Why are people so so ignorant about weight? Please help me.

Post Reply New Topic

I could literally write an entire essay about how astoundingly naive people are when it comes to understanding the causes of obesity. I'll tell you my situation, and you can go from there. I've always had difficulty losing body fat and being thin. I was 230 when I was 13, but managed to get down to 140 by the time I was 14. How? I exercised every day, for a total of four hours, and ate almost NOTHING. Does that sound extreme? That's literally the only thing my body responded to. I continued to live a healthy life style, and exercise a lot, but not to that extent, and I've slowly come gotten back to 230, but for some reason I don't look it because I exercise so much. I still feel the weight on me though- it's hard to walk, and I suffer from body image problems. I live a healthy life, exercise an hour at my gym almost daily, watch what I eat, but I still have an unusually high amount of body fat, and I still find it hard to move. I've gone to the doctors, and they simply insist it must be something I'm doing wrong. We've done blood tests, and I don't have a thyroid problem. I'm half black, and there are people in my family who have a similar body type but they don't fight it, and don't care as much. I practically kill myself fighting this. I'm sick to f****** death of it. I don't mean to be melodramatic, but I'm thinking of killing myself- I don't want to live in a world full of people that don't understand me at all, and just buy into the stereotype that all large people are eating too much, when in truth, there are those that are destroying themselves fighting it everyday and their struggle goes un noticed. Instead, they get criticized.

Can anybody, ANYBODY relate? I'm serious. Please. Imagine how if felt when people said aspergers was in your head, to take responsibility for yourself instead of making excuses, while the whole time you knew you did all humanly possible to conform. How did that feel? Like ****? Tell me I'm not alone.

I can't relate to this issue, although I had some weight issues while on medication that went away when I went off the meds. How is your body fat%? If you have a high muscle-low fat content and are heavy you should still technically be healthy.

If you haven't done so already, I highly recommend reading Master your Metabolism by Jillian Michaels. It's not just some fad diet book; it's an actual explanation of why some people find it hard to loose weight while others don't struggle at all.

When you said you exercised for hours and ate almost nothing, that was a good clue that you could benefit from the book. When your body is not taking in enough calories, it will automatically become more efficient at storing fat, which is the exact opposite of what you want. This is a vestigial evolutionary mechanism intended to survive famines. Unfortunately it seems to be working against us in modern society. What you did when you starved yourself is essentially train your body to store fat. You can reverse it, but you do need to become your own endocrinologist. I think you should also get a second opinion on your thyroid.

I don't have such problems but know others who do. I'm very glad you made this post, the flood of ignorant and callous posts about "lazy fat people" are driving me nuts lately

Same. I went on a trip where spent a couple months living with a girl who is pretty overweight. I ate way more than she did, and she was probably the least winded of everyone when we'd climb up towers and such. People are just so judgmental.

Those types of posts have also been driving me up the wall.

Very interesting post.

If you had lived in Ireland in the 1840's you would have been one of the survivors of the great potato famine. Youd physically slave all day and would be able to go without food because your body would still have fat for you to live off of. The skinny folks like me would drop like flies.
But amidst plenty apparently your body is a fortress of fat- impervious to diet and to excercise because of your genetic makeup.

People do tend to view obesity as a failure of character, or alternatively,as a form addiction. And depending upon the individual those might be issues, but not always.

There was a man on a tv documentary I saw who was an example of how fat and fit are not always mutually exclusive. He was round shaped but he wasnt sloppy fat- he had muscle tone and was an accomplished athlete- a marathon runner.

Healthy, fit, but not exactly slender. Like you he had tried all of his life to be thin. But he finnally gave up on thinness, but not on health.

I can definitely relate. I was born double the weight of some healthy newborns, and was 150 lbs by 6th grade. (I'm 5'-5'2" now- lord knows how tall I was then). All this while eating less than the other kids. I also fell into a habit of anorexia- there were eight months where I ate not so much as a cracker. My parents had a very difficult time finding an inpatient eating disorder clinic because I was not clinically-diagnosable as anorexic- it doesn't matter how long a fat girl deprives herself of food, she isn't anorexic until she's very thin (85% or less of a "normal" body weight, as determined by the oh-so-useless BMI) and misses three consecutive periods. Meaning, of course, the vast majority of women would have to be on death's doorstep before being certified as the clinical diagnosis for self-deprivation of food.

This is the point where some people who do not struggle with their weight in the same way will try to inform you, as you've noticed in this very thread, that such a "diet" is why you're fat- starvation mode, etc: because after all, your predicament must be your fault in some way or another. What they fail utterly to grasp is that sane people don't immediately forgo food for weeks or months at a time unless they are truly, agonizingly, often suicidally, desperate, and the "Eat less, move more" mantra chanted endlessly at fat people by others, that they have been convinced is the magical prescription for weight loss

DOES

NOT

WORK

for everyone. No matter how many times you've committed fully and followed a plan, a DOCTOR'S plan, (a WEIGHT LOSS DOCTOR'S plan, in my case) and failed, these people will insist that you must have been following some "fad" diet, that real, SMART weight loss plans would work (because after all, the fatties are stupid as well as lazy).

What's sad in my view is the ignorance that abounds on the subject. For instance, correlation vs. causation:

Medical Community Research: Obesity and overweight share a correlation with heart disease, diabetes, and more because higher weights and disease can both be resultant of a poor lifestyle and so are often comorbid in the same individuals.

Popular Culture Misinterpretation: Obese and overweight people are unhealthy, and they are unhealthy because they have poor lifestyles.

Part of this is due to cultural fads of thinness, a very recent aesthetic of attractiveness in terms of human history. Many of the individuals in question are far more caustic toward fat people than thin people under the pretense of "health", without knowing any thing about the actual HEALTH indicators of either one, because of the misinterpretation above. I'm not making an appeal to the exception, but pointing out a RULE- fat is not unhealthy. Fat is required for survival, humans have thousands of years of evolutionary predisposition to carry fat, and for women, often cessation of ovulation and menstruation occurs if they force themselves below a weight that would be considered overweight or obese for their height. But not only is it a war on acceptable aesthetics under the charade of "health", the war on obesity and overweight is a WAR ON MINORITIES, AND THE LOWER CLASS. The "eat less move more" crowd generally knows nothing of food deserts and the pronounced relationship between higher weights and lower incomes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
They're generally ignorant of government subsidies of wheat and corn and meat and dairy. They've never been faced with having $50 to buy food for a family for a week and had to choose between a family pack of mac and cheese or a postage-stamp sized bag of salad for the same price. They're ignorant of INCURABLE diseases which result in gaining weight which is impossible to lose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipedema
They sometimes even insist that any of these (and a dozen other factors) CAUSES of obesity and overweight are "excuses"- any paradigm, including the one based in reality, which contradicts their character judgments of fat people is an excuse-
this is all the more disturbing coming from people with Autism and Aspergers who have been told often that their struggles are their fault and they need to "get over them", and have faced ridicule for the crime of being different.

The Fat Acceptance Movement,
advocating the radical belief that fat people are people, deserving of respect and decency regardless of their size or reason for being that size,
is ridiculed.

The most tragic part to me is that fat people ACCEPT this kind of treatment- they accept that they're unsexy, lazy, stupid, unmotivated, gluttonous, unhealthy, worthless and other such garbage. CaptainTrips is suicidal because of how much space he takes up, and I've been there myself several times. It can't help that doctors, especially general practitioners, who are not often involved in research and don't follow actual studies can be just as ignorant as the general public. I would recommend every one (fat, thin, or in between) find a doctor who does not equate health with size, who will not tell someone with perfect glucose and heart rate that they are unhealthy by virtue of how much space they take up.

It's not an issue of fat vs. thin, as evidenced by Sal's wonderful post, but of ignorance and cruelty vs. reality and respect-
as a community built for people dealing with being different, with being accepted, with finding love and friendship and as fulfilling a life we can however we can, it is imperative that this nonsense is addressed.

If you're so offended by the concept of fat on the human body, rather than railing against those who have a certain amount:
demand that your government subsidize HEALTHY foods
demand an end to the extreme economic disparity among human beings
create a world where people are not depressed and abused and so don't seek chemical highs for relief of their pain
donate money toward researching genetic causes of obesity
advocate drugs which are effective clinically yet do not result in weight gain
or (and this is truly shocking) simply broaden your view of what constitutes healthy and attractive. If you can accept that not everyone is supposed to be tall and that no one should kill themselves trying to be, it should be pretty easy to do the same for weight.

/end rant

Thank you Bethie. We don't agree on everything for sure, but you're a damn smart woman, and I'm glad you articulated some of my thoughts I left out of the first post. Only one thing- I may have mislead you about the space I take up. You said I'm suicidally depressed because of it, but the reason I'm getting suicidal is because I toil in a daily hell to MAINTAIN at 230, which is too heavy, yet the braindead, cross eyed masses lump me in with people who don't try at all. Yet... I don't actually take up that much space. A lot of people look at me and say I'm just husky or "stocky". If you want a funny comparison, I look like a slimmer version of Dispicable me character. It just gets emotionally devastating when you know you have some disorder that isn't in the books, have to fight it on your own, and everyone invalidates you.

It slightly (only slightly) reminds me of the gun loaders in WW 2 on Germany's side. They'd run out, have to stuff a shell down this huge barrel, and get leap away while it fired. A lot of them developed a disturbing pattern of seizure like behavior and gasping. We call this shell shock, but the Germans called in cowardice. If they only knew how brave those men were. I'm not comparing myself to these souls, just illustrating how appalling ignorance can be.

I used "space" interchangeably with "weight", and shouldn't have. I wasn't making assumptions about your literal size. Apologies.

Okee dokee.

I didn't grow up with a scale...guessing I'm about 125.could care less.

Yes I have seen some overweight looking people who actually appear in decent shape to me and can run alot and play alot of sports. Alot of baseball players are overweight, but they still play fine.

Statistics do say that people with a morbidly obese BMI (40 or more) live a good decade less than the general population however and i do believe that as most old people i see on any given day are rather thin.

Your post reminds me of this weight loss doctor's blog writing. He gets frustrated with the press and want is believed by many in general.

"Nutritional ignorance abounds"

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/fast ... e-abounds/

The vast majority of overweight and obese people don't have a BMI nearly that high.

I don't think I've ever seen a thin old person.
Plus, it's a mistake to presume the weight that's healthy at one life stage is healthy at another-
if I remember, it it healthier for older people to be overweight than younger people, probably because overweight people are more likely to survive cardiac arrest.

I agree. It's been making WP a tough place to be for me lately.