I agree that we should treat them, but I don’t like people who are proud of them being overweight. This is a serious health condition and shouldn’t just be accepted.
I am overweight myself, with exactly the creeping up of weight over the years as you described. Every few years I have to do a weight loss diet for a few months to get back to the upper range of normal weight. That’s just how it is.
Also, there was a significant shift of people’s perception of what normal weight actually is due to the issues I mentioned in the first paragraph. If you have problems sitting in normal chairs due to your ass being too large, you’re morbidly obese.
There’s no point in ostracizing overweight people, but it should also not be treated as being normal.
I suspect the whole “fat acceptance” movement arises from the overwhelming amount of judgement that fat people suffer, combined with the fact that until recently there was no practical treatment for it. It’s the same process behind gay pride: it’s not pride as in “I’m better than you”, it is pride as in “I am not worse than you, no matter how badly you treat me”.
Being overweight or obese is a medical condition, not a moral failure. If you can’t fit in a normal chair, yes, you are morbidly obese, but that means you deserve more kindness, not less, just like we do with people who suffer a more severe form of cancer.
People who are fatter than you are not worse than you, they are sicker.
It’s a bit like drug addicts. Yes it is a medical condition, yes they need help and kindness and not judgement, but deep inside of us we still judge the heroin addicts for their choices. Same goes with the sugar addicts.
If we could just accept that sugar addiction exists and is a widespread problem we could make progress, but the addicts won’t
