dragonlady7

via https://ift.tt/39ePksy

It’s such an important thing that people start to learn. There are people that will never be completely able bodied and ‘healthy’ no matter what they do. They deserve just as much respect as anyone else. There are people that could be ‘healthier’ but there are barriers (money for instance) or they just don’t want to and both deserve respect. When we think of the value of a person, more often then not we think in terms of hierarchies and we shouldn’t be trying to quantify value of human beings, because 99.9999999 percent of the time it’s not appropriate and leads to bigotry and it’s a silly prospect to try to do such a thing. We are PEOPLE not stocks and bonds.

When people want to think about a ‘gold standard of living’ we need to think “how would THEY define a happy life?’ you see this issue in palliative care and end of life discussions. Individuals can and should always choose what they value, a person might be unhealthy but are they able to do the things they want in life? How can we support their wants and needs? Sometimes aggressively trying to met a standard set by a ‘society’ is more harmful then just letting someone be ‘unhealthy’ in someway. For fat people, trying to make us thin will cause so much harm via crash diets and weight cycling. Did you know that dieting can cause your body to cannibalize your heart? https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/yo-yo-dieting-linked-heart-disease-risk-women like wow, much health as the end goal there.

Anyway, I wanted to reply since I was the mod that wrote that. If you are interesting in more discussions of healthism (the very notion of health as a moral and ethic reflection) you can check out bigfatscience’s tag: https://bigfatscience.tumblr.com/tagged/healthism