You might consider one for your ego.
I would just like to draw one distinction. There are two stages of fatness:
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Getting fat. This is where you have the most control. If you catch this early, you can probably control it and stop gaining, or even reduce weight, with appropriate changes in eating and exercise, all by yourself without medical intervention or external support.
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Being fat and losing weight; or having lost weight, keeping it off. These are **physiologically **much harder. There are a number of clinical studies (sorry, no cites at the moment, if someone really cares I can look up some for you) showing that:
a. When you put on weight you add fat cells.
b. When you lose weight, you do not lose fat cells, they just get smaller.
c. Those starved fat cells put out a constant stream of complex chemical stimuli which urge you very strongly to fill them up again. Carrots are not going to satisfy those chemicals, only fat or things easily converted to fat will satisfy them.
d. etc. there’s more along the same line, but you get the idea.
Does this mean that, once fat, you are helpless? No, but it makes the struggle to lose weight and keep it off harder, by a factor of many, than not getting fat in the first place. If you are already fat you may need medical intervention and a strong support structure to lose significant amounts of weight and keep it off. I have personal experience in this area, having lost 150 pounds, of which I have put back on 20 or so over the past four years. I got fat due to emotional reasons plus complete nutritional ignorance (and I wasn’t even aware how ignorant I was).
One other point: being addicted to food. While not addictive in the strict sense, much of modern food is engineered to be what David Kessler called (in his book ‘The End of Overeating’) “hyperpalatable”, meaning that it satisfies so many desirable tastes at the same time, with fat layered on sugar layered on salt, that it is the next thing to addictive. Again, this doesn’t make anyone helpless, but if they aren’t aware what they are up against, they can feel helpless.
Shot, it’s not that I’m completely unsympathetic with your rather black-and-white worldview, it’s just that I find it ignorant and uninformed. If you want to to improve the situation (doubtful) why don’t you try disseminating useful information instead of your shitty opinions?
Roddy
I’m fat. Not morbidly obese or anything like that, but definitely fat. I can still see my cock and my shoes, so there’s something.
Anyway, the hard part of weight loss for me is portion control more than it’s cravings or anything like that. I can just not eat between meals- snacking isn’t a problem.
Where I go off the rails is eating everything on my plate, and to a lesser degree, having an ingrained feeling that I have to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. I think these must have been something that took hold very early- I’ve always eaten everything on the plate, and I’ve noticed that my thinner friends don’t- they leave some behind. It’s goddamned HARD not to eat everything on the plate- I don’t know why, but it is. It’s not hard not to get seconds, or dessert, or not to snack between meals though.
What makes it suck is that between eating everything on the plate and feeling compelled to eat 3 meals a day, it’s difficult to lose weight, unless I eat something like Healthy Choice TV dinners, or never, ever go out to eat.
And don’t start on exercise; people just flat out don’t burn off enough calories fast enough through aerobic exercise to warrant doing any more than necessary for cardiovascular health. How many times have you ridden the bike or elliptical or whatever for an hour, and come to find that you’ve probably burned 200 calories. You can eat 200 calories in half a second pretty easily. but getting rid of it is a different story entirely.
The willpower aspect is one that I’m somewhat ambivalent about. On one hand, it’s not like something along the lines of smoking or drinking, where you could conceivably just not do it if you had enough willpower. You have to eat every day. How many smokers or alcoholics would be successful at quitting if they were required to have at least one cigarette or drink a day. Consequently, the cigarettes and booze would be around all the time, along with the temptation.
On the other hand, I know some people who are morbidly obese, and it’s obvious that their eating habits are just different than mine- they eat a LOT of fried foods, order the largest thing on the menu (like a double-meat burger, or super-sized fries, etc…) In their case, they’d be much more successful at the whole weight-loss thing if they’d just eat better foods and not go for the largest option every time. Speaking as a fat guy, NOBODY needs a double meat, double cheese burger with XL fries and a non-diet soda. A single patty cheeseburger with small fries and a diet coke will do fine.
I’m also kind of conflicted about the airline seat issue. On one hand, some humongous fat-ass like Kevin Smith has become probably ought to buy 2 seats. On the other hand, I barely fit in the airline seats, and the odd part is, it’s my shoulders that are too wide- I have about 4-5 inches of leftover seat belt, and don’t need an extender. Even when I was pretty thin, I still couldn’t put my arms in far enough to not encroach on both arm rests. I’d hate to think that I’d have to buy an extra seat because I’m just broad shouldered, not because I’m too fat.
Theirs just no excuse for bad grammer.
I’d better be getting dinner first, and I’m talking at least three digits on the final bill, before tax and tip.
Well, not just. That kind of shit really *does *piss me off.
I’m guessing the correlation has to do with being willing to swallow whatever shit people put in front of you, then blaming it all on illegal aliens/fags/socialism/genetics.
Well, until I start posting in every thread with my approval or disapproval, it’s probably safe to assume that I don’t give a shit about most of the threads. But it’s nice that you took the time to try and be mean. Keep it up; one day you will attain that summit.
And I will be sitting there like blind master fucking Po, grasshppper.
I’m sorry, but we need more photographic proof of this before we can determine if this, is, in fact true.
IVN, I’m pretty sure you don’t have a penis, or at least one you can find without tweezers and a magnifying glass.
So, what fat person hurt you as a child? Would it make you feel better to talk about it?
That’s not Po, that’s a sheep, you blind bastard.
No problem. If we split an Onion blossom, the bill might even hit four digits.
BTW, it is important to note that I will also have requirements vis a vis the number of digits involved.
While I agree that obesity isn’t something outside most obese people’s control, I think the data in your link makes almost exactly the opposite point from what you’re trying to say.
As Euphonious Polemic noted, the rising obesity rates in that graph look like what you’d expect to see from an epidemic of an actual disease. Clearly, there’s something affecting our society as a whole that is making so many people so much fatter in such a short space of time.
Obesity, like drug abuse, is an individual problem that only individual responsibility can solve in any individual case, but which has a lot of social and cultural contributing causes. You’re using the data in that link as an excuse to make fun of fat people as individuals for being greedy and weak-willed, but what the data’s actually indicating is a systemic problem we’ve got with fatness as a society.
And that’s something that worries me a lot more than whether any individual fatty is being greedy for scarfing down an extra cheeseburger or inconsiderate in taking up more than one seat on the bus. A crisis of this magnitude should tip us off that we’ve got a much more significant and systemic problem on our hands than mere individual failures of self-discipline.
Impossible. No material is strong enough to contain my arrogance.
Because, no matter what else *influences *why people are fat, it *ultimately *comes down to personal choice. And yes, we do *also *need to look at root causes (food has become incredibly fucked up in the U.S., I’ll happily admit), but there is still nobody forcing a fat person to grab that second, third, or fourth brownie.
Fat people don’t *have *to eat *fattening *food every day, just like alcoholics don’t *have *to drink *alcoholic *beverages every day.
You didn’t choose how broad your shoulders are, but you can choose your waistline. And that, IMO, is the difference.
Unwarranted as that arrogance may be.
Sprawl. Suburbia. That’s the disease. When the only time you walk is from your home to your car to your desk at work, that’s a damn problem. When you have to drive just to pick up your mail, that’s a problem. When you drive to Wendy’s to get a 1000-calorie meal to eat at your desk, that’s a problem. When you have to drive to get anything done, then the only exercise you’re going to get is exercise for the sake of getting exercise, and who has time for that shit?
I know you don’t care about opinions and I hate to be the one to tell you this, but… ummm… not so much. You are that girl that sits all pissed off in the corner of the bar til 2am wondering why only the fatties and old guys hit on you cuz you think you are hotter than you really are.
Mrs. Hardison. She sat on me. Crushed me. Down onto the couch. For hours. Coudn’t feel me struggling underneath her, gasping desperately for air. Smelling nothing but ass-sweat and the stale Cheetos that had fallen into the crack between the cushions–
I… I don’t think I can talk about this anymore.
Just so you know, I’m not clipping my nails for you, and if you expect more than one finger up your ass, we’re rapidly approaching diamond territory.
Sedentariness doesn’t make you fat, though it can make you out-of-shape. Eating too much makes you fat. It is certainly true that you can afford to eat more if you are not sedentary, but there has been a large class of sedentary people throughout recorded history, and there wasn’t an obesity epidemic until recently.
I would have had you pegged as a guy. Goes to show.
They satisfy hunger just fine I imagine. Be honest here, they don’t satify the tastebuds, and that is the fatties main concern.
Hard to stop the treats when they are so so niiiice, mmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Slurp slurp.
I’m not saying this to be insulting, but are you gay? That or giant nerd are the only to explanations as to why you would be so completely clueless about how the 'ol barfly mating dance works. No one gives a shit if a girl thinks she’s hotter than she is or not; your scheme assumes some sort of hotness level sorting is taking place, when in fact all of these encounters depend only upon the probability of vagina success versus scooter embarrassment factor, and to be honest, most of us heavily weight the first factor.
Also, the key is to stare at them, maintaining eye contact until they succumb. Trust me, this works.
Well, sure, there are things that are affecting the trend. But nothing is *making *people fat other than their own choices. If you go around licking doorknobs in a hospital, I’m not going to have much sympathy when you start whining about the MRSA on your tongue.
I get that a lot online. Gender neutral name + geekery + arrogant + confrontational = male to a lot of people.
I know thats what the book you ordered from the back of a ten year old Hustler tells you, but when you get out in the real world, you will find that only gets you success if you are willing to pay forty bucks for a half and half.