If you've been paying attention, you might have noticed a shift in the body positivity movement in recent weeks. The rise of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Zepbound has made weight loss easier (although this writer worries about the long-term effects of such medications). What happened, of course, was that discussions we weren't allowed to have — like the health risks of being obese, and the health benefits of losing weight — could now be discussed.
With that, of course, came a healthy heaping of denialism from the Left, who insisted they never claimed it was healthy to be obese (except for all the times they did). That doesn't mean the "body positivity" movement is dead or that the Left isn't going to continue to push the harmful notion of "fat acceptance."
Trainer and fitness guru Jillian Michaels had a debate with some of these advocates, and it did not go well for the proponents of "body positivity."
Watch Jillian Michaels run circles around a “body positivity” advocate in a debate about excess fat.
— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) March 20, 2026
WOMAN: “You’re saying that it is inherently unhealthy to live in a fat body.”
MICHAELS: “Yes.”
WOMAN: “Where did you get that evidence?”
[Michaels lays out the evidence]… pic.twitter.com/wZRODiS8qE
"The claim that you're saying is that it is inherently unhealthy to live in a fat body," the activist says.
"It's inherently unhealthy to have access body fat, yes," Michaels replies.
"Okay, where are you getting that information?" the woman asks. Um, the whole history of medical science until about six minutes ago.
"There are dozens of MIT trials that show having access body fat — dozens — is causal, not correlated," Michaels explains.
"That's not true," the activist says. "There's no disease that just fat-bodied people get."
That's not what Michaels — or anyone else — has ever claimed. Being obese increases your risk of certain diseases. As the caption on the right of the screen says, even the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) note that excess body fat is "associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, high blood pressure, and premature death."
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Michaels pointed out that she never claimed only fat people get diseases. "I didn't say that," she says. "But obesity lends itself to all cause mortality, across the board. Have you heard of something called adiposopathy?"
The activist nods in the affirmative.
"Okay," Michaels continues, "so you you know it means literally 'sick fat.' And you understand how it works?"
"Mmm-hmm," the activist replies.
"Okay, tell me how it works," Michaels says.
"So, it's additional layer of fat in the stomach area," the woman says.
"No, that's not what it is," Michaels tells her. And here's where the activist gets taught what adiposopathy really is. "It works as follows. When we eat too much food that has energy that we're not utilizing, the body needs to put that energy somewhere, right? So it puts it in fat cells. So it puts it in initially subcutaneous fat cells, a little bit of visceral fat, which is fat around the organs. And at first you have hyperplasia, which means we're recruiting new little fat cells which isn't necessarily a bad thing up to a point. Now the issue is once you can no longer recruit more fat cells, right? You get hypertrophy. So the fat cells start to expand, and this is exceptionally dangerous because what ends up happening is the blood vessels get outpaced so the fat cells can't get oxygen and they start screaming. Literally. And when they do, they release cytokines, inflammatory proteins, right?
"I want to pause," the activist says, mostly because she's just been proven wrong and ignorant.
“Of course, you do want to pause because it’s irrefutable. You don’t even know what I’m talking about," Michaels says.
You can watch the full episode here.
For years, the Left has told us to "follow the science." The science on obesity is clear: it increases the risk of a slew of diseases and shortens lifespans. No amount of "body positivity" or "fat acceptance" changes that reality. The only thing that does is diet and exercise, both of which are anathema to the Left because they require self-control and discipline.
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