I visit family in other states and I get comments like “I can’t believe you are so thin.” For context I am a healthy weight and I eat what I consider a reasonable diet. I sit and smile while I watch them drink soda and eat pure sugar and salt. I don’t care about your life choices but don’t act surprised by someone that’s a normal weight.
I would like others to care for themselves. Stop slowly killing yourself.
I’m a pretty healthy person. I work out regularly, this summer biked up to 8 very hilly miles every day and I’ve been actively reducing sugar in my diet. It’s nice to let loose for holidays and indulge in more sugary and savory foods than you normally would. It’s part of the fun of holidays.
Also stop fat shaming. There’s a million and one reasons for people to be fat and there’s a million and one reasons for people to be thin. Would you judge less if you knew your super skinny cousin was only skinny because he starves himself and purges after the pendulum swing back and he binges? Or that your fat aunt was fighting with an idiot rhumotologist who insists the tests he ran that indicate an autoimmune disease which also causes weight gain don’t indicate that same autoimmune disease? Or how about a fat uncle who only eats one meal a day, tons of salads, walks multiple miles but never sees his weight change no matter what? Or your grandmother who periodically goes into an expensive commercial starvation diet so close to the edge you aren’t allowed to excercise in order to lose weight?
These are all real experiences of people I know, and I know these experiences because I stopped to listen instead of jumping to judgment. Of all of the people I know who struggle with either gaining or losing weight I only know 2 people who found changing their diet actually affected their weight
No, the reason people are fat is diet and lack of physical activity, they just don’t want to give up their lifestyle. Nothing changes “calories in vs calories out”. Saying it is “glandular” and such is a way of defending your drug of choice, food. If you keep a food diary you quickly realize how many more calories you are eating than you admit. Now changing that is tough because every fiber in your being is fighting you and it requires a multipronged approach. I know people who have lost weight and kept it off through diet and changing their attitude towards food (i.e. not treating it like a reward).
Calories in/calories out would have a couple of my friends looking like skeletons. I’ve seen their lifestyles up close and theyre healthier than I am. There’s simply more to the story than just diet and exercise. Many autoimmune diseases, and other incurable and/or chronic health conditions directly cause weight gain/prevent weight loss.
Or put another way, I’ve weighed about 120lbs the entire time I’ve been an adult, whether my diet was 90% poptarts and candy (I wish that was an exaggeration) while doing no exercise at all or a super whole dairy and veggie heavy diet combined with regular varied excercise. If I can be entirely incable of gaining weight while doing everything that should make me a balloon, why isn’t the inverse possible?
Nobody ever worries about the health of the skinny person because they’re skinny and therefore healthy. Nobody ever worries about a fat person who’s gotten skinny because obviously they’re getting healthier (never mind if they’ve got an eating disorder and are on the verge of suicide. They’re skinny now so theyre totally healthy!)
Stop trying to educate fat people about their moral failing and maybe listen instead to what their lived experiences are
I’m good. I’m a 150 lb six footer. But holiday cookies are still welcome into my hutch. People used to die from just winter coming and starving. Don’t be too disappointed at us for falling for biology.
Enjoy the winter celebrations, my kind OP. And I will continue to work on it, too.
That’s not that bad. I have family who are in the 250-400 range (my estimate)
My BMI is well on the obesity side, though I’m reasonably fit and more importantly, have built some muscle. I think last we checked it was around 35 or so, yet I do frequent 25km day off-road marches with ~25kg backpack just keep my body comfortable with the much less frequent, though much more enjoyable, longer hikes I try to fit in each year. Last I ran the (admittedly not all that useful) Cooper’s test, I got just past the 3km threshold.
All this, while technically being… *checks notes*… obese.
I’m 92kg and around 170cm, which I think gets close to 200lb and 5’7 in the land of the free units. Never felt better about my body and shape, although back in the day when I was doing my NCO school, I was in a much better shape. But about the same weight. Now I have some fluff on my dad belly. But I really find it sad that so many are scared of weight, when it’s the composition that matters.
I think speech like this is scaring people off of gaining a healthy amount of muscle, especially if they are longer in height than average. I’m short and I had to work a lot to get this weight and muscle. Someone tall wouldn’t have to work as much, and would not even be in as good a shape, but feel doubly worse because a lot of people just talk about all this in terms of weight.
All I’m saying is we should be critical of both using BMI in anything else than statistics where it’s at least helpful, and weight alone, which is even less helpful in any general sense. The kids will be too thin and frail in general, if they are scared of getting a healthy amount of strength, since that easily throws the scales off.
BMI is sketchy and at the boundary points doesn’t take build into account. Still, at large BMIs it does reflect a general fat burden.
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Happy to elaborate, if I was unclear somewhere