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If you're fat enough for long enough, it does become a part of your identity. That doesn't mean you shouldn't lose weight, but it does make it hard when it's a
by jschwartzi 11y ago
If you're fat enough for long enough, it does become a part of your identity. That doesn't mean you shouldn't lose weight, but it does make it hard when it's a big part of who you are and how others perceive you.
- Thriptic 11y agoI was fat my whole life and I didn't find it hard; I just needed people to show me the method for weight loss (in my case Atkins then IIFYM). Applying the method was fairly straight forward after a week or two of practice and experimentation. As you say, people have a tendency to incorrectly frame a lot of deficiencies as identity problems: "I'm a fat person", "I'm a weak person", "I'm forever alone", "I'm a person whose bad at X" etc. In reality most problems aren't identity problems at all, they're methods / systems problems and should be framed as such. A person who is overweight isn't inherently a "fat person", they're a person that hasn't discovered and applied the methods and systems to be at a normal weight; A person who has no strength isn't inherently a "weak person", they're a person that hasn't discovered and applied the methods to be strong etc. Once a problem is framed like that, solving it is simply a matter of research and applying known methods. You don't need to change your identity, you just need to change your systems.