Anyways, said author put some candy on his desk. Then he interviewed some colleagues.
A few of them said, “fuck it. I can’t resist it. That candy is offered to me, I’m gonna eat it. I’ll feel terrible about it later, but I just want it.”
A few said, “I don’t really get the appeal. I like candy, but I’m full. I don’t need it. no problem in saying no.”
What struck me was this. I (fat) and a friend (also fat) are die-hard gourmands. But on the other hand, another friend (thin) and another co-worker (also thin) have little interest in food, good or bad.
I think there’s a real difference in people that really want food and those that don’t. I fall in the want category. I love food, I appreciate it; yet I’ll pursue it to harm.
My other friends don’t care about it; they will eat shit cardboard and call it fine; but it keeps them thin.
I read that book, too, Gamehat. I nearly cried while reading the introduction because he described my thought process about food exactly. What’s weird is that I’m pretty thin. But if I had my way, I could easily be obese. Due to a combination of factors, I gained 25 pounds in a few months two years ago. (On a 5’1 woman, that’s a lot. I was buying new jeans every month.) I totally understand that drive to consume food for emotional reasons, even when it’s making me feel sick.
It was a bit depressing to to realize that I’ll truly always need to watch what I eat, but it was helpful to understand that I respond to food differently from, say, a friend who can easily buy a box of cookies and eat one every few days. Or my roommate who can forget to eat for an entire day. I also found it helpful how the book discusses how food is manufactured to make us addicted to a certain combination of fats, salts and sugars - I’m now encouraged to cook almost everything from scratch, if for no other reason than to stick it to the man who wants me to eat sweetened meat and salty sweets.
(I realize that saying that I was 25 pounds overweight is obnoxious to people who struggle with serious obesity. But I’m saying it to point out that there aren’t clear divisions between people who love food and are therefore fat, and people who hate food and are therefore anorexic, and all the normal people in the middle.)
While some thin people may be that way because they don’t care about food, it’s not the same for everyone. I know plenty of thin people that love eating as much as anyone. I don’t think love of food necessarily causes obesity.
QFT. A fat person knows s/he’s fat, unless s/he has some really serious mental health issues. I mean, I know that at least some anorexics look at themselves and see a fat person. I guess that there are some fat people who look at themselves and see a person of normal weight. But I haven’t met any fat person who does this. I’ve also never met any fat person who hasn’t had many, many people saying “You need to lose weight” with various degrees of tactfulness. Yes, most fat people should lose weight. Most rude people need to be smacked upside the head when they’re rude, too.
If a fat person asks for support in losing weight, by all means, give that love and support. Otherwise, your “love and support” message, no matter how kindly and gently you think you’re offering it, is perceived as an attack. Do you WANT to attack that person? Do you WANT to make him/her feel bad? Do you want that person to point out a few of YOUR flaws? Either accept your friend as s/he is, or avoid that person. Don’t try to change someone else, if that someone is an adult who doesn’t need to have someone else dress him/her*. That’s not love, it’s a way of making you feel better about yourself by pointing out a flaw in someone that YOU don’t have. You probably have some faults of your own that you could work on.
As I said, 2500 calories is considered a reducing diet for males. It’s the MINIMUM amount that most adult males should consume. There are a few very sedentary adult males who could get by on less, but most men need more that 2500 calories a day in order to maintain their weight and stay healthy.
*DAMNIT, the English language needs neuter pronouns!
I find the above logic to be, well not just be wrong, but also a slap in the face to thin people who have put a lot off work into changing their lives and entire lifestyles in order to lose weight an adopt a fit frame. It is really hurtful to a friend of mine who comes from a long line of heavy ancestry to be told “Yeah, well, you’re just lucky you have ‘thin genes’.” It completely denigrates - just pooh-poohs - all the hard work and discipline she put into shedding 80 lbs (at the last time I saw her, she’d lost 80 and was still hefty, but well on her way to being within her goal). She had to radically change her relationship with food, and she worked out three hours a day, six days a week, in intense martial arts classes. That is where I met her. She also had to re-learn everything she thought she knew about nutrition.
Don’t just say: “You have a different environmental and genetic legacy, that’s why you are thin.” because, for a lot of people, it’s a bold-faced lie. I have a rotund heritage too (edit: we are a family that looks like Winnie the Pooh, except two cousins and me who live active lifestyles). I work to maintain my health.
A 5’ 8", 160 lb. 30 year old male will burn over 1,700 calories via the basal rate alone. That is how much they would burn if they slept in bed all day. Even a sedentary desk work will burn a few hundred calories over the day. So 2000 calories is not for adult males.
For many years, I was one of those people. Until recently, it didn’t even occur to me that there was a reason why I could no longer see the veins in my forearms. The fat crept up on me and I didn’t realize how badly it had done so.
I tell you, I wish that somebody had pointed out that I had been gaining fat during that time!
Yeah, my sister got our dad’s frame and shape. She’s rail-thin, narrow hips, not much of a rear. I got our mom’s - wide hips, wide shoulders, bigger butt, tendency toward a pear shape. Mom has struggled with her weight all her life; dad was always slim and extremely physically active, too. Since I have a wider hip structure, weight only makes me look bigger when it does settle on. Meanwhile, my sister could stand behind me - even when I’m at my target weight - and hide completely in my silhouette.
I’m barely in the normal BMI range. When people bring in goodies to work and I try to demur - especially when I was about 10-15 lbs lighter, which is my target weight - I get comments like, “You don’t need to watch your weight!” This is almost always from heavier women. I know they don’t understand that I’m not overweight because I try to eat a healthy diet. At least, I hope that’s the case - occasionally when I’m feeling uncharitable I might suspect it’s “misery loves company” but that’s a rare feeling.
But anyway, I have a close friend who was morbidly obese. Who went through weight loss surgery last winter and is down to half her size with more to go (and she is looking and, more importantly FEELING, great). Its been a battle, gastric bypass doesn’t solve the problem, it just helps. She thanked me last winter after surgery.
I’ve been accepting as I can be. I haven’t encouraged her to do anything she didn’t want to do, haven’t made personal comments, and have tried to be as aware as I can of hurtful comments in my general conversation that might imply obese people are “lesser” or “lazy” or “undisciplined.” Years ago she started considering surgery and she talked to her friends. And her friends told her she should accept herself (as they did) for what she was.
Apparently I was one of the few who said “I like you how you are, but if how you are is hurting your knees and ankles and causing you distress, I think you should consider it. And whatever you decide you have my support and I’ll still like you.”
The problem with “fat acceptance” is it doesn’t empower change.
Your basal metabolic rate is the minimum number of calories required to sustain your basic physical functions at rest while your digestive system is inactive. If you ever plan on getting out of bed, you are going to need a few hundred extra calories per day.
Well, that’s the calculation for sedentary. And I tend to be pretty sedentary. But its an approximate calculation. Point being, a sedentary woman of my weight and height would gain weight on 2000 calories a day.
(And I do. I actually take in about 1500 a day when I maintain…if I want to eat more, I need to jog - which I do - irregularly. If I want to loose weight, I need to get down to about 1200 calories, exercise and loose the weight slowly)
Sedentary is not the same as completely at rest. You’re burning extra calories just by sitting up in your chair.
That said, the oft-quoted 2500 cal diet for adult men is often far too high. It’s fine if you’re reasonably active, but most men these days are not, and should not be eating 2500 calories per day.
The assertion that 2500 is a reducing diet for males is patently absurd. For a six-foot outdoorsey laborer, sure. For a five-and-a-half foot cube farmer, most definitely not.
I get the same thing, and I’m a guy, so it’s not just women who do this. About 12 years ago, I got motivated to lose the 60-lbs. to take me out of the “obese” category into an average BMI. I didn’t look obese (other than my fat face), but was definitely overweight and suffering health effects from it.
At the time, all I got for comments was “Oh! You don’t need to lose weight!” And now that I’ve kept the weight off for a decade, I get comments like “What? You don’t want cake/cookies/chips/pizza/french fries/etc./etc.? What are you, a girl?”
Then these same guys turn around and tell me how lucky it is that I don’t have to worry about my weight.
Baffling, utterly baffling. There is some sort of mix-up going on with self-body-image and perceptions of others’ bodies that doesn’t seem consistent.
The Winnie the Pooh side of my family actually has itty-bitty frames. I have the frame of a 14 year old boy - unusually narrow hips for a woman, and long slender fingers, like Arsenio Hall. The problem is that for some reason, starting at about 30, everyone gains weight. The unhealthy kind where it’s all around the middle. We look like Ernie: round pumpkin heads and round bellies, but no butt. (I’ not kidding either. My uncle bears and uncanny resemblance to Ernie!)
With an active lifestyle and by eating in accordance with fueling our bodies to be active, my two cousins and I still have our small frames. Although I’m the only one well into my 30s. I also have noticed a very remarkable change in my metabolism, but in all honestly, I believe the later generations in our family have difficulty evaluating proper portion sizes. My relatives find it disconcerting how little I eat, and like you I hear the “Oh, pshaw! Why don’t you eat something? You don’t need to watch your weight!” but in all honesty, I just can’t fit the food into me that they are offering. The foods they are eating are actually pretty good: most meals are cooked at home, most ingredients are fresh and there is not a lot processed, high-sodium foods, but they tend to cover their entire plates so all you see is the rim. I eat about half what they do and I’m sated.
My mother once expressed concern. “I’m afraid you don’t eat enough.” My answer was, “Well, yesterday I hiked to the top of a mountain carrying a 30 lbs pack on my back. Would I be able to do that if I didn’t eat enough to thrive?” They genuinely don’t know how much food they need compared to what goes on their plate. I think that if I secretly replaced their plates with a set that was 1.5" smaller in diameter, they would start losing weight. They see the size of the vessel as the prescribed portion size.
Sure. I understand that and misused the word basal. But the number of calories I use sitting in a chair or walking to the bathroom are not huge. The number of calories between sedentary and very active is about 1000. And I would assume that a very active category would not cover Michael Phelps, but would cover someone who does eight hours of fairly physical labor a day.
When I jog, I only burn about 200 extra calories during my jog. Not really enough to go to 2000 a day. Not really even enough to justify a Snickers bar.
On that note, I really have to recommend the book Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink. He’s a professor at Cornell who has done a lot of research into eating and food psychology. That’s one of the things that has come up repeatedly, and remains true even if you know about it - in general, people’s appetites expand to fit the plate and the amount of food given. They’ve done experiments with different sizes of plates (you eat more off a bigger plate) and with fixed soup bowls with hidden gradual-refill tubes (you eat more if you’re given more). Best yet, he suggests ways to make small changes at home to help fix problems with eating.
Tell me about it. I swear, I’m constantly astonished at how so many people have difficulty making the connection between dietary habits and one’s waistline. They surely understand it on an intellectual level, but they don’t seem to grasp the connection within their hearts.
There have been numerous occasions wherein I’ve been out to dinner with people who complained about their waistlines and bemoaned how much they needed to lose weight. Almost invariably, these same people were feasting on something that was fried, slathered in butter, or otherwise fattening. On occasion, they’d even top that off with a fattening dessert. The human mind is good at providing cognitive dissonance – in this case, making people willfully oblivious to the connection between food and fatness.
Oh, and if we’re adding data points. In my mid-20s, I was hoping to try out for the Canadian Olympic Tae Kwon Do team. I’m 5’4" and at the time was an very lean but muscular 128 lbs. I was built like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. My caloric intake ranged from 1800-2000 depending on the training day which usually had 4 hours of aerobic activity in total. Consuming 2000 would have been an unusual day for me. I can give you stupidly accurate details from back then because everything was so regimented.
The thing I dislike about the fat acceptance in the blogosphere is that it seems so one sided. I’ve read Shapely Prose (Kate Harding’s fat acceptance blog) and in one thread/post about fat characters in YA lit (an issue I think is fairly interesting), the conversation just got really annoying. A poster talked about how even though the representations of fat characters in lit is important, maybe we should also encourage fat kids to be healthy and basically got jumped on because this is the wrong place to ever suggest that fat people lose weight and then there was a little note at the end of her post saying that this poster is taking some time off to review our comments policy. It was kind of icky.
And then throughout the comments there was a lot of talk of privilege and oppression which got kind of eye rolly for me. Stuff like, “Is talking about reading at an early age an example of privilege” or “thin privilege.” It just felt like a contest–who’s more oppressed?
It seems like they want to shut their ears to anyone who disagrees with them. I get that they want to love and accept themselves, but I don’t see why you can’t do that and also work on making your body healthier.
Fat people are normally extremely well aware of why they are fat. You don’t have to bring in Sherlock Holmes to crack the case.
The primary difficulty is that there is brain wiring dichotomy between people who (like myself) will keep on eating even after hunger is satiated for the sheer pleasure of eating vs people who can push away and stop at the first sign of physical satiation. This is the difference between wanting food and needing food.
Perfectly rational fat people who might be able to think rings around you do not have a rational relationship with food. The fat person’s relationship to food is not a product of rational consideration, but of pure emotional desire.
To be wired as a fat person, and be and able to lose weight in an environment of plenty requires meticulous monitoring and awareness of your intake level. It’s mentally exhausting at a certain point, and sooner or later most people fall off the diet wagon.
