this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Humanities & Cultures
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People aren't "wilfully" fat. People struggle to prevent weight gain/lose weight to the point of self harm and eating disorders. It's not sugarcoating to say you should treat people with respect if you really want to help them.
The main message of being "fat positive" is mostly just "don't be a dick to fat people". Because a) don't be a dick anyway, and b) being a dick doesn't do anything except make people feel like bad. If your intent is to be harsh in order to help, the data proves that when people are fat shamed, it usually causes them to gain even more weight.
So if you really want to help people be healthier or have better quality of life, be encouraging and positive.
There's a difference between shaming and telling the truth.
Fat positivity may have been intended to mean "no hate" at some point, but today it is used as "no criticism". It's the same principle as free speech ultras claiming that someone else infringes their free speech by criticizing what they're saying.
Again, being fat is not positive.
And you're making a value judgement on these people that they haven't put in enough effort to make themselves not fat, ignoring the differences in our bodies and experiences. It's simply not nice to keep pushing the same rhetoric all over this post. We get it, you managed to get healthier and you wish to extol the virtues of how you managed to do it. For many people, they already tried all the things it took you so long to adopt and telling them that they need to try harder or have no excuses is not helpful to them.
You need to be nicer on our instance.
You need to understand that sugarcoating everything is not helpful.
Seriously, what is so hard to get about that? You jumped directly from "not lying" to "hateful insult" and that's just not a valid point. If a doctor tells you, that you will die sooner because you smoke, drink, or eat too much that's not hateful, but simply a factual statement.
Just tell me: how will any obese person benefit from simply ignoring their actual problems? You want to be super cushy positive, I get it. But in reality, you're just advocating for deadly silence.
Accusing anyone who disagrees with you of being hateful is either lazy, evil, or stupid.
I'm not saying you're being hateful, I'm asking you to be nicer. You don't seem very receptive to being told by an admin or a mod to follow our only rule, so you're getting a 7 day ban to think things over. If you show up again and keep violating our only rule, you'll get a permanent ban.
Well, regardless what you think of fat positivity and how others interpret it, you should still treat people with understanding and respect.
And again, if you're trying to convince someone to lead a healthier lifestyle, (even though you are making assumptions about that) a negative approach is only going to be counter-productive.