NBC really makes you THINK. At least that is their intention.

In reality, they make you chuckle when they try to produce any kind of deep and insightful commentary.

Kate Bernyk, a writer and “senior communications strategist” at Kickstarter (that site where you drop some dough in the sometimes vain hope that some promised product might be produced), is standing up for the rights of people of pounds.

As an obese person, I can sympathize with her troubles while recognizing that her pleas for special treatment are utterly ridiculous.

As a fat person, I hate the first few weeks of January with a fiery passion.

Following every holiday season, there’s seemingly no escape from the weight loss industrial complex. Social media is inundated with weight loss ads, people are constantly posting fitness goals, and gyms are in your face talking about “beach bods.” The entire world embraces the disordered eating I worked so hard to escape while gleefully saying, “Your body shouldn’t exist.”

I’m sorry, that’s ridiculous on so many levels. In the main, people go on diets because they are overweight, and in doing so they are trying to correct their own disordered eating, not engage in it. And, not to put too fine a point on it, except in a few cases where people are suffering from an endocrinological problem, we are fat because, at some level, we choose to be because we eat too much and move too little.

And being fat is really bad for you.

If that makes Kate feel like that others are thinking “your body shouldn’t exist,” that is a mental disorder on her part. If she feels that way it is entirely in her own head, and her desire that others should choose to be less healthy in order to make her feel better about herself is selfish and disordered.

The worst was when it would show up at work. I might be able to easily report social ads and mute friends, but how do I escape an email from human resources encouraging staff to join a team weight loss challenge with monthly weigh-ins? Or a boss who encourages her whole team to buy Fitbits so we can compete on daily steps? (Both were real things that happened at two of my former jobs.)

Horrors! These are programs that companies and insurance companies have to help employees both get healthier and to reduce health care costs. It is no secret that the diseases of obesity are both preventable and expensive to treat, as well as shorten the lives and reduce work availability of employees. Not too long ago these wellness programs were seen as benefits, not attempts to oppress. The fat acceptance movement is trying to redefine these as attempts to oppress and silence the fat? Ridiculous.

Before I started remote work, I would dread the office kitchen in early January, where almost every conversation would include how “bad” folks had eaten over the holidays and how “good” they needed to be now. Staring blankly at my colleagues as they described exercise as some kind of self-inflicted punishment for enjoying food, all in an effort to not look like me.

I’ll admit, it was really difficult for me to notice how harmful these things were until I recovered from disordered eating and I started to refuse to participate. Speaking up about how fatphobic and ableist these kinds of “wellness programs” or incentives are toward people with larger bodies, disabilities and experiences with eating disorders would often be met with an eye roll or a lecture about how my employer is only encouraging “healthy behaviors.” Politely asking co-workers not to discuss restrictive eating with me usually led to awkward silences and not a lot of future conversations.

Fatphobic? Sure, a lot of people are afraid of being fat, but nobody I know is afraid of fat people. If you aren’t fat, a quick walking speed or at worst a jog will get a healthy person out of the danger zone. Nobody is afraid of me because they are pretty sure they could outrun me.

Calling people fatphobic is a cope, not an accurate description. And while plenty of people don’t want to look fat, it has nothing to do with fearing fat people. It is that being fat is unhealthy, and unhealthy is unattractive.

As for having “recovered from disordered eating,” I can’t say anything intelligent about her former eating habits. But if she is obese she hasn’t recovered from disordered eating, she has adopted another form of it. Eating too much food is as disordered as eating too little. That isn’t a critique; it is a fact. My doctor, who is a dear friend as well as my physician, brings up my weight and my dietary habits not to shame me (she doesn’t) or because she is afraid of me (she isn’t), but because she cares about me and my health. I embrace her honesty because it comes out of a place of concern and empathy, not disdain.

That’s pretty easy to see, unless you are so embedded in the “everything and everybody is perfect unless I don’t like or agree with them, in which case they are Nazis who must be destroyed” mindset.

Embracing untreated mental disorders isn’t compassionate; it is cruel. And that is what this sort of thinking is. It is the same attitude that allows mentally ill and addicted people to rot to death on the streets, because it would be oppressive to treat the schizophrenia or help people escape addiction.

These kinds of programs and incentives value weight loss as healthy above all else, completely disregarding the complex factors that go into measuring one’s health. They also ignore the findings of studies that suggest that anti-fat bias and weight stigma contribute to worse health outcomes than a high Body Mass Index (BMI). In fact, weight discrimination (which is still entirely legal in 49 states) leads to poor outcomes for fat folks at work — including harmful biases in the hiring process and less pay.

So if workplace weight loss programs don’t actually improve employee health — what is it they are attempting to do?

As the writer and fat activist Aubrey Gordon put it when discussing workplace wellness programs on a recent episode of her podcast “Maintenance Phase“: “One of the major narratives that drives our understanding of and response to fat people in the world: Fat people are most frequently discussed as a cost.”

Valuing health? Horrors! And, let’s admit it: fat employees do cost more money. It’s actually not clear that the wellness programs on offer do much to improve health, but that is clearly the intent.

As a fat person I am sympathetic with Ms. Bernyk’s frustrations with being fat. As much as I believe that for most of us our obesity is the result of life choices, I understand those life choices having made them myself. Dieting sucks. Exercise requires reordering one’s life, including less screen time and fewer arguments on Twitter. It means fundamentally changing large parts of our lives, and few of us are willing to do that.

But the result has been an ever fattening of America and an increase in all the diseases associated with that.

And including obesity in DEI is not simply an extension of compassion to people who haven’t made the necessary choices; it is sending a message to the next generation that being fat is a perfectly reasonable life choice.

It isn’t. Ultimately, maintaining a level of social unacceptability attached to being fat is a good thing; it encourages those of us who are obese to get healthier, and signals to youth that you don’t want to go there.

So include obesity in DEI efforts? No thank you!