Your Body Deserves Better Than This Story
We live in a country where over 70% of the population is overweight or obese (CDC 2024). That is a biological reality, not a moral one. But it has collided with another truth: that every person deserves dignity, regardless of what their body looks like, what shape it takes, or what it struggles with.
These two truths are not in conflict—unless someone profits from the confusion.
I. When Kindness Is Misused
Most people now know that body shaming is harmful. It erodes self-worth, damages mental health, and solves nothing. That part is clear.
What’s less clear, because we’re not allowed to talk about it without being accused of cruelty, is that denying the biological consequences of excess weight also causes harm.
Not to corporations, but to people: to children, to communities, to personal health systems. And eventually, to every person who wakes up in a body that can no longer keep up with their life. Meanwhile, corporations benefit enormously from not talking about it. They’re callously capitalizing on well-meaning references to respect.
This isn’t about beauty. It’s about blood sugar. Insulin. Inflammation. Cardiac stress. Degeneration of joints. It’s about the silent progression of disease in a population that’s been told it’s offensive to talk about disease.
II. The Culture Shift
In the last decade, the public conversation about weight has shifted dramatically. Once dominated by unrealistic thinness, it’s now governed by an equally distorted idea: that all bodies are healthy, and to question that is a form of hatred.
This new narrative feels compassionate. It sounds like freedom and respect. But it has two side effects:
- It cleverly hides truth in identity, and
- It makes it harder for people to seek help, because acknowledging a medical concern has been defined as an act of betrayal.
This benefits the industries that profit when people stay sick.
III. Profit by Confusion
Let’s be clear about who gains:
Sector | Profit Model |
|---|---|
Food companies | Sell hyperpalatable, low-nutrient products that override hunger signals |
Pharma | Sell long-term treatment for obesity-linked conditions: diabetes, hypertension, heart failure |
Weight loss industry | Sell quick fixes, pills, and plans—often ineffective and often recurring |
Media platforms | Monetize outrage, moral posturing, and identity battles |
The population doesn’t get healthier. Instead, medical conditions that curtail life span and diminish daily quality of life are ignored.
IV. Health Is Not a Moral Status
Your health is not your worth. Thin people are not more valuable. Larger people are not less. Weight is influenced by hundreds of variables: genetics, trauma, chronic stress, poverty, medications, medical history, sleep quality, and environment.
But none of that means biology disappears.
When joints are inflamed, when glucose is dysregulated, when visceral fat compresses organs, the body is not “thriving.” That doesn’t mean the person is bad. It means they deserve truthful care - not avoidance disguised as kindness.
V. The Right to Be Told the Truth
There is no shame in having a body that struggles. There is shame in building systems that lie to people about it.
It is possible to say:
- "You deserve full dignity exactly as you are," and
- “Your health is compromised, and you deserve to know that, and to fix it.”
Those statements are not enemies. They are allies. Together, they give people a way forward that is grounded in both love and reality.
VI. What Compassion Looks Like
Real compassion isn’t silence. It’s clarity.
- It’s hearing your friend talk about their health, while holding their full value as a human being and the facts of the disease in equal measure.
- It’s raising children who know how their bodies work, without attaching fear or shame.
- It’s recognizing the food system is rigged, and helping each other opt out where we can.
- It’s seeing the full person, not their weight, but also not pretending that weight has no meaning.
