I do not know how I found myself on this old thread. I was trying to update my recent thread which I started in May of this year and my phone took me to this. But since I did scan the first three posts:

It is very funny that a woman aspiring to be Rubenesque berates Western men and capitalism as Rubens was himself a European man and a highly successful one. He lived before the peak of modern capitalism but he clearly benefited commercially from his success.

Also, I do not know what OP''s height is but in general 170 lbs is a fine weight and is below the weight of a typical Rubenesque beauty.

I do love love love Rubens, but I love Botticelli's beauties even more. This is not due to them being thinner but because I love their faces more. And hair. Bodies are not everything. But while their thinner bodies are very graceful and dynamic, they are not railthin. You simply do not find a lot of bodies similar to the thinnest of thin fashion models end of last century styke in classical western art. Yes, including that Western art created by white men during the period of peak of capitalism.

My 172 cm tall aunt who herself has a very small waist, ample hips and medium sized breasts explained it to me when I was a teen: it is much easier to demo clothes on hangers than on a real body with its curvature. On hangers, nothing takes away from the appeal of clothes themselves. It is about clothes and not their wearer. I can also add now, having lived a few decades since: it is much easier to design, cut and sew clothes if you do not have to adapt to curvature. There is also the issue of standardization. Bodies, even average bodies in the thick of the bell curve, differ widely. Buy tall thin models are standard shapes. So designers can make their clothes without worrying that the clothes won't fit the idiosyncratic shapes of whoever happens to walk the podium. It is far easier. It may not be representative but it is very simple.

Maybe my aunt's compelling explanation, maybe other factors, but I have never wanted to be model thin and was happy with a medium height medium frame body. Then I gained a lot of weight on psychiatric medications and later was able to shed some of it though definitely not all. Shedding that weight and exercising led to the resolution of severe steatosis (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease). How is that not improving health? Also my lipids improved.

HAES adepts love saying that you cannot tell if a person is fit and healthy by how they look. This is not entirely correct. Many severely obese people have shortness of breath which is plainly visible (and audible). It is obvious when you look at them and hear them breathe that they are at an increased risk of cardiovascular adverse events. You do not need labs or a professional degree in health to make that assessment. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I have been inpatient on psych units with women suffering from anorexia nervous and on tube feeding and they had yellowish complexion and clearly unhealthy looking flaking skin and dull hair. What is true is that when you look at an *average* person, you do not know if that person is fit. Fitness also comes in different forms. I prefer the look of more strength and more musculature in men but not too much, but there are endurance athletes who are not muscular at all but, say, participate in long cycling competitions. They are fit alongside a different axis. I know one such young man - he so lacks muscle that I thought he was sedentary until I saw him in full cycling gear and he told me he would spend a *whole weekend* racing. So my hat was off but in terms of personal asthetic preferences, I still do not like the look of those long muscle fibers of endurance athletes. So there is fitness and fitness, different types of fitness. And only tangentially related: I have known women who are zaftig but very flexible. You do not have to have the body of a modern ballerina to be flexible. And, speaking of ballerinas, ballerinas of the past were not so thin. That was at the peak of industrial revolution and that did not prevent them from being adored by rich men in Europe, including royalty. So much so for the alleged blame Western men supposedly bear for the proliferation of the ueber thin model type.

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There have recently been reports that several women influencers who agitated for HAES and denied even the connection with diabetes have simply *died young*. No, they did not weigh perfectly reasonable 170 lbs, nor were they a little zaftig - they were morbidly obese.

There are health benefits to being heavy: you end up engaging in constant weight-bearing exercise which strengthens the bones. I happen to have bone density in the 90th percentile and I believe it is partially due to having carried extra weight (I am doing strength training but I did not start that early enough to have that make such a huge positive contribution). Of course I also consume a whole lot of bioavailable calcium from the diet which helps bone density. My podiatrist says that being overweight helps bone density and that many body shapes are just fine as long as your labs are fine and you are not sedentary. He is a white male practicing the kind of medicine that the OP would dub Western at a not-for-profit clinic in Silicon Valley. He told me that his daughter is overweight. I do not know to what extent being a loving father to a chubby daughter colors how he advises his patients, but I do trust him when he says that he sees a lot of thin patients in his practice with injuries which is why he dismisses the notion that by default orthopedic problems are due to extra weight. He is a highly respected clinician, both by patients and colleagues, and he speaks based on the vast data he sees: thin people injur themselves.

Regarding the supposed vast divide between East and West, the world is actually quite big, not dichotomous, and the actually situation is enormously more complicated than this reductionist and stereotyping assertion. I grew up next to a large population of students from the African continent and observed, from an early age, an absolutely dazzling variety in their facial features and body types. I think I also learned in school that both the *shortest* and the *tallest* people by stature live in Africa. Africa is not homogenous. And even though these days, it is runners from Kenya who travel to the US and take top prizes in running competitions, it is also in Africa that there are teenage girls who are being sent by their parents to force-feeding camps because fat young women are more valued on the marriage market in some locations.

In Asia there is also a stunning variety and there are, mentioning just the two biggest countries for brevity, both slender Chinese women and the occasionally full figured women from India (those who are not malnourished and malnourishment is still rampant in that overall still poor country).

Going to find now the actual thread I was trying to to update...