Being Morbidly Overweight Is Inherently Bad
One of the most disturbing social trends that has come up lately is, by far, the so called “body positive” movement. Although the “body positive” movement started as a reaction to an unattainable level of thinness being celebrated as an ideal, it has become a pernicious movement that will ultimately cause great swathes of preventable human misery. Where once, women who were a healthy size UK12/UK10 rightly objected to being told they were too fat in favour of women were a size UK6, now the poster girls for the “Body Positive” movement are size UK20/22/24 and higher.
If you are morbidly overweight then in 99.9% of cases there are only two possible explainations; either you are suffering from a serious eating disorder or you are a glutton. But, Sara, don’t you know that some people have problems which mean they have a tendancy to gain weight? Yes, I do. I have one. For most of this year I have been deeply ill with the autoimmune disease Hashimoto’s Hypothyroidism, which until it was diagnosed and treated was severe enough to be debilitating. I gained weight, but I was still not morbidly obese because I do not eat more than I need. Now that I’m on an appropriate course of treatment I’ve lost the weight. Conditions that make people irreversibly overweight are simply not that common.
Eating Disorders
If someone uses alcohol to deal with their emotional problems – we stage an intervention and call them an alcoholic. If someone uses drugs to deal with their emotional problems – we stage an intervention and call them an addict. If someone starves themselves to deal with their emotional problems – we stage an intervention and called them an anorexic. If someone eats themselves to obesity to deal with emotional problems – we’re not allowed to say anything because they’re special, fat, snowflakes, who unlike everyone else aren’t allowed to feel bad or take responsibility for their poor choice of coping mechanisms. I don’t think having a binge eating disorder or food addiction is something that should ever be acceptable, just as we don’t accept alcoholism or drug addiction. We have a word for being who facilitate alcoholics and drug addicts and it’s ‘enabler.’
Gluttony
If someone is greedy and has more wealth than they are perceived to need, column after column in the Daily Mail is dedicated to their folly complete with sneering comments underneath. “No one *needs* more than one house.” In fact, we argue endlessly on how we are going to redistribute the extra wealth these people have. Yet, if people eat more than they need, we say nothing. I’m a capitalist but I’m not a consumerist. It’s not inherently good to spend for the sake of spending and it’s not inherently good to eat for the sake of eating. By all means, if that’s what you want then feel free to eat all you want but don’t blame anyone else for it. And please, don’t insult our intellegence by supporting an entire movement designed to absolve yourself of responsibility for your own moral weakness.
The solution to both these contributing factors contains at least some measure of personal responsibility, if not all. A factor that has mysteriously disappeared from the obesity debate almost entirely. The entire ‘body positive’ movement has become a sad way of silencing people who dare to use a factual and accurate adjective. The consequences of this emotional fragility will be the misery and ill health of so many people, not to mention the strain on the already crumbling NHS. I don’t think fat people are inherently bad but I do think being fat is an inherently bad state of being. The “body positive” movement represents the worst of societal double standards. It operates on the grounds that the best way of not encouraging anorexia is to encourage being ‘plus size.’ That’s simply not true. I, for one, refuse to swap encouraging one eating disorder with encouraging another.