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.
On second thought, I shan’t got to the comments section. T’is a silly place.
Really putting that tolerant left on display lol
This actually makes me sick. People on average are fatter than they used to be AND THAT’S NOT A GOOD THING! Do people really want to let the corpos win by shoveling slop in our mouths without care to the effects on our health?
I get that it’s hard to lose weight, and not feasible for everyone atm, but it’s not something to celebrate.
Pride is for people who were routinely ostracized, beaten, disowned, and murdered because they were different in a way they couldn’t change.
Being overweight is something you can change.
Being fat has always been accepted. It’s just not celebrated, because it’s not healthy, indicates that you don’t take care of your body, and/or you don’t have control over your eating habits. There are rare circumstances when weight is influenced by a medical condition, but generally it’s people eating too much and not moving enough. Being fat is looked down on the same way as being un-showered, wearing dirty torn clothes, or smelling bad. It’s not the person, but the way this person presents themselves, and it can be changed. It’s like if a guy wears offensive slogan t-shirts every day, and gets upset when people aren’t especially nice to him. It’s your own doing, my guy.
Were you kicked out of your family because you’re fat? Were you fired from your job because you were fat? Were you denied healthcare because you were fat? When was the last time someone targeted fat people for a mass shooting?
Fat acceptance is just an attempt at finding victim hood within habitual self-flagellation.
But also, I’ve never fat shamed anyone, I’ve never picked on someone because of their weight, or “judged” them. People who do that are assholes. I’m just upset that pride is being routinely co-opted by other movements like furries, fat acceptance, and all this other nonsense that, again, nobody was ever actually hurt over. I’m sorry you feel judged at the beach, but gay people are routinely murdered because they’re gay and pride is a protest.
You’re gatekeeping the word pride, lol. Try just not being a dick.
John Stuart called it in 2004.
He styles his name as Jon Stewart, unless that’s a picture of a book by the 17th century English philosopher John Stuart Mill.
People in this comment section being shining examples of why some fat people would feel uncomfortable at the beach.
Too many of them think protecting these folks from bullying and harassment on one beach for one day is some kind of threat to civilization. Typical moral panic.
Too many of them think that you can bully a fat person into losing weight.
They’re all completely in control of their weight, and clearly waiting for just the right arrogant condemnation to make a change. /s
Definitely not an environmental problem at all.
Fat-shaming is definitely an issue across the political spectrum, unfortunately.
May well be, but I saw comments like “This is how the left loses voters”, and generally the pointless mean-spirited bigotry does come from the right
This users left Reddit but Reddit never left the users.
Is normalizing obesity really a good thing?
No, but neither is body shaming, and fat people get a lot of that at a beach.
Yup. They just want a single day to enjoy the beach and feel safe and not be judged.
The internet loses its damned mind
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.
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.
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.
You can eat much more cheaply if you spend a little bit of time cooking.
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.
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
You’re always going to be judged. If you base your own happiness on the collective opinion of society about you, you will never be happy. You can’t control how other people feel, so you need to focus your mental energy on controlling your own feelings.
Sure, but that doesn’t address harassment and bullying. If you think they just “need a thicker skin” you haven’t been bullied in any meaningful way by a large group of hostile people.
I don’t really want to get into it, but, we have campaigns that actively target people who smoke and/or drink. Two other things that people can indulge in that can and will eventually lead to negative health effects and kill you, much like overeating will.
Again, that is not attacking the problem at the source. Unlike smoking and drinking, you have to eat to survive. And corporations have taken that necessity and twisted it so that people are not making healthy choices.
And there is still the problem of having the energy to cook when you’re a wage slave.
No amount of “stop overeating and exercise” campaigns can solve those issues. You have to attack them at the source.
Unlike smoking and drinking, you have to eat to survive.
Except you don’t need to stress eat or eat when you’re bored. At some point you’re eating over the calories required just for living. To act like what you’re eating is the only problem is disingenuous.
More often its why your eating and how much.
Stress eating is a much smaller problem compared to the issues I was discussing- companies using science to make processed food very difficult to resist and many people finding it hard to get the energy- both physical and mental- to cook in this modern oligarchical world.
Also, if fat people are stress eating, body shaming them would make that worse. And my original point was about body shaming.
Exactly. We don’t need to bully anyone smokers or fat people, but normalizing and “accepting” either is not an option. These people aren’t just killing themselves, they are also heavily impacting our healthcare system.
For the afflicted? No.
For us as a species? No.
For capitalism? God yes.
Thin people consume the least. Once we stop growing we stop needing new clothes. Obesity changes this. Clothes wear out faster, you need new sizes. Obesity leads to depressive states where people buy more to feel better. Speaking of more: eat more! Have some sweets to feel better!
Be bold. Be beautiful. Be you (for us!)
Clothing stores and food chains done with you? Guess you are broken now…
Welcome to the medical system you will now need to rely on to function and stay alive! Till death do we part.
Obesity is an epidemic and it’s too profitable to actually do anything about. They don’t care about you, your feelings, or your health. You are literally livestock to these corporations that you think are caudling you and your way of life. This is a wake up call.
Obesity is difficult to conquer. It requires change and persistence. It requires support. Not everyone can achieve a ‘healthy ideal’ but everyone can do better.
I have a family member with Hashimoto’s disease. Hormone treatment, regular exercise, and a healthy diet keep her as healthy as she can be, but still very obese.
Some people have no control over their weight. Is it fair that they are criticized for having a medical issue? Are you going to ask someone why they’re overweight before judging them?
You’re right there are so many things that are not in control and it’s not easy. It might not just be a thyroid issue that is causing it, but it doesn’t help matters any. Many people have hashimoto’s and are thin.
Does Hashimoto’s disease actually cause obesity? Feels like a lot of people blame thyroid diseases for issues that are actually mostly under their control.
In the grand scheme of things, weight is a physics problem. I seriously doubt that outside of extreme cases that someone would be obese solely from hyperthyroidism.
Hashimoto’s disease is a form of hypothyroidism. Hyperthyroidism is an overactive thyroid.
No, it doesn’t always result in substantial weight gain. Eating less results in rapid energy decrease. Consistently fighting through that exhausting exercise still hasn’t resulted in weight loss for her.
She’s gone to several endocrinologists and nutritionists seeking answers. She was also on dexadrine at three years old, because doctors were medicating energetic children in the 90s. She’s been given plenty of advice and speculation, but still hasn’t received a definitive answer to the problem.
The details of the problem don’t change my point though. Someone could be doing everything they can to address the issue, and will be judged just the same. It’s all the more reason that we shouldn’t criticize others for their weight.
Yes it is, because quite a few people are obese, and they deserve to feel normal too.
C’mon 😹. Sorry about this… 4 people rescued several people who apparently beached themselves. Fortunately they all survived and happily swam into the open ocean.
Sigh, way too much to unpack here
We should try socialism. Then we wouldn’t have any fat people since there wouldn’t be any fucking food for anyone. Am I doing this right?
Ah yes all the European countries are starving
Compared to America, Europe might look socialist. I assure you it’s not.
Far more than the US in every way
Please note that nowhere have I pointed out or implied Europe lol
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You voting for beach days?
Don’t tell idaho, their bars will have a “Super awesome straight skinny guy beach days” every Saturday…
“I was going to vote for Democrats this year, but then I heard that one of the eight public beaches in New York City had one day a year for fat people and now I’m MAGA all the way!”
Lol yeah idk what the hell they’re on about.
Oh come on, stop it with this perpetual culture war.
