Health At Every Size? Fat Shaming, Part I

So the latest American Victimhood™ perversion du jour is the demand that the assorted beached whales of modern convenience be taken seriously as an intersectional Othered Out group, whatever the fuck that could possibly mean when the Plus Size Brigade makes up 2/3 of the unwashed masses.

Oh, right.  They mean I’m not allowed to say negative things about them, because Fatties are now a protected class.  Anyway, haven’t you heard that – contrary to what doctors have been telling us for generations – fat isn’t really unhealthy?

The true bottom line is that if fat was healthy, my penis would engorge itself to match the elephants stampeding around my local watering hole, because social standards of beauty reflect biological realities rather than the other way around.  Let’s conveniently ignore that for a minute and simply take a vigorous, heart-rate increasing walk through the carbohydrate-drenched dogshit arguments that HAES proponents love to serve:

Jude Lee
5 hours ago

Why do most of you assume that overweight is unhealthy? That is an ignorant attitude. I’ve been overweight most of my life, but I’ve been healthier than a lot of my skinny friends.

Two big issues with this one.

First, our corpulent commenter is committing a major categorical fallacy here by confusing the issue of her own health with the issue of health across people:

P: I’m fatter than my friends.
P: I’m healthier than my friends.
[A: I can directly compare my health to my friends’ health.]
C: Fat must be healthy.

See the problem?

Correctly identifying obesity as unhealthy (you know, like your doctor keeps telling you) is stating that an individual would be healthier at a lower weight (but not too low, you strawman!) than that individual is as a fatty fat fat.

In other words, Jude Lee, if you lost weight you would be healthier, regardless of your friends’ scale readings or health conditions.  Also, for what it’s worth, your skinny friends would be even unhealthier if they were fatter.  The correlation is between an individual’s weight and health, not between separate people of varying sizes.

Second, this greasy screed dishes up a composition fallacy in using her bloated anecdote to try to disprove data.  Here’s her argument, rendered:

P: My skinny friends are unhealthy
[A: Skinny people I know means skinny people as a whole]
C: Skinny people are less healthy.

Hit the gym, Adipussy.  You’ll see some data points refuting your assumption.

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