Rant about weight, fat acceptance, obesity and health

[SteelCurtain]

...but have also told him it's ok to love himself anyway and not to let other people dictate how he should feel about his weight.

And there you have the impetus for the entire movement. It is not about saying being obese is healthy, it is about not shaming people because of their bodies.

It all started with the anti-supermodel lilt. Society is being force fed the perfect ideal for what a female body should look like, and by proxy, what a male should look like. The whole point of the fat acceptance deal was initially if you had love handles to be okay with that. It was taken a little farther, and like every movement, co-opted by the extremes. Yes, you can find examples of people co-opting the movement and saying that you can be perfectly healthy at 450 lbs. That's bullshit. You can't be healthy at 450 lbs, even if you're 7'2". What you can be, is body positive, and get support from your friends rather than derision.

To say that fat acceptance supporters want everyone to be fat is the same as saying people who say 'Happy Holidays" want to end Christmas. No. It's about being positive and inclusive. It doesn't mean you have to support a lifestyle that will lead to obesity. It means maybe we don't judge a person's character or literally anything about them based on their outward appearance.

I have struggled with many things in my life. I am hopelessly addicted to caffeine. I know that drinking a .5L of soda a day is terrible for me. (I don't mean to make these two things sound as if they are on the same plane---just drawing a parallel by which I can empathize) It would technically be easy for me to stop drinking pop. Just don't buy the shit any more, right? And I've done, for weeks, sometimes months at a time. But I keep going back. I don't think this is some sort of character flaw on my part. But society has made it just that for obese people. I simply reject that notion, and try to empathize. That, to me in a nutshell, is fat acceptance.