I used to judge overweight people. Now I understand that I was an asshole.
I have gained 25Kg in the past three years for no apparent reason. I eat the same kind of food, I exercise regularly… yet something is slightly off and my weight continues to slowly creep up.
People talk about calories in, calories out. What is missing from that argument is something as obvious as hunger: in the real world, over the long term, people eat until they are satisfied and no sooner than that. “Count your calories” means “Go hungry every meal”. You can soldier on for a few months or a year, but eventually you will simply eat until you are no longer hungry.
If your hormones are slightly off and you feel a little too hungry for how much energy you actually need, you will slowly gain weight. Healthy people don’t feel hungry every meal, that’s simply not how they maintain a healthy weight.
That is why drugs like Wegovy are so important. They slightly adjust your sense of hunger so that it matches the amount of energy you actually need. Being overweight is in itself a chronic disease with all sorts of complications, from hypertension and diabetes to heart disease and joint problems. We need to stop judging people who suffer from it and start treating them now that we finally can.
I agree that we should treat them, but I don’t like people who are proud of them being overweight. This is a serious health condition and shouldn’t just be accepted.
I am overweight myself, with exactly the creeping up of weight over the years as you described. Every few years I have to do a weight loss diet for a few months to get back to the upper range of normal weight. That’s just how it is.
Also, there was a significant shift of people’s perception of what normal weight actually is due to the issues I mentioned in the first paragraph. If you have problems sitting in normal chairs due to your ass being too large, you’re morbidly obese.
There’s no point in ostracizing overweight people, but it should also not be treated as being normal.
I suspect the whole “fat acceptance” movement arises from the overwhelming amount of judgement that fat people suffer, combined with the fact that until recently there was no practical treatment for it. It’s the same process behind gay pride: it’s not pride as in “I’m better than you”, it is pride as in “I am not worse than you, no matter how badly you treat me”.
Being overweight or obese is a medical condition, not a moral failure. If you can’t fit in a normal chair, yes, you are morbidly obese, but that means you deserve more kindness, not less, just like we do with people who suffer a more severe form of cancer.
People who are fatter than you are not worse than you, they are sicker.
Hmm, many overweight people I know don’t treat it like the disease it is. Some even got diabetes, but don’t want to give up their eating habits. They just don’t want to.
That’s as close to a moral failure as you can get in my opinion. It just might be medical in the same sense that drug addicts might not be able to control their compulsions, but otherwise no, it is all on them.
Hmm, many overweight people I know don’t treat it like the disease it is. Some even got diabetes, but don’t want to give up their eating habits. They just don’t want t
You could make the same comment about smokers, they are not seeing themselves as sick, but as life enjoyer who want to keep that little piece of pleasure. And when they want to quit, they want an instant-drug that would solve everything.
In the 80’s/90’s we were living in a society actively promoting smoking, now we’re in a society actively promoting sugar and fat causing people to be overweight. It’s even worst because you often don’t see the global picture, like A and B are both taking a burger and a dessert at the restaurant outing, but A goes to the restaurant once a month, while B goes twice a week, A never eats for breakfast while A takes large breakfast. the result is that it feels like that the slim and the fat one are eating the same stuff.
Kinda. I judge smokers a lot more, because their choices also risk the health of others.
I don’t have strong feelings about fat people. I just believe all the excuses are misplaced for a majority of overweight people though. It should be treated like the eating disorder it is and not promoted or encouraged.
That’s a pretty liberal approach. When 50% of the population is overweight, me need a societal shift and strong regulations rather than blaming individual behaviour in a society promoting obesity. We didn’t got rid of smoking by blaming smoker but by taxing cigarettes, and tons of prevention campaign
Actually I agree. Unfortunately you cannot tax food like smokes as it is essential.
Technically you could tax sweets more, but let’s be real the problem is the two pounds of pasta and meats some people are able to eat. It is the shear amount of food some people stuff in their faces and they are actually already paying more for it, but they obviously don’t care.
I don’t have any solution though. As I said before it should at least not be promoted or encouraged.
It’s a bit like drug addicts. Yes it is a medical condition, yes they need help and kindness and not judgement, but deep inside of us we still judge the heroin addicts for their choices. Same goes with the sugar addicts.
If we could just accept that sugar addiction exists and is a widespread problem we could make progress, but the addicts won’t
One of the mechanisms that is thought to affect long term weight gain is the following:
Your body offets heat loss by burning calories from food intake. In healthy people this is well regulated so that the body radiates off about as much heat as you gain through food. Some medications or conditions however can mess with hormones involved in regulating your body’s temperature. Even just being slightly colder (it’s imperceptible, you won’t be shivering or anything) kickstarts a different homeostasis mechanism which essentially tries to make up for the heat difference by upping the other side of the equation: more food intake. That means you feel more hungry than usual and eat a little more than you need. Over time this adds up and you gain weight.
Of course in the real world many more factors are involved, for example how much you move or how much sleep you get. But it’s still an interesting piece of the puzzle.
The whole problem is pretty much home made. By allowing these cheap sugary foods like white bread, candy, etc to be produced, we are setting up the masses for obesity
it is also a lot more expensive and takes more time, effort and knowledge to prepare.
there is a reason obesity correlates with low socioeconomic status.
i don’t like to throw the bad lefty “p” word around, but check it
But let’s be real here. 40% of the US population isn’t obese because they have a medical problem. They just eat too much and eat the wrong things. People eat for entertainment, not because they’re hungry. Others make no difference between “wanting to eat” and “being hungry”, probably because they have never experienced actual hunger in their lifes.
We evolved in a way that we really like calorie dense food. In the past that was a feature. The modern world by itself isn’t harmful. But human demand will ( and in the us has) shift supermarket offerings away from what we evolved with and towards what our brain rewards. It’s subconscious, and no one is really to blame. Some people with a more conscious approach are less affected, the rest just follows instinct.
Whole grain rye bread is very calorie dense. But many US people eat white toast- so full of fructose syrup it tastes more like cake than bread - instead.
It’s not the calorie density. It’s choosing to eat garbage.
I recommend you to go read or watch anything including the geneticist Giles Yeo.
There are reasons people eat more than they should and it has lots of variables including genetics, personal variance, food environment and the composition of foods.
Bashing americans is fun and all, but if you want to solve a social problem you need a social solution, not blaming individuals.
Okay…there are of course medical conditions that let you put on weight. Also medicines and problems with your hormones.
But how many overweight people are just eating to much and don‘t exercise a lot or at all?
So I kinda agree with you here. You shouldn’t insult someone. But just to say: it’s not your own fault…
I think this is a easy excuse.
But how many overweight people are just eating too much
How do you determine what is “too much”? If you measure it by weigh gain, then all of them are eating too much. But if you measure it by “they eat until they are satisfied and no more than that”, probably most of them aren’t eating too much.
and don‘t exercise a lot or at all?
That I suspect is very common. Then again, many modern jobs involve sitting all day and the day has a finite number of hours, and at least in North America cities are car-dependent so many people don’t even get to commute by foot. It’s an environment that produces very sedentary people.
There is also lack of sleep, which I personally suffer from. How many of us are getting a good eight hours of good quality sleep every night?
There is more to it than “personal responsibility”.
First, I completely agree with you that it’s incredibly easy to let your weight slip. Just wanted to add that I know many overweight people I have gone out to dinner with, or just been around, that consistently make the wrong choice everywhere they go.
I’m at a restaurant and order something made of say, cucumber lettuce chicken and whole-wheat bread(as someone who is about average weight)
The people I’m with order beef patties with mayo on white bread with fries as a side. I just want to shake them and say stop hurting yourself!! But there’s not much I can do when every time I give a healthy alternative they’ll say yuck, give me the processed food instead.
So definitely don’t be hard on yourself if your weight is slipping, but if you’re eating out every day or eating high calorie foods, just try to replace some of those, even with something else unhealthy but less calorie dense.
“Count your calories” means “Go hungry every meal”
You ignore the factor calory density here. So, yes you can put your effort into restricting how much you eat, if you want to keep constant what you eat. But you could reinvest the effort in restricting the quantity of your food into restricting its quality. Furthermore, you could confuse hunger for appetite and - no judgement - this could come from a misalignment of your dopamine system and hence mental health.
Furthermore, you could confuse hunger for appetite
A distinction without a difference: if you don’t eat some more, you will suffer. In the long run, people eat until they are satisfied. Call it hunger, call it appetite, call it cravings, call it whatever you want. Stop eating too early -> suffer.
That’s exactly why I mentioned effort. You can suffer from your effort or from the lack of it and most of the times, suffering from effort is awarded with pleasure, while suffering from the lack of effort spirales into more suffering.
Sure. Let’s do an experiment. Try losing 5Kg/10lbs and maintain that weight loss for two years. Show us how rewarding it is to feel hungry after every meal.
I have a healthy weight because I’m mentally balanced and take responsibility for whatever I do to my body. That is however not something that I assume to be true of somebody who reacts with aggression to genuinely kind help.
I give you a last kind hint, even though I’m convinced you won’t hear it and then I’m out here: Going after a craving comes with pain, not with pleasure, because dopamine is a liar: it is the hormone of wanting, not the hormone of satisfaction. Whatever you are craving, allow yourself to go after it here and then, but start paying close attention to how it makes you feel after giving in. Most of the times, it makes you want more and more instead of reducing the craving.
Watch what you’re eating and be aware how it makes you feel.
I used to judge overweight people. Now I understand that I was an asshole.
I have gained 25Kg in the past three years for no apparent reason. I eat the same kind of food, I exercise regularly… yet something is slightly off and my weight continues to slowly creep up.
People talk about calories in, calories out. What is missing from that argument is something as obvious as hunger: in the real world, over the long term, people eat until they are satisfied and no sooner than that. “Count your calories” means “Go hungry every meal”. You can soldier on for a few months or a year, but eventually you will simply eat until you are no longer hungry.
If your hormones are slightly off and you feel a little too hungry for how much energy you actually need, you will slowly gain weight. Healthy people don’t feel hungry every meal, that’s simply not how they maintain a healthy weight.
That is why drugs like Wegovy are so important. They slightly adjust your sense of hunger so that it matches the amount of energy you actually need. Being overweight is in itself a chronic disease with all sorts of complications, from hypertension and diabetes to heart disease and joint problems. We need to stop judging people who suffer from it and start treating them now that we finally can.
I agree that we should treat them, but I don’t like people who are proud of them being overweight. This is a serious health condition and shouldn’t just be accepted.
I am overweight myself, with exactly the creeping up of weight over the years as you described. Every few years I have to do a weight loss diet for a few months to get back to the upper range of normal weight. That’s just how it is.
Also, there was a significant shift of people’s perception of what normal weight actually is due to the issues I mentioned in the first paragraph. If you have problems sitting in normal chairs due to your ass being too large, you’re morbidly obese.
There’s no point in ostracizing overweight people, but it should also not be treated as being normal.
I suspect the whole “fat acceptance” movement arises from the overwhelming amount of judgement that fat people suffer, combined with the fact that until recently there was no practical treatment for it. It’s the same process behind gay pride: it’s not pride as in “I’m better than you”, it is pride as in “I am not worse than you, no matter how badly you treat me”.
Being overweight or obese is a medical condition, not a moral failure. If you can’t fit in a normal chair, yes, you are morbidly obese, but that means you deserve more kindness, not less, just like we do with people who suffer a more severe form of cancer.
People who are fatter than you are not worse than you, they are sicker.
Hmm, many overweight people I know don’t treat it like the disease it is. Some even got diabetes, but don’t want to give up their eating habits. They just don’t want to.
That’s as close to a moral failure as you can get in my opinion. It just might be medical in the same sense that drug addicts might not be able to control their compulsions, but otherwise no, it is all on them.
You could make the same comment about smokers, they are not seeing themselves as sick, but as life enjoyer who want to keep that little piece of pleasure. And when they want to quit, they want an instant-drug that would solve everything.
In the 80’s/90’s we were living in a society actively promoting smoking, now we’re in a society actively promoting sugar and fat causing people to be overweight. It’s even worst because you often don’t see the global picture, like A and B are both taking a burger and a dessert at the restaurant outing, but A goes to the restaurant once a month, while B goes twice a week, A never eats for breakfast while A takes large breakfast. the result is that it feels like that the slim and the fat one are eating the same stuff.
Kinda. I judge smokers a lot more, because their choices also risk the health of others.
I don’t have strong feelings about fat people. I just believe all the excuses are misplaced for a majority of overweight people though. It should be treated like the eating disorder it is and not promoted or encouraged.
That’s a pretty liberal approach. When 50% of the population is overweight, me need a societal shift and strong regulations rather than blaming individual behaviour in a society promoting obesity. We didn’t got rid of smoking by blaming smoker but by taxing cigarettes, and tons of prevention campaign
Actually I agree. Unfortunately you cannot tax food like smokes as it is essential.
Technically you could tax sweets more, but let’s be real the problem is the two pounds of pasta and meats some people are able to eat. It is the shear amount of food some people stuff in their faces and they are actually already paying more for it, but they obviously don’t care.
I don’t have any solution though. As I said before it should at least not be promoted or encouraged.
It’s a bit like drug addicts. Yes it is a medical condition, yes they need help and kindness and not judgement, but deep inside of us we still judge the heroin addicts for their choices. Same goes with the sugar addicts.
If we could just accept that sugar addiction exists and is a widespread problem we could make progress, but the addicts won’t
Speak for yourself. My father was an alcoholic and I don’t judge him for that. I know the history of child abuse that led him to the bottle.
One of the mechanisms that is thought to affect long term weight gain is the following:
Your body offets heat loss by burning calories from food intake. In healthy people this is well regulated so that the body radiates off about as much heat as you gain through food. Some medications or conditions however can mess with hormones involved in regulating your body’s temperature. Even just being slightly colder (it’s imperceptible, you won’t be shivering or anything) kickstarts a different homeostasis mechanism which essentially tries to make up for the heat difference by upping the other side of the equation: more food intake. That means you feel more hungry than usual and eat a little more than you need. Over time this adds up and you gain weight.
Of course in the real world many more factors are involved, for example how much you move or how much sleep you get. But it’s still an interesting piece of the puzzle.
You can eat different to reduce the amount of hunger you feel. Things like keto and intermittent fasting go a long way
Whole foods. Whole grain rye bread instead of sugary white toast so sweet it tastes more like cake than bread, for example.
The whole problem is pretty much home made. By allowing these cheap sugary foods like white bread, candy, etc to be produced, we are setting up the masses for obesity
it is also a lot more expensive and takes more time, effort and knowledge to prepare. there is a reason obesity correlates with low socioeconomic status.
i don’t like to throw the bad lefty “p” word around, but check it
You are correct in everything you said.
But let’s be real here. 40% of the US population isn’t obese because they have a medical problem. They just eat too much and eat the wrong things. People eat for entertainment, not because they’re hungry. Others make no difference between “wanting to eat” and “being hungry”, probably because they have never experienced actual hunger in their lifes.
We evolved in a way that we really like calorie dense food. In the past that was a feature. The modern world by itself isn’t harmful. But human demand will ( and in the us has) shift supermarket offerings away from what we evolved with and towards what our brain rewards. It’s subconscious, and no one is really to blame. Some people with a more conscious approach are less affected, the rest just follows instinct.
Whole grain rye bread is very calorie dense. But many US people eat white toast- so full of fructose syrup it tastes more like cake than bread - instead.
It’s not the calorie density. It’s choosing to eat garbage.
I recommend you to go read or watch anything including the geneticist Giles Yeo. There are reasons people eat more than they should and it has lots of variables including genetics, personal variance, food environment and the composition of foods.
Bashing americans is fun and all, but if you want to solve a social problem you need a social solution, not blaming individuals.
Okay…there are of course medical conditions that let you put on weight. Also medicines and problems with your hormones. But how many overweight people are just eating to much and don‘t exercise a lot or at all?
So I kinda agree with you here. You shouldn’t insult someone. But just to say: it’s not your own fault… I think this is a easy excuse.
Counter-question: how many non-overweight people eat too much but don’t gain weight because of differences in metabolism, calorie absorption, etc?
A lot fewer.
You got a study for that?
How do you determine what is “too much”? If you measure it by weigh gain, then all of them are eating too much. But if you measure it by “they eat until they are satisfied and no more than that”, probably most of them aren’t eating too much.
That I suspect is very common. Then again, many modern jobs involve sitting all day and the day has a finite number of hours, and at least in North America cities are car-dependent so many people don’t even get to commute by foot. It’s an environment that produces very sedentary people.
There is also lack of sleep, which I personally suffer from. How many of us are getting a good eight hours of good quality sleep every night?
There is more to it than “personal responsibility”.
First, I completely agree with you that it’s incredibly easy to let your weight slip. Just wanted to add that I know many overweight people I have gone out to dinner with, or just been around, that consistently make the wrong choice everywhere they go.
I’m at a restaurant and order something made of say, cucumber lettuce chicken and whole-wheat bread(as someone who is about average weight) The people I’m with order beef patties with mayo on white bread with fries as a side. I just want to shake them and say stop hurting yourself!! But there’s not much I can do when every time I give a healthy alternative they’ll say yuck, give me the processed food instead.
So definitely don’t be hard on yourself if your weight is slipping, but if you’re eating out every day or eating high calorie foods, just try to replace some of those, even with something else unhealthy but less calorie dense.
Sounds like excuses to me.
Excuses to what? Why do you think people are overweight?
Eating to much/not burning enough As states before
That’s not an explanation on why you think they’re doing it. It’s just a description of what’s happening.
You are right, losing weight is really easy. And you will show those lazy fatties by losing 5Kg/10lbs this year.
Wait, did I hear any excuses?
Well it is easy for me. I didn’t want to offend here anyone
I get this is also an emotional subject for some people. I helped people to lose weight and to build muscles. And also didn’t judge them.
So if I offended anyone here, im sorry that wasn’t my intention.
That is the excuse you will get. Have a good evening
You ignore the factor calory density here. So, yes you can put your effort into restricting how much you eat, if you want to keep constant what you eat. But you could reinvest the effort in restricting the quantity of your food into restricting its quality. Furthermore, you could confuse hunger for appetite and - no judgement - this could come from a misalignment of your dopamine system and hence mental health.
A distinction without a difference: if you don’t eat some more, you will suffer. In the long run, people eat until they are satisfied. Call it hunger, call it appetite, call it cravings, call it whatever you want. Stop eating too early -> suffer.
That’s exactly why I mentioned effort. You can suffer from your effort or from the lack of it and most of the times, suffering from effort is awarded with pleasure, while suffering from the lack of effort spirales into more suffering.
Sure. Let’s do an experiment. Try losing 5Kg/10lbs and maintain that weight loss for two years. Show us how rewarding it is to feel hungry after every meal.
I have a healthy weight because I’m mentally balanced and take responsibility for whatever I do to my body. That is however not something that I assume to be true of somebody who reacts with aggression to genuinely kind help.
I give you a last kind hint, even though I’m convinced you won’t hear it and then I’m out here: Going after a craving comes with pain, not with pleasure, because dopamine is a liar: it is the hormone of wanting, not the hormone of satisfaction. Whatever you are craving, allow yourself to go after it here and then, but start paying close attention to how it makes you feel after giving in. Most of the times, it makes you want more and more instead of reducing the craving.
Watch what you’re eating and be aware how it makes you feel.