Sept. 11, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:02
3071 Re: Dear Fat People
Comedian Nicole Arbour caused an uproar when she recently published the video, "Dear Fat People," on YouTube. Other YouTube commentators have made emotional response videos decrying Arbour for "Fat Shaming" and "Body Shaming," while others created emotional response videos calling Arbour a bully. Stefan Molyneux responds to the controversy to look at the facts behind obesity, fat shaming and the reaction.
Dear fat people, this has been floating around on the internet, I guess, for a couple of days, where a woman who's kind of funny, if a tad acerbic, has been talking about the need for fat people to just lose weight and stop putting so much food in their mouths and so on.
And I get the frustration.
I do.
Because, of course, now that we're all bound to each other collectively, Through socialized medicine or Obamacare, but I repeat myself, you know, other people's health decisions have a big impact on our own wallets.
So I kind of get that.
You know, will they cost you more in terms of diabetes?
Will they save you more in terms of old age pensions?
Who knows?
It's the smoking question.
But I do sort of want to point out a couple of important things.
I'm no expert in this area.
These are just my personal observations.
So, first of all, being overweight has a genetic component to it.
If your parents...
Or overweight, then you are much more likely to have inherited the kind of metabolism that tends to gain weight.
So that's pretty wretched.
Everyone has seen, wherever you go, if you're a parent in particular, everyone has seen fat kids.
And fat kids, you really can't blame the kids, of course, right?
It's the parents who are buying the food, it's the parents who are providing the environment, it's the parents who are cooking the meals, and it is the parents who are making a disaster out of that child's metabolism and future potential for health and fitness.
You can also, of course, look at the increasing, you know, let's bubble wrap our kids and let's keep them safe from everything.
Don't climb that tree!
You know, because fathers have basically vaporized for large segments of particularly the poorer Western families, and in particular the American families.
And it's the fathers who say, go climb the tree, and it's the mothers who are cautious.
And because fathers are absent, mothers' hypercaution has been, don't go out, don't play near the road, don't climb trees, don't jump from the stairs, don't...
Right?
And that's natural.
I mean, that's natural and it's a healthy balance.
You know, if bachelors around the world, the children would be...
I don't know, lawn darts would still be a popular birthday toy.
But...
Of course, for a wide variety of reasons, the government tax on sugar and the government food pyramid, which is basically a marketing agent bought by major food groups.
Food has become a mess.
Food has become riddled with fructose glucose and sugars of every kind.
There was, of course, this massive anti-fat campaign that went on.
And when people said, I don't want fat anymore, and the food was largely processed and frozen, the only way to make a taste of anything was to add sugar to it.
And you can find of the hundreds of thousands Of foodstuffs available in American supermarkets, the vast majority of them have some sort of sugar added and that is the result of a variety of things.
The push to get women into the workforce, whatever its benefits may have been in other areas, meant that there was much less time available for cooking healthy and nutritious food from scratch with ingredients that you can pronounce.
And so bringing women into the workforce meant that more processed and frozen foods became the staple and the standard As did, of course, going to restaurants.
And that meant that food quality declined.
I mean, that's just the price you pay.
And of course, not like families became richer when women went into the workforce.
Governments got a double hit of tax goodies because the women who were formerly not being taxed as homemakers then became taxed when they went to work.
And then all the childcare workers who had to rush in to take the place of the mothers also produced income which could be taxed.
So governments loved it.
Because it was great for that and of course the Marxists loved it because it undermined family relations and all that kind of stuff.
So there's a lot of politics behind it.
There is of course also a general bell curve of obesity that follows intelligence, follows IQ tests.
More intelligent people tend to be less overweight and of course there are exceptions but so what?
Everyone points out these exceptions like they mean something.
And those who are less intelligent tend to have lower impulse control and focus more in the moment and tend to eat the stuff that tastes better, but which is worse for you.
So there is that issue as well.
And so it is a complex web.
A lot of family dysfunction goes into producing an obese child.
And that's not just within the family.
It's like everyone who's not sitting down with the parents and saying, what the hell are you doing?
You cannot be.
Allowing this kid to eat this kind of crap.
I mean you're just passing on the physical self-abuse known as obesity to the next generation.
There's an entire environment that produces this kind of dysfunction and kids don't choose which family they're born into.
You can choose who you marry, you can choose your friends, you cannot choose the family you're born into.
So I think some sympathy is in order.
And if you happen to be born into an intelligent, high socioeconomic status, relatively svelte family, then you have the resources for better food, you have better genes for keeping weight off, and you have a better environment.
Also, of course, you know, poor kids in bad neighborhoods don't have as much opportunity or freedom to go out and play.
Generally, if there are bars in the window to keep the predators out, It also keeps the children in and that of course has some effect on things as well, particularly if you look at poorer or minority communities.
There's more obesity there because there's more fear of the neighborhood as a whole.
Physical activity has been diminished in schools for a variety of reasons, usually due to inefficient government spending and so on, so there's lots of that stuff as well.
The advent of, you know, video games and really engaging media.
You know, I would go out because I was bored to tears when I was a kid because there was like maybe half an hour of cartoons every week and now you can dial up whatever you want, anywhere you want.
And that, of course, has meant that the mere outdoors, which is, you know, often badly rendered if you don't wear your glasses, the mere outdoors, well, it can't really compete with, I don't know, Dragon Age, Race to the Edge or whatever it is, right?
That's another aspect.
And of course, smarter people recognize that you've got to get up and exercise, but less intelligent people, it just doesn't cross their minds as much.
So it's not so much fat shaming as it is, you know, poverty shaming, low intelligence shaming.
And I think that's not particularly valid.
Now, the last thing as well that I wanted to mention is that I still recognize, you know, there's free will, there's choice.
You've still got to make your decisions, but the best way to do it is not necessarily by screaming at people that they're fat and disgusting.
But, which is not what I believe.
Fat, yes.
Disgusting now.
But here's another aspect too.
You know, people say lose weight and if you've ever flipped through magazines, you know, you'll often see these before and after pictures where, you know, before you have, you know, Aretha Franklin's butt on your belly and afterwards you've got, I don't know, Britney Spears at the age of 22, washboard stomach.
That of course is not real.
that is not real.
People who have gained a particular amount of weight, I don't know exactly what it is, but you know, 50 pounds plus, 40, 50 pounds plus, what they've done is they have stretched their skin out.
And they will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever look thin again.
They will never look thin again, because you've stretched your skin out.
And when you lose the weight, your skin hangs down in folds.
And this is one of the reasons why in the before and after pictures, if they're undoctored, you don't see the belly.
You see the woman in a nice dress or whatever, or you see a slightly overweight person getting more svelte, you know, where your skin hasn't stretched out.
Once you have gained a significant amount of weight, you will never ever look normal and thin again, so to speak.
Normal being how they show in the after pictures.
Now, What are you going to do with all of this excess skin?
Well, you can go for surgery and you can get it hacked off and you can get massive amounts of stitches, which is going to leave you with a lot of scars.
But basically, you will never ever look like you did before.
And there is that aspect of despair where people, you know, you'll get health benefits for sure.
But you'll look like you put on a skin suit, you know, 12 sizes too big for you.
And that is very tough.
You know, where are you going to tuck all of the excess hanging skin?
And what are you going to feel like when you get naked in front of someone, right?
And this is very, very tough stuff.
Very tough stuff.
So people who say, well, just lose weight, I think that a lot of, I mean, I've lost a little bit of weight.
You can look back at my earlier videos.
I lost about 25 pounds, I don't know, six years ago or whatever.
I've kept it off, but only by accepting that you can never go back.
If you want to lose weight, you have to commit to changing your life and never going back.
If you quit smoking, you never smoke again.
And so if you want to lose weight, you have to up your exercise regime.
And you simply have to not have that crap in the house anymore.
You can't do it.
It doesn't mean you can never have a dessert.
I'll have a dessert every couple of months.
But you can't have, you know, chips and cookies and chocolate and cakes and crap and all.
You just can't have it in the house.
You've got to go to nuts.
You've got all the other stuff.
It doesn't maybe taste quite as exciting, but your taste buds will adapt and it's not so bad after a while.
But you lose weight by permanently changing your lifestyle.
It's not a temporary thing.
If it's a temporary thing, you'll do what 95% of people do when they try to lose weight, which is to gain more back afterwards.
You have to change your lifestyle.
You have to say, that was the old me.
That was the old fridge.
I'm not going to have pop anymore, even diet pop, which has been, Negatively associated with weight loss as well.
You've got to change your life and never look back.
You simply can't.
You can't go back to the way you were.
Because what, of course, a lot of people do, they try to lose weight.
That puts their body into starvation mode, which means that almost every extra calorie gets converted to fat.
And so the moment they break their diet, they end up gaining back more weight than they lost before.
And of course, also, as they lose weight and their skin begins to hang, then they feel less attractive and they lose the motivation, if you're doing it for attraction.
Losing weight is very much a double-edged sword.
And of course the other thing too, for kids who grow up fat, I mean the fat cells once created, they never go away.
They never ever go away and they're always looking to expand.
So you got a real monkey on your back.
You got a real tie around your middle that has a will of its own and wants to feed and grow.
There is elements of will involved and there are elements of choice involved, so I'm not saying, you know, doomed, doomed, doomed, but I think for the complexities of people who've ended up obese or who have gotten that way, I think it's important to just understand that there's a lot of factors that have gone into it.
Human nature hasn't just magically changed over the past 20 or 30 years as the obesity epidemic has swept in a very slow way the Western world, in particular in America.
But there's a lot of complexity that goes into it and I think that there's fundamentally a lot of neglect and trauma that lies at the root of obesity and I think that piling on and simply, you know, using this disgusted face, particularly for an attractive young lady, is not the most productive way to help people to understand the source of these problems.