I’m sure that you get to be 500 pounds and using a scooter because you used to be 250 pounds and it’s really, REALLY easy to go from 250 to 275. And it’s absolutely trivial to get to 300. And you blink and you hit 350. And you don’t even really see the point of trying, because you’re 350 pounds, for chrissake, and you probably don’t think you’re even capable of losing the weight at this point. And then, boom, 400 and 500 is peeking around the corner. That’s how people get so fat.
I was in physical therapy for a stress fracture, and I don’t know about the rest of the day, but at 7 AM it’s all fat women who have ruined their knees. Literally every single one of those people was a fat lady with knee problems. I was expecting some athletes, you know? No. Me and probably fifteen rotten knees. And you know what? They were supportive of each other but downright rude as hell to me. “Look at Little Miss Running!” Yeah, look at Little Miss Still Has Her Knees. I mean, I can hear you! I was nothing but nice to you! I’m not saying all overweight women are like that (I know they aren’t), but the 7 AM club sure is. It was really kind of hurtful - everybody else gets “You can do it!” and I get “<snort> Well, look at that.”
ETA - and you use the scooter not to continue eating but because it hurts like hell to walk and you breathe like a Clydesdale coming up a mountain and think you’re going to die before you get to Sporting Goods. It isn’t a conscious choice of “food or walking”, I’m sure.
Not completely true. Some drugs can cause fluid retention or metabolism problems. An older lady I know had a liver transplant about a year ago and Prednisone is one of the cocktail of drugs she’s on at the moment. It’s caused a lot of fluid retention in her neck and face, even though she’s always been thin (and is still thin everywhere else). But to look at her, the average schlub (you) would think she was eating too much and just had weird fat distribution.
I agree with this to a certain extent but I think it’s more complicated than this.
I think both my parents are addicted, not to food, but to certain types of food. Basically, the problem is that they’re addicted to food that should only be eaten in moderation, if at all. Like stuff that’s super-fatty, super-sweet, etc. Let’s face it, it’s not like food addicts have problems because they can’t stop eating broccoli and rice cakes.
Likewise, an alcoholic cannot stop drinking liquids because everybody has to consume at least some water to survive but an alcoholic should stop drinking alcoholic liquids. And former drug addicts often take drugs, just (hopefully) not the ones they happen to be addicted to.
Saying that the problem is that people can’t stop eating food because they need to eat to survive not only simplifies the issue but also makes it seem kind of hopeless to overcome.
Being fat is killer on your legs. But, you’ve still got to do things like get groceries, go to your kids’ ballgames, etc. You can start your diet on Monday, and save up some money for a gym membership to lose some weight and make it easier to walk around, but in the meantime, why not get a powerchair? Then the minimal activity you were doing gets cut in half.
Even for those without powerchairs, the less physically fit you are, the harder it is to exercise. And like someone mentioned above, the more you eat, the more you feel like you need.
Personally, (I apologize to anyone who hates me for this) I’ve always been fit, but once or twice a year, I’ll go through a lazy (and hungry) spell. I can’t stand the feeling of my belly jiggling when I drive over a pothole, though. When it gets to that point, it’s time to get back on track. However, if I could get over that initial hump (and I can imagine any number of life events that would cause something like that) and get up to the high 100s, it would be very, very easy for me to just keep getting fatter and fatter.
It’s not just eating, a lot is what gets eaten, lack of exercise and lack of muscle tone. There is a heart care poster saying that only half an hour’s walk a day is enough to keep the heart in shape. I don’t know how anybody can manage not to walk for half an hour a day unless they spend it in bed. Often I see big people in much better condition than smaller ones who look ‘fat’ because they slouch, their belly hangs over their pants because there’s no muscles there and their physical attitude shows their mental one. They will often say that they don’t eat much but they aren’t counting the three spoons of sugar they put in their tea, the sweet starchy cakes and the ubiquitous corn-potato ‘snacks’ like Pringles that they are always nibbling at. If it were only starch that made fat then most of the world would be because most of the world lives on rice or potatoes or bread or pasta and not a lot else. Then there’s refinement, that unrefined, those starchy things include a certain amount of nutrition while refinement knocks most of it out so that they are less satisfying and need more of something else to go with them.
I don’t believe that any food is really ‘junk’ except snack stuff, after all a burger has meat and pizza has tomato and cheese. It’s the amount and the way of eating it and the laziness that are the real culprits. That and a very narrow-minded attitude to food that gets taught to children and passed on to their children. There’s a belief that children won’t like anything considered ‘healthy’, so if they are fed it, it’s with reservations that teach them not to like it. In fact children often like much stronger flavours than adults but they get trained into wanting only the over-sweetened ones and because those at the same time don’t really taste of anything much more, they don’t satisfy but they do create sugar dependency.
One thing I’ve noticed about American food too (and applies particularly to additives like relishes) is how bland it is. Everything cancels out in a big mixup that becomes a vaguely sweet pulp. There’s no ‘bite’ in the bite! The only spice they seem aware of is chilli and some of their chilli sauces give the impression that a korma curry would have them gasping for breath.
IOW, “How dare people have an addiction that I don’t have?”
I have met damn few people who didn’t have any addiction whatsoever. And many people get judgmental about other people’s addictions . . . but, of course, not their own.
I’m one of those people. I couldn’t walk around a supermarket 10 years (and I’m only 36) or 100 pounds ago. I’ve got a series of injuries dating back to high school, arthritis and an autoimmune disorder. I’ve been through surgeries, multiple courses of steroids and other drugs which cause weight gain, reinjury and now battle with chronic pain.
I fight daily to have enough energy to work, maintain my house and have what little social life I can muster. Even on days when I’m not in pain, I have to practice active energy management so that the next day I’m not struggling. I consolidate trips, I use delivery services rather than carrying things when I can, I ask for assistance in airports (especially), and I use martcarts in the market and anywhere else that they’re available to me. If you look at me and only see “woman who got so OMGfat she can’t walk around the WalMart” you’re making the most superficial judgment possible. Fortunately, I don’t care much about the judgments of strangers about the condition of my body.
It’s a simple issue with complex causes. The simple part is the part everyone knows: if calories in exceed calories out, you gain weight, and if vice-versa you lose weight. So far, so trite.
But the underlying causes can be many and profound. Relevant factors would include genetics, upbringing, self-esteem, education (especially about nutrition), emotional balance, stress, role models, lifestyle, psychological and even psychiatric issues, the success and prevalence of non-foods (refined and processed too far, laden with sugar salt and fat plus flavourings) and the mass of conflicting and sometimes plain misleading information, especially all the rubbish spouted by the ‘diet foods’ industry. Jon Gabriel, in his excellent book The Gabriel Method, has a very interesting analysis of the problem, which he says basically comes down to misplaced fear. (You’d have to read the book, which I heartily recommend, to see why this makes sense.)
So, back to the OP. How do people get so fat? Because they do what we all do every day: respons to their perceived experience of life with optimal strategies for satisfying the fundamental needs… survival, safety, belonging, love and fulfilment. But they don’t have a good repertoire of strategies (for whatever reason) and end up using unhelpful and self-destructive behaviours in lieu of better ones. Among them, eating many times more calories than they can expend.
If you know someone with this sort of problem, try to be sympathetic. It can be a really, really tough and frustrating problem to tackle. And buy them a copy of the Gabriel book.
Even if the OP glosses over the various reasons people are overweight or need power chairs, his main point, as I saw it, is that while you can be overweight and still eat a lot, there comes a point where you get so heavy that a lot of other things happen to your body and you can’t walk comfortably.
I think the idea is that, whatever the reason, it has to hit you that your eating habits have gotten so out of control that they have rendered you a handicapped person.
It’s like smoking, even if you do it because you like or you are addicted, the moment you start coughing up bit of your lungs, that’s the moment you got to change.It’s not the time to buy more tissues for the blood on your mouth.
I knew a guy in your exact situation. Before he did anything about it, he had a frickin stroke. After rehab he was in a chair, and a cane for short walks. Then his wife committed suicide blaming his health issues and poor long term prognosis. Depression over his situation lead to him gaining more weight. He died about 5 years after the stroke.
You know, it is attitudes like yours that makes going to a gym fucking HELL on people who arent miss pretty?
For what it is worth, I thrashed my knees out playing soccer, cross country skiing, and one memorable time my horse slammed my knee into a tree while out on a steeplechase. I was having joint issues at 135 lbs at 5’7" and in good shape. Im not on crutches and a chair for that at all … I have an entirely different degenerative issue in my feet. My knees are oddly enough doing fine, except for a little light crunching in the one that got the kneecap broken.
Did you know that most athletic high school kids thrash major joint systems and end up suffering for it when they hit 40 … one cheerleader that I did a couple years in school with has already had knee replacement done on one side - when she was 30. Her other knee is up for replacement in about 2 months.
/me raises hand. Some days I actually do spend in bed. Pain sucks. I’d tell them to cut my feet off and go with prosthetics, but I would probably be that lucky one that gets phantom pain… nothing like athletes feet itch you cant scratch because you dont have feet…
And of course most doctors sort of resist the idea of cutting off more orless perfectly good limbs without a seriously good reason, and CPPD in the feet isnt considered one of them, or at least not until every single joint is affected and totally destroyed.
I doubt if the epidemic of obesity in the Western world is caused by medical problems. More like the other way around, most of the time.
Sure, it can be a self-reinforcing cycle, where you are obese and that puts stress on your weight-bearing joints, which means you have trouble walking and get a power chair, which means that you don’t walk very much, which makes you even more obese.
But the obesity came first. Look, we’re hunter-gatherers, programmed to overeat in times of abundance to prepare for times of famine. Now we don’t have times of famine, or the Darwinian effect where a hunter-gatherer who couldn’t walk due to obesity would starve by force of circumstances until he could either walk or died.
Now he just buys a power chair and goes to get more groceries.
I don’t think you read Zsofia’s post very closely, if you don’t mind my saying so.
My attitudes? I don’t care why they’re in therapy, I care that they’re making snitty comments about me because I run on the treadmill because my therapist told me to! I don’t even have any attitudes! I was just surprised at the extreme prevalence of knee injuries and that everybody but me was really fat - I don’t know why they hurt their knees, really, but that wasn’t the point at ALL. The point is that they were mean about the one person who wasn’t fat and didn’t have screwed up knees! Jeez, look, it sucks to be the albino chicken the other chickens peck at, especially when your bone hurts and you have to wake up at 7 AM to go through painful physical therapy and you hear a bunch of bullshit from everybody else.
And the rest of my post was trying to put myself in the mind of somebody who is gaining a lot of weight. Sorry you got offended or something, but I don’t understand why.
Where did you have this “American” food? If you stick to fast food, then yes. But I would bet that fast food in any country is more or less bland and not great.
We have TONS of spice that’s not ‘chilli’ - have you had roasted green chiles? How about chipotles? What about Louisiana blackened fish/meat? Trust me, we can keep up with the best korma curry out there, heat and taste wise.
Have you gone to a non-chain American restaurant and had regional food? Seafood in the Northeast, California style food in the West, Southwestern corn and squash and the aforementioned green chile? Great steaks and pizza in the midwest?
I’m not saying that every American takes advantage of the good food around them, and obviously as a country, we have a collective weight problem. But it’s not because the food isn’t good. If you haven’t had good American food, you haven’t looked around very much.
Not always. My wife uses a power chair when we go shopping, because her scleroderma has ruined her hips and legs, and she only has 45% of normal lung capacity. Due to her illness and the drugs she is taking (including steroids) she has gained weight. If you saw her on a power chair at the supermarket, you would be incorrect to make the generalization you offered above.
I know exactly how I got fat. When I graduated from high school I was barely five feet tall and don’t think I weighed much more than a hundred pounds. Then I went away to college, where I got all my meals at their all you can eat cafeteria, heavy on the starches. During my freshman year I finally got a growth spurt; my height shot up to my present 5’6". I had never been that big an eater before that, but suddenly I was ravenous. The aforementioned all-I-could-eat, heavy-on-the-starches menu caused to pack on the pounds, and I think I doubled my weight by the time I had graduated. I didn’t feel unhealthy, though; I had never been the athletic type, and didn’t have any trouble getting around, so I wasn’t really aware of how my weight was slowly creeping up until one day in my mid-twenties I got on a scale and found that I was over 240.
This gave me a bit of a wake-up call, and I resolved to get rid of the excess. First thing I did was see a doctor to make sure I didn’t have any health problems that would interfere with exercising. My blood pressure was fine (always has been, to the constant amazement of my doctors) and I was given the okay to join a health club. I put myself on a strict diet and went to the health club three days a week, and in less than a year I was down to 186 pounds.
Then things came up in my life; I had to move and it was no longer convenient to get to the health club. I started relaxing my diet, and bit by bit I put on all the weight I’d lost. I hovered around 240-250 for years, occasionally telling myself that I needed to lose weight but never really doing anything about it. When my wife was dying, and then after her death, I became depressed and put on another thirty pounds.
Now I’m trying to get myself back into something resembling fit. But at 57 it’s hard to break myself of ingrained habits. I have managed to drop a few pounds, so I must be doing something right.