“body positivity”, just more unhealthy hypocrisy

“I’m fortunate to be one of the few people who no matter what she eats never gains weight😂! I still eat healthy though.”

Well first off, I hate you.  Secondly, again, I hate you.  :P

But eating right is not just about weight.  Look at the starving folks in any place you can think of.  Are they healthy?  No.  Cleary that is because of lack of nutrition. Ironically, you can be overweight and still lack nutrition if you eat things that just have calories with little of what your body actually needs. You can literally be fat and be starving in a nutritional sense.  In my experience this actually causes you to be more hungry more often because your body is essentially screaming at you to find something of value.  That is why eating balanced is important.  It is also important to feed your body what it is designed to take in.  That comes down to simply eating animals and plants.  If it came from a machine or a factory or food scientists were involved in the production then it’s not what you were meant to eat.  That includes protein bars, shakes, that fake meat crap etc etc etc.

It’s interesting if you think about it.  The chant of the body positivity movement “you can be healthy at any size” is a complete falsehood.  However the inverse is actually true.  You can be unhealthy at any size.

@Roccandil

“On gaining weight, I believe a significant factor is the lack of nutrition in conventional food. ”

100% truth.  Also due to the massive amounts of unnatural carbs (and lack of natural fat and protein)  in most processed foods you end with insulin resistance which is weight gain spiraling out of control where you possibly end up diabetic. Evidence of this is the massive amounts of Ozempic that get prescribed for wait loss as it combats insulin resistance.

“I mostly eat organic food, and while it’s more expensive, I can eat a meal and be satisfied. So, I may pay more per calorie, but I eat fewer total calories.”

When you say organic do you mean natural?  IE plants and animals?  Organic as a label in the USA is governed by the USDA. There are a lot of questions and some evidence there that even things labelled Certified Organic are not as great as you think as the rules have what appear to be intentional loopholes.  That’s not even to talk about things labelled organic but not certified organic.  I think there are different rules there as well.

Anytime there is a boon of cash to be made for something and the government is involved you can be assured corruption will abound.  Labelling something organic is free money as you can charge significantly more for it and maybe it’s organic and maybe it’s not.

I think ultimately everything should be organic.  We should not treat the Earth like a factory. Sure you can have large farms but not “factory farms”.  And let them spring up all over.  Farming as we knew it 75-100+ years ago was not bad for the environment. There is nothing wrong with growing plants and animals the natural way as I see it.  From my understanding the farmers in the Netherlands (ironically) which they are trying to shut down have great processes for this.

@SuperSoynic_Speed

“But people shouldn’t be judged and bullied for their body, and everyone should have the right to be happy and proud of the body they got because there are sometimes underlying issues like a body condition or medication which makes you swell up a bit.”

Bullied?  No, of course not but there is something to be said for general stigma.

Judged?  That’s not something you can control in others and it’s not something you should try to control either.

Everyone should have the right to be happy?  Absolutely as the “pursuit of happiness” is in the Declaration of Independence. Should everyone be proud of their body? No, not necessarily however, again, this is not something anyone but that person controls.

“Another issue is that for children from poorer families, they can not afford foods or ingredients that are more on the expensive side and rely on cheap fast food or convenience food. Having free food provided in school is in my opinion a way to make sure the kids get at least one healthy and nutritious meal per day, as well as a way to save up some money for healthier options at home.”

It is a misnomer that you have to eat garbage if you are low income.  Does it make it harder to eat natural? Yes, but it does not exclude it.  And I am not sure when your last trip to McDonald’s was but fast food is no longer cheap.  I would say you can make a healthy meal for more people with the same cash.  The hitch there is you have to know how to cook (used to be a common skill) and you need to make the time to do so.

I agree with school lunch programs as I have heard first hand how sometimes that is the only meal a child will get in a day. But referring to that as healthy is a lie.  It’s not, its cheap garbage food.

Furthermore I find that often times, like pretty much anytime the government gets involved, EBT or other welfare programs encourage bad behavior.  For example, allowing EBT funds to purchase fast food.  It’s not that there should not be safety nets in life but they should not be a lifestyle.  It should be a hand-up not a handout. If such programs also taught folks how to eat properly, eat well on a budget or how to do basic cooking that would actually help a person with lifelong skills instead of throwing someone elses money at them as you pass by waving asking them to vote for you.

I am all for helping folks.  But actually help them.  Just tossing cash at people hoping for the best DOES NOT WORK.  It’s never has and it never will.  It is simply a political platitude to gather votes.

This was true 200+ years ago and it is still true today.  Sure, the times have changed but human nature is the same.

“I am for doing good to the poor, but…I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed…that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”

― Benjamin Franklin

• This reply was modified 8 months, 2 weeks ago by Vknid.

“You all know that most countries don’t really have this problem.”

That’s actually entirely untrue.  Many other countries have the same issue but possibly for different reasons.  In fact if you go by percentage of population that is obese the US is not even top 10.  But we must consider all information in the proper context.  If you list only modern or developed nations or even nations of size then yes the US is at the top of the list but they are not alone.  For example the US is at 36%.  But you have Canada, Australia and the UK at at nearly 30%.  And most likely for the same reasons as the US being the fact that “garbage food” is plentiful and bad habits are encouraged in a number of ways.

Now if we drill into this further you can find evidence that these percentages are not exact and are only general references.  But if you use them for a general reference you can slice it up in all sorts of ways that show overall that about 40 years ago underweight was a worse problem world wide than obesity.  That dramatically shifted for much of the world since, especially the developed world.  And obviously I think that is due to the introduction of garbage food, processed food and the demonizing of things that are actually good for you.  The interesting part is that the obesity rate in the first world (while still going up) has slowed due to the recent emphasis on health and nutrition and what I assume is a renaissance for eating common sense natural foods.

The other thing is all this is based on BMI which is a relatively just a general reference for health as it is just a simple calculation of ratio of weight and height (BMI = kg/m2). It takes nothing else at all into account that I am aware of.  That’s not to say any part of the thought that too many folks are overweight as clearly that is the case.

I think at the end of the day what we see across the world is indeed a rise in obesity.  I think that study I read said that obesity worldwide is now a larger problem than being underweight for essentially the first time in known history.  I believe almost of all of that (especially in the west) is due to people being so far separated from their actual food source that they have in general fallen victim to decades of marketing and lack of direct food knowledge and now we often eat man made crap instead of the things we spent evolving off of for hundreds of thousands of years.