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Fatphobia and Health - Coggle Diagram

- - - - makes obese, overweight, or fat be collapsed into group of 'unhealthy'
    - - "individuals are now asked to locate themselves within the BMI scale..."
      - people are forced to become whatever is accepted to "avoid becoming an economic burden for society"
    - - includes dangerous or less-than-healthy acts like plastic surgery, bulimia, tanning, etc.
    - - "those remaining 'healthy' are then recognized as superior to their problematic counterparts"
  - - - aims instead to reconfigure fatness away from 'obesity epidemic', disconnect fatness from its "necessary" relationship with ill health, and problematize moral imperative for health
        
        basically says that saying fatness is "contagious" and those of average weight should distance themselves from fat others doesn't make much sense and instead creates heightened sense of shame
        
        shame may manifest into "unhealthy relationships with food" (binge eating, extreme dieting, etc.)
        
        "why does fat have to be unhealthy?"
        
        Skrabanek - from the "healthism" that exists now people have decided that healthy = moral and pure; unhealthy = foreign and impure
        
        condemning fat people because you just don't like how they look is plain rude and immoral "'Judge not lest ye be judged'" and has no compelling argument
- - - - hard constructivism - increase is size is only a rhetorical fact made true or 'real' by many claims
      - soft constructivism - social and cultural phenomena have produced the epidemic as a problem
      - artificial constructivism - "knowledge of scientific phenomenon is profoundly shaped by the techniques, laboratory practices, conventions, observational methods, instrumentation and measurements that produce scientific facts and in that way bring the material world into being"
        
        obesity epidemic primarily artificially constructed thru use of BMI
        
        BMI doesn't directly measure fat but rather ratio of weight-to-height measurements and is really just a crude measure of adiposity
        
        cut-offs for BMI classifications causes issues not only in relation to health outcomes but also with the fact that they're absolute
        
        difference between a 29 BMI and a 30 BMI represents about 5 to 8 lbs
        
        if average weight gain among pop. is 7 lbs then those on higher end of category will move to next category even if weight gain is minor
        
        CDC reported in 2006 that obesity prevalence among adults had tripled between 1960 and 2003-2004 but that increase more than likely means that a group of people who were already large became larger not that all the thin people became fat
        
        use of averages in this sense (BMI) conflate phenomena
        
        artificial constructivism aims to reconceptualize the problem in this case change focus from measuring and documenting rise in BMI and creating panic to paying attention to consequences of "real" obesity
  - - - BMI values on a graph tend to create a bell curve the issue is deciding whether or not the outliers are "problems" or just natural variation
        
        variation should be the norm in the real world and thus there is nothing "abnormal" about outliers on a bell curve
      - BMI is now used normally to say what the height/weight ratios should be but as the average creeps upwards creating a new "normal" it creates a problem which is the "obesity epidemic"
        
        "the rise in size as something that necessarily is cause for concern"