How do people get so fat?

Great Debates
221

I have never said it was impossible.
But I woke this morning with something to add, and this is not directed at any particular individual.

As I said in another recent post, people who, to one degree or another, have the attitude of “it’s just that simple” towards the fat, and are therefore without any sympathy, to one degree or another, are wrong, and they are wrong because they want to be wrong, and they want to be wrong because, again, to one degree or another, they are hostile to fat people. To quote myself:

If you really believe, down in your gut, that overcoming obesity is “just that simple”, fine.

Let me ask you another question or two.

What do you believe about bulimia? Should the people who have it just stop stuffing themselves and barfing? Is it “just that simple”?

And how about anorexics? Should they just start eating? Is it just that simple?

If you do feel that way, then congratulations: you are nothing if not consistent.

But I’m guessing that a lot of you don’t feel that way. You think bulimics and anorexics have disorders and need treatment. You probably feel sympathetic to their pain and struggle and suffering. You probably think it’s really sad and shocking that they would gorge themselves and then throw up, making themselves ill and destroying their teeth and endangering their hearts and their health, and even more sad and shocking that they would starve themselves to death.

But bulimics and anorexics have “real” disorders, “real” psychological problems - anorexics die! Bulimics die! They wouldn’t do that unless they had “real” problems. Fat people, on the other hand, are just out of control pigs that need to pull themselves together.

Well, compulsive eating and becoming fat and compulsive eating and throwing it back up only differ in that the person who throws it back up has bought into the idea that the need to be thin must be served above everything else, and if the only way that can be accomplished is by giving in to the urges and then throwing it up, then that’s what they’ll do.

And anorexia is the extreme expression of the same fundamental disordered relationship with food, only anorexics, in order to be “acceptable” and loved and not despised, give up on eating altogether, terrified that a single morsel might make them fat. And interestingly, many anorexics control their eating so extremely because they don’t feel they can control anything else.

There are more fat people in America today than ever before, and there more morbidly obese people. Do you think millions of people have just decided that being fat is okay with them? Suddenly? For no good reason, there has been a massive shift in consciousness leading to an embrace of being fat because, while it’s really just “that simple” to change it, they’d rather not?

There’s also been an explosion of bulimics and anorexics. Do you think that millions of people suddenly, for no apparent reason developed life threatening eating disorders?

And speaking of that term, how in the world do you reconcile sympathy towards the idea of “life threatening eating disorders” and the struggle of the people who suffer with them, and in the next breath curl your lip in disgust at the “fattie” who can’t stop stuffing food in their mouths and then want you to pay for their heart attack!

Compulsive overeating, bulimia, and anorexia are all eating disorders. They are all related. They are all life threatening. They all vary in their degrees of severity. And they are all extremely difficult to treat because they are tied to a critical life-sustaining drive that has multiple components in the body affecting it, along with the psyche, which makes eating disorders unique in the pantheon of disorders and addictions that people suffer from. No one has water consumption issues, or breathing issues.

I’m not saying that everyone with a weight problem is a compulsive overeater, because that’s not true. But the majority of people who are truly obese either are or have been, and all the same factors that make serious compulsive eating so difficult to overcome exist to a lesser degree for everyone who has ever been overweight to any significant degree: we are all born with a preference for fat and sugar, fat and sugar keep us alive. We are all born with a drive to eat the most calorie-dense food we can find, because if we were still on the savannah, that would keep us alive. Getting fat and staying fat is what separates the living from the dead. There is nothing inherently wrong with feeling compelled to eat a cheeseburger rather than a bowl of cauliflower, there is something inherently right about it.

And I also want to point out that there are very significant differences, both biologically and psychologically, between middle aged people who suddenly find they’ve allowed their weight to slowly creep up over time, and people who have been battling weight issues and serious obesity since they were young. It’s a biologically different experience to be slim and active throughout your youth and young adulthood, slowly put on 40 pounds by the age of 45, and then face losing it, than it is to be someone who was a chubby kid, and became a fat adult. That once-chubby kid has in most cases been pinballing between all kinds of crazy diets and eating freely all their lives, and screwing up the whole system in the process, as well as having a significant propensity to fat out the gate, obviously.

All this to say that those of you who think it’s a simple matter of calories in, calories out, and anyone can and should be able to just snap out of it and deal with being so fat and if they don’t it’s because they don’t try and don’t care and don’t deserve any sympathy - you are completely and utterly ignorant and you are letting your personal disgust at the appearance of fat people inform your attitudes towards them and your beliefs about their condition.

222

Dude, if every time you went to the store with somebody they talked for 20 minutes about their budget and is this in their budget and they found these things that are in their budget and have you read this blog about budgeting? you would think they had an unhealthy relationship with money. Most of us can save and spend when it’s appropriate; some people can’t do that and have to obsess. Now, if obsessing keeps you from bankrupt and it’s what you have to do, then fine - obsess. But it’s not what I’d call “a healthy relationship with money.” Get it?

223

I never said it was impossible–I said it was complicated and difficult.

224

So, what, fat people are incapable of doing things that are complicated and difficult? How do they hold jobs?

225

Well, no, it isn’t.

“Eat less” is true but utterly without merit as advice. If you asked me “hey, Rick, how do I improve my golf game?” and I said “Hit the ball straighter” you’d rightly consider my advice useless. But my advice was completely true; the #1 thing that virtually all poor golfers need to do to improve their game is to improve shot accuracy and reduce hook and slice. So just hit the ball straighter, you dumbass bad golfer. What, that didn’t work?

In my case, losing weight was enormously helped by having a doctor explain to me HOW to eat less in a way that was sustainable over the long term. Just eating less is doomed to fail, if it’s done wrong. I suspect that’s true of almost all fat people. You can’t simply eat less, because if you do so in a way that depries your body is key nutrients or creates revenous hunger, it won’t work. You have to eat less in a way that keeps the necessary material in your diet AND keeps hunger to a minimum.

Stoid is a longtime fat apologist but she’s said something that’s a hundred percent true and deserves to be repeated; overeating is a psychological disorder. It comes in varying levels of severity, but it’s true. You can’t “just get over it” any more than you can “just get over” schizophrenia. You need to want to get over it, you need education and understanding to get over it, and sometimes you need professional help.

226

Many people avoid doing things that are complicated and difficult. I daresay nearly everyone has areas of their life that are not what they want them to be because they haven’t taken the complicated and difficult steps needed to change them. I am not claiming it’s impossible to lose weight. I’m just objecting to the idea that it is a simple process.

227

AND… it’s very much affected by biological factors that make it especially difficult to get over, just like schizophrenia, AND, just like schizophrenia, you don’t actually ever “get over it” at all, it’s something that needs to be confronted and managed every single day of your life. Because even if you heal the psychological compulsions, you still eat, you still have impulses, desires, habits, and all the biological factors. If you read the research, you see that being fat changes your physical response to food and eating. And that once you have been fat, especially very fat for long periods, those internal changes aren’t fixed by losing the weight, they are still a part of you that you have to deal with.

Not even a little bit simple.

228

And you were fortunate that it was evidently the trigger foods themselves that led to your problems with controlling yourself; that did simplify things, since you were in sufficient control before eating the trigger foods.

Do you think it would have been as simple or as relatively easy/doable as you have found it to be if the trigger wasn’t the food you started with, but something that existed apart from the food itself, like smell, sight…even thought?

What if all food was “trigger” food for you, in the same way all alcohol is a trigger for alcoholics? If eating anything at all led to losing control and eating too much? (That’s why fasting is so effective. It’s actually easier to stop eating altogether than it is to eat just a little. Of course, it screws up your body so badly you get fatter than ever later.)

This is actually very cool, and it’s very similar to what I’ve been trying to do. One rule I’ve made…and fail to consistently stick to, but I do much better than I would have at one time… is that if I want to eat something that is high fat or densely carby or, for want of a better word, “bad”, I must eat it with something “good”. An example might be, I want to eat a smoked sausage. Well, instead of having it in a bun, or with white rice, which would be the two ways I’d normally choose, I have it cut up mixed into a bowl of cooked Kashi and beluga lentils.

My general point of view has become very similar to yours: instead of thinking “No”, think “Yes”. It’s not about what I cannot eat, it’s about what I must eat. I must eat vegetables every day, I must eat fruit every day, I must eat fiber every day. And I have to eat my “musts” first. If, after the musts, I really want something else, I can have it. But fortunately, eating the musts often satisfies sufficiently. Or the desire to eat more can be satisfied with foods that are healthier and more nutritious, even if they are calorically dense, like seeds or dried fruit. I am much more focused on how I feel and how healthy I am at my age; after a lifetime of up and down, I don’t think that becoming slim would be much of an improvement in my appearance, it would just mean a different kind of ugly. My skin is trashed and surgery is not an option in my world. So for me it’s about how I feel and my mortality, and I can improve both of those without obsessing about how much I weigh. (Of course, sex is still important and that’s a vanity issue…)

The hardest thing for me to change in terms of my eating habits is something that is extremely common among people with serious weight issues: I starve all day and then, when I start to eat at night, I find it incredibly difficult to stop. It is SO difficult to make myself eat regular meals, to eat breakfast, to eat throughout the day. ( Of course, in my own personal case, that has also to do with other issues I struggle with around routine and memory and organization, but even so. ) I just don’t care, it seems like too much trouble. And I get hungry, very hungry. But for some reason I don’t want to eat. If I could feel at night the way I feel during the day, I would be the beanpole everyone expected me to be when I was a beanpole kid. ( Extremely tall for my age, very slim, and largely indifferent to food. Until I was 6, when my parents split up and my daddy, who had been my primary caregiver until then, moved out. Suddenly, the best thing in life was a stack of cinnamon toast …and it’s been a struggle ever since.)

229

Absolutely. But doing those things anyway is called exercising willpower. Avoiding doing necessary things that are complicated and difficult is called being lazy.

I personally do not see what is so “complicated and difficult” about NOT buying fattening junk foods in the first place. If you don’t buy them, you won’t eat them. If you are fat, and you fill your cart with ice cream, cookies and cheetos then whine about how difficult and complicated it is to not eat the whole bag once they’re open then hello? Just don’t buy the fricken box of cookies in the first place. :rolleyes:

If not buying the junk food is too “complicated and difficult” a concept for a fattie, then they are not only lazy but not really terribly bright as well.

230

If you’re starving yourself all day, then yes, your body will demand food later on - it’s a pretty common mistake among people trying to lose weight. Small, regular meals - five or six a day - seem to work a lot better for most people to keep hunger down and metabolism up.

And as a former quite-large person (6’2", 285 at heaviest, 195 now) I’d say that to a large degree it is mind over matter. You’d be amazed at what you can do if you just decide to do it - no excuses, no bullshit. (In fact, I would recommend anyone thinking of losing weight to browse through the board in that last link - there’s a lot of great advice there, and a lot of useful mythbusting.)

I think a part of the problem is that people see their appetites as an inherent feature of their bodies - something born with, the status quo. They don’t think of it as a controllable, guideable, malleable thing - which it certainly is. It does take self-discipline to start the ball rolling, but once you lead, your body will follow - and adapt.

231

That’s because you refuse to look. Read the science.

232

Yes, I know that very, very well. Which is why I struggle to do it. And my struggle to make myself eat during the day is not that much different from my struggle to stop eating at night. Both are very difficult for me, both because of my issues with food, and additionally because of my other issues with routine, organization, impulse control, memory… (I have ADD, whole different conversation, but as it happens a major feature of ADD is impulse control, along with memory, routine, organization, planning, etc. So I find it extremely challenging to stop my impulses to act, and extremely challenging to compel myself to act. I find it extremely challenging to be me.)

233

Heh.

And finally…

Glad you came to the same conclusion. In a thread about impulse control, no less.

234

You need to read articles about science in order to simply not reach your hand out in the grocery store and grab a box of cookies? :rolleyes:

235

Well, that must suck, but it would seem to me that a person who KNOWS they have poor impulse control with junk food would at the very least just make a hard and fast rule that they NEVER BUY FATTENING JUNK FOODS. Just don’t buy 'em. Hell, I’m an ex-smoker and still crave the damn things. But y’know what? I know better than to actually BUY A PACK OF CIGARETTES and bring them home. Why? Becuase it’s just way too much of a temptation. If you are buying boxes of cookies, then its your own dumbass fault that you can’t resist eating a whole box of 'em at midnight.

Solution? Don’t buy stuff you should not be consuming. Or does that require reading a science book to accomplish? :rolleyes:

236

Just as an aside, has anyone here tried Lean Cuisines? I used to take them to work for my lunch, and they’re pretty good.

237

I’ve heard they’re not bad, but pretty expensive compared to making your own “meals to go” at home. I can make the equivalent (both calorie and nutrition-wise) of a Lean Cuisine meal at home for about fifty cents, then I just freeze individual meals. Cheaper and healthier.

238

No doubt cheaper to DIY, but I used to eat those things all the time.

The portions are right, a decent selection, and they are good IMO even if you arent “into” diet foods. I saw them in the freezer section just the other day and they looked to be about 2.50 a meal.

I wasnt even dieting at the time and I thought they were perfectly passable.

I suspect most people who are overeating are already spending that much per meal anyway, so for most cost isnt an excuse. They will just be pissed they got a normal portion rather than a massive bag of crap for the same amount of money.

239

“Fatties”? Nice.

I haven’t encountered that sort of “whining”.

You’ve revealed your contempt for the obese. I wonder which other groups you feel this way about (Cigarette smokers? Homeless? Uncharming young men who can’t get dates?).

As I’ve mentioned, I’m not overweight (I’m 5’10", 165lbs) and I never have been,* so I can’t be accused of such whining and excuse-making. I don’t understand the view that there’s nothing interesting to be said about overweight and obesity beyond “they eat too much and don’t exercise enough”. People here have pointed out various interesting facts, reported by actual scientists. Some of these results fly in the face of conventional wisdom, and hence seem especially appropriate for an SDMB thread (fighting ignorance and all that). If you’re not interested in this sort of thing, an SDMB thread about obesity is not the place for you.
*Well, I did temporarily gain 20 lbs. when taking a drug with that side effect. But, hey, it’s calories in and calories out, so I can’t blame the drug, right?

Right. It’s just like foreign currency speculation, though not easy, is simple: buy low, sell high.

You really think there’s nothing else worth saying? Consider this:

  1. Eating fewer calories may cause the body to burn fewer calories, even for the same nominal amount of exercise.

  2. If two people of the same height eat the same food and do the same amount of exercise, one may end up weighing much more than the other.

  3. It may be much harder for some people to limit food intake than it is for others.

  4. There is evidence that genetic differences account for some of the variation in weight. This is not a matter of excuses given by overweight people; this is the conclusion of scientific studies.

Perhaps you’re not interested in any of that. But do you really think you’re adding anything by repeating “it’s simple; eat less and exercise more”? Or do you just want to make sure that obese people know what lazy, worthless, reprehensible whiners they are?

240

And all because they have no access to science books. :smiley: