I feel gaslit:
Every other day or so I come across somebody I want to grab, shake and yell, “You are telling me all this? YOU are telling ME?”
People look me straight in the face and earnestly deliver the exact same statements for which they puffed at me like tea kettles two years ago.
How is this not victim-blaming or fatphobia? I could have sworn that such headlines were victim-blaming and fatphobia. When did they change the rules?
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New guidelines were dropped today suggesting that fat kids should be medicated and trimmed surgically. So now it ok to gang up on the chubby amongst us.
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It’s a great racket. First, they plumped these kids up by keeping them locked up in front of screens for two years. Cancelled athletics, outlawed playgrounds and parks. And now it’s time to start slicing them up.
And those of us who warned about it and fought to give our kids a normal childhood were vilified and persecuted.
Like all the other politically-popular surgical procedures, bariatric surgery comes with some gnarly irreversible side-effects that people are not properly informed about. Gastric bypass in particular is a nasty piece of work. You’ll never digest anything properly again, and because of the truncating of the digestive tract and its abnormal effects on alcohol metabolism (when you drink, all the alcohol goes hits your bloodstream all at once, instead of gradually as it works through your digestion) a certain small but predictable percentage of people will go on to become raging alcoholics, post-surgery.
And children! What is it with these people and medical experimentation on children? This is all massively invasive stuff they are advocating. Why not start with something like mandated 3 hours of daily physical activity at school? Why is the first response always to chop off body parts?
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To be fair, it’s not primarily about physical activity and official dietary advice is mostly useless for losing weight. It’d take something like defunding the USDA to get good solutions in place for this problem, because we have a whole scaffolding of official dietary advice and subsidies whose sole purpose is to prop up corn/soybean agriculture, at the expense of everybody’s health. Our whole national policy is to treat people as commodity crop dumpsters.
This was one of the revelatory things about spending real time outside the US: The relative pricing of meat and fresh produce vs. processed/packaged foods is completely, radically different in countries that don’t have ag subsidies to tip the scales.
Healthy children have a hard time sitting still in front of a screen for hours. But it’s easy if they are tired and feel like crap already. At our house… even rainy weather isn’t enough to keep the kids indoors all day. By afternoon, they are begging to put on rain jackets and go play.
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The sound bite I heard was that kids just keep getting fatter. Duh. It’s because the family doesn’t change the habits, behaviors or foods. No judgement. It’s hard to do. But we mostly haven’t been able to get adults to lose weight with billions of dollars of intervention. Why would those same unhelpful things work for kids? Where kids have the advantage is that they are still growing and maybe more amenable to lifestyle changes. But those only work when the whole family commits. And if they are following TERRIBLE low- fat advice, the kids will for sure get fatter.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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