So I think most people can recognize that skinny people can be unhealthy.
But the way that we often talk about weight and its relationship to health, often implies
that that's not the case.
What I mean by this is that weight loss in popular culture and in the mainstream is often
seen as an overwhelmingly positive thing.
There are always articles about how to lose weight, people compliment each other when
they lose weight.
A lot of people think it's a compliment when you haven't seen someone in a long time, and
you say, "Oh, wow, you look great, have you lost weight?"
Weight loss isn't always good, and it isn't always bad either.
It's complicated.
And in a similar vein, the relationship between weight and health is very complicated.
But a lot of the time, people act like they're directly related.
Like the lower your weight gets, the better your health gets.
But that's just not true!
There are unhealthy skinny people.
There are healthy fat people.
And I'm firmly of the belief that nobody owes you information about their health.
Like you don't get to go up to strangers and demand that they be healthier.
That's none of your business.
But I still wanna break down some of the myths about health and weight.
I just also wanna recognize that nobody owes you that information about their health, and
you shouldn't be making snap judgements about strangers' health anyway.
But basically, everyone's body is different.
I don't think that's a controversial idea.
And everybody's body has a different equilibrium.
It has a different place where it's happy.
And for some people, their body is happiest and healthiest when they're skinny.
And for other people, their body is happiest and healthiest when they're fat.
Now the thing that I always run into when I say that is that someone jumps up in the
comments and is like, "What about morbidly obese people?"
First of all, I don't really like that terminology.
But also, a lot of the shaming that happens happens to people who are just fat or are
maybe just a little bit bigger than normal.
But the thing is is that both of the extremes are equally unhealthy.
Like if you get super super overweight or super super underweight, both of those are
gonna have very bad health outcomes.
And yet in our culture, we still continue to universally praise weight loss, and universally
hate on weight gain.
So you know about the BMI, the body mass index.
We've known that it's a pretty bad indicator of health for a long time now.
I'll link to an article down below about that, but I don't think it's a very controversial
thing at this point to say that BMI is not a good indicator of health.
Like, for me, personally, I have a very low BMI.
And it's been very low for my entire life, whether I was healthy or unhealthy.
There have been times where I was very unhealthy, when I was eating junk food and not exercising,
and I was still skinny.
Everybody's body works differently, and your metabolism, your hormones, there are so many
different factors that play into what your BMI is.
So for me, my body tends to stay at the same weight, whether I'm not exercising and eating
bad, or if I'm exercising a ton and eating as well as I can.
And I've done a video on this before, but there's a lot of evidence that the biggest
factor in your weight is actually just your metabolism and how your body functions, and
that exercise affects a very small portion of your overall weight.
Like, yes, sometimes exercise can lead to weight loss or weight gain, depending on if
you're losing fat or gaining muscle.
But in the overall, like, percentages of how your body is gaining or losing weight, exercise
is a very small portion.
So like, maybe you can affect it, but you're affecting a very small portion of it.
So for some people, losing weight is going to be a lot easier than for other people,
just because their body responds differently to food and to exercise and metabolism.
And just like there can be skinny, unhealthy people, there can be healthy fat people.
Some people's healthy BMI is just higher than others.
People are diverse and their bodies are diverse.
And there's not gonna be one single BMI that's the healthiest for everybody.
Lots of people are healthy at a higher weight.
I've known people who exercised way more than me, ate way healthier than me, and they still
had a higher BMI than me, they still weighed more than me.
And that's just how it's gonna work for some people.
But the thing that I'm really getting at here is, like, you don't get to shame someone for their health.
If you look at a fat person, and you think that they're unhealthy, and therefore, that
gives you justification in shaming them or making fun of them, or whatever.
For one, you're just wrong.
It's not an indicator of their health.
But also, you're just being mean.
There's been studies that show that fat-shaming someone doesn't help them lose weight.
It's very obvious that when you do that, you're not intending to help the person.
You just wanna feel better about yourself by putting someone else down.
And even if a fat person is unhealthy, it's still none of your business!
People just don't make fun of skinny people in public the way they do fat people.
Even if those skinny people are unhealthy.
Like, I was never mocked for me weight when I wasn't eating well and not exercising.
Meanwhile, people would make fun of people who weighed much more than me
but were much healthier than me.
And it's just frustrating because you don't need to do that.
So just stop it.
Stop having fake concern for other people's health, and stop making fun of people because they're fat.
Because for one, their health is none of your business, and two, being fat doesn't mean being unhealthy.
Like, honestly, I've met some very unhealthy skinny people who will like smoke all day,
and drink all night, and eat poorly, and not exercise, and then they'll look at like an
athlete who's like a little bit bigger and make fun of them.
Like that just makes no sense to me.
Like, no one's on this high horse of being the healthiest person in the world.
We all do stuff that isn't perfectly healthy all the time.
We don't even understand what it means to be healthy.
Health and nutrition is a very complicated field that even the experts in those fields
haven't figured out fully yet.
So yeah, the moral of the story is just don't make fun of fat people.
Whoa, controversial idea, maybe we shouldn't be needlessly mean to people.
I know, wild, it's a -- what a concept, right.
Anyway, I hope all of that rambling made some kind of sense.
I didn't have a script for this video, so we'll see how it goes when I get into editing.
And yeah, thanks for watching this video, I love you all so much, and I'll see you next time.
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