7 ms·

> I get to eat what I want and sit around all day? Hell yeah! I am naturally thin. That statement ("i get to eat what i want and sit around all day") is true o

> I get to eat what I want and sit around all day? Hell yeah! I am naturally thin. That statement ("i get to eat what i want and sit around all day") is true of my body. Is it such a strange idea that there are as many people who are naturally thin as there are that are naturally fat? Those people aren't making a choice to be fat any more than i am making a choice to be thin. Why should they feel bad about their body?

oska 4y ago
Intriguingly, it seems that the vast majority of the population of North Korea are 'naturally thin' and virtually every young person you see in footage of 1960s USA too. IOW, 'naturally thin' is a bogus idea.
700000thMistake 4y ago
>Those people aren't making a choice to be fat any more than i am making a choice to be thin. What an interesting take. Are you saying that people do not essentially "choose" what weight to be by their eating habits?
frankzander 4y ago
They choose it a bit. First eating all the day long some crap (sweets, processed food, fiberless industrial food), drinking sweet sodas and not walking/doing real sports is a choice. It's the choice to live unhealthy. They should feel bad the same way smokers should feel bad. It's quite a disrespect for oneself.
- amrocha 4y ago
  There's people that don't do all that and are still fat, and making them "feel bad" about it is counter productive. In fact, the research on losing weight is quite clear: once you've put on weight, losing it and keeping it off is nearly impossible, and requires life long constant effort. Instead of focusing on individual behavior, you should be speaking out against a government that built a car society, made cities hostile to walking and biking, and made cheap unhealthy food the easiest and cheapest option for most.
  - gadders 4y ago
    Citation needed. Nobody gets fat without over-eating. Walking and exercise in general make less difference to weight loss than diet. People know what food is healthy. If they choose not to do it, it's on them.
    - kennywinker 4y ago
      1. people do get fat from things other than "over eating" - citation: https://www.drugs.com/article/weight-gain.html https://www.drugs.com/article/weight-gain.html 2. I'm the great-grandparent in this thread. My original comment was in essence: I am naturally skinny, nobody questions that. Is it so strange that people might be naturally fat? You've said something that DIRECTLY contradicts that argument, without any evidence or argument to explain why - all you've done is assert the opposite of what I said. You're going to have to do better. Citation needed on your part.
      - gadders 4y ago
        Nobody is "naturally fat". In animal husbandry, people breed livestock for their "feed conversion ratio" - I.e which animals can most efficiently convert the same amount of food into the most additional bodyweight. It's not a stretch to think something similar might happen in people. However, if you're one of those people that puts on more weight per item of food then it sucks to be you, but you'll need to eat less food. Re: your point about medicines - I doubt they manage to create additional calories out of thin air.
        kennywinker 4y ago
        There are medicines that change how your body processes the calories you eat, and the balance may be that in order to get the nutrients you need to stay in good health, you need to eat in a way that causes you to gain weight. There are certainly drugs that increase your appetite, meaning you the effort required to eat less increases dramatically. But... your overall point is that people need to suffer in discomfort for their entire life so their body looks the way you want it to look? Or so that they stay in good health? If someone is faced with the choice of being fat and happy for 75 years, or being skinny and suffering for 80 years (or whatever the lifespan difference is), why do you feel like your opinion about that choice is something anybody needs to hear? Why is someone else’s choice your business? Do you think that someone should be ashamed or embarrassed about choosing one of those? I didn’t have to make that choice. But if I did i would 100% choose fat and happy, and i would be upset with anyone who tried to make me unhappy for my choice - especially if it’s coming from someone who didn’t have to make that choice themselves
- mort96 4y ago
  > They should feel bad the same way smokers should feel bad. Smokers are chemically and behaviourally addicted to a substance that's killing them. Just like alcoholics and heroin addicts. It's probably appropriate to view obese people (food addicts) in a similar way. I don't understand the reaction of telling them to feel bad though. People who are addicted to harmful substances deserve sympathy and medical care.
jtode 4y ago
That's the bit that OP and the writer, if they're different people, miss. Fat acceptance is basically a position that we fatties have been forced into. If every skinny person learned to mind their own business, it wouldn't exist. The problem is not that we aren't listening to our doctors - the problem is that people like OP exist who self-appoint themselves as our doctors and start preaching. And that word was chosen carefully, because it's exactly the same bullshit.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  So much this. I can't tell you how sick I am of getting some dumb, poorly thought out health/diet advice from a skinny person who never had to lose a lot of weight. Losing weight is actually really easy. Eat less calories than you burn, and be motivated. My first serious attempt I managed to lose almost 30kg. Sticking with it and keeping it low is really hard. Because every kilo you gain back makes you that much less motivated. But if you're not motivated, no amount of fascile health advice is going to help. Motivation must come from within. And it can be hard to maintain. The only diet advice I have from my experience: make a diet you like. If you hate the diet, it will never work. Dieting doesn't have to suck.
  - shrikant 4y ago
    > Losing weight is actually really easy. Eat less calories than you burn, and be motivated. I've often heard fitness instructors often phrase this as "weight loss is simple, but not easy" precisely because it's hard to sustain CICO discipline over a reasonable period of time.
  - pnt12 4y ago
    I'd put it in another way: losing weight is simple, but it's not easy! As I understand, you just need to consume fewer calories, less sugar and do more exercise. But there's cravings. It's harder to get healthy food at restaurants and cafes. It's harder to cook healthy and tasty food - no one wants to eat miserable food for months, many doctor and nutritionists will just tell patients to eat bland food day after day, like people are robots without souls. I've heard the same thing about the C programming language: it's a small simple language, but programming with it is hard!
choeger 4y ago
It's unhealthy and they can change it. While there are many people that have a comparatively harder time to retain a healthy weight, no one has to be obese. A small minority might find it so hard to not become obese that they simply cannot manage it, but that fact should not dominate public discourse and act as an excuse for everyone. More importantly, obesity is contagious. You give it to your kids and family. If you don't stop it, your loved ones might suffer.
- kennywinker 4y ago
  > they can change it. Can they? We agree that some fat people can change their weight to become thin. But do we agree that not all fat people can? For example what about people who have become fat as a result of side effects from medication that is treating other health conditions. Hopefully you accept that's not something those people can realistically change. Should they also feel bad about their bodies? I would say no. Now how do we tell which fat people we think should feel bad about their bodies and which shouldn't? Do we have a little health background interview with each one first? Or maybe we could just accept people for who they are, and don't make anyone feel bad for what their body looks like. As for contagiousness, idk. I know thin kids of fat parents, and I know fat kids of thin parents. I suspect there's a lot more at play than a simple "fat adults make kids fat".
- P_I_Staker 4y ago
  > A small minority might find it so hard to not become obese that they simply cannot manage it, but that fact should not dominate public discourse and act as an excuse for everyone I think the opposite is true, though I don't have statistics in front of me. Obesity traditionally had low rates of recovery. A huge percentage can never seem to figure it out. The situation looks so grim that doctors were pushing to stop treating it as a "choice". I recall it being controversial, but somewhat agreeing with that perspective. Looking at a condition where people "want" to change, but almost always fail, it appears to look more like an incurable disease, than something that can easily be fixed with "discipline". What's the point of guilt tripping people when the results are so consistently bad? I know there may have been some breakthroughs since then.
max47 4y ago
Almost everyone I met (incl me when I was younger) who think that way never realized just how much food obese people eat at home. It's wayyy more than you think. They never tell the truth about it out of shame because they know how bad it looks to others.
- kennywinker 4y ago
  My guy, i do those things. edit: parent comment was edited to remove the examples of eating behaviors they believe are the cause of fatness. Their examples were all things that I as a naturally skinny person do or have done regularly.
- Volundr 4y ago
  Even at my maximum weight I was most definitely not eating like this. The idea that every obese person is just slamming junk food down their gullet is just false and needs to die.
- etothepii 4y ago
  One extra rich tea biscuit a day (100kcal) is 10lbs in a year. You don't know what you are talking about.
  - manmal 4y ago
    That’s assuming perfect conversion of energy to body fat. That’s never the case due to losses, and everybody is _vastly_ different: > In response to 84 days of 1000 kcal/day of overfeeding, 12 pairs of monozygotic twins gained on average 8.1 kg, but the range was from 4.3 to 13.3 kg. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2897177/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2897177/
    - etothepii 4y ago
      Your arithmetic does not support the use of the word vastly. It only diverges by mine on the line above by 25%.
code_sloth 4y ago
You might be genetically blessed, others might be genetically cursed. Some are genetically predisposed to becoming fat. Its still a fact that they are fat. And being fat comes with associated health risks.
- kennywinker 4y ago
  Right, sure. But we don't make women who are generically pre-disposed to have breast cancer feel bad for being genetically pre-disposed to breast cancer. We don't call their bodies disgusting because of that risk, do we? Do we say that it's their fault? That they're lazy, have no self-control? That the "breast cancer pre-dispositon acceptance movement" is wokeness out of control?
- throw_pm23 4y ago
  The genetic cause doesn't explain why ratio of obesity went from 10% to 60% in one generation. Fat people didn't have that much more kids.
  - kennywinker 4y ago
    It's likely the result of genetic, epigenetic, cultural, economic, and food system factors combined. As for how it went from 10% to 60% (your numbers, idk if they're right) one piece of the puzzle is that in 1998 the definition of obesity was changed, which made MANY more people fall into the obese category who did not previously: http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9806/17/weight.guidelines/ http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9806/17/weight.guidelines/
    - throw_pm23 4y ago
      Definitions aside, look at the video from woodstock 69 -- not even one fat person. Look at a video of a current event in the US.
      - kennywinker 4y ago
        Ahh for sure, that’s a demographically representative sample of the american population. /s Yes people have gotten fatter. That’s a thing that’s happening. To me that’s evidence of systemic problems in our food supply, economic factors like poverty. None of which are reason to treat someone poorly for being impacted by that.
varjag 4y ago
I was naturally thin too until I started driving to work.
- bialpio 4y ago
  Adulthood was what did it for me. : - ) I'm theorizing that it's at least 2 factors: lack of PE (2.5h a week of forced exercise - gone), & reaching legal drinking age (I lost the most weight when pausing drinking for a bit). There were also random occasions for physical activity that now require more effort to set up that were handled by adults in my life or otherwise organized by someone else (skiing trips, hiking, kayaking).
pizza234 4y ago
> Is it such a strange idea that there are as many people who are naturally thin as there are that are naturally fat? [...] Why should they feel bad about their body? Because naturally thin people, and the opposite case, are outliers. There are very few people, especially in the 40s, that can eat a lot and still remain thin.
- kennywinker 4y ago
  ...and the reason we should make them feel bad is? Setting aside the fact that you've conceded that you don't know if someone is fat "by choice" or because they are an outlier, so you're ok with making people who are fat because of natural reasons feel bad as casualties in your noble quest to make people who are fat "by choice" feel bad. Do we shame people for the health risk of going skiing? It's a well know health risk, yet i don't see a lot of people telling skiiers their lifestyle disgusts them.
  - pizza234 4y ago
    > ...and the reason we should make them feel bad is? > in your noble quest to make people who are fat "by choice" feel bad. If you're taking this personally, I don't shame anybody, and I don't spend time on "quests" centered on other people. I agree actually with you that people are responsible for their choice, and shaming them (as in "you're fat, ha-ha") is not a proper attitude. Regarding fat excess in itself (that is, disassociated from a given person), on modern times _and_ in western society, while in principle it may be risky as other activities, it's on a very large scale, so it's important to consider it as a serious problem.
gadders 4y ago
They are making a choice to be fat because they eat the quantity of food that creates that condition in their body. Nobody says two people should eat the same level of food. You should eat the appropriate amount for your body.
- david-gpu 4y ago
  People, in the long term, eat as much as they need to not feel hungry. Whether they are slim or overweight. Asking people to ear less than they are eating now is thus asking them to be perpetually hungry. It can be done, even for a year or two if they have willpower, but eventually they will get sick of being cold, tired and irritated all the time --because that is what chronic hunger does to you-- and they will go back to the normal behavior of eating until they are no longer hungry.
  - oska 4y ago
    Getting to explore what it means to be 'hungry', i.e. asking yourself "Is this feeling I need to eat habit or actual real need?" is a large part of controlling/regulating food intake. This 'exploration' used to be engendered by religious practices of fasting and also, times of food scarcity. We don't have either as widespread experiences these days, so the only people who explore their hunger and eating habits are mostly people with a drive to develop awareness around their bodies and who work to identify and then pull themselves out of 'bad habits'.
  - jandrewrogers 4y ago
    When and how often you feel hungry is a well-documented to be a conditioned response based on eating patterns, it isn't intrinsic unless you go quite a long time without eating. Human eating patterns have considerable flexibility. A person with a normal metabolism can habitually eat one meal a day without being any more hungry than someone that eats three meals a day with snacking in between. Unless they are on a particularly aggressive program of calorie reduction, eating less than they are eating now is not asking them to be perpetually hungry.
  - bialpio 4y ago
harshreality 4y ago
I'm naturally thin too, but thin is relative. I noticed on day soon after college that I was starting to acquire (relatively minor) fat deposits, and despite that not making me even close to overweight, I resolved that I wasn't going to put up with that. Since then I've payed more attention to health and fitness. I could eat pizza all the time and not be overweight, but I don't because I know that would be unhealthy.
- aquaticsunset 4y ago
  That's okay - you're not the topic of this article. If you want to trim up and tone because it makes you happy, that's fantastic! The criticism of "lose weight at any cost necessary" is that people who have been fat their entire lives will get yelled at to lose a significant percentage of their body weight, with very little care given to their actual health. It's incredibly naive and destructive to assume all extremely fat people got that way because "they eat pizza all the time" and they should simply stop eating so much pizza to fix all of life's problems. If they can't lose the weight it's clearly because they're not trying hard enough. That's why the discussion around this isn't changing the needle on America's weight gain (or most populations across the Earth). We focus on the thinness of the person before we focus on the health.

oska 4y ago

Intriguingly, it seems that the vast majority of the population of North Korea are 'naturally thin' and virtually every young person you see in footage of 1960s USA too. IOW, 'naturally thin' is a bogus idea.

700000thMistake 4y ago

>Those people aren't making a choice to be fat any more than i am making a choice to be thin. What an interesting take. Are you saying that people do not essentially "choose" what weight to be by their eating habits?

frankzander 4y ago

They choose it a bit. First eating all the day long some crap (sweets, processed food, fiberless industrial food), drinking sweet sodas and not walking/doing real sports is a choice. It's the choice to live unhealthy. They should feel bad the same way smokers should feel bad. It's quite a disrespect for oneself.

amrocha 4y ago
There's people that don't do all that and are still fat, and making them "feel bad" about it is counter productive. In fact, the research on losing weight is quite clear: once you've put on weight, losing it and keeping it off is nearly impossible, and requires life long constant effort. Instead of focusing on individual behavior, you should be speaking out against a government that built a car society, made cities hostile to walking and biking, and made cheap unhealthy food the easiest and cheapest option for most.
- gadders 4y ago
  Citation needed. Nobody gets fat without over-eating. Walking and exercise in general make less difference to weight loss than diet. People know what food is healthy. If they choose not to do it, it's on them.
  - kennywinker 4y ago
    1. people do get fat from things other than "over eating" - citation: https://www.drugs.com/article/weight-gain.html https://www.drugs.com/article/weight-gain.html 2. I'm the great-grandparent in this thread. My original comment was in essence: I am naturally skinny, nobody questions that. Is it so strange that people might be naturally fat? You've said something that DIRECTLY contradicts that argument, without any evidence or argument to explain why - all you've done is assert the opposite of what I said. You're going to have to do better. Citation needed on your part.
    - gadders 4y ago
      Nobody is "naturally fat". In animal husbandry, people breed livestock for their "feed conversion ratio" - I.e which animals can most efficiently convert the same amount of food into the most additional bodyweight. It's not a stretch to think something similar might happen in people. However, if you're one of those people that puts on more weight per item of food then it sucks to be you, but you'll need to eat less food. Re: your point about medicines - I doubt they manage to create additional calories out of thin air.
      - kennywinker 4y ago
        There are medicines that change how your body processes the calories you eat, and the balance may be that in order to get the nutrients you need to stay in good health, you need to eat in a way that causes you to gain weight. There are certainly drugs that increase your appetite, meaning you the effort required to eat less increases dramatically. But... your overall point is that people need to suffer in discomfort for their entire life so their body looks the way you want it to look? Or so that they stay in good health? If someone is faced with the choice of being fat and happy for 75 years, or being skinny and suffering for 80 years (or whatever the lifespan difference is), why do you feel like your opinion about that choice is something anybody needs to hear? Why is someone else’s choice your business? Do you think that someone should be ashamed or embarrassed about choosing one of those? I didn’t have to make that choice. But if I did i would 100% choose fat and happy, and i would be upset with anyone who tried to make me unhappy for my choice - especially if it’s coming from someone who didn’t have to make that choice themselves
mort96 4y ago
> They should feel bad the same way smokers should feel bad. Smokers are chemically and behaviourally addicted to a substance that's killing them. Just like alcoholics and heroin addicts. It's probably appropriate to view obese people (food addicts) in a similar way. I don't understand the reaction of telling them to feel bad though. People who are addicted to harmful substances deserve sympathy and medical care.

jtode 4y ago

That's the bit that OP and the writer, if they're different people, miss. Fat acceptance is basically a position that we fatties have been forced into. If every skinny person learned to mind their own business, it wouldn't exist. The problem is not that we aren't listening to our doctors - the problem is that people like OP exist who self-appoint themselves as our doctors and start preaching. And that word was chosen carefully, because it's exactly the same bullshit.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
So much this. I can't tell you how sick I am of getting some dumb, poorly thought out health/diet advice from a skinny person who never had to lose a lot of weight. Losing weight is actually really easy. Eat less calories than you burn, and be motivated. My first serious attempt I managed to lose almost 30kg. Sticking with it and keeping it low is really hard. Because every kilo you gain back makes you that much less motivated. But if you're not motivated, no amount of fascile health advice is going to help. Motivation must come from within. And it can be hard to maintain. The only diet advice I have from my experience: make a diet you like. If you hate the diet, it will never work. Dieting doesn't have to suck.
- shrikant 4y ago
  > Losing weight is actually really easy. Eat less calories than you burn, and be motivated. I've often heard fitness instructors often phrase this as "weight loss is simple, but not easy" precisely because it's hard to sustain CICO discipline over a reasonable period of time.
- pnt12 4y ago
  I'd put it in another way: losing weight is simple, but it's not easy! As I understand, you just need to consume fewer calories, less sugar and do more exercise. But there's cravings. It's harder to get healthy food at restaurants and cafes. It's harder to cook healthy and tasty food - no one wants to eat miserable food for months, many doctor and nutritionists will just tell patients to eat bland food day after day, like people are robots without souls. I've heard the same thing about the C programming language: it's a small simple language, but programming with it is hard!

choeger 4y ago

It's unhealthy and they can change it. While there are many people that have a comparatively harder time to retain a healthy weight, no one has to be obese. A small minority might find it so hard to not become obese that they simply cannot manage it, but that fact should not dominate public discourse and act as an excuse for everyone. More importantly, obesity is contagious. You give it to your kids and family. If you don't stop it, your loved ones might suffer.

kennywinker 4y ago
> they can change it. Can they? We agree that some fat people can change their weight to become thin. But do we agree that not all fat people can? For example what about people who have become fat as a result of side effects from medication that is treating other health conditions. Hopefully you accept that's not something those people can realistically change. Should they also feel bad about their bodies? I would say no. Now how do we tell which fat people we think should feel bad about their bodies and which shouldn't? Do we have a little health background interview with each one first? Or maybe we could just accept people for who they are, and don't make anyone feel bad for what their body looks like. As for contagiousness, idk. I know thin kids of fat parents, and I know fat kids of thin parents. I suspect there's a lot more at play than a simple "fat adults make kids fat".
P_I_Staker 4y ago
> A small minority might find it so hard to not become obese that they simply cannot manage it, but that fact should not dominate public discourse and act as an excuse for everyone I think the opposite is true, though I don't have statistics in front of me. Obesity traditionally had low rates of recovery. A huge percentage can never seem to figure it out. The situation looks so grim that doctors were pushing to stop treating it as a "choice". I recall it being controversial, but somewhat agreeing with that perspective. Looking at a condition where people "want" to change, but almost always fail, it appears to look more like an incurable disease, than something that can easily be fixed with "discipline". What's the point of guilt tripping people when the results are so consistently bad? I know there may have been some breakthroughs since then.

max47 4y ago

Almost everyone I met (incl me when I was younger) who think that way never realized just how much food obese people eat at home. It's wayyy more than you think. They never tell the truth about it out of shame because they know how bad it looks to others.

kennywinker 4y ago
My guy, i do those things. edit: parent comment was edited to remove the examples of eating behaviors they believe are the cause of fatness. Their examples were all things that I as a naturally skinny person do or have done regularly.
Volundr 4y ago
Even at my maximum weight I was most definitely not eating like this. The idea that every obese person is just slamming junk food down their gullet is just false and needs to die.
etothepii 4y ago
One extra rich tea biscuit a day (100kcal) is 10lbs in a year. You don't know what you are talking about.
- manmal 4y ago
  That’s assuming perfect conversion of energy to body fat. That’s never the case due to losses, and everybody is _vastly_ different: > In response to 84 days of 1000 kcal/day of overfeeding, 12 pairs of monozygotic twins gained on average 8.1 kg, but the range was from 4.3 to 13.3 kg. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2897177/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2897177/
  - etothepii 4y ago
    Your arithmetic does not support the use of the word vastly. It only diverges by mine on the line above by 25%.

code_sloth 4y ago

You might be genetically blessed, others might be genetically cursed. Some are genetically predisposed to becoming fat. Its still a fact that they are fat. And being fat comes with associated health risks.

kennywinker 4y ago
Right, sure. But we don't make women who are generically pre-disposed to have breast cancer feel bad for being genetically pre-disposed to breast cancer. We don't call their bodies disgusting because of that risk, do we? Do we say that it's their fault? That they're lazy, have no self-control? That the "breast cancer pre-dispositon acceptance movement" is wokeness out of control?
throw_pm23 4y ago
The genetic cause doesn't explain why ratio of obesity went from 10% to 60% in one generation. Fat people didn't have that much more kids.
- kennywinker 4y ago
  It's likely the result of genetic, epigenetic, cultural, economic, and food system factors combined. As for how it went from 10% to 60% (your numbers, idk if they're right) one piece of the puzzle is that in 1998 the definition of obesity was changed, which made MANY more people fall into the obese category who did not previously: http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9806/17/weight.guidelines/ http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9806/17/weight.guidelines/
  - throw_pm23 4y ago
    Definitions aside, look at the video from woodstock 69 -- not even one fat person. Look at a video of a current event in the US.
    - kennywinker 4y ago
      Ahh for sure, that’s a demographically representative sample of the american population. /s Yes people have gotten fatter. That’s a thing that’s happening. To me that’s evidence of systemic problems in our food supply, economic factors like poverty. None of which are reason to treat someone poorly for being impacted by that.

varjag 4y ago

I was naturally thin too until I started driving to work.

bialpio 4y ago
Adulthood was what did it for me. : - ) I'm theorizing that it's at least 2 factors: lack of PE (2.5h a week of forced exercise - gone), & reaching legal drinking age (I lost the most weight when pausing drinking for a bit). There were also random occasions for physical activity that now require more effort to set up that were handled by adults in my life or otherwise organized by someone else (skiing trips, hiking, kayaking).

pizza234 4y ago

> Is it such a strange idea that there are as many people who are naturally thin as there are that are naturally fat? [...] Why should they feel bad about their body? Because naturally thin people, and the opposite case, are outliers. There are very few people, especially in the 40s, that can eat a lot and still remain thin.

kennywinker 4y ago
...and the reason we should make them feel bad is? Setting aside the fact that you've conceded that you don't know if someone is fat "by choice" or because they are an outlier, so you're ok with making people who are fat because of natural reasons feel bad as casualties in your noble quest to make people who are fat "by choice" feel bad. Do we shame people for the health risk of going skiing? It's a well know health risk, yet i don't see a lot of people telling skiiers their lifestyle disgusts them.
- pizza234 4y ago
  > ...and the reason we should make them feel bad is? > in your noble quest to make people who are fat "by choice" feel bad. If you're taking this personally, I don't shame anybody, and I don't spend time on "quests" centered on other people. I agree actually with you that people are responsible for their choice, and shaming them (as in "you're fat, ha-ha") is not a proper attitude. Regarding fat excess in itself (that is, disassociated from a given person), on modern times _and_ in western society, while in principle it may be risky as other activities, it's on a very large scale, so it's important to consider it as a serious problem.

gadders 4y ago

They are making a choice to be fat because they eat the quantity of food that creates that condition in their body. Nobody says two people should eat the same level of food. You should eat the appropriate amount for your body.

david-gpu 4y ago
People, in the long term, eat as much as they need to not feel hungry. Whether they are slim or overweight. Asking people to ear less than they are eating now is thus asking them to be perpetually hungry. It can be done, even for a year or two if they have willpower, but eventually they will get sick of being cold, tired and irritated all the time --because that is what chronic hunger does to you-- and they will go back to the normal behavior of eating until they are no longer hungry.
- oska 4y ago
  Getting to explore what it means to be 'hungry', i.e. asking yourself "Is this feeling I need to eat habit or actual real need?" is a large part of controlling/regulating food intake. This 'exploration' used to be engendered by religious practices of fasting and also, times of food scarcity. We don't have either as widespread experiences these days, so the only people who explore their hunger and eating habits are mostly people with a drive to develop awareness around their bodies and who work to identify and then pull themselves out of 'bad habits'.
- jandrewrogers 4y ago
  When and how often you feel hungry is a well-documented to be a conditioned response based on eating patterns, it isn't intrinsic unless you go quite a long time without eating. Human eating patterns have considerable flexibility. A person with a normal metabolism can habitually eat one meal a day without being any more hungry than someone that eats three meals a day with snacking in between. Unless they are on a particularly aggressive program of calorie reduction, eating less than they are eating now is not asking them to be perpetually hungry.
- bialpio 4y ago

harshreality 4y ago

I'm naturally thin too, but thin is relative. I noticed on day soon after college that I was starting to acquire (relatively minor) fat deposits, and despite that not making me even close to overweight, I resolved that I wasn't going to put up with that. Since then I've payed more attention to health and fitness. I could eat pizza all the time and not be overweight, but I don't because I know that would be unhealthy.

aquaticsunset 4y ago
That's okay - you're not the topic of this article. If you want to trim up and tone because it makes you happy, that's fantastic! The criticism of "lose weight at any cost necessary" is that people who have been fat their entire lives will get yelled at to lose a significant percentage of their body weight, with very little care given to their actual health. It's incredibly naive and destructive to assume all extremely fat people got that way because "they eat pizza all the time" and they should simply stop eating so much pizza to fix all of life's problems. If they can't lose the weight it's clearly because they're not trying hard enough. That's why the discussion around this isn't changing the needle on America's weight gain (or most populations across the Earth). We focus on the thinness of the person before we focus on the health.