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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

> …you will also accrue personal and professional benefits from not being fat.

As an overweight person, I don't think it's controversial. You'll also accrue personal and professional benefits from being a tall man and/or good-looking.

However, "fat people have no self-control" is still fatphobia and ignores the interplay of genetic, metabolic, physiological, cultural, socio-economic, and environmental factors that contribute to obesity. There are countless fat people who are incredibly smart and hard-working, and have exquisite discipline in most areas of their life.

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As a former obese person, the culture of America is excusing people for being fat is disgusting. I'm not saying you have to be supermodel thin, but being fat is literally bad in every single possible metric (Except for possibly surviving longer in a survival situation, which I presume most fat people will never be in)

Being fat is bad. Being a normal weight is better in every metric

It also makes you feel like something as trivial as taking out your garbage out to the curb is a monumental physical task.

The quality of life improvement from not being obese is obscene.

I have never met a fat person with "exquisite discipline". They had other positive qualities, but discipline was not over of them.

Also, I prefer to associate with people who are not fat. Is that a bad thing?

>fatphobia

First of all, I really find this term to be gross. You should be afraid of being unhealthy.

Second of all, are you posting that you have individual metabolic differences that substantially alter your caloric expenditure?

FYI most studies show very little innate caloric expenditure differences between human beings outside of what can be predicted based on their body mass. Ironically, heavier people burn more calories, not less, innately.

This makes sense because metabolic machinery is complex and so fundamental to life that it would obviously be very tightly tuned genetically.

> First of all, I really find this term to be gross.

Lodge a complaint with dictionaries, I guess? https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fatph...

You can't agree with "you will accrue personal and professional benefits from not being fat" and then pretend fat-scrimination (is that better?) doesn't exist.

Being negatively predisposed to bad things is both normal and healthy behavior.

Also, using heuristics to make judgments about situations is how intelligence works.

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