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Not everyone is beautiful. Most people are average and many are not attractive.
Obesity is not beautiful. It is unhealthy and honestly delusional.
Edit: Most people are thinking of this when mentioning obesity.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=real+obese+people+&t=h_&iar=images
Not this.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=heavy+rugby+players&t=fpas&iar=images
Complaining about the BMI scale is a disservice to those who truly need to lose weight for their health.
Same with being underweight. It is also not healthy or beautiful.
I'd even go so far as to say obesity is unattractive, because it's unhealthy.
Healthy is of course beautiful.
Pretty undefined moving target unless you carry around your medical records and a rubric for what everything should be.
There's an implied "[what looks] healthy is beautiful"...
We... obviously can't peer into people's cells while we're walking around town and people browsing... I didn't think I had to clarify this. 😄
How is that better? How do you determine what “looks“ healthy? That seems to me like a recipe for falling right back into the trappings of socially/culturally enforced body types.
It’s not that you have to clarify it, it’s that I don’t think you fully realize what you are saying. People say “I like people who are healthy,“ not even realizing that we all have different concepts of what that even means, generally informed by marketing which is part of the reason we have so many issues with people and body image today. It’s all clearly connected.
“Look healthy,” “are healthy,” it’s all the same problem. You’re acting like this is some clearly defined metric when a lot of the reason for even having this debate is because it isn’t.
People speculate that this is one of the reasons why those most opposed to weight loss medications like Ozempic are, in fact, fit people. In a world where most people around you are obese or unhealthy, being fit becomes a way to signal discipline, long-term planning, a healthy lifestyle, competence, and so on. But now that you can get lean without putting in the effort, it dilutes that signal.
Yeah but I think it'll just be a more explicit marker of wealth instead, sort of how so much of fashion boils down to "how much are you willing to spend?"
Really? I’ve never heard that sentiment from any of my other fit friends and I certainly don’t feel that way. I would love it if everyone was just hot.
I've never heard that about Ozempic or had those thoughts about weight loss medications.
The only thing I've ever thought about weight loss medication is "that's probably snake oil" or "that doesn't sound healthy for the body".
Considering how much of human effort is just signaling in different forms, this makes a lot of sense. Losing a visual marker of your hard work messes with your established signaling. This makes me wonder what the new signal will be? Fitness clothing has already been taken... Maybe people will wear their gym memberships on a lanyard all the time or something?
Well, Ozempic will make you lean, but it won’t make you fit or muscular - so there’s still that. In that sense, it might be more accurate to say that the people opposing it are likely those who’ve gotten lean through dieting and occasional exercise, rather than bodybuilders.
That's a good point, I was lumping too many people together there. Yes, now how will people show they "suffered" with dieting?
Average is plenty beautiful, though. At least in countries where 'average' doesn't mean 'severely over- or underweight'.
The whole fat acceptance movement is honestly gross AF.
I don't care how happy you are about it. This shit is not healthy and we shouldn't be promoting it.
Says fat people promote unhealthy lifestyles. Gif: An obese chick getting exercise while playing an instrument that takes considerable muscle control and a high lung capacity.
Damn. Lot of people really hate fat folks. I'm just saying you want to prove fat people are unhealthy— a woman in a career that takes a high level of stamina and discipline isn't a great example.
Yeah that's a terrible example of an unhealthy fat person, she is an outlier for sure, was so overweight and could run and sing at the same time! I'm sure it's harder on your joints and all but if someone can out-dance you, while singing loud, she is in better cardiovascular shape than you.
who is considered "obese" is often determined by the BMI which is a flawed scale to determine health and wellness, you can read about it here: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/why-you-shouldnt-rely-on-bmi-alone
Absolutely there is such thing as unhealthily fat and weight being a detriment to your health, but there are 100% people who are, by modern beauty standards, "fat" and still very active and healthy by all measured metrics. Body types are different and some people will be more stocky than others, and I think that's what the "fat acceptance" movement is really about
Yes, but actually no. I'll not discuss taste because that's very personal, but while as a general rule obesity is unhealthy and most obese people should change their habits, the way we define obesity is with BMI, which is extremely inaccurate for very short or very tall people, not to mention bone and muscle density is different for different people, I have always (since at least 13 YO) have been in the obese category, even when I was training daily and could run a few kilometers at around 5 min per km I was obese, even though I looked only slightly overweight, the reason is because I have dense bones and at the time had lots of muscles (which are lots denser than fat). So while there's a strong correlation between being obese and being unhealthy one should be very careful not to mix the two and assume a 100% correlation or causation effect.
I hate BMI. I am working on losing weight, but I am gaining muscle at the same rate I'm losing fat, so my weight has hardly changed. None of my clothes fit anymore and I am much slimmer, but still considered obese. I'm not even weighing myself regularly at this point. I'm just going by how I look and feel and my clothes size.
Yup, don't bother too much with BMI, like I said, I've been obese all my life, even when I was in better shape than almost anyone I knew and was training and beating people that looked a lot better than me.
If you want to show just how absurd it is, look at the world strongest man, his BMI is 40.7 which puts him as an obese type 3, even now that I'm in the worst shape of my life I'm not in that category.
Holy shit that's wild. Is BMI good for anything, then? Or does it need abandoned?
BMI misses more often in the other direction (skinny-fat), being fit and obese is much less common.
It's my understanding that the only proven health metric with regard to size is waist to height. Your waist measurement less than half your height? Then you don't have too much abdominal fat, and it's the abdominal fat that is a bigger risk to your health.
It's a general guideline that's accurate for average people that live average lives, but if you're too tall, too short, too muscled, have lower or higher bone density, etc it can be very inaccurate. No doctor takes any action on this alone, but it can be a guideline to ask you for blood works or other studies to ensure things are okay. There are better ways to measure body fat percentage, but that requires special instruments and also are usually dependent on where your body stores fat, so you might not have ever done them before.
Hard agree. I am so willing to die on this hill.
My brother is obese and also one of the fittest people I know. He can walk miles without breaking a sweat, no high blood pressure, no high cholesterol, heart is doing fine, no arthritis, etc. ad nauseum. He's fat because he eats a lot, but everything he eats is home cooked with plenty of veg and little meat. He just loves cooking.
My doc said the other day she prefers it when her patients are heavier, because when people get very sick, it's the "healthy" thin ones who die first in the ICU purely because they don't have any fat to spare.
As to your second point, I have a personal hypothesis that cancer is the reason for the middle-aged gut. Hell, guess it could be disease in general. Anyway, with a few extra pounds you have more time to fight.