Jacob Riis Beach hosts the day of body positivity and fun, in the city at the heart of the fat acceptance movement
Fat Beach Day events are springing up across the US in an effort to fight back against fat-phobia, reclaim safe spaces for the community and honor plus-size culture. Today, one of these celebrations is being held to coincide with Pride month at Jacob Riis Beach in New York, a location deeply ensconced in the city’s activism space.
A lot of people seem to think that you can shame people out of obesity, which is nonsense. We live in a country where processed foods are cheap and easy when people barely have enough time to relax, let alone cook. Those processed foods are also designed by everything from scientists specializing in creating new flavors to psychologists to get people to buy them, so they do. We also live in a country where a lot of people are expected to just sit in a chair for eight hours with maybe a couple of short breaks and a lot of them end up doing regular overtime (and that doesn’t count commuting time, when they are also likely sitting).
Of course there’s an obesity epidemic. Why wouldn’t there be? But shaming people for being fat when they don’t have time to cook or the energy to exercise and are forced to spend large portions of their lives sedentary is not the solution. You need to attack the problem at the source, not the terminus.
That’s also without going into how shaming someone can easily send them into a spiral where it’s even harder for them to motivate themselves to improve (this isn’t just regarding fat people, but rather shaming anyone for something that requires lifestyle changes to remedy)
Happy people tend to make less self-destructive life choices
I hate this line. “Processed foods are cheap and easy.”
Theyre easy, but they’re not cheap.
You can eat much more cheaply if you spend a little bit of time cooking. There’s no fast food meal that beats the price of a simple pasta with some chicken, or rice and beans with bacon, or a beef stew. You can get per serving portions of those for less than $2 USD and all of them use meat. You can get vegetarian dishes down to less than a dollar per portion.
None of those require anything more than a single pot and pan, and a half hour of actual cooking.
Besides, the vast majority of obese people are drinking 1000+ calories a day. Thats not about cheap or easy, water is the cheapest and easiest drink available. They just choose not to.
I say this as someone who drinks coke every single day, and has a BMI under 20. Weight is about portion control. Health is about nutritional balance and exercise.
Now, the lack of education around cooking and nutrition, that’s a problem.
I addressed this already. Many people barely have enough time to relax and de-stress from their horrible job possibly plus their horrible commute. Expecting everyone to be able to have the psychological fortitude to take the time to cook a meal regularly is asking a lot of a lot of people. Ingredients for cooking may be cheap. Energy for cooking is not a purchasable commodity.
I’m just arguing that it’s not BOTH cheap and easy. It’s only one of those.
Also, don’t cook every meal. I cook 10 portions at a time for my family every time I make dinner and put leftovers in the fridge (or freezer) which reduces the total time to cook per week quite significantly. It barely takes longer to cook 10 portions compared to 2 portions, which drops the per portion cook time down to single digit minutes.
I’m not someone deep in the throes of poverty, I’m decently middle class and I work an office job but 12 hours of my day is dedicated in service of my job. My alarm goes off at 6 so I get up, washed, and dressed in the morning, leave by 7 for about an hour drive to work, I have an 8 hour work day with an unpaid hour for work, and an hour drive back home which brings me to about 6 pm. I’m already tired from the day and by the time I’ve made dinner, eaten and cleaned up it’s easily close to 8:00. Before I’m too tired to go much further past 9:00 or 10:00.
And before you say, “why not move closer to your job” Gee I wish I thought of that but I live at home with my parents because homeownership is quite a bit beyond my economic ability at the present moment and rent is even more expensive than having a mortgage.
You could probably take a 50% pay cut and still be better off if you took a job that can work from home (or much closer)
You may want to run the actual math and think outside the box for options.
Well said, and thank you. I agree that shaming doesn’t work. Fat people have the unfortunate disadvantage that their personal problem is so visible to others. The social dynamics would radically change if other types of problems were equally visible. Say you have a gambling problem and your skin turns green, or you cheated on your spouse and you grow a third eye on your forehead. Things like that. People love to judge and not be judged.