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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

The body positivity movement when it was more about people not being ashamed for having conditions (amputations, eczema, vitiligo, etc.) was a good movement. It was about accepting people for their body that they had no control of. It was a bit tumblr-y but it had its heart in the right place at the start. It was kind of hijacked by these fat activists that wanted to convince people that being 400 pounds was not just okay, it was good. Then social graces forced people to go along nod politely despite everyone disagreeing.

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This is precisely how I felt. Being obese is not, nor ever, ok. The body positive movement around obesity should have been to help people to 1) nto feel ashamed at being obese, but also 2) to reduce the negativity around it and turn that into positive reinforcement for healthy eating. Instead it became a dogmatic, self righteous movement of encouragement to continue to live that way because others judged it negatively.

No one should be harassed or made to feel bad by the way they look, but at the same time, it's not wrong to want others to be healthy.

I mean… I’d very much push back here.

GLP-1 drugs have basically thrown out the idiotic idea that people were fat because they were sloths or gluttons. Our genetic and epigenetic predispositions very obviously played a huge role in whether on not people became obese. Body positivity was a reasonable coping mechanism for folks who drew the short straw at birth or in youth, and would never be able to have the beauty our society holds above almost everything.

Not we have a drug that fixes these predispositions. Yay! It’s basically the equivalent of “teeth positivity” going away after the advent of braces. The point was about helping people cope in an uncaring world… and then there not needing a coping mechanism after the problem people were coping with gets solved.

I realize this is a nuanced discussion, but could you clarify the predispositions you're referring to? I'm asking because there are people who blame obesity on a predisposition to hunger (obese people have a stronger hunger drive than thin people) but also people who blame it on a predisposition to weight gain, meaning that obese people can eat the same amount of food as thin people and still be obese. Are you saying GLP-1 drugs have refuted the idea of the latter?

I'm actually saying quite the opposite. That GLP-1 drugs have refuted the idea that people do not have built in biological mechanism that make them obese, whether or not that's on the hunger side (say, ghrelin) or on the amount of stored energy per calorie (say, metabolism, gut microbiome, etc).

My hypothesis is that GLP-1 drugs are basically counteracting the effects of various chemicals interfering with the natural processes of our endocrine system. I think something (microplastics, chemicals in the water, hormones, ultraprocessed food, etc) is interfering with how GLP-1 is interacting with our body in the first place. So the GLP-1 Drugs is helping bring this back to normal. I think different people due to genetic differences are affected by these environmental factors differently, that's why two people can both eat the same food and one is still starving and one is full.

Always struck me as odd. We would not encourage an alcoholism positivity movement.

> We would not encourage an alcoholism positivity movement.

Sure we would. James Bond movies? Frat parties?

Maybe Bond, he's a casual day drinker which aligns with alcoholism. The frat thing is more about binge drinking than alcoholism, which is not exactly the same thing. Binge drinking can cause alcoholism in the long run, but is inherently problematic even if it doesn't reach the point of developing a physical dependence.

To some extent American culture does glorify binge drinking, but I don't think the same is true of alcoholism. People brag about how much they drank at the party last night, but they feel shame about starting the morning with a few drinks.

Can you clarify which description of body positivity struck you as odd?

I’m fairly certain that the “odd” behaviour is that of the extremists who hijacked the original concept to promote the idea that being fat is good.

I’d consider calling it “odd” to be an understatement. I always thought such extreme positions were a bizarre denial of the negative impacts that obesity can have on personal well-being and quality of life. Having said that, I only ever encountered such views on the Internet; never in real life.

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