Have A F*cking Donut

Oh no people got fat. I SAID OH NO.

Now that we are on the precipice of back to normal, lots of people have been talking about what they are most excited to get back to doing. It's like we can finally give ourselves permission to talk about all the little things we missed about non-pandemic life while we were trying to just power through this whole thing. I can't even tell you how much I missed earrings.

Other people, however, are looking at this in an entirely different way and have decided to fret over a recent study from the American Psychological Association and start publicly worrying about everyone's health. According to the study, 60 percent of Americans have reported an undesired weight change over the course of the pandemic.

Holy cow: 42% of Americans report undesired weight gain during Covid 19. The average weight gain is 29 lbs. And 41… https://t.co/1M8Z8tqsId

— Jonathan Rauch (@Jonathan Rauch) 1616423416.0 

There's a lot that seems suspect about this study, but people are still posting it like crazy. They are not worried, mind you, about the people who reported an undesired weight loss during the pandemic — because for some reason these people are never quite as desperately concerned about the health of people who have lost too much weight — but rather with those who reported an undesired weight gain. They now see this as a wonderful opportunity to go on a full-on fat-shaming spree or talk about how "shocking" it will be when they see people they haven't seen in a while and see they've gained weight. Like that's the biggest issue, right?

There are also those predicting we're all going to dress in bizarre Canadian tuxedos to "hide" our "pandemic pounds."

Wide-legged jeans are back to hide a year of pandemic pounds https: //t.co/ZFzyR2fMdU https://t.co/RXoVxLGutv

— New York Post (@New York Post) 1616186742.0 

And then there's the whole moral panic surrounding Krispy Kreme offering a free donut to people who get vaccinated.

Krispy Kreme offering free doughnuts for getting vaccinated is like Marlboro offering free cigarettes for getting a… https: //t.co/WQZLbjPHPZ

— Eugene Gu, MD (@Eugene Gu, MD) 1616430442.0 

PEOPLE CAN FUCKING HAVE A DONUT, EUGENE. Or not! Because it's not as if you go get a shot and then the nurse just shoves a cruller right down your gullet, it's a promotion. It's not illegal for Krispy Kreme to do a promotion! They are a legal business operation.

While we're at it, I also wouldn't care if Marlboro gave out free cigarettes for getting a flu shot, as long as they weren't giving them to children or forcing anyone to take them. And that is despite the fact that I prefer Camel Lights.

The "obesity epidemic" is bullshit, by the way, brought to you by doctors and scientists who basically get paid by the weight loss industry to fear monger about people's weight.

Via Scientific American:  

What is really going on, asserts [J. Eric] Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, is that "a relatively small group of scientists and doctors, many directly funded by the weight-loss industry, have created an arbitrary and unscientific definition of overweight and obesity. They have inflated claims and distorted statistics on the consequences of our growing weights, and they have largely ignored the complicated health realities associated with being fat."

One of those complicated realities, concurs Campos, a professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the widely accepted evidence that genetic differences account for 50 to 80 percent of the variation in fatness within a population. Because no safe and widely practical methods have been shown to induce long-term loss of more than about 5 percent of body weight, Campos says, "health authorities are giving people advice--maintain a body mass index in the 'healthy weight' range--that is literally impossible for many of them to follow." Body mass index, or BMI, is a weight-to-height ratio.

Oh, you think?

If people took half the time they do clutching their pearls over someone else eating a freaking donut and focused that on actually caring about the health of people in this country, we would have single payer by now. At the very least , we would not have the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world.

We live in a country where people who are injured beg strangers not to call ambulances because they can't afford them. You wanna worry about health? Worry about that!

Awful scene on the orange line. A woman’s leg got stuck in the gap between the train and the platform. It was twist… https: //t.co/rCf3anl5ds

— Maria Cramer (@Maria Cramer) 1530308716.0 

You know what's unhealthy? That's unhealthy . So is the stress from medical bankruptcy. So is not being able to go see a doctor when you're sick. So is not being able to afford insulin or an epipen or medicine that prevents the transmission of HIV .

Part of the reason our health care system is such a mess is because we treat illness and injury as a moral failing, instead of an inevitability for most people at some point in their lives, seeing as how none of us is immortal. This nonsense contributes to the harmful narrative of "healthy living through personal responsibility" philosophy that is, obviously, killing a lot more people than donuts are. It's simply a lot easier to brush off someone losing their house because they or someone in their family got cancer if you secretly think they deserved it. It's also a lot easier to assume it will never happen to you if you, on some level, think people only get sick or injured when they're "bad," and it's a lot easier to not really give a shit if you assume it will never happen to you.

 Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons .

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