I somehow find it interesting, including the questions like:
What is too fat? what is too thin? What and when is good to say if you care about someone fat? What is fat shaming?
My life time high is 91 kg. My life time low 45 kg. That means I know both sides of it. My mom, whom I love, is too fat for her health.
It seems I am not the only one who finds that all interesting so…
My friend recently described me kind of offhandedly as overweight. I am 5’10” 175ish. I was 190. I feel a great deal of shame about my belly.
I’m siding with gman there. If we take the 40-70% is genetics comment as truth there is still a large chunk left over that we control. Genetics obviously play a big role in how fat is carried and distributed on our body but they generally don’t prevent an obese person from losing weight.
I don’t care if someone is overweight although it would be nice if society as a whole got thinner and in better shape, maybe our insurance costs wouldn’t be so insane (narrator: nothing would change) but don’t complain that you’ve tried everything and you can’t lose weight. Unless you’re part of a tiny fraction of the population that has a legit disorder that’s bullshit.
A lot of this is poverty related. Poverty ends up costing us more in the long run vs fixing poverty with UHC and UBI.
This is worth the 10 minutes of your time to get a basic understanding of all the factors working against people when it comes to junk food addictions.
It does not talk about other factors that lead to food addictions like trauma and stress (stress is poverty related a lot of the times).
It also doesn’t talk about lifestyle and how fat people have fat kids a lot of the time.
Genetics also play a role as well but is just another small factor.
It isn’t a character flaw if you are overweight.
This recent episode of NOVA (an American science program that airs on PBS) was interesting.
This too.
I agree with this but I also think that the impact of genetics, etc…, has to be communicated carefully so that we’re not removing all agency from people that are in fact able to modify their lifestyles and achieve changes in body composition. There are a lot of success stories out there for people who were struggling with weight or fitness generally and decided to change that. Does that mean everyone can do to? No. Is it much harder for some people? Yes, absolutely. But a culture of hopelessness about it doesn’t seem optimal to me
I agree with this for the most part.
It’s something that is tricky. I don’t believe in free will (Or at least I’m not sure it exist) but we still have to hold people accountable.
My main point is we need to be able to empathize with people and understand they have a lot of things working against them. Then from there we can build a framework on how we can address the problems.
I lost a bunch of weight while smoking.
The US is basically the fattest country on earth. Must be genetic problems for 70% of the population. Or these people are just too lazy to work their way out of poverty.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2228rank.html
I think Mexico passed us a while ago. ¡Vaya!
Lots of tiny islands top the US. Samoa and Nauru are prime examples.
TIL my current BMI is actually below the average BMI in America in 2014 according to the WHO
This is what they call damning with faint praise.
Man that’s brutal
Crystal meth? One of my former bosses lost a ton of weight over the course of a year. It was meth.
Cigarettes. I was also 10 years younger and more physically active.
Despite the weight loss, cigarette smoking was way worse for me than any fast food. Fucked me up and I wasn’t even smoking for that long.
Yes
Not why the addiction. Instead ask why the pain.
Come on, now. you’re just making stuff up. But, fine, let’s take your claim at face value.
So you would say the following is true: Obese people are all unhealthy
But you would say the following is false: Overweight people are all unhealthy
I’m sure you would love for us to believe that’s what you really think. But I kind of find that hard to believe. Here’s why. Because if your really believed that obese people were unhealthy, then when you saw people saying “overweight people are unhealthy”, I would think a natural response on your part would be “Hey, don’t you mean obese instead of overweight?”
But of course you didn’t do that. Or even consider the possibility that someone just actually held the very same view that you’re now claiming to hold and just inadvertently said “overweight” instead of “obesity”. That thought never seemed to cross your mind, even though we were clearly talking about a specific obese person.
Now that is a fucking tell.
I’m not sure that this is a useful way to approach health generally. Doctors establish lots of metrics and its convenient to have shorthand rules of thumb for “healthy ranges”, but there isn’t really an healthy/unhealthy switch that occurs at the end of the range. We don’t really think that a person is perfectly healthy if their cholesterol is 200 and then BOOM YOU HIT 201 NOW YOU’RE UNHEALTHY! The same is true for weight and other stuff (blood pressure, waist size, etc.)
In reality all of these things are data points that give you information to make decisions. Looking at them in totality allow a physician to recommend changes to diet and lifestyle that change your probabilities of adverse health events.