I'm mid-40s, grew up in the American South, so I've always been around fat people, even back in the day. They weren't especially entitled, but I can only imagine how crazy it would have been if we had social media. Figuring out people in person was hard enough. If we'd had Tubblr, people would have been fighting every day.

People used to smoke a lot more, and that kept everyone's appetite down. I know girls who would smoke just one or two a day after school, to look cool and also for the appetite. It was more my parents generation that smoked like crazy, and suffered more when they quit. Not to say smoking should come back, but a silver lining was the appetite control.

My parents were great people, but simple. No college, grew up on farms, I'm surprised they survived their danger filled childhoods and smoke filled 20s-50s. They would have not supported HAES but they never would have made fun of our fat relatives to their faces. My parents were the shitlords of their generation and just lived as good examples of not stuffing their faces, and surviving on black coffee, cigarettes, and not a lot of food.

The thing about fatties back then, is that they would spend a lot of time eating high fat foods, drinking coke non-stop, and sitting around talking smack about everyone. It was like a live version of sub reddit drama. Us kids would be outside playing, even the fatties, but one by one they would drop off into the house for cokes & smack talk. So that's how they indoctrinated the young, us skinny kids escaped by literally not going in there, until dinner, which was farm food (mostly vegetables and salt. Crazy amounts of salt.)

HAES would have been accepted to an extent as a philosophy since it already was the reality for a lot of people. At least in my part of the south. People married young, so maybe they married before achieving planetary status.