not only does a good portion of the world have high BMI and does nothing about it, we as a country have now gone so far as to say it's 'OK' to have a high BMI. I know in advance this comment will be misinterpreted, but it's genuinely sad that our advertisements, education, and social media all parrot the same message that it's okay to be overweight.
I think the intended message of these campaigns isn’t that high BMI is considered healthy; rather, it’s that making people feel bad for having high BMI is doing them no favors in the journey to solve a very difficult problem. They are campaigns reminding people to be nice.
I think that’s a good message. I certainly feel badly for obese people because, however they got there, they’re going to have a hell of a time getting back to a healthy body size.
I do agree that many people lose that key part of the message when they pass it on.
> rather, it’s that making people feel bad for having high BMI is doing them no favors in the journey to solve a very difficult problem. They are campaigns reminding people to be nice.
Feeling bad about your weight is a good motivator to lose weight. It might be bad for your mental health and it could do absolutely nothing for some people but the vast majority of people who keep their weight in check and/or are motivated to lose weight do so more for social reasons than they do for health reasons.
Compared to something like alcoholism, being overweight (which can be similarly deadly) is treated much differently. For alcoholism, the attitude has been changing from "alcoholics are degenerates with weak wills" to "alcoholism is a disease and these people need help" where the attitude toward obesity is going from "fat people are disgusting people who have no self control" to "big is beautiful".
The difference is with alcoholism the message goes from disdain to support but he solution remains the same, a great deal of personal work to solve the problem. With obesity, the message goes from disdain to acceptance and the solution is to just not bring it up.
> Feeling bad about your weight is a good motivator to lose weight.
Educationalist here, actually it isn't :) For many people, this just makes you feel bad - and that's it. For that feeling to result in meaningful action a bunch of conditions have to be met, e.g. the absence of eating disorders (including things like stress eating etc.), a concept of self-efficacy (the idea that one actually is able to change out of one's own will), impulse control, knowledge about food and dieting, the time and money to eat healthier and so on. Often people are perfectly aware that their behaviour is unhealthy, but they lack one or more of those conditions. It therefore is better to focus on providing people the actual means to change (knowledge, methods, better food in school and at work, a supportive environment, taxation to make unhealthy food/drugs more expensive (a thing in the EU)).
Note that I'm fully in support of emphasizing the unhealthy aspects of obesity, though. Providing the facts often just isn't enough.
> Educationalist here, actually it isn't :) For many people, this just makes you feel bad - and that's it.
Are you just asking overweight people or are you asking all people? The people who are overweight today are obviously the group of people for which social pressure is ineffective. I'm talking about all people including the people who are successfully at a healthy weight.
Wait, why would we study people at a healthy weight whether or not shame is an effective strategy to lose weight? I am genuinely confused why someone at a healthy weight would be the person to ask, because for all we know they never had weight to lose.
Because if you stop the social pressure to be a healthy weight (ie, big is beautiful), people who used to maintain a healthy weight due to social pressure may no longer feel the need to do so.
Do we have evidence that people who maintain a healthy weight do so primarily because of social pressure? I'm genuinely asking because I don't actually know that that's true. Most of the people I know of a healthy weight actually don't have a lot of shame about their bodies. In fact the most internal shamed people I know are either fat people or unhealthily thin people??
How do you know that "healthy people would feel shame if they got obese" -> "healthy people use shame as a motivator to maintain weight"? Doesn't that rely on the assumption that shame works?... but that's precisely the thing I'm questioning. I don't actually know shame works because I don't see evidence that healthy weighted people have more shame, are more sensitive to shame, or are shamed more often than fat people. If anything fat people have the most shame, are the most sensitive to being shamed, and are publicly shamed more often... and they're still fat.
30 years ago you would have gotten shamed if you gained a few pounds, that early signal makes people think about eating habits earlier and makes many people never go into unhealthy weight in the first place.
So even though shame might not work to get fat people to lose weight, it could still work to keep people from ever getting fat. Getting shamed for a few pounds means that you can fix the source of shame by dieting for a few weeks, very doable for average people.
Where is the evidence that shame has a causational relationship with people getting fat? You're still only pointing to correlation and saying that because shaming was more common in the past, shaming is effective now. This implies that healthy weight people respond to shame more strongly than fat people or something, but that's just not true in my experience.
This comment made me remember all of the anti-gay-marriage politicians saying that if we legalized gay marriage, men would just start leaving their wives and marrying men. As if the only thing keeping me from being fat or gay is some brave gatekeeper, rather than a lack of a desire (or makeup) to be fat or gay.
They also gave us insight into the mind of the gay anti-gay politician.
The difference is that the obesity doomsday predictions has already came true, and things are still getting worse every year. Today the median American is close to obese, and in some years will be obese unless something drastically changes. That would have been unthinkable 30 years ago when obesity was a tiny minority.
I had overweight people in mind. For both cases I'd argue that emphasizing the benefits of healty weight and the means of getting to/staying at that weight is the more effective approach, though.
I've definitely have zero science on this and these are anecdotes so keep that in mind but I know a ton of people who maintain healthy weight so they look good in a bathing suit. I also know overweight people who are _only_ motivated to lose weight due to health concerns (and still really struggle but I've seen more movement from that angle), they also feel the social pressure but it's not effective.
I think it's important to not lose sight of the fact that maintaining a healthy weight is a challenge for nearly everyone and undermine what is currently working for those who are not overweight.
Furthermore, I think obesity has somehow found it's way to be more in line with the LGBT style movements of acceptance/tolerance instead of the changing view of addictions as disease instead of character flaws when it clearly should be much more like the latter.
My point was more that feeling bad, by itself, actually is a demotivator. I'm all for motivating! But that would mean emphasizing e.g. the health benefits, or positive reinforcement of actual lifestyle changes.
Sure, but if you overdo your campaign to prevent shaming (and I can say what happens now in US is definitely in that territory for quite some time), than even a slightest hint that obesity is something bad and should be actually worked on to get rid of becomes shamed too.
Then it becomes (well, became) the next taboo that nobody wants to touch with a 10 feet pole since its playing with a PR suicide.
And so we have the world we have, and we reached it step by step by exactly this logic. Simple thing is, fat people need help from society just like drug addicts, yet everybody desperately tries to avoid this framing, and thus help is often not deemed necessary/worth the risk of offending. Thus people die needlessly just that somebody doesn't have hurt feelings.
I don’t think we’re past — or even approaching — some sort of threshold where we’ve overdone compassion in America. In fact, studies have shown that the more compassion shown to fat people, the more likely they are to seek help [1].
I deal with chronic pain and I’m at the hospital or clinic frequently, often multiple times per week. As someone who is in that environment quite a bit, I can assure you that the dangers of obesity are very clearly and openly discussed; frankly, you can’t walk two steps in a hospital without seeing some sort of PSA about the dangers of obesity.
Your mental model just doesn’t track with what I’ve seen again and again in reality.
There's absolutely no necessity to shame anyone for being fat. You can be concerned about it with your friends and loved ones, and express that concern if the relationship you have is of a character where you're busybodies about each others' health. There are very few people in your life who would appreciate or desire that criticism from you.
The people being told to shut up about it are usually abusing strangers or enemies, and feel very abused and targeted for being criticized for targeting and abusing people. If you were talking about being fat with someone you obviously care about and cares about you, they'd take it in that spirit. If you shamed them for it, they'd hopefully end that fucked up abusive relationship. The only thing I would ever shame a loved one for is their abuse of other people. Otherwise, I want to lift them up, not tear them down.
They are unfortunately mixing up the messages there. It's one thing to fight the shame associated with body appearance (this should be the real fight), and another thing to claim BMI has no significance on health risks (which is what often the argument boils down). There are people comfortable with smoking, there are people comfortable with their weight too, I just hope both know the increased risks to which they are exposed. However shaming the one or the other is just disgusting, especially when it appeals to a "tradition".
I have started to wonder if there won't be a war at some point where Survival of the Fittest becomes a very literal factor in who wins. We seem to be rapidly circling back to the military superiority of the Hoplite.
