• Zetta@mander.xyz
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    21 hours ago

    exercise is simply not possible for a lot of overweight people.

    I’m not fat, but that seems simply untrue unless the person is fat due to a serious disability in the first place. Maybe doing intense exercise isn’t possible, but fat people can absolutely start with small, little exercises and work their way up over months or years.

    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      I wasn’t going to get into it, but I think you’ll find disability is far more widespread than you think it is, and the other limiting factor is poverty. Obese people skew poor for the first time in history, and it’s because the working poor are limited in food choice, healthcare, and disposable time. People who say “start small and work your way up over months or years” never worked 80 hours a week for minimum wage and it shows.

    • enkers@sh.itjust.works
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      19 hours ago

      You’re right, of course, it’s not impossible, but as someone who’s had several significant changes in BMI/body fat in my life, I can tell you exercising when you’re already in decent shape is SO much easier.

      Being fat makes a lot of potential options for exercise much more difficult if not outright impossible. One of the biggest ways to stay active is to find something you actually like doing, so the fewer options you have, the harder it is.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        20 hours ago

        …if there’s [a pool] available near them.

        Speaking of institutional racism…

        This validated a new normal across America: When legally required to share public pools with Black children, many white families decided they’d rather not go at all. Closing public pools to avoid racial integration became official policy for many cities across the U.S.

        Not only did racism deprive black people of access to pools (leading to stereotypes like “black people don’t swim” etc.), it also greatly reduced it for white people, especially ones not wealthy enough to pay for membership to one of the private pools that sprang up in the wake of the closures of the public pools.

        We are all sicker because of the bigots’ hate.

    • hissing meerkat@sh.itjust.works
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      19 hours ago

      I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Obesity is almost always caused by other medical conditions, not the other way around.

      • Zetta@mander.xyz
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        18 hours ago

        ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In the sample size of the few fat people I know IRL and their family’s that’s not true, at least for the people I know. Unless we’re counting mental illness as a medical condition, which is fair because they are.

        • hissing meerkat@sh.itjust.works
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          18 hours ago

          Mental illnesses are absolutely medical conditions. Many of them have physical origins; your brain is a physical organ in your body. Mental illnesses with social or experiential origins are also medical conditions that can demand both physical and mental care. The brain can have a physical impact on the body that also need care. Your brain is the main organ in your body that predicts what will happen in the future, and other parts of your body respond to it to regulate biological functions, as famously demonstrated by Pavlov’s experiments with conditioning dogs by experience to get a response from their digestive (salivary) glands.