Here’s a segment from this week’s “Real Time” show in which Bill Maher addresses the epidemic of obesity among Americans. While he, like me, is against “fat shaming”—telling obese people that they need to lose weight (that’s their doctors’ job), we both object to the recent movement to de-stigmatize obesity by pretending that it’s not harmful. Of course it is: it’s associated, as Maher says, with nearly every health issue you can imagine. Yet with the rise of the “body acceptance movement,” we constantly see claims that you can be “healthy at every size“.
But that’s not true. On average, you’re less healthy if you’re obese. In a 2010 National Institutes of Health study, researchers found a decrease in longevity with every ranked step up on the body mass index (BMI). And overweight people know this. As Grania used to tell me, “You don’t have to tell people…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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