The Atheist
The Grammar Tyrant
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The stupid explodes: obesity now a disability
- Thread starter The Atheist
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You're right I jumped to that false conclusion based on your consistent fat shaming throughout. I apologise.
So should an overweight person be compelled to have a medical procedure which has a significant risk of death in order to continue to receive their benefits ?
Nihilianth
Illuminator
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You're talking extremes here (I know the subject of this thread is about extremely obese people to the point where they can hardly help themselves do normal activity.)
It isn't true that only fat people tend to have denser bones. Athletes tend to have denser bones than anyone else as well. Your average NFL football player puts "normal bodies" to shame. Part of it is due to proper nutrition, and excellent exercise of course. Something that virtually everybody can do to improve, not just their bone density, but their overall health. The individual person who becomes an NFL star, is so because their body is entirely different in many different ways from most other people to begin with. As is their brain activity.
Yes, fat people can have a larger lung capacity than most other people. But the size of their lung capacity is not in proportion to most other people. Michael Phelps naturally has a much greater lung capacity, in proportion to his body, than just about anyone else on the planet. Yes, he has trained himself to increase his lung capacity and endurance. Anyone can improve their own lung capacity and endurance. But very few people would ever be able to attain what Michael Phelps has. Because again, his body functions differently, more efficiently, than most other people.
Nihilianth
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That doesn't change the fact that is it HARDER to lose weight than to gain it for an awful lot of people!
Do we then have a duty, as a society, to make it harder for them to stay fat?
Guybrush Threepwood
Trainee Pirate
Johann Hari (for those unfamiliar, he's a lying plagiarist.) and the Daily Mirror, you do love your reliable cites don't you?
To be fair the Hari article was interesting, I'd have preferred something by a trustworthy author in a less golly gosh tone though.
On the obesity-as-an-addiction front, do fat people generally want to lose weight, or are they happy being whatever size they are? I ask because addicts may prefer to be addicted - so long as things don't get out of hand. But I don't know how it is with the obese.
I followed that link. Given her obesity, she probably isn't faking her inability to do various simple tasks. In effect she has restricted her freedom pretty effectively*, so I'd guess that she has underlying psychological problems, as it isn't normal to want to be disabled just to get minimal benefits.
blutoski
Penultimate Amazing
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There have been surveys that indicate almost all persons with obesity not only want to lose weight, but value this very highly.
Rudd Institute did a survey in 2006 with the following "personal trade off items"
- 18% would rather give up 10 years of their lives than be obese
- 36% would rather be divorced than be obese
- 27% would rather be infertile than be obese
- 21% would rather be severely depressed than be obese
- 20% would rather be an alcoholic than be obese
- 7% would rather lose a limb than be obese
- 5% would rather be blind than be obese
The link I had is botched, because the survey was published in the journal Obesity, which has undergone ownership changes since 2006 and moved under the Nature family of websites, and I can't identify the original article.
This is a different article in Obesity from 2012 with similar survey questions that more directly addresses your questions: [The Influence of One's Own Body Weight on Implicit and Explicit Anti-fat Bias]. Relevant excerpt: "In each case, thinner people were more willing to sacrifice aspects of their health or life circumstances than were heavier people."
The percentages you list argue the opposite of your first sentence, since in all cases, a higher percentage prefer to be obese than suffer any of those other conditions.
Exactly. Employment is valued less by you than sight. And for most people (according to those numbers) most would not do those things - preferring to remain obese instead.
For example, if 20% would rather be an alcoholic than obese, it means 80% prefer to be obese over alcoholism. What would make the point is if large majority (see what I did there?) preferred something distasteful over obesity. But those numbers don't show that at all.
All I need to do to construct a similar table is to find a list of bad outcomes and get choosy with what I share.
where does that contradict Blutoski's statement that
Not that it was the most highly rated factor but surprisingly highly valued.
blutoski
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No, it doesn't. There is no mechanism for making these tradeoffs in the real world. I cannot exchange divorce for obesity in any market. This type of survey is showing something different: it's showing the degree of negative impact obesity is having on their lives, and how much concomitant effort they would be willing to invest in mitigating it.
The problem these people face is in knowledge about how to balance personal discomfort with long term goals. The decisions they make are short-term rational, with counterproductive long-term effects.
The important takeaway is that people have not become lazier or more gluttonous or have less willpower over the last 3 generations. We're the same people we were before. Character weakness is not a credible explanation for the increase in obesity.
What has changed is the environment; people are acting quite rationally in a commercial environment that is trying very hard to get us to eat more, because it is profitable. Food producers invest a great deal of money deliberately confusing people about what a healthy level of eating and physical activity should be, and people are generally trying to do the right thing.
I've even seen myths in this thread from people who claim to be doing the right thing to achieve their relatively healthy body fat percentages. This strongly suggests they're taking credit for their biopredisposition.
A specific myth is that exercise is a reliable way to reduce obesity - all the research shows this is not true. (The expression in the profession is: "You can't outrun a fork")
I could make a list of weight loss myths that are 'common knowledge' but completely contrary to the scientific literature, if anybody's interested (maybe I could do it as surveys?)
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Guybrush Threepwood
Trainee Pirate
I would certainly be interested.
You can out run a fork but it is impractical for most people.
Ranulph Fiennes managed to lose about 7 stone whilst eating as much food as he could (about 8000 Calories a day IIRC)
But he was crossing the Antarctic unsupported
Ranulph Fiennes managed to lose about 7 stone whilst eating as much food as he could (about 8000 Calories a day IIRC)
But he was crossing the Antarctic unsupported
Right there. If you say "almost all" you need to give percentages that show a clear (even overwhelming majority), not a minority which prefers the bad thing over being fat.
ETA: Something like: "92% of obese people say they'd rather strangle kittens for a living than be fat."
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blutoski
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It's my fault for not supporting that introductory passage with statistics. The question of whether they wanted to lose weight was a yes/no and it was over 99%. It's relatively rare to meet an obese person who is uninterested in losing weight. That fraction is real, of course, and we've already discussed that this is a major problem with HAES.
The "personal trade off items" element of the survey was attempting to determine how highly obesity ranked in a person's life in a gradient rather than a binary fashion, by comparing it to other negative life experiences. I wouldn't have chosen all of those personal trade off items if I had done the survey. I would have looked more to LEDS or SEPRATE since they qualify 'reasons' the life experiences are negative. But what's done is done, and I was hoping to answer the poster's question with the closest applicable research.
I was being a stats pedant, that's all.
But it looks like you've answered my question about whether or not people want to be fat. Plainly, they don't want to be.
Which brings me back to this part: Do we, as a society, then have a duty to help them achieve a better state, a state they say they want, and to help them quit harming themselves?
We could do it without necessarily withholding benefits or treatment, but in the game of "harder" there are two dials to tweak - make the thing you want to happen "easier" or make the thing you don't want (obesity) harder than it is now.