I personally think its stupid. Accepting being fat would be like accepting being anorexic, because they are equally unhealthy.

Original Post by swimchick_123:

I personally think its stupid. Accepting being fat would be like accepting being anorexic, because they are equally unhealthy.

I kind of thought the name to be inaccurate because it's not really that they're promoting fatness, but rather a healthy lifestyle at all sizes and shapes.

The problem is that not all sizes and shapes are healthy.  There is overwhelming medical evidence that obesity is very unhealthy.  I am a firm believer in treating everyone with respect, but pretending that obesity is healthy is a really bad idea.

The problem about those topics is - it won't work. Accepting something that isn't common never worked in history and especially won't work when it's about unhealthy things. It might be possible to accept someone for his personality but not for his unhealthy bodyshape. That is like trying to accept drugabuse.

And the two groups - skinny and fat people, will never come on one path since both argument with them being "at least not a ..." (put in "skeleton" or "whale"), people with a healthy weight will always be seeing only "he's fat" or "he's skinny", because that is true compared to them.

If tomorrow people with green hair would be walking around because they drank too much orangejuice and it would be well known that this is unhealthy, they would try to find acceptance too and it would fail in the same way.

Let's promote SELF-acceptance. Kinda hard to make meaningful change if you buy into the gluttonous lazy whale propaganda, you know? If you accept yourself as a valuable, strong, amazing person you'll be more likely to be a sucess in all arenas.

Original Post by clharr:

The problem is that not all sizes and shapes are healthy. There is overwhelming medical evidence that obesity is very unhealthy. I am a firm believer in treating everyone with respect, but pretending that obesity is healthy is a really bad idea.

Agreed.

Original Post by noelle31:

Let's promote SELF-acceptance. Kinda hard to make meaningful change if you buy into the gluttonous lazy whale propaganda, you know? If you accept yourself as a valuable, strong, amazing person you'll be more likely to be a sucess in all arenas.

The problem is that accepting yourself when you have a medical problem isn't a good thing. You should accept that you need to change to have a healthy life.

Original Post by alibuch:

Accepting something that isn't common never worked in history

I'd say obesity is running rampant... It IS common.

That's what I was thinking.

I agree with the concept that you should except everyone for the way they are and to be happy with the way they are. Though, I also agree with the doctors you can be fat and happy, but you need to be healthy.

Cholesterol and blood pressure isn't everything. BMI is a part, and I don't think they mentioned that.

Anywho, that argument was very pushy and the doctors aren't being supportive of anorexia at all, just supportive of a healthy lifestyle. Just because she couldn't maintain 125 didn't mean she couldn't maintain 130, 135, 140, etc.

Original Post by alibsam:

Accepting something that isn't common never worked in history

I'd say obesity is running rampant... It IS common.

Can't agree. I see various chubby people but really FAT people? Real obesity? No. If every third person crossing my way would be obesed I would call it common but that isn't the case.

Chubby is what a doctor would call obese.  And it is enough to greatly increase the odds of having all kinds of serious problems starting around your 50s.  What you are thinking of is called 'morbidly obese', and that can cause problems much earlier.  But studies have found that about 1/3 adults in the US are at least obese, closer to 1/2 in some states.

Original Post by alibsam:

Can't agree. I see various chubby people but really FAT people? Real obesity? No. If every third person crossing my way would be obesed I would call it common but that isn't the case.

Regardless. It's like some 75% of Americans are overweight. I'd say that's a problem.

True - sure I can still say that I don't see that, since I'm not American :)

I would post pictures about my definition of what overweight, chubby, fat and obesed is...but that would be tasteless.

Apparently Australian recently beat America at being fat, so I would assume the problem is prevalent there as well.

Well I guess it really depends on the um...space a country has. Australia, as it was used as an example above me, just has really less people for so much space and I don't see that much obesed people there, probably because of that.

I'm in germany atm and the interesting part here is, that more men than women are obesed. It's the opposite in the US as much as I know.

Well anyway, I believe with no doubt that in (a lot) of countries the obesityrates are high but really SEEING seriously obesed people on street, seems to be an american thing. I never saw somebody using a scooter to get around anywhere else but in the US, but I realized that countries with a lot of space have a higher percentage of fat people - probably through the fact that you can't reach places without a car so easily.

But well the point of the video was the acceptance of fat people, and I still don't see the use in that...

sorry for rambling