You will search for days, through more than 7,000 posts over a decade, and never find a single instance, much less repeated instances, of me saying “it’s not their fault” - which is not to say that I think it IS their “fault” - my issue has primarily to do with the meaning of “fault” itself, with the underlying assumptions that are made about people who are fat, and the assumptions that are made about people who are fat when it is likely to be true that if they ate less and were more active they would be less fat or even slim.
The reason fat people get defensive is because of what other people believe, erroneously, about what people with serious obesity issues face. Many people believe that it’s the same equation for everyone, the same experience for everyone, the same challenge for everyone, and they are thoroughly and completely wrong. Because of this belief, they think they are entirely justified and correct in their belief that fat people are lazy, self-loathing, dirty, sloppy, unworthy, and a host of other “less than” adjectives that then gives the non-fat license to be cruel, derisive, judgmental, hostile, and generally dismissive of the fundamental unworthy fat people.
False. The evidence in front of you is that one person is thin and the other is fat. That’s pretty much all you know.
Nearly every person I know is slim or average weight, and not a single one of them has “learned” jack, insofar as it applies to their behavior. They eat the way they like, and roughly half of them naturally prefer what is considered a very healthy diet: little meat, low-fat, lots of vegetables. They didn’t train themselves to eat that way. It’s what they like. a couple of them are almost entirely indifferent to food, one has told me many times if he could take a pill to meet his needs he would rather. He can take some degree of pleasure in eating, but he mostly doesn’t give a shit.
The other half eat whatever the hell suits them as well, but what suits them includes all the same crap and more that you will see millions of other people eating: fat, sugar, junk of every description, no vegetables, no whole foods. They eat when they are bored, because they are triggered by ads or smells, they eat because food is there to be eaten and they like it, all the same stuff fat people are (usually correctly) accused of doing that’s so damn awful. These folks fall into two basic groups: one group has the fabled “fast metabolism” - their bodies take what they need and dump the rest, period. The other group can gain, but they make a few adjustments that they don’t find at all difficult or challenging to make, the weight falls away, and they relax again and go back to enjoying whatever the hell they want.
I do not personally know one slim person who is constantly, day after day, year after year, battling overwhelming, maddening compulsions to eat, and keep eating, that grip them every day of their lives. I am sure a few exist, but I’ve never met them. The people I know who do have such compulsions are either some degree of fat, usually wildly fluctuating because they are trying so hard to fight those compulsions and for a variety of reasons, including purely chemical and biological, they always fail eventually, or they are bulimic, or anorexic, or they have been all three, or they are blessed with one of those fast metabolisms and they never have to worry about the visible effects that their compulsions might produce.
And science has pretty much wiped away any doubt that extreme obesity is created by dieting. The extraordinary numbers of seriously obese people in the US are a direct result of the obsession with weight and thinness. I guarantee you that you have never met or even seen a fat person that has not dieted dozens of times, depending on their age and how long they’ve been fat. And the more they’ve dieted, the earlier they started, the fatter they are likely to be.
Lastly, the comparison between a food addiction and other addictions is useful only to a point. There is a vast difference between food addictions and all other possible addictions: food is necessary to sustain life. We MUST eat. And we’ve all heard the saying regarding alcoholics: One drink is too many, and a thousand is not enough. How sober do you think an alcoholic would remain if he or she HAD to sip an ounce of alcohol 3 times a day? What if a junkie had to take just a tiny little shot a couple of times a day? A smoker could take 2 puffs 3 times a day?
It’s well-established that obese people can and do lose enormous amounts of weight by fasting; Oprah got as thin as she’s ever been doing that. And virtually all such people gain back not only what they lost, but more. Because it’s easier to starve than it is to eat just a little bit.
The bottom line is that looking at anyone tells you nothing. You don’t know why someone is fat. You don’t know why someone is thin. You don’t know their habits, their biology, their genes, their history, their psychology. * YOU. DON’T. KNOW.* So if you are repulsed by their appearance, that’s just how it is. But you cannot possibly extrapolate from someone’s weight what kind of person they are or what challenges they face, and arrive at a judgment about how worthy of admiration, respect, or simple human decency they are deserving or not deserving of.
On the other hand, stepping up to make public judgments about people who are fat, and doing so in the most insulting terms possible, does tell others quite a bit about how worthy of admiration, respect, and simple human decency such persons are deserving or not deserving of.