More of an empirical evidence thing, with some logic supporting it: For the vast majority of people, their fat percentage says nothing about their health or how well they’re living their lives. The cultural opposition to fatness is status-driven, and should be viewed as signaling gone out of control.
The demand for leanness has made people’s lives (including their health) generally worse rather than better.
This looks like evidence against that to me. See also this. (All that publicity for anorexic models is still a Bad Thing, but “opposition to fatness” needn’t mean endorsement of emaciation; the latter is signalling gone out of control.)
ETA: FWIW, all other things being equal I feel better (e.g. more stamina) when I’m slimmer; YMMV.
ETA: FWIW, all other things being equal I feel better (e.g. more stamina) when I’m slimmer; YMMV.
How have you managed the ‘all else being equal’ part? Most things that cause you to have more stamina* also cause you to be slimmer. It seems more likely that you will have more stamina because all else is almost certainly not equal.
* In the non-trivially-short-term. ie. I’m not talking about drinking 5 bottles of Gatorade giving you more stamina for that day.
How have you managed the ‘all else being equal’ part?
By eating less for a couple of months without any other major change of habits.
Most things that cause you to have more stamina* also cause you to be slimmer.
(provided slimmer is defined in terms of fat mass alone and not total mass: muscle weighs a lot, and...). Sure, eating a lot by itself also makes me less energetic for a while (probably due to digestion requiring energy), but I’d expect that to be a short-term effect only.
More of an empirical evidence thing, with some logic supporting it: For the vast majority of people, their fat percentage says nothing about their health or how well they’re living their lives. The cultural opposition to fatness is status-driven, and should be viewed as signaling gone out of control.
The demand for leanness has made people’s lives (including their health) generally worse rather than better.
This looks like evidence against that to me. See also this. (All that publicity for anorexic models is still a Bad Thing, but “opposition to fatness” needn’t mean endorsement of emaciation; the latter is signalling gone out of control.)
ETA: FWIW, all other things being equal I feel better (e.g. more stamina) when I’m slimmer; YMMV.
How have you managed the ‘all else being equal’ part? Most things that cause you to have more stamina* also cause you to be slimmer. It seems more likely that you will have more stamina because all else is almost certainly not equal.
* In the non-trivially-short-term. ie. I’m not talking about drinking 5 bottles of Gatorade giving you more stamina for that day.
By eating less for a couple of months without any other major change of habits.
(provided slimmer is defined in terms of fat mass alone and not total mass: muscle weighs a lot, and...).
Sure, eating a lot by itself also makes me less energetic for a while (probably due to digestion requiring energy), but I’d expect that to be a short-term effect only.
Does anyone really deny this? Or is it simply not socially appropriate to say you want to look better?
I don’t think slightly overweight people use the rationale for losing weight to be more healthy. They know they want to do it to just look better.
I don’t think either of us have statistics on this.
My impression is that looking better gets conflated with being healthier and proving one’s virtue.