Everything Huffington Post Claims About Obesity Is Wrong

10 min readJun 13, 2021

The obesity epidemic is one of the most dangerous existential epidemics in our lifetime. We are not dealing with an epidemic that can merely cause one disease, but is linked to an entire network of dangerous health complications.

Obesity is linked to more than 200 diseases which includes type 2 diabetes, various cancers, hypertension, sleep apnea, gallbladder disease, strokes, stillborn children, polycytosis and mental disorders.[1] It is a massive strain on the healthcare system as a result, obesity related diseases alone were responsible for $190 billion which is about 21% of medical spending in the US, in 1998 this was (adjusted for inflation) $42 billion.[2] Over 78% of people hospitalized by COVID were overweight or obese meaning a huge part of the lockdowns with the economic disasters, bankrupt businesses and mental health issues that followed from it are owed to obesity.[3]

And it is getting worse, extremely worse. It is estimated that in the worst case scenario obesity rates in 2050 could go to 60–80% in the west.[4] That would be an absolute disaster scenario. That means the vast majority of people would be at a massive risk for tons of dangerous diseases. People at a healthy weight would be an outlier! Imagine the ridiculous pressure it would put on those people with normal weight having to sustain such a society, all over something that can be treated with a change in lifestyle. It is entirely preventable!

With all that context it is even more odious that there is now a massive industry of people who outright deny the obesity epidemic, something that I coin Obesity Epidemic Denial (OED). These are people who run a giant disinformation campaign insisting that it is completely healthy to suffer from morbid obesity, who actively encourage and normalize a sick lifestyle, who actively shame and hunt women in that community who try to lose weight despite their claims of body positivity.

Now yes diet culture is trash. Fad diets, crash diets, etc are unhelpful. Eating disorders and underlying mental issues with weight are serious issues. Yes there is a class disparity when it comes to weight. Yes the model industry has promoted thin malnutritious bodies that are also very unhealthy. But none of that changes the fact that OED activists are enabling a dangerous epidemic with massive health issues, rampant economic costs and overwhelmed hospitals that will only get worse as we go.

With that all said I want to put my direction to an article by Huffington Post called “Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong”, this article pretty much seems to be the holy grail of the fat activist arguments because everytime I see a fat activist/OEDs try to promote denial they will always link to that particular article.

So it’s time that someone dismantles this garbage article and see it for what it really is.

Debunking the article

So the article more or less starts off that the medical community’s response to rising obesity rates has more or less been to put the responsibility on people who are fat.

“Obesity, we are told, is a personal failing that strains our health care system, shrinks our GDP and saps our military strength. It is also an excuse to bully fat people in one sentence and then inform them in the next that you are doing it for their own good”

And here you will find that a good portion of this article relies on emotional argumentation and anecdotes. Mostly talking about fat shaming and how it affects other’s perception of their own image. Now I fully agree that fat shaming is not helpful, it can be destructive and more often than not discourage and demotivate people to make the changes they need. People should not be ashamed of their bodies, they should not be unhappy with themselves, they should not lose weight for the sake of others but for themselves, I would never mock or shame a fat person looking to become better mentally and physically.

That being said let’s remove the emotional aspects from the facts. Ultimately you are responsible for your own health and weight. Yes external factors like eating disorders, child abuse, childhood obesity and wealth can affect it. But when it comes down to it, you decide to overeat, you decide to live a poor dietary lifestyle, you decide that eating 5 burgers per week is more important than your own life, family and relationships. There’s no conspiracy, it’s not your genetics, it’s not your metabolism, it’s not water weight. You are doing it to yourself and you as a damn adult should have to be willing to confront that.

The 95% myth

So he outright just says, which I find absolutely sickening, that diets do not work. He brings up a statistic that has been debunked since the 90s. And that is the statistic that 95% of people who try to lose weight fail and gain it back, with two thirds of people gaining back even more. This myth is often spread by OED activists. I dislike this myth intensely because this is disinformation that demotivates and discourages people, giving them a sense of fatalism that they are stuck this way forever. It is straight up abusive to gaslight people like this.

Now even if this statistic was real, that in no way proves obesity to be healthy. Most people fail when it comes to quitting smoking, but that doesn’t mean that smoking is healthy. The big reason why weight loss fails is because there is a lot of misinformation about dieting. A lot of people go in with the mindset that they should follow a restrictive crash diet for a couple of months and then go back to their normal caloric surplus diet, and they’re shocked to then see gaining the weight back. That is not how you are supposed to go about it. The key to sucessful weight loss is very simple.

To lose weight you need to be on a caloric deficit, and to maintain weight you need to be calory neutral. As long as you include all the food groups and enough nutrients you really can continue eating your favorite food, just do so moderately. Hell on my diet I lost more than 16 kg/35 lbs while eating a pizza every Friday.

A diet is not supposed to be temporary, restrictive and something you cannot mentally handle for a long term. You can eat a diet that includes your favorite food, makes you feel full, healthy, energized and be a permanent lifestyle change. If you do that your weight loss and maintainance will be a success.

But back to the statistic. The problem is that the cases used in these studies are people that are patients in hospitals or university programs, in other words people who would have by far the most difficulty physically and mentally to lose weight. When a study resorts to a very biased focus group rather than random sampling such studies become useless.[5] In comparison a long term study from the National Weight Control Registry which targets the average person showed that “More than 87% of participants were estimated to be still maintaining at least a 10% weight loss at Years 5 and 10”[6] and the Look AHEAD Project the largest randomized evaluation study for weight loss showed “50% clinically meaningful weight loss (≥5%) at year 8 in 50% of patients with type 2 diabetes” and that was specifically for cases with diabetes which makes dieting even more complicated.[7] Of obese people who had bariatric surgery, specifically Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, “93 percent of patients maintained at least a 10 percent weight loss from base line, 70 percent maintained at least a 20 percent weight loss and only 40 percent maintained at least a 30 percent weight loss after 12 years”[8]

Another claim he makes is that 3% of fat loss will lead to a 17% reduction of your metabolism and claims that it is because a diet is a form of self-starvation. And yes it is true that your metabolism does get slower as you lose weight. Which is why weight loss is always fastest at the start and starts to plateau over time. (This is a good thing unless you think having to eat 5000 calories to stay around 50 kg is healthy). But it is completely stupid and ridiculous to pretend that this because weight loss is self-starvation and that you will feel hunger for all time. This is a stupid and extremely dangerous claim. You do not have to feel hungry at a calory neutral diet, not even at a calory deficit diet, this is not how hunger or energy works at all.

IF ANYTHING it is OBESE people who are constantly making themselves hungry, the massive amounts of food they eat would not even be remotely possible or feasible for someone who managed to get on a healthy weight. In fact this author literally proves my entire point, obese people have a faster metabolism, they can burn calories by merely moving a little bit, so they are consistently feeling hungry as a result, so what do they do? They eat high calory junk food that are empty calories, they get all the calories without the nutrients that should satiate their hunger and make them feel energized, so they get hungry again and repeat the process.

Isn’t it a bit too coincidental that overeating always happens with the same type of junk food? Hamburgers, fries, pizza, deep fried snacks. Why do we never hear someone who became obese because he ate too many bananas or apples? Because it is impossible to eat as many fiber rich food as you would with snacks. Because fiber rich food is filling. Your body will literally stop you from eating too much of it. If you eat food that is low in calories but high in nutrients and very dense you will not feel hunger.

The obesity paradox

Now despite the fact that the overwhelming consensus of health experts and mountains of studies show a very clear link between obesity and countless of illnesses he tries once again to cherrypick data and use it in a misleading manner as if it somehow completely debunks mountains of evidence.

He says that “Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy” in contrast he says “about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.”

This is what’s known as the obesity paradox, where studies find obese people being healthier in some instances than skinny/lean people. But this is a very clear example of dishonest example of trying to fit correlation into causation because in his article he pretty much tries to paint it as normal fat people vs normal lean people with no other context whatsoever.

First of all metabolically healthy obesity is a misleading term and doesn’t really exist. A cohort study of nearly 400k biobank participants concludes “The term ‘MHO’ should be avoided as it is misleading and different strategies for risk stratification should be explored.”[9]

Second, when it comes to health there are a lot more data points that can determine things. Obesity is merely one of such data points. But obviously there are other things people can do or have to increase health risks from smoking to genetics. Most of these studies have explained the “paradox” in various ways such as sick people progressively losing weight or smokers being more likely to be thinner.[10] This is pretty much the same thing as the smoker’s paradox.[11] Starting to notice that all these arguments can also be made for chain smoking being healthy yet?

Anecdotes, anecdotes, anecdotes

After these two arguments the majority of the writing is anecdotal stuff about obese people feeling bullied or fat shamed by their doctors and again I have already said that bullying and humiliating fat people is stupid. But here is the thing. Doctors are not therapists, they’re not your personal trainer. They are here to diagnose your health problems, explain them and tell you what you need to do in order to change it. You may experience that as “fat shaming” but a doctor is simply confronting you with the reality. You think doctors enjoy telling patients they have stage 4 cancer? No. But someone has to do it.

Now does that mean doctors can’t fuck up? Of course not. I very much agree that doctors need to learn more about dieting, nutrition, the mental and emotional aspects of it. But that only emphasizes why we have an epidemic to begin with.

Conclusion

Overall this article doesn’t really say much, there’s very little in it that is actually factual as it relies on personal anecdotes. If this was merely an article that talks about HOW we should go about fighting obesity and that it hasn’t succeeded due to dietary ignorance among doctors, stigmatization of fat people, ultra-processed foods, etc I would have no issue with the article for the most part, although I do think a more tough, confrontational and educational method is better.

Where this article goes completely wrong is in the parts where it promotes obesity epidemic denial. Trying to make dangerous statements and outright gaslighting to fat people that over 95% fail their diets, insisting that dieting is self-starvation and will make you permanently hungry, insisting that you can be metabolically healthy while being obese.

He whines about a system that makes misleading claims about dieting, stigmatizes fat people and ultimately demotivates people to even try maintaining a healthy lifestyle. And then he goes on to make misleading claims about dieting, stigmatizes those losing weight and ultimately demotivates people to even try maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

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