How ‘Fat Acceptance’ Movement Will Destroy America

Once upon a time, it was important that disadvantaged groups raised awareness on how they were being treated. There were gays being attacked simply for being gay. Minorities were attacked just because they were minorities. It wasn’t a good thing.

Even when actual violence wasn’t a result, though, they were still mistreated from time to time, and so they fought back to change the culture so that crap wasn’t acceptable.

Today, it isn’t. That’s a good thing.

However, today there’s a group that claims to be fighting for the something similar. Unfortunately, in this case, it will lead to the downfall of America.

That group is the crusaders of “fat acceptance.”

Now, let me preface this by saying that some of the early things I heard out of the fat acceptance movement were basically people asking folks to treat fat folks decently. I have no problem with that.

You see, I think everyone should be treated decently unless they’re one of three things:

• Known racist
• Known pedophile
• Known fan of Nickleback

If you’re not one of those, you should be treated with a certain amount of courtesy. What size you are shouldn’t matter. I thought that when I was a scrawny little bastard, well before I became one of the fat.

But the problem is that the fat acceptance movement didn’t stop there. They kept trying to up the ante with some assinine arguments.

Some are merely annoying. Others, however, are downright dangerous.

For example, the fat acceptance movement is taking issue with doctors talking to their patients about obesity. They’ll cite examples of a poor diagnosis like it’s weight bias at work, but they fail to remember that obesity is often the biggest cause for some of these conditions, so of course the doctor’s advised their patients to lose weight.

Fat acceptance activists will claim that you can be perfectly healthy and be overweight.

No, you can’t.

Being fat and healthy is like being a healthy smoker. It only means you don’t currently have any health problems associated with what you’re doing. It doesn’t mean you won’t. You’re basically playing roulette with your health simply because you don’t want to lose weight.

Now, do some people develop eating disorders because they’re told to lose weight? Yes.

Can the doctor’s be responsible for that? Possibly.

I won’t pretend otherwise. A muscular woman will, for example, exceed the ideal BMI for someone of her height and age, but may end up with an eating disorder trying to conform to her doctor’s wishes.

But let’s also be realistic. Most of the people bitching about doctors supposedly body shaming them are fat slobs who were likely fat slobs at the time the doctor told them to lose weight.

And I say this as a fat guy.

Unfortunately, fat acceptance is gaining steam. It’s influencing the culture as a whole. Above, I linked to a post I wrote about attraction. A lot of women are arguing that “real women have curves,” as a way to do a little shaming of their own–in this case, shame men into going after women they aren’t really attracted to just to seem more woke. A lot of women think that same thing.

They’re body shaming other women, for crying out loud. But, since they’re not shaming fat women, who cares, right?

The thing is, the fat acceptance movement will gain momentum. Why wouldn’t it? It’s telling the 66 percent of Americans who are overweight or obese that they don’t have to do anything. They’re preaching that the problem is society, not these overweight people.

People like being told they don’t have to work hard. People like being told they can sit on their fat asses playing video games and screwing off on Facebook while eating anything they want. People hate hardship, be it self-imposed or not.

But there are problems with that.

For one thing, the military is apparently having trouble recruiting at least in part because the military has weight standards. We’re still fighting terrorism as we have since 2001. We need fit men to fight that war, and we’re having trouble finding them. That’s not good.

Back in 2005, the New York Times reported that today’s kids will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents did.

Contrast that with China, where the World Health Organization is concerned because the obesity rate is a whole 5 percent overall in the nation but as high as 20 percent in the cities. In other words, 95 percent of the population is a healthy body weight.

Now, imagine we somehow had to fight China. Who has a deeper pool of recruits to feed the war machine?

The only saving grace is that Russia, another rival of the United States, has an even deeper obesity problem than we do.

Still, that’s only one aspect of the problem. Our nation’s military might is important, but it’s only part of what has made this country into a world superpower.

The other aspect is our economic might, and obesity has a negative impact there as well.

Basically, everywhere you look, you’ll see somewhere that obesity is causing problems. It negatively impacts our economy and our military might. It also negatively impacts our quality of life. People who are overweight get exhausted much easier, making it more difficult to play games, take tours of historical sites, or countless other things.

Yet despite all of this, the fat acceptance movement persists. They may call themselves “body positivity,” but they simply want people to pretend fat people aren’t having any problems.

As this progresses deeper into the mainstream culture, however, expect it to continue to morph. They’ve already argued that losing weight isn’t “body positivity,” regardless of why they want to lose that weight. What was once a movement about treating fat people well will transform into a movement actually calling on people to get fat themselves.

Yet we’ve already looked at just some of the problems that will cause. That won’t matter to the fat acceptance jihadists, though. They’re focused on creating their own Utopia and tend to act like those problems are really societal rather than something based on individual failings.

And yes, most of the time, being overweight is a failing on some level.

There are some people with thyroid disorders who honestly can’t help it. However, there is an order of magnitude more people who claim to have thyroid disorders just to justify their lazy lifestyles. They don’t eat right, don’t exercise, don’t do anything, then bitch because they can’t lose any weight.

Shocking.

Fat acceptance at least gives these people an excuse to stop lying about underlying medical conditions, which is probably a good thing, but then it does nothing to change the underlying behavior. It does nothing because it wants people to think the underlying behavior is normal.

It gives them moral cover to ignore their own failings.

Look, if you’re overweight and don’t care that you’re overweight, that’s fine. I honestly don’t care. We live in a free country, and if you’re not free to make decisions I don’t agree with, then you’re not really free.

If you make that choice and want to be treated decently, I’m down with that as well.

However, when you also expect people to not just treat you decently but also to fawn all over your brave decision to continue your Cheeto Diet, that’s where you’re going to lose me. Especially when you’re also advocating others follow your inherently unhealthy and disastrous lifestyle.

After all, it’s a lifestyle that will make it possible for our enemies to overtake us militarily, for our economic rivals to get ahead of us in business, and to cause the entire nation to deteriorate to the point where the fat folks in Wall-E will look at us and think, “Damn, son, you should lose a few pounds.”