It occurred to me to write this article because ’tis the season where we celebrate refined carbohydrates and overeating. Holiday eating automatically means a table filled with sugary treats. Here’s another well-known fact: Here in the U.S. more than 70% of us are overweight or obese.

The thought of holiday sweets automatically puts me in defensive mode.  I’ve substantially modified my eating and exercise routines several times during my life. I’ve once lost more than 30 pounds and I’ve lost more than 20 pounds twice. I know from experience that I need to consciously watch what I eat, make myself get on the scale several times each week and force myself to exercise. If I don’t do these things, I inevitably gain at least 2 or 3 pounds each month. Over the course of 12 months, that can add up to more than 30 pounds. My personal struggles and hard-won successes probably explain my lack of patience with the common claim that being obese is something over which they have no control.  Or the claim that obesity is something that can be healthy or even admirable. I bristle when I hear people accuse me of “fat shaming” when my careful words and motives focus purely on health issues faced by obese people.

I’ve followed the writings of British writer Helen Pluckrose on many topics, including weight loss and “fat shaming.” I follow her on Twitter and really enjoy her matter-of-fact upbeat attitude. Pluckrose currently describes herself as obese and indicates on Twitter that she is working on losing weight. In the attached 2019 article, “Big Fat Lies: The Fat Activism Movement is Risking Lives by Suppressing Obesity Research,” she offers the facts first, then her opinions, regarding obesity and accusations of fat-shaming. For starters, according to WHO, most of the world’s population “lives in countries where an excess of weight now kills more people than being underweight.”

The accusation of “fat shaming” often begins with the false claim that overeating has little to do with obesity.  Pluckrose does not buy this attempt to portray obesity as an immutable characteristic:

There are certainly plenty of people who insist they eat very little and yet are heavily overweight, but it’s hard not to notice that in regions where people genuinely don’t have enough to eat, none of them are obese.  Similarly, people who tell us they are obese because of their genes do not seem to have answers for where all these obese genes suddenly came from as our grandparents’ generation did not have the same problem

Activists, many of them steeped in postmodernist thought, work hard to ignore that there are many legitimate health reasons to speak up about the dangers of obesity:

There is a genuine need for activism and advocacy for the obese because obesity is an extremely dangerous health condition. Even when we know this, it can be difficult to take control of it for all kinds of reasons, many of them psychological. Nevertheless, we recognise eating disorders which cause people to become dangerously underweight as a psychological problem requiring treatment; we should be able to address beliefs and behaviours leading to becoming dangerously overweight in the same way.

Fat activists and scholars hinder this by insisting that any failure to validate obese people’s weight problem as healthy and beautiful is a form of bigotry. They accomplish this by putting obesity into the category of immutable characteristics such as race, sex or sexuality rather than where it belongs alongside smoking, alcoholism or anorexia as a problem people may require sympathetic, expert support to overcome. This is alarming because in the case of race, gender or sexuality, it is both reasonable and ethical to tell people, “There is nothing wrong with you. The problem lies with society’s failure to accept you”, but in the case of obesity, thinking this way can be a comforting self-deception to which many who find weight-loss very difficult may be tempted to subscribe.

The CDC lists the following dangers of being overweight (this is a partial list):

• High blood pressure (Hypertension)
• High LDL cholesterol, low HDL cholesterol, or high levels of triglycerides (Dyslipidemia)
• Type 2 diabetes
• Coronary heart disease
• Stroke
• Gallbladder disease
• Osteoarthritis (a breakdown of cartilage and bone within a joint)
• Sleep apnea and breathing problems
• Many types of cancer

I once read a book called “Diets Don’t Work” and some of its suggestions helped me in my successful weight losses.  The author claimed that the best way to cause people to gain weight was to put them on diets. There is reason to believe that this often happens. On the other hand, if diets never worked, l’d be carrying a lot more weight than I do right now. This is true of millions of other people too, and there are healthy ways to lose weight. And what kind of a wacky strategy is “stop trying?”  In her article, Pluckrose addresses the frustration of dieting, indicating that not all diets are created equal:

Another miscategorisation of the problem lies in the claim that “diets do not work”. The Fat Studies Reader is yet again, guilty here. The claim that “diets don’t work” relies upon “diet” being defined narrowly as a short-term weight-loss programme which, by definition, cannot and does not work long-term rather than broadly as “what one eats”, the management of which is the only thing that does work. Defining diets in this short-term way to claim that they don’t work makes as much sense as claiming that cleaning your house does not work because all the dirt comes back again when you stop doing it. Or as claiming that brushing your teeth does not work because they all fell out even though you cleaned them for a fortnight in 1987.

The claim that the majority of people who diet fail to maintain a healthy weight and so dieting is pointless completely ignores the billions of people who maintain a healthy weight by consciously or intuitively managing their diet.

If you enjoy these excerpts by Helen Pluckrose, I invite you to check out the full article in The Critic.