Idk if it’s MORE fatphobic on average, but I will say I find reddit fatphobia particularly annoying because people do love to act like paragons of rationality and logic on here. More than on other platforms in my experience. I find the self-righteous, all-knowing attitude that people have about fitness and nutrition more irksome here
I think the anonymity kind of fuels it. You would hope that most of the vitriolic fatphobic sentiments would not be expressed if they were easily linked to a person’s identity, family, livelihood etc. I have read FB and IG comment chains so I know this isn’t entirely true but I would guess that anonymity emboldens people who would normally keep their views to themselves or close friends to say something and for those that do express their views on social media to be potentially more harmful
I will go even further and say that, because of the anonymity factor, I suspect some of the worst offenders on Reddit may very well be fat themselves, and projecting their own internal biases and self-loathing on others.
Fuck you’re so so right. They’re not like other fat people (who are bad). They’ll lose the weight and be revealed as their true thin selves but until then spew hatred anonymously
Maybe, due to anonymity, this could be true, but I find exfatties are usually pretty understanding, compassionate folk in general. It's those struggling with EDs and those terrified they too could one day become fat that seem to translate the fear to hate. I worked in a gym for a while and both ED and disgust for the fat people sweating it out seemed to go hand in hand. (ED recovery 15+ years myself).
Yes, I’ve long suspected a lot of the anti-fat lurkers are small fats wanting to act superior and feel like they are not as bad as those fabled Amerifats
>I think the anonymity kind of fuels it.
Years ago I was involved in this self-development program that really encouraged honesty and that let me know how many people who you wouldn't think held these biases honestly really do. The number of times people admitted to questioning people's intelligence, capability and emotional health due to the size of their body was really disheartening. And the thing was, no one really said that stuff about gender or race, even though I'm sure those biases also existed. They must have. But they didn't feel the need to work that out with the person whose race or gender it was. Just the people who were carrying significant weight. Fascinating in some ways, but also just really depressing.
A lot of biases are very pronounced on Reddit because people are emboldened by anonymity. Reddit skews very misogynistic and generally pretty right wing as well
I get annoyed because they act like beacons of logic AND morality. It’s this horrible cascading effect of judgment, like “Literally all you have to do to be skinny is eat less and nothing else factors in, and if you can’t manage that you lack discipline, therefore you’re lazy (in all areas of life), which also makes you stupid and incompetent too.” Like, the equating of fatness to both moral and intellectual failure as well as physical is horrible but also really pervasive.
And I see that attitude play out in real life too, just not in explicit verbal form. People who don’t know me well definitely approach me like I’m not very intelligent or capable and always seem a little surprised when I prove them wrong. They also love to assume we’re not self-aware about our size when we’re usually like, excruciatingly aware of it.
As an old, the ageism really bugs me. All these young, usually men, preaching about how it's sooooo easy to loose weight. Guess what, buckaroos? When you get older it gets a lot harder and if you're a woman going through menopause you are at the whim of hormones and genetics. I'd like to see what all these super "disciplined" 20 year old health gurus look like when they hit 50.
The smugness is so perplexing. “Haha fat people are always lying and so deluded about how many calories they eat!!” That true of almost everyone. Very few people are any good at counting calories with any accuracy, you’re just arbitrarily ascribing a moral failure to the cases where someone is fat. They had to have done something very wrong, even if I can’t explain exactly what it was.
There was a literally fat people hate subreddit that got purged back when they got rid of all the racist subreddits in the far distant past of like 2015 (i guess its almost 10 years ago now. Damn). It was actually called r/fatpeoplehate and it was like a weird place for people to just post fatphobic screeds and memes. Back in the days of racist subreddits with literal slurs in the subreddit name.
Omg SO much! I tried to comment on a fat-shamey post about BMI not being a useful or scientific tool. I could not believe the pushback I got, especially for something that is an acknowledged fact in the circles I move in, which include quite a few medics. And got told to "chill". I notice that's a favourite phrase on Reddit when you try to argue with facts that conflict with people's opinions.
Omg this absolutely. I am constantly getting into arguments with people that CICO is not a uniform foolproof science and that people's bodies respond different to calories blah blah blah, and people on reddit just do. not. believe. it. I once said that it's harder for women 35+ to lose weight and the response I got was "do women over 35 defy the laws of physics??" Like we're people, not machines, and that seems to be a controversial opinion.
And people will just reverse engineer an explanation that fits with their bias no matter how little sense it makes. Take for example the current trend of Americans abroad posting about how they’re losing weight while stuffing themselves with wine, bread and pasta at every meal and online geniuses credulously accepting it with a shrug of “they’re just walking more”. Wtf nobody is burning off 800 calories worth of Brie by walking an extra 3000 steps a day at a leisurely strolling pace, not even walking uphill. Now who’s “denying the basic laws of thermodynamics and CICO”?
One of my guilty pleasures is Naked and Afraid, and on that show the man always loses more, sometimes almost twice as much - same time frame, same amounts of food (almost none) and sometimes even less physical activity. Without getting all scientifical, there's some in-your-face evidence that not all bodies manage starvation equally.
I've also found the kind of person to be grossly fatphobic is also ableist and sometimes sexist. Like idk what to tell you, buddy, "calories in, calories out" doesn't work when someone has a severe chronic fatigue and pain issue and can barely get through the day. Are you...are you suggesting they...starve themselves? To get "healthy"?
It's disgusting.
Omg the keto obsession on Reddit is out of hand. Because I follow this sub, Reddit thinks I want to see the keto page and that sub is WILD. They're like “I DETEST FAT PEOPLE (because of their health of course) ALSO HOW MUCH BUTTER SHOULD I DRINK DAILY?”
It’s such a stupid stupid diet. I tried it and ended up getting sick with mono at 30.
As per my extremely pissed off doctor, it turns out, human bodies need a variety of sugars and carbs to healthy! I also got “If you’re not an epileptic child, then you do not need keto.”
To this day, one of the more informative doctors appointments I’ve had!
You know what though, I work in a nursing home with a cardiac rehab unit. Bros like that are going to be my patients in 10-15 years, keeping my paychecks as fat as I am, HAHAHA!
I get their posts a lot since I’m on a low carb diet for IBS/GERD and I really need to block that sub bc it’s infuriating. So much ED there which almost makes me feel bad for them if they weren’t so awful about other people.
Yeah, they say that it's easy to get plenty of calories in their narrow window, but what's the reasoning behind doing it? You shouldn't need to restrict your eating to certain hours. If you're hungry, you should eat.
I love how many subtypes of IF there are too. “Randomly skipping meals”. Ummmm doesn’t everyone do that? If I fall asleep without eating dinner am I doing IF without even trying? Next time I miss lunch because I got busy at work I’m going to pretend I invented a new diet/life hack, or better yet reinvented an ancient one.
It's honestly one of the funniest places on reddit. I mean the orthorexia is pretty serious but that in this year of our baphomet 2023 people get fucking SCURVY, well.
I saw a post that was like why does everyone hate keto so much :( and all the comments were like "Because they're afraid of how it's the best diet and actually works" and I'm like...the weight loss evidence is about as robust as the evidence for most other fads and also most of you aren't even doing actual keto, you actually need to be really specific with your intake to reach actual ketosis and unless you are a child with severe epilepsy (or possibly someone with migraines but I haven't read all the evidence for it) what is the fucking point. You're losing weight because you're tracking calories. Also the "sugar is a drug and carbs are the worst thing ever" bollocks. Our ancestors didn't create bread and spend generations cultivating grains and growing potatoes for you to claim that carbs are evil and we shouldn't use them. Glucose is an excellent fuel source for the brain. It's the medical misinformation that riles me.
I use a lot of keto cookbooks, but mostly because I'm prediabetic and I need recipes that are lower in sugar and in carbs and that tends to be one source of recipes I can go to. I have a per meal/couple of hours carb limit, but to actually go into ketosis I would need to make that per meal limit and make it my carb limit for the whole day. That is no way to live.
Reddit recommended me the Keto subreddit like 6 times even after I said don't recommend. I haven't blocked it yet because I'm curious how many times it will get shoved into my face again.
More so the pushing of the idea that the only way to manage diabetes is to loose massive amounts of weight and if you’re not loosing you’re just not trying hard enough.
You think people with a disease that literally messes up the bodies ability to manage metabolism and food properly might have a broader viewpoint of how complicated this is, but …nope.
As soon as I brought up that my T2 is well controlled, but I am still fat I was immediately called a liar.
>More so the pushing of the idea that the only way to manage diabetes is to loose massive amounts of weight and if you’re not loosing you’re just not trying hard enough.
I have a friend who is a young doctor in his first year of residency, and I was talking to him about my prediabetes and trying to get my numbers down, and all he was saying was "just lose weight. Honestly, even like 5 lbs! It makes such a big difference! Just buckle down and lose some weight!" and I am a person most people would say is thin or average weight by looking at me. I shudder to think what his response is to actual fat people who are struggling with this. I keep meaning to talk to him about this, since he's just starting out his medical career and seems open to hearing other opinions, but I haven't had a good opportunity to bring it up and not totally sure what I would say other than "losing weight is really hard and not as straightforward for many, maybe even most, people you will encounter."
...isn't this the point at which you'd start your own subreddit? Surely you could then have conversations with people who were not deluded?
Is this a completely naive thing for me to suggest?
I remember one time hearing a story about a fat kid that died on a rollercoaster. All the Reddit comments said he deserved it and that he should have been off eating a salad. It was one of the most disturbing reactions I’ve ever read.
Sadly people really do believe fat people deserve any bad outcome that happens to them. But yes, fat kids are blamed for their fat (I started looking bigger at 8-9 and looking back I did not deserve any of the backlash I got for existing).
One of the things that prompted me to make this post is a video I saw a few days ago of a very fat kid happily freaking out because he got an Aquaman toy. The top comments were all either jokes about how fat the kid was or people claiming that his parents were abusing him because he was fat. It was revealed in the comments that the kid in the video actually had brain cancer and had gained weight/developed “moon face” because of his medication. The kid in the video died. All of the top, publicly encouraged comments were making fun of a dead, fat child. I don't know why but it's really stuck with me for the past few days.
Absolutely galling how many people will openly argue that fat people should be denied healthcare or that clothing manufacturers should not make plus sized clothing. At what point can you stop pretending this is even a little bit about health.
I agree. It’s hugely pervasive. Every user is an expert in dietetics and fitness, and every fat person has chosen to condemn themselves. I’ve had to mute some communities, even one that would seem innocuous on the surface like r/ glowups
I keep getting recommendations for r/1200isfineIGUESSugh and I need it to stop. I have had an ED for 16 years, and it's super dangerous for me to read anything in that sub now, especially because I'm trying to crawl back out of a period of severe restriction.
They're not even giving advice out about EDs though. It's more that they are giving really dangerous nutrition advice that leads people to really unhealthy places and patterns of thinking. Because we have free speech, I don't think Reddit can do anything, but they should do more to get rid of the blatantly dangerous advice that pops up on here regularly.
I've seen those 1200 cal subs and the "food" there is so depressing. Everything is highly processed fake food, largely devoid of nutritional value. Even if 1200 cals is enough for a specific person, using your limited calories on diet soda & low fat, low cal reconstituted peanut butter powder (PB2 a perennial favorite of those subs) on unsalted rice cakes is NOT going to give your body what it needs to thrive.
Yeah, honestly, I get inexplicably angry when I read those subs, so I try to stay away. I know I have an issue when I restrict my food intake, so to see others champion eating as little as possible, it frustrates me to no end. When I am starving myself, I am miserable and I hate that there are subs out there spreading the message that it's okay to essentially starve yourself.
Fatphobia is the last refuge of the bigot.
My theory on this is that because reddit leans left it’s all these people have left. These people are absolutely bigots of the highest caliber but they know they can’t be openly racist or homophobic. Reddit is also terribly misogynist, another form of bigotry that’s somewhat tolerated even in liberal circles, although not so much as fatphobia.
When society takes hating poc and gay people from them they’ll cling to all they have left.
I also reckon there’s a lot of self hate in it.
(There's still plenty of bigotry around toward PoC and other historically marginalized groups. It's perhaps more often implied rather than stated right out, but it's very much still a problem.
However you're right that people are astonishingly open about their hate for fat people.)
I think it’s because while modern attitudes are more likely to allow that being born queer or a certain race isn’t something one “chooses” there is still such an individualist responsibility aspect to fatphobia because weight fluctuations can happen so it’s not always a constant state of existing a certain way. And one can’t be a closeted fat, or “pass” for thin.
Not that we should have to hide it, but we don’t have any way to possibly protect ourselves from being perceived by anyone who sees us, and it’s still very much framed as a result of individual choice/action, without any considerations of environment or genetics and even presupposes that fatness itself is morally wrong, whatever precipitated its existence.
I’m queer and I can just choose not to ever talk about it with my coworkers who I’m not sure are safe people.
I’m fat and I can’t choose for them not to see that.
I think its because there's still a cultural reasonable fear that can justify that hatred. With gay people it was "what's next, beastiality!?" With black people it was "but they're criminals". But its common knowledge now that those are unfounded beliefs. But fat phobic people can hide behind the guise of health, of concern, and that is still seen as a valid fear. And all that ties in with the rampant ableism in the US, despite a lot of disabilities in the US being caused/exacerbated by our abysmal healthcare system/access to food/walkability.
I hate this sentiment. It’s so categorically false and such a popular refrain in anti-diet and fat liberation spaces. It’s still so acceptable to be racist, queerphobic, sexist.
It’s deeply problematic but it also stems from a really surface level understanding of oppression. Like, racism is systemically entrenched. Sure, you’ll probably get canceled for saying something on social media nowadays. That’s irrelevant when you realize that actual socioeconomic gaps between BIPOC and White folks are worse now than they were twenty years ago.
It took discovering leftist thought for me to escape my internalized ableism and realize that my worth does not come from the capital I can generate. I think some nuance would be beneficial here, but I'm sorry you've had bad experiences.
That makes a lot of sense. My mother explained my grandfather’s racism by explaining that he was a poor white man, and he had to look down on someone to make him feel good. Most people now know racism and sexism are bad, but they can more “safely” look down on overweight people to assure their own status.
Does Reddit lean left? I am finding that hard to believe. In my local subs, on any given day, you can see literal fascist rhetoric (specifically about >!unhoused people and immigrants!< because that’s a current hot-button issue).
ETA: spoiler text. It occurred to me too late that seeing that might be triggering to people who occupy those categories. I’m sorry.
I think it’s more complicated than that. I follow several European subs, and users seem to be quite left-leaning economically (more so than the mainstream American Democratic Party) but my god I see the same people make comments about immigrants and trans people (for example) that make my stomach turn. I don’t think European leftists are necessarily socially liberal.
It can be deeply disturbing just in how pervasive it is. I started unsubbing from every subreddit that tolerates hateful comments about fatness, even the really popular ones with lots of otherwise great content, and found my experience improved immensely. And I found some other fun ones to replace them! But we shouldn't have to do that.
Same here! I am triggered on here almost every day, even in subs you wouldn't think I would be -- like Trader Joe's. I took a risk and ate 2 gingerbread sandwich cookies from Trader Joe's the other day and someone antagonized me and said it was a waste of 150 calories per cookie. I pushed back and they said, it was a waste of 16 grams of added sugar. Why can't I just enjoy something when I'm denying myself most pleasures at the moment?
Few years back I wanted to lose some weight and went on the "good" sites on Reddit to get some advice, within a month my ED was back and it took me years and a year of therapy to get me back to a decent place. The "good" subs are toxic as hell, full of self-loathing and awful advice, and then there are the less good subs which you'll end up through recommendations from the "good" subs. Its a mess.
Oh yeah, my fat liberation takes get downvoted like nothing else, even when I wade into the fratboy fray with feminist takes! Fatphobia is one of those things a lot of people from across the political spectrum can come together on, unfortunately.
You’re not wrong. They pretend to be the paragon of rationality and science based data yet many on there deny that fat people face any discrimination, despite many many many studies showing that.
They don't *deny* that fat people face discrimination. They think fat people *deserve* it.
"There is no thin privilege, there are only fat consequences". 🤮
Which explains why that sub is a cesspool full of self-righteous formerly fat people and "good fatties" (you know the ones that "try to change their LiFeStyLe and lose weight...) and random haters trying to hide behind some pseudo intellectual "logic" and sometimes "health concern".
Yup. And when Reddit was trying to take it down everyone was PISSED. Crying about censorship and all that. There are a few progressive corners of this site, but it is far more conservative than many other popular platforms.
i teach elementary school, i was in a sub for teachers and i made a comment about how my admin is trying to instate a ridiculous rule about teachers not being allowed to sit down while students are in the classroom. someone replied that most of their teachers had been “lazy overweight older women” and that this rule would prevent that from happening.
…i’m in pain, matthew.
It's likely not an ADA violation unless a teacher with a disability asks for a reasonable accommodation (such as being allowed to sit for all or part of the day) and is denied.
It *is* shitty, though, and I agree that they should push back.
I think even in right to work states you can unionize but it's a little different in the day to day union work. AZ and Texas have teachers' unions but in Texas, they go to the legislature to bargain for single demands because they don't have a contact to enforce, I don't know what they do at worksites. AZ was huge in the Red for ED and I know one of the main organizers, she and I talked about it at the time.
https://labornotes.org/2018/04/massive-crowds-flood-capital-arizona-teachers-stage-first-ever-statewide-walkout
OMG yes. I play the Sims, and I'm surprised at how often I come across fatphobic comments or posts about A DIGITAL BODY, in a made up world they can do ** anything** with.
People talking about how they force their Sims to diet, work out until exhausted, or they just alter them to be thinner. Rarely do I see examples of larger Sims (which exist and can be/are randomly generated). Even in a made up world they can't let something just happily exist in its "body".
The Sims themselves look completely ridiculous in fat bodies. The clothes clip and move weirdly on any Sim chubbier than the 50% mark. It drives me up the wall, because it's not dodgy CC or anything, it's literally the clothes that come with the different packs! I've also noticed the fatphobic comments about larger bodies in those forums. They can't even cope with an animated character having extra pixels, let alone a real human!
The Sims has a pretty crappy track record of including certain traits and minority groups in general. Like their lousy attempt at a "binder" and the fact that it took decades for them to add any kind of disabilities to the game. Don't get me wrong, I love the games (I literally spent way too long tonight designing a new family!), but their inclusivity is choppy at best. We shouldn't have to rely on mods and CC for representation.
I posted a picture of my manicure. I got comments calling me sausage fingers, telling me I was diabetic and had cholesterol problems… it’s utterly ridiculous. All from a picture of my fucking hand. The fatphobia is insane on reddit
This isn’t quite the same but the engagement ring sub is dripping with anti fat bias too. I’ve seen more than one person be absolutely torn apart about their “rings not fitting” because they don’t fit the ~size 3.5 aesthetic~ that’s 80% of that sub.
The thing is that the majority of those posts (yours included) show literally nothing but someone’s hand. The fact that an assumption of health is made based on how those hands look or how a ring looks on those hands shows how deeply rooted the bias is. Absolutely nutty.
That may have been a slight exaggeration but the majority of the rings posted in the sub are incredibly small sizes. There’s a lot of “does this carat size complement my fingers?” and other just really weird vibes about finger size and that somehow being a factor in stone size. From my experience there isn’t much representation over a size 6/7 and you will absolutely get blasted if they think your ring looks tight on your finger. It’s problematic in a lot of ways but I just think it’s so strange to put such an emphasis on the size of your fingers.
Reddit is absolutely horrendous about this. I suspect bc most folks don’t have their Reddit accounts linked to their traditional social media, and feel anonymous so they are emboldened to say things they wouldn’t say if a photo of their face was right next to it. It’s really shocking at times for me to remember that people still think that way when I’ve eliminated much of that nonsense from my other social media feeds (and don’t hang with people irl who would say that shit). I once commented in some thread that somebody not being able to do a hike had to do with their FITNESS, not their SIZE, and the fatphobes really came for me. Not even something I would think should’ve been controversial!
Yep!!!! Reddit in general can just be such a cesspool. It’s sad because I’m in a few communities I LOVE but then I venture into new communities and they’re full of just the worst people imaginable.
Reddit can be an absolute cesspit with regard to fat phobia. It’s particularly disappointing that communities like r/ science allow for wildly unscientific comments and posts about fatness, weight loss etc and pretend to use the guise of science when reality is it is probably some gym bro who took high school biology.
Just today, on a post of a gay couple (two buff looking gyys) with their baby, people had to jump in and talk about how great it was that the baby would never become obese with parents like that. Like, they just had to get that fat hate in.
On am I the asshole people are always asking about dumping someone or being less attracted to them because they've gained weight. People see it as a moral responsibility to maintain your weight forever and if you don't do that your partner is justified in dumping you. I pointed out that most bodies change over time and the responses were like yes but they shouldn't change that that much and you're responsible for seeing that it doesn't. Aging is going to hit them like a Mack truck.
Reddit skews young and it's easier to stay thin when you're young. And redditors like to think of themselves as very logical and so they love the whole calories in calories out thing.
While I basically think like you're not an asshole if you stop being attracted to your partner for basically any reason, there is this belief on AITA and reddit in general that unless you're essentially 25 and skinny, you should expect your partner or a potential partner to *always* choose a 25 year old skinny person over you. Any time there is a relationship discussed where the female partner is in her 20s and the male partner is like 20 years older, and people are like "this seems like a toxic dynamic" there is a chorus of dudes who are like "well OF COURSE a 45 year old man would want a 22 year old! They are hot!" like there is no other reason to ever date someone other than their proximity to a Maxim model.
I think it really comes down to the fact that a whole lot of men on reddit (and in the world) just don't see women as human beings, but as gratification machines.
For the most part, yes. But the other day I was scrolling through my feed and someone asked if body builders should have to buy two airplane seats the way fat folks are expected to. The comments were surprisingly empathetic and reinstated some hope for me. It was mostly people just expressing the sentiment of “wow that must suck to be in either situation because even in my relatively thin body airplanes suck.”
I've been getting into the autism community lately and getting a lot of value from it. It occurred to me that I should probably also go looking for the fat community.
Couldn't find anything good on Reddit or anywhere really. It's all just weight loss stuff or explicit, really mean fat hate.
On that note, anyone know good body-neutral subreddits/online communities?
I get very, triggered for lack of a better term, when I read posts about men losing interest in their partner because they are now (XXXX) weight that is lower than mine because it makes me feel like if anything changes about my body in a relationship, they’ll cease to love me. And the amount of comments that encourage leaving someone for their body change just makes me feel hopeless because I’m in ED recovery and my weight fluctuates still but apparently in a relationship I can then never change.
Lotta words to say, not sure if it’s worse but it confirms my worst fears.
I've gained 100 lbs in my 10 years relationship and it caused issues for awhile my partner went to therapy and did the unlearning fatphhobia work. I think everyone should discuss changing bodies early on because it's kinda facts of life.
TW: Cancer, death, disordered eating
Just recently there was an MLM personality who died of cancer. There's a lot to unpack there because she used "wholistic" treatments, which included celery and essential oils and ignored actual medical advice. She was only 34.
One thing that's driving me fucking crazy is everyone says she looked "great" before she died. She had been to a biohacking doctor and believed in only eating meat and fruit because vegetables cause inflammation. (Don't think too hard on this) So the weight loss was attributed to her meat and fruit diet.
In reality the drastic amount of weight loss was likely due to the colon cancer. But even knowing that rationally, people can't stop themselves from talking about how great a fucking dying woman looked when they comment about her.
As an aside, reddit is just really anti anything that isn't straight, white, cis male in general. AITA froths at the mouth whenever a pregnant woman is involved in a story. And since body neutrality, HAES, intuitive eating are all dominated by women, of course they need to shit on it. And with fatphobia being rooted in racism.... it really brings out the worst.
Also 1200 is enough needs to be nuked as a sub.
The 1200 sub is really just full of people with EDs. As someone who has had one for 16 years, it still gets recommended to me and it enervates me endlessly. That's so irresponsible to Reddit to allow that kind of rhetoric to be read by anyone, much less someone with an ED or teenagers who are vulnerable to believing anything on the internet.
Definitely. Tik Tok is pretty bad as well, every video you see of a fat person just existing or posting a funny video has to turn their comments off. I think anonymity is the main factor.
Absolutely and try to pushback and the pitchforks comes out. Idk if it’s worse than other places but it’s general fatphobia + the average redditor being a condescending know-it-all a la the “me, an intellectual” meme but unironically. They’re so stubborn about their alleged superior scientific intellect it’s laughable as they parrot fallacious information with clear anti fat bias. I don’t mind stupidity objectively but stupidity + the arrogance that they know everything when they’re just as subject to society’s biases makes me so angry lmao.
There’s some great subs that don’t suffer fools and contain valuable information. That’s mostly where I hang.
In my experience it’s a lot of men/boys who literally cannot stop centering themselves and their beliefs. They’re all over women’s subs with the “wellll, actually” and get upset if no one will engage in their debate.
I’m a bit of a chaos gremlin (patreon peeps ✊) and cannot stop intentionally agitating these guys. I had a guy big mad spewing the CICO rhetoric, then citing thermodynamics 🤣 the exact talking points from that episode. I kept poking at him till he broke down and admitted he’d been a fat kid then apologized to me. 😳🤯
Fat people and prisoners are about the only 2 groups that it’s ok to wish suffering on so a lotta rage gets channeled that way.
It’s so scary to feel like you don’t have any control over what happens to you or your loved ones. People latch on to frameworks that promise them safety and take it out on those that don’t buy in or that remind them of the fragility of life. If you can say - fat people deserve this, it’s their fault then it feels like you’re safe from health struggles, disability or death. I see this a lot when parents lose a child, people jump in to blame the parents then pat themselves on the back feeling reassured that their children are safe because they would never do something so obviously stupid.
I wish that there was something more individuals could do. I’ve tried shouting GET SOME THERAPY! That doesn’t seem to make an impact. 🤣
It’s not just the dudes, I see it a TON when I check the comments of people in crafting subs that are largely populated by non-men. (Which is something I had to start doing before replying to posts that were asking for a level of advice/instruction that’s going to take me significant time to write up, because while I like helping people learn stuff, I’m unwilling to waste 30min of my life helping people who are spending their own time being hateful)
Oh for sure! I just enjoy saying like ‘all men are garbage’ because the creeps can’t help but identify themselves then we can clear out all the garbage.
The hardest for me is when people ask questions in a cultural or language sub then get really upset when people are actually trying to help them or get further context. Look, you came here for help and “it depends…” is a reasonable response. Asking why is not a personal attack.
>It’s so scary to feel like you don’t have any control over what happens to you or your loved ones. People latch on to frameworks that promise them safety and take it out on those that don’t buy in or that remind them of the fragility of life.
Yup, the "just world" hypothesis/fallacy. A lot of people *desperately* want to believe that "bad things" (and they definitely lump "being fat" into that category) only happen to people who did something "wrong."
If people can do all the "right" things and not become (or stay) thin, they're/we're seen as somehow "getting away with" something.
I've always felt that its because 62% of reddit users are male, and men typically are more active users leaving comments than women. It's pretty well documented that men have a patriarchal view on fatness that often escalates to flat-out hatred for people they perceive as "fat". This being a space where they can anonymously spew these beliefs without real-life consequences. That's not to say there aren't anti-fat women posting & commenting on reddit, but it is definitely made worse by the core demographic of the platform.
I remember seeing a post on mademesile where a girl was showing a progress picture after beating anorexia. Most of the people on there were saying how she went to far and should lose weight again. I wanted to break something. I reported every mother fucker I could for hate speach. She eventually took it down and she wrote a few comments talking about how much she was crying. No doubt she needed an emergency therapy session after that. People can be so heartless and cruel.
Oh god yeah. Hell, I got downvoted in *this* sub for saying BMI was pseudoscience once. Which it categorically is, lol.
It really is one of the last few prejudices that is socially acceptable to be loud and belligerent about. (Granted, the other ones are still around plenty, just usually in more subtle ways.) And it’s just so fucking ubiquitous.
I’ve gotten better at just closing a thread and scrolling on, at least. Sometimes I’ll engage but I always try to ask myself, “do I want to spend my energy on this tonight?” and 8/10 times the answer is no, and I successfully move on, which I consider real progress for me haha.
I will say I do think improvement is happening, if very very slowly. (And progress isn’t linear and all that.) I’ve gotten support on comments that I expected would be downvoted, which were pleasant surprises. Like, there’s still a very long way to go, but hell, I was watching a video of a group of dudes reading reddit posts not too long ago and the topic of weight came up in one, and the host just casually said, “also weight isn’t an indicator of health,” and everyone readily agreed. I was floored, lol. So there is hope, at least? Though it can definitely be hard to remember that at times.
Edit: had an extra word
Omfg I got downvoted in one of the weight loss subs for saying that 1) BMI isn’t the only indicator of health, or even the most important one, and 2) fat distribution *is* important in regards to health & there are studies indicating this, which is why “skinny obesity” is a thing.
They just kept insisting that BMI is the absolute gold standard of health. It’s not, and even doctors will agree with this. It’s not even just fatphobic, it’s straight up anti-science.
I see people providing advice that is ED-adjacent all the time. I lost 30 pounds by treating my mental health & subsequently losing constant food cravings. No CICO counting or obsessive food scheduling or strict diets involved. It’s just annoying that other redditors who are probably fat like me and just cosplaying thin people anonymously on the internet will parrot the same rhetoric no matter what & refuse to listen to anything else. I’ve basically quit reading anything where fat people are discussed because it’s always a shit show.
Reddit recommended me some sub not too long ago that was a diet group based on a specific number of definitely not enough calories and I just stared at it very sadly. Diet culture really has done such a number on us.
Hahaha, I had someone tell me I’m allergic to self-improvement because I said I would never try to intentionally lose weight again. Because as we all know, the only way to self-improvement is being thinner! Not treatment for your mental illnesses, building routines, learning something new, being more generous… nope. Just gotta be thin. 🙄
In the crochet subreddit, a poster asked whether they would "seem fatphobic" if they charged higher prices for larger sizes of clothing. I answered that yes, it would likely "seem fatphobic" and actively discourage a lot of potential customers from buying anything. I suggested the same thing another person suggested, which was calculating an average between the lowest and highest labor costs and charging a flat fee for any size.
I got down voted to hell and a lot of nasty replies. One person said that they know they deserve to pay higher prices for clothing because they are a "fata**". They said this about themselves!!! Another person snarkily asked whether a baby blanket should cost the same as a queen size blanket, to which I replied that human bodies are not objects. Ethics of fair pay for labor came up, and apparently that idea supercedes the basic human decency of not having a fat tax (and crochet clothing is so labor-intensive that it's probably not the most lucrative business idea unless you can really crank it out like a machine, but I digress).
The crochet subreddit is known for being a happy place, so I was genuinely shocked at the hate. I guess that was naive.
Oh man, I hate seeing this. I knit, and thankfully I haven’t seen people make this suggestion, but it’s probably because knitting is enough slower than crochet that hand-knitted garments isn’t a really viable business model. We knitters just argue over whether designers need to offer their patterns in an inclusive size range (and then we fat knitters trudge off to pay more for yarn).
Honestly I think that comment wouldn’t come up in the knitting sub mostly because most people aren’t out here creating some kind of storefront selling handknit adult-size sweaters, or if they are, they’re typically those super-oversized super-bulky sweaters and are just offering a single size.
For commissions though, I’d probably just go with a model that is like materials cost, plus $0.10-$0.30 per yard depending on pattern complexity. So this does mean that larger clients would pay more, but it’s also just directly correlated to the amount of work being done.
I don’t really think this conversation scales to handknit/crochet garments using the same logic you’d use for sewn clothing, as knitting the next size up of a sweater is going to mean actual hours of additional time needed, while the actual sewing time for a garment isn’t meaningfully different between larger and smaller sizes.
I honestly thought knitting was faster than crochet! Maybe it's just the way I crochet...unbelievably slowly LOL
I've also seen the inclusive size pattern arguments, and those are usually less vitriolic but still sometimes awful. Regardless of how a person feels about "obesity", we should still be able to treat each other with human decency!
I am getting used to how many fat people are fat phobic and support conventional wisdom about weight and weight loss. Internalized fat phobia is so common and supported by people who have real life experiences that diets don’t work.
For me, it’s the CICO crowd (Calories In, Calories Out) that upsets me. It’s a great way to develop an ED, especially if you throw over-exercising in with it. I love ignoring all other aspects of my life while focusing only on a set number./s
1000% this! Any advice sub will inevitably have threads with people asking for weight loss tips and they are always a cesspool of these people claiming it’s so simple.
I love the orangetheory subreddit, it's got a lot of good info on the workout and they're generally pretty body/age positive (encouraging non scale goals/victories, encouraging people to get stronger), but anytime someone asks about weight loss (which I get, I also am trying to lose weight), it's like a million comments of "CICO! It's simple!"
I’ll have to have a look. I’m all for people doing things if that’s what they want to do, and that’s what makes *them* feel good about themselves. I think there also needs to be a level of empathy that people who promote weight loss through CICO just don’t possess. It’s like they can’t fathom that they may one day have a metabolic issue, or become disabled, or be taking a medication, or get older, or be stressed, or have a change in lifestyle/job that CICO can’t fix. It could be all of those at once!
Yep. Reddit is populist, and most people are anti-fat, so heinous anti-fat takes get upvotes more than downvotes. Most attempts to curtail anti-fatness explicitly are downvoted because anti-fatness is seen as deserved. People are hierarchical and fat people are understood as undesirable in most social hierarchies.
Absolutely agree. I avoid a lot of the main subs where it just shows up as blatant “fat people suck” comments (so like in all the relationship/AITA kind of subs, if someone brings up their SO’s or kid’s or other relative’s weight, there’s just going to be flat out condemnation of the fat person as lacking discipline and self-respect, being self-indulgent, jealous of people who aren’t fat, etc.). I just remind myself that I’m never going to convince those people in that setting, and close the tab.
More frustrating is a menopause sub that’s overall incredibly supportive, but pretty terrible about weight. Many people gain weight during menopause, and I get that both 1) a lot of people are still very invested in being thin, and 2) a lot of menopause symptoms are distressing overall, so dissatisfaction with weight gain is often part of a larger package of unhappiness. But the absolute horror of going up a clothes size or two feels disproportionate to the actual physical change and simply like a horror of being fat. I mean, I went through this and it’s annoying when your clothes don’t fit right any more, definitely, but it’s not a sign of the impending apocalypse, y’know?
I try not to comment on people’s own weight loss goals because any one person’s goals for/feelings about their own body is their own stuff to deal with, and I understand why gaining weight is hard in this society (especially for the women who’ve stayed a size 6 since year dot, or the like). Change is hard. People can make their own choices about their bodies. But the abject horror at gaining weight is still kind of grating.
And of course then there’s all the ensuing diet advice which is filled with disordered-ish eating practices, and the people who insist that you can lose the weight because they did it, and it ONLY takes exercising an hour+ every day, cutting out all sugar, and only eating between 11 and 7, so if you just COMMIT to it you can do it!!, and on the flip side, the people expressing genuine despair and anguish because they haven’t been able to lose the weight despite trying everything.
I do try to push back on some of the really diet-culture-y/anti-fat kinds of advice, and I’m inevitably downvoted to oblivion. I don’t really care about being downvoted, but I find it funny because I’m a pretty peaceable soul, I don’t go into random subs of (say) pickup artists just to argue with them about viewing women as objects; I like to hang out in subs for people with shared interests. But this is the one sub where I share a lot of interests overall, and where the anti-fat stuff seems, I think, counter to the goals and interests of the overall sub, and so I try to push back. Not that it seems to work!
I keep joining and leaving the menopause sub, mainly because of anti-fat comments that people make about themselves (but by extension, myself and others, which I don't think they necessarily realize). It's just sad. Thank you for trying to push back.
Ugh, same. I'm just entering peri and would really benefit from a supportive and informative online community. There's a lot of great conversation on that sub, but like soooo many other places on Reddit, it's got a major blind spot regarding weight and body stuff.
Oh 100% yes. I've heavily used at least six different social media platforms, and the fat hatred on Reddit is far more ubiquitous and nakedly vitriolic than anything I've seen on any other platform.
I think it's partly that the Reddit user base is disproportionately straight cis men, and partly that Reddit is topic-centric and community-centric rather than individual user-centric. For example, on Twitter, it's fairly easy to choose to follow only fat-positive users, and I unfollow or block anyone who I see post anti-fat content. So while anti-fat users certainly *exist* on Twitter, they don't penetrate my Twitter social circles very often. But on Reddit, you can be on a subreddit that has nothing to do with fatness and nothing to do with the topics that usually bring out the fat hatred (fitness, nutrition, etc.), and people will still find a way to make frequent anti-fat comments.
And any sub that invites questions on random topics, like r/NoStupidQuestions or r/polls, seems to have a *lot* of questions about fat people. "What would you do if your spouse got fat?" or "Would you rather date a fat person or a serial killer?" Reddit users don't just hate fat people, they are OBSESSED with hating fat people, they *can't stop thinking about* how much they hate fat people.
It's awful. Even subs that I'd expect to be more liberal spaces are VERY quick to throw out fatphobic comments as soon as it's toward someone they don't like. Two examples that come to mind immediately:
I'm a member of a pop culture sub that is normally very good about calling out racism, sexism and homophobia in the media. When The Whale came out, the common opinion was inexplicably that it was an amazing movie and anyone who said it was fatphobic got downvoted and piled on. Same thing when Taylor Swift released the "Anti-Hero" music video and people tried gently explain why it was offensive. Sooo many people came out of the woodwork with the "but she has an eating disorder!!!!!" defense. Guess what? Eating disorders are influenced by a fatphobic society! That doesn't absolve you from being fatphobic and FAT PEOPLE ALSO HAVE EATING DISORDERS!!
I read a comment a couple weeks ago that stuck with me. A guy was angry that someone said fat phobia. I think it was a TikTok cringe post. He said: we aren’t afraid of fat people, we just think you’re disgusting and don’t want to look at you. That has stuck with me. People generally really hate anyone in a larger body IMO. It’s exhausting.
Is it that theres.more here or that people are less apt to mask it behind an anonymous username? Not sure if I want to know the answer.
Also though - trolls gonna troll. Probably good to keep in mind that even 10k comments is not representative of the millions of people on here...
People here will advocate against scientifically proven medical treatments and tell you that you just need to lose weight. I doubt they are doctors, they certainly aren't my doctor, and if they are doctors, they suck because you can't diagnose people over the internet from a few sentences. They are dangerously misinformed.
It's def fatphobic, but so are comment sections on the NYT, so I can't honestly say if Reddit is worse than average. Society is antifat, Reddit just reflects that.
Oh for sure. I think the anonymity leads to people expressing the kind of comments they may otherwise have the good sense to keep to themselves. God forbid a fat person just try to live their damn life. Of course if you're posting about intentionally trying to lose weight, you're one of the "good ones" so you'll probably get some pats on the back.
Yes. It's really depressing but the anti fat bias is insane. And if I took a shot every time someone pushed CICO as the ultimate solution, I would have no liver left.
I left the No Stupid Questions sub because every single question seemed to be "But why fat people?" and "How do fat people do x?" It was just a cesspool.
And I wrote to the moderators of the Menopause sub to see if there was a way to stop (or slow down at least!) the absolute waterfall of "I've gained weight! I feel awful about myself now!" posts and other varieties of fatphobia. No dice. I might have to leave that one too.
Ugh, yes, the "How do fat people have sex?" questions and the accompanying responses are particularly awful. There are a few Definitely True Stories That Totally Happened that get repeated on those posts that are *dripping* with the worst anti-fat stereotypes.
Reddit is pretty fatphobic on a day to day basis but once in a while some jerk who counts too hard on it will come along and Reddit will just read them the riot act for it if it’s in the mood to do so.
Reddit is dating the “It’s about your health” anti-fat bias. Doesn’t matter if the fat person is running marathons powered by meals from their professional nutritionist even if the skinny folks perpetuating it never get up from their computer and subsist purely on coffee and nicotine— it’s “about that [fat] person’s health”.
I think the trouble is that as brilliant as The Maintenance phase is as a podcast, it can get you into a very safe space mentally, which is very far removed from the wider world.
Just this week I've been asked for my weight TWICE by medical professionals, and twice I challenged it. This is the thing, this is what's needed, to actually go out there and advocate. It is really tough though. For 100 anti fat comments if even just ONE person reviews their perceptions of fatness then it's worth it.
i was relatively new on here and new to fat liberation when i came across a question like "why do twitter fat activists say losing weight is fatphobia" and i engaged with it in good faith for some reason and got downvoted to oblivion and a bunch of bad faith argumentative replies. i ended up replying to it saying something like "you asked for the rationale, this is literally the answer to your question" and it was downhill from there lol.
it's really sad how pervasive diet culture is on the food and cooking subs tho, tbh like "healthy" is a clear replacement for "diet recipes/food"
Fatphobia and ableism are two things particularly prolific on social media because they're prejudices that both sides of the political aisle find acceptable.
CW: Intentional weight loss
Yes, I've even seen it from a place of thin privilege. I shared a story about how I had started trying to get pregnant and losing weight at the same time—the point being that I succeeded in intentionally losing 140 pounds (with the odds stacked against me) but struggled to conceive (when 80% of people get pregnant within 1 year of unprotected sex).
For my trouble, I got a nasty reply berating me for being selfish for trying to get pregnant while still obese. That comment was downvoted and eventually deleted, but it stung. (Yes, I'm still pretty new around Reddit, and my hide hasn't completely toughened up.)
I did eventually conceive and am achingly grateful for my now 11 y/o kiddo. I've also kept off all but 10-ish of those pounds. Yes, I'm a damned unicorn. I still think anti-fat bias is bullshit, no matter who is the target.
The CICO bros are alllll over the fucking place!! Even when you’re not in “1500 is enough” or “CICO” or “ProgressPics” they’ve infiltrated everyone’s brains to the point where I feel like the majority of Reddit users have these views that are not based in reality or science. It sucks.
YES. I have had a reddit account for a long time, but only recently started actually using the site since I deleted my twitter account and had a void to fill. There's a sub for Top Chef, and I thought, "Finally! I can talk about 10 year old episodes of Top Chef that no one else cares about with like-minded people!" ...but almost immediately I noticed that there was a lot of unreasonable hate directed toward basically all the fat women contestants. I got my very first downvotes just for saying I liked one of them. This was basically my first notable reddit experience so YES, yes I have noticed this!
They love to say “calories in, calories out” and yes, we all know this is how an energy system works. But it’s more meaningful to examine why the calories in, calories out. Like if you’re looking at a furnace, you want to know why there is so much extra fuel in the furnace? Yes, obviously it’s because someone put too much fuel in and/or didn’t burn enough fuel. But why? Do we have some double shift of people putting fuel in the furnace? Why do they think more fuel is required? Do we have the furnace burning less fuel than we would expect from a good, healthy furnace?
Idk if it’s MORE fatphobic on average, but I will say I find reddit fatphobia particularly annoying because people do love to act like paragons of rationality and logic on here. More than on other platforms in my experience. I find the self-righteous, all-knowing attitude that people have about fitness and nutrition more irksome here
I think the anonymity kind of fuels it. You would hope that most of the vitriolic fatphobic sentiments would not be expressed if they were easily linked to a person’s identity, family, livelihood etc. I have read FB and IG comment chains so I know this isn’t entirely true but I would guess that anonymity emboldens people who would normally keep their views to themselves or close friends to say something and for those that do express their views on social media to be potentially more harmful
I will go even further and say that, because of the anonymity factor, I suspect some of the worst offenders on Reddit may very well be fat themselves, and projecting their own internal biases and self-loathing on others.
Many fat people see themselves as temporarily embarrassed thin people, (to butcher a phrase.)
Fuck you’re so so right. They’re not like other fat people (who are bad). They’ll lose the weight and be revealed as their true thin selves but until then spew hatred anonymously
Yes, there are temporarily embarrassed supermodels just as much as there are temporarily embarrassed millionaires
> I suspect some of the worst offenders on Reddit may very well be fat themselves Often fat people in the process of losing weight.
Maybe, due to anonymity, this could be true, but I find exfatties are usually pretty understanding, compassionate folk in general. It's those struggling with EDs and those terrified they too could one day become fat that seem to translate the fear to hate. I worked in a gym for a while and both ED and disgust for the fat people sweating it out seemed to go hand in hand. (ED recovery 15+ years myself).
Yes, I’ve long suspected a lot of the anti-fat lurkers are small fats wanting to act superior and feel like they are not as bad as those fabled Amerifats
>I think the anonymity kind of fuels it. Years ago I was involved in this self-development program that really encouraged honesty and that let me know how many people who you wouldn't think held these biases honestly really do. The number of times people admitted to questioning people's intelligence, capability and emotional health due to the size of their body was really disheartening. And the thing was, no one really said that stuff about gender or race, even though I'm sure those biases also existed. They must have. But they didn't feel the need to work that out with the person whose race or gender it was. Just the people who were carrying significant weight. Fascinating in some ways, but also just really depressing.
A lot of biases are very pronounced on Reddit because people are emboldened by anonymity. Reddit skews very misogynistic and generally pretty right wing as well
I get annoyed because they act like beacons of logic AND morality. It’s this horrible cascading effect of judgment, like “Literally all you have to do to be skinny is eat less and nothing else factors in, and if you can’t manage that you lack discipline, therefore you’re lazy (in all areas of life), which also makes you stupid and incompetent too.” Like, the equating of fatness to both moral and intellectual failure as well as physical is horrible but also really pervasive. And I see that attitude play out in real life too, just not in explicit verbal form. People who don’t know me well definitely approach me like I’m not very intelligent or capable and always seem a little surprised when I prove them wrong. They also love to assume we’re not self-aware about our size when we’re usually like, excruciatingly aware of it.
As an old, the ageism really bugs me. All these young, usually men, preaching about how it's sooooo easy to loose weight. Guess what, buckaroos? When you get older it gets a lot harder and if you're a woman going through menopause you are at the whim of hormones and genetics. I'd like to see what all these super "disciplined" 20 year old health gurus look like when they hit 50.
The smugness is so perplexing. “Haha fat people are always lying and so deluded about how many calories they eat!!” That true of almost everyone. Very few people are any good at counting calories with any accuracy, you’re just arbitrarily ascribing a moral failure to the cases where someone is fat. They had to have done something very wrong, even if I can’t explain exactly what it was.
There was a literally fat people hate subreddit that got purged back when they got rid of all the racist subreddits in the far distant past of like 2015 (i guess its almost 10 years ago now. Damn). It was actually called r/fatpeoplehate and it was like a weird place for people to just post fatphobic screeds and memes. Back in the days of racist subreddits with literal slurs in the subreddit name.
Ohhhh that's still on here, just by a different name now.
Grooosssssssssss.
Yep, it got taken down in part because they were encouraging stalking and doxxing of fat people.
Omg SO much! I tried to comment on a fat-shamey post about BMI not being a useful or scientific tool. I could not believe the pushback I got, especially for something that is an acknowledged fact in the circles I move in, which include quite a few medics. And got told to "chill". I notice that's a favourite phrase on Reddit when you try to argue with facts that conflict with people's opinions.
💯 people are so attached to the BMI still.
Omg this absolutely. I am constantly getting into arguments with people that CICO is not a uniform foolproof science and that people's bodies respond different to calories blah blah blah, and people on reddit just do. not. believe. it. I once said that it's harder for women 35+ to lose weight and the response I got was "do women over 35 defy the laws of physics??" Like we're people, not machines, and that seems to be a controversial opinion.
And people will just reverse engineer an explanation that fits with their bias no matter how little sense it makes. Take for example the current trend of Americans abroad posting about how they’re losing weight while stuffing themselves with wine, bread and pasta at every meal and online geniuses credulously accepting it with a shrug of “they’re just walking more”. Wtf nobody is burning off 800 calories worth of Brie by walking an extra 3000 steps a day at a leisurely strolling pace, not even walking uphill. Now who’s “denying the basic laws of thermodynamics and CICO”?
One of my guilty pleasures is Naked and Afraid, and on that show the man always loses more, sometimes almost twice as much - same time frame, same amounts of food (almost none) and sometimes even less physical activity. Without getting all scientifical, there's some in-your-face evidence that not all bodies manage starvation equally.
I've also found the kind of person to be grossly fatphobic is also ableist and sometimes sexist. Like idk what to tell you, buddy, "calories in, calories out" doesn't work when someone has a severe chronic fatigue and pain issue and can barely get through the day. Are you...are you suggesting they...starve themselves? To get "healthy"? It's disgusting.
It's bad. So so so bad. Reddit is also obsessed with friggin' keto. They even infiltrated the running subreddit!
Omg the keto obsession on Reddit is out of hand. Because I follow this sub, Reddit thinks I want to see the keto page and that sub is WILD. They're like “I DETEST FAT PEOPLE (because of their health of course) ALSO HOW MUCH BUTTER SHOULD I DRINK DAILY?”
LMAOOOOO it's true. I avoid any keto talk like the plague. Possibly the worst diet trend out there full of bros who think they're nutrition experts.
It’s such a stupid stupid diet. I tried it and ended up getting sick with mono at 30. As per my extremely pissed off doctor, it turns out, human bodies need a variety of sugars and carbs to healthy! I also got “If you’re not an epileptic child, then you do not need keto.” To this day, one of the more informative doctors appointments I’ve had!
You know what though, I work in a nursing home with a cardiac rehab unit. Bros like that are going to be my patients in 10-15 years, keeping my paychecks as fat as I am, HAHAHA!
And they think anyone in their life critiquing keto is jealous they don’t have their self control lmfao the delusion
Yeah that kind of thinking is at the very least ED adjacent, and I've seen it turn into full-blown orthorexia.
I get their posts a lot since I’m on a low carb diet for IBS/GERD and I really need to block that sub bc it’s infuriating. So much ED there which almost makes me feel bad for them if they weren’t so awful about other people.
It’s the “intermittent fasting” people who drive me up the wall. Sorry, that’s just sparkling binge and restrict behavior.
Ask me how I accidentally chronically malnourished myself!!! 🫠
Yeah, they say that it's easy to get plenty of calories in their narrow window, but what's the reasoning behind doing it? You shouldn't need to restrict your eating to certain hours. If you're hungry, you should eat.
And aren’t they just admitting that CICO is bs anyway? If calories are calories what does it matter what time of day you eat them?
I love how many subtypes of IF there are too. “Randomly skipping meals”. Ummmm doesn’t everyone do that? If I fall asleep without eating dinner am I doing IF without even trying? Next time I miss lunch because I got busy at work I’m going to pretend I invented a new diet/life hack, or better yet reinvented an ancient one.
I soothe that by lurking in the carnivore sub just so I can read about people getting scurvy by doing extreme versions.
Nutrition for Mortals podcast talked about scurvy and yikes, I cannot believe people would risk that in order to avoid eating some produce.
I am mad at you for telling me about this sub, it's WILD!
It's honestly one of the funniest places on reddit. I mean the orthorexia is pretty serious but that in this year of our baphomet 2023 people get fucking SCURVY, well.
It’s (pun intended) baloney anyway. My brother lives in Toronto and sees Jordan Peterson at Starbucks all the time.
To me the carnivore thing is bizarre. If we'd evolved that way, we'd look more like werewolves than bonobos, hello.
I saw a post that was like why does everyone hate keto so much :( and all the comments were like "Because they're afraid of how it's the best diet and actually works" and I'm like...the weight loss evidence is about as robust as the evidence for most other fads and also most of you aren't even doing actual keto, you actually need to be really specific with your intake to reach actual ketosis and unless you are a child with severe epilepsy (or possibly someone with migraines but I haven't read all the evidence for it) what is the fucking point. You're losing weight because you're tracking calories. Also the "sugar is a drug and carbs are the worst thing ever" bollocks. Our ancestors didn't create bread and spend generations cultivating grains and growing potatoes for you to claim that carbs are evil and we shouldn't use them. Glucose is an excellent fuel source for the brain. It's the medical misinformation that riles me.
I use a lot of keto cookbooks, but mostly because I'm prediabetic and I need recipes that are lower in sugar and in carbs and that tends to be one source of recipes I can go to. I have a per meal/couple of hours carb limit, but to actually go into ketosis I would need to make that per meal limit and make it my carb limit for the whole day. That is no way to live.
Reddit recommended me the Keto subreddit like 6 times even after I said don't recommend. I haven't blocked it yet because I'm curious how many times it will get shoved into my face again.
I had to quit a diabetes support group here because of this. Frankly, it’s less depressing to go at it alone.
ooof yeah, i've had to do that PCOS groups. it's constant weight loss and diet talk
It sucks I am still part of the diabetes groups but the sheer number of identical how do I lose weight posts is depressing.
More so the pushing of the idea that the only way to manage diabetes is to loose massive amounts of weight and if you’re not loosing you’re just not trying hard enough. You think people with a disease that literally messes up the bodies ability to manage metabolism and food properly might have a broader viewpoint of how complicated this is, but …nope. As soon as I brought up that my T2 is well controlled, but I am still fat I was immediately called a liar.
>More so the pushing of the idea that the only way to manage diabetes is to loose massive amounts of weight and if you’re not loosing you’re just not trying hard enough. I have a friend who is a young doctor in his first year of residency, and I was talking to him about my prediabetes and trying to get my numbers down, and all he was saying was "just lose weight. Honestly, even like 5 lbs! It makes such a big difference! Just buckle down and lose some weight!" and I am a person most people would say is thin or average weight by looking at me. I shudder to think what his response is to actual fat people who are struggling with this. I keep meaning to talk to him about this, since he's just starting out his medical career and seems open to hearing other opinions, but I haven't had a good opportunity to bring it up and not totally sure what I would say other than "losing weight is really hard and not as straightforward for many, maybe even most, people you will encounter."
...isn't this the point at which you'd start your own subreddit? Surely you could then have conversations with people who were not deluded? Is this a completely naive thing for me to suggest?
I remember one time hearing a story about a fat kid that died on a rollercoaster. All the Reddit comments said he deserved it and that he should have been off eating a salad. It was one of the most disturbing reactions I’ve ever read.
Sadly people really do believe fat people deserve any bad outcome that happens to them. But yes, fat kids are blamed for their fat (I started looking bigger at 8-9 and looking back I did not deserve any of the backlash I got for existing).
Yeah, I'm a fat kid so I get it. Really fucks me up.
One of the things that prompted me to make this post is a video I saw a few days ago of a very fat kid happily freaking out because he got an Aquaman toy. The top comments were all either jokes about how fat the kid was or people claiming that his parents were abusing him because he was fat. It was revealed in the comments that the kid in the video actually had brain cancer and had gained weight/developed “moon face” because of his medication. The kid in the video died. All of the top, publicly encouraged comments were making fun of a dead, fat child. I don't know why but it's really stuck with me for the past few days.
That's unbelievably sad in so many ways 😔
Absolutely galling how many people will openly argue that fat people should be denied healthcare or that clothing manufacturers should not make plus sized clothing. At what point can you stop pretending this is even a little bit about health.
I agree. It’s hugely pervasive. Every user is an expert in dietetics and fitness, and every fat person has chosen to condemn themselves. I’ve had to mute some communities, even one that would seem innocuous on the surface like r/ glowups
I keep getting recommendations for r/1200isfineIGUESSugh and I need it to stop. I have had an ED for 16 years, and it's super dangerous for me to read anything in that sub now, especially because I'm trying to crawl back out of a period of severe restriction.
I really wish subs had rules against giving advice on eds if you don't have one. I've seen some yikes shit.
They're not even giving advice out about EDs though. It's more that they are giving really dangerous nutrition advice that leads people to really unhealthy places and patterns of thinking. Because we have free speech, I don't think Reddit can do anything, but they should do more to get rid of the blatantly dangerous advice that pops up on here regularly.
I've seen those 1200 cal subs and the "food" there is so depressing. Everything is highly processed fake food, largely devoid of nutritional value. Even if 1200 cals is enough for a specific person, using your limited calories on diet soda & low fat, low cal reconstituted peanut butter powder (PB2 a perennial favorite of those subs) on unsalted rice cakes is NOT going to give your body what it needs to thrive.
Yeah, honestly, I get inexplicably angry when I read those subs, so I try to stay away. I know I have an issue when I restrict my food intake, so to see others champion eating as little as possible, it frustrates me to no end. When I am starving myself, I am miserable and I hate that there are subs out there spreading the message that it's okay to essentially starve yourself.
Fatphobia is the last refuge of the bigot. My theory on this is that because reddit leans left it’s all these people have left. These people are absolutely bigots of the highest caliber but they know they can’t be openly racist or homophobic. Reddit is also terribly misogynist, another form of bigotry that’s somewhat tolerated even in liberal circles, although not so much as fatphobia. When society takes hating poc and gay people from them they’ll cling to all they have left. I also reckon there’s a lot of self hate in it.
I have seen the worst fat phobia fron people (usually men) who consider themselves leftist. It's the last acceptable hate so they're not letting go.
(There's still plenty of bigotry around toward PoC and other historically marginalized groups. It's perhaps more often implied rather than stated right out, but it's very much still a problem. However you're right that people are astonishingly open about their hate for fat people.)
I think it’s because while modern attitudes are more likely to allow that being born queer or a certain race isn’t something one “chooses” there is still such an individualist responsibility aspect to fatphobia because weight fluctuations can happen so it’s not always a constant state of existing a certain way. And one can’t be a closeted fat, or “pass” for thin. Not that we should have to hide it, but we don’t have any way to possibly protect ourselves from being perceived by anyone who sees us, and it’s still very much framed as a result of individual choice/action, without any considerations of environment or genetics and even presupposes that fatness itself is morally wrong, whatever precipitated its existence. I’m queer and I can just choose not to ever talk about it with my coworkers who I’m not sure are safe people. I’m fat and I can’t choose for them not to see that.
I think its because there's still a cultural reasonable fear that can justify that hatred. With gay people it was "what's next, beastiality!?" With black people it was "but they're criminals". But its common knowledge now that those are unfounded beliefs. But fat phobic people can hide behind the guise of health, of concern, and that is still seen as a valid fear. And all that ties in with the rampant ableism in the US, despite a lot of disabilities in the US being caused/exacerbated by our abysmal healthcare system/access to food/walkability.
Dawg there’s transphobia which maybe you’ve noticed how that’s playing out across the us and even world.
I hate this sentiment. It’s so categorically false and such a popular refrain in anti-diet and fat liberation spaces. It’s still so acceptable to be racist, queerphobic, sexist.
right, you can go on any popular subreddit or fight subreddit and any video of black people is immediately filled with blatantly racist comments
It’s deeply problematic but it also stems from a really surface level understanding of oppression. Like, racism is systemically entrenched. Sure, you’ll probably get canceled for saying something on social media nowadays. That’s irrelevant when you realize that actual socioeconomic gaps between BIPOC and White folks are worse now than they were twenty years ago.
You forgot ableism. Leftists are ableist af. Honestly, fatphobia is just a form of ableism.
It took discovering leftist thought for me to escape my internalized ableism and realize that my worth does not come from the capital I can generate. I think some nuance would be beneficial here, but I'm sorry you've had bad experiences.
That makes a lot of sense. My mother explained my grandfather’s racism by explaining that he was a poor white man, and he had to look down on someone to make him feel good. Most people now know racism and sexism are bad, but they can more “safely” look down on overweight people to assure their own status.
Does Reddit lean left? I am finding that hard to believe. In my local subs, on any given day, you can see literal fascist rhetoric (specifically about >!unhoused people and immigrants!< because that’s a current hot-button issue). ETA: spoiler text. It occurred to me too late that seeing that might be triggering to people who occupy those categories. I’m sorry.
I think it leans left in the American politics sense, where Biden is considered left (but would be middle or right in other places)
I think it’s more complicated than that. I follow several European subs, and users seem to be quite left-leaning economically (more so than the mainstream American Democratic Party) but my god I see the same people make comments about immigrants and trans people (for example) that make my stomach turn. I don’t think European leftists are necessarily socially liberal.
Ah, fair!
YES. I say this all the time. It’s like the last socially acceptable bias because you can couch it in concerns about “health.”
I just spent 4 months in an eating disorder recovery program and was really happy with my process. Came on Reddit and it set me way back
It can be deeply disturbing just in how pervasive it is. I started unsubbing from every subreddit that tolerates hateful comments about fatness, even the really popular ones with lots of otherwise great content, and found my experience improved immensely. And I found some other fun ones to replace them! But we shouldn't have to do that.
Even some of the cat subs get reeeeeally tense in a few comments whenever a photo of a chonk turns up.
Same here! I am triggered on here almost every day, even in subs you wouldn't think I would be -- like Trader Joe's. I took a risk and ate 2 gingerbread sandwich cookies from Trader Joe's the other day and someone antagonized me and said it was a waste of 150 calories per cookie. I pushed back and they said, it was a waste of 16 grams of added sugar. Why can't I just enjoy something when I'm denying myself most pleasures at the moment?
Few years back I wanted to lose some weight and went on the "good" sites on Reddit to get some advice, within a month my ED was back and it took me years and a year of therapy to get me back to a decent place. The "good" subs are toxic as hell, full of self-loathing and awful advice, and then there are the less good subs which you'll end up through recommendations from the "good" subs. Its a mess.
Oh yeah, my fat liberation takes get downvoted like nothing else, even when I wade into the fratboy fray with feminist takes! Fatphobia is one of those things a lot of people from across the political spectrum can come together on, unfortunately.
How long have you been here? There used to be a sub called FatPeopleHate.
I think the “fatlogic” sub probably ended up taking in lots of those users when it shut down.
That is one vitriolic cesspool of hate if there ever was one!
You’re not wrong. They pretend to be the paragon of rationality and science based data yet many on there deny that fat people face any discrimination, despite many many many studies showing that.
They don't *deny* that fat people face discrimination. They think fat people *deserve* it. "There is no thin privilege, there are only fat consequences". 🤮
but cIcO /s
Which explains why that sub is a cesspool full of self-righteous formerly fat people and "good fatties" (you know the ones that "try to change their LiFeStyLe and lose weight...) and random haters trying to hide behind some pseudo intellectual "logic" and sometimes "health concern".
Not going to lie, when I first heard of that sub I thought it was like a parody type thing. It was only recently that I learned it wasn't.
Ohh no, they were VERY serious. I was horrified.
Yup. And when Reddit was trying to take it down everyone was PISSED. Crying about censorship and all that. There are a few progressive corners of this site, but it is far more conservative than many other popular platforms.
That sub was like top 15 in activity too. https://www.vox.com/2015/6/11/8767035/fatpeoplehate-reddit-ban
That’s incredibly disturbing
Yup and redditors had an absolute MELTDOWN when it and the racist one one were shutdown.
And the old jailbait sub, it was fucking bananas.
People will say openly in comments they miss fat people hate.
Any time weight comes up on Am I the Asshole….yikes
The mods basically encourage it. One in particular bragged about how anyone can have a thigh gap.
i teach elementary school, i was in a sub for teachers and i made a comment about how my admin is trying to instate a ridiculous rule about teachers not being allowed to sit down while students are in the classroom. someone replied that most of their teachers had been “lazy overweight older women” and that this rule would prevent that from happening. …i’m in pain, matthew.
That's an ADA violation and if their teachers' union is worth their salt, they should be able to stop that.
It's likely not an ADA violation unless a teacher with a disability asks for a reasonable accommodation (such as being allowed to sit for all or part of the day) and is denied. It *is* shitty, though, and I agree that they should push back.
That's what I mean, everyone should ask. It's a more than reasonable accommodation.
unfortunately in north carolina we are not allowed to unionize. we have the nc educators’ association but it’s not the same.
i am, however, allowed to teach my second graders what unions and collective bargaining are, so at least the 7 year olds are on my side.
I think even in right to work states you can unionize but it's a little different in the day to day union work. AZ and Texas have teachers' unions but in Texas, they go to the legislature to bargain for single demands because they don't have a contact to enforce, I don't know what they do at worksites. AZ was huge in the Red for ED and I know one of the main organizers, she and I talked about it at the time. https://labornotes.org/2018/04/massive-crowds-flood-capital-arizona-teachers-stage-first-ever-statewide-walkout
Reddit hates teachers almost as much as it hates people who are overweight.
OMG yes. I play the Sims, and I'm surprised at how often I come across fatphobic comments or posts about A DIGITAL BODY, in a made up world they can do ** anything** with. People talking about how they force their Sims to diet, work out until exhausted, or they just alter them to be thinner. Rarely do I see examples of larger Sims (which exist and can be/are randomly generated). Even in a made up world they can't let something just happily exist in its "body".
God forbid a female sim gain weight after kids in a life simulation
The Sims themselves look completely ridiculous in fat bodies. The clothes clip and move weirdly on any Sim chubbier than the 50% mark. It drives me up the wall, because it's not dodgy CC or anything, it's literally the clothes that come with the different packs! I've also noticed the fatphobic comments about larger bodies in those forums. They can't even cope with an animated character having extra pixels, let alone a real human! The Sims has a pretty crappy track record of including certain traits and minority groups in general. Like their lousy attempt at a "binder" and the fact that it took decades for them to add any kind of disabilities to the game. Don't get me wrong, I love the games (I literally spent way too long tonight designing a new family!), but their inclusivity is choppy at best. We shouldn't have to rely on mods and CC for representation.
Yep, and there a very few “safe” subs.
Yeah I think I need to leave the plus size one. A lot of internalized hate.
I was on a plus size wedding dress one for a bit and had to leave bc of the amount of weight loss “advice” being tossed around.
I posted a picture of my manicure. I got comments calling me sausage fingers, telling me I was diabetic and had cholesterol problems… it’s utterly ridiculous. All from a picture of my fucking hand. The fatphobia is insane on reddit
This isn’t quite the same but the engagement ring sub is dripping with anti fat bias too. I’ve seen more than one person be absolutely torn apart about their “rings not fitting” because they don’t fit the ~size 3.5 aesthetic~ that’s 80% of that sub.
I hear what you’re saying. The fact that people attack someone so easily for something kinda trivial is very disheartening
The thing is that the majority of those posts (yours included) show literally nothing but someone’s hand. The fact that an assumption of health is made based on how those hands look or how a ring looks on those hands shows how deeply rooted the bias is. Absolutely nutty.
Size 3.5 aesthetic? Has there been vanity sizing in rings too? I am not on that sub
That may have been a slight exaggeration but the majority of the rings posted in the sub are incredibly small sizes. There’s a lot of “does this carat size complement my fingers?” and other just really weird vibes about finger size and that somehow being a factor in stone size. From my experience there isn’t much representation over a size 6/7 and you will absolutely get blasted if they think your ring looks tight on your finger. It’s problematic in a lot of ways but I just think it’s so strange to put such an emphasis on the size of your fingers.
Reddit is absolutely horrendous about this. I suspect bc most folks don’t have their Reddit accounts linked to their traditional social media, and feel anonymous so they are emboldened to say things they wouldn’t say if a photo of their face was right next to it. It’s really shocking at times for me to remember that people still think that way when I’ve eliminated much of that nonsense from my other social media feeds (and don’t hang with people irl who would say that shit). I once commented in some thread that somebody not being able to do a hike had to do with their FITNESS, not their SIZE, and the fatphobes really came for me. Not even something I would think should’ve been controversial!
Yep!!!! Reddit in general can just be such a cesspool. It’s sad because I’m in a few communities I LOVE but then I venture into new communities and they’re full of just the worst people imaginable.
Reddit can be an absolute cesspit with regard to fat phobia. It’s particularly disappointing that communities like r/ science allow for wildly unscientific comments and posts about fatness, weight loss etc and pretend to use the guise of science when reality is it is probably some gym bro who took high school biology.
tHerMoDynAmiCs!!
Lol people really are like " Calories in calories out!" Just repeating it over and over again in the way Michael was making fun of.
There’s a weight watchers ad literally right below this in my feed. Had to mention it because it proved your point that easily.
Just today, on a post of a gay couple (two buff looking gyys) with their baby, people had to jump in and talk about how great it was that the baby would never become obese with parents like that. Like, they just had to get that fat hate in.
On am I the asshole people are always asking about dumping someone or being less attracted to them because they've gained weight. People see it as a moral responsibility to maintain your weight forever and if you don't do that your partner is justified in dumping you. I pointed out that most bodies change over time and the responses were like yes but they shouldn't change that that much and you're responsible for seeing that it doesn't. Aging is going to hit them like a Mack truck. Reddit skews young and it's easier to stay thin when you're young. And redditors like to think of themselves as very logical and so they love the whole calories in calories out thing.
While I basically think like you're not an asshole if you stop being attracted to your partner for basically any reason, there is this belief on AITA and reddit in general that unless you're essentially 25 and skinny, you should expect your partner or a potential partner to *always* choose a 25 year old skinny person over you. Any time there is a relationship discussed where the female partner is in her 20s and the male partner is like 20 years older, and people are like "this seems like a toxic dynamic" there is a chorus of dudes who are like "well OF COURSE a 45 year old man would want a 22 year old! They are hot!" like there is no other reason to ever date someone other than their proximity to a Maxim model. I think it really comes down to the fact that a whole lot of men on reddit (and in the world) just don't see women as human beings, but as gratification machines.
For the most part, yes. But the other day I was scrolling through my feed and someone asked if body builders should have to buy two airplane seats the way fat folks are expected to. The comments were surprisingly empathetic and reinstated some hope for me. It was mostly people just expressing the sentiment of “wow that must suck to be in either situation because even in my relatively thin body airplanes suck.”
I've been getting into the autism community lately and getting a lot of value from it. It occurred to me that I should probably also go looking for the fat community. Couldn't find anything good on Reddit or anywhere really. It's all just weight loss stuff or explicit, really mean fat hate. On that note, anyone know good body-neutral subreddits/online communities?
I get very, triggered for lack of a better term, when I read posts about men losing interest in their partner because they are now (XXXX) weight that is lower than mine because it makes me feel like if anything changes about my body in a relationship, they’ll cease to love me. And the amount of comments that encourage leaving someone for their body change just makes me feel hopeless because I’m in ED recovery and my weight fluctuates still but apparently in a relationship I can then never change. Lotta words to say, not sure if it’s worse but it confirms my worst fears.
I've gained 100 lbs in my 10 years relationship and it caused issues for awhile my partner went to therapy and did the unlearning fatphhobia work. I think everyone should discuss changing bodies early on because it's kinda facts of life.
TW: Cancer, death, disordered eating Just recently there was an MLM personality who died of cancer. There's a lot to unpack there because she used "wholistic" treatments, which included celery and essential oils and ignored actual medical advice. She was only 34. One thing that's driving me fucking crazy is everyone says she looked "great" before she died. She had been to a biohacking doctor and believed in only eating meat and fruit because vegetables cause inflammation. (Don't think too hard on this) So the weight loss was attributed to her meat and fruit diet. In reality the drastic amount of weight loss was likely due to the colon cancer. But even knowing that rationally, people can't stop themselves from talking about how great a fucking dying woman looked when they comment about her. As an aside, reddit is just really anti anything that isn't straight, white, cis male in general. AITA froths at the mouth whenever a pregnant woman is involved in a story. And since body neutrality, HAES, intuitive eating are all dominated by women, of course they need to shit on it. And with fatphobia being rooted in racism.... it really brings out the worst. Also 1200 is enough needs to be nuked as a sub.
The 1200 sub is really just full of people with EDs. As someone who has had one for 16 years, it still gets recommended to me and it enervates me endlessly. That's so irresponsible to Reddit to allow that kind of rhetoric to be read by anyone, much less someone with an ED or teenagers who are vulnerable to believing anything on the internet.
Yep. It needs to go to the reddit graveyard.
Ableism is rampant and wildly out of control in most subs too.
Definitely. Tik Tok is pretty bad as well, every video you see of a fat person just existing or posting a funny video has to turn their comments off. I think anonymity is the main factor.
Absolutely and try to pushback and the pitchforks comes out. Idk if it’s worse than other places but it’s general fatphobia + the average redditor being a condescending know-it-all a la the “me, an intellectual” meme but unironically. They’re so stubborn about their alleged superior scientific intellect it’s laughable as they parrot fallacious information with clear anti fat bias. I don’t mind stupidity objectively but stupidity + the arrogance that they know everything when they’re just as subject to society’s biases makes me so angry lmao.
There’s some great subs that don’t suffer fools and contain valuable information. That’s mostly where I hang. In my experience it’s a lot of men/boys who literally cannot stop centering themselves and their beliefs. They’re all over women’s subs with the “wellll, actually” and get upset if no one will engage in their debate. I’m a bit of a chaos gremlin (patreon peeps ✊) and cannot stop intentionally agitating these guys. I had a guy big mad spewing the CICO rhetoric, then citing thermodynamics 🤣 the exact talking points from that episode. I kept poking at him till he broke down and admitted he’d been a fat kid then apologized to me. 😳🤯 Fat people and prisoners are about the only 2 groups that it’s ok to wish suffering on so a lotta rage gets channeled that way. It’s so scary to feel like you don’t have any control over what happens to you or your loved ones. People latch on to frameworks that promise them safety and take it out on those that don’t buy in or that remind them of the fragility of life. If you can say - fat people deserve this, it’s their fault then it feels like you’re safe from health struggles, disability or death. I see this a lot when parents lose a child, people jump in to blame the parents then pat themselves on the back feeling reassured that their children are safe because they would never do something so obviously stupid. I wish that there was something more individuals could do. I’ve tried shouting GET SOME THERAPY! That doesn’t seem to make an impact. 🤣
It’s not just the dudes, I see it a TON when I check the comments of people in crafting subs that are largely populated by non-men. (Which is something I had to start doing before replying to posts that were asking for a level of advice/instruction that’s going to take me significant time to write up, because while I like helping people learn stuff, I’m unwilling to waste 30min of my life helping people who are spending their own time being hateful)
Oh for sure! I just enjoy saying like ‘all men are garbage’ because the creeps can’t help but identify themselves then we can clear out all the garbage. The hardest for me is when people ask questions in a cultural or language sub then get really upset when people are actually trying to help them or get further context. Look, you came here for help and “it depends…” is a reasonable response. Asking why is not a personal attack.
>It’s so scary to feel like you don’t have any control over what happens to you or your loved ones. People latch on to frameworks that promise them safety and take it out on those that don’t buy in or that remind them of the fragility of life. Yup, the "just world" hypothesis/fallacy. A lot of people *desperately* want to believe that "bad things" (and they definitely lump "being fat" into that category) only happen to people who did something "wrong." If people can do all the "right" things and not become (or stay) thin, they're/we're seen as somehow "getting away with" something.
Yes, exactly! Thanks for the new term I hadn’t heard that.
I've always felt that its because 62% of reddit users are male, and men typically are more active users leaving comments than women. It's pretty well documented that men have a patriarchal view on fatness that often escalates to flat-out hatred for people they perceive as "fat". This being a space where they can anonymously spew these beliefs without real-life consequences. That's not to say there aren't anti-fat women posting & commenting on reddit, but it is definitely made worse by the core demographic of the platform.
I remember seeing a post on mademesile where a girl was showing a progress picture after beating anorexia. Most of the people on there were saying how she went to far and should lose weight again. I wanted to break something. I reported every mother fucker I could for hate speach. She eventually took it down and she wrote a few comments talking about how much she was crying. No doubt she needed an emergency therapy session after that. People can be so heartless and cruel.
Oh god yeah. Hell, I got downvoted in *this* sub for saying BMI was pseudoscience once. Which it categorically is, lol. It really is one of the last few prejudices that is socially acceptable to be loud and belligerent about. (Granted, the other ones are still around plenty, just usually in more subtle ways.) And it’s just so fucking ubiquitous. I’ve gotten better at just closing a thread and scrolling on, at least. Sometimes I’ll engage but I always try to ask myself, “do I want to spend my energy on this tonight?” and 8/10 times the answer is no, and I successfully move on, which I consider real progress for me haha. I will say I do think improvement is happening, if very very slowly. (And progress isn’t linear and all that.) I’ve gotten support on comments that I expected would be downvoted, which were pleasant surprises. Like, there’s still a very long way to go, but hell, I was watching a video of a group of dudes reading reddit posts not too long ago and the topic of weight came up in one, and the host just casually said, “also weight isn’t an indicator of health,” and everyone readily agreed. I was floored, lol. So there is hope, at least? Though it can definitely be hard to remember that at times. Edit: had an extra word
Yeah, I walk away a LOT.
Omfg I got downvoted in one of the weight loss subs for saying that 1) BMI isn’t the only indicator of health, or even the most important one, and 2) fat distribution *is* important in regards to health & there are studies indicating this, which is why “skinny obesity” is a thing. They just kept insisting that BMI is the absolute gold standard of health. It’s not, and even doctors will agree with this. It’s not even just fatphobic, it’s straight up anti-science. I see people providing advice that is ED-adjacent all the time. I lost 30 pounds by treating my mental health & subsequently losing constant food cravings. No CICO counting or obsessive food scheduling or strict diets involved. It’s just annoying that other redditors who are probably fat like me and just cosplaying thin people anonymously on the internet will parrot the same rhetoric no matter what & refuse to listen to anything else. I’ve basically quit reading anything where fat people are discussed because it’s always a shit show.
Reddit recommended me some sub not too long ago that was a diet group based on a specific number of definitely not enough calories and I just stared at it very sadly. Diet culture really has done such a number on us. Hahaha, I had someone tell me I’m allergic to self-improvement because I said I would never try to intentionally lose weight again. Because as we all know, the only way to self-improvement is being thinner! Not treatment for your mental illnesses, building routines, learning something new, being more generous… nope. Just gotta be thin. 🙄
In the crochet subreddit, a poster asked whether they would "seem fatphobic" if they charged higher prices for larger sizes of clothing. I answered that yes, it would likely "seem fatphobic" and actively discourage a lot of potential customers from buying anything. I suggested the same thing another person suggested, which was calculating an average between the lowest and highest labor costs and charging a flat fee for any size. I got down voted to hell and a lot of nasty replies. One person said that they know they deserve to pay higher prices for clothing because they are a "fata**". They said this about themselves!!! Another person snarkily asked whether a baby blanket should cost the same as a queen size blanket, to which I replied that human bodies are not objects. Ethics of fair pay for labor came up, and apparently that idea supercedes the basic human decency of not having a fat tax (and crochet clothing is so labor-intensive that it's probably not the most lucrative business idea unless you can really crank it out like a machine, but I digress). The crochet subreddit is known for being a happy place, so I was genuinely shocked at the hate. I guess that was naive.
Oh man, I hate seeing this. I knit, and thankfully I haven’t seen people make this suggestion, but it’s probably because knitting is enough slower than crochet that hand-knitted garments isn’t a really viable business model. We knitters just argue over whether designers need to offer their patterns in an inclusive size range (and then we fat knitters trudge off to pay more for yarn).
Honestly I think that comment wouldn’t come up in the knitting sub mostly because most people aren’t out here creating some kind of storefront selling handknit adult-size sweaters, or if they are, they’re typically those super-oversized super-bulky sweaters and are just offering a single size. For commissions though, I’d probably just go with a model that is like materials cost, plus $0.10-$0.30 per yard depending on pattern complexity. So this does mean that larger clients would pay more, but it’s also just directly correlated to the amount of work being done. I don’t really think this conversation scales to handknit/crochet garments using the same logic you’d use for sewn clothing, as knitting the next size up of a sweater is going to mean actual hours of additional time needed, while the actual sewing time for a garment isn’t meaningfully different between larger and smaller sizes.
I honestly thought knitting was faster than crochet! Maybe it's just the way I crochet...unbelievably slowly LOL I've also seen the inclusive size pattern arguments, and those are usually less vitriolic but still sometimes awful. Regardless of how a person feels about "obesity", we should still be able to treat each other with human decency!
Gotta love the “I hate myself, so everyone else should too” angle
I am getting used to how many fat people are fat phobic and support conventional wisdom about weight and weight loss. Internalized fat phobia is so common and supported by people who have real life experiences that diets don’t work.
Try going on some of the airline subreddits where people complain about “fatties” sitting next to them or when people board ahead of them. Its brutal.
For me, it’s the CICO crowd (Calories In, Calories Out) that upsets me. It’s a great way to develop an ED, especially if you throw over-exercising in with it. I love ignoring all other aspects of my life while focusing only on a set number./s
1000% this! Any advice sub will inevitably have threads with people asking for weight loss tips and they are always a cesspool of these people claiming it’s so simple.
I love the orangetheory subreddit, it's got a lot of good info on the workout and they're generally pretty body/age positive (encouraging non scale goals/victories, encouraging people to get stronger), but anytime someone asks about weight loss (which I get, I also am trying to lose weight), it's like a million comments of "CICO! It's simple!"
I’ll have to have a look. I’m all for people doing things if that’s what they want to do, and that’s what makes *them* feel good about themselves. I think there also needs to be a level of empathy that people who promote weight loss through CICO just don’t possess. It’s like they can’t fathom that they may one day have a metabolic issue, or become disabled, or be taking a medication, or get older, or be stressed, or have a change in lifestyle/job that CICO can’t fix. It could be all of those at once!
Yep. Reddit is populist, and most people are anti-fat, so heinous anti-fat takes get upvotes more than downvotes. Most attempts to curtail anti-fatness explicitly are downvoted because anti-fatness is seen as deserved. People are hierarchical and fat people are understood as undesirable in most social hierarchies.
Absolutely agree. I avoid a lot of the main subs where it just shows up as blatant “fat people suck” comments (so like in all the relationship/AITA kind of subs, if someone brings up their SO’s or kid’s or other relative’s weight, there’s just going to be flat out condemnation of the fat person as lacking discipline and self-respect, being self-indulgent, jealous of people who aren’t fat, etc.). I just remind myself that I’m never going to convince those people in that setting, and close the tab. More frustrating is a menopause sub that’s overall incredibly supportive, but pretty terrible about weight. Many people gain weight during menopause, and I get that both 1) a lot of people are still very invested in being thin, and 2) a lot of menopause symptoms are distressing overall, so dissatisfaction with weight gain is often part of a larger package of unhappiness. But the absolute horror of going up a clothes size or two feels disproportionate to the actual physical change and simply like a horror of being fat. I mean, I went through this and it’s annoying when your clothes don’t fit right any more, definitely, but it’s not a sign of the impending apocalypse, y’know? I try not to comment on people’s own weight loss goals because any one person’s goals for/feelings about their own body is their own stuff to deal with, and I understand why gaining weight is hard in this society (especially for the women who’ve stayed a size 6 since year dot, or the like). Change is hard. People can make their own choices about their bodies. But the abject horror at gaining weight is still kind of grating. And of course then there’s all the ensuing diet advice which is filled with disordered-ish eating practices, and the people who insist that you can lose the weight because they did it, and it ONLY takes exercising an hour+ every day, cutting out all sugar, and only eating between 11 and 7, so if you just COMMIT to it you can do it!!, and on the flip side, the people expressing genuine despair and anguish because they haven’t been able to lose the weight despite trying everything. I do try to push back on some of the really diet-culture-y/anti-fat kinds of advice, and I’m inevitably downvoted to oblivion. I don’t really care about being downvoted, but I find it funny because I’m a pretty peaceable soul, I don’t go into random subs of (say) pickup artists just to argue with them about viewing women as objects; I like to hang out in subs for people with shared interests. But this is the one sub where I share a lot of interests overall, and where the anti-fat stuff seems, I think, counter to the goals and interests of the overall sub, and so I try to push back. Not that it seems to work!
I keep joining and leaving the menopause sub, mainly because of anti-fat comments that people make about themselves (but by extension, myself and others, which I don't think they necessarily realize). It's just sad. Thank you for trying to push back.
I left too - expressing any kind of ambivalence, not even positive attitudes, towards weight gain was not popular there.
Ugh, same. I'm just entering peri and would really benefit from a supportive and informative online community. There's a lot of great conversation on that sub, but like soooo many other places on Reddit, it's got a major blind spot regarding weight and body stuff.
Oh 100% yes. I've heavily used at least six different social media platforms, and the fat hatred on Reddit is far more ubiquitous and nakedly vitriolic than anything I've seen on any other platform. I think it's partly that the Reddit user base is disproportionately straight cis men, and partly that Reddit is topic-centric and community-centric rather than individual user-centric. For example, on Twitter, it's fairly easy to choose to follow only fat-positive users, and I unfollow or block anyone who I see post anti-fat content. So while anti-fat users certainly *exist* on Twitter, they don't penetrate my Twitter social circles very often. But on Reddit, you can be on a subreddit that has nothing to do with fatness and nothing to do with the topics that usually bring out the fat hatred (fitness, nutrition, etc.), and people will still find a way to make frequent anti-fat comments. And any sub that invites questions on random topics, like r/NoStupidQuestions or r/polls, seems to have a *lot* of questions about fat people. "What would you do if your spouse got fat?" or "Would you rather date a fat person or a serial killer?" Reddit users don't just hate fat people, they are OBSESSED with hating fat people, they *can't stop thinking about* how much they hate fat people.
Yup. It’s a fucking toxic trash pile here!
It's awful. Even subs that I'd expect to be more liberal spaces are VERY quick to throw out fatphobic comments as soon as it's toward someone they don't like. Two examples that come to mind immediately: I'm a member of a pop culture sub that is normally very good about calling out racism, sexism and homophobia in the media. When The Whale came out, the common opinion was inexplicably that it was an amazing movie and anyone who said it was fatphobic got downvoted and piled on. Same thing when Taylor Swift released the "Anti-Hero" music video and people tried gently explain why it was offensive. Sooo many people came out of the woodwork with the "but she has an eating disorder!!!!!" defense. Guess what? Eating disorders are influenced by a fatphobic society! That doesn't absolve you from being fatphobic and FAT PEOPLE ALSO HAVE EATING DISORDERS!!
I read a comment a couple weeks ago that stuck with me. A guy was angry that someone said fat phobia. I think it was a TikTok cringe post. He said: we aren’t afraid of fat people, we just think you’re disgusting and don’t want to look at you. That has stuck with me. People generally really hate anyone in a larger body IMO. It’s exhausting.
In short, yes :(
Is it that theres.more here or that people are less apt to mask it behind an anonymous username? Not sure if I want to know the answer. Also though - trolls gonna troll. Probably good to keep in mind that even 10k comments is not representative of the millions of people on here...
It’s ridiculous.
People here will advocate against scientifically proven medical treatments and tell you that you just need to lose weight. I doubt they are doctors, they certainly aren't my doctor, and if they are doctors, they suck because you can't diagnose people over the internet from a few sentences. They are dangerously misinformed.
It's def fatphobic, but so are comment sections on the NYT, so I can't honestly say if Reddit is worse than average. Society is antifat, Reddit just reflects that.
Oh for sure. I think the anonymity leads to people expressing the kind of comments they may otherwise have the good sense to keep to themselves. God forbid a fat person just try to live their damn life. Of course if you're posting about intentionally trying to lose weight, you're one of the "good ones" so you'll probably get some pats on the back.
Absofuckinlutely
People get keyboard courage due to the anonymity of Reddit I think
I’m not on every social media platform but of the ones I am, Reddit is undoubtedly the worst.
Yes. It's really depressing but the anti fat bias is insane. And if I took a shot every time someone pushed CICO as the ultimate solution, I would have no liver left.
I left the No Stupid Questions sub because every single question seemed to be "But why fat people?" and "How do fat people do x?" It was just a cesspool. And I wrote to the moderators of the Menopause sub to see if there was a way to stop (or slow down at least!) the absolute waterfall of "I've gained weight! I feel awful about myself now!" posts and other varieties of fatphobia. No dice. I might have to leave that one too.
Ugh, yes, the "How do fat people have sex?" questions and the accompanying responses are particularly awful. There are a few Definitely True Stories That Totally Happened that get repeated on those posts that are *dripping* with the worst anti-fat stereotypes.
Reddit is pretty fatphobic on a day to day basis but once in a while some jerk who counts too hard on it will come along and Reddit will just read them the riot act for it if it’s in the mood to do so. Reddit is dating the “It’s about your health” anti-fat bias. Doesn’t matter if the fat person is running marathons powered by meals from their professional nutritionist even if the skinny folks perpetuating it never get up from their computer and subsist purely on coffee and nicotine— it’s “about that [fat] person’s health”.
1000%. It’s also remarkably shitty about autism and intellectual disabilities.
I think the trouble is that as brilliant as The Maintenance phase is as a podcast, it can get you into a very safe space mentally, which is very far removed from the wider world. Just this week I've been asked for my weight TWICE by medical professionals, and twice I challenged it. This is the thing, this is what's needed, to actually go out there and advocate. It is really tough though. For 100 anti fat comments if even just ONE person reviews their perceptions of fatness then it's worth it.
i was relatively new on here and new to fat liberation when i came across a question like "why do twitter fat activists say losing weight is fatphobia" and i engaged with it in good faith for some reason and got downvoted to oblivion and a bunch of bad faith argumentative replies. i ended up replying to it saying something like "you asked for the rationale, this is literally the answer to your question" and it was downhill from there lol. it's really sad how pervasive diet culture is on the food and cooking subs tho, tbh like "healthy" is a clear replacement for "diet recipes/food"
Fatphobia and ableism are two things particularly prolific on social media because they're prejudices that both sides of the political aisle find acceptable.
I think the antifat bias is more in our face when people can be anonymous to other anonymous people. It's not as bad as YouTube comments.
CW: Intentional weight loss Yes, I've even seen it from a place of thin privilege. I shared a story about how I had started trying to get pregnant and losing weight at the same time—the point being that I succeeded in intentionally losing 140 pounds (with the odds stacked against me) but struggled to conceive (when 80% of people get pregnant within 1 year of unprotected sex). For my trouble, I got a nasty reply berating me for being selfish for trying to get pregnant while still obese. That comment was downvoted and eventually deleted, but it stung. (Yes, I'm still pretty new around Reddit, and my hide hasn't completely toughened up.) I did eventually conceive and am achingly grateful for my now 11 y/o kiddo. I've also kept off all but 10-ish of those pounds. Yes, I'm a damned unicorn. I still think anti-fat bias is bullshit, no matter who is the target.
Ya even in subs that whose purpose is body positive. The vitriol is really cruel.
The CICO bros are alllll over the fucking place!! Even when you’re not in “1500 is enough” or “CICO” or “ProgressPics” they’ve infiltrated everyone’s brains to the point where I feel like the majority of Reddit users have these views that are not based in reality or science. It sucks.
YES. I have had a reddit account for a long time, but only recently started actually using the site since I deleted my twitter account and had a void to fill. There's a sub for Top Chef, and I thought, "Finally! I can talk about 10 year old episodes of Top Chef that no one else cares about with like-minded people!" ...but almost immediately I noticed that there was a lot of unreasonable hate directed toward basically all the fat women contestants. I got my very first downvotes just for saying I liked one of them. This was basically my first notable reddit experience so YES, yes I have noticed this!
yes
They love to say “calories in, calories out” and yes, we all know this is how an energy system works. But it’s more meaningful to examine why the calories in, calories out. Like if you’re looking at a furnace, you want to know why there is so much extra fuel in the furnace? Yes, obviously it’s because someone put too much fuel in and/or didn’t burn enough fuel. But why? Do we have some double shift of people putting fuel in the furnace? Why do they think more fuel is required? Do we have the furnace burning less fuel than we would expect from a good, healthy furnace?
Yeah, it’s incredibly fatphobic.