Our culture is currently set up to use health as another stick to beat fat people with - but there’s not actually any carrot. “Lose weight” isn’t useful advice.
So my quandary always sits squarely on whether or not fat people are expected to do themselves mental harm in the pursuit of uncertain physical benefit. Especially given the negative health repercussions of repeated dieting - and I’m not even talking about yo-yoing dieting so much as I am the lifelong diet cycle that many fat people find themselves engaged in.
I think obesity is what we use to code a lot of things that we don’t want to talk about: the scarcity of quality foods, poverty, racism. I think when we focus on fatness - because people keep throwing obesity around like it doesn’t apply to people who don’t “look” fat - as the problem, it means we cannot effectively and honestly look at the actual issues.
So, yeah, please do be concerned about people - but I wish folks understood that sometimes that concern is being expressed in a way that does more harm than good given our current cultural atmosphere.