I mentioned above but I'll repeat it here as well. Humans conform to the norms around them. As weight went up and it became normalized there's no feeling of being alienated. Smoking is a good example. It went up. But then it became unpopular and declined.
Unfortunately, it's not acceptable to mention someone's weight. And the less that was allowed the more normalized it came be.
It's ok for Oprah and such to promote the idea of "love yourself." Unfortunately they failed to mention that some versions of yourself might be unhealthy.
And here we are, in the middle of a health pandemic and we are unable to discuss some of the root causes of worse outcomes.
> Humans conform to the norms around them. As weight went up and it became normalized there's no feeling of being alienated.
This fails to account for many properties of the obesity epidemic. I mentioned some elsewhere, but perhaps the most glaring flaw with your theory is that it doesn't explain why the epidemic began in the first place, and how it grew while it was still rare.
> Unfortunately, it's not acceptable to mention someone's weight. And the less that was allowed the more normalized it came be.
The actual reason it's not acceptable is because this angle has been studied, and it has been found to be actively harmful. Obese people don't become thinner by being told they are ugly, undesirable, about to die, lacking in willpower, or that they should eat more salad. If anything, this can lead to feelings of depression and more weight gain.
> And here we are, in the middle of a health pandemic and we are unable to discuss some of the root causes of worse outcomes.
This is true and it is a shame, but arguments like yours are exactly the reason. Instead of digging deeper and asking why are people overeating in the first place, 99% of discussions on obesity focus on lifestyle changes (the right diet, how to exercise more, lamenting modern trends etc). We're basically treating obesity mostly like we used to treat mental disorders (and still do to a great extent), and refusing to even try to look for environmental or other factors, that are much more likely for such a tectonic shift in the prevalence of obesity.
It's again important to remember that people didn't start getting obese with the advent of industrialization (1850s) or even modern automation (1940s-50s), but much later. Obesity was stable for thousands of years before 1980, and then it went from 1-3% to 30%. And this is not happening only in rich countries, it is happening in poor countries that work in the global economy. And it is not uniform in the populations of these countries, but geographically clustered and professionally clustered as well.
Unfortunately, it's not acceptable to mention someone's weight. And the less that was allowed the more normalized it came be.
It's ok for Oprah and such to promote the idea of "love yourself." Unfortunately they failed to mention that some versions of yourself might be unhealthy.
And here we are, in the middle of a health pandemic and we are unable to discuss some of the root causes of worse outcomes.