I certainly won’t be. It’s looking more and more every day like The_Donald has found a new home. Only they’re just slightly more clever about hiding it.
I’m certainly not seeing that. Could be I’m missing those posts. Could also be some, such as yourself, are expecting to see something and applying a label to explain it.
I’d tell you where to see it and what to look for, but my comment would probably be removed and I’d probably be banned for it. I’m actually surprised that the comment I responded to and my own are still here.
I say, as I slowly roll over a 5 year old in my four door f150 “kids just don’t exercise anymore, they just stay in their houses and look at their phone” then I end my tiktok video.
I’ve argued with people who claimed being overweight isn’t bad for your health. It’s not a common position, but it’s not exactly a strawman either. It’s more like focusing on the crazies.
What an intellectually dishonest reply. “It’s just a meme, it can’t have any meaning!” despite the fact that clearly everyone in the comments is able to understand and discuss the meaning.
How cowardly do you have to be to hide from simply saying you agree with meme.
Not to the people who are just fatphobic, but it definitely sows confusions. I’ve cleared it up with way too many people offline and on for it be just a rare misunderstanding.
But the nature of straw man arguments is that since you are not citing someone who’s actually making that argument, there’s also not any way to refute it. “Somene somewhere is making a bad argument” doesn’t really mean anything. (What’s extra ironic is that this is an ad hominem attack against no one in particular)
Its not a strawman unles the bad argument is being misrepresented. Just because you don’t care to look for examples for fear of what you may find doesn’t mean that anyone who hasn’t thrown them at you up-front is engaging in a logical fallacy.
It’s a straw man because the meme references the entire body positivity movement (on Twitter), while the statement it refutes is only argued by a select few.
I’d say it’s closer to the Dicto Simpliciter fallacy. Essentially, starting with an unqualified statement and extrapolating to a more general statement. Examples would be things like “Exercise is good, so everyone should exercise” or “Online members of a group said something, so all members of that group agree” or “High BMI is unhealthy, so all people with high BMI are unhealthy”
Read the meme again. “Explaining why weighting (sp) 300 pounds is healthier than every other lifestyle”. Is someone actually arguing it’s healthier than literally every other lifestyle? Are they doing it without qualifications? Did they not use some sort of logic to support their position? Or is the maker of this meme making an overly simplistic representation of an imagined argument someone might make, specifically chosen because it’s easy to refute? That’s what a strawman argument is. And they’re not even using good logic to argue against this fictional claim!
That argument is likely a distortion of the medical argument which goes something like, “People who are overweight by the medical definition of BMI between 25 and 30 are not necessarily unhealthy. There are some circumstances such as being an athlete or genetics that are associated with denser body compositions. BMI is a crude tool that is useful for some things but should not be used on its own to indicate health status.”
BMI isn’t science. Its an almost 200 year old equation that was arbitrarily fitted to data. There is no go reason square ones height except that it fit the data. The cutoffs are arbitrary and, at least in the US, shifted in 1997.
And there is a growing body of evidence showing it’s not accurate for many cases in addition to the one you provided.
We have better indirect measure and far better direct measures for assessing disease progression and likelihood of disease development. Getting rid of BMI won’t stop fat shaming, but I hope it gives people pause.
I completely agree, we need to move on from BMI. But it’s a bit silly to say it’s BMI isn’t science when it’s been used for the entirety of modern health sciences. People would be shocked by how many crude, yet useful enough measures that health sciences use even today. And it’s notoriously slow/stubborn in adopting the best tools for many methods. Still, humanity has continued to make scientific progress with them.
Show me the science in the particulars and I’m happy to change my mind. Its widespread use in the modern medical system doesn’t make it scientific. We continue to use generally true ideas such as drink water and then wrench them into prescriptive positions like drink 8 cups of water per day. Literally no science to support that claim.
I was talking about how widespread BMI is used in health sciences, I.e. everything from basic physiology to clinical trials to program evaluation to epidemiology. This is different from medical practice, e.g. family doctor taking your BMI. Whether it makes for good science or not, it’s use makes it part of science and replacing outdated tools is part of the broader scientific process–that doesn’t make the tools “not science”.
You’re asking about “accuracy” which is a good question, as well as “precision”. However in health sciences we usually evaluate such measures more thoroughly with similar concepts of validity (construct and discriminant) and reliability; you’ll also see sensitivity in the literature but it’s a kind of discriminant validity.
So if you do your own search using “BMI” and these terms on PubMed or even Google Scholar, you will find a range or scientific evidence. Most will say BMI is not good but not terrible, even good in some specific contexts. You will also find lots of evidence of how BMI is associated with other health indicators and health outcomes. I’m not going to spend an hour collating this for you. “Review” is also a useful search term. You seem smart enough to do it if you really want it. In any case, the argument is moot because we agree BMI should be replaced.
Edit: okay I was curious comparing BMI to WtHR and actually found a couple cherry-picked examples that might be interesting for you
I appreciate the systematic review and meta-analysis. It’s a good starting statement and if I worked with children, I would look at the paper more closely. As a whole, these studies don’t address the most at risk groups with a high level of evidence. Perhaps that last paper will be part of a meta-analysis that gives clearer evidence of BMI indicating CVD in children. This would be great.
I focus on medical practices because it’s my area of expertise and where I do my work. So I see the negative effects of people’s conceptions around weight, BMI, obesity, and how difficult it is to change even with the best applied efforts. I wrote my initial response when I saw an avalanche of self-righteous, care trolling with vague allusion to science and medicine with a level of certainty that isn’t warranted. At best, I was being confrontationally polemical, at worst, I lack nuance or sensitivity to work in the field.
The ease at which people fat shame and delude themselves that they are helping is astounding. I was a little surprised to see it on Lemmy.
Admittedly, my statistical training isn’t the best, but I appreciate the role it plays in making sense of large datasets. Still, I appreciate the reminder to dive deeper into how statistics are used in observational studies. For me, at least, I wish that much of this was done before the wide deployment of BMI in the populous. I’m not saying that fat-shaming wouldn’t continue, but there doesn’t need to be poorly applied scientific ammunition either.
What science would change your mind? There’s never going to be a magical cutoff number for cholesterol or height or weight that separates healthy and not healthy.
Heuristics are useful tools and sometimes that’s the best you get. You need water to live, clogged arteries cause heart attacks, insulin resistance leads to diabetes. Exactly how much of any given thing causes bad outcomes is going to vary case by case, but doesn’t negate trends.
I say all this as a former wannabe body builder who hasn’t had a BMI under 25 in about 20 years, but I still know a BMI of 60 or 80 is no good.
I though I was clear about this, but I’ll reiterate.
That the heuristic is accurate.
That the heuristic is more accurate than other easily applied heuristics.
That when the heuristic makes categories, the categories are backed by studies. These studies would show a statistical increase for specific health outcomes above this cutoff. That line would be tested relative to other proximal lines.
These heuristics would include different recommendations for different populations such as race, biological sex, and age.
A better alternative, as I had previously linked to, would be abdominal fat as measured at the waist. Easy heuristic and closely correlated to CVD.
All of what you say is true, but you’re not address my particular issues.
Thx sorry I didn’t read all your comments in the post, I was using that question as a proxy to whether or not your discussion was in good faith. It seems like the answer is yes.
I frequently wonder how many better metrics are available that just aren’t as easy to capture as stepping on the scale, grabbing blood oxygen, and taking blood pressure. I’m sure that part of the balance is value of vitals versus time or effort to collect them.
it’s disturbing how much people nowadays never did anything harder than getting up their bed in their entire life. Physical activity is a necessity. Its ok to be fat. Its not ok to be an antropomorphic equivalent of a truck.
Obese people are not all anthropomorphic trucks. Some of the obese people you caricature work very physical jobs, and work harder than you ever will in that cushy office job of yours (if applicable, but given that we’re on Lemmy… Chances are that it applies).
The first step towards not being a bigoted asshole is to look at reality as it is. Obese people are very diverse, there’s degrees in obesity. Some of them - mostly on MTV - are pathologically consuming heaps of unhealthy foods and look like balls of flesh straight out of a freak show. Others… don’t. Most of the real obese people I know get out of bed, go to work every morning and have fairly normal lives. My next-desk colleague even goes to the gym twice a week.
But yeah, in the mind of the dim-witted and the fatphobic cave dwellers, “being obese funny”.
there are degrees, and i never said otherwise. What i ment by “anthropomorphic equvalent of a truck” is exactly what you described - pathological consumers with a very unhealthy diet. I guess i have chosen my words poorly, therefore made my thought unclear. There are lots of fat people that are quite strong, and this is ok to me, as i said.
The part about physical activity wasn’t exactly about fat people though, rather about our modern society in general. A healthy diet with the correct balance, and moderate physical activity makes wonders, not simply in terms of weight. Those two things are grately underestimated. Those things were underestimated by me. After i started to be more physically active, my thoughts got clearer and i became much happier in general. And yeah, the best gym is a part-time job in a field, if you ask me. Actual gym sucks compared to it.
I mean when people are that size there’s almost always some kind of additional disease at play. It seems crazy to be like “oh this truck sized man who has a metabolic disorder clearly just needs to pull up his bootstraps.”
The meme is bad faith. Its very obvious with a little thought that making fun of fat people isnt going to fix obesity.
Physical training literally cures methabolic disorders, except the genetic ones of course, good thing they are extremely rare. Vast majority of them are behavioral.
Moreover, I wasn’t judgemetall of obesity before I had met few people with weight problems. One of them even had problems with legs because of that. You know what he did about that? Right, not a damn thing, hasn’t even tried. Instead of that he chose only to complain about his poor legs all the time. He never tried to see a doctor, never tried to train. The more you defend this people, the more of them there will be. And of course every one of them claims that they have bad genes or something, except they self-diagnosed it to themselves, because its easier that way. Its always easier to do nothig but to pity yourself, and to look for other people to pity you.
Just because someone is overweight, doesn’t give you the right to be a cunt to them. Overweight people know they are overweight. No need to make fun of them. It makes you an asshole.
No, its people being overweight AND ignorant that this meme is pointing out. People who are in total denial that losing weight will alleviate many health issues and prevent further complications to ones that can’t actually be helped.
Do you live under a rock… Because you’re in denial, just like so many who are denying they’re morbidly obese. And despite warnings of health problems and risks… The obesity problem keeps rising. en.wikipedia.org/…/Obesity_in_the_United_States#%…
I’m not saying insulting is the right approach. But clearly this pro-obese movement people have been pushing is just as wrong.
Yes it is harmful to the people themselves. Then help them with kindness. Not by shitting on them and bullying and offending them. A lot of people are overweight because they are depressed. And just because there are a few people that think its healthy, doesn’t mean they all should be made fun of. Talk to those specific people directly instead of being a bully towards everyone.
I don’t see people being hateful like this towards people smoking.
Stop crying over a simple sponge bob meme. This is your life and your health. Do something about it instead of coming up with silly words like fatphobia to make yourself feel better.
I think fatphobia and other issues like it are pretty good indicators as to whether or not people are actually evaluating issues correctly from like, a whole perspective, a detached “what’s good for society, what should I be doing that’s good for society” kind of perspective, or if they’re just kind of going based on what’s socially acceptable, and what’s emotionally appealing. Based on shit like this, I’d say it’s pretty clear that we have a ways to go.
Yo I used to weigh 300 pounds and had health problems. Guess what happened when I lost 80 pounds? Many of these problems are fading away. There’s truth in this meme. I was this meme.
Lemmy has mostly tech savvy people, which are either oldschool incel or LGBT+. There’s some regular people but those two demographics are quite predominant in the tech world, you know, the geeky bullied people trope and all.
In this case I’d say that since regular people side with lgtb usually, the incels are shut down quite fast.
I do see the incels rear their heads from time to time.
I had to close out of a thread regarding how FGM was on the rise again in a country in Africa, and I saw users likening it to male circumcision.
There was (presumably) a chick in the comments trying to explain why they’re not one in the same, and she was getting heavily down voted.
Like, yes, I think a lot of Lemmy users are against male circumcision as well (myself included), but it is NOT the same.
My circumcised husband can still orgasm, most women will not be able to at all without clitoral stimulation. It takes the pleasure out of sex for us and makes us simple brood mares.
And I’m always like “Jesus, this line of thinking is prevalent in a lefty place like Lemmy? No fucking wonder things like ‘Fresh&Fit’ are taking the youth by storm.”
Yes! I at first was trying to look at everything through the lens of “Maybe they just don’t know, maybe this is an education moment.” But the more and more I saw the user attempting to explain the difference between what parts are removed, the more and more people were making fun of them/downvoting them.
Also, thank you! I’m pretty partial to yours as well!
Yeah, like I’ve been opposed to male circumcision my whole life, ever since my mom taught me why she opposed it as a young child in the 90s. But objectively one is bad and the other is obviously worse unless you don’t consider women being unable to experience sexual pleasure to be worse than men having reduced sexual pleasure. Like that’s the difference here.
And like, I get being defensive about opposing male circumcision. I’ve been treated like a radical and a body shamer for it. But when we acknowledge that FGM as it is practiced in locations like Gambia is worse we aren’t saying that male circumcision is fine or that we don’t oppose it. We also shouldn’t make discussions about either about the other.
But yeah Lemmy is way more progressive and feminist than a network like it would’ve been even 10 years ago, but also there’s definitely an mra portion to it and I have to remind myself not to attempt to play chess with the pigeons.
I mean it didn’t take long for the new atheist types to spawn, or the classic neolibs, so I wouldn’t be surprised if more dookie ends up flooding the site. I’ve definitely seen some MRA shit here already. Any comic or meme underneath like, a woman’s experience being recounted, is sure to be full of it, and if you ever bring up disparities in men’s and women’s sexual assault, that’s also a pretty easy trigger.
Every time people talk about this, they always envision the most morbidly obese example that they can think of, when we’re really just talking about the average slightly overweight/obese people. Those people often have their actual medical needs ignored by doctors and are given “lose weight” as a cure all. There are literally hundreds of millions of people who experience this.
Lose weight often IS the cure-all as obesity is clearly linked to a litany of health issues.
Do you want to treat the symptom or the cause? Folks can take pain killers for their knees, but the issue here is often that the knees are overloaded with too much weight.
Idk much about ozempic, but before that, “Lose weight” was rough to hear because a doctor can’t wave a magic wand to fix the patients problems - the patient had to work to fix things. And if you’re honestly putting in the work, eating a healthy diet and exercising and you’re still struggling with weight, then I feel for you, because that suggests there’s a hormonal or other medical cause for the obesity, that the doc needs to go over. However I am certain that the majority of the hundreds of millions of people you cite don’t.
Studies show there isn’t an actual diet people can go on to lose weight and keep it off. The diet just doesn’t exist for the vast majority of people. People gain the weight back almost 100% of the time. The only thing you can do is prevent the weight gain in the first place, which isn’t that simple given our lack of walkable cities, cheap food being the least healthy etc
Given how seriously bad doctors say obesity is, I don’t understand why people are mad at fat people for taking ozempic.
Another thing to be mad about: the most expensive component of the ozempic shots is the plastic container it comes in.
Such a diet exists. It’s called eating less meat and sugar.
And don’t get me started on only unhealthy junk being cheap. Not only have all fast food chains hiked up their prices to near uncompetitive levels, but even fruit and veggies are dirt cheap in America. Europeans pay far more, especially when comparing PPP, than Americans, when it comes to healthy eating. Yet they manage.
I’m interested that you suggested “less meat and sugar”. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone claim protein to be a major contributor to obesity in the last 40 years. I usually see sugars and carbs as the main culprits. Is there some new info I should read about?
I (luckily) have always had my weight and nutrition under good control, so I’m more interested for the sake of knowledge.
Meat is just so calorie dense that even switching to carbs is a massive upgrade.
The carbs they talk about are simple carbs, with high glycemic indexes. Something like whole wheat is going to be a lot healthier for your health than white rice.
Meat may also promote consumption of alcohol, which isn’t great for weight loss.
Your last point, that’s not true at all. I can very easily drink alcohol with zero meat, just any other food will do.
Some meat is good for your health tbh, turkey york slices are pretty fucking healthy proteinwise and don’t have much calories. If you want to lose weight fat and cereal are the first two that have to go. You can use some oil and eat some pasta once in a while, but given how caloric intense it is if you eat pasta you will just end up hungry, it fills the caloric budget way too fast. Whole cereals are indeed healthier than white rice and couscous mostly due to the river they have, but the calories per 100g will vary from 300 to 350 or so, it’s still pretty expensive on the budget.
Two studies (each reviewing a number of other studies) and an article putting it in lay terms:
“He and others have estimated that for every two pounds of weight you lose, your metabolism slows by about 25 calories per day, and your appetite increases by about 95 calories per day. So in other words, if you lose 20 pounds, your body will burn roughly 250 calories less each day while craving about 950 calories more.
To maintain your weight loss through dieting over time, you’ll have to continue eating less while resisting a rising appetite and slower metabolism, which is “increasingly difficult,” Dr. Schur said.
The drive to eat more is so strong because our brains “sense that our energy stores are being depleted,” she added, and “that’s a threat to our survival.””
So diets mostly all work in the short term, but people just return to their top weight over time. Your body is always trying to get you back to your top weight.
Because in a lot of ways “lose weight” really is a cure all, and it’s not some grand mystery as to why people gain weight.
It isn’t a doctors job to drug the people up so they don’t have to live a healthy lifestyle. Most people aren’t told too lose weight because they go to the doctor to lose weight, they’re told to lose weight when they go to the doctors for the litany of health affects surrounding obesity.
when we’re really just talking about the average slightly overweight/obese people
Are we though?
I think the discussions here are mostly coming down to what you think you’re arguing about. Because there certainly are some crazy claims made by the body positivity movement as well. Even if the core message (“your dignity as a human is not bound to your body shape”) is something basically everyone can agree on.
So the big majorities on both sides argue against the other side based on some fringe opinions. And since one rarely explains their position in detail on the Internet neither side is aware that they actually have a lot of common ground.
-A person loses no humanity or respectibility by being overweight. Overweight people are still people.
Overweight people deserve to have their concerns actually heard. Doctors often literally will not investigate some problems that overweight people ask about beyond “oh you should lose weight.” For some concerns, that may be a reasonable diagnosis, but there are plenty of actual medical concerns that are ignored by doctors in fat people.
Shame largely does not work to get people to lose weight. For the people where it does work, it definitely doesn’t do it in a healthy way, and for most people it just makes losing weight harder. (I’ve seen a lot of people justify being shitty to overweight people because they think they need to feel shame all the time to change).
That’s it. It’s literally “treat people like people and actually listen to their concerns.”
Honestly, I’m pretty surprised that Lemmy already seems to have a bit of the “fat people hate” energy. People have a very specific image of a “fat person” in their head that they imagine when this stuff comes up, but all I’m saying is that people who are overweight sometimes have concerns that aren’t addressed by just losing weight, and those concerns are often dismissed because we value and respect fat people much less than skinny people.
Even on shows like My 600 lb life, they have to actually lose weight and maintain a healthy diet for months before they’re considered for Liposuction and other surgeries.
Sure, that care should be available, but you have to lose the weight first and maintain healthy habits. There’s no excuse for it.
That’s not what they’re talking about. Doctors will attribute anything they can to your weight instead of actually testing and treating you. There are a lot of problems with being over weight but there’s also legitimate illnesses being missed.
There’s more to it than just “develop healthy habits” though. There are psychological reasons one could have for overeating like having eating disorders or using food to treat depression which could require psychiatric assistance. My brother died at 600+ lbs after breaking two lap bands. He required some serious intervention, but we couldn’t afford what he needed, he was homeless and he couldn’t hold down a job, so he died instead.
Mind you, being overweight wasn’t the only cause for his death. He was eating very unhealthy foods because they were a cheaper means to fill himself up since his stomach was huge. His severe ADHD prevented him from being able to hold down a job despite being a fairly intelligent person.
He did some shitty things in his life, so don’t give too much sympathy, but in retrospect doing something to help his ADHD early on could have helped to prevent the train wreck that became his life. Maybe that would have helped him do better in school, be better to our parents, be able to hold down a job, etc. which could have prevented overeating to treat his depression.
I get that, I really do. Mental health is a really really important part of being healthy.
But at the end of the day, eating less is the solution to the weight loss. Mental healthcare is the solution to mental health problems. They’re interconnected, but one can be solved independent of the other. And I do realize that it’s difficult.
Ok but also doing something very difficult at the best of times is particularly difficult while also struggling with mental health issues. And beyond that even if you succeed you’re not unlikely to swing hard the other way. People with serious mental health issues that manage to lose a lot of weight have a nasty habit of doing so using an eating disorder.
But at the end of the day, eating less is the solution to the weight loss
And abstinence is the solution to unwanted pregnancies and STDs. The solution to alcoholism and all other drug addictions? Stop taking drugs/drinking.
Did I just provide medical advice? Or did I just make it clear that I don’t know anything about sex education and drug addictions? I think it’s the latter, and I think you’re making similar arguments wrt fat people.
You’re flattening the realities of life, and needlessly stigmatizing and moralizing eating . for every fat person you save with this gospel, there’s many more anorexic people absorbing the same message.
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