This is why large portion sizes are a problem, and why restaurants being willing to give you a doggy bag isn’t going to solve that problem. A lot of us were brought up to “clean your plate”, or “not waste food”, and that can make it hard to not eat more than you really want to when you’re given too large a portion.
Larger than what?
Ok, so it’s not that you eat lots of food then, it’s genetic.
Ok, so it’s not that you eat lots of food then, it’s these meds.
Ok, so it’s not that you eat lots of food then, it’s the jaw problem.
Wait, what? 
I think we can all agree that not all overweight people on scooters are there because they are fat. The OP’s question is how do people who are incredibly overweight get that way.
My adopted daughter’s birth mother is obese. We adopted her at birth. Since my daughter was an infant, she ate huge quantities of food. As a teenager today, she eats 3 times as much food as I can, and can’t control her eating. No one else in the family eats like this. We’re all slightly overweight, but watch what we eat and get exercise. I can’t buy things like crackers or chips anymore or she will eat the entire thing. She’s currently at least 60 lbs overweight, and rapidly gaining, and hates it, but would rather eat. Once a kid is old enough to obtain their own food, you no longer have complete control what they consume anymore. No amount of pleading, punishing, rewarding, etc makes a bit of difference. Some people are just hardwired to be out of control. Frank Bruni’s new autobiography goes into detail about this, too.
I recommend Gary Taubes’ great book (albeit bad title) Good Calories, Bad Calories. It’s about how eating carbs makes us need to eat more carbs, and how they cause immense weight and health problems, and how once the concept of eating lowfat, high-carb diets came into vogue, and eating less meat, Americans’ weight ballooned.
I have known MANY obese people who are obese ONLY because they eat uncontrollably. Perhaps they would also be obese if they ate normal quantities of food as well, but they will never find out.
I agree with an above poster; it’s all a matter of degrees. Each 15 lbs adds just a bit more girth, and it isn’t enough of a change to make you take the blinders off.
Um, infants don’t make their own meals or decide on their portion sizes. Parents do that for them. Why are you blaming the kid’s birth mother for the kid’s obesity when YOU are the one who overfed her from birth?
The OP is right. It comes down to responsibility and personal character. Those are dirty words on the SMDB, but they are needed. The OP saw things getting out of control and took personal initiative to correct them. It boggles my mind as well that someone can see that they are getting too fat to walk, and instead of dieting, they buy a scooter.
And while I feel sorry for those with medical issues, I agree with Shodan that these people are in the minority. Problem is that nothing is anyone’s fault anymore. You eat too much? You have a disease, it’s not your fault. So, feel sorry for yourself and keep cramming cheeseburgers in your mouth.
When you have a heart attack and die, you can go to heaven knowing that it wasn’t your fault. Take no responsiblity for your own health.
It sounds like the OP was inactive and ate lots of junk food (and still never got very fat). When he changed habits, the weight fell off. Of course, for the majority of people carrying excess weight things are not nearly that simple.
Being fat is impossible without carbohydrates in the diet. Read Gary Taubes’ book. Some people are more ‘sensitive’ to carbs than others. It’s genetic. I can eat nothing but sugar and not gain an ounce. My best friend can put sugar in her coffee twice a day and gain 10 lb in a week. Both of us have about the same risks of health problems from a poor diet, though.
There are many medical conditions that cause weight gain, such as hypothyroidism, PCOS, diabetes, kidney conditions, the list goes on. Medications (steroids, birth control, anti-depressants, anti-convulsants) can also cause fat gain to an extreme degree.
When it comes to the super-obese, most either have both underlying endocrine issues and a problem with overeating carbs. But it seems to me (from observation of my many fat friends) that overweight and moderately obese people (by BMI measures*, as useless as they are) usually eat about the same amount ‘normal weight’ and skinny people do… it’s just that when they eat causes them to put on more fat.
*Illustrated BMI Categories | Flickr
http://www.cockeyed.com/photos/bodies/heightweight.shtml
Everyone’s metabolism is vastly different. I know this because my own is completely abnormal. I have never been over a BMI of 17.5 (quite underweight) in my entire life, no matter what or how much I eat (naturally I eat somewhere between 1500-2000 calories per day, within normal ranges for a small woman. When I have gone on weight gain diets I have eaten as much as 4000 per day and felt very ill from it… put on a few pounds, but not enough to make me normal weight, and the heartburn and nausea isn’t worth it). Calories in=calories out has nothing to do with what my body looks like, so why should it apply to everyone else?
It’s both stupid and ignorant to blame people’s behavior for their weight or being ill/immobile. IMO. This thread disappoints me.
My mom didn’t overfeed us. In fact, she’s acutely aware of portion control and healthy eating. But literally from the time I could open the fridge, I have been sneaking food. At 4 years and up. I never felt full, unless seriously packed, and the urge to eat still more remained even then. I would fry bread in butter when she was out of the house. Steal money from her purse to buy snacks she never kept around. When I washed dishes, I would scrape the pans and eat what I could get that way (if no one was watching). If I went into a situation where food might be available, that was my main thought and focus, even if I could manage to hide that from the people around me.
I am now in my early 30s and, yes, quite fat, although not washing-myself-with-a-rag-on-a-stick fat. I’ve managed to learn to fight that drive to compulsively overeat to an extent, but it is still very much part of me. But it’s not my parents’ fault. If there is blame too be laid, it is on me. I have to tell you, though, it feels like a chemically based addiction and always has.
Every single member of my family is fat. Sisters, both parents, parent’s parents and siblings. Both sides of my family, the only people who aren’t obese are the ones who make a full-time job of it: for them eating is not a pleasure but a punishment, rewarded with more punishment in the form of the neverending battle of burning off the calories. My dad and his two brothers all played professional football. All three of them got fat the day they retired.
So I gots the gene.
On top of that I suffer from major depression, and I’m a compulsive overeater: when I’m anxious or depressed, that physically unpleasant feeling you get in the pit of your stomach can be quelled, often, by filling it. Perhaps conditioned upon this, for me an empty stomach feels exactly like anxiety, and can generate a feeling of panic and depression.
So, all told, without a constant battle, a battle that is waged not just day to day but minute to minute, my “path of least resistance”–just going with my natural flow–leads to obesity.
The OP makes the mistake of believing that each act of overeating is an active choice. It’s not. For me it’s like gravity; it happens *to *me, unless I devote the majority of my attention and energy to fighting it.
(Add to all this the fact that there are days–a lot of them sometimes, like, uh, now–when the only moment of comfort you can find in a hostile world involves ice cream or butter.)
It’s worth noting that it’s only called ‘overeating’ when someone is fat.
So fat people should be shamed into keeping themselves constantly hungry (even though there is no science that provides any evidence that calorie restriction leads to long-term weight loss of any degree)…
…while natural beanpoles like me can stuff their faces with burgers and cake to their heart’s content, and people chuckle and tell me to eat more?
This is disturbing to me.
I don’t for an instant believe that you do stuff your face and remain a beanpole. If you are thin then you are taking in significantly less calories than someone who is fat. You may on occasion indulge yourself with a burger or cake but you don’t make a habit of it.
To all the people claiming they’re obese because of legitimate illness: fine. You are the exception. That doesn’t negate the fact that most fat people are fat because they eat crap and don’t exercise. I’d like to see an actual percentage of obese people who are only obese because of a pre-existing condition (now I sound like an insurance company), because I bet that number is pretty small.
What’s worse is the growing “fat acceptance” movement which has people proudly proclaiming their fatness as them being an individual, and that they don’t need to be skinny to appease society. Yes, tell that to your poor bones in a few years… :rolleyes: If obesity is such a danger to society (and it obviously is), then being complacent with that obesity is downright scary.
It reminds me of the few times I saw that “More to Love” show on Fox. All the chubby girls were supposedly so proud of their “big, beautiful” bodies, but their tears began to flow the second they were asked to get into swimsuits. It just proves that much of the “big and beautiful” movement is a defense mechanism rather than a legitimate mindset. All I’m trying to say is the less we act like eating too much and not being active enough is a thing to be proud of, the better off we’ll be.
I don’t really eat that much and not when I’m bored, and I’m really skinny. I exercise now but before that I would eat pretty much whatever and never work out and was even thinner than I am now. So I don’t eat past when I’m hungry but I pretty much eat some kind of chocolate every day (candy bars, cookies, etc.). I can’t remember a day when I haven’t. When my metabolism does slow down, if I gain weight, I’ll probably stop eating as much junk food, but I don’t think I’ll change my habits radically. So yeah, some people really can eat whatever they want.
Bah…
People are often jealous of me because I can eat whatever and never gain weight.
But when push comes to shove, its actually because , if I bother to stop and think about it, I am borderline hungry most of the time.
A friend of mine had a great method of keeping the weight off. He only ate things he didnt like. It worked like charm apparently. He would only eat enough to take the edge off.
Yes.
I’m nowhere near powerchair huge, but I’m overweight. I’ve worked at losing weight, gained some back, lost again, gained back (though I’ve never gotten back up to the first “this shit has got to stop” high weight, so that’s good). I know that, while I do have some crappy genetics against me*, the main issue I need to work on is completely in my head.
I’ll eat because I’m sad, because I’m bored, because I’m lonely, because I’m happy. I’ll even eat when I’m not hungry, meaning I’m actually FULL and the idea of food sickens me. Thankfully that’s rare! But it happens and that is CLEARLY something mental, not physical.
Once I get my insurance switched over to my soon-to-be husband’s, I’m going to look at perhaps CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) to work on those issues. I’ve noticed that my overweight friends often have similar issues. Food isn’t just food; it’s linked to emotions. It’s very hard to fight that and it gets mentally exhausting. A lot of times it’s easy to just give up because dammit, you’re tired of having to work against your stupid brain. This is something that a lot of thinner people don’t understand.
Here’s a random example: there was a store-bought cake at work once. A naturally slim woman took a piece and had a bite or two but didn’t like it. So she moved it to the side of her desk and just left it there. She didn’t like it so she wouldn’t eat it. Logical, right? I can’t tell you how extremely hard that would be to some (me for sure and other overweight co-workers I asked). The cake is still there, therefore you’d end up eating it. Why, if you don’t like it? I don’t know. It’s obviously psychological.
BUT, on the genetics side, it really does suck to not be able to eat as much of the junky stuff that your thin friends who have better metabolisms do. I can lose weight (I’ve showed that to myself), but it does take me more effort than it does for a lot of others. But that’s not a reason not to do it.
- My mom’s side has notoriously slow metabolisms and I actually do have doctor-diagnosed hypothyroidism. I’d be sitting at work where others are wearing pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt and I’d have pants, a sweater, a fleece jacket over it AND a blanket wrapped around my lower half and still be cold.
I would like to know how the OP got up to 220 pounds before he realized he was fat. According to the CDC, someone who is 5’10" is overweight if they weigh more than 175. So why did the OP have to pack on 45 more pounds before he realized he had a problem?
Because he could still use shoes, not wheels.
There are different levels I would say, and that’s not even factoring in the inherent issues that BMI numbers have. Gain a few pounds and become chubby and you may start to half-heartedly cut back on sweets or whatnot. But for many reasonable people, once they hit a certain weight, they realize they need to take immediate action and not half-ass it this time.
Are you saying that your mind is closed to anything that might refute your personal ideas about food, health, and weight, gazpacho?
I was put on a medically supervised diet to increase my weight. I ate 4000 calories per day for a couple months. I put on 10 lbs by the end. I also felt very ill from eating that volume of food.
I still count my calories to make sure I am getting enough. I eat about 1500-2000 per day, now. I have a BMI of barely 17 (significantly underweight). I am healthy by all other measures. Currently I get about 70% of my daily calories from fats. I eat no sugar and very few grains. I am within the same 5-lb range that I have been in since age 17 (I am 24 now).
Hey - I was a sneaky little food eater as a kid. I used to do stuff like eat spoonfuls of brown sugar when no one was looking. I very rarely felt full, it’s like I didn’t have an off switch. I ate what I wanted, when I wanted, big portions, lots of cheese, huge muffins for breakfast, the largest size Starbucks coffee with a danish for snacks, Taco bell, pizza, etc. It is no mystery to me why I was heavy, I ate about 3500 calories a day. I might have thought I didn’t eat “that” much (breakfast, it’s just a muffin!) but it was a LOT of calorie dense foods.
I changed my life in 2004 - when I weighed 200 lbs. What worked for me was seriously limiting/eliminating foods that made me feel like eating and eating. My trouble foods were and still are: baked goods, chips, pretzels, cookies, white carby nothing foods. If I eat one Oreo, I immediately want another Oreo. I want to stuff in another Oreo while I’m still chewing on the first, and then a third Oreo. I guess it was a handy little self-preservation strategy thousands of years ago - “it’s there, eat it, it’s hardly ever there, you should store up, don’t stop eating until it’s gone!”
When I dieted, I never tried to stop eating those foods, I just tried to cut back, have 2 cookies or whatever. It never worked, I would eat a Snackwells cookie (healthy! for dieting!) and feel compelled to eat and eat and eat. Then, I would feel like a no will power loser. The self hatred was horrible - I didn’t understand how OTHER people could diet and I just couldn’t.
In 2004, I gave up fast foods, sugary soda, and almost all packaged/processed foods. I took myself off the typical American diet. Switched to as many whole foods as possible with an emphasis on fresh fruit, HUGE servings of vegeables, lean protein, low fat dairy, complex carbohydrates (beans, brown rice, sweet potatoes, whole wheat tortillas - always carefully measured) and healthy fat.
My cravings disappeared. I always thought I had a problem with food, it turns out I had a problem with some foods.
If you had told me 5 years ago, I wouldn’t eat scones anymore, or muffins or Wheat Thins, I would have said it was a terrible way to live - those were my favorites, I needed them. Now, as an 130 lb slender woman, I feel free.
I probably think about food more than most people would think was “normal” (I have found I can’t eat healthily by accident, it requires a lot of planning, shopping, packing and cooking) but it works for me.
I never ever want to go back to that sad, lethargic, depressed woman with one pair of blue jeans that fit (barely). Giving up baked goods and crackers is a small price to pay.
Cite?
There is no evidence for what you are claiming here. Your prejudice is showing.