According to a new study, overweight Americans are giving up on the idea of shedding any extra pounds—and fat activists may be part of the reason.
Between 1988 and 2014, researchers tracked how concerned a group of overweight and obese adults were about their size. Over that time, they found a seven percent decline, which could translate to millions of people nationwide. During this time, obesity rates continued to climb.
“Socially accepted normal body weight is shifting toward heavier weight. As more people around us are getting heavier, we simply believe we are fine, and no need to do anything with it,” said the study’s author, Dr. Jian Zhang, a public health researcher at Georgia Southern University. Zhang also notes that doctors are “no longer discussing weight issues with patients.”
Over a third of American adults are obese. Combine that with people who are overweight, and 68.8 percent of Americans aren’t at a healthy weight.
These disturbing conclusions arrive in an era when the fat acceptance movement seeks to assure individuals, mostly women, that their weight or size has nothing to do with their attractiveness or health. One of the prominent chubby faces of the campaign, Lindy West, has written that society shouldn’t “tell fat women to put down the fork.” West ignores evidence showing that weight is directly linked to an individual’s health. instead choosing to favor an overweight woman’s self-esteem.
Other studies have indicated that “women are leading the decline in dieting.” Despite evidence of widespread unhealthiness, polling has found that most Americans don’t think they’re overweight.
The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, founded in 1969, considers itself a “civil rights organization” and is dedicated to helping “build a society in which people of every size are accepted with dignity and equality in all aspects of life.” On the organization’s website, one can find brochures entitled “Travel Tips for People of Size” and “Size Diversity in Higher Education Tool Kit.”
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