Dietitian Reacts to Blaire White’s Comments About Fat Activists Dying (I Can’t Keep Quiet…)
Just because I’m fat that doesn’t invalidate the things that I say she died you ready to get super siiz she died too today I’ve got the big Fruit Loop he’s dead well this is going to be [Music] spicy hey everyone I’m Abby sharp welcome to aby’s Kitchen today we’re going
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to be unpacking this super controversial take by Blair white on the death of popular fat activists and the dangers of a fat positivity movement now important heads up here guys these are some hot takes that may offend or trigger some people and I was sent this video countless times asking me
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for my opinion on some of Blair’s sentiments so if you are new here it’s really important that you know that as a science Communicator I always come to the table with science so my opinion is really just interpretation of the research to date it’s not just how I feel and I will always
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try to deliver information like this with as much sensitivity as possible while not diluting what the science says that said Blair and I obviously have very different tat so please feel free to skip this video if you are sensitive to Fat phobic language Let me jump in here quickly to tell you
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slabby for 40% off of your subscription all right folks let’s take a deep breath maybe get some coffee and dive in I consider one of the most damaging lies that is told by The Establishment is that you can be healthy at any size that you can be obese and somehow happy okay let’s start
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with a quick overview here of the establishment aka the fat positivity or acceptance movement and health at every size so fat positivity and health that every size or Haze are two related movements that promote body acceptance for people of all sizes now fat positivity focuses more on
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challenging negative attitudes around fat bodies and promotes self-love for folks who are fat whereas the priority of haze is more on promoting a weight neutral approach to health that focuses more on healthy behaviors rather than just weight loss so I’ve discussed my professional stance
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on the haze movement right here but in short I wholeheartedly agree with its core tenants so way clu ivity Health enhancement eating for well-being respectful care and life-enhancing movement people will always come in different sizes and shapes where two people can eat the exact same diet and
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never look the same and whether or not someone has always been fat or became fat through behaviors I still believe everyone is entitled to respect I also believe in prioritizing Health promoting behaviors as our goals over arbitrary amounts of weight loss since the former will generally
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positively influence the latter but not necessarily the other way around that said I think that there are a lot of extremists Within These movements that tend to take it way too far into legitimate disorder territory and Blair has a lot of extremist example showcased in her video
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where people are essentially co-opting a lot of the language to suggest that if you are not fat and actively trying to become fat then you are not practicing self love welcome to a day in the life of a fat activist I start the day off feeding my cat some treats because she needs to know that
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unless she’s fat I won’t love her then I filmed some Tik toks making sure to glorify obesity and show everyone how cool and trendy it is to be fat if you’re a fat person who is not trying to lose weight I love you keep it up so I think it’s important to recognize that fat folks have a
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history of Oppression that thin folks do not or at least nowhere near the same degree so I understand the need for a little extra encouragement in a world that basically hates them especially because weight stigma and self-loathing actually results in a decrease in health promoting behaviors and
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an increase in weight over time but I am strongly opposed to the position that you shouldn’t love your cat or someone else if they are not fat no different than I am opposed to skinny people saying if you’re not skinny you’re not worthy of love I also don’t think that we should be
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glorifying any specific body type it feels just as disorderly to glorify the act of rejecting your body wisdom in an effort to actively achieve a fatter body than one would naturally be as it is to starve yourself into an unnaturally thin body so I actually agree with Blair that this kind of
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content is never okay but moving on one of the central arguments that Blair has in this video is that it is absolutely imposs possible to be fat and happy fat Liberation they say they feel liberated they feel free they’re happy they love themselves if you have a sneaking suspicion that
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that’s all [ __ ] you’re correct it’s it’s clear as day to see these people are not happy and the lie that these people themselves will tell you is that they are happy but science has more and more shown that mental health is directly connected to gut health okay so this is a very interesting
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argument but way too flippant and inflammatory to have any real legs one she doesn’t know the true affect of every fat person on the planet so she cannot possibly know that none of them are happy and two she’s not a dietitian or neuroscientist or psychologist or any other credible source of
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information to explain the link between gut health and mental health but I happen to know a little bit on the topic so let’s dive in so first of all Blair says that 50% of your dopamine is produced in your gut so her assertion is that if you’re fat your gut must be in a state of complete disbiosis
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and if your gut isn’t in check you can’t be happy her antidotal evidence of this is that when she’s bloated she doesn’t feel like going out okay let’s talk actual facts as I discussed in my video right here there’s loads of research suggesting that fat people’s guts tend to look different than
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thin people’s namely that there’s a higher than normal ratio of firmicutes to bacterio bacteria that said we don’t necessarily know what comes first the bad microbiome inherited in Udo or via early life experiences or a diet full of low fiber highly refined foods that prevent
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those good bacteria from flourishing and also causes weight gain so a fat person who perhaps is eating in a calorie Surplus but is eating a lot of high fiber Whole Foods could potentially have a more favorable microbiome than a skinny person who eats a ton of sugar and meat which I think is one
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of the important and evidence supporting pieces of the haze movement Health can look bigger or smaller even inside your gut now as for gut health and mental health yes Blair is right that 50% of your dopamine is produced in your gut and your gut microbes mediate the communication in our central
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nervous system via the gut brain axis there is plenty of really good research suggesting that gut disbiosis can be linked to mental health disorders and neurotransmitter imbalance B es that help to regulate our mood and we can’t rule out that in a lot of these extreme morbid obesity cases we may
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actually be dealing with a psychiatric disorder like binge eating disorder which has its own set of disbiosis microbiome markers when we look at the relationship between obesity and mood disorders like depression we see a clear link but this link is actually bir directional so
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folks with depression have a 58% higher chance of developing obesity and folks who are obese have a 55% risk of being depressed and one systematic review found evidence that this relationship can go both ways so depression causes obesity and obesity causes depression regardless this
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Association is multifactorial and Way Beyond just what gut bacteria are present in which amounts social stigma job discrimination specific genes that encode for dopamine receptors leptin and other hormones that increase inflammation and can increase the risk of both depression and
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obesity so 100% our gut health is associated with our body weight and our gut health also gives us insight into our mental health but just because there are all these independent associations doesn’t mean that we can say with absolute certainty that no fat person ever can
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be happy like that is a huge misinformed leap to make but let’s move on to Blair’s history of the fat positivity movement and buckle up because it’s wild so if you ever had a sneaking suspicion that the fat positive movement is just a sex thing um there’s some validity to that if you look at
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the history of it which is actually very dark and scary enter NAFA the National Association to Advance fat acceptance and what they really mean is to advance the fat fetish because the leader Bill Fab started this movement because his fat wife was getting ridiculed notice how there’s
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no men in this movement other than perverts who who are into fat wom you can see this is literally just some weird pervert trying to appease a room full of women that he has a heart on for that’s the history of literally where the fat positive movement started out of
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like a sex fetish group and here’s where y’all are going to say Blair you’re Kink shaming I am what are you going to do about it if your Kink is like you know forcing someone or encouraging someone to eat themselves to death you got to be checked okay so the fat acceptance movement
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started in 1967 with a fat in in New York City’s Central Park which was followed two years later by the creation of NAFA which Blair focuses in on right here now Blair is right that NAFA has been criticized as encouraging fat fetishism and more problematically feedism which is a subculture
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that practices feeding women to encourage them to eat excessively and intentionally gain a lot of weight now some people claim that this fetish is is grounded in our evolutionary pleasure that we derive from food others claim it’s simply about finding a particular body type or in
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this case fatness attractive and I think that both of those things are valid and completely unpraised by men’s desire to control overpower and even humiliate fat women and like Blair I don’t mean to Kink shame but I do agree that even if the relationship seems consensual that goal is super
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problematic if the opposite attraction were true and we were looking at men attracted to hyper thin women and we had a man withholding food from a woman to see how small and frail she could become we would be calling it out as abuse so yeah that’s going a controversial take for me but I think any
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movement that encourages intentionally ignoring your body wisdom in an effort to cause bodily harm and I would argue that for forcing your body into morbid obesity is harmful yeah that is exploitive in my books that said Blair seems to suggest that any man who finds a fat woman attractive
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is a pervert and that is not fair if men can be attracted to thinness or big butts or brown hair or blue eyes and no one calls them a pervert why can’t they be attracted to larger women also the fat positivity movement like any other social movement has come in evolving ways Nava might
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have had a moment in the early ’70s which seemed to be more skewed towards fat matchmaking and fat fashion but the movement has evolved well beyond fetishism so the second wave in the 80s and 90s focused more on anti- dieting programs and weight neutral models of obesity management like Haze and
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the body positive movement and now in the third wave we’re really seeing more research on the intersectionality of size discrimination and other forms of Oppression now the last thing I want to touch on is this the famed foodie whose real name is Taylor died on Wednesday night he has passed
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away from a presumed heart attack I’m 30 I can’t imagine having 3 years left in my life because I’m making eating videos on Tik Tok his first videos which never hit that the algorithm never picked him up he never got famous for them were regular videos and then as soon as he started eating crazy
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[ __ ] on camera his [ __ ] went up I’m getting paid to eat unhealthy foods and like gross people out on camera and it’s killing my body but it’s making me money it’s very it’s very dark it’s very dystopian like I said he wasn’t necessarily on camera talking about fat is beautiful you
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can be healthy but he was taken by clearly the idea that he can just live on and eat like that which is a lie directly told by the fat positive movement so I grew with Blair here the mukbang or eating challenge trend is so problematic like this is nothing short of devastating but Blair
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and I slightly differ on our interpretation of the situation Lara solely blames these creators tragic deaths on the fat positivity movement spreading the narrative that you can do mukbangs all day and live forever whereas I actually think that everyone else is just as much to blame like I
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said earlier there are absolutely extremists in these movements who truly are glorifying getting yourself to become morbidly sick by eating fast food all day but that actually feels like a bit of exploitation of the true intention of these movements by some Fringe radicals most people who
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are fat and are benefiting from a weight neutral approach to Wellness are not doing 10,000 calorie challenges every day and telling their kids that if they don’t get super fat that they won’t love them so while sure it’s very possible that the actions and belief systems of some of these young
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people were influenced by the extremists and that is not okay I think this wrong wrongfully absolves the rest of us who consume this problematic content of our responsibility here you know I talked about this problematic phenomenon when I discussed nikocado avocado amberlin Reed and
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the mukbang trends in general but I am strongly against eating excessively for views remember a few years back when amberin Reed claimed that she was rebranding her Channel after years of being known for her eating videos she said this I mentally ready and wanting and willing to feel
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better so to do that I have to say goodbye to the mukbangs unfortunately people like to hate watch fat people overeat and ultimately money talk so these creators go back to what gets them views even if it’s at the expense of their health same thing happened with nikocado avocado a few years
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back after he allegedly had a heart attack I couldn’t every I took it felt like nothing was happening um um and I had to look at myself in the mirror and say this is how I make my money this is how I pay our bills this is how we can afford America I see our obsession with watching
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morbidly obese people become more obese really no different than our obsession with creators on the other end of the spectrum like eugina Cooney views comments likes subscribers all of these serve as positive reinforcement for the potentially disordered behaviors especially when
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it’s what’s paying the bills so folks don’t watch and concern troll driving that content up in the algorithm and contributing to the Creator’s sense of accomplishment and praise just do not engage do not watch it report it actually that’s what you can do because as you can see
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your viewership may be interpreted as support and as a result May inadvertedly contribute to someone’s demise so yeah ultimately I think it’s really a shame that there are folks on the fringes of the fat positivity movement who are diminishing the real legitimate health or social benefits that
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these movements offer I mean we see this with literally every social cause movement religion political standpoint Etc the extremists may be the loudest but they don’t represent the masses and that really sucks but I would love to hear your thoughts on this please keep the comments
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kind this is a very sensitive topic and so if you’re new here please subscribe to the channel there is lots more interesting discussion like this hit up my description for my free Hunger crushing combo ebook and protein ebook and I will see you guys next time on aby’s kitchen
