Fat Activists

America's Waistline - The politics of fat. By Laura Kipnis
I disagree with fat activists who say they are perfectly normal, and there isn't an obesity epidemic. According to some of them, that is just their body type. I think that it is true that most people aren't naturally thin, with a thin frame. But there's a difference between someone who has a larger frame and is stocky and someone who weighs over 300 pounds. I think the fat activists could say that is their natural body type, if there aren't all the problems with diet and exercise. I really doubt that there were extremely obese people a few hundred years ago, or during a time when everyone didn't drive everywhere and eat fast food all the time. They seem more of a causuality in a time of an overabundance of fast food and extreme marketing of a fattening lifestyle. Most of the fat people I've met may have a different body type, but they also don't exercise at all and eat fast food all the time. The fat activists claim that it's perfectly healthy to be obese, but if you can barely walk up a flight of stairs, how can that be healthy?
On the over hand, I do think that how they live their life is their business. It is really presumptuous to tell someone else how to care for their own body. If people want to smoke and eat fast food every day, they should be allowed to. But they shouldn't claim that they can't help it when they become unhealthy, or say they have a different body type, and it's out of their control. I guess that's what bothers me about fat activists, is that they act like they can't do anything about their obesity. But unless you have a thyroid disorder, you must have eaten a lot of junk food or been totally inactive, in order to gain 100 or 200 pounds. It's like having an addiction and claiming it's completely out of your control, and that it's your natural state of being. It's giving up in difficult circumstances. I guess they can do that, but I don't like that the fat activists are trying to say that obesity is totally normal and healthy. It's like saying that your addiction completely controls you, and you give in and don't even try to improve yourself.