People are trying to make being overweight as something acceptable instead of a condition to be treated.
"Fat acceptance" is actually quite popular. It's not fringe. Fringe is being a furry. The entire medical field walks on egg shells because of so called "fatphobia".
You also say fringe is being a furry as if there are 10 or 20 furries and not millions of them.
A lot of people are angry about the fact that the US spends the most on healthcare, but we don't actually live that long - with the implication that healthcare here in the US is a racket just stealing our money and not helping us.
But, why don't we live very long, compared to other people? A big reason is probably how fat we are, and how little we take care of our bodies. The best health care system in the world won't be able to fix you if you've ignored doctors orders to lose weight for 30 years and then have some health issues associated with that.
So, while people aren't explicitly saying "being fat is great", they are implicitly saying it, by pointing to something other than our own lifestyle choices as to the reason why we have bad health outcomes relative to the amount we spend on healthcare.
And while "just eat less" has an intuitive appeal as a treatment strategy, alas, it's been shown again and again to be a dead end in practice, much as "just don't spend money" or "just do less heroin" don't seem be effective treatments for poverty or addiction. It is sometimes difficult to get over the bias that what seems intuitively effective in theory is not actually so in practice. But, as we're evidence-driven people, we need to look elsewhere.
Surgical interventions, and GLP-1 receptor antagonists work, but they are expensive and there is limited access to them at present.
So, as of today while I agree that it is a condition to be treated, there are no effective treatment options for a population, which is the scope of what this article is talking about. Thus the situation we're in.
Not to mention that people confuse health standards and beauty standards. Being a little rounded is of no health risk. And you can be very overweight (like a sumo wrestler) and very fit at the same time if you are both exercising and eating in excess.
There’s an interesting article I read a while back where a woman (who was heavy in part due to muscle mass but also body fat) went to a personal trainer to improve her cycling performance. She had just cycled from SF to LA. Even though the trainer was a professional, certified and likely had a degree, he could not mentally shift from the idea that she was there just to lose weight.
To be fair, carrying less weight will make your cycling performance improve. But from what I recall he was running it like a weight loss program and assumed she’d never been in a gym before. She had filled out a form with all of her exercise history and goals. I would have expected him to work up her back squat, weighted lunges, etc. At least as part of the program.
When you’re fat for a long time, you forget what it’s like to be light weight, you forget how easy everything feels. Being fat is like walking around with a two 25 pound dumbbells strapped to your body everywhere you go. My fatter friends complain when we go to a dense concert or festival and I can just turn sideways to slip easily through crowds, leaving them behind. Trivial things like this is what you forget when your body has become too large.
Not that I think it’s the ideal. But it supposedly did cause a reduction in BMI. And many of those called out said they appreciated the pressure.