Sun, May-10-20, 06:12
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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Fat-shaming is a less heavy issue than dying of Covid-19
Fat-shaming is a less heavy issue than dying of Covid-19
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...id-19-xzjm9pn22
Quote:
The singer Adele posted pictures last week revealing she’d lost up to five stone in weight. She had previously been curvy/comfortable in her own skin/plus size/voluptuous/above average weight/queen size — the latter being a new American euphemism, playing on “king size”, designed to convey a regal insouciance about societal expectations. The only word you could not use in relation to Adele was fat. You could say “obese” if you wanted to get clinical, but not fat.
Fat, though, is what she was. She was a fat girl, unhealthily, unwisely and, it now seems, unhappily fat. Apparently she set about losing the weight after her marriage broke down. Some women get their hair cut; Adele got a personal trainer and a healthy new diet. “I used to cry,” she posted on Instagram last October, “now I sweat”. Living well, after all, is the best revenge.
Yet the reaction to her taking control of her health and adopting a sensible regime has been extraordinary. The majority of female commentators are barely able to conceal their outrage at her treachery: she has betrayed “normal women” by conforming to male standards of beauty and acceptability. She had made fat glamorous, being beautiful and not seeming to give a stuff when designer Karl Lagerfeld used the F word to explain why he’d never dress her — and now she’s gone and sold out by prioritising her health over others’ insecurities.
Some disguised their dismay in concern about her motivation — is this just the heartbreak diet, and is she really happy? Others worried for her prospects of keeping off the weight, with one female television presenter predicting she’d be back on the chocolate in no time. So much for the sisterhood.
The rest are terrified to commend her on an achievement of which she is clearly proud, for fear of appearing judgmental in the minefield that is body image. Patently delighting in the virtue-signallers’ confusion, Titania McGrath, the online satirist of all things PC, accused Adele of “fat-shaming her former self”.
If fat were just a fashion statement, or an unalterable condition like age or race, then the taboo on negative comment would be perfectly in order. But it is neither. It is a serious health issue, totally remediable by willpower, medical intervention or both. It is also a significant factor in the risk of dying from Covid-19. Some 16% of Irish patients have body mass indices of 40-plus. As the healthy range is 19-25, those people are grossly obese.
Medics have had no hesitation in warning that a condition we cannot address — age — puts people at risk, and in calling for severe restrictions on older folks’ freedoms. Recently we discovered another condition that cannot be altered by willpower or medication — race — is a risk factor. In the UK, black people are four times more likely to die from the virus, and the disparity is not explained by either health or economic factors.
So it’s fine to warn black people and old people that they need to take more care of themselves right now. But you daren’t warn fat people, even though our statistics suggest the obese are at eight times greater risk, lest you be accused of “fat-shaming”. This reticence isn’t just cowardly, it is dangerous.
There are grounds to suspect we may well be in the second wave of Covid-19. Being a famously open and transparent nation, the Chinese surely alerted the rest of the world the first moment the coronavirus emerged. If not, though, and if it were circulating earlier, as the taoiseach ventured last week, then lots of us have already survived it.
I was flattened by a weird, debilitating respiratory bug around Christmas, shortly after meeting a friend home from China for the holidays, and have lost count of the number of people with the same story. Even my normally sceptical GP says he saw many strange fevers and odd respiratory complaints in January.
If this proves true, it means we may be edging closer to herd immunity. If not, though, then a second wave may hit in the winter and, given the Spanish flu precedent, it could be far more virulent than the first.
That gives plus-size people several months to lose weight and, just as Adele did, reduce their risk of dying of the virus — assuming that somebody in authority has the guts to tell them so.
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