How do you feel about the 'Fat Acceptance' movement?

I agree that insulting people for being fat is a bad thing. But that is as far as it should go imo. Being fat is not ok imo.

Fat people shouldn't be 'accepted' as fat people they should be encouraged to lose weight/become fit/live healthier. In a respectful manner.

Are you aware of how difficult it is for some people to lose weight? Literally billions of years have gone into forging an organism whose primary goal is to reproduce, and whose secondary goal is to eat as much as possible. There are some pretty powerful mechanisms in place to make it really hard to lose weight. Yes, it's a "self-control problem" if you insist on phrasing it like that, but it requires a close-to-inhuman amount of self-control to overcome it if you're one of the unlucky ones (see paragraph 3).

Imagine a world in which humans live to 100 if they don't drink any liquids, and only to 20 if they drink more than a litre of liquid in any given year. (Yes, that's not a thing, but imagine we're in that world.) Then try and give up drinking water. I imagine the biological mechanisms which lead us to crave water would start kicking in pretty rapidly, and after seven days of intolerable thirst, you'd drink. Repeat for the next week. And the next. And the next. Look who's ended up costing the NHS huge sums of money to keep them alive past 20 when "it's just a self-control problem!"

Additionally, some people are simply less prone to addiction of all kinds than others. Some people just get addicted to things at the drop of a hat - they got unlucky in the dopamine-receptors draw when the sperm met the egg. Consider that maybe you are one of the lucky ones, either on the addiction front or on the desire-for-food front.

Isolating people who eat because they feel isolated won't help anything.

It comes down to how you can teach someone self-discipline. Do you support and encourage them, or not? Some ideas:

1. Force them to do it when young. I mean the British public school type physical education. This is free, and there is no reason why it shouldn't be implemented in state schools. At the very least, all children without medical conditions should be made to run regularly.
2. I wouldn't mind health warnings on junk food. Anyone who wants to eat it still can, but even skinny people could benefit from knowing what it's doing to their heart.
3. Books and TV programmes already 'teach' us about how we are supposed to behave (sometimes patronisingly). There's a propaganda machine already in place - why not put in some motivational and realistic stories about kids / adults transforming their lives? It could be simple (Tim the bullied fat boy trains in secret until he's really fit and gets a girlfriend) or something like the Karate Kid, but more achievable. Instead of having magically skinny celebrities, advertise what they do to keep fit.
4. Make 5k races etc less of a 'niche' thing. As well as the London marathon, have small races that everyone can enjoy, and publicise them as things you can take your children to.
5. 'Healthy' fast food. I don't mean carrots and lettuce, I mean pasta bake, homemade curry and soup. Decent, filling food that has a couple of nutrients in it somewhere. I would actually choose to buy that over chips, and it's so cheap to make.

The biggest problem is fat parents passing on their eating habits to their impressionable children. That's the #1 reason why fat acceptance is a disgusting movement.

Noone finds it easy to lose weight. It's tough. I find it tough. It sucks. I'm constantly hungry. I eat things that are less tasty then what I want to eat. It's not that I don't get that dopamine rush from the nice food, I do. I just get that instead from other things because I'm not a wild animal.

And your water analogy is completely moronic. Sorry but it is. That's like people needing oxygen to breath. A better analogy could be drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes and getting addicted though. Try that.

These sort of threads mostly attract hateful comments and very little constructive discussion so I dunno what the point of them is.

Isolating people who eat because they feel isolated won't help anything.

It comes down to how you can teach someone self-discipline. Do you support and encourage them, or not? Some ideas:

1. Force them to do it when young. I mean the British public school type physical education. This is free, and there is no reason why it shouldn't be implemented in state schools. At the very least, all children without medical conditions should be made to run regularly.
2. I wouldn't mind health warnings on junk food. Anyone who wants to eat it still can, but even skinny people could benefit from knowing what it's doing to their heart.
3. Books and TV programmes already 'teach' us about how we are supposed to behave (sometimes patronisingly). There's a propaganda machine already in place - why not put in some motivational and realistic stories about kids / adults transforming their lives? It could be simple (Tim the bullied fat boy trains in secret until he's really fit and gets a girlfriend) or something like the Karate Kid, but more achievable. Instead of having magically skinny celebrities, advertise what they do to keep fit.
4. Make 5k races etc less of a 'niche' thing. As well as the London marathon, have small races that everyone can enjoy, and publicise them as things you can take your children to.
5. 'Healthy' fast food. I don't mean carrots and lettuce, I mean pasta bake, homemade curry and soup. Decent, filling food that has a couple of nutrients in it somewhere. I would actually choose to buy that over chips, and it's so cheap to make.

I domt think being fat is a good thing, people who are actually fat should be encouraged to lose weight, not told it is okay, because it's not healthy.

However, if you are of a healthy weight that's alright and acceptance of all healthy body types is great, I'm glad that more people are accepting bodies aside from "perfect figures"

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I domt think being fat is a good thing, people who are actually fat should be encouraged to lose weight, not told it is okay, because it's not healthy.

However, if you are of a healthy weight that's alright and acceptance of all healthy body types is great, I'm glad that more people are accepting bodies aside from "perfect figures"

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It's actually a large percentage of the NHSs costs and increasing every year.

And those are topics for other debates you're free to start separate threads on.

You raised the issue of "fairness". I was simply pointing out that life is rarely fair.

Very sensible reply.


Too many people have a lack of basic knowledge. E. G. My parents are overweight but eat healthy food. They just eat twice what they should. Portion size lesson and they're both losing weight.

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