The bizarre downward spiral of fat acceptance and "Health at Every Size"

if you work out strictly for appearance-based reasons you are fat phobic well all right then hi my name is sydney welcome back to hell and as per usual before we launch in today's video is sponsored by established titles this week i learned there is such a thing as the fatness spectrum where people refer to themselves as mid fat super fat and infini fat okay this is the fatness spectrum a small fat is a size 18 and lower 1x or 2x i'm a 4x5x i'm a size 26 sometimes 28. i am the super fat you say i'm speaking over apparently the spectrum doubles up as a hierarchy you know the bigger you are the more weight your opinions have pun intended the more you know but seriously the fat acceptance health at every size and body positivity phenomenon has grown and changed a lot over a very short period of time we know obesity is on the rise we know people are considerably larger than they were only a couple decades ago and a lot of this has boiled down to an acceptance and normalization of obesity and being generally overweight stop giving your kids weird sugar bowls for breakfast it's not good sport brands make ads featuring significantly overweight women tess holiday paved the way for obese models when she found herself on the cover of cosmopolitan magazine some years ago the write-up in the magazine essentially made the claim that tess's 300 pound or 136 kilo weight still let her be fit and healthy since then we have only seen this trend continue and it's brought us to the undeniable corporatization of the issue companies and brands make it seem as though deeming yourself healthy is enough it's as simple as health gets rather than actually promoting the lifestyle you must lead to actually be healthy i often see people asking what changed to make us as fat as we are now and honestly it's a really good question there was a significant shift in a bunch of different areas that brought us to this point food being one of course but that is a conversation for another day the thing i want to know is how in a quest to make people feel normal no matter their appearance body type or general attractiveness level i guess we've instead arrived at the insane and out of control fat acceptance and body positivity movements we know and love today which funnily enough view any kind of weight loss or dieting as an infraction against fat people that must be stopped so intentional weight loss so you purposely saying i want to lose 20 pounds is fat phobic and you might be like what oh my goodness i'm not trying to be fat phobic but you are you're being fat phobic to yourself why do you want to lose 20 pounds it's probably to fit into something smaller it's probably so people treat you better it's probably for all the reasons that fat folks are shamed simply for being fat no friend it's to avoid heart disease this is gonna be one of those videos isn't it so that's what we're going to talk about today the fat acceptance movement body positivity health at every size we'll do a bit of history a bit of tick tocks a bit of sadness but before you once again board my hell gondola and this video makes you feel like you want to peel your own skin off let's hear from today's sponsor established titles you're a lord harry i'm a what a lord but i can't be a lord i'm just i'm just harry well just harry you are a lord because you now own the square foot of land in scotland thanks to established titles if you care about the nature in scotland or you just want to be able to scream at people i'm a lord then established titles is a hundred percent of interest to you based on a historic scottish custom where land owners are called lairds and ladies established titles lets you buy a square foot of land on one of its private scottish estates you get a fancy certificate with the land's individual plot number and in exchange established titles promises to plant a tree this preserves the scottish woodlands and as you well know the hedwigs and the hairy coos okay i can pretend to be a cow but i will not be dressing up as an owl nobody wants to be just harry hey so don't be be a lord or a lady and plant a tree and save a hereky so if you want to impress the people by having lord or lady on your credit cards plane tickets and dating profiles then click the link in the description and check out established titles take advantage of their memorial day sale but also established titles makes a great last minute gift for father's day coming up when you do and you use my code you'll get 10 off any purchase on the website the body positivity fat acceptance health at every size movement that we know today has not always been in its current radical form it's come so far and become so radical in such a short period of time that it even conflates obesity with racism here's your reminder that fat phobia is rooted in racism because people don't realize that fatphobia is rooted in racism and more specifically anti-blackness from valuing voluptuous figures to valuing slender ones and what i found was that it had everything to do with the growth of the slave trade i hate it here what probably started off as an initiative with reasonably kind-hearted intentions has ended up as a movement dedicated to attacking thinness and ensuring that fat people can never get better and can never leave the colony and it's gotten to the point where fat acceptance people view themselves through the lens of a marginalized group of people who have no control over their own appearance so much so that they have their own fatness spectrum can i just note here that people they don't consider fat are called straight sized which goes all the way up to size 18. my god i'm so sick of mainstream body positivity because most mainstream body positivity is just straight sized people reassuring other straight sized people that they aren't fat there's also a term death fat which is for people who want to reclaim their morbid fatness we are out here celebrating people who are morbidly obese i'm sorry to say but we have more than earned whatever asteroid decides to hit this planet but i digress now where we are and where we started are two radically different things but it does seem like the mechanics that got us here haven't really changed that much over time while the exact origins of health at every size or haze are contested the 1960s appeared to be the first time it was pushed as a concept before this there already existed the fat underground and other organizations they weren't mainstream but they did use many of the talking points we see today from the modern fat acceptance movement we demand good health care i hate it when i go to doctors and they blame all my symptoms on my fat by the time the 1980s rolled around hayes had begun to take off in medical circles the 70s and 80s were a wild ride as far as fitness and diet culture went and the emphasis wasn't necessarily being unhealthy as it was on being thin i feel thin colleen kieselhorst has lost weight on the control diet plan control works and without stimulant it uh helped me eat less so that i lost weight it doesn't make you feel shaky or uncomfortable in any way control capsules contain no stimulant only the strongest most effective appetite suppressant available without prescription and it was customary to own a leotard or you couldn't even get into the gym okay i made that up but seriously many extremely restrictive low calorie diets were born out of this time period the better known of these being the boiled egg or cabbage soup diets but there are plenty more i won't lie this kind of reminds me of the people who think they can survive by only breathing air wow you're looking good what's your diet photosynthesis cabbage consuming under 1200 calories a day of cabbage juice cabbage juice i think it's cabbage juice is not hugely sustainable for your average person but women wanted to be thin it was all the rage and the icons at the time like cindy crawford and madonna exemplified that something i think is worth noting here too is that in the 1980s there was a strong emphasis on not eating fat as a result processed foods became low in fat but that didn't mean the sugar content was lessened as well if anything some reading i did suggested that food companies started adding sugar instead for taste maybe we can correlate this to why so many foods today have so much added sugar which has maybe played a role in exacerbating our current obesity epidemic i don't know why i said maybe it did we're fat because of sugar cane and because nobody wants to go upstairs or go on runs i am always skeptical of runners they're kind of like horse people except they really like their nike shoes and pavement now in 1982 a best-selling book titled diets don't work by bob schwartz was published and rather than promoting restrictive dieting schwartz as well as other doctors and fitness experts started promoting intuitive eating simply much of the focus was on eating when you're hungry eat slowly eat what your body craves and stop when you're full a year after the release of this book in 1983 karen carpenter of the carpenters died of heart failure caused by anorexia although there is speculation she abused other medications to induce vomiting and what have you people were clearly and obviously shocked and it started a public conversation about the effects of extreme dieting and the quest for thinness i think it's also very important to note that the birth of healthy at every size in the 1980s was speaking to a completely different shaped population i mean on the nose of it obesity rates have doubled since the 1980s and your average person is about 20 pounds or 9 kilos heavier than they were back during that time one 2015 study even found that people today are about 10 heavier than people were in the 80s even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans i'm sorry to say that society has made you fat and there's no other option for you except to go and get absorbed by your local gym so a key takeaway is that healthy at every size still meant a smaller size than now i will note again that by the end of the 1980s there were still books being written about fat acceptance and how you can be fat and healthy although like i said these weren't particularly mainstream and they were still at the time quite fringe fast forward about 20 years and tumblr was born it became a safe haven for social justice orientated people and hayes found a home there a year later in 2008 a book was released called health at every size by lindo bacon who identifies as ginger queer and isn't they them i wonder if they they them themselves before or after they became a fat acceptance person this person asks would you be open to talking more about how being fat ties into gender identity the book reignited conversations about weight being the soul marker for health which we'll come back to shortly remember the bacon tumbler for those of you who can remember was a weird place with weird subcultures one of the most destructive however was the pro-self-damage and pro-eating disorder or ed as i'm going to refer to it content a 2012 article noted that these tumblr communities had gotten so bad and so impactful that tumblr itself had to institute a policy against thinspo posts content designed to inspire thin women to be even thinner there's a lot of this online today but on most social media platforms including youtube it's mostly banned which is why i once again have to use weird language to discuss all of this also i realized while i was looking at these pictures i used to do this sort of crap as a teenager and who's to say maybe post edit sydney will show you some of these exceedingly embarrassing pictures greetings children it is me post edit sydney and yeah let's laugh at how i used to look because that's what that's what you guys love doing that anyway okay yeah so here's this and that's that's embarrassing um also really embarrassing i don't know how i draw myself that's confusing uh this one i guess i guess my hand is broken off from my wrist that is horrifying i suppose now i am part of alien so there is that too and you know this last one um this is fun i want to know what this leaf is all about where did where it who who thought this was a good idea i don't know teenagers were weird that's all back to the back to the the video i'm so glad i didn't have social media during this period of my life parents with teenage girls it it gets better i think now something i found really interesting here is that this tumbler policy is still in place however no such policy exists for anybody trying to glorify obesity much like how the emergence of extreme diet culture in the 80s prompted the creation of haze the extreme ed culture in the mid-2000s may have also prompted the development of increasingly radical pro-fat ideologies on tumblr that some people get so infuriated by the okay actually rant in my head about this all the time because i think there's so much politics wrapped up in how people take their coffee and what we say about them and i think a lot of it just comes down to fat phobia and sexism i swear to you these people can make anything into victimhood in a sense there were competing communities of those who were pro-ana and those who were pro-body positivity and the pro-body positivity subculture started to use lindo bacon's ideology as a basis for their own the bacon had said some questionable things already but like at this point i mean i just you know listen which one of these people hasn't fat isn't the problem dieting is the problem a society that rejects anyone whose body shape or size doesn't match an impossible ideal is the problem the bacon outwardly rejected common knowledge such as obesity leading to a shorter life and greater health complications insisting one could even be obese and perfectly healthy okay well this is why i have to navigate people on obesity mobiles in the supermarket all of this set much of the stage for how the body positivity movement in the early 2000s went from being about accepting yourself regardless of conventional attractiveness to actively discouraging people from associating weight with health in any situation and it just got worse from there fast forward about a decade and we birthed to tick tock the new pro social justice social media platform and similar to tumblr it has both a large ed community and a huge fat acceptance community another thing i will add here is that in my travels of tick tock i found that searching for specific kinds of content gave me numbers for the national ed association thank you for thinking of me tik tok that was that was genuinely nice of you you're still demonic however as per usual you can search fat acceptance and other related terms until you're blue in the face which they often are but like i mentioned the fat acceptance community we see today has morphed into something truly breathtaking do not make another joke about being out of breath seriously in addition to centering around the elimination of social stigma and negative attitudes that might be harmful for overweight people the fat acceptance movement has morphed into fat liberation which we will talk about in just a second now parts of this subculture believe that weight loss of any sort is fat phobic the community actively shames you for losing weight take for example the singer lizzo who did a juice cleanse and was aggressively attacked another singer adele lost a lot of weight looks awesome and people attacked her even tess holliday had to note that her attempts at fitness are not to lose weight that she still continues to engage in fat people behavior i don't know if she actually you know used those words or sydney words anyway she said she eats cheetos and i don't know cheaters are gross so there's that but this is not just isolated to celebrities plenty of other fat influencers have noted these things in videos and other content that they've made about the topic and all of this is to appease a community who will abuse you for bettering yourself the community who also believes certifiably untrue things like obesity is mostly genetic which like genes play a role but they don't play the role genetics determine if you're short not rotund they believe eating less and exercising don't work that you can be healthy and fat and we're not just talking about being a little chubby we're talking obesity the idea that fat people are promoting obesity is nonsense i know not everybody can achieve this [Music] soak it in soak it in boys today i'd like to take a moment to glorify obesity oh yes part of the problem here is that we've seen an increase in the amount of brands and companies using genuinely obese models in their advertising campaigns suggesting that this kind of body type is completely natural and completely normal this is such a far cry from curvy models in days gone by who while they weren't you know way thin or certainly not obese or overweight this also feeds into the fatness spectrum that i didn't know existed until recently they're called categories if you will and they determine who sits where on the oppression spectrum if you're a size 18 you're significantly less oppressed than an infinifat and therefore aren't positioned to contradict the opinions of the fatter ups sometimes i feel like i'm living in an amy schumer comedy sketch and they're just waiting to see how far they can push me before i self delete this brings us to fat liberation which is just like i you know that just that in that just that it's arguably the most bizarre part of this whole journey and it's a weird cocktail of social justice and fat acceptance and gender theory and critical race theory fat liberation took fat acceptance one step further which was already an extreme mutation of the 1980s health at every size fat liberation isn't just about destigmatizing fatness and not being mean to people who happen to be overweight but lashing out against the concept of thinness altogether and treating fatness as though it is a discriminated against social class and an immutable characteristic i talk a lot on this page about fat oppression and while the fact that i a fat person am sharing my own lived experience and that should be enough let's bring some research into the mix starting with employment fat people are less likely to get the jobs and promotions they are qualified for and they make less money than their thin counterparts across the board for doing the exact same work fat people are denied health insurance and medical care they frequently experience medical malpractice and medical negligence y'all tells big girls to cover up and wear clothes that fit but then make wearing oversized clothing a fashion trend to where all the larger sizes are being bought out by skinny women but no yelling fat phobic so i just want to be really clear about something i am not interested in soothing your fear of being fat i am interested in creating a world that has no reason to fear fatness i'm interested in seeing fat people treated with dignity and respect i'm interested in seeing fat people gain access to the rights and resources we're currently denied i'm interested in seeing fat people gain full and uninhibited access to healthcare employment travel clothing and more you just you know you have to live a really sheltered life to think that your own choices make you a marginalized group unfricking believable fat liberation essentially sees fatness as a marginalized identity that challenges normativity it wants fat people to be accommodated everywhere no matter their size so when they find uh chairs or plane seats that they cannot fit in that are too small they view that as a systemic discrimination some figures in this part of the subculture also believe that dismantling western civilization will end fat phobia fat phobia as far as these people are concerned is the result of racism and colonialism and really the term fatphobic is levied towards anyone or anything that takes a sense contrary to being obese losing weight is fatphobic exercising is fatphobic drinking coffee is fat phobic you get the picture at the end of the day fat activism and fat acceptance the narratives that surround it are the reason why people feel comfortable pursuing obesity staying obese and seeking to normalize it and i have a huge problem with that and i know i'm not alone not everybody is extremely thin i think we have established that and it's okay to be a person who has a normal kind of body a normal shaped body an average person if you will but trying to say that being extremely overweight is something to emulate something that should be achievable is not for the betterment of our society i'm certain a lot of these people the activists the tick-tockers the bacons want to believe that you can be fat and healthy they want to believe that obesity isn't actually a massive problem they want to believe that they don't actually have to shoulder any responsibility for their physical appearance their health and the way that they're overall perceived by society we are legitimately starting to normalize not curvy bodies but actual obese bodies because it's easier to join a community and a movement that attributes everything to fat phobia and doesn't ever expect you to better yourself that excuses your weight and your appearance and the overall bad habits that you probably have than to push back and fight against the sedentary lifestyles that a lot of us have our processed foods and our overall inability to commit to a healthier lifestyle but you know i'm going to end this video on a positive note because i don't often do that but in this case i do want to say that you don't have to be overweight there's no rule that you have to be fat in the modern era this is i don't know why people act like it's impossible to lose weight but it's not you can take control of your life you can take control of your surroundings you can better yourself you can feel better about everything and all it takes is a little willpower and a little motivation and a lot of you know proper eating but you can do it i believe in you unless of course you're a bacon then probably not now before i open the floor do all of you this is just a reminder that you can check out established titles using the link in the description when you use code sydney you'll get 10 off your entire order and that will be very cool and then you can be like harry potter now open the floor to all of you what do you all think is fat acceptance as corrosive as i think it is do you believe that there is a place and a community for fat people and they should be able to have that do you think that it's right that our society is moving in the direction of being more and more overweight do you think that we need to pump the brakes and stop this is it not good for us what do you make of the history of the fat acceptance and haze movements what do you generally make of this issue overall as always if you liked the video hit subscribe the thumbs up button if you want to leave a comment free to do so just be respectful about it and i will see you guys next time [Music] you

Channel: Sydney Watson

Views: 1,220,770

Keywords:

Id: hwL-8cSiK6Q

Length: 24min 36sec (1476 seconds)

Published: Sun May 29 2022