mathbabe

On a recent airplane trip I had the pleasure of seeing a South Park special episode called The End of Obesity, which brilliantly satirizes the culture around weight loss, fat shaming, and weight loss drugs. It manages to do all of these things simultaneously:

• make fun of “MILF”s that use weight loss drugs to obsessively lose a small amount of weight,
• extend sympathy to actually fat people who cannot afford the weight loss drugs when they could really benefit from them,
• poke fun at the “body positivity” movement,
• truly villainize the health care industry, and in particular the way it tortures people that try to navigate the system, as well as
• the companies producing weight-loss drugs, which now make ginormous profits off of stuff that’s actually easy to manufacture, and finally
• they address the tired notion of “will power” and how it should be sufficient as a replacement for real solutions to the problem of obesity.

I recommend it! In particular, I’ve ready tons of coverage about weight-loss drugs in the past few years by journalists, and it’s mostly garbage and rarely gets at the underlying issues.