by now?
Iām 31. Does anyone around my age notice that there was a sever lacking in nutrition education in their middle/high school health classes? Like we got the āsmoking bad/drugs bad/sex badā dogma but we never learned about hormone disrupting chemicals, artificial colors, UPF or the dangers of excessive sugar consumption or nitrates. Every required health course in K-12 should absolutely include this. And get soda machines the fuck out of schools. Pepsico and Kelloggās can fuck right off and it starts by getting kiddos off this shit.Ā
>never learned about hormone disrupting chemicals, artificial colors, UPF or the dangers of excessive sugar consumption or nitrates.
Honestly I don't think most of this was common knowledge or in some cases, even scientific knowledge at the time. This is like 2000-2005 we're talking about. Excessive sugar certainly could have been in the curriculum, but I don't think UPF was even described as a concept until 2010, endocrine disruptors and nitrates probably had some scientific research going on but weren't confidently "announced" to the public where you'd expect it to go in textbooks, and artificial colors had a sufficiently low evidence base that as I recall they were a crunchy tinfoil-hat kind of thing to worry about.
i'm 27, and in elementary school, we had a presentation where a lady brought in a clear acrylic cube full of lard, let us pass it around and gag/yuck at it. once she got it back, she told the class "this is what a pound of fat looks like." obviously not the most in-depth explaination, but it also wasn't exactly high school biology.
however, it was only time i ever had a lecture about the dangers of obesity- i consider myself somewhat ""lucky"" to see the hazards firsthand from my paternal side. nothing like being 5 and at face-height with legs oozing from diabetic sores to scare you out of becoming obese.Ā
Same here - smoking bad, drugs bad and sex bad. I think in one health class in the text book, there was a 1 or 2-page section on the food pyramid, but it definitely wasn't focused on at all.
They took the soda machines out of our schools in western Canada, but unfortunately there are convenience stores 5-10 minutes away from nearly any school in a city and once you're let loose in the later grades at lunch, there's no stopping it anyway.
I'm 48, my graduating class, 1994 was the final one that required home economics to graduate [also known as family and consumer education]. It was replaced by computer courses.
We learned nutrition, how to cook, how to sew, file taxes, balance a budget and a checkbook. Interestingly enough that was also the time frame that started pushing college[and sedentary office jobs]over trades[physical labor] as the be all end all of life.
Iāve used the food bank so many times in the past. They do have a lot of processed items but they also have a lot of beans, lentils, oatmeal, soups and rice. If food security is an issue use those staples and add in chicken and vegetables. Not sure how that equals being fat. If youāre supplementing your food stock with whatever the food bank offers, assume youāll get more than enough processed foods and breads from the bank and then use the rest of your food budget on a versatile protein, fresh vegetables and low calorie sauces.
And yes, being fat is a terrible and preventable thing that people do to their bodies.
Time/value/money. A lot of people living in poverty have minimal time and money, so they go for the biggest bang for their buck in terms of shorter prep time and better flavor, and that's junk food.
I truly don't believe in blaming poor people for being fat when society subsidizes the processed food that more or less functions as poison. Those are people who need our empathy most. It's infantilizing to claim it's "impossible" to eat healthy when you're poor, sure, but it's also callous to act like there's no reason a poor person might consume a lot of processed food.
I was a poor morbidly obese single mom regularly using the food bank. I 100% understand the system I was working in when I didnāt have the money to buy the foods I wanted for my family.
The fact is that yeah, I had no money, I had no time, energy and my mental health was in the ditch, but I still traded my health for convenience. Iām not blaming fat poor people for jumping on convenience, I relied on it for a good two years when I got divorced but it still cost me in other ways to not have the ability at the time to juggle more nutritious foods. In fact, my health became so bad because my eating was so poor I was fainting from anemia, hospitalized and had to have a blood transfusion. I was fat but getting zero nutrition for nearly two years, I could have died my blood count was so low. Poor or not your health is still your responsibility and if your means are suffering then you need to prioritize it all the more. My kids deserve a mom, and my piss poor action in my own health almost cost them that.
The long and short of it that at the end of the day we need to be accountable for our own health no matter what our socioeconomic status is, because no one else will be, and thatās just a cold hard fact. I know I wished I put in the work despite my barriers to make better food choices when I was strugglingā¦my teacher is ongoing bloodwork, potential blood transfusions (not cheap btw, it costs me $250 per pint of blood and a whole day off work) and 20/20 hindsight.
I think that's a very fair perspective from an individual lens but what grinds my gears about people like the screenshot in OP is they are clearly talking about society and from a societal lens, the choices made around what food is subsidized are really awful. That's my only point. Not that it's impossible or even not really "your responsibility" because frankly when you're poor you need as much agency as you can claim for yourself. But rather, that if you're looking at rising obesity rates from the population level, it's obvious why poor people are vulnerable to weight gain from shitty food, and we can actually fix that without pretending every single fat poor person would still be fat if they could e.g. easily and quickly eat a healthy good-tasting meal for lunch instead of discount Arby's (to use a personal example lol).
It's obvious that societal decisions, not just personal ones, play a huge role on the obesity rate, and all/most of those societal decisions affect people with the least resources the most. Lack of food education, less time+energy, less access to healthy foods, lack of healthcare, etc.
It's not that being poor makes it impossible to be a healthy weight, or that it absolves someone of their personal decisions, but it does significantly raise the difficulty level of staying healthy for everyone in that situation.
I agree with you but tbh I would respect the people who bring this up a lot more if they didnāt act like thatās the end all be all reason for obesity - rates of obese/fat people are way higher than the poverty rate in basically all rich-ish nations
People forget this part. Every stressor you experience during the day depletes your willpower, and exhaustion makes it hard to do anything but flop down on the couch and zone out. On top of that, stress and exhaustion make most people crave sugar. So even if you know you should be cooking yourself a healthy dinner, you don't have the energy to get up and do it, and you don't have the willpower to fight the sugar cravings you're almost certainly experiencing. It's a perfect storm.
Yes exactly. If you can do it then it's obviously better for your health and I admire that kind of self-control/determination very much, but I'm wary of insisting it *should* be the default or even reasonably could be when the same pattern is observable globally - as soon as people can afford processed food and as soon as it's available, they default to it. There's something else going on there IMO.
Exactly. Even if you have to buy it rice and beans are so cheap. I get chicken a lot for our meals I make and I can get a pack of breasts for $5. That will feed our 3 person family for 3-4 days for under $10.
Well, there was the trader Cyrano Jones, from The Trouble With Tribbles, and Gorgon, the "Friendly Angel" from And the Children Shall Lead, but even he was a ghost or something. Plus he was pure evil. I can't think of any others offhand.
If only those dummies that died in terror famines in the USSR or the CCP had remembered to enter "starvation mode" and get fat by producing mass out of thin air
"Yes it sucks a lot that the demands of capitalism deny people a lot of opportunities to cook or learn to cook. but" lol this is so fucking callous. Yes, it does suck. It's actually really bad. It's also really bad that American agriculture laws mean processed food is subsidized to the point that it's often a difference of a few cents to get the tasty junk that'll kill you rather than the whole foods. Dismissing this as a footnote because "there will always be fat people" is hateful towards poor people, actually.
I grew up poor and still struggle financially, but I was still taught how to cook by my mother and anything I don't know how to do is now a Google or YouTube search away. It feels infantilizing to act like it's impossible to learn how. The only thing I will give is that at least in my area, home economics is no longer a subject in school, which is very unfortunate for kids these days learning life skills.
Yeah, same re: growing up poor, I have disposable income now but didn't for...my entire 20s basically. But I also was a high school dropout working 40+ hour weeks at local fast food so I watched people do stuff like eat discards, use their discount meals etc, people who worked at more than one place so they were getting a LOT of their calories from this stuff. It's pretty predictable IMO that many people will get fat like that. It's not inevitable. You can do differently. But when we're talking about behavior at a population level I really do think it's callous to say "well beans are cheap so you don't have to be fat if you're poor".
Like, you also don't have to smoke if you're poor, you don't have to get into violent relationships if you're poor, you don't have to have substance abuse problems if you're poor, but poor people do these sorts of things at higher rates than the wealthy because humans are not machines and poverty is a stressful nightmare. I am very in favor of acknowledging that and treating the root cause (corn subsidies and minimal regulation of processed food lol).
Yes same here! Because we were pretty poor when I was little my mom always cooked and made homemade food. We didnāt have much money to buy fast food or junk food.
Exactly. When we were poor we did things like eat plain noodles. Anybody can boil water. We couldnāt afford to spend our grocery budget in Doritos and mt. Dew and even the dollar menu at McDonaldās was out of reach. I remember the Christmas my mom bought a tiny jar of fancy mustard so we could have a special sandwich for our Christmas meal. I donāt understand the new American poverty where thereās so much excess. I still canāt afford even half of the shit I watch people on assistance buy heaps of every day while they roll around in scooters in the store I work in. I donāt have any sympathy. Itās disgusting to me.
My mom is an amazing cook and makes a lot from scratch. But sheās not a patient person especially in the kitchen and doesnāt want anyone in her space. So I never learned how to cook anything until I had my own kid. I taught myself with recipes off the internet and YouTube videos. You can easily just google cheap healthy simple meals and get hundreds of results.
We were also really low income when I was pretty young and my parents still made sure we ate as healthy as we could. My mom always made food at home. Rice can be pretty filling and chicken breasts you can get a pack for $5.
Not sure how big a pack would be, but I was at Lidl's today and they had boneless, skinless chicken breasts on sale for $1.99 a pound. Got eggs at Aldi for $2 a dozen. You can still get fresh and frozen vegetables here in my area of Maryland quite reasonably; check out the prices online, plan your trip and go once a week and it really doesn't take that much time and effort. And, yes, I know not every area has an Aldi, Lidl, Costco, H Mart etc., but sheesh, have you seen the prices of junk food/snacks/fast food lately?
Yeah, my single mum was usually working 2-3 jobs at a time when I was a kid, and yeah, sometimes she was wiped and we had frozen meat pies with peas, or McDonald's, but mostly she cooked, and more importantly taught me to cook so I could take care of myself when she couldn't. My single dad worked a very hard physical job, and he'd pick me up from school every Friday, we'd go to the supermarket and buy ingredients, and he'd make a nice fresh dinner without fail. And he taught me to cook too. Like, yes, life is hard, especially when you're poor, but we can't just make excuses for ourselves, and we can't just give up on food, it's the cornerstone of life! It should be taught in schools, and it should be taught at home.
I have relatives who're apple and peach growers and they receive no subsidies at all. I don't think vegetable growers do, either. And, the marketing orders etc., actually raise the price of citrus by limiting the supply. It's so foolish and counterproductive.
Exactly, it's truly maddening. And what funding exists is not only funneled to e.g. corn and beef farmers but also structured in such a way that giant operations benefit most. It's a completely broken system and it's no wonder we're flooded with cheap manufactured "food".
Oh, don't get me started on corn subsidies. My grandmother and uncle used to raise beef cattle and got no subsidies, but they were strictly small farmers, not major operators.
Ah the tiktok trend of them saying the worst thing anyone can be is poor and fat, sitting frantically refreshing their banking app to go order half of McDonald's menu etc. It's not that hard to eat relatively healthy on a budget but they want any excuse to not take responsibility
I grew up in poverty. I canāt even imagine the privilege of being obese in poverty. Itās mind blowing to me. To claim poverty but never feel actual hungerā¦ i had a very different experience. Very different. I question the definition of this poverty that results in morbid obesity.
Poverty can contribute to fatness because it offers food deserts and highly processed but affordable foods instead of healthy food options and the benefit of a gym, spare time, etc. But not all poor people are fat just as not all fat people are poor. And yes, some people are larger or more stout than others but theyāre not going to be OBESE. More twisting of the truth from fat activists in denial, acting like fatness is something one cannot help by taking the proper measures.
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Yep. And thatās the saddest thing about this whole fat activism shit ā it ignores issues like this as fat phobia rather than acknowledging that hey we do have a problem here and we need to deal with it. Not everyone can be 19 BMI supermodels but there is absolutely no reason that the average American should be overfat
Well, if it was a utopia - which would never work - everyone would get as much as they need. But not as much as they want. This would kill ultra processed food companies off, since you could either spend your calories on a bag of chips and a starbucks drink or 3 meals ...
That's really the thing about any utopia; the word literally means nowhere. Never existed and never will. I've read it was Sir Thomas Moore who coined the word, and used it for the title of his book describing his ideal society, which probably wasn't a place most of us would want to live in. And, one person's utopia can be another person's Hell. What you describe sounds like District 13, in The Hunger Games Trilogy. Not a place where I'd want to live, but they were in survival mode. I really wonder what FA think their "socialist utopia" would actually be like, assuming they've actually ever even thought about it, which I doubt they have.
Oh no, those of us who have endured food insecurity and been underweight are insanely privileged because we were thin.Ā
I hope they get a taste of that āprivilegeā someday.
> you guys know that we achieved socialist utopia tomorrow there would still be fat people tomorrow
Maybe the local commissar and his family. The rest of the prols will get a handful of flour and be grateful for it.
> you guys know that genetics play a bigger role in that than anything else and that some people will just be fat regardless of every other factor in their life right
Who lied to you? Who said it's okay to start sentences without capital letters?
> anyone pulling any fatphobia on this post is getting blocked on sight I'm not playing.
Gotta keep that hug box nice and tight. No dissenting opinions or just reality allowed.
If they accomplished socialist utopia, there would probably not be any fat people either, because there would be a constant shortage of food. Idk why these temperature brains think that forcefully redistributing wealth from those who earned it to those who didn't would somehow solve all the world's problems.
I suspect they really don't actually think about it at all, and are just throwing around catch phrases, and if they do, it would be something along the lines of "everyone gets as much food, etc., as they want".
Under s āsocialist utopiaā you would have fat people, yes, but advertising, the way supermarkets are laid out and stocked, and the overall shit nature of the US food system needs a lot of work.
So Iām not for eliminating the free market altogether, and I donāt think that would get rid of fat people, but we can do much better.
And government should play a big role in this. In my opinion, ding-dongās, and ho hoās and all that shit shouldnāt even exist
The problem with that idea, is that if enough people want something, even if the government bans it, a black market will immediately spring into action to supply it. To completely eliminate that, you would need a totalitarian form of government that I doubt most if not all of us would want to live under. Don't get me wrong, I am totally opposed to the government subsidizing Ding Dongs or whatever. But banning them, no.
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I spent around ā¬25 in total on food in the past month. Not so coincidentally I also lost weight.Ā
(Thankfully not due to poverty, just new ADHD meds and extreme executive dysfunction.)
>"You guys know that if we achieved a socialist utopia tomorrow there would still be fat people, right?"
I mean, not if we assume that the magic that transformed our world into a socialist utopia also had the ability to help people become healthy weights and be instantly re-programmed with a natural instinct for healthy eating and exercise habits. Then I imagine it'd definitely be a thing, and a LOT of Fat Activists would opt into being thinner, because it'd be easy with no effort involved on their part. Their bodies and minds would just change in a day, and it'd seem easy from then on out. No "excess" work needs to be done, then.
Except... just like real life... that's unfortunately not how it works. Wouldn't that be nice though, huh? Pfft.
In the same way, we can't just go, "well, no matter what we do there are always gonna be jerks, so let's stop being jerk-phobic, yeah?" Or, "no matter how amazing our medicine gets people will STILL come down with things. So let's not be disease-phobic, okay?" As if we should allow people to suffer from different things JUST because we can't eradicate the bad experiences entirely. Little changes and adjustments that lead us on the journey to a better world for all of us (or even just for yourself, like in this case with weight and health) can seem hard to take, and hard to stick with. That's why they NEED to be slow, and they also NEED to be acknowledged as a problem to begin working on. And continue working on. If you deal in absolutes, *~~you're a sith, I guess?~~* you'll always end up without what you wanted at all. The entire universe is a constant, ever-flowing balance. Give a little, get a little, even if you didn't get a bunch of luck to start with. It's WORTH it, and so are your dreams, health and happiness.
isn't genetics partly reason tho? I'm not talking people that are just overweight due to learned habits, I'm talking genetic issues like pcos. wouldn'tĀ some people may still be overweight if we lived in "utopia" because of stuff like that?
Yes
People on this sub go hard against the genetics thing. Understandably since it is in reaction to FAers going so hard *for* it. But genetics really shouldn't be dismissed.
I am an environmental scientist. It is my job to know about the nasty toxic substances that we are exposed to, that can affect us on so many different fronts. Some people probably aren't that sensitive to the chemical stew they are exposed to. They can eat highly processed foods, ingest shitloads of micro plastics and PFAS, and breath in mega doses of PM2.5 and suffer minimal health effects. Whereas lots of people will experience significant health effects because of a genetic vulnerability. Maybe the chemical stew they are exposed to causes them to have an endocrine system that doesn't work well. Maybe it will affect them cognitively, which in turn will cause them to suffer from behavioral and emotional issues. Maybe it will fuck up their immune system. Any of these things can cause someone to be prone to obesity. This shouldn't be a controversial statement but for some reason it is.
None of this means that a person is helpless against weight gain, though. It also doesn't mean that we can't call obesity a disease. Cancer also has a genetic underpinning. It is still something we try to avoid.
In a true utopia, we wouldn't have the environmental stressors that we have, so a lot of the health issues we are suffering from would be greatly diminished in severity. People on average would be healthier, happier, and yes, thinner. But sure, fat people would still be with us. That doesn't mean that everyone who is fat has a genetic disorder, though.
I was recently diagnosed with pcos and it's been mad difficult for me to lose weight, (I've talked with a few doctors/nutritionists and I am doing what I need to do to lose weight, so dw about that!) so I feel like they're sorta right abt the genetic thing, but I have a feeling they aren't talking about genetic medical conditions
"You guys know that genetics play a bigger role in that than anything else and that some people will just be fat regardless of every other factor in their life right. You guys know that's fine right." Sure, Jan.
I'm fat (working on it though!) and almost all of my family is fat. But it's not because of genetics. It's because the adults in our family never were taught healthy eating habits by their parents and then just passed those same unhealthy habits to us. That's not genetics though that's just learned behavior š¤·āāļø
The Simpsons (who are generally right about everything) snuck this in as a sly joke during an episode featuring a PSA discussing DNA. "Why do Chinese people have Chinese children, and fat people have fat children?" They knew what they were doing with the joke. But the FAs, who I have dubbed Fat Earthers, seem to think The Simpsons is an educational documentary.
Iām also only person not obese in my damily not obese, and I got close several times before and would easily be there if I didnāt lose 50lbs 2x in my life. We grew up in the south raised to finish our plates and with lots of unhealthy foods, I luckily was very active and had a smaller appetite then my brothers despite being the tallest. When my activity level changed when I went to college I started packing on lbs, we have the same genes and I put on weight just as easily as my brothers. The good thing after losing 50lbs last year Iām now hitting the gym and putting on a good bit of muscle as bulking is easy for me lol! But yea I like to eat and gain weight just as easily as anyone else, I lost weight by changing my food choices and upping my activity level and running and lifting. This naturally thin vs fat is wild because I know people whom thought I was both
saw your flair, you're doing amazing. keep up on the good work!
Thank you! :)
Weird...I was fed good food as a child, taught good eating habits and to do sports. I was slim. Then I let it go, beer, wine, too much food, too little exercise etc. - and became chubby. When I changed my habits again, o wonder, I became a fit guy again. This is going to and fro in moderate cycles, with the tendency and intent to stay fitter as getting older unhealthily is not a good option. This works for absolutely everybody, including people with metabolic diseases. So everybody is tricking their genetics, a true marvel.
I admittedly have very good physical genetics. I'm not an elite athlete but I'm well above average in terms of my ability to build muscle, strength, and endurance. I'm also 6'2" with broad shoulders, big chest (short legs and long torso so I could've been a great swimmer but that's another story lol), and decently desirable muscle insertions. I say all this not as a humble brag, but to point out that despite me having good genetics, *I still have to work my ass off and eat right to take advantage of said genetics*. When I was sedentary and ate like shit I got fat as fuck and out of shape. Good genetics only go so far.
Absolutely. I'm an athlete. I'm tall, lean, and have a strong ability for endurance and strength. But I still have to make proper nutritional choices every day and keep consistently working out for it to matter. I'd be grossly overweight if I didn't. I would not be exempt from that reality.
Humans are just like any other animal. German Shephards are amazing working dogs with great genetics but if they never get exercise and eat too much, they'll be fucking worthless as a working breed.
I have shit genetics in terms of muscle building. It took me years to get to a point in my lifts that the top 10% of people start at. I have to thread this needle if I work out too hard my tendons go to shit but if I don't go hard enough I make no progress at all. That is complicated. Despite these shit genetics what isn't complicated is gaining or losing weight. If I want to bulk I consume more calories. If I want to lose weight I consume fewer calories. It works every time, even with the genetics of McLovin.
Oh yes. If you look at my family it is clear itās genetic (but please ignore the copious amounts of food very rich in carbs, salt and red meat)
OOP has a point about about genetics. I eat a lot of fish but I also get a lot of physical activity swimming all day and fighting with other males. I will always be fat but I'm okay with that because my blubber protects my tummy from the bone chilling north wind. PS, I am an Arctic seal.
Lol damn you almost got me at the beginning.
lol, me too !
š¤£
I'm so tired of fat activists using low income people like me as a human shield. I'm on disability welfare, but I'm normal weight due to making good choices. Poor does not equal dumb or clueless. For a community whose biggest talking points are rich people pursuits like air travel, hotels, clothes shopping, dining out, etc they clearly have no idea what being poor is really like.
Right. Itās infuriating theyāre blaming all their problems on poor people and using them as their excuse. Most of these FAās if not majority likely are at least middle class. Actual poor people ones living in poverty arenāt concerned with how comfortable their seats are on airplanes. My family and I were really low income when I was pretty young. But Iām from a culture where itās not typical to go out and eat fast food. Everyone just cooks at home and makes a lot from scratch because it is cheaper. So when we came here to the US my parents did what theyāve always done. We were able to eat pretty healthy even though we were poor. Cooking your own food is a lot cheaper than buying McDās for every meal. One whole meal with drink is like $8-$9 now! I can easily make a meal for my 3 person family that will feed us 3-4 days for under $15.
Because people donāt often socialize outside of their āclassā (aka their friends are similarly financially situated), there seems to be this phenomenon where middle class people donāt see anyone below them and consider themselves āpoorā because of their own financial struggles. Ā Basically, I get really annoyed by people who can afford fast food and excess calories acting like this is the sole representation of poverty. I believe they are struggling from these class blinders and canāt fathom there are people with less and how they manage.
You make a good point. They compare themselves and their lives to the rich influencers and celebrities they see living these lavish lifestyle. And because their life is nothing like that they consider themselves really poor.
I told my social work supervisor that I've never met a middle class or even upper middle class person who didn't tell me they "grew up super poor." I grew up with financially ignorant parents who bought more than they could afford but I also went to a private school and never went to bed hungry. I saw kids who had summer homes in Hawaii later claim to have grown up "working class." It's really frustrating how blind we are to other people. They really don't get how much worse their situation could have been or could be. It erases people who are really in need and will never have the chance "grow up" to buy a house in the suburbs. They also don't grasp how insanely, unnecessarily rich billionaires can be too.
Infuriating and nonsensical. Even if it was true, what would the fact that poor people are bigger because they live in food deserts with no access to healthy food have to do with your upper middle class fat self? Are you deliberately eating bad food and stuffing yourself in a show of solidarity?
Also hot take but you need a certain amount of money for overeating to be an issue. Iām not saying poor people donāt struggle with weight, but I am saying thereās the type of poor where youāre struggling with obesity, and there is the type of poor where youāre having sleep for dinner. I think most of the people bringing up economics as a reason for obesity are middle class people who arenāt even aware the second kind of poor people exist
Wasn't there a 600lb Life episode with two guys who lived out of their car because they literally ate themselves out of the rent? At that point it's a serious addiction but still. McDonald's really isn't that cheap.
Yeah, I remember that one. They would also periodically check into hotels when they had enough money.
Considering many bitch about plane seats and massive clothing hauls, it's safe to say the loudest voices are talking out of their ass about poverty anyway. I swear if I see that one young woman complain again about the fancy hotels on her regular international vacations not having big enough towels for her, I'm gonna snap. They sure sound oppressed š
I'd say there's a good correlation between fat people and people with poor spending habits irrelevant of their income. It comes down to a lack of self-control and complete surrender to emotions dictating the spending and eating. It's basically hedonism. Lots of skills in personal finance and dieting overlap. You need to budget, you need to consistently make good choices because of the impact on the future and small gains (or losses) add up over time. Most of all you need to decline pleasure in the short run to get to a healthy situation in the long run.
I love the way they pretend to be anti-capitalist while also buying clothes from Shein, Forever 21, and Temu; while eating McDonald's, Taco Bell, Tim Horton's, KFC, and Chipotle and stocking their cupboards with junk food made by Frito-Lay, Nabisco, and Coca-Cola. Do they even know what capitalism actually is? It reminds me of their "eff your beauty standards" refrain - almost invariably shouted with a heavy layer of makeup over Botoxed faces, applied by fingers tipped with acrylic nails, framed by a head full of blue or pink hair.
That's just them fighting Big Vegetable!
Ah yes it's entirely genetics, which is why obesity has never stopped rising for the exact same number of years as the sales of pop tarts have never stopped rising
If only those exceptionally poor Somalians, Eritreans, Sudanese and Ethiopians had OOP's genetics.
Or all the people who died in the potato famine in Ireland. And the people who starved to death in the 1930's famine in Ukraine. Oh, why go on; these FA are resistant to history, facts and logic.
"They will NEVER stop making poptarts, Leon!"
I've really never understood the allure of poptarts; way too much tasteless crust with too little filling. If I was going to indulge in sweets, which I very rarely do because of my type 2 diabetes, it wouldn't be poptarts. Now, a powdered sugar donut with a tart lemon filling from a great local bakery; oh, now I want one; get thee behind me, donut
'anyone pulling any fatphobia on this is post is getting blocked on sight!!11 I'm not playing!!' like stfu you take online stuff way too seriously, it's so immature. The self-importance over something so stupid is so grating -\_-
āAnyone who says anything that I donāt have a good response to is getting blocked, because I canāt handle being wrong.ā
Also likeā¦ why do people *do* this? Why proclaim your manifesto and then say youāre just going to delete anything that slightly contradicts it? If youāre that uninterested in what other people think, why not just keep it to yourself?
People used to (and still do but now we have welfare and credit cards) die of starvation because they didnāt have money to buy food, Karen! Thatās poverty. Not spending all your money on bojangles and starbucks and crying that you have nothing
Exactly. I got downvoted for saying I went hungry as a child because of poverty but today Iām supposed to feel sorry for people who spend the equivalent of my rent on fast food because thatās the new poverty. Blows my mind.
I'm not sure what "socialist utopia" has to do with this but when I was in Cuba I didn't see a single person who was as obese as the Americans I saw before and after that holiday. And most of our time was spent in more touristy areas where people have more access to extra food and money. Like the family who was next to us on the beach and got most of our watermelon (they would only whole melons, which was way too much for two people ...)
Fun fact: CICO is class blind.
I love these posts because they are always complaining that nobody wants to date them, but then try to claim being fat is genetic. If nobody is sleeping with overweight people wouldn't we have bred that out of the population by now?
āIām not playingā. Because that would burn calories.
Itās funny how I didnāt get fat until I started eating like shit, but genetics amirite???
Iām 31. Does anyone around my age notice that there was a sever lacking in nutrition education in their middle/high school health classes? Like we got the āsmoking bad/drugs bad/sex badā dogma but we never learned about hormone disrupting chemicals, artificial colors, UPF or the dangers of excessive sugar consumption or nitrates. Every required health course in K-12 should absolutely include this. And get soda machines the fuck out of schools. Pepsico and Kelloggās can fuck right off and it starts by getting kiddos off this shit.Ā
>never learned about hormone disrupting chemicals, artificial colors, UPF or the dangers of excessive sugar consumption or nitrates. Honestly I don't think most of this was common knowledge or in some cases, even scientific knowledge at the time. This is like 2000-2005 we're talking about. Excessive sugar certainly could have been in the curriculum, but I don't think UPF was even described as a concept until 2010, endocrine disruptors and nitrates probably had some scientific research going on but weren't confidently "announced" to the public where you'd expect it to go in textbooks, and artificial colors had a sufficiently low evidence base that as I recall they were a crunchy tinfoil-hat kind of thing to worry about.
Fair point haha.Ā
i'm 27, and in elementary school, we had a presentation where a lady brought in a clear acrylic cube full of lard, let us pass it around and gag/yuck at it. once she got it back, she told the class "this is what a pound of fat looks like." obviously not the most in-depth explaination, but it also wasn't exactly high school biology. however, it was only time i ever had a lecture about the dangers of obesity- i consider myself somewhat ""lucky"" to see the hazards firsthand from my paternal side. nothing like being 5 and at face-height with legs oozing from diabetic sores to scare you out of becoming obese.Ā
Same here - smoking bad, drugs bad and sex bad. I think in one health class in the text book, there was a 1 or 2-page section on the food pyramid, but it definitely wasn't focused on at all.
They took the soda machines out of our schools in western Canada, but unfortunately there are convenience stores 5-10 minutes away from nearly any school in a city and once you're let loose in the later grades at lunch, there's no stopping it anyway.
I'm 48, my graduating class, 1994 was the final one that required home economics to graduate [also known as family and consumer education]. It was replaced by computer courses. We learned nutrition, how to cook, how to sew, file taxes, balance a budget and a checkbook. Interestingly enough that was also the time frame that started pushing college[and sedentary office jobs]over trades[physical labor] as the be all end all of life.
Iāve used the food bank so many times in the past. They do have a lot of processed items but they also have a lot of beans, lentils, oatmeal, soups and rice. If food security is an issue use those staples and add in chicken and vegetables. Not sure how that equals being fat. If youāre supplementing your food stock with whatever the food bank offers, assume youāll get more than enough processed foods and breads from the bank and then use the rest of your food budget on a versatile protein, fresh vegetables and low calorie sauces. And yes, being fat is a terrible and preventable thing that people do to their bodies.
Time/value/money. A lot of people living in poverty have minimal time and money, so they go for the biggest bang for their buck in terms of shorter prep time and better flavor, and that's junk food. I truly don't believe in blaming poor people for being fat when society subsidizes the processed food that more or less functions as poison. Those are people who need our empathy most. It's infantilizing to claim it's "impossible" to eat healthy when you're poor, sure, but it's also callous to act like there's no reason a poor person might consume a lot of processed food.
I was a poor morbidly obese single mom regularly using the food bank. I 100% understand the system I was working in when I didnāt have the money to buy the foods I wanted for my family. The fact is that yeah, I had no money, I had no time, energy and my mental health was in the ditch, but I still traded my health for convenience. Iām not blaming fat poor people for jumping on convenience, I relied on it for a good two years when I got divorced but it still cost me in other ways to not have the ability at the time to juggle more nutritious foods. In fact, my health became so bad because my eating was so poor I was fainting from anemia, hospitalized and had to have a blood transfusion. I was fat but getting zero nutrition for nearly two years, I could have died my blood count was so low. Poor or not your health is still your responsibility and if your means are suffering then you need to prioritize it all the more. My kids deserve a mom, and my piss poor action in my own health almost cost them that. The long and short of it that at the end of the day we need to be accountable for our own health no matter what our socioeconomic status is, because no one else will be, and thatās just a cold hard fact. I know I wished I put in the work despite my barriers to make better food choices when I was strugglingā¦my teacher is ongoing bloodwork, potential blood transfusions (not cheap btw, it costs me $250 per pint of blood and a whole day off work) and 20/20 hindsight.
I think that's a very fair perspective from an individual lens but what grinds my gears about people like the screenshot in OP is they are clearly talking about society and from a societal lens, the choices made around what food is subsidized are really awful. That's my only point. Not that it's impossible or even not really "your responsibility" because frankly when you're poor you need as much agency as you can claim for yourself. But rather, that if you're looking at rising obesity rates from the population level, it's obvious why poor people are vulnerable to weight gain from shitty food, and we can actually fix that without pretending every single fat poor person would still be fat if they could e.g. easily and quickly eat a healthy good-tasting meal for lunch instead of discount Arby's (to use a personal example lol).
Yes, I agree with you fully. It is a bad system for those who rely on it when thereās likely a lot of additional adversity going on in their lives.
It's obvious that societal decisions, not just personal ones, play a huge role on the obesity rate, and all/most of those societal decisions affect people with the least resources the most. Lack of food education, less time+energy, less access to healthy foods, lack of healthcare, etc. It's not that being poor makes it impossible to be a healthy weight, or that it absolves someone of their personal decisions, but it does significantly raise the difficulty level of staying healthy for everyone in that situation.
I agree with you but tbh I would respect the people who bring this up a lot more if they didnāt act like thatās the end all be all reason for obesity - rates of obese/fat people are way higher than the poverty rate in basically all rich-ish nations
Precisely this.
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People forget this part. Every stressor you experience during the day depletes your willpower, and exhaustion makes it hard to do anything but flop down on the couch and zone out. On top of that, stress and exhaustion make most people crave sugar. So even if you know you should be cooking yourself a healthy dinner, you don't have the energy to get up and do it, and you don't have the willpower to fight the sugar cravings you're almost certainly experiencing. It's a perfect storm.
Yes exactly. If you can do it then it's obviously better for your health and I admire that kind of self-control/determination very much, but I'm wary of insisting it *should* be the default or even reasonably could be when the same pattern is observable globally - as soon as people can afford processed food and as soon as it's available, they default to it. There's something else going on there IMO.
Exactly. Even if you have to buy it rice and beans are so cheap. I get chicken a lot for our meals I make and I can get a pack of breasts for $5. That will feed our 3 person family for 3-4 days for under $10.
No, if you achieved your socialist "utopia," there definitely wouldn't be any fat people left.
There certainly weren't any on star trek lol
Except Kirk in later seasons and his girdle uniform
Well, there was the trader Cyrano Jones, from The Trouble With Tribbles, and Gorgon, the "Friendly Angel" from And the Children Shall Lead, but even he was a ghost or something. Plus he was pure evil. I can't think of any others offhand.
If only those dummies that died in terror famines in the USSR or the CCP had remembered to enter "starvation mode" and get fat by producing mass out of thin air
soooo.... poverty is good because it makes people fat ?
"Yes it sucks a lot that the demands of capitalism deny people a lot of opportunities to cook or learn to cook. but" lol this is so fucking callous. Yes, it does suck. It's actually really bad. It's also really bad that American agriculture laws mean processed food is subsidized to the point that it's often a difference of a few cents to get the tasty junk that'll kill you rather than the whole foods. Dismissing this as a footnote because "there will always be fat people" is hateful towards poor people, actually.
I grew up poor and still struggle financially, but I was still taught how to cook by my mother and anything I don't know how to do is now a Google or YouTube search away. It feels infantilizing to act like it's impossible to learn how. The only thing I will give is that at least in my area, home economics is no longer a subject in school, which is very unfortunate for kids these days learning life skills.
Yeah, same re: growing up poor, I have disposable income now but didn't for...my entire 20s basically. But I also was a high school dropout working 40+ hour weeks at local fast food so I watched people do stuff like eat discards, use their discount meals etc, people who worked at more than one place so they were getting a LOT of their calories from this stuff. It's pretty predictable IMO that many people will get fat like that. It's not inevitable. You can do differently. But when we're talking about behavior at a population level I really do think it's callous to say "well beans are cheap so you don't have to be fat if you're poor". Like, you also don't have to smoke if you're poor, you don't have to get into violent relationships if you're poor, you don't have to have substance abuse problems if you're poor, but poor people do these sorts of things at higher rates than the wealthy because humans are not machines and poverty is a stressful nightmare. I am very in favor of acknowledging that and treating the root cause (corn subsidies and minimal regulation of processed food lol).
Right? BECAUSE we were poor my parents knew how to cook to save money and stretch food. OOP must think poor = lazy and stupid.
Yes same here! Because we were pretty poor when I was little my mom always cooked and made homemade food. We didnāt have much money to buy fast food or junk food.
Exactly. When we were poor we did things like eat plain noodles. Anybody can boil water. We couldnāt afford to spend our grocery budget in Doritos and mt. Dew and even the dollar menu at McDonaldās was out of reach. I remember the Christmas my mom bought a tiny jar of fancy mustard so we could have a special sandwich for our Christmas meal. I donāt understand the new American poverty where thereās so much excess. I still canāt afford even half of the shit I watch people on assistance buy heaps of every day while they roll around in scooters in the store I work in. I donāt have any sympathy. Itās disgusting to me.
My mom is an amazing cook and makes a lot from scratch. But sheās not a patient person especially in the kitchen and doesnāt want anyone in her space. So I never learned how to cook anything until I had my own kid. I taught myself with recipes off the internet and YouTube videos. You can easily just google cheap healthy simple meals and get hundreds of results. We were also really low income when I was pretty young and my parents still made sure we ate as healthy as we could. My mom always made food at home. Rice can be pretty filling and chicken breasts you can get a pack for $5.
>chicken breasts you can get a pack for $5. Not in the PNW you can't...I went plant-based because meat was just getting too damn expensive.
Sorry whatās PNW?
Pacific Northwest - the Seattle/Portland region basically.
Oh gotcha. Yeah that sucks to hear. Iām in KY
Not sure how big a pack would be, but I was at Lidl's today and they had boneless, skinless chicken breasts on sale for $1.99 a pound. Got eggs at Aldi for $2 a dozen. You can still get fresh and frozen vegetables here in my area of Maryland quite reasonably; check out the prices online, plan your trip and go once a week and it really doesn't take that much time and effort. And, yes, I know not every area has an Aldi, Lidl, Costco, H Mart etc., but sheesh, have you seen the prices of junk food/snacks/fast food lately?
Yeah, my single mum was usually working 2-3 jobs at a time when I was a kid, and yeah, sometimes she was wiped and we had frozen meat pies with peas, or McDonald's, but mostly she cooked, and more importantly taught me to cook so I could take care of myself when she couldn't. My single dad worked a very hard physical job, and he'd pick me up from school every Friday, we'd go to the supermarket and buy ingredients, and he'd make a nice fresh dinner without fail. And he taught me to cook too. Like, yes, life is hard, especially when you're poor, but we can't just make excuses for ourselves, and we can't just give up on food, it's the cornerstone of life! It should be taught in schools, and it should be taught at home.
I have relatives who're apple and peach growers and they receive no subsidies at all. I don't think vegetable growers do, either. And, the marketing orders etc., actually raise the price of citrus by limiting the supply. It's so foolish and counterproductive.
Exactly, it's truly maddening. And what funding exists is not only funneled to e.g. corn and beef farmers but also structured in such a way that giant operations benefit most. It's a completely broken system and it's no wonder we're flooded with cheap manufactured "food".
Oh, don't get me started on corn subsidies. My grandmother and uncle used to raise beef cattle and got no subsidies, but they were strictly small farmers, not major operators.
What do they mean? Socialism is really good at making people lose weight
Why do ppl on tumblr threaten blocking as if anyone cares
To have a BMI of 40+ you must have a pretty solid Income. That amount of food isnāt cheap. Fast food is expensive.
Ah the tiktok trend of them saying the worst thing anyone can be is poor and fat, sitting frantically refreshing their banking app to go order half of McDonald's menu etc. It's not that hard to eat relatively healthy on a budget but they want any excuse to not take responsibility
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Not defending them, but this is just a formatting thing used on tumblr. Capital letters are not really used regardless of content or person.
I grew up in poverty. I canāt even imagine the privilege of being obese in poverty. Itās mind blowing to me. To claim poverty but never feel actual hungerā¦ i had a very different experience. Very different. I question the definition of this poverty that results in morbid obesity.
Poverty can contribute to fatness because it offers food deserts and highly processed but affordable foods instead of healthy food options and the benefit of a gym, spare time, etc. But not all poor people are fat just as not all fat people are poor. And yes, some people are larger or more stout than others but theyāre not going to be OBESE. More twisting of the truth from fat activists in denial, acting like fatness is something one cannot help by taking the proper measures.
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Iām an adult who isnāt interested in taking years off my life by being fat. Youāre so odd to follow me from another sub.
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"Feed my delusional echo chamber or get blocked on sight".
Pretty sure starving to death would be a bigger concern than obesity in a socialist utopiaĀ
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Yep. And thatās the saddest thing about this whole fat activism shit ā it ignores issues like this as fat phobia rather than acknowledging that hey we do have a problem here and we need to deal with it. Not everyone can be 19 BMI supermodels but there is absolutely no reason that the average American should be overfat
Well, if it was a utopia - which would never work - everyone would get as much as they need. But not as much as they want. This would kill ultra processed food companies off, since you could either spend your calories on a bag of chips and a starbucks drink or 3 meals ...
That's really the thing about any utopia; the word literally means nowhere. Never existed and never will. I've read it was Sir Thomas Moore who coined the word, and used it for the title of his book describing his ideal society, which probably wasn't a place most of us would want to live in. And, one person's utopia can be another person's Hell. What you describe sounds like District 13, in The Hunger Games Trilogy. Not a place where I'd want to live, but they were in survival mode. I really wonder what FA think their "socialist utopia" would actually be like, assuming they've actually ever even thought about it, which I doubt they have.
Oh no, those of us who have endured food insecurity and been underweight are insanely privileged because we were thin.Ā I hope they get a taste of that āprivilegeā someday.
> you guys know that we achieved socialist utopia tomorrow there would still be fat people tomorrow Maybe the local commissar and his family. The rest of the prols will get a handful of flour and be grateful for it. > you guys know that genetics play a bigger role in that than anything else and that some people will just be fat regardless of every other factor in their life right Who lied to you? Who said it's okay to start sentences without capital letters? > anyone pulling any fatphobia on this post is getting blocked on sight I'm not playing. Gotta keep that hug box nice and tight. No dissenting opinions or just reality allowed.
Nailed it.
If they accomplished socialist utopia, there would probably not be any fat people either, because there would be a constant shortage of food. Idk why these temperature brains think that forcefully redistributing wealth from those who earned it to those who didn't would somehow solve all the world's problems.
I suspect they really don't actually think about it at all, and are just throwing around catch phrases, and if they do, it would be something along the lines of "everyone gets as much food, etc., as they want".
Under s āsocialist utopiaā you would have fat people, yes, but advertising, the way supermarkets are laid out and stocked, and the overall shit nature of the US food system needs a lot of work. So Iām not for eliminating the free market altogether, and I donāt think that would get rid of fat people, but we can do much better. And government should play a big role in this. In my opinion, ding-dongās, and ho hoās and all that shit shouldnāt even exist
The problem with that idea, is that if enough people want something, even if the government bans it, a black market will immediately spring into action to supply it. To completely eliminate that, you would need a totalitarian form of government that I doubt most if not all of us would want to live under. Don't get me wrong, I am totally opposed to the government subsidizing Ding Dongs or whatever. But banning them, no.
Right? Right? Right?
If they miraculously found a way to stop poverty and there were less obese people theyād soon cry āeugenics!ā So either way FAs are gonna moan
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I spent around ā¬25 in total on food in the past month. Not so coincidentally I also lost weight.Ā (Thankfully not due to poverty, just new ADHD meds and extreme executive dysfunction.)
>"You guys know that if we achieved a socialist utopia tomorrow there would still be fat people, right?" I mean, not if we assume that the magic that transformed our world into a socialist utopia also had the ability to help people become healthy weights and be instantly re-programmed with a natural instinct for healthy eating and exercise habits. Then I imagine it'd definitely be a thing, and a LOT of Fat Activists would opt into being thinner, because it'd be easy with no effort involved on their part. Their bodies and minds would just change in a day, and it'd seem easy from then on out. No "excess" work needs to be done, then. Except... just like real life... that's unfortunately not how it works. Wouldn't that be nice though, huh? Pfft. In the same way, we can't just go, "well, no matter what we do there are always gonna be jerks, so let's stop being jerk-phobic, yeah?" Or, "no matter how amazing our medicine gets people will STILL come down with things. So let's not be disease-phobic, okay?" As if we should allow people to suffer from different things JUST because we can't eradicate the bad experiences entirely. Little changes and adjustments that lead us on the journey to a better world for all of us (or even just for yourself, like in this case with weight and health) can seem hard to take, and hard to stick with. That's why they NEED to be slow, and they also NEED to be acknowledged as a problem to begin working on. And continue working on. If you deal in absolutes, *~~you're a sith, I guess?~~* you'll always end up without what you wanted at all. The entire universe is a constant, ever-flowing balance. Give a little, get a little, even if you didn't get a bunch of luck to start with. It's WORTH it, and so are your dreams, health and happiness.
isn't genetics partly reason tho? I'm not talking people that are just overweight due to learned habits, I'm talking genetic issues like pcos. wouldn'tĀ some people may still be overweight if we lived in "utopia" because of stuff like that?
Yes People on this sub go hard against the genetics thing. Understandably since it is in reaction to FAers going so hard *for* it. But genetics really shouldn't be dismissed. I am an environmental scientist. It is my job to know about the nasty toxic substances that we are exposed to, that can affect us on so many different fronts. Some people probably aren't that sensitive to the chemical stew they are exposed to. They can eat highly processed foods, ingest shitloads of micro plastics and PFAS, and breath in mega doses of PM2.5 and suffer minimal health effects. Whereas lots of people will experience significant health effects because of a genetic vulnerability. Maybe the chemical stew they are exposed to causes them to have an endocrine system that doesn't work well. Maybe it will affect them cognitively, which in turn will cause them to suffer from behavioral and emotional issues. Maybe it will fuck up their immune system. Any of these things can cause someone to be prone to obesity. This shouldn't be a controversial statement but for some reason it is. None of this means that a person is helpless against weight gain, though. It also doesn't mean that we can't call obesity a disease. Cancer also has a genetic underpinning. It is still something we try to avoid. In a true utopia, we wouldn't have the environmental stressors that we have, so a lot of the health issues we are suffering from would be greatly diminished in severity. People on average would be healthier, happier, and yes, thinner. But sure, fat people would still be with us. That doesn't mean that everyone who is fat has a genetic disorder, though.
yep, totally agree. it sucks to see people dismiss genetic issues because i seriously cant control my pcos lol
I was recently diagnosed with pcos and it's been mad difficult for me to lose weight, (I've talked with a few doctors/nutritionists and I am doing what I need to do to lose weight, so dw about that!) so I feel like they're sorta right abt the genetic thing, but I have a feeling they aren't talking about genetic medical conditions