I’m so so SO sick and tired of the specious and dishonest discussions of weight one encounters virtually everywhere. I’m reading a mostly very enlightening book called Numbersense whose author (a-skinny-to-the-point-of-being-skeletal dude, of course) trots out the tired old canard that being overweight doesn’t lead to an appreciable rise in the likelihood of suffering heart attack or stroke.
Of course, people who are overweight at 30 (25, 35, 40, etc.) don’t drop off from strokes. We all know that doesn’t happen. What does happen is that such people become chronic consumers of prescription medications, and this is a real tragedy. Unless you are over 70, a chronically medicated life is no life at all.
Arguing that obesity is no big deal because there is no evidence anybody actually dies from it is completely dishonest and I’d say even immoral. It plays into the hands of pharmaceutical companies that are bent on promoting the idea that it is perfectly fine to go through life in a permanently medicated state. This is also an approach that is very helpful to people who sell us food poisoned with hormones, antibiotics, and all other kinds of noxious substances.
All of these fat acceptance movements, departments, scholarly publications and blogs pose as social activism but, in reality, they are pawns of agricultural conglomerates and junk food peddlers. They shush everybody who tries to ask what the hell we are being fed in this country to make us so abnormally fat and so dependent on drugs. Instead of asking questions, we are supposed to celebrate the harm being done to us as we make our bodies into a site where pharma companies and junk food companies vie for profits.
Yes, it’s comforting to chirp that the BMI is meaningless and that nobody has proven there will be any actual damage from needing prescription meds just to be able to function normally at 40. But that comfort comes at the price of relinquishing your autonomy and personhood and becoming an object that others fill with content, both physically and spiritually.
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