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We can! But should we?

Being fat is similar to being a drug user. At first, you actually are fat and happy. Over time, being fat will absolutely reduce your happiness from the medical, societal, and physical issues that arise. Similar to how drug users build up a tolerance and instead of using the drug to be happy, they use the drug to feel normal.

And just to state a simple fact, I do not condone shaming people with weight control issues.



I have thought of this before.

But it isn't really the same. Drugs, the really bad ones will probably ruin your life or kill you in the space of two or three years.

Being fat unless it's super super severe often won't start impacting your health seriously until your 30's or 40's.

on the opposite side anorexia will kill you much faster than obesity


At 30, you have more than half your life ahead of you. At 40, you are just about the halfway mark.

That's just the more serious longterm effects. The reversible short term ones are immediate.

I was at a birthday hike for a friend - up a short granite hill for good views, some slow meandering around a lake. Very relaxed stuff. One of her guests couldn't make it up the hill. Full on bawling, had to leave early. This woman could not participate in even a casual hike for a friends party and she clearly wanted to be able to.

I was fat but below the obesity level before I started my whole thing and the first "benefit" I noticed was that I could do any physical activity. I might be bad at it, but I could rock climb, and kayak, and play basketball with people. The "Oh, I can't do that" was simply _gone_.


> on the opposite side anorexia will kill you much faster than obesity

* Anorexia nervosa, about 5.1 deaths per 1000 person-years

* Obesity, about 200 deaths per 1000 person-years.


Some drugs will kill you slowly also. Doesn't mean they're good for you.


Being fat has numerous social penalties. I think they originate from instinctive reactions embedded deep in peoples’ brains, and those reactions are flat-out not going to go away from anything we can do today.


So what about smoking?

It's good that we discourage smoking, even aside from the secondhand smoke component.


Really bad drugs kill through overdose, whether from low quality supply or some users' inability to manage their addiction. I think there are more 'functional addicts' around than most realize. It seems to me that a good comparison to morbid obesity is tobacco smoking; you can keep at that for a long time but the odds of cumulative damage becoming disabling rise inexorably.




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