Apparently not, if “we” refers to the people behind the article/people who take BMI seriously.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

It is appropriate for a medical professional to suggest effective and safe treatments, if the condition is indeed exacerbated by weight (for example, back problems or problems with the joints of the legs and feet are often worse the more the person weighs).

However, there are no known effective and safe ways to lose weight permanently, so in practice I would say this is never appropriate. There’s “eat well and exercise”, but that usually doesn’t bring about much loss of weight, although it generally improves health if the person is not already eating well and active. There’s “eat less!”, which will usually bring about short-term weight loss, but at the expense of long-term health (and often causes additional weight gain in the end). There’s gastric bypass, which is sometimes cosmetically effective but never safe. And a simple demand to “Lose weight, fattie!” without a treatment offered is about as helpful as “Lose height, tall person!”.

1 piece of bacon = 50 calories. 2 pieces of bacon isnt going to make anyone “fat.” and i hope you get ripped to shreds for even suggesting that here!

Question – is it ever appropriate for a medical professional to suggest weight loss to a person whose health problems are caused or exacerbated by excess fat? I know the temptation is to be lazy and attribute everything to excess fat (smokers complain of the same thing), but how can this be balanced with the reality that excess fat is capable of worsening existing health conditions or create problems?

Not in ANY way defending the journalism Kate is discussing here, but that sort of fudging just reinforces the journalist’s idea that fat people are delusional about what they eat…

Yes they are, Lillian. They are real men who are the real product of the real society we live in. They aren’t fake men, they aren’t figments of your imagination; they are men and they are real, so they are “real men”.

What they are is pieces of shit, but there isn’t something unmanly about yelling out of your vehicle at people. It is in fact seen as an approved and encouraged part of masculinity by a lot of people, especially when the yelling’s aimed at women. The men who yell out of vehicles aren’t some easily-identifiable subset who fail to follow the “rules of manliness” in our society. They are in fact just taking many of the rules (women are communal property, a woman’s only worth is her fuckability, public spaces belong to men) to their logical conclusion. They are created by the misgoynistic culture we’re all soaked in, and we can’t wash our hands of them by declaring they’re “not real men”, because they are.