Some fat people are their own worst enemies

The BBQ Pit
61

You’re kidding, right? Please for the love of Pete tell me you’re kidding.

Why on earth should Company X be forced to make low-fat crackers? Because some people have little to no will power and don’t know when to stop stuffing their faces? That’s ludicrous. Bear in mind that low-fat does not equal lower in calories.

Who will give restaurants incentives to reduce their portions? The government? Get real. Why should restaurants be given incentives to reduce their portions? Some restaurants offer half portions. If you’re a person who has trouble controlling what and how much you put in your mouth, ask for a half portion.

It’s up to individuals to control themselves.

62

I’m not going to talk about why people are oveweight since I’m sure each reason is different. But for this post (and this post only), let’s assume that Janie Jones is correct and it is due to the food we produce and eat.

If this is true, put the blame where it belongs - on the eater. Don’t legislate what a company has to make. Don’t make restaurants reduce their portions. Fuck that. If I overeat, it’s my own fault.

63

i have to say, i’m with tarantula on this one.

mostly, something can be done to (gross) overweight.
mostly, people don’t, out of laziness/lack of self discipline/no interest.

And yes, there are exceptions to every rule, and no, you shouldn’t go about abusing overweight people.

On the other hand: don’t tell us lies, either. Don’t say you’ve got “big bones” (yeah right, big belly bone and arse bone?), don’t claim it’s “nerves” (an ex-colleague of mine claims she was grossly overweight because she was had “bad nerves”. Her husband told me she eats three greasy unhealthy fast food type meals a day, and plently of snacks inbetween.).

Don’t expect us to sympathise with you. Ultimately (in adult’s cases), you’re the one that choses what to put in your mouth. You’re the one responsible for what you look like.

64

I suspect most fat people are that way because they enjoy eating until they feel satisfied rather than they like the feeling of being fat. Getting fat is a by-product of eating until they feel satisfied.

It can be hard to keep the weight off because you constantly have to tell your body that it can’t have what it wants. It’s hard to deny yourself something that you want. Most of our society is built around letting us satisfy whatever needs we have. Want a new car? Get a new car. Want a new tv? Get a new tv. Want a donut? Get a donut.

Unfortunately for fat people, their lack of self control is very visually evident. I would say for the OP, it is never appropriate for an overweight person to eat a donut. If they want a treat, they should get a healthy alternative like fruit. A donut has a huge amount of calories which the overweight person doesn’t need and they are enabling themselves to continue the behavior of eating fatty foods. A piece of fruit can be a satisfying treat if you adapt to that.

Although I would never criticize an overweight person to their face, I think it’s okay to talk about these things in a message board. Hopefully someone reading will take some of this advice to heart and take control of their weight. If you’re overweight, you can be thin again. It might be hard, but you can do it.

65

Oh yeah, filmore, this thread is chock full of encouragement!

Fortunately, I hope that no one gives a good shit what you think is appropriate for them to eat.

66

Oh yeah, filmore, this thread is chock full of encouragement!

Fortunately, I strongly doubt that anyone gives a good shit what you think is appropriate for them to eat, and they shouldn’t until you’re their doctor, dietitician or they’ve sat on you.

67

I hope overweight people take control of their weight because it is killing them slowly. If they are on their deathbed at 55 from a heart attack, are they really going to look back at their lives and think how glad they are that they got to eat all that pizza and donuts? Sure it was enjoyable at the time, but is it worth giving up 5, 10, 15, 20 years of your life? You don’t need a time machine to tell you that that extra 100 pounds is going to cut your life short.

If your friend was on drugs that was ruining their life or killing them, wouldn’t you want help that friend. To help that friend learn to enjoy life without the destructive effect of the drugs? Food is like that for overweight people. So I don’t think we should just encourage overweight people to eat whatever they want so they feel good the same way I don’t think we should encourage drug users to continue using. I believe overweight people can be just as happy being thin as being overweight. It takes more work, but it’s worth it.

68

Why the fuck are you all bitching about other people’s sizes anyway?! What possible good could it do? Was she getting grease on you? Were you starting to bulge from the second-hand fat? What was it?

69

There’s a difference between eating until you are satisfied and eating until you can’t eat another bite.

70

I’ll say it again - people who are terribly obese aren’t doing it for fun. They’re in pain, and food is the only way they’re able to deal with it. They’re doing the best they can.

You posters with your scorn and disgust, I wonder if you laugh at poor people.

71

But you don’t know that for certain. You’re making a judgement about someone on the fact they had a DONUT!

72

You’re right, I don’t know for certain. That’s why I refrained from a blanket statement.

I don’t care if people are fat, that’s their business. My irritation comes in when I have to listen to it all day long from women who sit on their asses all day and eat snack after snack. Beyond that, I couldn’t care less. I just don’t want to hear them blame it on every other factor than what they eat and how much activity they do.

73

How do you know? Do you speak for all obese people?

Some of them are doing it for fun. Specifically for the fun of eating and drinking what they want to eat and drink, and they’re specifically not exercising because it’s a pain in the ass and they don’t want to.

I’m pretty much a beleiver in personal responsibility, here. If you are obese it’s almost surely your own doing, nobody else’s.

If you are grossly obese, the fact that you have chosen not to take care of yourself is readily apparent to most onlookers who will form judgements accordingly.

Sometimes those judgements will be accurate, sometimes not.

The opinions of other people and how they react to you is going to be colored by image and information you present to them.

Being overweight is a part of that infromation subject to judgement and interpretation by others.

I’m not into condemning anybody for a weight problem but on the other hand, I’m not going to accord anybody the status of victim based on their weight either.

Your weight is a part of an ongoing choice you make about how you choose to live your life.

That’s just the way it is.

74

Well, I live in a community where the local diet is, to put it mildly, lethally unhealthy…and yet incredibly tasty at the same time. (New Orleans) This town is noted for its food, and yet most of the food here is just killingly high in all the bad stuff.

Add to that a city with incredible poverty. New Orleans is a very poor city compared to many, with a much larger portion of the population living in really terrible conditions than is even common in bigger US cities.

I see, every day of the week, children under the age of ten so fat they can hardly waddle. I see women who are so fat that the only shoes they can wear are bedroom slippers. And I know how they got that way. They eat the local food, which is all they know. This is also a community where natives don’t leave unless they absolutely have to; folks love it here. The proportion of very fat people here at a very young age is an indication of a societal problem, not a personal one, IMO.

You contrast that with my aunt, who all her life has been very oddly shaped – from the waist up she’s almost skinny, about a size 10, with maybe a 34" bust; but from the waist down, she’s HUGE, has about 70" hips. Clearly there’s something medically wrong with her, although I’m not sure if it’s ever been diagnosed. (Nobody else in the family has this problem.) Now that she’s in her 70s, she’s having terrible health problems related to her being half overweight, too. Even with being very careful with her diet, she just struggles with it every day, and has my whole life.

I’m not going to criticize people who are fat on an individual basis. I blame our society for promoting quick and easy and convenient, albeit crappy, food – which I’ll admit to eating too much of because it IS quick and easy and convenient – and excessively large portions and driving everywhere and not getting enough exercise. Yes, I’m jealous of people who have managed to stay thin. I haven’t, but so far I haven’t wanted to get thin again enough that I’ve also wanted to do what it takes to become that way. That’s MY problem. Everyone has their own.

But none of us are victims, except maybe the poor kids who are ten years old and weigh 200 lbs!!

75

I’m not into making blanket statements, but I certainly can speak for myself, and I believe there are many others like me. It is my personal belief that many (not all, and maybe not even most) very obese people are addicted to food; more often, simple carbs like sugar, white flour, white potatoes and white rice. There have been books written about it. For myself, and for other sugar junkies, moderation doesn’t work. The only workable solution is to give this stuff up completely, forever. I put this plan into effect the beginning of the year, and have lost about 60 pounds. I have about 55 left to go.

At some point in their lives (often childhood), people like me learn that eating junkfood is an appropriate way to deal with emotional difficulties; this is one reason that it seems to “run in families”. My sisters and I learned it from our mother. She was diabetic, but the diabetes barely slowed her down in her eating. When we would fall down and skin our knee, we were given cookies to make us feel better. If kids at school teased us, and we came home crying, out came the snack cakes. The message was loud and clear: feel bad? Eat! A lesson we all learned well. I tried (and was partially successful at) other dieting strategies. I counted calories, and ended up screwing up my metabolism so badly that I was down to 800 calories a day before I decided I couldnt’ live like that, and gave it up. I tried WW, and actually lost 100 pounds, but every day was a struggle, because I still had the cravings. I regained the weight. I will never again eat refined sugar, white flour, white rice or white potatoes, because once I start, I can’t stop. The fact that I’m looking better is a fringe benefit. I’m really doing it because I want to live long enough to enjoy an active life with my husband once the kids are gone. I’m also doing it so the kids don’t “catch” my addiction, the way I caught it from my mother.

I could care less about sympathy, but putting us down isn’t going to help us come to a realization about what we need to do, any more than insulting a drunk in gonna make him sober up!

76

Legislation always fixes the problem.

:rolleyes:

77

I see a better solution to the problem being an enormous hike in gasoline prices for individual consumers. You could cut down on fuel emissions, dependence on foreign resources and the amount of fat cells people use as a cushion while they sit in their car seats to drive two miles down the road.

78

No, I wasn’t kidding in my proposed solutions to the obesity epidemic.

Yes, JuanitaTech and Fin_man, the blame belongs on the individual, but what have we accomplished by establishing that (which was never in doubt, BTW)?

The question still remains, how does a society – for the overall good of the society – change individual habits?

I say:

(1) Deliver positive public health messages, aimed at telling folks the only successful healthy diet mantra there is: Eat less, exercise more. That’s O.K. as far as it goes, but it’s obvious that this is effective only to a point. ('Merkins are stll grossly overweight.)

(2) The above-mentioned incentives. Why not? If the problem is people stuffing unhealthy food down their mouths in large quantities, then take steps to make unhealthy food less prevalent. Would it kill manufactures to substitute healthier oils such as canola oil or olive oil for the very much used artery-clogging palm oil?

At the moment, yes, because palm oil is cheaper. But if a government implements regulations eliminating the economic penalty for using higher-priced oils, then that’s a good thing, right?

Governments do this sort of thing all the time in other industries, i.e., drug companies, petroleum companies, etc. They can’t sell tainted medicines or put lead in gasoline. But more important, drug companies get tax breaks for making medicines more accessible to people who otherwise couldn’t afford them. And petroleum companies have incentives to make cleaner blends that pollute less when burned in car engines.

But if incentives for the food industry don’t strike your fancy, how about disincentives for the junk-food-eating consumers?

Most every country has sin taxes on ciggies and booze, so why not sin taxes on Big Macs?

79

FYI- norinew that was elfje you were quoting not elfje6, which sounds close enough to my name that I was wondering when the hell I said something like that.

More importantly, good luck with your struggle. Hopefully with your better understanding of some of the causes (which I found to be compelling arguments) you will have a leg up on staying healthy for yourself and your family. I hope you have an active activity which you enjoy (for me, its cycling) which helps you get out and burn some stress and calories at the same time.

This elf does sympathise with you, and is pulling for you.

:slight_smile:

80

Janie Jones, you last post seems a little more reasonable. Instead of forcing Company X to make a healthy food in addition to the “bad” food, give them tax breaks if they use healthier oils. One is a force - one is a “suggestion”. I can get behind that no problem. Benefits if they are health-minded but not penalties for doing their business as is.