This is an awesome post, Pam, and David Mixner’s post is awesome as well.

You can expect the usual people who are so concerned about the weight of us Fatty McFattersons to show up in the comments here, though. Oh, well.

What was amazing to me when those comments appeared in web sites, no one took them on for being insensitive bigots. Instead, there was amazing silence.

I think this is because even the most articulate and legitimate expressions of concern about this kind of bigotry are often met with some mouth-breather writing back, “You sound fat” - and, of course, that’s a sufficient reason to dismiss someone entirely.

I mentioned in passing that my husband and I are overweight on a bulletin board and was dealt an absolutely horrendous mountain of whining and abuse from a guy who accused me of “enabling” my husband to gain weight. Without knowing anything about us, he had all the answers: an in-depth understanding of our weak, gross psychological profiles, the perfect diet and exercise plan for us - the whole nine yards. (I found it darkly funny, seriously, that he bitched about personal responsibility while at the same time blaming me for someone else’s weight.)

I calmly told him what I thought of his histrionic tantrum and suggested that he might be addicted to malicious speech. Seriously - people like that, however common they may be, are merely the adult versions of their schoolyard bully-selves. If they couldn’t aim at our fat, they’d choose our disabilities instead - because it’s not really about ‘concern for our welfare’ with them; it’s about them, specifically, and their need to dominate others through coercion and cruelty. (YAWN!)

But I wondered, as Mixner does, just how that kind of cruel bullshit could effect an impressionable kid. I wish there were some way I could take hold of every bullied kid in my city and tell them, right to their faces, that it isn’t them - that they’re not the ones with the problem.

I still can’t fucking believe that Dr. Regina Benjamin’s weight was considered a rational basis on which to oppose her nomination as Surgeon General.  Really, people?  If she was in a wheelchair, would you oppose it because she wasn’t able-bodied?

Sadly, someone probably would.

If she was in a wheelchair, would you oppose it because she wasn’t able-bodied?

You’ve clearly never encountered a “Social Darwinist” before. Yes, they really are that stupid.

I absolutely hate it when people “advise” others to just “put down the Big Mac” to lose weight.  The very same condescending advice has even come up on this blog.  Anyone who says that does not have a basic understanding of arithmetic.  It’s extremely easy to become moderately overweight just from eating healthy foods.  I won’t repeat the calculations again unless someone wants it, but just eating a few extra apples can make someone gain weight over time.  Unless you’re obsessively tracking every calorie forever, most people will gain a little weight over time.

Bingo, #6.  And even if someone won’t “put down the Big Mac”, WTF does that have to do with anything?  The level of stupidity necessary to write out that statement and honestly think it has any value whatsoever is astounding.

Sorry but I’m fat as hell and I agree with the fatphobes.  Not only am I showing my lack of good values off to everyone but I’m also making their lives less pleasant by their having to look at me.  The resulting (justified) self-loathing makes it hard to do anything about it, but mainly I hope I’ll just die.

Not more than a week ago some random news bite threw out that married women gain more weight than unmarried women, in came out to roughly 11 lbs which in a healthy adult woman of average height would bump them up I believe 3-4% in body mass (if I can remember my charts at all without looking it up.)  Fundamentally we’re looking at the easiest way to discriminate without people getting upset because weight is psychologically viewed as a “choice” though work limitations, time constraints, and general enthusiasm not to mention genetics all play a factor in weight gain or loss.  The list is too numerous to muster in a comment window but to simply say “hey stop eating” isn’t a real answer. 

I put on close to 100 lbs in college (on a 250 lb frame, so I am not freakishly round.)  I’m now working it off with exercise but my position allows me to, I have free time that allows me to spend 3-5 hours a week at the gym grinding myself down.  But if you have kids, 40+ hour a week job, and want any sort of social life outside of the gym it’s quite easy to put it off.  Nobody really contemplates that actors and the whole media genre have generous amounts of free time or at least recognize their livelihood rely on their looks and thus put that time aside to keep in shape.

On the topic of actually trying to win votes/popularity with looks is obnoxious.  Name me one truly attractive republican front runner besides Sarah Palin (who is pleasant looking but incredibly paranoid, stupid, and untrustworthy).  It’s not as if they’re swimming in pleasant faces to throw at the public and if the public is truly and wholly swayed by attraction then we deserve what we get.  What we need to do is worry about getting the message out, shutting down the fox news BS, and keep Pam front and center on CNN to keep espousing the views of the left.

I’m not trolling btw I’m serious

I’ve been naturally skinny my whole life thanks to genetics, and that, coupled with the normalcy of putting down overweight people in my school and within my family, gave me a very negative mental stereotype that I’m still working hard to erase from my brain. Blog posts like this, and others primarily from Pandagon, have done more to get me out of that mindset than I can ever express. Keep it up.

If she was in a wheelchair, would you oppose it because she wasn’t able-bodied?

Are the two really equivalent?  This is not a rhetorical question. I’m willing to admit that, as someone who has no trouble keeping slim, I have a huge blind spot when it comes to the subject of being overweight.  I had been under the impression, quite possibly mistaken, genetic or hormonal issues preventing weight loss even with proper diet and exercise affected only a small minority of people.  I’d be very interested in links to studies on the subject proving me wrong, however.

In case there is any confusion, I guess I should point out this is not to imply that I approve of mocking or concern trolling people who are “fat”!  Criticizing other people’s appearance is rather dickish and juvenile. 

But when HHS says that 1/3 of children born in the new millennium will develop diabetes due to diet, I think overweight/obesity as health issue is a legitimate topic of discussion if for no other reason that it does have public health policy implications.  But can we have that discussion if we’re going to put being overweight in the same category as being disabled?

Notice when they say I cant believe the talking progressive heads dont go on diets and loose some weight so we can get more people to like us., what they actually mean is I cant believe the female talking progressive heads dont go on diets and loose some weight so we can get more people to <s>like us</s> think we’re sexy.

On the topic of actually trying to win votes/popularity with looks is obnoxious.  Name me one truly attractive republican front runner besides Sarah Palin

Well, Mireilly already touched on this point, but there’s definitely a double standard here.  The Republicans have fewer female leaders.  Because women are judged more harshly, that means the Republican party is less affected by this fat-shaming attitude.

Are the two really equivalent?

I think it’s a very common mistake to over-estimate the amount of control that people have over their weight.  It’s really extremely difficult to lose a significant amount of weight without drastic, possibly risky, intervention.

I had been under the impression, quite possibly mistaken, genetic or hormonal issues preventing weight loss even with proper diet and exercise affected only a small minority of people.  I’d be very interested in links to studies on the subject proving me wrong, however.

Well, exercise doesn’t help much with weight loss for most people beyond 5-10 pounds.  There are many, many reasons but the biggest one is that exercise just doesn’t burn enough calories.

A “proper” diet will work for most people, if they can stick to it.  But asking someone to just not eat when they’re hungry is like telling people to just not scratch that itch or to just not sleep when they’re tired.  A few people might be able to manage, but most people just can’t and that shouldn’t be considered a moral failing.

I think overweight/obesity as health issue is a legitimate topic of discussion if for no other reason that it does have public health policy implications.

Obesity does have legitimate health risks, but it’s not nearly as risky as some people make it out to be.  Also, it’s extremely difficult to lose weight.  Telling people to just eat less and exercise more is about as effective as telling teenagers to just never have sex until marriage.

Sorry but I’m fat as hell and I agree with the fatphobes.  Not only am I showing my lack of good values off to everyone but I’m also making their lives less pleasant by their having to look at me.  The resulting (justified) self-loathing makes it hard to do anything about it, but mainly I hope I’ll just die.

You’re placing undue emphasis on your weight in relation to your other physical attributes. I think your perspective is skewed, and my heart goes out to you. You have good qualities and value independent of how you look.

Consider this: even if you were right, and fat indicates a character flaw, it would be no more severe a flaw than smoking. Smokers don’t deserve to be ridiculed. They certainly don’t deserve to die for daring to indulge an unhealthy habit.

Your desire to die has less to do with being overweight than it does with being depressed - and depression can actually make weight-loss much, much harder than it otherwise would be.

Please - and I mean this in all sincerity - consider seeing a counselor. The worst that could happen is that you’ll feel the same as you do now; but it’s far more likely that you’ll end up feeling a lot better if you give it a little time.

Are the two really equivalent?

They can be, but not in the one-to-one “my genes made me fat” way you’re thinking.  (Though if some people are naturally thin, doesn’t it make perfect sense that other people would be naturally fat?  The bell curve alone would account for it.) 

Obesity is often a symptom of an underlying physical problem like PCOS or thyroid issues or (as was the case with me) a psychiatric problem like depression.  When I was 30 pounds overweight, I literally could not do anything about it until I had medication and therapy that helped me deal with the other issues in my life.  After I took care of my mental health, then I was able to get a handle on my physical health.

And I was lucky enough that a medication not associated with weight gain was the one that worked for me.  If you’re depressed and are prescribed one of the popular SSRIs (like Prozac), weight gain is a very common side effect.

That’s not saying that we don’t have an obesity problem in this country—I know people on here will dispute it or say it’s overblown (which it is) but we do have a genuine problem.  But there are a lot more factors that go into it (like only being able to safely exercise if you can afford a gym membership, or being stuck at your desk for 10 hours without even a lunch break, or not having any shopping areas within walking distance of your house) than all of those fatty-fat-fats downing Big Macs all day.

Neff @9, if you’re really not a troll: start here.

Are the two really equivalent?

In the sense that neither is indicative of whether this woman could do the job for which she was hired, then I think they’re equivalent.

I had been under the impression, quite possibly mistaken, genetic or hormonal issues preventing weight loss even with proper diet and exercise affected only a small minority of people.

I think that maybe if I’d been linked up with an exercise program as a kid, I could have lost the weight and kept it off as an adult. (I’m legally blind, and hated gym class because there was never an alternative program. I had to play badminton and dodge ball and all the rest of that crap, or sit out.)  Once a person grows larger, she gains additional fat cells that never go away. The cells become smaller with weight loss, but they’re always there – and there are far more of them in a once-larger person than in a person who has never been overweight.

Oh, it is possible to lose the extra pounds, but even on an altered diet paired with daily exercise, it’s much easier to gain the weight back.

When weight is used as the barometer for health, then people who try a difficult thing like losing a lot of weight and either fail at it or succeed but gain the weight back, are left to feel like losers - even though weight-loss efforts fail in the long term something like 95% of the time.

But asking someone to just not eat when they’re hungry is like telling people to just not scratch that itch or to just not sleep when they’re tired.

It’s not a moral failing, but a lot of people do eat when they’re not actually hungry.  In large part it’s because we’ve made food so emotional that most people have at least occasional bouts of emotional eating (eating for comfort, eating out of anger, etc.)  We’ve fetishized food so much that we’ve convinced ourselves that food will solve all of our problems.  That includes the people who are convinced that everyone just needs to eat the “right” food and weight will magically go away.

Telling people to just eat less and exercise more is about as effective as telling teenagers to just never have sex until marriage.

It’s actually quite common for overweight people to be eating fewer calories than their bodies actually need, so you end up with a cycle of frustration where people try to just eat less (when they’re already not eating enough) and then don’t lose weight because their bodies are already adapted to small amounts of food.  As I’ve mentioned before, I work part-time for a major weight loss company and I have at least one person every week who will not believe me when I tell them they actually need to eat more in order to lose weight.  That cultural message is so strong that they think I must be lying to them or something.

I work part-time for a major weight loss company

Thank you, I have even more reason to ignore your concern about the OOGA BOOGA OBESITY EPIDEMIC!!!!!

Wow.

I just found another reason to dislike Harry Ried.  I didn’t think I could fit any more on the wagon, but I was incorrect.

“Society totally supports these actions directed at people who are overweight. Kids lose the ability to have a childhood, go to dances, to be popular and to contribute their gifts and talents because of their struggle with weight, despite the fact that near a third of Americans are overweight. It is all about appearance, not substance.”

This, this, motherfucking this. story of my life, and now i’m having to overcome my demons and catch up.

It’s not a moral failing, but a lot of people do eat when they’re not actually hungry.

Yeah, I’ve heard this one before.  Cravings might not be “real” hunger, but they’re damn sure as strong as the real thing.  Either way, I’m getting the message from my body to do something, and it’s really difficult to just not do it.

As a side note, I recently read a a blog crying “hypocrite” that liberals “rush to defend” Reid when they would be angered by a Republican acting the same way.  I should have linked to this blog, where we call people on their shit regardless of their political label.

<blcoqkuote>I just found another reason to dislike Harry Ried.  I didn’t think I could fit any more on the wagon, but I was incorrect. </blockquote>

Ah yes. His body is a temple for the mind of a social climber who uses his public position for personal gain.

My wife went through so many issues about her weight. Only one of which was personal confidence. She is a executive VP at the firm where she works, has 20 years of seniority, and she still felt that when she would be addressing her colleagues at a meeting, they were all thinking “God, she’s fat”. It took a long time for her to lose a lot of the weight (it was causing a lot of other health issues for her). Now she is healthier and has more confidence, but I was always shocked at how much shaming she put on herself just because she assumed that everyone else was too.

I had been under the impression, quite possibly mistaken, genetic or hormonal issues preventing weight loss even with proper diet and exercise affected only a small minority of people.

So what if most people aren’t literally incapable of losing weight?  Most thin people don’t have a “proper” diet or exercise “enough”, either.  They probably think they do, because they’re thin, so they must be doing something right, right?  But they’re not.  If they had my genes and upbringing, they’d be fat like me.  Sure, I could exercise my butt off and lose the weight, but my failure to do so does not make me a worse person than anyone else in this country who doesn’t hit the gym 6 hours a week and count calories, just because you can see the evidence of my lifestyle on my body.

My bro in law and one of my closest friends were both college football linemen, really big guys. Bro in law played the o line at 6-5 and 300 lbs, my pal played at 6-4 280. Both were huge when they were young, almost as big in high school as college. In college they put on muscle weight and less fat. 25 years later, my bro in law does moderate exercise (walking a couple of miles a day) eats a balanced diet and 25 years later weighs in at 255. My pal never stopped eating like he did when he was playing football and has put on 200 lbs! I love the guy, he is smart, fun to be with and Mrs J thinks the world of him, but he is killing himself. Pal stayed with us last year and he could barely get up the stairs. Never the less, he’ll go out to dinner and eat the biggest porterhouse on the menu, full order of au gratin potatoes, asparagus with cheese sauce, drink a bottle of wine and finish it off with death by chocolate and all through dinner he’ll talk about having to lose some weight…he is fucking nuts! By the way, the moron had a massive stroke a few months ago. I visited him in the rehab hospital, the Dr told him if he didn’t lose 100 lbs in the next 12 months, his stroke was only the trailer for the main feature that would be coming soon. Hopefully he is scared shitless about what he has done to himself!

“Sure, I could exercise my butt off and lose the weight, but my failure to do so does not make me a worse person than anyone else in this country who doesn’t hit the gym 6 hours a week and count calories, just because you can see the evidence of my lifestyle on my body.”

Word.

the Dr told him if he didn’t lose 100 lbs in the next 12 months,

Did the doctor tell him how to loose 100 pounds in 12 months?  Clearly this guy has a big appetite for whatever reason, and it’s a bit impractical to advise that he just ignore his hunger.

I have been obese since 1984 due to the unbelievable stress I endured at a new job—I piled it on very, very quickly, and over the years I’ve noticed that people have NO idea how much stress is a factor in weight gain for some people. I haven’t been able to take the weight off until now since following conventional wisdom about calories in/out is not only useless, it may aggravate the problem for those who are insulin resistant. I am now eating more and exercising less. Yes, Michael Thurmond’s infomercial is right and no, I’m not using his program.

I eat six times a day, and I exercise with a very specific program once a week, yes, that’s right, once a week.

Being able to do this now, because I no longer follow conventional wisdom, really brings into glaring relief the feelings of failure, the idea of being constantly judged, of being thought of as lacking character. None of those things were necessary or true of me or other obese people.

Related to my recent ability to slim down, the following video explains the glucose and fructose pathways in the human endocrine system. Dr Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist doing pediatric work at UCSF, gives a thorough explanation of why we are having an obesity explosion in this country.

Sugar, the Bitter Truth. Dr Lustig lecture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

I’ve been trying to post this info at Hullabaloo on tristero’s post on HFCS, but comments aren’t working. According to the video both HFCS and table sugar are both toxins—we need to stop ingesting both.

By the way, the moron had a massive stroke a few months ago

Well, at least he’s lucky enough to have genuine friends like you to support him through the tough times. Fuck’s sake.

catgirl

He’ll be in rehab for at least 2 more months, close to 6 months total since the left side of his body was nearly useless. (slowly coming back) They’ve got him on a strict diet and physical therapy regime and have knocked close to 45lbs off him in slightly over 60 days. They had him on 800 calories in the beginning and have moved it up to 1200. He told the Doc he was really hungry and the Doc laughed and told him to live with it because if he didn’t he’d be dead, he is living with it! The Doc thinks if he can get used to eating less during his rehab that with counseling and this stroke scare he could get control of himself again. He has given up alot of things he loved for food, saltwater fly fishing (too big for the boat) his sports car (too big for the Porsche) his fiancee from 10 years back (too big to get on top, I suspect) nice clothes, etc. All of his friends are pulling for him to get his shit together, because we want our friend back and healthy! The doc told him his target weight is 260 over the next three years, as he loses weight he’ll be able to exercise again and that will help. Three or 4 of us are going to stay on his ass and get him going again, this has been a big wake up call for all of his pals!

Did the doctor tell him how to loose 100 pounds in 12 months?

I’m guessing no.  I have a friend who is a cancer survivor who put on a lot of excess weight during her recovery (almost 5-years cancer-free now), and she gets the ‘you need to lose weight’ lecture from her doctors all the time—but never a nickel’s worth of advice as to how to make it happen.  Her thyroid was rendered inactive by radiation; her immune system is compromised, making it hard to stay healthy for any significant length of time and she suffers from PTSD symptoms from her treatment and these idiots still think shaming is going to accomplish something.  She gets scolding without support and can’t lose the weight even if she wants to.  Wonder why.

Allow me to translate for Jager:

ZOMG! THIS TOTALLY HAPPENED TO THIS GUY I KNOW SO ALL YOU FATTIES ARE GOING TO ZOMG DIE!!!!!!!!!  TOTALLY!!!!!!

With of course no mention of whether this guy has a history of high blood pressure, stroke or heart disease in his family.  No mention of whether or not he has a high stress job.  Is the rest of his family prone to obesity?  If so, are the rest of them actually doing fine?

And of course, it sounds like the Doc isn’t taking into consideration that there might be an underlying cause for this guy’s massive hunger, because fatties are just fat fat fat because they’re all lazy, stupid, smelly morons who don’t know any better, right Jager?  Yeah.  The guy needs a doctor who will look at WHAT his body is asking for when it’s driving him to such lengths of hunger, not just tell him to get used to it.  The fuck?  Seriously? 

That’s one thing I really hate about our medical system, they don’t WANT to look for actual underlying causes, but would rather just call patients hysterical, non-compliant or diagnose some ethereal syndrome that allows them to treat symptoms but look no further for the whys. 

It always cracks me up when I go to my doctor for my yearly check up.  Every year we get the blood draw and before she looks at the results she starts in with the “Your weight is going to give you diabetes, here’s your blood sug…ar… Oh, it’s perfect.  Um, well your blood pressure is… um, low.  Ok, but your cholesterol… is also low.”  Usually I smile winningly at her and say, “So, um, how would you characterize my numbers again?  Perfect, you say?  Yes, I’m definitely dying any second now.” 

I’m happy with myself for the first time in my life.  After years of an eating disorder where malnutrition left me susceptible to every illness that came along, and made me crazy, yet even while my doctor was threatening to hospitalize me for malnutrition, people kept telling me I was fat. 
Sigh.

Sour Kraut, see #36

My bro in law and my friend probably have an advantage since they were highly skilled athletes at one time in their lives. When I first met my stroke victim friend he weighed around 315, we used to play raquet ball and at that weight he was quick as a cat even with his size 15 feet…triple wides! My nephew was a div 1 tight end and played at 6-5 260, he was offered a free agent contract and flunked the physical because of a shoulder problem. His coach told him to start an aerobic exercise program and lift lighter weights with higher reps and get rid of the football bulk, three years later he weighs 225!

Thank you, I have even more reason to ignore your concern about the OOGA BOOGA OBESITY EPIDEMIC!!!!!

Be my guest, but sticking your head in the sand isn’t going to do jack shit for the skyrocketing rate of type II diabetes.  But, hey, ignoring the facts will make you feel self-righteous, and what’s more important than that?

Wow, so the doctor really did just tell the guy to ignore his hunger.  He’s not only stupid, but cruel too.  Please tell me the name of this doctor so I can make sure to avoid him/her.  If any person told me to just “get used” to being constantly hungry, I’d laugh at them.

I love the guy, he is smart, fun to be with and Mrs J thinks the world of him, but he is killing himself.

Well, Jager, aren’t we all? My freckled, red-haired boyfriend has spent his life outdoors—without sunscreen—and still doesn’t wear it. I have a cigarette now and again. We sometimes go for a week without eating any vegetables, and we’ve been known to toss back a few. But we’re not overweight, so our bad health habits aren’t immediately apparent or subject to condescending comments by our “friends.”

Nobody here is denying that obesity can increase risks for certain diseases.  But we shouldn’t have to choose between death and constant hunger.  Medicine is about quality of life, not just length of it.  How much quality of life can you have if you’re constantly starving?  What about a case where someone has constant pain but they take a risky drug to reduce the pain?  Should we tell them to just get used to the pain or else they’ll die?  Or should we work to find a way to reduce pain with less risk to them?  What we really need is a safe, effective way to control hunger without eating, but then it becomes a moral issue with some people acting like it’s cheating, some people arguing that people who can’t do it the “right” way don’t deserve help or even life, and others putting up a straw man argument assuming that I don’t think obesity has any risks.  Let’s get rid of the moralizing and focus on helping people to be truly healthy without being constantly hungry.

“ZOMG! THIS TOTALLY HAPPENED TO THIS GUY I KNOW SO ALL YOU FATTIES ARE GOING TO ZOMG DIE!!!!!!!!!  TOTALLY!!!!!! “

With a none to subtle side helping of ableist shaming.  He’s nuts! and Crazy! and a Moron! 

What a great friend he’s got in jager. 

And clearly, Nat’s not the only person who needs to start here: http://kateharding.net/faq/

Binge eating disorder is twice as prevalent as anorexia and bulimia combined.  And yet we’re supposed to be desperately concerned as a society about anorexia/bulimia but we’re supposed to completely ignore any signs of an eating disorder in someone who’s overweight because being fat is totally normal.

Sorry, but Jaeger’s friend doesn’t sound like a normal fat person.  He sounds like someone with an eating disorder.  Pretending that binge eating disorders and compulsive eating don’t exist doesn’t do anyone any favors.

GreekGirlsRule:

My friend continued to eat like he was playing college football at a high level. (in Div 1 it is a year around highly regimented activity) When he stopped playing and burning up all those calories everyday in the weight room, running, etc. He kept on eating like he was still in training and he kept on doing it for 25 years, the more weight he gained, the less he did. When I first met him he was a monster raquet ball player, the next year he was slower and fatter, pretty soon he didn’t play anymore! This isn’t uncommon with athletes. I love the guy, but he didn’t have any underlying reasons for this to happen, he did it to himself! All of the additional problems that come with a 200lb weight gain were from the extra weight not from anything that was physically wrong prior to his weight gain. He was a big baby, a big kid, a big high schooler and a big, physically gifted college football player, when he was playing he ate 6000 calories a day and burned 6…when he stopped he ate 6000 calories a day and burned 3. Figure it out.

Thin does not equal healthy, or anorexics would be the healthiest people on the planet.

Poverty contributes to obesity, especially in the United States, because the cheapest food is the most highly processed, salt-laden, and fat-laden.  How many of you could eat all the fresh fruits and vegetables you’re supposed to if you only had $50 a week to spend on groceries?  Provided, of course, you live in a place where the stores you can get to actually *carry* fresh fruits and vegetables.

Were you aware that a 1,000-calories-a-day diet is officially considered not “torture” because people do it voluntarily all the time in the United States?  But according to studies that were done post-WWII, 1,000-calories-a-day is starvation level.  http://kateharding.net/2009/04/21/1000-calories-a-day-officially-not-torture/

How many of us starve and starve and starve ourselves, trying so desperately to be thin, only to end up fat and malnourished?

The fact remains that we must eat or die.

Eat.  Or.  Die.

There is no getting around that. 

Eat.  Or.  Die.

If she was in a wheelchair, would you oppose it because she wasn’t able-bodied?

Fuck off.

If someone is in a wheelchair, it’s either from birth defects or an accident & not from poor eating/exercise habits, period.  Unfortunately, these disingenuous false parallels are par-for-the-course when you have to deal with the cretins in the Fat-Earth Society (the ones who insist on the lunacy that one’s obesity can be clocking in @ 150+/kg [330lbs], yet be in perfect health), along with rhetorical cudgelling, emotional blackmail, etc.  A particularly sharp example of all the greasy underhanded BS that goes on w/ the Fat-Earthers is this post from Majikthise (http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2007/12/obama-on-obesit.html).  My “favourite” part in the thread is when the Fat-Earth Society Goon Squad impugn Lindsay Beyerstein’s feminism because she makes her case quite clearly & points out the flaws in their argument & refuses to cave in to their bullying.

Do I think fat people ought to be pilloried?  Of course not.  I’ve been overweight myself for years & during that time I FUCKING HATED EVERY GODDAMN SECOND OF IT.  It wasn’t just the body-images issues but also the fact that I felt UTTERLY POWERLESS to make any kind of change for the better.  I had a painfully sore back (overextension of the lumbar vertebrae from all that extra girth they were lugging around), suffered from sleep apnoea, all the rest of it.  As of October 2008 I promised myself that I’d loose this shit.  Yeah, it’s taken work, money, time, focus, concentration & all the rest of it, but I sleep far better in one night the whole time I was overweight, & thanks to loosing the girth & a double dose of yoga (morning & evening), my back doesn’t hurt anymore.  & I simply cannot describe the sweet feeling I had when I walked out of the Mark’s Work Wearhouse earlier this month in a pair of jeans w/ a 28” waist w/ my shirt actually tucked into them.  The air outside on 4th Ave?  “It smelt like…victory.”

If Harry Reid is being power-tool fat bigot, then he deserved to be called out on it, & more power to those who do so.  But this Fat-Earth bullshit has go to stop.  Fat people are not being forced to wear yellow stars & herded into concentration camps, not being forced into internment camps while their goods are sold off for doughnuts on the dollar, not being grabbed off the street & forcibly “repatriated” off to Mexico.  The notion that one can be morbidly obese & suffer no ill health & there is no obesity epidemic is of the same brand of wilful stupidity that’s been grown from the same Meme of Denial that gave us such winners as There Is No Such Thing As Global Warming & Iraq Has WMDs & Was Behind 9/11.

If I’m thrilled to hear that Pam’s lost weight, it’s because a) I’ve been there myself & know how good it feels & b) I want progressives like her to be around & rhetorically kicking ass & taking names long after worms like Hannity, Limbaugh, G.Beck, etc. have gone the way of the Dodo.

As a side note, I recently read a a blog crying “hypocrite” that liberals “rush to defend” Reid when they would be angered by a Republican acting the same way.  I should have linked to this blog, where we call people on their shit regardless of their political label.

I honestly and truly believe I am not a hypocrite when I say I don’t think I would want a Republican to lose his job* over a comment identical to Reid, nor do I think it was nearly as offensive as Trent Lott’s retroactive endorsement of segregation, which the Republicans are comparing to, an analogy I find absurd.

That said, the above quoted stuff does make Reid seem like a weird guy, and I kinda like Amanda’s “mandatory retirement age” notion.

*I don’t think Republicans should ever have jobs

Sorry, but Jaeger’s friend doesn’t sound like a normal fat person.  He sounds like someone with an eating disorder.

So should we just tell the man to get over it and eat less?  Is it really helpful to tell him to get used to being hungry?  That doesn’t seem like a good idea for treating a real disorder.  Would you tell an anorexic to just get used to eating more?  If this man had a real disorder, then he needs counseling for it, not just some doctor to tell him to get used to being hungry constantly.

Be my guest, but sticking your head in the sand isn’t going to do jack shit for the skyrocketing rate of type II diabetes.

I’m sorry, but the medical fat-shaming starts WAY before any plausible risk of diabetes arises. I have never been so speechless as I was when my doctor tried to convince me that I ought to lose “about 5 to 10 lbs” for health reasons.

What possible medical condition is correlated to weight gain of 5-10 lbs? Just the condition of being Less Than Optimally Fuckable for a 25 year old woman.

If someone is in a wheelchair, it’s either from birth defects or an accident & not from poor eating/exercise habits, period.

Ok, we’ve encountered a person who fails at basic math, so I’ll go through this again.  One pound of fat contains 3,500 calories.  So for a healthy person to become 10 pounds overweight in 10 years, they’ll need to consume and extra 35,000 calories, or 3,500 calories per year.  Let’s divide that by the number of weeks in a year: 3,500/52=67.3 extra calories per week.  That means that a “healthy” 25 year-old can become overwheight by 35 by eating one extra medium apple per week.  If you consider eating apples to be a bad habit, then you’re the one who needs to fuck off.  Math is your friend.

It’s worth noting that this obsession with thinness over health is taken to ridiculous extremes. I know more than one cancer patient who was complimented on their weight loss, and when I lost 15 pounds my first two trimesters with my first child because I threw up five times a day, other women were openly envious. Of my losing 15 pounds while pregnant. Even when we’re supposed to gain weight, I got compliments for being so clever as to lose weight instead.

By the way, the moron had a massive stroke a few months ago. I visited him in the rehab hospital

LOL! Un-fucking-believable. I’m sure your friendship means a lot to him.

Shorter catgirl: “Laaa laaa laaa laaa can’t heaaaaaaar you.”

One of the most outrageous aspects of the “don’t you know you’re fat” crowd is that they are yelling at people who almost universally agree with their attackers. Fat people don’t simply already know they are fat. Virtually all of them already HATE themselves for being fat. Yet there is is this confidence among fat bigots that any fat person they see must be either in denial or an idiot and thus it makes sense to to bully them. Its a product of our culture which professes that weight loss is easy or at least attainable. This lies in stark contrast with the facts, though.

While fat bigotry is wrong no matter what, I don’t think we stand to make progress by agreeing with the purpose of the bigotry and quibbling only about the nature of it. I feel that is the approach being made by Mixner and others in this thread who have adopted the “I’m gonna lose weight. I swear. Because it really is bad” line while complaining about fat discrimination. Its telling the discriminators that their heart is in the right place, but their methods aren’t. Frankly, both are dangerously wrong and I fear they are intrinsically linked. It might be nice for some to think we could create a culture that didn’t “discriminate” against fat people while still not tolerating them, but I don’t think that’s possible. Fat can’t be wrong but also not okay to treat like its wrong. People really need to understand how completely unproductive fat hate has been. This has been the only treatment of fat people for decades. It hasn’t made fat people happier, healthier, or even weigh less.

I think this thread ultimately really demonstrates what fuels this attitude. “Well, at least don’t discriminate against me” isn’t going to get us anywhere. Just look at the unrelentingly hostile treatment that inspires. This in response to a person (Mixner) who professes to agree with the substance of their position that fat is bad. Trying to play by their rules doesn’t work. They’ll still foam at the mouth about the skyrocketing death fatties. OMG! WTF! LOL! As long as they think they are righteous in being intolerant of fat, they will think any manifestation of that intolerance is justified. Including social and cultural discrimination. We need to get that they think discrimination is a tool. A means to an end. We have to stop quibbling with the means, and take on the end. A lot of people are doing that and while I’m glad that Mixner believes the discrimination and bigotry he is treated with is wrong, I would still challenge him and others like him to question the foundations of that bigotry, not merely its facade.

If this man had a real disorder, then he needs counseling for it, not just some doctor to tell him to get used to being hungry constantly.

Yes, that’s what I’m saying.  Binge eating is a real disorder.  So is compulsive eating.  But we’re so tied up in the notion of whether fatness is/is not a moral issue that no one on either side can see that there are some people out there who need serious mental health treatment.  As I’ve said before, obesity is more often a symptom or side effect of an underlying problem than a problem in itself, and one of those underlying problems can be a mental health issue.

I mean, I guess I could be the only person in the history of the world who gained weight when I had untreated clinical depression and was able to eat better and exercise after a few years of therapy and medication.  I doubt it, but I’m open to the possibility.  So, yes, I agree with you that Jaeger’s friend’s doctor is a moron because he’s trying to treat the symptoms of his patient’s problem without treating the problem itself.

If you were in unbearable pain and all your doctor did was give you pain medication, wouldn’t you ask him/her to look for an underlying cause?

Great piece, Pam.  Though I’ve never been particularly overweight, there’s always been something that has bothered me about people’s quickness to attack their ideological opponents by bringing up their weight, especially the fact that it’s one of society’s few prejudices that seems to be perfectly acceptable regardless of where one’s political beliefs lie.

If a progressive attacks someone like Sarah Palin in blatantly misogynistic terms, we would quickly call them out for it.

If a progressive attacks someone like Michael Steele in racist terms, we would quickly call them out for it.

But I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen people like Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes attacked in ways which explicitly make their weight a part of the insult.  Both of these men are despicable and vile creatures.  I get the desire to want to point out the things about them which our society shames so many others for with impunity.

But can we not focus our criticism on the Limbaughs and the Ailes of the world by talking about what despicable people they are because of how they act, and not how they look?  Read any progressive blog that brings up any number of hateful things these men say, and it’s inevitable that at some point in the comments someone will make some fat joke referencing Jabba the Hut.

And I’d be lying if I said I’ve never laughed at any of this or never crossed that line and made similar jokes myself.  But the more aware of my own privilege I become, the more I realize how shallow and empty these types of insults are, regardless of who the target is.

This isn’t a defense of either of those vile people.  This is merely pointing out the fact that one of the last acceptable “-isms” left in all circles in America is the belittling of others based on their weight.  And while you might be hesitant to make a fat joke about one of your ideological allies, are you really very evolved in your thinking if you give yourself permission to make fat jokes about others so long as they are an ideological foe?  Would you be as comfortable making a patently misogynist joke against Sarah Palin?  Or a racist joke against Michael Steele?

We all need to check ourselves.  Disco Ball knows I used to think it was cool to make fat jokes about the Limbaughs of the world.  There’s ten million things about Rush Limbaugh which are fair ground to make fun of him for… his weight doesn’t have to be one of them.

Fuck off.

If someone is in a wheelchair, it’s either from birth defects or an accident & not from poor eating/exercise habits, period.

It doesn’t matter: it’s still discrimination if someone with poorer qualifications is hired over the objectively better candidate, in an act of anti-fat discrimination, for a job where weight wouldn’t affect performance.

Disability is a great parallel, whether you’re willing to except that anti-discrimination laws should extend beyond “innocent conditions of being” or not. (If you think about it, someone disabled in a drunk-driving accident he himself caused could end up on the receiving end of discrimination similar to that faced by a fat person - because, while his disability is immutable, it’s not “innocent.”)

WHOOPS: “...willing to ‘accept’ not ‘except’.”

Ah, yes, Mnem. Waggle that finger a little harder, just like you waggled it at those of us who don’t want to hang out with people just because we share DNA with them. Who said all prissy, pious church ladies were conservative?

You’re not worth debating, especially when other people with more patience than I have are already doing such a great job. Neither is StupidPatrol, with his or her scarcely disguised hostility toward the fat.

If you were in unbearable pain and all your doctor did was give you pain medication, wouldn’t you ask him/her to look for an underlying cause?

If I was in unbearable pain and all my doctor did was give me a drug proven not to work that was designed to change my hair color, I’d wonder why the heck he was ignoring my pain.  THAT is how the medical establishment treats fat people. No disease is found exclusively in fat people, yet the only treatment option most fat people are given for almost anything is to lose weight. But weight loss has never been shown to be achievable on a reliable basis OR even help matters when it does. But we don’t get to really be sick until we aren’t fat. Until then, we’re just fat.

Jager, you love the guy, but he’s a moron who gave himself a stroke?  With friends like you, who needs enemas?

But seriously, you don’t know there’s no underlying cause.  It could be that there is an underlying problem and has always been, but when he was really active he burned through the calories accompanying his body’s appetite.  Now that he doesn’t, the problem shows up as a problem. 

The fact that his hunger level isn’t adjusting to the new diet, and that when he became less active after his youthful activity levels waned his appetite didn’t chill out as well, leads me to believe that there IS an issue that isn’t being addressed. And as long as he’s feeling continuously hungry, he’s going to keep falling off the diet wagon, and will not keep the weight off.  Even if he does manage to lose some, he will eventually gain it all back with friends.  His doctor needs to figure this shit out, not just say, “Oh well, you’re fat, suffer.” 

(btw most people’s metabolisms slow as they get older, leading to weight gain)

And I was lucky enough that a medication not associated with weight gain was the one that worked for me.  If you’re depressed and are prescribed one of the popular SSRIs (like Prozac), weight gain is a very common side effect.

Once a person grows larger, she gains additional fat cells that never go away. The cells become smaller with weight loss, but they’re always there – and there are far more of them in a once-larger person than in a person who has never been overweight.

Oh, it is possible to lose the extra pounds, but even on an altered diet paired with daily exercise, it’s much easier to gain the weight back.

qft. I was put on meds with a weight gain side effect when I was 16… and have been yo-yoing my weight ever since* (not always or even often intentionally, generally caused by being on or off of SSRIs or BCPs)

maybe it’s genes, maybe it’s mental state, maybe it’s just how you’re going to be this go ‘round the wheel… but it’d be way easier to come to grips with yourself and your own body if there wasn’t a greek chorus constantly in the background making comments and judgements 24/7.

*of course once those fat storage cells have been created the only way to get rid of them is liposuction, and I’m sure people remember the comments about optional surgeries from a few weeks back… you’re damned either way really…

I’m still stuck back where Smartpatrol congratulated Pam losing weight due to chronic illness.  Empathy fail or just reading comprehension fail?

If someone is in a wheelchair, it’s either from birth defects or an accident & not from poor eating/exercise habits, period.

Herein lies the problem with trying to reason with fat hatred. Because ultimately, they feel discrimination is justified because we deserve it. This is a clear illustration of that attitude. They will never see their bigotry as wrong so long as they believe that the underlying attitudes are right. “Yeah, but discrimination is wrong” does not address the causes of their bigotry and thus will not yield progress. The underlying attitudes need to be confronted directly. And we need to get that this is a VERY long-term project because our culture makes this hatred so self-righteous that it will not be easy to overturn it. Thus inspiring this absurd notion that they are fighting against a powerful foe by coming up with nonsense terms like “Fat Earters” or those who think of fat liberation as something akin to the Tobacco industry. In truth, the advocates are scarce, poorly organized, and terribly marginalized. But I guess it makes the fat bigotry seem more noble to imagine a more grand opponent when in truth its fat hatred that enjoys the stale dominance of status quo of “common knowledge”.

I started playing hockey when I was 4 years old, in high school I played at 6-1 185, played club hockey in college and stayed about the same (even taking in consideration all the beer I drank) I continued to play until I was 36 and was never over 200 lbs. I got promoted in my job (more money, longer hours and lots of travel) and stopped playing. In one year I gained 30 lbs, you know why? I didn’t have an eating disorder, I didn’t have any physical ailments, I stopped burning calories. My doc told me something profoundly simple: Imagine if your car had a 20 gallon rubber gas tank and no matter how little you drove you put 20 gallons of gas in it everyday, the tank would get bigger and bigger and soon it would lift the back wheels off the ground! He told me I had a choice; cut the calorie intake or burn them off again, because if I didn’t I was a candidate for high blood pressure, diabetes, etc, etc, etc. I started going to the gym the next day after work, one hour 3 times a week, 15 minute warm up on the stationary bike, high rep, low weight, high speed circuit training for 20 minutes and another 15 on the bike…goal was to stay at 80% max heart rate for most of the hour, yeah I hated it, I hated not going for a drink with my cohorts at work, too! But you know what within months, I felt better, looked better, was better at my job. 6 months later I had lost 25 lbs and I was down to 15% body fat. One of the guys I got to know at the gym was 65 at the time and from across the room he looked like he was in his 30’s…he told me he had knocked close to 70lbs off in the past couple of years. He told me that he was simply tired of feeling old, worn out and fat. If you have no physical abnormalities, you need to do something that burns calories, walk alittle everyday, do yoga, do something, other wise you are going to kill yourself.
I’d be a really good friend if I just patted my pal on the shoulder, handed him a Big Mac with super sized fries (his normal mid afternoon snack) or his regular 10lbs of food from the chinese buffet and told him I understood his “eating disorder” wouldn’t I?

Wait, they had a guy 6’4” on a diet of 800 calories per day?  Sorry but slowly starving someone to death is attempted murder, not medical care.  That amount of calories is not enough for any adult body to be healthy.

His doctor is a sadist and so are you, Jager.

Jesus Jager. I have never seen someone not get it so often, and at such astonishing length.

I’d be a really good friend if I just patted my pal on the shoulder, handed him a Big Mac with super sized fries (his normal mid afternoon snack) or his regular 10lbs of food from the chinese buffet and told him I understood his “eating disorder” wouldn’t I?

Nope. I’m afraid you’d still be an asshole.

My sister and I heard a radio program this weekend about the national obesity crisis. Last night, on NPR, I heard yet another interview with an expert about this issue. Both compared obesity with smoking, related to societal efforts to curb smoking, which actually worked, and trying to use those same things with obesity. The NPR person last night made a comment about making some kind of add campaign about the dangers of obesity, which struck me as the most idiotic thing someone could ever think of. It is very likely that the NPR person has never been fat and has never been closely involved with an overweight person (at least, I hope so) because clearly, s/he (I can’t remember) has no clue that if you are overweight, especially if you are obese, you fucking KNOW the “dangers”. You KNOW the stigma, the decreased movement, and plenty of other stuff that no media campaign could ever truly impress to someone. What those people might not know are the specific health risks - like diabetes or hypertension - but NO ONE knows more about how awful it is to be obese than an actual obese person.

My BMI says that I am obese, and I gained weight last year, even though I thought that I was doing everything right. Much to my relief, I wasn’t doing everything right, because I had been eating way too much sugar. Now that I know that, I realized that cutting back on sugar while eating a fairly normal American diet is impossible (even on an altered diet trying to avoid most processed foods, it is hard).

Both radio programs touched on environmental factors for obesity in America, but they did not really pinpoint what I see as the main problem, which is that almost all of the food available to us that is in a box or a can of some sort is loaded up with sugar and high fructose corn syrup (which despite being like sugar is not actually sugar, and our bodies have not evolved to process it - the same can be said for artificial sweeteners). So until we completely overhaul our food supply (and yes, shut down a lot of companies and mess with that part of the economy), we’re going to get fatter (and we cannot sacrifice the mighty economy just to make us healthier, that would mean that people would lose money!). Think of our future as the spaceship in Wall-E.

Hey, Jager?  That thing thing David Mixner said people do to fat people to discount their humanity?  You’re doing it.

The previous generation of my family on my mother’s side was morbidly obese, without the aid of sugar or HFCS (which definitely DO play a role in the current increase in overall weight).  It’s due to genetics, thyroid issues, trauma, stress and god knows what else in their lives to which I was not privvy.  But a lifetime of dieting and hating themselves - aided and abetted by everyone around them judging them for habits in which they did NOT engage - did not change a damned thing about their physicality.  I am currently overweight (hell, I may be obese - I neither know nor care) and I eat a balanced diet heavy on veggies and fresh fruit, never eat fast food (it makes me ill), exercise frequently, have good blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, etc.  My children eat the same amount of food.  The older boy is sedentary and rail thin (as his father was).  The younger one is athletic and active and round (much like his mother).  So yes, sometimes it is your genetic makeup that determines what your body looks like.  People accept that with thin folks, but fat people must be totally to blame for how they look because some guy you know overeats (for whatever reason).  Christ on a cracker, that failure of logic pisses me off.

Also,  Nobody in Particular - way to miss what Mnemosyne was saying - that the hue and cry for fat people to stop eating so much is erroneous in its assumptions and also ineffective as a prescription for weight loss.  She is absolutely right that failure to eat enough will lead to weight GAIN, because the body goes into siege mode and refuses to let go of anything it might need to stave off famine.  This is why the whole “eat less, exercise more” thing is deceptive and often ineffective.  When you exercise heavily, you have to fuel the body or you’ll get hurt. 

There are ways to effect permanent change, but you pretty much have to be willing to devote your life to that - assuming you have the time, money, resources, and are not disabled or ill.  That’s a whole lot of assumptions there.

This is starting to remind me of that (apocryphal?) Churchill quote. “Madam, tomorrow I’ll be sober, but you’ll still be ugly,” and whatnot.

So calling him a “moron” makes you a better friend?

Listen, I have news for you.  Your friend?  He knows he’s fat.  He knew he was fat before the stroke, and he probably hated himself for it even more than you could hate him for it.  Trust me.  FAT PEOPLE KNOW THEY ARE FAT.  And I’m going to wager in spite of your insistence that he has continually eaten like he did in high school that he’s probably tried a number of diets, probably secretly, since until very recently dieting was seen as something women did, and therefore effeminate.  In some areas of the country it still is.  The problem with dieting secretly is that you have to eat like you always did in front of the people you don’t want to know you’re dieting, or they’ll know you’re dieting. 

The culture you’ve described sounds very macho, and I wouldn’t doubt at all that he wouldn’t want you to know if he was dieting. 

You still haven’t answered my questions about his family history?  What’s the rest of his family look like?  What’s their history with stroke, high blood pressure and heart disease?  How are they, healthwise?

And what about those of us who do walk everywhere, work out, do yoga, bellydance, bike, go dancing on weekends and dance until we’re soaked with sweat and have outlasted people ten years younger and fifty pounds lighter on the dance floor?  Those of us who eat far less than most of our thinner friends?  Without quitting my job and making working out my profession, I’m not getting any thinner.  That’s it. My numbers (blood sugar, etc…) are all perfect, but I’m fat.  My major health issues are asthma (diagnosed when I was a string bean of a child) and the damage I did to my knees when I used to start out my day with a two mile run, and years of soccer. 

This may not be the case for your “friend,” there may or may not be an underlying cause, though I suspect there is a heretofore undetected cause, but all fat people are not your friend, and you’re extrapolating your view of him onto all of us. 

“Oh, I know this fat guy who I think has done this to himself, ergo all fat people are just lazy, lard-swilling morons who eat donuts by the bucket and mainline high fructose corn syrup.”  THAT’S what we are objecting to, primarily.  That and the fact that you refuse to even entertain the idea that yeah, maybe there really is something wrong with your friend that he should get checked out to find why he’s so fucking hungry all the time, whether it’s physical or mental, it needs to be fixed, not ignored and treated as penance for his fatty fatty fatness. 

People don’t come with health stats floating over their heads like in a videogame, you don’t know if they’re “good” fatties who are active and eat right or “bad” fatties who don’t.  You just don’t know, so here’s a novel fucking concept:  Treat all people as human beings regardless of weight (or race, age, gender, disability, nationality, etc…).

Uh. That was supposed to come right after Devil’s post. Meaning: Jager’s friend might eventually get to the bottom of his issue—but Jager will still be clueless.

I guess his Doc is a sadist and I’m an asshole, but its working. Any of you know what its like to weigh almost 500 lbs like my friend? He had so much fat on him that if he needed a simple operation they probably couldn’t do it. Along with the blood thinners, the vitamins and other things they were pumping into him, he needed to start burning that fat off and fast, the best way; starve him a little. Sounds shitty and it is really uncomfortable but it works. Once they got him stabilized from his stroke, they monitored him and started rehab twice a day, exercising him, getting his heart rate up, as he improved they have slowly brought his caloric intake up. Once they got him on his feet and walking again, they raised it some more, as he has progressed he gets more calories and more exercise. He has a damn good Doc and sure he is a bit of a smartass to my friend. Example, during one of my visits, my buddy says to the Doc, “you’re killin me, man”. The Doc says, “yeah and you’re paying for it”! Its called guy talk, for christ’s sake!

Jager, WTF is your point?  Should my friend be hospitalized full time and put on a starvation diet?  Even if it would work, do you have any idea how much that would cost?  She already owes a mountain of cash to the hospital for her cancer treatments.  And I explained that she doesn’t have a normal physiology anymore.  Shaming the depressed and traumatized is stupid and cruel.  Her doctors need to figure out what works for her, not strap her her to a gurney for a good biochemical bullying.

Hey, we’ve got a “500lbs!” We’re well on our way to BINGO.

If someone is in a wheelchair, it’s either from birth defects or an accident & not from poor eating/exercise habits, period.

Hm, you think that no one has ever ended up in a wheelchair due to being too heavy to walk, or due to health problems supposedly caused by obesity?  Also, getting in a tragic car accident due to being hit by a drunk driver or being born without legs aren’t the only reasons people need wheelchairs.  I read an essay by a person who has autism and sometimes uses a wheelchair to get around because walking can become too overwhelming.  This person doesn’t have a “birth defect” at all.

Would it be OK to discriminate against the person in a wheelchair if that person got that way because he or she had a car accident that was their fault?  Or is it eating/exercising habits that are the only ones that are OK to discriminate against?

I’m an asshole, but its working.

Not a single thing you have done would contribute to your “friend’s” weight-loss. You can pat yourself on the back for being a douchebag, but that doesn’t change the essentially useless nature of your “help.” Medical intervention might have helped, but you haven’t.

Any of you know what its like to weigh almost 500 lbs like my friend?

What “friend”? The one you called a moron? The one you’re treating as an object lesson?

Why the hell are you asking us to empathize with him when you can’t?

#72 Ursula, you’re almost right. Both sucrose(table sugar) and HFCS(high fructose corn syrup) break down into two basic “oses” glucose and fructose. Glucose is the one that spikes insulin, and fructose goes directly to the liver. It doesn’t spike insulin so some “health experts” have touted it as not being harmful, and they couldn’t be more wrong. The same kind of harm to the liver that one sees from ethanol use is the same kind of harm one sees with fructose. There has been a sharp increase in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease since the increased use of HFCS in American food products.

#53 catgirl, it just doesn’t work that way. Weight gain is hormonal and for many, insulin resistance, which means being resistant to a hormone, is a major factor. The youtube video that I linked to at #34 explains both processes far, far better than I can. catgirl I am losing weight on a lot more calories—some days I just can’t eat everything! I will be having two dinners today, one at 4:30 and one at 8:00. While I won’t tell you what my weight goals or current weight are, I will tell you that I’ve lost 4 inches off my waist since October on MORE CALORIES.

Please take a look at the video—it’ very near the beginning that Dr Lustig explains why calories in isn’t really the problem.

You people are nuts! My friend took a healthy, big, wide body, with top notch reflexes (as I said previously, quick as a cat) and ate himself into poor health. Yes, he dieted, he bitched about being fat, bemoaned his weight gain, damn near cried when sold his Porsche when he couldn’t fit into it anymore. I’ve listened to his bullshit about his weight since I’ve known him. He went to a psychologist and the bottom line was after a year of counseling; stop eating so damn much. He told me that the counselor said its like being an alcoholic and the first step is to stop drinking, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He went meetings with people like himself, he did everything thing except stop. When he had his stroke they had to take extraordinary measures to get him stabilized and save his life…it did and it scared the shit out of him, hopefully enough to get him to stop. He already feels better than he has in a long time and even with the damage the stroke has caused, he breathes better and has more energy than he has had in years. He is getting used to eating a whole lot less food and he’ll probably be hungry the rest of his life but he’ll be alive. I talked with him the other day and he told me he was going to kick my ass in raquet ball again! I can’t wait. I may be an asshole but I’m not an enabler. And yes, he thankfully has good insurance, still costing him a pile of money, though! BTW, another asshole friend of his and I are taking care of his engineering firm for him while he is recovering, were doing it because we are such pricks and we think he is a moron!

I was just thinking that this was a great topic, but glad people weren’t taking rumor as a reason to bash Reid.  I don’t care who it is, I don’t like un-sourced comments being used to define someone.

If someone is in a wheelchair, it’s either from birth defects or an accident & not from poor eating/exercise habits, period.

What if that person is in a wheelchair from the risky behavior of skydiving?  What if they’re in a wheelchair because they got in a car accident from driving too fast?  What if that accident was caused by them drunk driving?  Would be be allowed to shame them then?  Are you seriously telling me that an extra apple per week is more risky than skydiving or drunk driving?

He went to a psychologist and the bottom line was after a year of counseling; stop eating so damn much.

That’s an incredibly stupid psychologist.  That’s like telling someone with chicken pox to just stop scratching their itchy parts instead of doing something to control the itching.  Telling people to just ignore their hunger is not a solution!  It’s extremely stupid advice no matter who it comes from.

Well gee, maybe he should have gotten cancer or a chronic health problem, and then he could have gotten thin and you wouldn’t have called him a moron. Total win!

Honestly, I do not understand why this is so hard. Fat people have been shamed for generations now, and the number of fat people is only increasing. If you think that’s a problem, maybe it should occur to you that shaming fat people is not an effective way to make them healthy. It stands to reason. Maybe there are other reasons that people gain weight besides being morons who don’t do whatever you want them to do? Maybe?

Why are people so goddamn irrational about this?

You people are nuts!

I never said that being sedentary is healthy, or that junk food is the backbone of a good diet.

I’m going to assume you missed the point without malice, as opposed to being dense on purpose. Here’s the thing:

1) Fat people know they’re fat. No one needs a friend like you to tell him he’s fat.

2) You said your “friend” had a stroke, then you called him a moron, indicating by this that he brought on his own condition - as if, given the opportunity, anyone would choose brain damage (and social ostracization) over exercising a little every day and eating an occasional salad (which is usually the “prescription” fat-haters are quick to give fat people.)  Moreover, thin people also have strokes.

3) Fat-shaming doesn’t work. If anything, it has the opposite affect - especially for people who are depressed (etc.). So no, you didn’t help; if anything, you made things worse.

4) Ours is a sedentary CULTURE. Unlike our ancestors, many of us spend six or seven or eight or nine hours a day at a desk earning a paycheque. We have lots of food - enough food in the supermarket to waste tonnes of it every year. Pundits keep talking about this “crisis” as if the fat itself as the problem, rather than merely a totally predictable side-effect of how most people in the West live regardless of weight.

But hey, it’s easier to blame fat - and, of course, fat people - than to address an underlying issue that affects absolutely everyone; so most folks - you included - have simply taken the easy road. Then you bitch about fat-acceptance movements because, OMG, some people think they should be able to like themselves at any size and also that rude strangers should butt the fuck out. (To believe that is madness! MADNESSSSSSS!)

The fact you don’t recognize any of this is what makes you a complete and utter asshole.

I think smartpatrol’s response to my basic math and logic is a perfect example of the fat-shaming culture.  Facts don’t matter because fat people are just bad.  It’s surprisingly similar to the conservative mindset on other issues.

This is really tangential, but just a thought occurred to me recently.  My brother recently quit smoking after trying for years, but he gained a lot of weight.  Is there any merit to the theory that smoking suppresses appetite?  I mean real evidence and not just testimonials.  If that is the the case, could it be that our increases obesity rates correlate with decreasing smoking rates?  It’s something I’d be interested to see, but I don’t know if the connection has ever been looked into.  Also, are smokers statistically less likely to be overweight than non-smokers?  If it’s true that nicotine or some other ingredient truly reduces hunger, I wonder if there’s a way to make a similar but less harmful chemical to help people stave off hunger when they want to eat less.

catgirl

It is akin to be being an alcoholic or a drug abuser; the first step is to stop drinking, taking drugs, stop fucking too much or what ever. Ever hear of a drug counselor working out an addict’s problems while the addict is still still taking drugs? Like most addictions, the majority of the problems are caused by the addiction itself. My friend spent a year talking about his problems, most caused by his bad behavior, btw! When it came down to it, the “incredibly stupid psychologist” told him the first thing he needed to do was cut back on the food and then they could work on the rest of his real and or imagined problems.

My mother and grandfather were alcoholics, nothing got better for them until they stopped drinking and low and behold many of the problems they thought they had were caused by drinking. My friend was a guy with no problems other than he loved to eat at a level he got used to when when he played ball. He knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, (just like most alcoholics, addicts, etc) he knew it was causing virtually all his problems and he refused to do anything about it until it was damn near too late.

If healthy (let me make myself clear, no health issues) people who let themselves get fat and sick want to make excuses for their shitty and stupid behavior thats cool with me, but like alcoholics, addicts the way out of their problems is like the “incredibly stupid” psychologist said the first step is to stop eating too much.

This is really tangential, but just a thought occurred to me recently.  My brother recently quit smoking after trying for years, but he gained a lot of weight.  Is there any merit to the theory that smoking suppresses appetite?  I mean real evidence and not just testimonials.

It’s true, nicotine is an appetite suppressant, and I’ve often had the same thoughts as you—that the increase in obesity probably has a lot to do with the number of people who have quit smoking since the 1960s, as well as all those that never took it up when they were teenagers thanks to the effectiveness of anti-smoking campaigns. IMHO I think this also explains a part of the reason why Americans are fatter (along with things like our cities being way more car dependent and less walkable, or portion sizes) than Europeans—we have lower rates of smoking than most of the developed world.

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/04ZN1Es7pbbVA/610x.jpg

I don’t think people who are overweight or obese should be “shamed” or hated or whatever, but it, like smoking or drinking heavily, is unhealthy. But of course making fun of fat people or harassing them is just like the more obnoxious anti-smoking campaigns do to smokers (I’m thinking of “The truth.com” and the like), they’re counter-productive.

Nonetheless, it is widely considered that if you have to choose between being a skinny smoker and a fat non-smoker, it is healthier to be a fat non-smoker. Smoking is just that horrible for you.

It is akin to be being an alcoholic or a drug abuser; the first step is to stop drinking, taking drugs, stop fucking too much or what ever.

Nope, it’s not the same.  You can live forever without alcohol, drugs, or even sex.  You have to eat every single day or you’ll die.

Ever hear of a drug counselor working out an addict’s problems while the addict is still still taking drugs?

So a food addict needs to stop eating completely before a counselor can help them?  Also, plenty of counselors do work with people who are still using, especially if it’s smoking.

When it came down to it, the “incredibly stupid psychologist” told him the first thing he needed to do was cut back on the food and then they could work on the rest of his real and or imagined problems.

So why didn’t this psychologist help him to eat less?  It’s pretty fucking stupid to just tell your friend to ignore his hunger.  Drug addicts can take things that actually reduce their cravings for the drug, but did your psychologist give your friend any help on reducing food cravings?  Did this stupid psychologist give your friend any advice besides “ignore your hunger”?

If healthy (let me make myself clear, no health issues) people who let themselves get fat and sick

What about the ones who get fat but not sick?  What about the ones who “let themselves” get fat by eating an extra apple per week?  Are these people moral failures?

addicts the way out of their problems is like the “incredibly stupid” psychologist said the first step is to stop eating too much.

That’s great advice!  Let’s just tell people who can’t stop drinking to just stop fucking drinking already!  And let’s tell people who can’t stop eating to just stop eating!  You’re a freaking genius!

Devils Advocate

My friend did bring on his stroke with his self acknowledged behaviour. I’ve been his friend since he was a “big guy” all the way through to his ‘really fucking big guy” stage. If I was a “fat hater” I wouldn’t have hung around him all these years, I wouldn’t have supported him through all his bullshit, I wouldn’t have shared his heartbreak when he lost his fiancee over his weight gain. She was worried about his health years ago, it got to the point of her finally saying to him, you have to do something or you’re going to die, if you can’t do it for me, do it for yourself. She left about the time his breathing started to sound like a freight train and he was breaking 3-4 office chairs a year. I’ve had plenty of talks with him over the years as most of or mutual friends had, we’ve stuck with him, made excuses for him, changed plans for him and done shit for him you can’t even imagine.

Cat Girl

Now who’s the moron? The counselor never told him to stop eating, he told him to stop eating way the fuck more food than he needed to stay alive!

A lot of people here seem to be missing that it’s not just HOW MUCH food you eat, but what KIND of food you eat. A XXXL bag of potato chips and a 20 oz coke isn’t going to satisfy your hunger as much as baked chicken with brocoli and an unsweetened iced tea, even though the latter has far fewer calories. In fact, the former will end up making you hungrier later in the day. Calories alone don’t determine how well a certain food will blunt hunger.

My brother recently quit smoking after trying for years, but he gained a lot of weight.  Is there any merit to the theory that smoking suppresses appetite?

It looks like it not only suppresses appetite, there’s also some evidence that it speeds up your metabolism a bit.  Put those two things together and that’s where your weight gain comes after quitting smoking.

I read somewhere that it can take up to a year after quitting smoking for your metabolism to get back up to its pre-quitting level, but of course I can’t remember where and Google is failing me.

Cat Girl

The way you stop drinking is to stop drinking! The “taper off” programs didn’t work, my grandfather tried them, several times. When he did stop drinking, he stopped drinking, period, same with mom. Drug addiction is the same, same with nicotine and same with over eating. You have to stop!

Jager, it’s not “stop eating” it’s “change what you eat”, if you change what you eat to foods that better control your hunger the calories will take care of themselves.

Do an experiment some time. Eat two scrambled eggs for breakfast one day, then rice chex and milk the next. You’re going to feel hungrier on the day you eat the rice chex, I know I always do.

Pundits keep talking about this “crisis” as if the fat itself as the problem, rather than merely a totally predictable side-effect of how most people in the West live regardless of weight.

Well, yeah, because then we might actually have to do something about it as a society to improve our public health and it’s so much easier to blame individual people for being fat instead of talking about the way we build our suburbs or the fact that junk food is so cheap to produce that portion sizes have exploded in the past 20 years. 

We’ve known for years now that stress and sleep deprivation can trigger weight gain, but people are somehow supposed to magically fix their own long hours at work and home instead of, say, getting back to the concept of a 40-hour work week as a society.

Yeah, but Jager, you can’t just quit eating.  I will be completely honest with you, quitting smoking, drinking and drugs were ALL easier than getting over an eating disorder.  You CAN just quit smoking, you CAN quit drinking and you CAN quit drugs.  But you have to eat to live, you can’t avoid food like the others.  It’s pretty much a constant in your life. 

And like I said before, if there is some sort of underlying issue that isn’t being treated, that existed all along but his earlier activity levels masked it, his continued hunger is going to fuck up any chance of long term weight loss, and when the weight comes back it will bring friends.  Yo-yo dieting is not an answer.  Nor is being miserable for the rest of your life.  Has the doctor checked him for insulin resistance?  Thyroid, and I mean in-depth thyroid testing not just the most common test.  Has he seen an endocrinologist?

If he’s insulin resistant all the dieting and exercise in the world isn’t going to do shit long term.

It is akin to be being an alcoholic or a drug abuser; the first step is to stop drinking, taking drugs, stop fucking too much or what ever.

That’s pretty telling. Anybody else think the whole “sex and love addicts” meme is nonsense, as well as 12-step mission creep? And I think the 12-step movement is a cult anyway.

What is “fucking too much”? I mean, if you’re walking funny or something, take a few breaks in between sessions so you don’t chafe as much. Beyond than that, I think “too much” is a description you tend to hear from the types who could use a few orgasms themselves.

Nobody…

I pretty much agree with you on the sex addicts thing, although there are people who spend in an inordinate time chasing sex, porn, strip clubs, etc.  However, the 12 step thing worked for the alcoholics in my family, so if its a cult, it restored my grandfathers law practice and my mom’s peace of mind. it also worked for an employee of mine who was into an entire array of drugs, booze and anything else he could pour down his throat or get up his nose…saved his career and his family.

Geek Girl

If my friend kept on eating like he was, they could never get to his other issues. After his fiancee left because he wouldn’t take better care of himself, he decided that the solution was to eat even more than he had. been eating. That’s why his psychologist told him the first step he needed to take was to cut back, get heathy again. And he had every test known to man, his deteriation came from his over eating…

Mnemosyne:

I mean, I guess I could be the only person in the history of the world who gained weight when I had untreated clinical depression and was able to eat better and exercise after a few years of therapy and medication.  I doubt it, but I’m open to the possibility.

The possibility is dead.

What is “fucking too much”?

When the folks at the next table say, “excuse me, could you please get off our table now?”

Sour Kraut wrote:

Should my friend be hospitalized full time and put on a starvation diet?  Even if it would work, do you have any idea how much that would cost?

At least some insurance plans cover Bariatric surgery these days.  A lot depends on how the physician writes it up.  Depending upon the severity of the disease, some forms of gastric surgery have reduced the severity of or even ended diabetes for some patients.

My ex-wife is a cardiologist, in her group practice roughly 20% of patients who have by-pass surgery are back within a few years because they don’t adjust their lifestyle, they go back to their previous bad habits (usually men) they end up with a new array of heart problems. She attributes this to:
The fact they feel so damn much better than they have in years they think they are cured for good! No matter how many times they have been counseled, given a diet, visited a nutritionist, given an exercise program, they refuse to do the things they need to do to stay healthy and out of the hospital.
She has patients with a family history of problems who ignore medical advice and end up literally killing themselves by continuing to smoke, over eat, get heavy, etc.

Does anybody who contributes to this blog feel sorry for those people? They are given clear warning about the consequences of their behavior and they ignore it and get sick and die. Do they need a support group or a kick in the ass?

If you are overweight and you are told by a Doc to lose weight, no matter how flippant you may feel the advice was given and you ignore it or don’t ask questions or worse yet, try to do it, fail and then don’t go back for answers, maybe you should go sit in a room with people like yourself and whine about how shitty life is for fat challenged people. I know a bunch of big men and women, some in my family, who are healthy, happy and they watch what they eat. What they know is that if that eat more food than their body can use, they’ll be in trouble. One last example, my young niece played college hoops at 6-2 190, three years after graduation she weighed 250…her Doc told her to get her fat ass back in the gym, she did, by volunteering to coach a Jr Olympics team. Once she started running and playing hoops again her weight started to drop, she wasn’t as hungry, she ate less and she’s lost 50 pounds, any of you want to guess where she would be in another 5 years, she thinks 300 easy. When she was playing college hoops she looked like a Victoria’s Secrets model at 190lbs.

Does anybody who contributes to this blog feel sorry for those people? They are given clear warning about the consequences of their behavior and they ignore it and get sick and die. Do they need a support group or a kick in the ass?

I sure do. “Fair warning” doesn’t help people who have no training in how to eat and exercise properly. It’s like “fair warning” that a sidewalk is slippery and then saying someone who slips and cracks a kneecap did it to themselves. If you look at what’s happening with your friend, for example, he’s not just getting told what to eat and how to exercise, he’s getting actual honest-to-goodness training from people who are watching him do it, telling him when he’s doing it wrong, telling him how to do it right. No one would expect even the most naturally talented athlete to compete at a high level (and not get injured) just by reading a list of things to do and going to a meeting once a week, but when it comes to losing weight most people just get thrown in the deep end of the snack aisle and told to fend for themselves. (When I was in therapy, we sometimes discussed how it was a lot like going to the gym: even if you know the right behaviors, consistent practice in carrying them out is crucial.)

Meanwhile, I was going to say that one of the things that pretty much goes to the nature of progressive vs conservative talking heads is the infrastructure that’s surrounded them from an early age. If you’re rich, as people have mentioned, it’s much more likely that you’ve had access to gyms and high-quality food and training in good habits. If you’re getting wingnut welfare, spending that time at the gym or out running is so much easier than if you’re working a real job and have your extra hours taken up doing other stuff fow/with people.  And if you’re a conservative you’re solid, or heavyset, or people just don’t talk about your weight. Or you do radio…

They are given clear warning about the consequences of their behavior and they ignore it and get sick and die. Do they need a support group or a kick in the ass?

It’s so weird that in one comment you’re extolling 12-step groups for alcoholics as lifesaving and in another you’re claiming that people who are suffering the consequences of their compulsive behavior just need a kick in the ass to get better. 

Your friend may well need a support group, and there are several free or nonprofit ones out there, like OA (Overeaters Anonymous) and TOPS (Take Off Pounds Sensibly).  His hospital probably offers one as well.  If it was easy to lose weight by yourself with no support from anyone, everyone would do it.

I’m still stuck back where Smartpatrol congratulated Pam losing weight due to chronic illness.  Empathy fail or just reading comprehension fail?

Ehh.  You’re right.  I misread it as she lost the weight to help deal w/ the chronic illness rather than the chronic illness took off the weight.  Reading comp. fail, hands down.  Sorry Pam.

Thus inspiring this absurd notion that they are fighting against a powerful foe by coming up with nonsense terms like “Fat Earters” or those who think of fat liberation as something akin to the Tobacco industry.

Proponents of “fat positivity” BS sound very much like they’re cribbing their talking points from the Tobacco Industry.  The difference between the two is that the Tobacco Industry has deep pockets & could sue into oblivion anyone who tried to call them on their “there-is-no-evidence-that-our-products-are-either-addictive-or-harmful” mantra.  The Fat-Earth Society are a pack of tiresome cranks who believe that following the MacKinnon/Dworkin model of bullying anyone who calls them out on their BS will get them to submit, & what they lack in resources they make up for in foot-stomping OMG U MEAN FAT HATERZ! (repeat ad nauseam).  What they both have in common is the stedfast refusal to admit that what they advocate is self-destructive & gives rise to serious conditions of ill-health.

smartpatrol,

What do they advocate that is self-destructive?

Loving yourself?

I’ve never seen or heard of fat acceptance people telling people to put on weight or trying to discourage someone from losing weight, a good number of them loose weight themselves so what the hell are you talking about?

What do they advocate that is self-destructive?

That obesity is perfectly healthy state & anyone who says different is full of shit.  That anyone who points out that this just is not so is engaged in fat-shaming.

Jager, but your friend and your sister or neice or whatever aren’t everybody.  Having spent several years of my life constantly ill and nearly psychotic from starving myself and compulsive exercise, I’ll take my chances with my perfect blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure, and just be fat, thanks.

I also like how you ignored that being active is what destroyed my knees, not being fat.  I had my first knee surgery at 12 after a youth spent playing two seasons of soccer (spring-summer and summer-autumn)  I’m still active, love the gym and walk everywhere, AND I’M STILL FAT!!!!  And there are lots of others like me out there.

Your, and others’, assumption that all fat people do nothing but sit around chugging sugar water and eating bacon-wrapped bacon, is what pisses us off. 

Your friend is not the world.  I can recognize that there are some fat folks who don’t exercise and who eat badly, but then again I ALSO recognize that there are skinny people who don’t exercise and who eat badly and are in awful health, but who get a pass because they are thin.  The thing is YOU CAN’T TELL WHICH IS WHICH, AND FOR THAT REASON YOU SHOULD TREAT EVERYONE WITH THE SAME FUCKING COURTESY WHETHER OR NOT YOU FIND THEM FUCKABLE.

Jager, please recognize that the fuckable part of that last admonition is not for you, but for some of the others, mostly smartpatrol (what an ironic name).

I said in my post about my ex-wife the cardiologist. Fair warning consists of telling the consequences, giving them counseling and a wide array of services are made available. Is she expected to do more? The hospital has all kinds of programs, many are free. She takes phone calls in the middle of the night about a patient being flown in on a helicopter. Sometimes its a patient who has absolutely refused to take care of themselves and now two, three years after having a by pass and given a new lease on life they are back. It drives her crazy as she hates to have to crack chests unless its a last resort. She works her ass off to keep these people alive, she and the staff give them the best of care, the best advice and the opportunity to help themselves and they don’t, won’t or don’t care enough about themselves or their families to take advantage of what is presented. She told me the last time we were together that sometimes she’d like to say to some of them, “are you going to take care of yourself this time? If not, goodbye!”

If a cardiologist can’t make patients do what they should, even when the alternative is a death sentence. Group therapy and counseling probably can’t help an overweight person unless they are willing to eat less and better food and do some form of exercise…maybe somebody in those group sessions or the doctors should talk about a slow gruesome death from obesity, maybe show some pictures or just say goodbye!

I’ve never seen or heard of fat acceptance people telling people to put on weight or trying to discourage someone from losing weight, a good number of them loose weight themselves so what the hell are you talking about?

Actually, I remember two or three years ago that Hanne Blank, a major fat activist, announced that she was going to start trying to lose weight because she was having joint problems, and there was a major shitstorm about how she was “betraying” the movement. 

The Rotund said at the time, “But I do think there are some lines in the sand. Weight loss as a goal is one of those lines. It doesn’t mean you can’t play with us and it doesn’t mean you are making a bad or wrong decision for you as an individual. It DOES mean that you are a member of a different team.”

I have no idea how it all shook out.

Group therapy and counseling probably can’t help an overweight person unless they are willing to eat less and better food and do some form of exercise.

So, in other words, you think that alcoholics and drug addicts should just be left to die because, hey, it’s not like group support is going to help them change their lives if they haven’t already made all of the changes they need to make when they join the group.

Nice.

And, as I said earlier, Jaeger, binge eating disorder is more common than anorexia and bulimia combined.  Yet you still think that all your friend needs is one more stern lecture and he’ll totally turn himself around.

Geek Girl

Many think my big bro in law is fat at 6-5 255, he is one big bastard, he even looks fat as the years and gravity have shifted his old football muscle. His wife, my ‘baby” sister, is 6-1 and wieghs about 230 or so. (they produced the college football and basketball player) many people think she is fat and as she says my big beautiful 40 inch bust is a now a 40 long! She is a big woman, as is her daughter and they don’t have issues about it. What they do is eat right and stay in the best shape possible. When my family gets together the food bills are astronomical, when dinner is over, out come the bikes, the basketball or the walking shoes, we eat and we hit it. If we don’t we’ll all be so fucking big we’d need a truck to haul us around. When I quit hockey, I gained 30 lbs in less than a year. I think what scared us is we watched our overweight father die of a heart attack at 59…you know what killed him, he ate like a goddamned pig and didn’t exercise. When I was born he weighed 170 and when he died he weighed 265..he looked like Raymond Burr! I get “fat” and I hope you can figure out how to deal with it in a way that makes you happy.

Here is what really pisses me off:

My neighbor’s kid is 9 and is a lazy, over weight, little shit. He has a bike he never rides, he lives 3 blocks from a great park he never goes to, he wouldn’t play outside with my grandsons when they were with me (they are lean, mean little machines) he sits on his ass, eats and plays video games and is indulged by his parents, we think to shut him up they just shove food in his mouth. He is a catastrophe of a kid, I hope he is enjoying it because he has a shit load of problems that will come up on his radar and soon. His Mother is so stupid about it (she is thin as is his dad and and both sets of grandparents) “you know little x is so heavy and we don’t know what to do.” My grandson, who is the same age topld me the pantry at x’s house looks like a candy store!

Mnemosyne,

So group sessions for druggies and alcoholics are letting the members come to the session loaded or stoned now? So they can work out their problems prior to stopping the bad habit? Its a therapy miracle! I can’t imagine a counselor in a one on one setting letting somebody come to a session shit faced and then attempt to have a chat about their problems. Wow!

Do some of you even read a post or do you just look for something to pounce on to prove your point, whatever the hell it might be.

She has patients with a family history of problems who ignore medical advice and end up literally killing themselves by continuing to smoke, over eat, get heavy, etc. Does anybody who contributes to this blog feel sorry for those people?

I don’t feel sorry for them, but then again I don’t feel sorry for too many people at all. On the other hand, I wouldn’t demonize them either - especially since some of them needed a hell of a lot more support than they got.

There are in-patient programs in the province where I live for people with anorexia, but there aren’t even out-patient clinics for the morbidly obese. I know; I looked.

Fat people are told to “put down the fork,” but the opposite isn’t true for people with anorexia. People with anorexia have “body issues.” Fat folks are just gross and have bad characters, such that accosting strangers in the street is considered a totally appropriate response to seeing someone who’s overweight. That kind of cruelty puts the lie to any claim the fat-haters are just concerned about the health and welfare of the people they’re yelling at.

As for your “friend” - you never had to make excuses for his weight. You could have simply been his friend without needing to justify liking him despite his (OMG, so grossssss!) eating habits.

My neighbor’s kid is 9 and is a lazy, over weight, little shit. He has a bike he never rides, he lives 3 blocks from a great park he never goes to, he wouldn’t play outside with my grandsons when they were with me (they are lean, mean little machines) he sits on his ass, eats and plays video games and is indulged by his parents, we think to shut him up they just shove food in his mouth. He is a catastrophe of a kid, I hope he is enjoying it because he has a shit load of problems that will come up on his radar and soon. His Mother is so stupid about it (she is thin as is his dad and and both sets of grandparents) “you know little x is so heavy and we don’t know what to do.” My grandson, who is the same age topld me the pantry at x’s house looks like a candy store!

He’s nine fucking years old, and you’re calling HIM a little shit when his parents are the ones stocking the pantry? He eats food they serve. He plays video games they bought.

Your response is to a) call him names (ven if you did save at least some vitriol for his mother), and b) blame him for his weight (“I hope he is enjoying it because…”)

I said it before and I’ll say it again: God damn, but you’re an asshole.

Devils Advocate,

Sure they are turning (have turned)him into the monster he is. If you’ve ever had a kid, if you indulge them they ask for more and more. It s their fault because they won’t deal with it and he plays them like the suckers they are, he wants more candy they give it to him so he’ll shut up. They are shitty parents and their kid is going to be worse…they let the kid run the house, he is the boss!. They let him do what he pleases…they are to blame for his weight and so is he. Is he going to be sitting in group therapy whining about how hsi parents fucked him up, sure as hell he will be. We have a bunch of kids in our neighborhood and all but this little shit are out playing, having fun and they play videoi games too,,,he hasn’t any friends because he seem to not want any. My grandson asked the kid across the street why X wasn’t hanging out with the rest of the kids, the kids answer,,,because he’s a bossy prick!

I seriously wonder if some of you have any life experience at all. My friend, knowingly ate himself into a stroke, he is a smart man, he knew what he was doing, he wasn’t a fucking binge eater, he was a serious eater. He just decided to eat and eat and eat and eat and to hell with anything else. he was a trained athlete, he knew about nutrition, he knew the risks and was willing to take them, it took 25 year for him to wake up!

You know, Jager, you’re right. Your life is so fucking hard, surrounded by so many hapless lazy shit morons…So resistant to your down-home, commonsensical Guy Talk.

I don’t know what you can do about it. I guess you just have to bide your time until they all eat themselves to death. Then maybe you can chill the everloving fuck out.

Shorter Jager: No one here but me knows anything, and I know everything. Including the height and weight of all of my friends and family.

I was looking forward to discussing this topic on Pandagon, figuring that there would be disagreement among the regular posters but that regular posters would probably refrain from nastiness, given the personal nature of what Pam posted. I always underestimate the ability of one asshole who likes the sound of his own voice so much that he’ll come to hold court on a board where he doesn’t seem to have any prior investment.

There needs to be some special prize for saying that one’s own niece looks like a Victoria’s Secret model. I’m sure she’d be thrilled to hear that her uncle was thinking such things about her.

I find it interesting that so many comments here are devoted to 1) calorie consumption, 2) nutrition, 3) food choices, 4) health problems caused by weight.

So little discussion has occurred regarding 1) why people are reluctant to chastise those who make cruel fatphobic remarks; 2) why given fat people know they are fat, so many feel the need to make additional remarks about it; 3) why judgments are passed on a fat person’s opinions on politics or general character based on their weight.

And re: my weight loss, it is indeed because of chronic illness, not because I was dieting to lose weight to alleiviate it. Severe chronic pain of fibromyalgia in my case makes me eat less than the average person. Of course I’m still fat by anyone’s standard by looking at me, so the idea that the first impression someone has when they see me is to think “she needs to lay off the cheezeburger” or get on a treadmill when they know nothing about me, is appallingly presumptuous, but this is the sick culture we live in.

Jewish Dyke

How the fuck do you talk about height and weight ratios, heavy, slim, nice, cute…just asking. Our family has jocks in it…you go to a goddamn game and you get the stats…at 190 she looded skinny as hell, thought you and your pals might understand the contrast. Sorry, i won’t post any more I wouldn’t want to upset youe sensitive little souls…but you know what some people do shitty things to thems selves because they love the fucking exsexx, they love to eat, they love to drink, take drugs or drive too fast…for some of them there is no excuse…go ahead and discuss your version of reality, where every defect or failing can be explained by something other than a lack of self control or using the fucking brains in your head.

1jd, you fail to appreciate the amount of entitlement people feel to belittle fat people. Those feelings of righteous justness are what is on display here. And sadly, they are so pervasive in our culture that there really isn’t a “community” that doesn’t on some level tolerate the harassment of fat people. Heck, even fat liberation communities are plagued by concern trolling that constantly tries to stick up for the abuse of fat people or stand in the way of confronting it. It crosses political lines, gender, sexuality, race, etc. I share your disappointment, but perhaps no the surprise because I’ve seen this so many times from people I feel ought to know better. Conservatives and liberals attack fat people differently, but both attack fat people. Both, in their own way, see fatness as ultimately a consequence of their political enemies. That’s why both sides are so eager to be intolerant of fatness. Especially from their political opponants but also of their allies.

Our our nation, fatness simultaniously represents wealth and poverty, both negatively. It represents a failure of personal responsibility, and abuses committed by corporations. Those few who stand against these attitudes are inflated as being as powerful as the feminist lobby by one group, while exaggerated as representing something akin to the Tobacco lobby on the other. On both sides, the most hostile and cruel attacks are often allowed to lead the discussion because even if most might not say that, most ultimately don’t disagree enough to say its wrong.

They let him do what he pleases…they are to blame for his weight and so is he.

Oh, I know you need to blame someone, somewhere when people do things you don’t approve of, but how precisely can you lay any blame at the feet of a nine-year-old?

Guilt requires intent, or at least the wherewithal to know better. Blame can only be rightly affixed to someone who is guilty of something. (Like you, for example, who encourage back-biting, snooping, and tale-bearing in your own grandchildren.)

I seriously wonder if some of you have any life experience at all.

Yeah, I know. I disagree with you, and think you’re an asshole, therefore I must have no life experience. Would you think more of me if I also told you I think you’re as dumb as a box of rocks?

You know who wasn’t fat?

Hitler.

I’d point out here that most of us read the Harry Potter series, and note that J R Rowling created an image of Dudley Dursley we’d all loathe, and much of it was centered around him being overweight.  Sometimes we buy into the stereotypes just as much as anyone else.

A lot of people here seem to be missing that it’s not just HOW MUCH food you eat, but what KIND of food you eat.

No, we didn’t miss that.  You’re the one who missed my post about how you can become overweight by eating an extra apple per week.  Not all overweight people eat chips and coke all the time, and not all skinny people eat roast chicken and vegetables.  Skinny people eat chips too.  While it’s certainly advisable to eat more broccoli and drink less soda, it won’t result in weight loss for the vast majority of people.  Those people will probably be healthier, but probably not thinner.

Jager:
You’ll note that you drowned whatever valid points you may have made in a raging sea of tactlessness.

So little discussion has occurred regarding 1) why people are reluctant to chastise those who make cruel fatphobic remarks; 2) why given fat people know they are fat, so many feel the need to make additional remarks about it; 3) why judgments are passed on a fat person’s opinions on politics or general character based on their weight.

I said earlier that I think obesity is usually a symptom of underlying sickness and not the problem in itself, and I extend that out on a societal level.  Fat people get the treatment that they do because they are a visible symbol of how the choices we’ve made as a society have screwed us up as a society.

People run around yelling, “USA! USA!” but I think that, on some level, most people know we’re in trouble.  We have a lower standard of living than anywhere in Western Europe despite working longer hours.  Our wages are stagnant.  People got suckered into predatory loans and are losing their homes right and left.  Mass corporate layoffs and unemployment are a way of life even for middle-class people.  Health care is only available to the employed or the rich, and even that can vanish at any time.  The only thing we seem to have in abundance is food, especially low-nutrient/high-calorie food, and the amount of food available to us just keeps growing and growing. 

Other people have pointed out that weight and class are associated in our culture, and I think a lot of people make that association on an unconscious level.  We genuinely have a shrinking middle class and right now it seems to people that they can literally look around and see the lower/working class growing bigger every day.  And it scares the fuck out of them to realize that their own place in in the middle class is one illness or one bout of unemployment away from slipping away from them.

That’s what fat people symbolize in this culture and it’s one of the big reasons why we can’t have a sensible discussion about it.  Fat people sense that they’re getting blamed for all of the ills of our culture dressed up in “concern” for them.

For years I would be at the gym by 4:30 am every morning, sometimes 4:40 at the latest. This so I could work out for two hours every morning.  And I loved it.  But then I started by own business.  I now work until late at night, very often, and I maybe combined with the fact that I am getting older, I simply can no longer get up that early.  Also coupled with a constantly working on the run to meetings, clients, etc, lifestyle, my eating habits have also changed.  I have to eat out a lot.  So i have gained about 20 pounds.  right now I am simply struggling not to gain more.  I don’ tknow that I will ever be able to take off the 20.

Interestingly, because I have actually made my own way in this crazy world and at this crazy economic time, I have more, not less, confidence than I used to have.

I’d like to lose the 20 pounds, but if I never can, well, that’s okay.

Just to be clear, by “sensible discussion” I don’t mean, “Let’s explain to all the fatties how fat they are and how they should stop being fat.”  I mean we need to have a serious discussion about things like urban/suburban planning that makes it almost impossible for anyone to walk around their neighborhood and how long workweeks and stress are contributing to employee illness and weight gain.  As many people pointed out in the exercise thread, we need to rethink the way we do “gym class” to de-emphasize team sports and offer more variety so kids can find an activity that they enjoy doing.  We need safe parks and green spaces that both kids and adults can use.  We need to stop subsidizing the overproduction of corn.  We need better preventative care so physical and mental health problems can be treated before they become full-blown emergencies.  We’re willing to pay to have a diabetic’s foot amputated, but we’re not willing to pay for him/her to get the nutritional counseling they need to keep their blood sugar under control so they don’t have to lose that foot in the first place.

Or, as our president said about global warming, “What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—-ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”  We can’t solve the massive structural problems with our society that have led to an increase in obesity by chiding individuals to eat less and exercise.

Catgirl, if its that easy for people to gain weight than hey, just cut out a few extra apples a week, right?

Of course, it’s not, and no, people aren’t destined to gain weight over time. I weigh LESS now than I did in college and high school. And it isn’t some magical gene I have, either, two people in my family literally died from obesity.

You’re under a delusion that 50 calories from an apple is just as likely to make you gain weight as 50 calories from high fuctrose corn syrup. They aren’t. The apple will blunt your hunger, a coke is going to make you hungrier.

Not all calories are the same!

You’re under a delusion that 50 calories from an apple is just as likely to make you gain weight as 50 calories from high fuctrose [sic] corn syrup.

Please explain to me how thermodynamics work in your world.  Calories aren’t magic.

Just chiming in to echo those who wanted to thank you for this excellent post, Pam.

Bariatric surgery is more dangerous than being fat.  Let’s take a perfectly functioning digestive system and make it dysfunctional.  1 in 50 bariatric patients DIE from consequences of the surgery - even when they do everything right.  Many are left disabled due to malnutrition.  Some have to have additional surgery because they lose TOO much weight, or develop a leak in the remaining intestine.  It is NOT a solution to “cure” being fat.

I’m not sure when being fat became synonymous with being immoral, weak-willed, and lazy.  There was a time when that wasn’t so.  Check out the quote below:

“In 1912, Miss Elsie Scheel of Brooklyn, New York, was deemed the “most nearly perfect specimen of womanhood” among Cornell’s four hundred coeds. Scheel was twenty-four years old, stood five feet seven inches tall, weighed in at a healthy 171 pounds (her favorite food was beefsteak), and possessed a decidedly pear-shaped figure (it measured 35-30-40). Nevertheless, Cornell’s medical examiner [...] judged her “the perfect girl,” having “not a single defect” in her physical makeup.”

–Lynn Peril, College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Coeds, Then and Now, p. 256*

Now she would be described as “grossly obese” and spend her entire life being judged as lazy, weak-willed, stupid, immoral, and unfuckable.  Hell, I was treated as though I weighed 5,000 pounds when I was 16, although I only weighed 140 pounds at 5’2”.  My measurements were 38-24-40, and I could climb 5 flights of stairs in three minutes while carrying 25 pounds of books.  But I was FAT FAT FAT and completely undateable and unfuckable, all because I didn’t look like a 10-year old boy with tits.  I was teased, called “stupid” (although I graduated high school with a 4.0 GPA), and told how ugly I was at every possibly opportunity. 

How does being fat mean you can’t be compassionate?  Smart?  Generous?  Caring?  Politically savvy?  When did that happen?

And you don’t have to obsessively track every calorie. If you eat proteins and whole grains instead of white grains and and sweets, the calories take care of themselves because you are less hungry overall. Your blood sugar is no longer going haywire.

And really you shouldn’t be eating large amounts of fruits like apples, either, because all though its better sugar than the sugar in coke, its still pretty damn sugary.

Please explain to me how thermodynamics work in your world.  Calories aren’t magic.

No, but solid foods fill you up more than liquids do, so an apple will help satisfy your hunger while a Coke will just wash down the additional calories you need to eat with it in order to satisfy your hunger.

IOW, you will be hungrier after drinking a Coke than you will be after eating an apple.  Yes, calories matter, but they’re not the only thing—volume and fiber matter, too.

(“You” is generic here, BTW, because from what you’ve said, it sounds like your brain may not process those signals in the typical way.)

Thanks, Mnemosyne. And not only does coke fail to satisfy hunger, it actually makes you MORE hungry later on!

Being overweight, despite many social and health related deficits it produces, provides some benefit to the self. Often these benefits are unconscious to the individual, which is observed when people consciously try to lose weight and fail. Like smokers often do, dieters often fail to succeed with their consciously stated desires to lose weight because they do not address or provide alternatives to the benefits being overweight provides. Unfortunately, peer pressure often puts overweight people in a difficult position, where they consciously find fault with themselves for being overweight but have no way of understanding what psychological processes have occurred to mold their persons. That kind of peer pressure and confusion is what allows them to become victims of their own attitudes towards themselves and to quacks.

catgirl - the human body is a bit more complicated than being reduced to simple formulas like that.  There are mechanisms that tend to regulate weight.  For example, eating different types of things and eating smaller meals can alter your metabolism, etc.

Does anyone feel like the medical obesity standards are fairly arbitrary?  We hear all these statistics about how overweight America is, but I think that a lot of perfectly healthy people (myself included) get labeled as overweight by those obesity charts.  There were times in my life when I was running half marathons, and still was considered 30 lbs overwieght.

catgirl, digestion does not obey the laws of thermodynamics—if it did, no one would be fat. What regulates human digestion is the biochemistry of our hormones. Please go look at the UCSF video. It will explain all if this to your satisfaction.

Gary Taubes book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” contains as an example a study done on prisoners that were fed 10,000 calories a day. Most gained some weight, some gained a lot of weight, and a couple not a pound! More interesting, when the prisoners were returned to their normal prison fare, some lost their weight gain almost immediately and some took quite a while to have it come off. The human metabolism does not obey the laws of thermodynamics.

Pam, I thought that was a really thought-provoking post and as I think DTG mentioned above, my first thought was that no one complained when the likes of Rush Limbaugh were ridiculed for their weight (although Michael Moore’s had to take at least as much shit, and his weight’s always taken as an example of his supposed hypocrisy, as in how can someone as ‘well-fed’ as him complain about capitalism). Yes, people’s physicality is often used against them in political disagreements and while I hope most of us are very much against it in principle I’m sure we subconciously draw our own negative conclusions based on others’ appearance, and it’s something everyone should be wary of.

As for the main argument, I found catgirl’s comments especially interesting. Is it right for someone to spend their entire life hungry? That depends on what you mean by ‘hungry’. Your body adapts to a steady diet and obviously the more you eat, the more your body gets used to that level and unfortunately for some people, hungry is equated to feeling well-fed. Most people who are active for most of the day and restrict their food intake to three steady meals often put up with a low level of hunger a lot of the time but are used to it. If you expect to lose weight then yes, you should expect to be hungry for a while while your body adapts. It’s simple self-discipline.

Of course, bearing in mind the corn syrup-heavy diets in the US, preparing your own meals from healthy ingredients in a day to day sense is also important. Considering most people have hectic lifestyles and are sometimes too tired to do it at the end of the day, it also takes effort but it’s necessary.

Jager’s overwhelming confidence that his friend’s physician is applying sound and rational medical care to his obesity and overeating, and not taking advantage of his professional position to scold and punish his friend for being fat by starving him is yet another demonstration of male privilege.

As a woman, I and my girlfriends have countless stories of doctors or other medical personnel using their profession to enforce their own narrow morality and to prescribe or withhold treatments based on whether not he (usually, but not always) deemed us sufficiently deserving and not in need of punishment for our moral failings.

Doctors can be some of the worst fat-phobes because they rationalize their disgust of fat as an objective assessment of the health risks.  A doctor who positively revels in his patient’s starvation is a fat-phobe who gets off on punishing Jager’s friend for “allowing” himself to become fat.  If Jager’s friend was binge-eating as described, reducing him down 1800-2000 calories per day would have achieved reasonable weight loss if that’s all it took (just not nearly as rapidly, but then once the body starts consuming more calories again the weight will come back anyway, but let’s ignore that point). But no, this doctor had to literally put him on a diet under which his body would feel the most pain and retain the minimal amount of function to not kill him outright.  Starvation and malnutrition doesn’t become any more ethical and any less torture because a doctor is prescribing it.

It is absolute stupidity to think that a person with easy and abundant access to food will be able to live hungry for the rest of his natural life, but Jager’s friend is being asked to do exactly that instead of trying to discover WHY his body is hungry all the time and treating the problem.  Why should anyone with easy access to food have to live hungry? How is it even reasonable to propose that anyone should be hungry their whole life?  What kind of sick, twisted fuck thinks that is a moral good?

But you’re right, Jager, clearly we all just don’t have enough “life” experience.  Or maybe, we just haven’t had the benefit of of winning the genetic lottery like you and have to look at reality as more complex than “fat people are morons and just need to stop eating so damn much”.

Stubborn Kind of Fellow: I’m going to call bullshit on your “active people are accustomed to living with a low level of hunger”.  I have been active in sports or exercise pretty much my whole life and I only experienced hunger when I wasn’t properly nourishing my body. I was 26 years old before I realized that my blood sugar levels tended to drop every two to three hours and that I needed to eat that often. Once I did that, I was and am rarely ever hungry unless I skip a snack or just woke up. But it also changed what it felt like to be “full”.  I no longer eat until my pants are uncomfortable fully buttoned and zipped because I was only eating three meals per day.

That is the key, I think.  Teaching people to change how they eat, not fetishize food or completely strip of its social meaning, and address other institutional factors contributing to obesity, without making anyone feel that they are morally inferior or superior because of the shape and heft of their body. Why should anyone be dismissed as a politician, authority, or even be seen as less capable of doing the same job as a thinner person?

Doctors can be some of the worst fat-phobes because they rationalize their disgust of fat as an objective assessment of the health risks.

Exactly.  As I mentioned above, I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard from people whose only advice from their doctors was, “Lose weight,” and they had to see multiple physicians before being correctly diagnosed with low thyroid or PCOs or fibromyalgia, all of which can—surprise!—have weight gain as a side effect.  So the doctors were looking at the results of the disease and deciding that it must be the cause because I went to medical school and you didn’t, so shut up, that’s why.

That’s ‘active people who keep to three steady meals a day’, history_mom, I noticed you were quick to omit that bit of information before you called bullshit. Perhaps I’m generalising here but for most people ‘eating til your pants are uncomfortable fully buttoned and zipped’, is generally unnecessary to get your blood sugar up to a normal level. If your blood sugar levels are dropping between meals than yes, have a piece of fruit as a snack and eat moderate portions for breakfast, lunch and dinner, as any health professional will tell you. But first you have to get yourself into that pattern and it’s not something that’s easy to do overnight if your eating patterns are entirely different.

Stubborn Kind of Fellow: way to completely miss the point.  If you find yourself pretty much constantly hungry—even at low levels—you are more likely to make poor food choices and eat more than your body needs before feeling satiated (what I meant by “eating until your pants are uncomfortable” which is how many Americans are taught to eat). Whereas, when I learned to eat often instead of the three meal per day routine and NOT let my body feel hunger as often I became healthier because I made better choices, I was less irritable and stressed, and had fewer headaches and other ill effects from constantly fluctuating blood sugar. 

Interestingly, my weight didn’t actually change but my health did.  And at the end of the day, THAT is the point—to be healthy at any size and stop moralizing about weight.

jager, i don’t believe for a second you even HAVE friends. you have nothing but insults and anger for every human being you’ve mentioned, including children and your own family. why are you so angry and hateful towards absolutely everyone? you might want to talk to someone about that. eh maybe you’re just an immature, overgrown (wannabe) bully. that sounds more accurate.