The fat acceptance movement is stupid and regression

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Yes. It is a disorder. People with that disorder deserve social acceptance as well. Accept the person, don't accept the disease. And yeah, you're right about HAES.

Fat acceptance is dangerous but you also can't ignore body dissatisfaction leading to various forms of self-harm in young girls, 78% of 17 year old girls in the US think they are too fat. This is equally as bad from a psychological perspective.

Sorry the photo was a bad choice but both the above mentioned have been accused of starving themselves for the cameras. In Kate's case it was considered dangerous for her first child george when she was pregnant but if she does (did?) have this condition then she is largely not in control.

But I don't understand what space this is. If the acceptance movement is not giving overweight people more job options or more relationship options then how is it an acceptance movement. A space where they don't receive judgment doesn't mean anything, if there is no real pay off to it.

That is what I have been talking about all along.

Fat acceptance people want to deny science and pretend weight cannot affect your health. They want to pretend doctors are just against fat people and want to get rid of them. They equal losing weight to genocide. They also believe there is a big conspiracy against fat people in the medical and clothing industry and in general because they often can't fit into chairs with arms. So instead of knowledging they have a weight problem, they would rather blame it on others instead.

They also are against obesity being a disease. Well what if there was an anorexic movement and tried to say anorexia is not an illness and say anorexia is a slur and that the industry hates skinny people because lot of things are too big for them. I have visited pro ana stuff and it's not the same as HAES, it's just people with the illness telling others how to stay sick and how to burn some extra calories and how to manipulate people that they are not sick. Lot of pro ana sites have been shut down but not HAES sites. I see them just as harmful.

I would be mad as a parent if my daughter decided to put on 100 lbs and then was all about "accept me, there is nothing wrong with my size, you just hate me because I am fat" because she fell for that stuff online. I think teens are the most vulnerable to it. But that is what they are taught to think. If someone is concerned, they are just fat shaming you and it's just a guise they are using or if someone isn't happy with you over eating and putting on lot of weight, they just hate you as a person and hate fat people. But that is what the HAES community teaches. To me it's manipulation and gas lighting they are teaching them to do.

But are they really overweight? Why do they think they are too fat? Is it due to manipulated photos that make bodies look perfect and free of any body flaws and making them look thinner?

This is something we should be teaching to our kids and I also think photos need to stop being photo shopped to make bodies look perfect. I used to hate my stretch marks and cellulite and some loose skin I had when I was a teen. For a while I just thought I was too fat but it never occurred to me I just needed to tone my body and actually exercise and lack of food was not going to fix my body. Like do cardio, do some lifting with dumbells, do some crunches and lunges. Also healthy diet is important too. Instead of thinking about weight, I think about health and about aging well and only way to age well is to health healthy and exercise and drink plenty of water and wear sun screen 365 days of the year and moisturize.

According to objectification theory women are objectified by men (and other women) and the objectification standards are set by the media and popular culture. You can't stop girls from being dissatisfied with not meeting these standards no more than you can stop anyone from being dissatisfied with how much money they have. As for women their literal appearance is perceived to be associated (rightly or wrongly) with their worth/value to society,

I don't think that's necessarily the case. Humans find healthy humans attractive and the media plays little role in what people find attractive, rather they just appease pre-existing notions of attractiveness.

If you were to shove 300 pound women on the front cover of men's magazines, porn, movies and on the cat walk, the vast majority of men will never find them attractive regardless of how many decades it goes on for for the simple reason they're unhealthy and human nature says no.

Many thousands of years in the past morbidly obese women once upon a time were found attractive but only because being morbidly obese back then meant someone was loaded with an obscene amount of money. It was the wealth and not the body that was doing to talking back then.

Ah, accused.
That was probably seeded by the UK gutter press, swinging between trying to make Kate another "damaged Diana" figure - and holding her up as a saint to shame Meghan, depending on what someone thinks will sell the paper.
I suspect it's all crap.

To some people it wouldn't mean anything, but to some others, it would. If you feel judged everywhere you go for one reason or the other, and then suddenly find a place where you don't feel judged, being in that place will feel really good. Yes, there's nothing concrete that you can take a photo of, show it and say "this is what I got", but the feeling will be there. It's like with insults vs. physical violence. One could say about insults that they don't mean anything when you don't have any physical proof of harm to show, while with violence, you would have something to show. But even show, insults can cut really deep, even though there's no solid way to prove that.

Well it seems to me that more girls are becoming part of this acceptance movement compared to guys. But why is that? Are girls more shamed for it comparison?

But what I don't understand is why girls think it's worth the pay off. Here are the two pays offs, one for keeping your weight down and one for choosing to just let yourself go:

1. More job options and more love interest options.

2. Getting to tell people that they are judging you but you won't have it because you are proud of who you are. But still less job options and love interest options as a result.

Why would anyone want to pick gaining more weight and option 2?

What is healthy is lean/fit bodies and symmetrical faces. There's actually thousands of scientific papers that support the role of the media in social learning leading to internalisation of norms around thinness. If you map the incidence of eating disorders in young girls and the popularisation of catwalk modelling you'll find numbers skyrocketed in the 1960s



As recently as the Victorian era in Britain

Kate's behaviour shows some similar patterns to somebody with an eating disorder but unlike Diana she's never going to be open about her personal struggles. Kate tows the line with the Royal protocols.

It's more socially acceptable by men to be overweight than it is for women. Men don't care much about appearance as women do. Weight is associated with beauty and women are expected to be good looking and attractive.



I never understood the whole weight gain thing unless they were already underweight to begin with. Some people have a fat fetish so they get turned on being overweight. Some have been fat their whole lives so they don't know any different and they may feel their fatness is part of their identity.

Some have tried for years to lose weight only to gain it all back so they decide to just accept it.

Fat acceptance is so convinced they can change science and change society but I know that will never happen unless fat people decide to start opening their own businesses to cater to the plus size over size 20W and 3XL and start opening their own companies to make their own bariatric furniture to sell. Other businesses would never do that because not enough people are that heavy to begin with, it's supply and demand and capitalism. Of course hospitals will cater to them because they are medical so I see seats without arms and see wide seats with arms. If I saw a fat person like 400 lbs and they needed the seat I am in and it's the only seat there is for them, I would give it up for them and move to another seat for my size.

It's so much easier to be the victim here than to make permanent changes to their eating and lifestyle. You don't just lose weight and resume back to your old diet or else the weight will come back on.

Also there is a thing in fat acceptance telling you to eat anything you want so people have actually put on weight after joining the community because they are being told to binge eat and eat anything you want, don't restrict it. They are also being told if you feel like eating, that is your body telling you it needs food. So these people end up putting on weight and think this is what they have to accept and fight diet culture. And some of these people had anorexia and then they end up replacing it with another eating disorder. It's like when a addict replaces their drug addiction with another addiction so they start drinking and no longer do drugs and say they are recovered. That is what these girls are doing here, saying they are recovered from an ED when in fact they are not. They had replaced their ED with another ED. So do them being overweight is a success to them if they had anorexia or atypical anorexia. This is why I find the movement so toxic and I pity anyone who falls for their propaganda. Some of them are even therapists spreading it which is even worse. If my therapist was a HAES person, I would drop them like a hot potato because I would be questioning their intelligence and common sense, if they are dumb enough to believe this crap, what other crap do they believe in? I will even question their ability to do their job as a therapist if they defy science.

All of which you have said is well articulated.

Keep in mind that many people who are overweight do face various forms of social barriers and so find these types of movements beneficial to the self-esteem and self-worth.

I heard that in a song lyric that stuck with me that people often don't know what they are worth. The fat acceptance movement has good intentions, that is, to help overweight people believe they have self-worth and not derided simply because they look aesthetically unappealing.

Where the movement lacks nuance is their inability to channel their influence to motivating people who are "fat" to take positive steps to control their weight instead of reacting to the mainstream media and attacking normal bodies in the public gaze.

Many of those leading the fat acceptance movement are likely themselves food addicts and may/may not be aware their brains are conditioned to craving unhealthy types and amounts of food. For this reason I don't think its necessary to be too harsh on these people, They will learn the hard truth when they need to visit their doctor.