I think you&#x27;re touching on the heart of the tension behind the &quot;health at every size&quot; movement.<p>I know a couple of people who are big advocates of it, and surprise surprise, they&#x27;re all pretty fat.  They&#x27;re still wonderful people, and I of course don&#x27;t respect them less because they&#x27;re fat.  You know, for me, it&#x27;s like..who cares?  It&#x27;s not my body.  I&#x27;m even pretty sympathetic to how much difficulty they have doing basic stuff, just for having their joints and muscles carrying around an extra hundred pounds.<p>But it <i>really</i> seems to me that what&#x27;s going on is that they&#x27;re reacting to the constant onslaught of fat-shaming and moral judgments with this ideology of &quot;health at every size&quot;.  There is a constant moralizing about fat people in our culture, like if you&#x27;re fat you&#x27;re lazy or bad or whatever, none of which is warranted.<p>But I think that&#x27;s where things get muddled--culture turns fatness into a moral failing, wrapped under a sheath of health concern trolling.  Reaction to the moral judging is to try and take away the health claims, when that&#x27;s really kind of missing the point.<p>What <i>would</i> be appropriate, I think, is to push for &quot;human dignity at every size,&quot; you know, and leave the moralizing to stuff that matters. But that&#x27;s not so catchy or easy to distinguish, I guess...<p>As for the actual health claims, I, for one, don&#x27;t buy it at all, it seems obvious to me that carrying around excess weight is going to cause a number of immediate problems (joint strain, etc), to say nothing of the strain on your organs for being encased in excess fat.  But the health stuff <i>is</i> separate from the moralizing, and I don&#x27;t know how you&#x27;d get the larger culture to separate out &quot;you&#x27;re fat and it&#x27;s hurting your body&quot; from &quot;you&#x27;re fat and you&#x27;re lazy&#x2F;stupid&#x2F;etc&quot;.