The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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I don't think undercounting can explain the prevalence in older media of fit people. Look at those old Victorian street scenes: everyone is good looking. The historical existence of this or that obese person shouldn't counter the overwhelming evidence that we've become a fat society.
Those Victorian street scenes are excluding a lot of ugliness already, though.
I don't think I'd want to paint (cameras were limited to exposure too long to capture someone walking down the street, so they had to be painted) the piles and streams of shit in the streets of a society [that hadn't yet implemented indoor plumbing and used horses for transport] if I didn't have to either, so naturally none of those scenes include it. If you have to put in effort to paint people you might as well make them decent-looking, so it's understandable there'd be, uh, fat erasure.
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"good looking" is not the same as not being overweight or obese according to precise BMI measurements. I recall when i was dieting (still am) than when I took some photos of myself i didn't look overweight, no stomach bulge , yet I was technically in the overweight category . i was still somewhat flabby in the mid section but it was covered well. But you're right society has gotten fatter, even with undercounting. Some of it can probably also be explained by demographics such as increased Hispanic population.
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