swolerbear:

I want to make one thing very clear: we as a society gaslight fat people

First off, I’m speaking as an abuse victim that has experienced gaslighting and spoken about it often with my therapist, so I do not use the term either lightly or loosely.

The scientific understanding of obesity post-WWII is incredibly fucked. Before WWII it was largely understood that obesity was caused by hormones, and it was studied by endocrinologists specifically. Weight loss, gain, and maintenance is intricately tied to hormones. This is why endocrine disorders often result in weight loss or weight gain and why dfab folks who go through menopause tend to gain weight.

Long story short, the reason people have become larger on average isn’t because we suddenly got lazier and hungrier. Calories in/calories out is a fad diet that was born of the very poor nutritional science that has been conducted after Ancel Keys came dicking onto the scene. What your calories consist of matters far more than the number of calories you’re taking in. For instance, a 2300 calorie diet that is 60% carbohydrates will likely cause more weight gain in your average person than a 2300 calorie diet that is 60% fat.

But it’s important to keep in mind that everyone is different. Insulin is a fat storage hormone, and that’s what’s released to deal with glucose in the system. Some people release more insulin than others in order to deal with the same level of glucose in their body, and in this way, two people can eat exactly the same diet and have wildly different body fat percentages.

But we don’t recognize any of this. We don’t recognize even the basic realities like the fact that your body handles different calories in different ways. The way your body breaks down bread is not the same as the way you break down bacon.

Instead, we shame fat people. We do not recognize the drastic changes that have taken place in the human diet, that agriculture is only something like 12,000 years old, that processed foods, refined sugar, vegetable oils, and high fructose corn syrup are brand new and our bodies aren’t equipped to handle them in these amounts.

But yet these are the only foods many people can afford. Or we tell people that severely unhealthy foods are in fact healthy for you.

So we tell fat people that they’re lazy or gluttonous. Even when they work out or eat less, we mock and judge them. They can tell us of their struggles to lose weight, and we roll our eyes and say you must not be trying hard enough. Fat people can be anorexic, and we don’t believe them. We assume they’re lying or hell if we DO believe them we congratulate them on their self control. Fat people follow strict low fat diets that are then in turn high in carbohydrates and don’t lose weight or lose weight only temporarily, and we tell them they’re lying when the reality is that their body does not handle carbohydrates well.

Dieting as we understand it in our society has a SERIOUSLY low success rate, and yet we pretend that the rare exceptions prove somehow that this bullshit fad diet of CICO works.

I lost a significant amount of weight by ignoring all of this and learning about actual legit nutrition science, not bullshit. And what this has taught me is that we fucking gaslight fat people left and right and that this idea that everyone can be thin if they want to is bullshit. Some people can lose weight by going low carb but you know what? Not everyone will. I advocate low carb diets for the health benefits for most people, but the reality is that some people can’t go low carb and some people will never be thin even if they do, and that’s okay.

Let fat people be fat. Believe them when they tell you what they’ve done to try and lose weight if they have because chances are they’re telling the truth. Recognize that the diet industry advice works VERY rarely in the long term and nobody NEEDS to be thin in order to be worthy of respect.

I could go on about this but I’m already not articulating myself very well.