Person: “i feel like going on a diet and avoiding sweets” you: “as a rationalist who supports self-determination and morphological freedom, yoy wanting to be less fat is DANGEROUS MENTAL ILLNESS THAT NEEDS TO BE KILLED WITH FIRE”. becoming a catgirl cyborg is sweet, becoming not-obese is a dangeroualy toxic wish that shall be shamed.”

theunitofcaring:

I think that there are a lot of things wrong with the way our society thinks about weight and dieting, and this reaction is actually a really good example of that!

What anon expressed was ‘I notice myself obsessing over food and wanting to skip meals; I’m scared of this and I want to give myself better habits before this one turns in the really self-destructive direction I feel like it might turn in’. But that gets glossed by many people as ‘I feel like going on a diet and avoiding sweets’. We don’t consider it bad when people obsess over food or feel like their lives are consumed by avoiding it and thinking about it and stressing about it. 

I think that’s partially because it’s so common – people think that that’s just how it is – and partially because it’s a domain where a lot of people have wildly misleading beliefs about what produces healthy lives. For example, lots of people basically think that the more effort and suffering you put into you relationship with food, the healthier you will be. This is obviously silly when I phrase it that way – suffering doesn’t generally make you healthier, and effort you pour into one aspect of your life is effort you don’t have for other aspects of your life, like getting enough sleep and exercise, both of which are about as critical to health and vastly more under volitional control. But lots of people think it anyway. So when someone goes ‘I am struggling and suffering’, they go ‘well, if you do that enough, health will result’ instead of ‘wait, shit, that’s bad’.

But actually, it’s bad.

If you want to lose weight, that’s your business, though don’t send me asks about it; last time I tried losing weight it was wonderfully easy right up to the part where I nearly died, so I’m probably a poor resource for people who want to lose weight and be alive at the end. But when people say “food is consuming an ever-increasing share of my brain, and it doesn’t feel healthy, and I don’t feel in control of it”, they’re not actually saying “I want to go on a diet”.

I think it’s worth thinking about why those things seem the same to you. I think it’s worth thinking about how our society thinks about ‘diets’, such that you could make that mistake. And I hope you don’t make it again.