You don't owe the world a body you have to sacrifice your mental health for
You don’t owe the world a body you have to sacrifice your mental health for.
I’ve seen so much back lash against the body positive / self love / body acceptance movement. Comments ring in my ear like “you’re killing yourself with fat” or “you’re promoting obesity and an unhealthy lifestyle”.
It’s no secret the media has hyped up the “obesity epidemic” or that A LOT of money being made of off people trying to make themselves smaller. If you subscribe to the HAES model or Intuitive Eating, you have probably already thrown BMI out the window and know health has more to do with other measures such a cholesterols, blood pressure, etc. Things that can not be concluded from size alone.
But there are still so many who prescribe to the ideology that fat and health are not only correlated but directly draw causation between fat and being unhealthy.
Data is numbers, information is interpretation of data. So what are the numbers behind these claims?
I did a google search and found that the World Health Organization mortality rate for obesity related issues is 2.8 million per year (globally)
But I wanted to directly compare this to the number to people who lose their life due to mental health related issues.
The truth is the answer is very complication. People with mental health issues also display some of the highest risk behaviour for developing other “diseases”:
- substance abuse
- poor self care
- smoking
I found a well backed study from 2014 that found people will mental illness have a risk of mortality that is two times higher than the general population.
The study concluded that (including heath complications, infections and Suicide) the total global annual death rate is 8 million.
8 million vs 2.8 million.
So I wonder out loud, do we have a obesity crisis, or a mental health crisis?
When will we stop the message that your body is where your worth is held?
When will we stop prescribing to an overweight person what would be considered an eating disorder in someone small?
At what cost, to what end, do we want to keep trying to make people skinny at the expense of their mental health?
I’ve seen so much back lash against the body positive / self love / body acceptance movement. Comments ring in my ear like “you’re killing yourself with fat” or “you’re promoting obesity and an unhealthy lifestyle”.
It’s no secret the media has hyped up the “obesity epidemic” or that A LOT of money being made of off people trying to make themselves smaller. If you subscribe to the HAES model or Intuitive Eating, you have probably already thrown BMI out the window and know health has more to do with other measures such a cholesterols, blood pressure, etc. Things that can not be concluded from size alone.
But there are still so many who prescribe to the ideology that fat and health are not only correlated but directly draw causation between fat and being unhealthy.
Data is numbers, information is interpretation of data. So what are the numbers behind these claims?
I did a google search and found that the World Health Organization mortality rate for obesity related issues is 2.8 million per year (globally)
But I wanted to directly compare this to the number to people who lose their life due to mental health related issues.
The truth is the answer is very complication. People with mental health issues also display some of the highest risk behaviour for developing other “diseases”:
- substance abuse
- poor self care
- smoking
I found a well backed study from 2014 that found people will mental illness have a risk of mortality that is two times higher than the general population.
The study concluded that (including heath complications, infections and Suicide) the total global annual death rate is 8 million.
8 million vs 2.8 million.
So I wonder out loud, do we have a obesity crisis, or a mental health crisis?
When will we stop the message that your body is where your worth is held?
When will we stop prescribing to an overweight person what would be considered an eating disorder in someone small?
At what cost, to what end, do we want to keep trying to make people skinny at the expense of their mental health?