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.

> 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".

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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!

You're absolutely right, and this is essentially what I meant.

But dieting doesn't have to suck at all. You can diet on food you enjoy no problem.

They key for me was to design a diet to my liking as opposed to one that sucked all the enjoyment out of food. Here are some of the ways I accomplished this:

0. My BMR is about 2000 for reference. I used myfitnesspal w a kitchen scale to count calories and a fitbit(charge 4) to estimate my metabolic rate. I weighed in daily, not weekly, and then went by the weekly average to see progress. I found that weight could often fluctuate by as much as a kg daily due to variables like bowel movements, hydration and imprecision of the scale. Weighing in daily helped control for that.

1. Dinner is sacred. It should be filling and tasty. One of the dinners I made the most was chicken breast with brown rice and a variety of delicious sauces. I managed to make a recipe that included 1 chicken breast sliced up, brown rice and creme fraiche and butter added to the sauce, often with lots of mushrooms, at about 1000kcal pr meal. That's pretty much a full-blown dinner with a very high protein content. And absolutely delicious.

2. To make room for dinner, my breakfast and lunch were quite spartan, about 2-300 calories each. And I would eat maybe 200 calories of nuts or something before bed, because it helped me sleep better. In total that leaves a total daily consumption of 1800kcal. This provides a buffer of 200 calories to my base metabolic rate. That's enough that any added physical activity is always a bonus. But I could sit on my ass all day and still break even at worst. Some days you just don't feel like going outside at all.

3. Insisted on at least 6, ideally 8 hrs of sleep every night. Took whatever steps necessary to make that happen without medication that worsen sleep quality. One thing that really helped here was to take a short walk after dinner. This prevented me from my natural dinner nap which made sleeping at night much easier. Adequate sleep is crucial for losing weight.

4. Incorporate a cheat day at most once a week, at least once a month, making sure it coincided with a lot of activity. So if I got a dinner invite, I would find some way to be really active that day. Maybe I'd walk most of the way to/from the restaurant, or get to public transport by taking a a forest trail in rough terrain. And then I would eat whatever the hell I wanted to that day, as long as I'm not straight up gluttonous about it. This meant in practice that it was pretty hard for me to actually eat more than I burned, because I still ate tiny meals before dinner.

5. Walk whenever possible. Find little ways to walk a bit more, walk one bus stop further than you need to. If you're overweight, just walking can burn a surprising amount of calories.

6. I never set foot in a gym, went jogging or any other "tryhard" forms of exercise. I just took enjoyable walks. More than adequate exercise for weight loss for me anyway.

With this set up I lost 0.5-1kg every week all the while enjoying my diet every day, and regularly allowing some guilty pleasures. And I never did or ate something I hated.

The reason I eventually failed was the bane of my existence: my ADHD, and winter depression. I was doing well with all this taking medication, which enabled me to have all these routines at all. But then the usual depressive episode happened and things got so bad I stopped taking medication, all routines ceased to exist and weight came back. I'm ramping up for another go, with a new plan. In the winter I will attempt to maintain weight, not lose it. This should be significantly easier. And I'm taking more steps to avoid another winter depression but that's a whole other rabbit hole.

The problem with all this is the word 'diet'. For most people they shouldn't be "dieting". They should be changing their perspective on food and exercise completely, forever.

Otherwise after the "diet", they will go back to their original weight.

Note: I'm using the definition most people think when they hear diet, which is a restriction.

That's literally what my long post was about though. Overly restrictive diets never work. Finding a healthier relationship with food is precisely what I was trying to do, and I would say I succeeded. I just failed to solve the problem which is more unique to me, namely that I completely cease to function as an adult human being for several months at a time almost every year. This has mothing to do with dieting per se and isn't the case for most people.

> I never set foot in a gym, went jogging or any other "tryhard" forms of exercise.

I had to look up that word: A person usually of little talent who tries hard to succeed, especially through imitation, usually to gain fame or popularity.

A big part of habit change is also changing identity, how you see yourself. In that sense it might be worth investigating your aversion to people that exercise. Many forms of exercise can become quite addictive in themselves. Additionally building some basis of muscle if you have never trained before can increase your base metabolism.

Good points.

When I say tryhard, I just meant anything that to me is not enjoyable and therefore requires mental effort just to motivate me to do it.

I don't have an aversion to people that exercise. I exercise. Exercise doesn't have to include going to a gym or running. I used to think I just hate all exercise, but I learned that really I just hate synthetic exercise, like gyms and jogging on asphalt. I love spending time in nature, forests, river valleys. It's great exercise. Hell you could go do calisthenics in the woods if you really wanted to. You can do pullups from branches etc.

My point both for dieting and exercise is that the key is to find something you don't hate doing. I resent the implication that hating gyms is some kind of character flaw that needs fixing. If you enjoy the gym, great, go there! If you don't, find something else! I definitely got addicted to walking/bursting/parkouring around a river valley with some death metal in my ears. In the summer I would do it almost every day for half an hour just because I wanted to.

As for growing muscle, this is certainly also important, and initially I tried to incorporate it, but I found that building muscle while also eating a caloric deficit greatly reduced my options in terms of food. I came to the conclusion I had to cut out almost all fat to accomodate the protein and carbs necessary for that. I decided to postpone this until a "stage 2" where I would change my diet to instead maintain weight while gaining muscle and losing fat, but I never got there. Feeling good about next time though because I know what failed last time and what I need to watch out for.

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.

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.

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.

You're not providing citations either. Get off your fat hating high horse.

Walking and exercise make a HUGE difference in average weight. Just look at Canada, a place mostly analogous to the US, but with way more walkable cities and better public transit. They don't have this problem.

Regardless of how people get fat, we know for a fact that it's nearly impossible to get back to a healthy weight. Children of fat parents are more likely to be fat, both because of genetics and because of diet. Is it their fault that they were born that way?

Here's the citations:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy

https://researchblog.duke.edu/2021/03/24/duke-researcher-bus...

I got back to a healthy weight by losing 15kgs. It can be done.

"Walking and exercise make a HUGE difference in average weight. "

Interesting. I like to walk generally, but in the last year, with a fresh Garmin watch prodding me into more steps, I increased my walking by at least 50 per cent. I actually made some 5 million steps last year, at least 7 km every day, in every weather.

My weight fluctuated a bit, but basically didn't change. I am not fat, but I have some amount of belly fat I don't like.

What really changed and improved was my immune system. I am not totally immune to everything, but I tolerate a lot more environmental distress (cold, hot, sweating, getting soaked by rain etc.) before encountering first symptoms of having a cold.

Yeah, that's consistent with the research. It seems like the body really likes to stay at a given weight, so it adjusts so there's not too much fluctuation. That's why it's really hard to lose weight and keep it off if you've been fat for a long time.

What exercise helps with is making sure that the occasional binge, or change in circumstances, doesn't lead to permanent weight gain. If you're temporarily disabled for 2 weeks and can't move and put on some weight, your body then burns more of that fat when you go back to exercising, or regulates your appetite so you eat less.

But if you're not used to exercising and then suddenly increase your caloric intake, your body has less opportunity to burn the extra fat, so it leads to long term weight gain, and eventually your gut biome and body adjust to the new normal.

1. people do get fat from things other than "over eating" - citation: 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.

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.

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

>>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?

It's nothing to do with how I think people should look aesthetically, and I don't think the difference is about an extra 5 years of life. There is also "health-span" to consider - i.e. are you bed bound or unable to walk to the shops in the last few years of your life?

>>why do you feel like your opinion about that choice is something anybody needs to hear?

You seem confused as to the purpose of the comment section on a website. Discussing differing views is the whole point of it, I thought. I'm not running up to overweight people in the street and shouting abuse at them.

I'm also not mandating six packs. A certain level of fat is healthy. And I also have zero problem with people like this who own it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG8k8ouN8ro The people I have contempt for are the "Healthy at any size" liars.

No, but some people process different food differently, so eating the same amount of food might lead to different weight in different people.

And no, the jury is not out on what food is healthy. Carbs are public enemy number 1 according to keto people. Carbs are the best according to Italians.

I agree with the part that diet is way more important than walking and exercise, in the short term. But not exercising can lead to obesity long term. Here are some other things that can cause obesity / type 2 diabetes aside from dietary choices:

- Microbiome (eg due to bad microbiome passed on at birth): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27255389/

- Sitting the whole day

- Circadian rhythm disturbance, eg through shift work

- Gestational diabetes increases infant‘s T2D risk later in life

- Hypothyroidism

- Hypogonadism / low Testosterone

- Chronic inflammation, eg via inflamed root canals or chronic infections. People can have eg low grade E. coli overgrowth without knowing.

- Low gut barrier function due to drugs or inflammation

- many many more

I would be hugely surprised if there are any conditions that can cause obesity without eating excess calories unless the people concerned have learnt to create excess calories by photosynthesis or something.

Define „excess“ though. If metabolism is out of whack, a person might need to overfeed in order to get enough glucose into cells. If they don’t, cells/mitos are stressed and damaged.

I like to eat healthy. It's extremely impractical unless you constantly cook, and do so the "hard way", with fewer shortcuts.

Yes, there's "less bad" options, like not eating your whole meal, and/or buying "fake health" food.

Healthy convenience food is very hard to come by and the unhealthy stuff is everywhere.

> 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.

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.

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.

One extra rich tea biscuit a day (100kcal) is 10lbs in a year. You don't know what you are talking about.

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/

Your arithmetic does not support the use of the word vastly. It only diverges by mine on the line above by 25%.

> 4.3 to 13.3 kg

That’s not a vast range? It means some people gain more than they „should“, and some less than half of the caloric intake.

It’s also not „my“ arithmetic btw.

Apologies. Though my statement holds with s/Your/That/.

My original response was to a comment suggesting that overweight and obese people get home and eat 15 chocolate bars. My observation, supported by your additional evidence, is that a small imbalance has a substantial cumulative effect.

The study was with 12 pairs of identical twins. Variation of 25% in IDENTICAL TWINS suggests that variation among genetically different individuals is probably going to be much larger.

You can see the videos on tiktok. Each individual meal is actually pretty reasonable, but each one should be the main meal of the day. Having several per day (plus high calorie but healthy snacks such as nuts) is what cause the problem.

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.

It depends what you're talking about. Especially as people age, it doesn't always take as much as you'd think.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

According to that article, fully 50% of Americans were already considered obese at the time.

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?

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

I was under the impression that you can cheat yourself a bit by eating unlimited food but low-cal. Vegetables are one way (they're mostly water and fiber), but I'm not a picky eater and mostly eat to feel full, not for the taste so YMMV.

They can be perpetually hungry or perpetually unhealthy and obese. Choose you poison.

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'.

That's an incredibly simplistic way of looking at it.

Alcoholics are "making a choice" to drink alcohol. But we both know that it's more complicated than that. There are both habits and chemical addictions in play which makes it incredibly hard to stop.

Why don't you afford the obesity issue the same level of understanding?

> 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.

...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.

> ...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.

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.

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.

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.