I put in no effort and thus have a beer gut. Before my metabolism slowed, I was super skinny with no muscle definition. Neither are considered an ideal male physique, but I don’t knock people who work out and have great bodies to show for it. It’s just not terribly important to me.

Your comment sounds very much like the insecurity that the parent was pointing out. I’m with the parent on this. There’s nothing wrong with people who spend time and effort to look physically fit, if that makes them happy. Note that I’m not in support of exploiting people who don’t like the way they look.

Nothing you said makes a whole lot of sense. It seems like you wrote your post out of anger more than anything else.

Are they "bad" by advertising standards, though? The history of advertising is a history of preying on people's insecurities.

To those of you who work in this field, I urge you to consider your actions and to exercise integrity in your work.

I'm not one to make sweeping judgments, but I must admit that, personally, I sometimes find it difficult to understand how some people in the field of marketing can do what they do with a clean conscience.

Some ppl might be triggered when they see a billboard for an expensive car that you can't afford.

As an unattractive person, I wouldn't want to see unattractive people in ads either. Seeing fat people wouldn't make me happier.

(Why was this thread collapsed?)

My biological instinct is to find a mate who has the highest probability of successfully reproducing. So even in this regard, someone healthy fits the bill over someone unhealthy any day. Healthy people live longer, are able to more successfully reproduce and have less complications in general.

Now should fat people in society be treated worse in terms of the opportunities they have? Absolutely not. But should society reward people for being fat? In my opinion, no, not explicitly.

Being unhealthily fat is just as abnormal as being unhealthyily skinny. Normalizing either is probably misguided at best.

I think you’re wrong; bigger folks can totally be attractive. That they are unattractive to you is different.

Again, representing the extremes as norms is not great - I think we can both agree on this point at least. But if there was an ideal that I would rather society value - it would definitely err on the side of healthy and fit.

Also, many women have to work much harder than men to stay on the skinny side because they store fat easier. A 5’1” 110 lb woman with 18% body fat would need to eat 1500 cal/day to maintain that weight. That’s practically nothing! It’s harder still if you were raised in a family that encouraged overeating (several reasons behind this).

Then there’s the double standard that exists in many relationships where the woman needs to be “healthy and fit” at all times while the man can treat his body however he wants because practically nobody cares about an out-of-shape looking man.

I say look however you want and weigh however much you feel comfortable with. One life to live and all.

In any case, I mostly agree with everything you've written.

Cheap food is why the norms played out like they did. In places with less easy access to calories, fat is considered beautiful and thin ugly.

I’ll throw another othrogonal point into the mix: our definitions of “skinny” and “fat” are probably very different and very relative to our realities.

Anyway, I don’t claim to have the answers - it gets really messy to articulate the big question of “how do values form”.

Being attracted to fat people is a kink, not the norm.

Norms of attractiveness are social constructs that demonstrably change over time.