“Thank You, Medical Community, For Taking Care Of The Well-Being of Fat People Without a Three-Hour Lecture On How We Can Lose Weight If We Just Substitute Every Meal For a 4 Ounce Mocha Chobani.”
There’s been a lot in the news lately because fat people were given priority to get the Covid vaccine. I for one have never been happier to the see the word “Obesity” on a government run website. But of course it didn’t take more than five seconds after states started prioritizing high-risk people--include obese goddesses like yours truly--for the fat-phobia to surface.
In spite of this, I’m still gonna utter words I never thought I’d say: “Thank you, medical community, for taking care of the well-being of fat people without a three-hour lecture on how I can lose weight if I just substitute every meal for a 4 ounce mocha Chobani.” I’ll be honest, I did not think this was coming and I realize it’s not entirely your fault, medical community (hashtag not #notalldoctors), but after a lifetime of being treated like crap for my weight, it’s nice to finally get a perk.
The media was pretty instrumental in the hate rolling in; a Fox news anchor felt the need to tweet that he was “annoyed” fat people would be prioritized for vaccination. “The Pandemic is a Wake-Up Call for Personal Health,” shouted the New York Times, and of course by personal health they meant “not being obese”.
They aren’t alone, of course. A lot of folks feel the need to tie together the phrases health and obesity, and you might be nodding in agreement when you hear someone say that obesity is unhealthy, obesity leads to earlier death, and if we could only reverse obesity, we’d have a healthier, happier world.
Well buckle up, folks, cause I’m gonna spend the next five minutes tackling some shit that most people seem to have accepted as truth.
Myth number 1: Fatness is a personal choice
Look, I get it, you read The Fountainhead when you were 13 and have ever-since been convinced that all humans make rational choices free of any systemic forces. And that’s great for you.
But that isn’t how life works. I could spend a lifetime trying to take down the $192 billion diet industry, but I’ll make it short: Diets, in general, DO. NOT. WORK. Study after study after study shows that the vast majority of dieters gain back most, if not all the weight they lost--with some gaining back even more. At BEST 10% of dieters are able to keep off most of the weight they lose after 5 years.
A 10% success rate. Where else in the medical world would you accept a 10% success rate as a best practice. If I told you I could give you Lasik, but there’s only a 10% chance it would stick, would you take it? Of course you wouldn’t. So why do we settle for this shitty diet line?
Remember the Biggest Loser, the show that promised to transform the lives of fat people by torturing them for public amusement? In an incredibly comprehensive, 6 year Biggest Loser Study (From the National Institutes of Health) contestants from the Biggest Loser found that after six years, the contestants gained back 90% of the weight they’d lost and that only ONE contestant in the entire study had managed to keep the weight off. Scientific American
And the reason for all of this is not because all these people are just lazy and can’t keep their shit together. The reason is that when fat people lose weight, they are fighting their own genetics to keep the weight off, losing weight literally changes your metabolism. Because your body WANTS to be fat, it does everything it can to keep you fat, including gaming the system. In the same study of Biggest Loser contestants, they found that even though they’d regained almost all of the weight they’d lost, their metabolisms were burning 700 fewer calories per day, which means they would have to continue to eat less and less to maintain their weight loss.
It turns out all of this is just science: Your body wants to protect fat stores, so when you lose weight it slows your metabolism, so that even on your reduced diet, you’ll gain weight again. Which means fat people have to eat EVEN LESS FOOD than people who’ve been thin their entire lives, just to keep off their weight loss. That’s why diets fail and why it has nothing to do with laziness. Believe me, I have will power, I once stood outside of a store for 48 hours to try to meet a Hanson brother (The middle one).
But, even if losing weight was an option, it turns out, it’s not at all what most people think. Because now we come to Myth number 2: Obesity unequivocally means illness and early death
A 2017 study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition the team followed 5,344 Dutch people over the age of 55 for 15 years and found that folks with high BMIs who also had high levels of physical activity showed no increased risk for heart disease compared to equally active people with normal BMIs. An analysis of data on 22,476 Americans aged 30 to 64 published in 2020 found that being physically active was associated with a larger reduction in a person’s 10-year heart disease risk than having a normal BMI. Get it?
Myth 3: Shaming fat people will make them lose weight.
Focusing on fat is easy, because it’s simple to focus on a symptom and not the bigger, more complicated answer. We human beings, are excellent at answering a different, less complicated question when a difficult one is presented. Gee I wonder if there is an invisible force that is keeping fat people from going to Gyms, or walking in public or even sweating in public. SO WHAT DOES WORK? Maybe it would make it better for fat people if it was okay to just exist in spaces and feel comfortable. That means longer seat belts and public transportation seating, it means building a world that welcomes fat people in it, and help us be the healthiest version of ourselves. Shame is not a lifelong motivator, eventually the veil slips. The best motivator is connection, love and support. The best thing that could happen to fat people is just being active. Just by getting out there, moving, you are conditioning yourself and it doesn’t require losing weight. It’s the best thing you can do for your health. So now that shame is off of the table, make it easy for fat people to make the best choices they can make and accept that that choice might be a different one that the one you would.
Myth 4: Fat people are a drain on the healthcare system, when in fact fat people get substandard healthcare. In one study, 1 in 5 physicians admitted to feeling DISGUST when treating their obese patients. And those are just the ones who were willing to admit it! None of that, of course surprises me, because I’ve lived in my body for a long time and I’ve dealt with doctors. Let’s be clear: You cannot provide quality healthcare if your patient disgusts you. Homophobic doctors can’t do it for queer patients and fat-phobic doctors can’t do it for fat patients.
And to that Fox News anchor? Go ahead and suck on my big fat co-morbititties!
Political Sketch Comedy
Honey, Mom is a Latina 4 Trump
Segment starts at 12 minutes 12 seconds.
HONEY, MOM IS A LATINA FOR TRUMP.
So you gays may have heard that a bunch of Latinos voted for Trump. And by “bunch”, I mean Cubans, Venezuelans and like four Puerto Ricans. But what were they thinking? I needed to know. So I called up the only Tina’ For Trump, that has ever told me they loved me. My mom! Yup, my beautiful, kind, immigrant, woman of color mother voted for this guy.
(Cue Video of Trump throwing paper towels at Puerto Ricans after hurricanes Irma and Maria)
But wait, before you try to chalk this Geomechanical Engineer PHD off, I have to tell you, my mom is not actually that pro Trump, she’s just that anti-socialist.
My family and I are from Venezuela. We fled the country and arrived in Texas on July 24th, 2005. We lived in a weird ass extended stay hotel that had something called a kitchenette, which before arriving, I assumed was a small woven net, you keep in your kitchen to catch garden animals. It’s not that.
I watched my parents struggle to build a credit score, work insane hours and adapt to a world with no support network, which is kinda like watching this guys’ friends, allow him to do this.
(Cue video of man jumping into icy lake)
After all of their hard work, our immigration status finally stabilized. Though it’s worth mentioning that at this point in time I was still being an ungrateful little bitch about all of it.
But we are the lucky ones, we got out. And though leaving Venezuela is one of the hardest decisions my mom ever made, she knew we had to. So why did we have to go? Well, let me ask you this: what do Venezuela and beloved fast-food chain Popeyes have in common? An over-dependence on oil.
Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, worth an estimated 18 trillion dollars. That’s a lot ya’ll. That’s like, a 1.8 trillion carabiners, that’s like a gajillion front row tickets to go see Brandi Carlile. It’s a lot of money.
But in the past 15 years we’ve gone from Bernie Sanders’ wet dream - a utopia of tuition free public universities and a functioning universal healthcare system, to a nation in crisis. For Venezuelans the culprit is Socialism.
Since 1998, Venezuela has been under the leadership of the United Socialist Party. Under the moniker of socialism, presidents Chavez and Maduro implemented massive social welfare programs, which in theory should make me cum, but in reality they used these programs or “misiones” to operate like a mafia drug-front, but instead of a garbage company it’s the full on government of an entire sovereign nation.
It was shady. I’m talkin Narcos, meets House of Cards, meets Game of Thrones, and then they make sweet love and birth the video of all those people clapping and crying in unison for Kim Jong Un.
Instead of going to people who needed it, billions of dollars were siphoned into illegally awarded contracts and into the pockets of those in power, all of it funded by nationalized oil resources.
It was already barely sustainable, and then, the oil bubble popped, the economy has never recovered.
How does the “socialist” government respond to this crisis? By pretending everything is great, while seizing land and companies, putting regime supporters in key positions of power and leading violent crackdowns on peaceful protests.
They even refuse humanitarian aid, ya’ll the only time I’ve ever turned down help is when a stranger from the grocery store feigned interest in my lower back health, and asked me if my bra was sufficiently supporting my breasts.
It’s bad, the average salary in Venezuela is now 2 dollars a month. There are gasoline shortages, gasoline shortages, remember what I said about the 18 trillion dollars. A ella le gusta Gasolina, pero si no hay Gasolina, how she’ gonna get work baby?
Data shows Venezuelans have unwillingly lost an average of 19 pounds a year, with wide-spread malnutrition verging on the level of a humanitarian crisis. Venezuela needs international support to get through this, and while I can’t address the depth of every single atrocity that’s happening there right now, I think you can start to see why my mom has a problem with socialist policies.
So like body hair and militant lesbianism, the two terms: “socialism” and “corruption” were fused forever in my family’s mind.
And now we arrive back at this moment in time. It’s 2020, ya girl is ass-imilated. I am a fully drenched in body positivity, and canceling almond milk from the comfort of my polyamorous queer safe space... But I forget sometimes, why we came here.
But my mom? She still vividly remembers what it was like being a dissenter in Venezuela.
Trump ran for re-election with “socialism” as a trigger word everywhere, and it worked. Republicans discovered that link to the current Maduro “reign of terror” and spoke directly to it. They purposefully played into the psychological threat in many Venezuelans minds by spraying the word “socialist” on everything, anything, anything at all. Like, I could call this harmless cachito socialist, and Venezuelans will run away from it clutching their Virgin Mary candles, but the way, what a woman.
When I found out Mom was voting for Trump I was so shocked, I felt betrayed and hurt that she was choosing someone who in my mind, had just spent four years proving he is dangerous to women, to gay people, to immigrants, to me.
The first conversations we had about her voting for Trump were a disaster, it was bad y'all. I called her brainwashed and maybe insinuated she was stupid, she told me that I’m obsessed with justice-- trademarking that!-- and wanted to destroy america.
My mother isn’t ‘living in a different world’ and neither are the other Cuban/Venezuelan Trump supporters. They’re scared of losing everything, again.
The problem is, they are assuming Socialism always implies authoritarianism. And it doesn’t. Bernie Sanders isn’t Maduro. and Elizabeth Warren isn’t Chavez, she’s more like a practical and handsome wooden chair who’s very good with numbers.
Our system allows for flexibility and change, as citizens and voters, we can pick and choose what policies we want to support, we don’t have to adopt the whole system of another nation. The US needs progressive politics to heal, inequality isn’t going to disappear, it just gets bigger.
If there is one thing we should be wary of – It’s just how autocratic Venezuela’s regime has proven to be - demonization of the media, loss of confidence in the democratize process, messing with the separation of powers, and a megalomaniac refusing to leave even though it is way past his time. Does that remind you of anyone?
For Gay News – I’m Hoja Lopez and I love you mom.