About Giving Advice to Fat People

For the past ten years I’ve been starving my body in order to maintain my body at a normal wight, but most of my lifetime I’ve been quite fat, so I know a lot about the experience of being fat.

Guessing why fat people are fat is a cultural favorite pastime.  Fat people have to deal with people guessing why they are fat.  We are told to “eat less and exercise more” by people who can’t possible know how much we eat or how much we exercise.  We’re told that no matter what we’re doing - our bodies make it completely obvious that we must not be doing it right.  We  are not doing enough cardio, we are doing too much cardio, resistance training is a must.  We need to cut down on this food or eat more of that food or use this or that new supplement etc.

People are a lot of different sizes for a lot for different reasons. After over 50 years of intense study there is not a single intervention that has been shown to lead to long term weight loss. There is no study that shows that such weight loss would lead to greater health.    

It’s bad enough when people use their limited time on Earth to make random guesses about why fat people are fat, but it’s worse when it comes to “well-meaning”, “concerned” people who think that such “information” constitutes some kind of evidence-based health intervention, and that “evidence based health interventions” are acceptable.

First, they need to take note of the fact that the way that you can identify an evidence-based health intervention is that it is based on evidence, and has something to do with health.  It is not based on somebody’s random guess about why people’s bodies are a certain size and how that size might be manipulated.

Then they need to Butt out.  Giving unsolicited comments or advice to fat people about their bodies is Ignorant, Unkind, and Rude!

So.... potential helpful persons, repeat after me:

"Not My Body, Not My Business"