more debate about women's faces/bodies

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So I read all posts, and I've formed myself an idea.

There is being healthy, and then there is being fit. I believe being healthy, within certain parameters, is something we should all strive for. There can be thin, healthy people, and there can be chubby, healthy people, but as long as they feel happy with the way they are, and don't have any health issues related to their body composition (weight is not an appropriate indicator by itself) then they are fine.

There is also unhealthy, obese people, and unhealthy, skeleton-like people. They may delude themselves into thinking they are fine, and they may even feel a bit happy, and if they are truly happy then it's debatable whether it's good or not to make them unhappy although themselves, but still, they have reached a point where they may be at risk of heart attack, or may not be able to move around without help, or may feel weak all the time (or BE weak all the time) and for women, lose their fertility, among other risks that bring having too much or too little body fat.

Being fit, that's another issue. It requires to put more work on it, to keep track of nutrition, to do heavier, well planned exercising, it's strenuous, time-consuming and draining work. And it's nice to be fit, as it's nice to be very good at drawing, or to have a lot of knowledge on a certain topic, or to be a superb chess player, all of those without necessarily being among the best ones in their fields. Sure, being fit is a lofty goal, but not something everybody should strive for. Healthy is fine, healthy is enough, as my father says, he wants to be healthy enough so that he can enjoy the things he enjoys without dying prematurely or spending his last years bed-ridden, he doesn't exercise or follow a strict diet, and has a bit of a tummy, but he is still strong and eats well enough so that it doesn't really matter. And in this case, Wolfheart, may I daresay being fit is one of your goals?

Accomplishments are subjective, and I usually measure their worth by the hard work put behind me. Getting fit is a much greater accomplishment than going up a level in Tomb Raider, because there is a lot more work behind it, besides being fit brings some advantages over being healthy. Also, I understand that was a derisive comment, but killing a specially hard bonus boss in an RPG after failing literally dozens of times does feel like an accomplishment, although that's something only fellow gamers would be able to relate to. I'll be able to do a one-handed pull-up some day in the non-foreseeable future, and only fellow exercisers would be able to appreciate it, as well. To each one their own.

Small thoughts:

VW made me think on something; if we see somebody smoking, which is something objectively unhealthy, can we judge them?

Under which objective parameters can be said that someone is fat and healthy, fat and unhealthy, thin and healthy, or thin and unhealthy?

i am glad you are happy with the person that you are. it would be nicer if you would allow people to have their own goals too, instead of pushing them to have YOUR goals.

once again, i think it is a very good idea to eat properly and get exercise. but that has nothing to do with the appearance of a person's body.

here is some advice i've given people over and over: if you are unhappy with yourself when you are fat, you are extremely likely (not true for every person) to be unhappy with yourself when you are thin. people don't really believe me (partly because they see the odd thin person who seems happy with themselves) until they lose the weight and find themselves with low self-esteem.

the fact is, if a person bases their self-esteem on appearance, it's a very shallow measurement. so they won't stop hating on themselves just because one aspect of their appearance has changed. they will continue to judge themselves harshly for other things, like the size of their nose, their limp hair, or their knobby knees.

i think that you don't want fat people to love themselves because you still think that there is something inherently wrong with being obese, even though we have established that there is not. getting exercise and eating properly doesn't require role models and hating your body. in fact, those things are likely to have a detrimental effect on self-esteem, and people who hate their bodies are less likely to treat them well.

most people have goals in their life that they push themselves towards. for some odd reason, you seem to believe that fitness goals are the most important. other people may disagree, because those are not their goals.

i don't think i saw your response about that fitness program you keep mentioning. do you get paid by them in any capacity?

by the way, ValentineWiggin, Wolfheart was never fat. he was just less fit.

i said that OVER-exercising can cause a person to look older. moderate exercise is good for people, but in excess it might not be. i think you're reading my posts selectively because i have NEVER said that regular exercise is bad, nor did i say that there are no benefits to exercise.

I would have sworn up and down you were wrong the livelong day two years and a hundred pounds ago,
but you're absolutely-right.
I was far happier with myself, and my level of health, at 215+ than I am now at 117.
Now I feel this oppressive pressure to keep the weight off, much more so than when I was larger and for a time (after years of obsessively-adhering to the ol' "diet-n-exercise" cliche) just ate what I liked and made me happy.


I agree. The comments about athletic ability and health, energy levels, etc are obfuscating the issue of weight by drawing a false equivocation with it:
there are FAT PEOPLE who are STRONG, HEALTHY, ENERGETIC.
Right now, there are fat people lifting weights, running marathons, eating vegetables, and more.
So when we talk about being fat or overweight, let's call a spade a spade:
we're talking about whether someone feels happy taking up a certain amount of space and likely being stigmatized for it.
There are also fat people, just like thinner counterparts, eating Big Macs and watching reruns.

In neither case are someone else's priorities my business to preach about.


Gotcha. I am awfully-prone to skimming when I shouldn't.

no, it was in another thread where i asked directly, because i was posting studies that demonstrate that it is in fact harder for an obese person to lose weight than it is for never-fatties to stay fit. it takes more willpower, yet the majority who are unable to do it are seen as weaker than average people.

Of course you didn't.
I'm likewise not arguing that __________________ (insert healthy habit- diet, exercise, sleep, emotional health, etc) doesn't have benefits (to be clear to everyone). I think we're also saying we don't get to presume, based on nothing more than external appearance, that someone is in fact not living those healthy habits.

I'm IN ADDITION saying we don't get to pretentiously wag fingers at people for not caring about those benefits vs others- that's their paradigm, and their life. Even if (/though) walking is objectively healthier than sitting on my butt posting to forums all day, how is what's healthier "objectively" what I should care most about?

I've had a pair of jeans I want to fit into for years now.
I also have yet to get 120 stars on Mario 64 despite having owned the game since 5th grade (damned rotating spindles in Tick Tock Clock).

Which would make me happier? Really happier? I get to decide.

So you play Super Mario. When you dissed Tomb Raider I thought you were dissing videogames in general

TR = my fave game

That doesn't mean I'm gonna blather about how everyone else should play it and get as far as they can.

Your siggy is awesome, btw.
Saw a Reddit post t'other day of a photo of a business card, given to the user by a cop with
"He who fights monsters should take care that he does not become a monster"
on the back.
Cue 3 hours of research on Nietzsche.


Aaaaaaand we're eight topics removed.

Heh, duly noted. And thanks Nietzsche had very smart things to say. Now the thread may keep going~

Well here's the thing. Yes, some people will be, well, fat. There is differences of bone structure and just genetics and environmental factors at play. For me, I always envied the skinny "ectomorph" kinda people, and always wished to be like 130lbs at my height. I know 130lbs for me is an entirely unrealistic and downright ret*d goal, and instead for my ideal physique, I should be sitting at like 180. So 15lbs to lose instead of 65, quite a difference. Even at 195 nobody like thinks I'm fat, and I tell them and they're like "Really, you're 195?"

But here's the thing. Obese people used to be much less common. And people are NOT healthier being obese, especially the children. I'm not talking about cases where 10lbs overweight or something, like 300lb people walking around are incredibly common now, and it's sad. There's quite a difference here between obesity and overweight, and honestly the BMI is flawed as a measurement tool, as it doesn't take bodyfat levels into account. So what happens is, genuinely bigger framed or more muscular girls freak out and think they're fat, and then girls with higher bodyfat levels and a smaller frame think they're fine.

All I want is the obesity level of the population to drop from 1/3 of the entire country to single digits. I'm not expecting everyone to have ripped abs or whatever, I just don't want everyone to be blobs.

As far as weight relating to health, there's generalities, and many times generalities are... right. There's exceptions, but there's exceptions in jail, too, that doesn't mean the entire population there is innocent. Generally, people who are obese (again not extra 10lbs) are perceived as less healthy than their non obese counterparts. It's the same thing with muscle mass, people with lots of muscle mass are perceived to be stronger than people with less, even though this isn't neccessarily the case much of the time. Are there exceptions, yeah, Shane Hamman for example, Olympic lifter is 300lbs or so, and can do a standing backflip. But, this does not make every fat person Shane Hamman, that's the thing. As a generality, being non obese is better. If it works for you, it works for you, fine, whatever. But the problem is... it's not working for most people. When I was obese myself, I had high blood pressure, 18 years old with high blood pressure. That's not good. High blood pressure went away as I exercised more and lost bodyfat. But this is happening to lots of people, high blood pressure at young ages simply due to bad diet and little to no exercise.

with approximately 40% of obese people being perfectly healthy, that is not an exception!! !

Hyper: I was solely addressing the way, not the principles behind it.

I am on the opposite side of where you are - in regards to no matter how much I eat it is difficult / impossible to maintain a "normal" weight - I am always in the underweight category usually, unless I consume about 3 times as much as I am supposed to - which is a chore even for me. So people often accuse me of "not eating" (in fact I vacumn up food) and other stupid accusations too. So I can relate to both you and VW in that regard although I am on the opposite side - it pisses me off no end when someone says I am not "healthy" when the exact opposite is true.

I don't think we have the right to judge whether an individual is healthy or not solely by looking at them. If you follow them around for a month or two and track everything they do - then you might have an idea. Until you do that, you can't say they are automatically "unhealthy".

Last edited by Kjas on 24 Jul 2012, 7:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

that makes sense.

I was guilty for a while of referring to such people as anorexic, I'm absolutely-ashamed to say, until I educated myself more on size acceptance and realized how hurtful size-based stereotypes are, for everyone. We've got to start public dialogues about the numbers that actually paint a picture of someone's health, as opposed to obsessing about how thin or fat people are. I had legitimate (and unrelated) medical conditions written off by doctors as being supposed mere symptoms of my obesity, on one occasion nearly costing me my life. It's absurd.

In another thread you linked to an article from Forbes magazine as evidence that obese people, or "lardbuckets" as they were referred to in the article, cost the healthcare system less money.

Let's look at the study the Forbes article was based on. It provides a great deal more detail, and objectivity, than the article you linked to.

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/inf ... ed.0050029

"Since the mid 1970s, the proportion of people who are obese (people who have an unhealthy amount of body fat) has increased sharply in many countries. ... Compared to people with a healthy weight (a BMI between 18.5 and 25), overweight and obese individuals have an increased risk of developing many diseases, such as diabetes, coronary heart disease and stroke, and tend to die younger."

"Because obesity causes so much illness and premature death, many governments have public-health policies that aim to prevent obesity. Clearly, the improvement in health associated with the prevention of obesity is a worthwhile goal in itself ..."

"(t)he researchers ... used a computer model to calculate yearly and lifetime medical costs associated with obesity in The Netherlands. ... (They) used their model to estimate the number of surviving individuals and the occurrence of various diseases for three hypothetical groups of men and women, examining data from the age of 20 until the time when the model predicted that everyone had died. The “obese” group consisted of never-smoking people with a BMI of more than 30; the “healthy-living” group consisted of never-smoking people with a healthy weight; the “smoking” group consisted of lifetime smokers with a healthy weight. Data from the Netherlands on the costs of illness were fed into the model to calculate the yearly and lifetime health-care costs of all three groups. The model predicted that until the age of 56, yearly health costs were highest for obese people and lowest for healthy-living people. At older ages, the highest yearly costs were incurred by the smoking group. However, because of differences in life expectancy (life expectancy at age 20 was 5 years less for the obese group, and 8 years less for the smoking group, compared to the healthy-living group), total lifetime health spending was greatest for the healthy-living people, lowest for the smokers, and intermediate for the obese people."

"(T)hese findings suggest that although effective obesity prevention reduces the costs of obesity-related diseases, this reduction is offset by the increased costs of diseases unrelated to obesity that occur during the extra years of life gained by slimming down."

Looking at the detail of the report, and the results, it is stated that

"The obese cohort has the highest health-care costs for diabetes and musculoskeletal diseases compared to the other cohorts."

"At all ages, smokers and obese people incur more costs than do healthy-living persons. Until age 56, average annual health-care costs are highest for an obese person."

"Obesity increases the risk of diseases such as diabetes and coronary heart disease, thereby increasing health-care utilization but decreasing life expectancy. Successful prevention of obesity, in turn, increases life expectancy."

They conclude by saying that
"Prevention may therefore not be a cure for increasing expenditures—instead it may well be a cost-effective cure for much morbidity and mortality and, importantly, contribute to the health of nations."

Obesity rates have risen sharply in my country over the past couple of decades and continue to rise. What is most shocking is that Type 2 Diabetes is now being increasingly diagnosed in children, as a result of their obesity. This has only happened in the past 10 years or so, and as time goes on it is likely that those and other obese children will suffer ill-health and premature death directly as a result of their excess weight.

From the World Health Organisation's website - "Overweight and obesity are defined as abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health."

When someone is so overweight that they have difficulty walking, and have to adopt an abnormal gait to get one foot in front of the other, when they are out of breath going up stairs or climbing a hill, when they struggle to lean down to put their socks on, that is unhealthy.

So, essentially you just made my point for me:

bad diet, no exercise > high BP (and other conditions) & (sometimes) overweight/obesity

NOT

bad diet, no exercise > obesity > high BP

Weight and "weight-related illnesses" are linked because they both CAN BE CAUSED by exogenous variables, those being lifestyle-related: diet and exercise.

They also can occur in isolation, IE, the plethora of diseased thin people,
and the plethora of healthy fat people.

So, if you wanna talk about disease, let's talk about DISEASE, not SIZE.