ExponentialDecay

Varangian, I loved your post. In my experience, this has been true. It might be because I am on mealplan, whereas at home I subsist mainly on home cooking, but dude, the corn syrup/sugar situation in America is ridiculous. I have SUCH a hard time finding full-fat yogurt! For some reason, Americans apparently only eat low-fat yogurt that has 18 g. of sugar per serving - I mean, you might as well eat a candy bar. At Wholefoods, there are literally 5 brands of full-fat yogurt I can find, and this is a hipstery area. Like, how is Paleo so popular in the US, if literally nothing one can buy anywhere that sells food is unprocessed? I guess part of the equation is that the EU subsidizes the production of milk and olives, whereas the US subsidizes corn. I'd like to look into this in more detail, actually.

Fat people are not cancer.

What you're failing to remember is that non-believers will burn in hell. I have no sources for this claim except what my mom says, but it's true, and you better believe it, because I said so. No, my argument is centered around the point that fat people are people. (Feel free to google "people" for clarification on what people are). You should therefore stop reducing fat people to their fatness. Adipose tissue occurs naturally in the human body. It is not a "medical condition", in the same way that having ten fingers or being tall is not a medical condition. Once again: this is not an argument of whether an obese person should or should not lose weight (that falls under body autonomy). This is the statement that having fat tissue on your body in whatever quantity is not a priori a death sentence, or an excuse to be treated like shit. Seriously, when a fat person comes onto the forum asking for advice on how to determine if a university will physically accommodate people of size, how do you think it is acceptable to tell them to lose weight? Nobody asked you your opinion, whether medical or stupid. Get the fuck out.

Well, I'm an economics major, so I wouldn't know about sensitivity, but I definitely know that any feature of my kentish boarding-school education did not contradict the overall goal of becoming more knowledgeable and better educated. So sorry, sugar, but your angle that you have a European and therefore starkly original view on the issue is neither accurate nor original, and you can stop touting it. Stiff upper lip I'm not entirely sure why you read my responses as "badgering", whatever that means in Spain. If Gnome says that fat people must be held responsible for their fatness because people from broken families are held responsible when they become serial killers, YES, he is comparing fat people to serial killers. I'm glad you're going to graduate school in Rhetoric and Composition this fall, where they will be able to teach you this astonishing bit of analysis. I believe you have been provided, prior in the discussion, with links to studies showing that the health scares you mention are quite weakly correlated with obesity and in most cases more contingent on lifestyle than on BMI. You will also have been provided with links that show that, in the majority of cases, people who diet gain their weight back within 5 years. This is old research, mate, but it makes for some fascinating reading. But I will go back on a point. You will say, especially since health risks are contingent upon a healthy lifestyle, shouldn't we "build a framework around the ideal of being healthy"? No, your argument is completely impalatable to me, for two reasons. 1) you say you're promoting health, but you're actually promoting thinness. I understand that you're concerned that she can't walk more than 20 paces, but you don't even stop to consider why that is - whether it's a medical condition or a lack of physical conditioning. You immediately pounce on her fat. This whole discussion so far has centered on fat people, not unfit people. I have less of a problem promoting health, but your idea of health includes the idea fat person=unhealthy person, which is patently untrue. You say promoting an "ideal" like it's easy, but it actually involves a lot of measuring and defining of that ideal - because how can you promote an ideal if that ideal is not measurable? Inevitably such a policy would lead to the statistical discrimination of some population. 2) Whenever you're building a social ideal, you're engaging in social engineering. I'm not a libertarian, but I don't believe that creating a mythology of something is useful for anything but social control. People should 1) have access to information that shows that it is physical fitness that reduces the risk of metabolic disease and so on, and not how fat or thin you are, and 2) be able to choose if they want to reduce their risk of metabolic disease, or do something else with their lives. I cannot cede the last point. Body autonomy is a basic freedom, and basic freedoms are protected in the United States. Gnome will chime in here with something along the lines of, "but why must we make special accommodations for fat people, then?" - and you don't, actually. It would be, you know, decent of you to treat fat people like people (not patronize them, not talk down to them, not tell them what to do with their bodies, all of which you have been doing here), and not expressly hinder them from living their lives (you shouldn't be going to grad school if you're so fat!!!). Just do what you do with any other group of people you dislike. Step away and move on. I'm pretty sure I haven't dissuaded y'all from being assholes, but I hope I have at least elucidated my position. And now we can close this thread, because it is apparent that there is no such thing as a fat-friendly campus. I doubt there's even a fat-friendly morgue.

Dude, why?

I mean, it's not so much an issue of frame as an issue of starting weight. If you start at 400 pounds and lose 30, you won't go down even one size. If you start at 110 pounds and lose 30, you might lose your life.

Jesus, you're comparing being a serial killer to being fat? My linguistics vocabulary is a little rusty, but that's some slicey and dicey semantics, innit? What I don't understand is why you think a fat person must do everything in their power not to be fat. To take the OP's example, why must she put off graduate school until she loses weight? It's not like she's not gonna spend the next 5-10 years of her life glued to her desk for the best outcome, so it's not like her mobility issues have a significant impact on her work productivity, the validity of her research, her intelligence and writing skills, etc. Fat people can still go to graduate school, you know. So can people with cancer. Or people with depression. Or people who are debilitatingly insecure unless they have a boyfriend, like your friend LittleDarlings. Or people who have bombed a small village during their tenure with the US Army. All of us have shit going on all the time. Why do you insist on making a person's body weight an insurmountable hurdle to them living their life? A fat person is a stereotype, but they are also still a person. I'm not sure responsibility, and excuses, are a useful rhetoric here. You've admitted that people can be fat owing to a lot of factors - but why does it follow that all these factors must be surmountable? I get you're super proud about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or some shit, but it doesn't work out for other folks, either because they don't want it, or because they're plain out of luck. I get why you're so invested in maintaining the human-will rhetoric. It's like 99% of your identity. But you actually owe a lot to other people (starting with your parents), and some of it is good, and some of it is bad. Some people are fat because they are, and you can sit here splitting hairs all day, and that won't change their reality. So basically, I don't understand why all fat people must get skinny, and I don't understand why those fat people who are not skinny must be shamed for being skinny. No one should be excused. No one should be excused from being treated like a human being and given basic respect.

Oh, that gotta sting.

Idk, my experience with alternative schools is that all the students majoring in the non-humanities end up taking classes off-campus because the free structure allows for delving into a broad array of sources and aspects, but not so much for learning the methodology of a field. Although, literally the reason I've hated science all my life is because of those pointless labs where they force you to sit there for 3 hours collecting pointless data to elucidate a relationship that is obvious/clearly described in the text book. Idk perhaps curricular changes are needed, but they need to be more nuanced than what has been done since the 60s. Also, we really haven't departed much from the 19th century model, economically speaking.

Hey Gnome Chomsky, how did you troll your way into graduate school? Because I would be honored to avail myself of your skillz. What the fuuuuuuck, man, where do you even come up with these illusions? I mean, I've only been on volleyball, hockey, and crew, but in those sports, the majority of olympic athletes come from well-to-do families, because, guess what, sports are different and you can't generalize across all sports! Also, whenever I watch those linebackers in the NFL, I shamelessly stuff my face with chicken wings because, oh man, I have a LONG way to go . Oh wait, they're NFL athletes, so they're probably fit, right? They probably run that football obstacle course or whatever in 48 seconds and benchpress your mom 3x10 even though she's so fat, because they're professional athletes. But they're still fat. Oh shit. Holy shit. FAT PEOPLE CAN BE ATHLETIC TOO. This is cray cray. I mean, next thing you know, we're gonna be discovering that FAT PEOPLE EXIST NATURALLY IN THE WILD. sanctorum cacas! http://bleacherreport.com/articles/955775-nfls-all-time-fat-guy-team

http://www.upworthy.com/what-if-colleges-had-no-departments-offered-no-majors-and-students-only-took-one-class-at-a-time?c=hpstream tl;dr It's a soundbyte about Quest University in Canada, which is pioneering yet another alternative undergraduate program that doesn't have majors, departments, tracks, etc. Starting at 7.30 is a bit about faculty research at Quest. The dude says, at the beginning, that the current college system is optimized for the 19th century, whereas now we need critical thinking etc. to prepare students for the modern workforce. I have two issues: his plan for preparing students for the modern workforce is rather wishy-washy, and the notion of preparing students for the workforce is of itself problematic. I don't know anything about Canada, so maybe this is the first college of its kind there, but in the states, Hampshire in MA, Evergreen in WA, Naropa in CO and countless others come to mind, and so far they haven't impacted the higher education landscape very much, and many of their graduates, especially in the sciences, struggle to become acceptable to institutions. Although they do teach some killer humanities classes. The only thing is, these schools look like fun places to teach at. You can make your own curriculum that carries over into later years and mentor your students throughout their education.

lol but the whole point of the metaphor is that its logic is consistent with the logic of the thing it refers to lol fail.

Well, if you're really good, you will continue being a star in your postgraduate institution. The field of comparative literature is especially prone to this, from what I've gathered. I actually think this isn't a function of prestige as much as it is a function of graduate school. Nobody goes into comparative literature for the career prospects (although few people, I think, can handle a PhD in any subject for the career prospects alone), so you're gonna end up nose-to-nose with equally nerdy and insufferable people. Such a situation definitely psyches me out, so I'm developing a coping strategy that involves lots of arrogance, brown-nosing, and martinis.

I'm going to be sanctimonious with you now, Joanne, maybe remind you that you should be inventing the Theory of Everything or curing cancer or building schools for African children or something, throw some percentages in that shit. Blah Blah wisdom. Here's something I wrote in my poetry journal. Wisdom. Yes, Honorary Oppression Olympics Committee. Her family's lived there ever since they immigrated 15 years ago.

...your chances of not being homeless when you move are exactly proportional to your ability to afford rent in and around NYC. my best friend lives in brooklyn too! she fucking hates all the hipsters that have gentrified the neighborhood.

The problem I have with MyFitnessPal is that 1) a lot of the nutritional data is crowd-sourced, so it is sometimes wrong for packaged goods, and pretty much useless for freshly-prepared food, and 2) it overestimates calories burned. I actually wish they'd come up with an algorithm that would decrease the calories burned from an activity you've been doing consistently over a period of time, as commensurate with observable nature.

One important thing to consider is that interest on private loans begins accumulating immediately. Basically, 7% a month is a shit ton of interest over a 2-year master's program.

Your first statement is correct. Generally speaking, the American legal institution is stable enough that an obvious lack of compliance with regulations would eventually be righted, even if many years and dollars later. However, the scope of disability is so broad and compliance across a variety of institutions so tenuous that pointing out that not every university will have accommodations for every disability is not misinformation. The way you put it, however, could be taken as minimization of experience, though.

Also, is it like, totally okay that we're talking about this chick like she's some abstract theory or fictional character? She has an account on gradcafe, so apparently that makes her a person with her own cognition of her own life. If she's eating more calories than she's burning, she can tell you that - and that would save you speculating on it and all this other shit. But seriously, do you even lift, bro? Because I'd like to see you talk your calories in-calories out bullshit on a 50% protein diet.

America Runs on Douchebaggery

1. why is it obvious that they ate more? from what is it obvious that they ate more? we actually have a very limited idea of what goes on inside the living human body, and a very limited idea indeed of how the kcal that is taken in is utilized. there is no research that suggests that any random human body must subscribe to a standard that you arbitrarily deem as "healthy". 2. sure. but we don't know where it goes, or why it goes where it goes, or how it goes where it goes. you're grossly oversimplifying, which is understandable, but not excusable.

I am mildly perplexed at your hypocrisy, given your stance on class privilege and educational achievement.

Since bodies aren't closed systems, there is no a priori argument that all energy that goes in must go out. Friction, bro.

Oh, do you model biochemical reactions in the human body? My Harvard interviewer did that. He also did some evolution modeling. However, he was a physicist, so I suppose he was taught that bodies are not closed systems. Surprising, how different methodologies, terminologies, and contents are in different disciplines. But I bet you think that Lagrangians are the same thing in math, physics, and economics, too