this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
52 points (93.3% liked)
Europe
8484 readers
1 users here now
News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, 🇩🇪 ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures
Rules
(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)
- Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
- No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
- No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.
Also check out !yurop@lemm.ee
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I agree that we should treat them, but I don’t like people who are proud of them being overweight. This is a serious health condition and shouldn’t just be accepted.
I am overweight myself, with exactly the creeping up of weight over the years as you described. Every few years I have to do a weight loss diet for a few months to get back to the upper range of normal weight. That’s just how it is.
Also, there was a significant shift of people’s perception of what normal weight actually is due to the issues I mentioned in the first paragraph. If you have problems sitting in normal chairs due to your ass being too large, you’re morbidly obese.
There’s no point in ostracizing overweight people, but it should also not be treated as being normal.
I suspect the whole "fat acceptance" movement arises from the overwhelming amount of judgement that fat people suffer, combined with the fact that until recently there was no practical treatment for it. It's the same process behind gay pride: it's not pride as in "I'm better than you", it is pride as in "I am not worse than you, no matter how badly you treat me".
Being overweight or obese is a medical condition, not a moral failure. If you can't fit in a normal chair, yes, you are morbidly obese, but that means you deserve more kindness, not less, just like we do with people who suffer a more severe form of cancer.
People who are fatter than you are not worse than you, they are sicker.
Hmm, many overweight people I know don't treat it like the disease it is. Some even got diabetes, but don't want to give up their eating habits. They just don't want to.
That's as close to a moral failure as you can get in my opinion. It just might be medical in the same sense that drug addicts might not be able to control their compulsions, but otherwise no, it is all on them.
You could make the same comment about smokers, they are not seeing themselves as sick, but as life enjoyer who want to keep that little piece of pleasure. And when they want to quit, they want an instant-drug that would solve everything.
In the 80's/90's we were living in a society actively promoting smoking, now we're in a society actively promoting sugar and fat causing people to be overweight. It's even worst because you often don't see the global picture, like A and B are both taking a burger and a dessert at the restaurant outing, but A goes to the restaurant once a month, while B goes twice a week, A never eats for breakfast while A takes large breakfast. the result is that it feels like that the slim and the fat one are eating the same stuff.
Kinda. I judge smokers a lot more, because their choices also risk the health of others.
I don't have strong feelings about fat people. I just believe all the excuses are misplaced for a majority of overweight people though. It should be treated like the eating disorder it is and not promoted or encouraged.
That's a pretty liberal approach. When 50% of the population is overweight, me need a societal shift and strong regulations rather than blaming individual behaviour in a society promoting obesity. We didn't got rid of smoking by blaming smoker but by taxing cigarettes, and tons of prevention campaign
Actually I agree. Unfortunately you cannot tax food like smokes as it is essential.
Technically you could tax sweets more, but let's be real the problem is the two pounds of pasta and meats some people are able to eat. It is the shear amount of food some people stuff in their faces and they are actually already paying more for it, but they obviously don't care.
I don't have any solution though. As I said before it should at least not be promoted or encouraged.
It's a bit like drug addicts. Yes it is a medical condition, yes they need help and kindness and not judgement, but deep inside of us we still judge the heroin addicts for their choices. Same goes with the sugar addicts.
If we could just accept that sugar addiction exists and is a widespread problem we could make progress, but the addicts won't
Speak for yourself. My father was an alcoholic and I don't judge him for that. I know the history of child abuse that led him to the bottle.