I do not encourage fat shaming at all, but I can also imagine that in some cases shame may be a powerful motivator for some people. Is there hard data showing that it actually makes it harder?
It is not at all a constructive approach.
The "healthy obesity" thing is the pendulum flying to the opposite end of the spectrum: unconditional support turned into acceptance and promotion of what we know to not be true.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
Unfortunately getting into that argument is a minefield.
Just let them be adults and manager their life as they please. At one point they might becone fed up with life as a fat person and they'll make the effort.
And it they don't, well, there are people who smoke from teenage years all the way to the grave
But, either eay, people dont humiliate smokers the way they do with fat people
No, we just tax the shit out of tobacco, exclude them from certain insurance plans, blame and shame them about smoking indoors or inside vehicles, and tell smokers to go huddle outside and off to the side, away from doors, windows, and air intakes, while they do the thing we don't like.
Or were you thinking of air travel, where the difference between a smoker and a non-smoker is either negligible (because they aren't currently smoking), or completely excludes the smoker from the activity (because 16 hours in a plane is too long without a cigarette for them).
Humiliate them? Not often. But we sure as hell told them to take it someplace else; anyplace else, just not near the rest of us.
If you are shamed for your body, you feel even worse; you may then eat even more to feel better.
Now it’s a different story if you’re willing to work with them daily to help them lose weight or something similar. But just telling your friend “he your fat, it’s bad for you fix it” will only hurt
Well, we’re probably 70+ years into a National experiment with it, and weights are only going up.
The short of it is that it increases stress, increases depression, eating disorders, and risk of suicide.
As for shame and its ironic effects, you can look to Brene Brown's research and that of other shame researchers.
1 year later, and I'm down 35 pounds with another 10-20 to go. I feel great! walking doesn't hurt anymore, doing physical stuff is fun again, and I have more energy than I used to. All that to say, the guilt and shame definitely helped motivate me, but YMMV :)
On a related note, find yourself in a woman’s house and notice the inspirational text artwork. “Eat, Love, Pray”, “Worrying works because it never happens”, etc. These little signs are powerful.
A bit brief though, probably need to check the cited material. The overall theme of the report as awhile though is that motivation issues are less of a factor than generally believed.
I think it's better to stick to that, and just drop the term 'fat-shaming'.
It is the same as changing "retard" to "mentally challenged" or "handicapped" to "disabled"... the next term just becomes equally toxic because you haven't changed the actual stigma, just the word used to express it.
But recent efforts have been focused on blurring the lines here.
The stigma causes the hate, they're effectively the same thing (I used them interchangeably) and leads directly to adverse actions against those individuals.
And the argument generally shifts at that point to "it's good for them to be attacked, maybe it'll motivate them". Because again, it's just a socially-acceptable vector for hate. We've gradually run out of other forms like racism and sexism, for a while it was homophobia (and the argument was that was a choice too, so it was fine to attack), but we'll always have fat people.
Others, on the other hand, will be pushed further back into the hole by such talk. This is very individual.
I'm surprised you put that in and not:
4. motivated reasoning. People want reasons to justify their current lifestyle and not having to put in hard work to change it.
For point #1, most western cultures already idealize thinness. Therefore that's not really a factor unless you're from a culture that idealizes being fat.
Wasn't it more a sign of being wealthy and successful? Like if you were fat, it meant you could afford to spend a lot of money/effort on getting food and didn't need to do difficult work outside for 8+ hours a day?
Not sure people were calling it healthy, so much as treating it like a status symbol (because it kinda was).
He always responded: "I just wanted to move to a place where the poor people were fat."
1. Historically being fat was considered a sign of good health. Of course, this was during times of massive food scarcity and the definition of fat was probably very different from what we consider fat today.
2. Massive amounts of money involved in telling people to eat/drink more, and then spend more money in gyms and taking pills to lose that weight. As opposed to just eating less and then living normal healthy active lives. There’s not much money in the latter.
3. People wanting to stop fat-shaming (which is also unequivocally bad…fat shaming only makes it harder for people to lose weight), trying to convince other people that someone being fat does not make them bad, quickly morphing into being fat is good.