You're So Carb

I don't know how--but it causes me great distress that--fat as a vital nutritional component became conflated with obesity.

Well, some might tediously explain, people are called fat because their bodies have too much fat on them. 

Alright. I get that. But our bodies convert extra protein, carbohydrates, and fat, into the fat which our bodies store.

So we might as well say, "That person is so protein," or "you're so carb," but instead we say "fat," because this is how the body stores it.

And this is used in turn to shame and hurt many people. The statistics on fat shaming and its link to depression are well-documented.

In addition to creating feelings of shame and depression and higher risks of heart attacks, fat shaming also has an adverse nutritional effect: people avoid eating fat because they think it will make them fat, by which most people mean have an "excess" (deemed so by, most often, Western medical practitioners) storage of fat on their bodies. And what happens when people avoid fat in their diets? They replace that fat with carbohydrates. (If you don't believe me, just pull out that bottle of fat-free salad dressing in your refrigerator and check it out.) Our body stores excess carbohydrates in the same way it stores excess fat.

But there are other implications for replacing fat with carbohydrates. The "replacement" carbohydrates often come from "sugar, refined grains and other starches" which affect "blood sugar and insulin levels and possibly result in weight gain and disease"(source here).

The bottom line is that shame is bad. We don't need it. It doesn't make anything better. And I mean shame for anything--that mistake you made back in 6th grade, the time you yelled at a loved one, or the time you didn't achieve what you knew you could.  And fat shaming, a special subset of shaming, has such wide-ranging and backfiring consequences. If nothing else, maybe we could give ourselves some compassion and at least not fat shame our own selves.

And the reality is that this shame for years has been taking its toll on human beings and their nutritional intake.

For even more information about fat shaming and its pervasiveness, read this excellent post by Sapiens (an organization funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, devoted to anthropology), summarizing much of the authors' research on weight loss.

Citation for molecular image of fat above here.