Health At Every Size: Fat Shaming, Part II

Back to the butcher’s block.  Here’s another gem from the comments section of an HAES/fat debate.

The Post: 

Meghan Heasley

2 Fans

02:31 PM on 06/13/2013

People need to understand that weight is not necessaril a predictor of anything. I am obese, but my numbers for cholesterol, hdls, lds, blood pressure, triglycerides triglycerides and blood sugar are all OPTIMAL. And they have been for quite some time. They are even better than many off my thin counterparts. Yes, being overweight wears on your body, but it is no predictor of behavior. I hace been iverweight since grade scool and I made straight As in college and completed an Honors Thesis. I know thin people who eat just like “fat people,” supposedly do, out of control and full of fat and yet they are thin. Why? Genetics. Everyone us different. Everyone’s body processes food differentky.For some, even a sliver of cake will put weight on, others a whole cake does nothing. Another factor is STRESS and DEPRESSION, which causes people to over eat. And by BULLYING overweight peopke, you are contributing factors. Are you PERFECT in every way? NO. Sostop assuming everyone else has to be.

Fallacy One: I Am America, And So Can You

The general trend that fat is unhealthy doesn’t mean that every fat person is unhealthy.  Moreover, this argument perpetually fails to see the forest for the trees: some people have always been genetically fat, have bodies designed to be that fat, and can maintain that fat even in the absence of poor health.  There were still fatties decades ago, before the Great American Panniculus Explosion.  Those fatties then are the same people who would be fatties now, even with exercise and good diet.  It’s the other two bloated thirds of America that bucks the trend.  This is an ironic oversight, because she brings up genetic makeup as an excuse for being skinny, but misses the corollary that her position on the other end of the bell curve is similarly unrepresentative of the population as a whole.  In short, the fallacy is:

P: I am fat and healthy.
[A: The one data point of my experience is the rule, not the exception.]
SC: Fat must not be correlated with health. (stated in her conclusion, above, as “weight is not necessaril [sic] a predictor of anything.”)

The final step in the leap from her own experience to a global takeaway is insinuated, but not explicit:

C: These other fat people are healthy as well.

Fallacy Two: Implied Helplessness

“Everyone’s body processes food differentky.For some, even a sliver of cake will put weight on, others a whole cake does nothing.”

Even taking as a given that some people are genetically fat, the abdication of responsibility for body condition is misguided.  She’s attempting to minimize her own involvement in her weight by sloughing the blame on genes and food; it isn’t her choice to be fat, it’s that she can only eat a little sliver of cake.  Really, just a little sliver.

P: When I eat just a little sliver of cake, I put weight on.
[A: My body responds to all food like this.]
C: I am genetically fat, and nothing I do can ever make me skinny.

Look, if eating only a little sliver of cake makes you fat, then maybe the solution is to not eat any cake at all.  Oh, it’s delicious?  So it goes.  I have nasty food allergies that arose suddenly in my late 20s.  What I learned from that is that some foods have deleterious effects on my health in any quantity.

I stopped eating them.  It’s more expensive, and it cuts down on a lot of what I used to enjoy.  But I’m healthier.

Your choice.

Fallacy Three: Shifting The Goalpoasts

“I hace been iverweight since grade scool and I made straight As in college and completed an Honors Thesis.”

We’re talking about physical health.  Your college performance, which clearly wasn’t in a writing-heavy discipline, is entirely irrelevant to everything except your own narcissistic compensation.

P: I am getting negative attention for a trait of mine.
P: I have an entirely unrelated positive trait.
[A: These two are interchangeable, subject to offset against each other, and can be used as currency in my scheme of individual worth.]
C: I am worthy of, and shall receive, positive attention.

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