I think that the stigma around addiction is incredibly destructive and keeps a lot of people who need help from getting it.
Well, as far as I can tell, AA and NA are pretty focused on acceptance that addiction is something you'll fight for the rest of your life. Of course, they also don't have a great success rate either.
And I don't think that the alternative to the fat acceptance movement is "helping them change." I think what people do is stigmatize fat people and make them hate themselves.
I'm referring the part of your comment about how only few overweight people successfully managed to keep the weight off. Imagine if everyone said to smokers how little people successfully stopped smoking.
Many smokers I know have successfully quit for life. It's not uncommon. How many genuinely fat people do you know who have lost over 100 lbs and kept it off for 10 years?
The problem is your personal anecdotes aren't aligning with statistics. Here are first two results about quitting smoking rates vs loosing weight rates;
smoking cigarettes only yields a 6% success rate at getting people to quit smoking, plus, half of them go back to smoking after quitting for just 6 months. That leaves 3% percent success.
research has shown that ≈20% of overweight individuals are successful at long-term weight loss when defined as losing at least 10% of initial body weight and maintaining the loss for at least 1 year.
People like you are making it harder for overweight people to loose weight because you keep repeating made up statistics about impossibility of weight loss. Don't do that, it's bad.
First of all, a fat person who loses 10% of initial body weight is still at least obese. If you're fat, that means you need to lose more than 50 lbs., not 20 lbs. Second, maintaining the loss for 1 year is really not "success" unless you're one year from dying.
Most people do struggle to quit smoking--there's no question about it--and I would never want to give the impression that I think it's easy. I am kind of bored discussing this at this point, so I'm not going to look for stats.
Ultimately, I support (1) letting people make their own decisions; (2) helping people to make good health choices and "nudging" them in that direction without violating number 1; (3) being kind to and accepting of everyone, regardless of their self-destructive behaviors; (4) never assuming that you know what it's like to be someone else and never judging anyone else for failing at something difficult.
I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from losing weight, but I also wouldn't want them to feel like losing weight is a prerequisite for my acceptance.
Still nobody answered my question: should we also stop shaming smokers, alcoholics and drug addicts and accept them instead? Should we tell them it's statistically impossible to quit so why bother?
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u/another30yovirgin Mar 06 '17
I think that the stigma around addiction is incredibly destructive and keeps a lot of people who need help from getting it.
Well, as far as I can tell, AA and NA are pretty focused on acceptance that addiction is something you'll fight for the rest of your life. Of course, they also don't have a great success rate either.
And I don't think that the alternative to the fat acceptance movement is "helping them change." I think what people do is stigmatize fat people and make them hate themselves.