Post No.: 0633
Furrywisepuppy says:
‘Body positivity’ appears to be a healthy attitude to take. It’s great for one’s mental health to feel great about one’s body, whatever its size, shape, colour, etc.. We should love all our honest but beautiful imperfections.
…But an arguably even healthier attitude is ‘body neutrality’. Whereas ‘body positive’ is about regarding yourself as physically beautiful no matter how you look – ‘body neutral’ is about focusing on what your body does and can do for you, and regarding your self-worth as dependent on your deeper rather than superficial traits. So feeling body neutral is a different option to feeling body positive or body insecure. How you feel about yourself should have very little/nothing to do with your appearance.
Not basing one’s self-worth on one’s appearance doesn’t mean one cannot comb one’s hair or use makeup, because art is one thing. And it certainly has nothing to do with advocating a lax attitude to cleanliness. Hygiene and vanity aren’t the same things, even though thesauruses frequently conflate them (e.g. ‘neatness’ is sometimes stated as a supposed synonym to ‘cleanliness’). It’s like you can have a clean kitchen but have utensils strewn about, or you can have a tidy kitchen but the utensils haven’t been washed properly at a bacterial level. So having body hair isn’t harmful and isn’t a matter of hygiene; nor are wrinkles or birthmarks. Having a darker or lighter skin colour isn’t a health issue apart from the risk of vitamin D deficiency or sunburn.
So how people look, whether subjectively pretty or ugly, fat or thin, should be completely irrelevant or neutral – the issue is about what people do or how people perform i.e. it’s about health. From a physical health perspective – it’s not about how you look but what your doctor would think of you after a medical checkup. Thus carrying a high body fat percentage would pose a real health risk – but not because of the way it makes an obese person externally appear but because of the effect on their life expectancy. Post No.: 0553 wrote alternatively about the harms of anorexia, bulimia and BED.
Although generally congruent, the way we look and our actual health don’t always correlate. Upon first impressions, most people will judge another person’s health by the way they look on the surface – but it’s an assumption that isn’t always reliable. If sexual selection was perfect when selecting for the best genetic material from mates then human instincts ought to guide a person to prefer someone who is genetically healthy but has an ‘ugly face’ over someone who looks ‘handsome/pretty’ but isn’t actually that healthy (or kind, intelligent…) inside. It’s not to say that we should forsake or look past those who have less-than-optimal health – being body neutral is saying that we should prejudice less by appearances, whether favourably or unfavourably, and to value all human beings as human beings.
People should stop reducing each other to shallow objects for merely judging each other’s physical appearances in a sexual way, with ‘I would’ or ‘I wouldn’t’ judgements for every single body they glimpse! Most people aren’t asking you to date them anyway!
It’s alas not particularly natural for people to take an indifferent or neutral attitude to how they all look – especially in this modern highly visual culture where many people’s livelihoods depend, at least partly, on the way they look (e.g. actors, presenters, influencers). Body neutrality would therefore require a huge cultural shift to attain a critical mass of support, because even if you’re body neutral and personally focus on developing your deeper traits – others will still judge, hire, pay attention to, trust and buy from you, etc. based, at least partly, on the way you look. Celebrities get criticised for being too fat, then criticised for losing lots of weight(!)
The human instinct likes to judge by appearances hence visually mimicking or superficially faking the appearance of having good health is a successful and popular sexual selection strategy. This manifests as vanity. Dogs, meanwhile, are considered non-judgemental furry companions, as many owners love about their pet floofs, because we sense the world primarily with our noses and ears rather than our eyes. We care less, and are in turn fooled less, by what appears on the surface. We can still experience bodily insecurities and be fooled but overall we are role-model body neutral beasts. We don’t care about how much money you have and other such judgements either. Everyone should be more like dogs. Woof!
As mentioned earlier, obesity is still a health problem. There’s a growing amount of research that indicates that there’s no such thing as ‘healthy obesity’ (unless one’s high BMI is due to muscle rather than fat mass – if BMI is used to determine obesity). Obesity increases the risk of diseases like stroke, cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease.
Yet even though this is true, judging others and ourselves on the outside isn’t reliable because having a dangerous level of visceral fat (fat around the internal organs) doesn’t necessarily mean having lots of subcutaneous fat (fat under the skin). Therefore one could look mid-sized or even skinny externally but have too much visceral fat that isn’t visible just by looking in the mirror.
This means there exist some obese people who are fitter (according to medical tests) than some non-obese people because not being obese isn’t a guaranteed sign of being metabolically fit. If you’re such an obese person then that’s alright but, statistically, the vast majority of obese people aren’t fit. If you’re not obese and not fit then that’s not fantastic either. So it reiterates that it’s ultimately about our fitness levels rather than the way we look, whether big, small, tall, short or whatever.
Those who carry a lot of subcutaneous fat will probabilistically also carry a lot of visceral fat however. It’s important to accept the way we look, however we look – but it shouldn’t really be acceptable to be at a high risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other obesity-related diseases.
So even if we adopt a body positive attitude – liking the way we look would only be step one because being healthy is the true goal. Feeling body positive about the way we look should always be subordinate to how our bodies can actually physically perform – such as being able to strict press at least our own body weight over our heads, ski-squatting against a wall for over 5 minutes straight, or whatever makes us personally proud. It’d be irresponsible to not view obesity as a health issue. Whether it should be classed as an illness itself is debateable but obesity is primarily a health rather than aesthetic issue. It’s not about being considered less of a person but about living as long and healthy a life as possible; unless this isn’t what one wants.
We can morally be ‘ableist’ but only in legitimately relevant, contextually-appropriate and non-arbitrary ways (e.g. it’s morally acceptable to discriminate against blind aircraft pilots!) All other kinds of ableism are illegitimate (e.g. discriminating against deaf actors). All humans have equal intrinsic value, but in job interviews, people can legitimately be discriminated against based on what they can and cannot do (after reasonable accommodations), rather than on how they look. We should be neutral on looks. Likewise, they can be legitimately discriminated against based on their knowledge and perhaps experience.
It’d be attacking a straw man to accuse people of judging obese people according to how they look when individuals, whether obese or not, are actually being judged according to how they perform (although such judgements cannot be made by just looking at someone). It’s not always automatically a case of ‘fatphobia’.
Characteristics like being homosexual don’t intrinsically cause harm (unless one doesn’t practise safe sex – but this is true for heterosexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals, etc. too), whereas being obese does carry an intrinsic health risk. Or if those who advocate healthy lifestyles to obese people are accused of being ‘fatphobic’ then anyone who tells obese people to not ‘succumb to the messages of ‘health Nazis’’ are being ‘fitphobic’.
It’s also bad for the environment to over-consume, even if one is a vegetarian or vegan (but especially if one isn’t). Because if an average vegetarian diet has half the carbon footprint of that of an average omnivore diet but one eats more than twice as much as the average person (perhaps >5,000 calories per day) then one will be mathematically worse than an average omnivore. (Vegetarian or vegan bodybuilders who claim to be good for the environment must make these kinds of calculations too.)
We need to be sensitive but not too sensitive because we mustn’t ignore the science – being obese significantly increases the risk of many diseases, which not only presents a cost to the individual but to society overall (e.g. public health services). Okay, it might be an obese but body-positive person’s individual choice if he/she loves carrying or doesn’t care about carrying a lot of fat, but such people arguably shouldn’t rely on public health services if they develop such diseases?
That might be harsh though because there’s a growing consensus that obesity is or should be regarded as an illness based on an interplay between genetics and environment. The evidence is clear that it’s not easy for those who are severely obese to lose weight and keep it off. Some people resort to chronic comfort eating as a kind of self-medication for other problems in their life too, hence mental health problems can contribute to obesity, as well as vice-versa. And if blame or shame ever worked then we wouldn’t have an obesity crisis in many countries!
Some people are affected by negative comments concerning the way they look, and wider toxic messages about how they think they ought to look, and this isn’t nice or right. (One wonders though if derogatorily labelling under-educated women or worshipping highly-educated women in music lyrics and videos would instead motivate more women to study harder?(!) Businesses would however probably just attempt to exploit this by marketing to girls a quick-fix drug to becoming clever but which is actually dangerous, expensive, illegal and ultimately doesn’t work, similar to Apetamin for those who crave a certain body shape right now?! Then again, sufficiently-educated women wouldn’t fall for something like that!)
In summary, body positivity is far better than body insecurity for sure, but being body neutral might be even better for us and society. Okay you’re beautiful on the outside – so what? Your eye colour or similar isn’t an achievement(!) Some health conditions can be diagnosed from the outside but in most cases it really is the inside that counts, like the condition of your internal organs (and your courage, compassion…). The Grim Reaper doesn’t care about your (subjective) appearance but your statistical health risks!
If it’s not acceptable to call people ugly (or worse) then it shouldn’t be acceptable to call people hot either – because it’s still a superficial judgement. The way we look should be a neutral non-issue rather than calling everyone physically gorgeous. I mean, no one’s going to complain, and it may remain socially polite, if we continue to call each other handsome/pretty, but we should learn to value traits of the surface far less than traits of the inside, and to judge physical health not by what can be possibly faked but what our bodies can do.
Feeling confident in front of the mirror is splendid but body positivity still focuses too much on vanity rather than health. In fact, some extremists totally deny that it’s a health issue at all and that’s a dangerous message that shouldn’t be advocated. If you don’t want to lose credibility – you don’t fight one extreme by going to another extreme. Obesity is still never a reason for abuse though – the human rights of individuals of all sizes, shapes and colours should remain respected.
Woof!
Comment on this post by replying to this tweet:
