I hate to break it to everybody, but almost everything you know about weight and weight loss is wrong.
It is not a simple case of calories in versus calories out. People can literally be starving and not lose a single pound. They can work out until they pass out, and not budge their fat/muscle ratio.
Most of the correlations between various diseases and weight have been found by looking at all the people with the disease and finding the correlation, not by looking at all the people who are overweight (or underweight, depending on the issue – it can make you just as sick, but we don’t blame it) and seeing if there really is a correlation. Even when there is, correlation is not causation: “fixing” one’s weight is not a cure-all.
People die from fat-phobia. Between eating disorders and diets that literally cause heart-attacks (that’s what killed Mama Cass, not the fat-phobic and anti-semitic meme of a Jewish woman choking on a ham sandwich), and doctors blaming all of a patient’s issues on their weight and missing serious diseases that had nothing to do with it, fat-phobia kills people.
Don’t kid yourself. Weight-loss is an industry. It’s a very successful one, having gaslit and misinformed even those who should know better. There are billions of dollars tied up in it, and they work hard to hide evidence that anything other than “perfect” can be healthy, just like (and more successfully) the tobacco industry hid the cancer evidence in smoking.
These plates aren’t just fat-shaming. They’re bloody dangerous to someone with an eating disorder.
I have known fat people who can run up the side of a mountain in full fire-fighting gear, and “ideal weight” people who can’t make it a block at a slow jog in t-shirt and shorts. One of the former is a vegetarian – you know, that super-healthy lifestyle of the skinny people?
That people find these plates amusing is proof that the industry has succeeded in brainwashing enough of the population to ignore any other possibility other than fat=bad.
P.S. Pregnancy wreaks massive changes on the human body. But let’s go on laughing at those who – not always by choice – go through that.
