I am someone who can’t help being fat no matter what. Why personal judgments come into play in threads like these, I don’t know. But I can see why other fatties would prefer not to post about their experiences and state of mind, knowing that attacks on them will be inevitable.
BMI of 17.5 is not “dangerously underweight.” 14.4 is, sure. Anyway, a lot of people in this thread have copped to being overweight without comment. The particular “:dubious:” in this case was due to the loony reasoning. If someone were to come in and say, “BMI of 13 because most people are turned off by my body, and if I worked toward a healthy BMI and still didn’t acheive it, it wouldn’t be worth the effort,” my response would still be “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
There is enormous predjudice against fat people, true. And I for one think there’s a lot more to someone’s weight than ‘calories in, calories out’.
I am 6 lbs underweight. SurrenderDorothy is probably about 20-30 lbs underweight (so was I, when I was 13-15, and I was in reasonably good health). Someone with a BMI of 50, on the other hand, is about 125-200 lbs overweight. It’s understandable that this seems a lot more crazy to people. I would have to triple in weight exactly to have a BMI of 50.
I realize that we’re talking about your friend, not you, which adds an element of mystery to things. But you keep talking about things like they’re mysterious when I see no evidence of that. We have really reasonably accurate formulas for determining how many calories a person needs to eat to maintain their weight.
They’re not perfect, but really the biggest variation comes from people’s subjective interpretation of their activity level. If your BMR is 1500 calories, do you add 20% or 50% to account for your daily tennis game? That kind of thing. But you’re implying that even a basic measure of how many calories it takes to keep her body’s organs working is grossly inaccurate.
It’s entirely possible that a doctor or scientist would expect her to need 1500 calories to keep her organs churning, but the formula is wrong for her body by a small amount. But it simply makes no sense that a healthy woman’s predicted BMR to be 50% greater than it is in reality, let alone that her actual caloric needs are, after adding in her normal activity.
And all this when the alternative is that she eats too much. Why can’t we just conclude she almost certain does? Two big spoonfuls of peanut butter snuck as a snack, 1 snickers bar at the grocery store checkout and a cup’s worth of cheddar cheese before bed is an extra 1000 calories per day. It just seems drastically more likely to me than what is basically a magical metabolism.
They shouldn’t add bacon but their problems could be solved by eating more. Maybe turkey bacon. Bacon is very fatty but not really all that calorie dense. It would be better to add calorie dense foods to things, basically the opposite of what overweight people need to do. But bottom line, it is just the same as losing weight. Evoking physics doesn’t really strike me as very clear but it definitely just comes down to metabolism and the way your body uses energy.
SurrenderDorothy has been very open on the boards about her struggles with anorexia.
Your own quote says difficult, not impossible. You can help being overweight, you chose not to, that’s cool.
25.9 which is overweight; however, I’m still losing some pregnancy weight, and to be fair to me, these breast feeding boobs weigh a TON!!
I’m not particularly bothered by it because:
a) I’m breast feeding and losing about 1/2 a pound per week
b) I’m not about to go on a diet right now - I have enough stress worrying about my baby dying of SIDS - I’m not adding worry about eating an extra banana. Also, I suspect it’s not great for milk production to cut calories too much, but that’s probably an excuse.
28.3, but as others have mentioned, the BMI doesn’t work as well for lifters.
Regards,
Shodan the Overweight but Indifferent
For those who DO have medical conditions that make it harder to lose weight, surely there are some treatments to take care of this? I would think one would be on some kind of medication to treat it in the first place.
I probably could help being overweight if I starved myself, didn’t work, and exercised 12+ hours a day. I mean, that seems like a formula that would be guaranteed to help even the fattest person get to a societally-acceptable low weight. But no rational person would ever ask someone to give up their entire life to do so.
There’s a huge, gaping difference between “not impossible” and “doable”. If it’s (to pick a number from my bum since I don’t know that one actually exists, but roll with it) 10 times more difficult for me to lose weight than it is for a normal person, should I be expected to put forth 10 times the effort to look the same as them? No rational person would say yes to that.
As I stated earlier in the thread, I have not found the trade-off of happiness and free time worth it. I, and other women with PCOS, have to work orders of magniture harder than normal people, in order to go from morbidly obese to just obese. Who the fuck wouldn’t get disenchanted with or demoralized by those results?
I was a size 3 in 7th grade and now am a size 23. My happiness and self-worth were demonstrably worse back then. In my experience, my happiness and my BMI actually have an inverse correlation. When I’m working out hard, I hate every single second of it, and when I eat less I am hungry and cranky every waking moment. Back when I was in 7th grade, I had typical teenaged anxiety about my size, which should always be smaller than currently. When I don’t worry about what I look like, I am able to spend more time doing things I enjoy (playing computer games, looking for fun new restaurants to try out), and I am much more pleasant to be around.
It’s probable that if I became a size 3 now that my happiness would increase. But that would be predicated on the knowledge of what it’s like to be a 23, which I didn’t have when I was in 7th grade (and which normal people don’t have, ever). If I could magically push a button to weigh half of what I do now, I’d happily do it to get rid of the ridicule factor. But I can’t. And the longer, harder road I have to run down to do what is comparatively a casual short stroll in the park for others, is not a choice I will ever make again.
If you believe this is a ridiculous attitude to have, then you’re clueless.
27.2, same reason.
I don’t wish to comment on the difficulty of weight loss (besides to say that I think that recommending that someone merely, “eat less and exercise more” is equivalent to telling a smoker that the way to quit is to "stop putting cigarettes to your mouth), but I was under the impression that in PCOS the obesity (and associated factors) causes the syndrome and not the other way around.
IOW, you don’t want to, and that’s ok.
I have PCOS as well, it’s not so hard as you make out. You don’t want to put the effort in. That’s fine. I do believe it’s a ridiculous attitude to have. But I’m allowed, and so are you allowed to go, it’s too hard, I don’t want to.
It’s the “not my fault” I find to be the indefensible position here.
You know, I always find it interesting that at the other extreme of weight issues, people with anorexia, everyone is super supportive and gentle. No one would tell an anorexic on the boards to, “just eat.” No one would sarcastically tell an anorexic that they have a “great attitude!”
Everyone seems to recognize the psychological background of anorexia. And yet people freely ignore the underlying psychological and social issues accompanying obesity and feel free to criticize and dismiss.
Hee. It’s funny, 'cause fatties like pie.
ETA: Mmm, pie. BRB.
Do we inhabit the same body? I’d like to know so I can move some stuff around and make room for you in here.
Or, what Gestalt said.
24.3, which is a little high because of a medication I was on that made me gain 20 lbs in like, a month. I’ve still not worked it all off yet. At my highest I was 42, however, and that sucked, a lot.
That’s an interesting point. Are you saying obesity is a mental illness like anorexia?
I’m a lardass, there wouldn’t be room. 
And I will take that answer to be “I don’t want to lose weight”, which is cool. Or that you have psychological and emotional issues, as Gestalt said, which are keeping you from wanting to do so, which is also cool. Been there myself (emotional ones, anyway). But it’s clearly not impossible.
But commenting that it’s an unhealthy choice is also fairly obvious.
As a total layman (that is to say, I’m not sure if there is sufficient science to back this up), I feel like it has to be, particularly at the level of a BMI of 50. Doesn’t it at least require some amount of lack of self-esteem to allow yourself to become so unhealthily overweight?
Rachellogram mentioned in another thread being sexually abused as a child. AFAIK, there is a high comorbidity between childhood sexual abuse and adult obesity.
That being said, in another thread I just decried the practice of armchair psychiatry, so maybe I should shut up now. I just find it interesting that one set of self-destructive tendencies is treated with such compassion and understanding and another with so much derision and frustration.