Fat acceptance seem to be going around the manosphere right now and derisive mockery seems to be the order of the day. It seems to have started with this guy’s (probably satirical) blog on fat game.
I’m going to avoid the derisive mockery, but instead I’m going to talk about shame and self-hatred.
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First, some theology. Being fat is generally a sign of sinfulness.
Sloth and gluttony, the two primary causes of obesity, are two of the cardinal sins. It is shameful to be fat, because it is shameful to sin.
Derisive mockery is not untoward to someone who advocates the acceptance and normalization of sinfulness.
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Theology aside, obesity is still something to be shamed.
I do not need to go into all the ways obesity is unhealthy for an individual, that’s common knowledge. By allowing yourself to be obese you are quite literally committing slow, likely painful, suicide.
By allowing your body to destroy itself you are showing that you do not love yourself or your life. You are also showing you do not love those who love you and will be devastated by your early death.
If you are married, by being fat you are showing your spouse through deed, if not word, that you do not love them enough to remain attractive enough to have a healthy sex life.
You should be ashamed of being fat.
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Fat acceptance is concerned with ending self-loathing fat people feel for themselves. That is wrong.
Self-loathing and self-disgust is generally a sign that something is wrong in your life. It is your body and subconscious telling you that something needs to change as your current actions, lifestyle,and choices are negatively impacting your body and its ability to reproduce itself.
It is an evolutionary mechanism designed to protect you.
In the case of obesity, the shame and self-disgust you feel is your body telling you that you are killing yourself.
When your body and subconscious tells you something is wrong, the answer is not to get over it, the answer is not to drug it into submission, the answer is not to accept it, the correct answer is to figure out the reason your body and subconscious are screaming at you and to change yourself so they no longer have to scream.
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Your body evolved in an environment of scarcity. Food was scarce, you rarely gained the calories necessary for optimal health, so your body adapted to urge you to eat as much as possible, particularly of sugars and fats, which provided a large amount of calories.
Modern industrial agriculture has made food abundant; it is no longer scarce but your body still thinks it is, so it demands you eat, and it particularly loves its fats, sugars, and salts.
When you do not eat as much as you can your body screams at you that you are starving yourself; when you exercise, you are depleting your energy reserves and you body screams at you.
This is why it is much easier to gain weight than lose weight. Your old primal self is no made to handle the new modern world. You should not ignore this, but you should know why this pain exists.
The curse of being fat is: Your mind and body scream self-loathing at you for being fat, but your body screams pain at you if you diet and exercise. It is painful either way.
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So why do people participate in fat acceptance, when their own bodies and minds are screaming at them that they are killing themselves, when all the research says they are killing themselves, when obesity negatively impacts yourself and those you care about?
Easy: change is hard.
It is a lot easier to come to accept (and possibly overcome) your self-loathing mentally than it is to overcome the pain of diet and exercise. Self-loathing is vague and amorphous, pain is immediate and direct.
Self-loathing can be reasoned at, self-justified, denied, and overcome by other emotions. There is no reasoning with, denying, or ignoring pain: pain is.
Instead of facing the pain, it is easier to accept the self-loathing.
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Shame is used for societal control. It is used by society to prevent people from following their base urges to self-destruction.
Forgoing shaming obesity, gluttony, and sloth is not loving; it is apathetic. It is people to destroy themselves.
Fat acceptance is not something society should embrace, for the good of fat people.
This is not to say fat people shouldn’t be loved, they should, but their obesity and the behaviours contributing to it should be shamed out of love.
Fat acceptance is telling people it is okay to engage in self-destruction.
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If you are fat, realize it is not healthy. You are hurting yourself and showing you do not love yourself or those around you.
Realize that the pain may be unavoidable, but it is necessary.
Overcoming the pain and making yourself a better person will do much more for you, your self-respect, and your happiness than any amount of fat acceptance.
If you want to improve yourself, I would recommend the primal diet.
I tried the primal diet; while being strict on it I lost 10 lbs in 3 weeks. After that I became less strict, but I’ve still lost about 25 lbs (12% of my body weight) in 3 months. I’ve never been actually fat, maybe skinny-fat, but I did have a gut, it’s quite noticeably shrunk.
The best part, after the initial three weeks it’s required almost no willpower on my part. I rarely feel hungry and I never feel like I’m missing anything; it requires very little discipline. Once you get over the initial hump, it’s easy. It causes minimal pain, while still getting results.
So, do yourself a favour. Try the primal diet.
Mind you, there are also people with metabolism problems, and thyroid problems, who end up overweight as a result, and in such cases, their overweightness may not be mostly due to poor diet and lack of exercise.
But they typically don’t get as obese as the most obese people out there, like the ones who weigh far more than even, say, 300 lb. The 600lb and 800lb fatties, usually have only laziness and poor diet to blame…
For cripe’s sakes, we can accept obese people as human beings with worthy traits without pretending that fatness is beneficial. Fat acceptance or “pride” goes too far, and so do you.
Don’t fall for the over simplistic calories in v calories out bullshit. Becoming overweight is a biochemical effect of eating shitty foods. Eating less of those shitty foods can make you lose weight (by starving yourself) but it doesn’t improve your health in the long run (not to mention how hard it is to maintain.
Secondly, if you do any research at all into nutrition you realise that the idea that food was scarce is bullshit. Just because you don’t see cheeseburgers roaming the Savannah doesn’t mean people are struggling to survive between meals. Food was all around primitive people and they had more than they could eat. They worked less than we do today because once they had they fill of nutritionally satisfying food they had no desire to keep eating, which today people suffer from due to the huge amounts of sugar, additives and white flour in their foods.
Read up on paleo and educate yourself. Then the next time you see some fatso wanting to lose weight you can actually help them.
I know there are, but they are a small minority. My post is not directed at them.
Where did I say that we shouldn’t treat them as human?
I stated: “This is not to say fat people shouldn’t be loved, they should, but their obesity and the behaviours contributing to it should be shamed out of love.”
If you read to the end of my post, you will realize that I eat paleo/primal and recommended the paleo diet to the fat.
As for food being scarce, that would probably depend largely on where you would live. Certain tropical areas would be blessed by natural abundance where there were never food problems, but most areas would not be.
Scarcity would also be characterized by periods of up and down. In winter scarcity would increase, in summer it would decrease. You’d go with little meat for a while, then gorge when a hunt was successful. And so on.
Amen on the primal. Started March 1, 2012 and have lost about 20 pounds, feel so much better, and my allergies symptoms have decreased. GROK ON!!
+1 on primal diet. I went WAP over a year ago and had great results. Once I further removed added sugars and grains, I started to feel even better. That’s not to say there is no room, ever again, for certain foods, but a person needs to find what works for them.
Most of the pain of dieting comes from trying to eat low fat/high carb. Those foods don’t satisfy or nourish and it drives a body crazy. I’ve found that eating whole foods, traditionally prepared, and with a distinct primal bent satisfies after eating about half to two-thirds of the amount I used to.
Good post.
Son, you Crazy?
Girl’s ain’t big enough if you ask me. I love ’em all. :D
Sometimes you lay it on thick enough, that I wonder if you aren’t satire.
I know, it’s awesome.
Thanks. Primal does work very well.
Nigga, what you been smokin’? 0_o
I lay that pipe thick on thick.
Ah, yes, Jennifer. That is not an uncommon name, but there is a Jennifer who has nothing to do but go to men’s blogs and emit shaming language at anything that does not meet her approval, which is most things.
Fat men and women disgust me, nor do I apologize for that. So do stupid doctors who continue to preach low fat; high carb; even as the health of the USA turns to crap.
By the way, how many doctors do you know who are not also obese because of following their own dietary advice? Physician, heal thyself.
Thyroid problems mostly constitute an excuse by high carb grazers who try to rationalize their obesity. My daughter has thyroid problems, and she lost a ton of weight on Atkins, until she decided she would rather eat.
I’ve seen that Jennifer around here and there as well. Don’t know if that’s her or not though.
I think you’re not being entirely fair.
These days, nutrition in the western world is so poor, that the so-called obesity epidemic was entirely predictable some 30-40 years ago. What I’m saying is that people today are well-fed, but malnourished – I would venture that a good number of obese people have never benefitted from full-fat home-made bone broth as advocated by the Weston A. Price foundation, and to some degree, the Primal Diet. I’ve been obese for a very long time, but I started slimming almost immediately after going on a broth-heavy diet, and I rarely got hungry at all, simply because home-made bone-broth is so nutritious, especially compared to the super-market crap that most people eat.
Many obese people are following their instincts, and eating until their body is satiated. Unfortunately, the nutrient-poor crap on supermarket shelves is somewhat more to blame than they are, because the knowledge that proper food will satiate them better than breakfast cereal and other toxic foods isn’t easy to come by, and often villified by large agri-business corporate interest. This is a recipe for an obesity epidemic.
On the other hand, if this basic nutritional information wasn’t so suppressed, hidden, obfuscated, and misrepresented, but rather promoted, and widely dissemenated, we’d almost definitely see the obesity crisis all-but disappear within a few months. Like me, and you, people would find that their cravings for junkfood would disappear in the space of a few weeks.
That being said, you’re right that this fat-acceptance nonsense is deeply unethical. And props to you for promoting the primal diet, which being based to a large degree on the nutrtional principles discovered by Weston A. Price is an immanently acceptable solution to the obesity problem – if only it were more popular.
TL:DR – Maybe less moralizing, but good work calling out this fat-acceptance nonsense for the bullshit that it is. And please understand that it’s tough to slim down when your body is actually starving on industrial garbage. Finally, if people knew what to do, the problem would largely go away.
I believe I was being fair. I never said it was easy; I said it would be pain, but sometimes you have to embrace the pain.
Admittedly it’s easier on Paleo, but even without it, it’s still possible.
As for the moralizing, sometimes shame is a good driver. If people are at the point of normalizing obesity, it might be the only possible driver. If someone’s feelings are hurt by what I say, but the shame drives them to self-improvement, I’ll consider it a victory.
You sound fat.
Let me tell you something Christian boy. Jesus was not white. He was a distinguished man of color. He didn’t discriminate either. He wasn’t just color blind, no sir, he was “ass-blind” meaning that he’d hit any type of ass. Especially fat ass! Let me tell ya something, he died on that cross for our sins, all of our sins, so you better believe he made it worth dying for, and sinned his ass off with ancient fat hebrew bitches.
Basically I’m saying that Jesus was cool with obesity.
Satire, or not, that’s sacrilegious; Christ certainly did NOT sin. And being Hebrew himself, he was white. And given that gluttony is a sin, obesity due to gluttony is most uncool, as far as the Lord is concerned.
You’re saying Jesus died for nothing? Come on man, you tell Jesus that at the pearly gates, see the look on his face; Man, it says in the book that we are all sinners. As long as you take each and every sin into account, you can remember to forgive and confess each one to god. That’s why I got my notepad next to my bible. It’s accounting for the afterlife homie.
Also, he was NOT white. The original Hebrews were of dark complexion and had nappy hair. Also, he didn’t know his daddy, and he loved grape juice and beans. He had Ethiopian and Egyptian blood too. That’s as black as it gets man.
Christ died for OUR sins; He had none.
I’m done talking to you.
i.e. nigelbiggame.
Being fit is an essential part of being a respectable human being. Enough said(:
It is especially interesting that doctors preach high carb; low fat. When they went to medical school, they were properly taught that excess carbs or excess protein is converted to glucose and stored as fat.
And, eating more fat starts burning body fat.
So, after passing the test, they lose their brains. How often do you see a thin, slim, trim doctor?
I bought a copy of a physiology text book, TEXTBOOK OF MEDICAL PHYSIOLOGY, 11th edition, used in a medical school around 2005. I accepted one used by a dog for teething pains, and got if for around $20. Pages around 829 to 887, plus insulin and diabetes 961-976.
But. especially pp. 841-846.
You are indeed allowed to buy and read such books. I will not say they are easy reading for those who don’t go to med school, but with a good dictionary or Internet you can do it. And, in some places, they spit it out in plain English.