<p>There is tons of information in magazines and media about eating right and getting more exercise.</p>
<p>Consolation,</p>
<p>You are absolutely right. I tried to edit “thin” to healthy, but I had timed out. Not everyone could or should try to be “thin.”</p>
<p>It is true that some fit people look down on those who are not managing their weight properly, and it does seem to be one of the last acceptable forms of discrimination. I cringe when I see all the fat jokes in movies.</p>
<p>I wonder if some who discriminate would like it if they were judged for something, say for not being as financially “fit” as they should be? If only they were more disciplined, they would be worth millions (or if they have millions, then billions).</p>
<p>Life is complicated. It is best not to judge others.</p>
<p>The worst thing of all is how much most men discriminate against overweight women. Ever peruse the personals? For the most part, you’d be better off with advertising that you have a communicable disease than being overweight in the dating market. There are guys out there who are bald, out of shape, sport yellow teeth, and have a pedestrian balance sheet, and they are all about rejecting women who are a little on the abundant side. Men are even weird about eye contact with overweight women. I am a little fluffy. I swear I cannot get a middle aged guy to look me in the eyes and smile as I am going about my life, at the hardware store for example. A few pounds back, things were very different. Bring my teenaged daughter with me, and many certainly check her out (EWWW! Gross!). I am happily married, but I am just a very friendly person. Women seem to be OK meeting eyes with me and smiling. Very young guys and old ones as well. Guys in the range of those I could date? No. Really, that is kind of sick.</p>
<p>I wish Marilyn Monroe was still around. Ladies without curves are like candy without sugar. I’ve also noticed that overweight women are generally friendlier. That’s not to say that being thin automatically makes one unfriendly, so don’t go chastising me for saying that. It’s just a fact that when I smile at or make small talk with an overweight woman in public, I usually get a warmer response than I get from a smaller person. I think it might be a form of compensation, I dunno. But I like it.</p>
<p>Both my parents came from ‘lightweight’ stock. I married someone similar and neither of us, nor our kids, have to worry about our weight. We are just plain lucky and no more to it (although I and D have a non-functioning thyroid as well).</p>
<p>It’s simply not fair to judge others on this. It’s a complex mix of factors that determine one’s weight, including genes, socio-cultural factors and a lifetime of habits supported by a larger culture. </p>
<p>But it is not so simple to drastically change a lifetime of behavior (no matter what the behavior is). Ask me to even change one tiny behavior, such as give up chocolate, or don’t go on CC more than once a day, and it’s hard even when there are huge benefits to doing so! So who am I to judge?</p>
<p>One of the best pieces of advice I have read about food is to shop around the outside aisles where the actual ‘food’ is: like dairy, bread, meat and fish. Stick to the basics. Skip the middle aisles where you find the processed food. I honestly think the issue of increased obesity in recent decades has to do with processed and fast food. </p>
<p>I think avoiding processed food and too much trans and saturated fat and salt is key, to save your heart and increase your longevity, and to save money too. Lower weight is a maybe a side benefit but not the main thing as one’s health. I’m not even sure processed food is more convenient. Fish takes 5 minutes to bake; a slower cooker roast takes seconds to prepare. Steam some rice, veggies, a bag of salad. One doesn’t even have to know how to cook.</p>
<p>I’ve spent most of my adult life somewhere in the middle - not a bad place to be!</p>
<p>Would it be ok to ask a opiate addicted person to stop the drug but still have to taste it every day. Weight loss is really hard and people should be more lenient of others. Not every person is the same, I have friends who never gain weight and then me who gets a new handle every time I drink a can of coke. I have friends in college who eat pizza and wings 4-5 nights a week, have an endless supply of beer and never get of the couch playing the xbox. They get little exercise, except walking to class and showing. They are all skinny and never gain the weight. I on the other hand U could never do it, id be 600 lbs.</p>
<p>When I took nutrition in college, we learned that some people are just naturally born survivors and others are not. In the past there bloodline has been forced into some type of survival mode(famine) and their bodies keep everything to prevent death. A fat person would be much more likely to survive in the wilderness vs a skinny person. At least that is what we learned in my class. I think its true.</p>
<p>timely- Thank you for bravely sharing your story. It’s a good one and gave me reason to pause. Congratulations to you for your weight loss success. Your post will hopefully make people think before acting/talking.</p>
<p>I would add that there is another group that is acceptable to criticize: thin people. Kids and adults do it all the time and it is just as hurtful. “String bean, bones, sticks, twig legs, toothpick,” etc…are names I heard growing up. Even as an adult I have recently been greeted with, ‘you’re so skinny, don’t you eat? if you put on some weight, that would look a lot better on you, I want to be thin, but not THAT thin.’ If in reverse, I can’t imagine the same being said to an overweight person. ‘You are so fat, you must eat a lot’, is something I hope is never said. But it is ok to make comments at very thin people. </p>
<p>My kids are thin and very athletic, they hear the skinny slams all the time and they are indeed hurt. They are underestimated because of their size too. Watch out opponents, she’s not nearly as fragile as she looks! We all come in different packages and the key is mutual respect and kindness. I’m a believer in do unto others as you want others to do unto you. It’s a good way to live.</p>
<p>Mamabear- I disagree, everyone intentionally smokes. Forced smoking? And I wil go far out of my way to not be in a smokers air-space.</p>
<p>There is one person out there who is in every way the typical human being. Average waistline. Average intelligence. Average looks. Graduated from an upper-third-tier university with a GPA around 2.9. He lives in a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, ranch-style house with his wife, two kids, and a dog within a 40-mile radius of Topeka, Kansas. He votes for whichever political candidate he likes best, regardless of party. His 2006 Chevrolet has approximately 34,000 miles on it. He is just slightly off-white.</p>
<p>I say we find him and discriminate the $#!% out of him.</p>
<p>CelticClan07, I think you’re right about thin people being fair game somehow, when we’d never accept that attitude toward overweight people.</p>
<p>I’m really interested in, but know little about, the science behind discrimination. It’s clear that human societies tend to marginalize, if not outright abuse, those who are different. Obviously we feel threatened by differences. It’s not too hard to imagine why that was sensible thousands of years ago, when we had to worry about raids by rival tribes, passing on genetic mutations, and behavior that would upset the fragile social order. But now…I hope we’re outgrowing it.</p>
<p>
It can be pretty tough for some people. A relatively extreme example is what tends to happen with the Pima Indians of Arizona. They evolved over many thousands of years to be able to subsist on the nutrition available in the desert region where they live. Although their genes haven’t changed significantly in the last 50-100 years their environment has - Safeway, McDonalds, 7-11, basically easy access to any food they like and I expect that most of us would prefer to subsist on what we today consider ‘normal foods’ rather than what Pima ancestors ate a thousand or even a hundred years ago. These people are now facing huge issues with obesity and the diseases that go along with it. Clearly for them it’s not a simple ‘eat less exercise more’ equation. Scientists have compared them in a closed environment where controls were placed on calories consumed and efficiency of their bodies versus other groups of people and the bottom line is that they have very efficient bodies that are able to survive on a small number of calories but of course that clashes with today’s enormous availability of foods - especially foods high in calories.</p>
<p>That’s an extreme case but there are less extreme examples as well and the genetic disposition doesn’t just affect overweight people, it can also affect underweight people as others here have noted. We all need to be aware of how our individual bodies seem to function in this area, understand habits we’ve been raised with or acquired in the types of foods we eat, and ideally strive for a healthy balance as reasonably as we can. But since everyone is different and faces different challenges, it’s not fair or right to project one’s own experience in this area upon someone else and simply conclude that ‘they’ should simply do the same as ‘me’ and it would solve their issues.</p>
<p>Great post, UCdad. Along those lines, I have read somewhere, though I can’t find it now, that there’s a program in Australia to re-teach urban aboriginal people their traditional diet, in order to counteract the same processes that you describe as affecting the Pima Indians.</p>
<p>USCD dad, I’ve read about the PIMA Indians and also agree that it is an extreme example. I have actually not advocated the “eat less and exercise more” as it is being propogated today. In fact, I am absolutely anti- deprivation diet or the low grade misery so many people put themselves through in order to drop a few pounds. I’m stating that for most of us, eating the present diet of processed, refined, bastardized version of food we are constantly being presented with is causing a huge rise in obesity rates. Going back to food in its natural state is what MOST of us would find would help decrease the obesity rates in our society. If we could eliminate the fake, chemically engineered food from our diets and substitute it with real food (the outer ring of the grocery store as someone else stated), we could eat MORE, reduce obesity, and improve our health on a major scale. Notice I’m not saying everyone would magically become model thin, but I am referring to the recent OBESITY that has overtaken our country in only the last few decades. One need not be thin to be healthy; in fact there are plenty of people who are moderately overweight who are perfectly healthy. Obesity and morbid obesity are another story altogether, and it’s merely my opinion that the processed chemical diet we are ingesting could very well be the culprit. We’ve had genetic differences in body weight for many many centuries, but morbid obesity is a relatively new phenomenon, and it SEEMS to correlate with the proliferation of fast food restaurants and processed foods which have flooded our society. As a matter of fact, I’m not seeing how my opinion contradicts what you have said. Our genes have not changed-our environment is what has changed with regard to our current diets and activity levels. Diet being the most radical change I can think of. It’s not gluttony that’s causing the problem but the quality of the food we are ingesting.</p>
<p>
I agree. We Americans live in a land of plenty and convenience and are faced with industries working very hard to determine what appeals to us the most and providing that commodity (food) or service (transportation, delivery, etc.). </p>
<p>
I think we’re in agreement - I was just pointing out that genetics does play a role when we’re presented with the opportunities (as stated above) of today. With the change in lifestyle over the last 50 to 100 years together with the mobility we have where one can relocate anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours (and away from the foods/lifestyle they may be ‘genetically used to’), we’re confronted with challenges. I do know however, that whether it’s due partly to genetics, partly to the lifestyle growing up, or partly to the lifestyle we impose on ourselves in our fast paced society (grabbing quick fast-food meals between kid shuttle duty, grabbing calorie-infused Starbucks drinks, etc.), not everyone faces the same challenges and it can be much more difficult for some people to deal with the challenges than others and it must be frustrating for them when they know they’re sometimes criticized by and have their challenges over-simplified by others.</p>
<p>yes, I agree with both of you. The dominant food system we have is lethal to everyone, and yes, appeals to our deepest instincts (sugar, salt, fat). Which is surely why obesity rates have gone up so drastically. At the same time, as ucdad says, some people seem more sensitive to the effects. Some metabolisms do seem to process calories more efficiently; thus the same intake, even if not extreme, will cause more problems in some than others. Similarly, some people develop the lethal effects (high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease) more readily than others. </p>
<p>I think there are undoubtedly both environmental and genetic factors uniting to cause this epidemic.</p>
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<p>This is completely true in my case. Last year my weight was up 25 lbs. or so. I was almost, but not quite, clinically overweight for my height. I had high blood pressure, was showing signs of metabolic syndrome, and pre-diabetes. Since I began the exercise program, cleaned up my diet, and lost the weight, my hypertension and other problems have resolved. My body simply cannot tolerate excess weight. As a cardiology nurse, I’ve worked with many people who don’t begin to show those symptoms until they are clinically obese. Losing even a small amount of weight puts them back into good health, while still overweight. I’ve also taken care of the foks who can eat whatever they want and stay super skinny. Their arteries, however, tell another story. </p>
<p>We are now seeing very young people showing up with type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and other cardiac problems. It’s very scary; I can’t help but feel we are failing our young people. I, too, utilized the playground at McDonald’s and bought the Happy Meals. Little did we know at the time…Perhaps the best tactic to take is to approach diet from the health aspect rather than a weight aspect. Whatever, we need to do something, because our current system is NOT working.</p>
<p>Karl Lagerfeld said “eat less and wear smaller sizes”
I’ve lived by that rule and my IQ is 50% higher than my weight. ;-)</p>
<p>This thread seems overly complex and pedantic for what it really is…</p>
<p>
Only here… Unless you’re like 4’0" that seems unhealthy.</p>
<p>I do not think it is right to make fun of people for fat or other reasons. Mean spiritedness isn’t to be condoned. My comments about someone being overweight which are restricted to family members, close friends and otherwise undirected as in this post do focus on the unhealthy aspects of obesity. Yes, it is unhealthy to be popping a lot of unnecessary pills. It is unhealthy to do a lot of things. But that doesn’t make obesity a health problem.</p>
<p>Much of the miseries that my mother in law is suffering is due to her obesity while she was in her 30’s until several years ago. She ruined her knees, bones, her health due to being so heavy. It caused issues for us too. She insisted for many years that there was not a thing she could do about her weight. It was the way her body worked. Absolutely she did not eat too much. </p>
<p>Since she has been living with us and pretty much a paraplegic, those pounds have come off quickly. No one is heavy in my household except for my husband and it’s not from what he eats here. I don’t keep munchies around, and I am careful in planning my meals. If I go slightly off diet and pig out, I gain weight just as easily as anyone else and these days it does not come off quickly.</p>
<p>We don’t talk much about fat or weight here except when MIL brings it up which is all of the time. Fat people do not repulse me, but the health risks do concern me. And, yes, I believe fat people can lose that weight.</p>