Thanks for the response and sorry for the dual reply. What part of the world are you from? I’m American and we’re mostly obese here. My experience is that in cities probably 30% of people are noticeably overweight but anywhere outside a city is more like 75%, no joke. It’s gotten worse since I was a kid for sure.
The kind of “bullying” that is never okay is making people (especially children) feel bad for something they never chose. The “good” “bullying” would be better feedback at doctor visits and things like these floor signs. It’s obviously a touchy subject and a difficult thing to address so I’m not flush with examples.
Mainly I just wish my doctors had seemed concerned before I had “elevated” blood pressure at age 30. And mind you, even then the only reason I got the message was mention of possible medication for it. I know for sure in a lot of American families, such medication is seen as normal and not concerning. It is in my family, I just go against the grain in a lot of ways so for me that was a wakeup call.
I was directly shamed for being fat so infrequently that I cannot even think of a specific example. I think I wrote it off as people just being mean. Being male, I know I’d naturally get less of that, but still. I marvel to this day how I could’ve looked and felt like that and still thought “meh, eventually I’d like to lose 15 pounds” when I truly needed to lose 65 minimum.
i assumed american, partly from the .world and partly from the difference in experience. i’m from rural scandinavia, basically in the mid-point of the peninsula. we are also “dealing” with what doctors are calling an obesity epidemic, as is most of europe. in quotes because what’s being suggested is basically that sign.
i am also a much larger than the average individual, not quite to the point that i hit my head on doorjambs but my hairline definitely suggests some scraping has taken place. when i was in school in the 90s, the teachers were so worried about some of us being obese that me and a few others got “extra motor training”, which basically boiled down to an extra PE session every week. my parents tried to get me to start every hobby under the sun, so to speak, and me being interested in “indoor activities” made them feel like they failed, which of course spilled over onto me. so i’ve always been big, and i’ve always been made aware of this fact.
now, in regards to bullying, i’m going to drop a word, and depending on your degree of redditorness you may or may not disappear like a staked vampire:
brace...
microaggression
still with me? ok, so.
a doctor saying “you should try to lose weight” is not helpful. it is a statement of fact, yes, but it gives no information. a doctor running tests and saying “these things are off-balance it your body, here’s something we/you can try to fix them” is useful. a doctor not wanting to do those tests because it is clear that the patient needs to lose weight is actively harmful. doctors have missed acute heart problems and cancers because of that. and yet it is common. this is is usually what’s sloppily referred to as a microagression: a (possibly subconscious) act that from one perspective may seem neutral or even helpful, but from the other is detrimental to mental health. the floor sign seems like a good idea if you have the sensibility that “obese people are lazy and showing them this will motivate them”, but with the mindset “obese people are trying already and always telling them that they are not doing enough will ruin them in the long run” it’s just yet another thing on the pile of othering and self-loathing. when that is done consistently towards a group of people, i would classify that the same as the sort of bullying that children do.
now, what our conversation here has shown is that both of these things can be true at once, and that one strategy or the other isn’t the “right” one. asia in general and korea in particular (again, if this is korea) also has a huuuuge thing about normative culture and othering. so while this may wake some people up in your community, i think the effect over there is that it would do more harm than good.
as for the tooth thing, i brought it up in another comment thread about the source of the obesity epidemic. basically when the number of affected people starts getting too big, individual choice can no longer explain the statistic. my example was the discovery of flouride’s effect on dental health, which was due to research on the teeth of a community in rural colorado which had, much much better dental health than the rest of the country. turns out, lots of fluoride in the ground there. if only a few people have good teeth, they are probably careful about their teeth. if most of them do, it’s most likely out of their hands.
I appreciate and understand your response. Before you wrote this, I would’ve assumed people from your part of the world would be pretty happy with how your countries handle public health issues in general, because all the data I’m aware of indicates that whatever you are doing is working better than what we are doing. Admittedly I haven’t seen recent obesity numbers though. And now I’m seeing the cost that measures like you described can have, and it’s probably not even fair to assume those measures deserve credit for the relative skinniness of Scandinavia. I gotta admit it is tempting to think your society is as close to utopia as exists, but there’s clearly a lot I don’t know.
In America, I think the shame and hate against fat people is often more… subtle? I say that because I had multiple doctors say literally nothing about my weight when I know they should’ve, and I’m getting a lot of indicators from my rural family and friends that they don’t get much of that feedback either. I think in America, most fat people just look around and see media representations of very skinny attractive people and feel bad. Some of us don’t get a lot of direct criticism (constructive or otherwise), to the point that I find it harmful. I’m not sure how to strike the right balance there.
Thanks for the response and sorry for the dual reply. What part of the world are you from? I’m American and we’re mostly obese here. My experience is that in cities probably 30% of people are noticeably overweight but anywhere outside a city is more like 75%, no joke. It’s gotten worse since I was a kid for sure.
The kind of “bullying” that is never okay is making people (especially children) feel bad for something they never chose. The “good” “bullying” would be better feedback at doctor visits and things like these floor signs. It’s obviously a touchy subject and a difficult thing to address so I’m not flush with examples.
Mainly I just wish my doctors had seemed concerned before I had “elevated” blood pressure at age 30. And mind you, even then the only reason I got the message was mention of possible medication for it. I know for sure in a lot of American families, such medication is seen as normal and not concerning. It is in my family, I just go against the grain in a lot of ways so for me that was a wakeup call.
I was directly shamed for being fat so infrequently that I cannot even think of a specific example. I think I wrote it off as people just being mean. Being male, I know I’d naturally get less of that, but still. I marvel to this day how I could’ve looked and felt like that and still thought “meh, eventually I’d like to lose 15 pounds” when I truly needed to lose 65 minimum.
Edit: meant to ask-- what tooth thing?
i assumed american, partly from the .world and partly from the difference in experience. i’m from rural scandinavia, basically in the mid-point of the peninsula. we are also “dealing” with what doctors are calling an obesity epidemic, as is most of europe. in quotes because what’s being suggested is basically that sign.
i am also a much larger than the average individual, not quite to the point that i hit my head on doorjambs but my hairline definitely suggests some scraping has taken place. when i was in school in the 90s, the teachers were so worried about some of us being obese that me and a few others got “extra motor training”, which basically boiled down to an extra PE session every week. my parents tried to get me to start every hobby under the sun, so to speak, and me being interested in “indoor activities” made them feel like they failed, which of course spilled over onto me. so i’ve always been big, and i’ve always been made aware of this fact.
now, in regards to bullying, i’m going to drop a word, and depending on your degree of redditorness you may or may not disappear like a staked vampire:
brace...
microaggression
still with me? ok, so.
a doctor saying “you should try to lose weight” is not helpful. it is a statement of fact, yes, but it gives no information. a doctor running tests and saying “these things are off-balance it your body, here’s something we/you can try to fix them” is useful. a doctor not wanting to do those tests because it is clear that the patient needs to lose weight is actively harmful. doctors have missed acute heart problems and cancers because of that. and yet it is common. this is is usually what’s sloppily referred to as a microagression: a (possibly subconscious) act that from one perspective may seem neutral or even helpful, but from the other is detrimental to mental health. the floor sign seems like a good idea if you have the sensibility that “obese people are lazy and showing them this will motivate them”, but with the mindset “obese people are trying already and always telling them that they are not doing enough will ruin them in the long run” it’s just yet another thing on the pile of othering and self-loathing. when that is done consistently towards a group of people, i would classify that the same as the sort of bullying that children do.
now, what our conversation here has shown is that both of these things can be true at once, and that one strategy or the other isn’t the “right” one. asia in general and korea in particular (again, if this is korea) also has a huuuuge thing about normative culture and othering. so while this may wake some people up in your community, i think the effect over there is that it would do more harm than good.
as for the tooth thing, i brought it up in another comment thread about the source of the obesity epidemic. basically when the number of affected people starts getting too big, individual choice can no longer explain the statistic. my example was the discovery of flouride’s effect on dental health, which was due to research on the teeth of a community in rural colorado which had, much much better dental health than the rest of the country. turns out, lots of fluoride in the ground there. if only a few people have good teeth, they are probably careful about their teeth. if most of them do, it’s most likely out of their hands.
sorry that got really long…
I appreciate and understand your response. Before you wrote this, I would’ve assumed people from your part of the world would be pretty happy with how your countries handle public health issues in general, because all the data I’m aware of indicates that whatever you are doing is working better than what we are doing. Admittedly I haven’t seen recent obesity numbers though. And now I’m seeing the cost that measures like you described can have, and it’s probably not even fair to assume those measures deserve credit for the relative skinniness of Scandinavia. I gotta admit it is tempting to think your society is as close to utopia as exists, but there’s clearly a lot I don’t know.
In America, I think the shame and hate against fat people is often more… subtle? I say that because I had multiple doctors say literally nothing about my weight when I know they should’ve, and I’m getting a lot of indicators from my rural family and friends that they don’t get much of that feedback either. I think in America, most fat people just look around and see media representations of very skinny attractive people and feel bad. Some of us don’t get a lot of direct criticism (constructive or otherwise), to the point that I find it harmful. I’m not sure how to strike the right balance there.