Most horrifying facts about obesity?

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I’m obese and looking for something to really shock me into losing the weight. I know that it’s unhealthy and it can cause stroke and diabetes, but they all feel like distant far off issues and it just feels like it’s far too much work to lose weight with my mobility issues.

Does anyone know any gruesome, horrifying facts about obesity and the effect that it has on the body? We all know that fat = bad but I don’t think it’s discussed in detail nearly enough. It’s far too easy to just bury my head in the sand and convince myself that I’ve got years and years before it happens to me.

I watched a 'gray's atonomy' epidode the other day where one of the main characters nearly died of a heart attack because the dr didn't believe her because she presented with vague symtoms and those were put down to her being overweight anx havinv mental health issues.

Thank you for this thread op, and to @Vallmo47 for suggesting swimming. Like you, I hate exercise but quite like swimming when I occasionally go. I’ve wondered before about doing it to lose some weight and get fit, but people have scoffed and told me swimming doesn’t help you lose weight and I ‘should just start running or cycling’. But of course I don’t, because I hate both those.

The only trouble is I swim with my head up because I was never taught how to swim properly, so my neck aches after a few lengths. I need to learn to put my face in.

I know of an obese patient who died whilst waiting for an ambulance - because he needed the specially designed ambulance for heavy patients. We are in a rural area and I assume there was a limited number of them.

Thanks @yorkshirepudsx , those articles are interesting but I wondered about the actual piece of research that says if you have a BMI of over 40 or whatever you will not be able to lose weight ?
I know bariatric surgery is seen as potential cure, but most of the people who I know who have gone down that route have also regained the weight. The one thing that I suspect both groups of people have in common is no long term suppport. Those people I know who had surgery, had very little follow up/long term support, although this may have changed in very recent years ?
Another thing that I find interesting is the messaging from government, if you go to the NHS website, it still states that Generally, the recommended daily calorie intake is 2,000 calories a day for women, which some women might need, but probably not your average overweight, sedentary lifestyle woman. At 2,000 calories you could be eating 500 calories too many every day depending on your age and activity level ?

One of six siblings with a family history of type 2 diabetes.

The oldest three all developed type 2 and were all overweight. My Mother kept it at bay by being really careful with what she ate and lived till she was 93. One made a huge effort to lose weight and her diabetes improved significantly. The other two didn’t make an effort and one died prematurely of kidney failure having been on meds for a decade. I’m not anti drugs they can be all that keeps us alive but being on diabetes drugs for years can in itself be bad for you as far as I’m aware. His widow now looks after three lovely little grandchildren he never met because he died prematurely. He spent the last years of his life on dialysis, so had to stay at home, couldn’t go very far afield. I’m the same age as when he was starting to get really ill it’s a very sobering thought, he was really very disabled from mid fifties.

@VenusClapTrap its a big breath and then a deliberate putting your face in as you exhale. We all need to exercise but weight is mainly governed by what we eat. People have lost sight of portion sizes. Good luck.

I suppose everyone has a different reality check that makes them think ‘fuck, I need to do something about this’. I weighed 14 st 11 at the start of 2022 (I’m 5 ft 7 so BMI was about 32). I went to do junior park run with my DC this time last year (2.5km run) and I probably ran for no more than one minute before I had to stop because my whole chest felt like it was caving in, honestly thought I was having a heart attack. Anyway, I lost 4.5 stone last year and now run 30km a week. I did couch to 5k the next day and never looked back. That was the shock I needed personally, being 28 at the time and unable to run for more than a minute.

Lots of people are similar, almost embarrassed into losing the weight. I often hear stories of people struggling to sit on a plane or rollercoaster and that being enough to transform their lives. Different things work for different people I guess.

@Snellytheelephant it is a very sad situation. I know the father via another part of my life as well so it's not just gossip, he does his best but their child is forever altered by the loss of his mother. If this encourages you to aim for a healthier future for your baby then I'll take that as something coming out of this terrible situation.

I watch this as well but a lot of the weight issues stem from childhood sexual abuse, trauma over divorced/absent parents, etc.

I don’t think you can scare yourself into losing weight

People are all different and we're all motivated by different things.

I'm not sure where that particularly statistic is (I wasn't the one who originally posted about that) - but they were just articles I've seen that explain it too :)

The NHS can only give things on average, but, everybody is different,
With calorie intake - if you were to see a nutritionist and get your own diet plan, it would differ to every other persons diet plan.

So 2000 is the recommended amount 'on average' for an adult woman to maintain their weight, (this is also going off the basis that this average person also exercise the average amount) but there are other factors that may tweak this amount, such as age, etc.

So as some examples

Say you have a 20 stone woman, who isn't very active, but on average she eats 3000 calories a day. & she wants to lose weight, starting to have 2000 calories a day instead may be what is needed to shift some weight to start with, 2000 is what another woman may need to maintain, but this lady is used to 3000, so 2000 for her is considerably less.

But on the other hand of it, say you have a lady who is 5 stone, and needs to gain weight, she's very active and isn't much of an eater, she usually has 1000 calories a day. To gain weight, she may only need to lower her activity levels and up her calories to 1500 to start with.

Then each persons height will play a part too. A 6ft woman will need more calories than a 5ft woman to maintain a normal weight. Etc

There's such a great grey area with it all,
2000 calories is the amount for an average, moderately active female adult.
You can lose/gain weight by altering your calorie intake and not exercising, you can also lose/gain weight by altering your exercise routine but not changing your diet - it's usually most effective to do both, but it all differs.

The best thing to lose weight, would be to work out your own calorie intake & activity levels prior to starting a change in routine, then you can try and lower your calorie intake slowly hand in hand with upping your activity levels.

There's also the risks involved with suddenly changing your eating/exercise habits.
If an obese person is used to no activity, and eating 3000 calories a day - it would be very risky and unhealthy for them to cut their calories down to 1000 and suddenly start intense exercise.

(I hope I make sense lol, but the NHS website and others make weight loss seem so simple, but it isn't, and everybody is so so different, we should treat things like this as a personal journey, we can't all do the same things)

Which is why sensationalist, negative shock tactics aren't going to work.

Rather than thinking of it as "eurgh, look at all the horrible things that will happen to you as you are now", most people have better luck framing it as "here is how much my health will improve once I lose X pounds, here is how much my chances of diabetes will drop, here is the fitness goal I'll be able to achieve".

The 600lb Life/shock stuff isn't helpful, partly because it engenders disgust and contempt (it's designed to) but also because the vast majority of overweight people aren't anywhere near that size, so it doesn't even give them the "reality check" everyone claims to be hard enough to want. What it does is distort our views of what obesity is, so that even when we do have a BMI of 30 or over - the definition of obesity - we still say we aren't obese, or don't feel or look or consider ourselves obese. There are always people on these threads saying "My BMI is 30 but I carry it well and I'm not obese." Because they think obesity means sensationalist TV levels of hugeness, as well as being ugly, contemptible and useless.

Most of the time, we watch that kind of shit to make ourselves feel better.

I've never met anyone who did positive things out of self-loathing.

It is weird though. My bmi is now 30. I really genuinely don't feel obese! It just creeps up on you.

If an obese person is used to no activity, and eating 3000 calories a day - it would be very risky and unhealthy for them to cut their calories down to 1000 and suddenly start intense exercise.

Agree re the intense exercise, not so much the calories

A relative who’s a surgeon told me recently how much more difficult it was to do a really good hip replacement job on a seriously obese person, because of all the fat in the way.

If you were unfortunate enough to be around in the 90s, you'll remember the intense pressure to be pin thin. If you were ever a size 16 or over, you'll remember how difficult it was to find anything nice to wear. So if you were fat, or even just size 14 or over, there was plenty of criticism and punishment and "hard truths".

How did that work out for the population in maintaining healthy weight?

Realising that your are damaging yourself and increasing your risk of many horrible illnesses is not self loathing. WTAF is wrong with people to think that taking accountability for doing something negative is the same as self-loathing??????? If anything it's the exact opposite. It's self loving to realise you are hurting yourself and make changes to better yourself.

If anything is stopping people from making positive changes, it's crap like telling people that being honest about their negative actions is self-loathing. We feel negative feelings for a reason, they aren't some sort of cosmic punishment that we should always protect ourselves from. If we feel negative about our ongoing actions, that has a purpose. When I ignored how fat I was getting and told myself I was fine, I was damaging myself. I was stopping myself from feeling negative in the very short term while ensuring I would feel much worse physically, then and in the future that would have brought me to. When I acknowledged that I was hurting my health, that initially didn't feel great, but then when I decided to change, I felt not just positive. But powerful. It wasn't easy, it downright sucked initially as I was physically sick from sugar withdrawal but that feeling of power let me continue until I lost the weight.

And once I wasn't overweight, I was able to get fit. I'm athletically fit now and it's absolutely fucking amazing. You know that whole 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels' crap from the 90s, well it's crap. Being a good healthy weight is great but so is great food. But honestly, nothing, absolutely nothing feels as good to me as being able to turn a one handed cartwheel and land in the splits. As being able to swing from trapeze to trapeze. Hold a handstand and feel my strength pushing through the ground to hold me up. Absolutely nothing. But then as a bonus, food tastes far better afterwards than it ever did.

Allowing myself to be obese was a form of self-loathing, even if I wasn't aware of it. Allowing myself to acknowledge that something was wrong and would go worse and taking control was one of the most loving things I have ever done for myself.

The calorie part, health professionals would usually recommend somebody (of the profile I made up) to slowly reduce calories, cutting out 2000 calories a day all of a sudden would also be massively risky.
In this instance, it could medically be classed as anorexia too, for them to limit their intake so much, in comparison to what they were eating before.

"Severely restricting your calories can decrease your metabolism and cause you to lose muscle mass. This makes it more difficult to maintain your weight loss in the long term."

Lowering calories can in general be very risky or ineffective to those who are obsessed, medical professional supervision would be the best route.

Telling yourself how disgusting you are and how many horrible things are going to happen to you is self loathing and doesn't get you into the necessary headspace to lose weight.

What is better, as I've said, is to frame it positively: here is how much my risk of diabetes will fall when I've lost X pounds, here is the fitness goal I'll be able to achieve, here is how much I've lost already.

Because otherwise, you feel that you're already disgusting and in the shit, so another doughnut and missed gym session hardly matter.

I don't think you've read anything I've posted, just saw "self loathing" and made up a load of stuff about what you imagined I meant. Thanks for the insight into your head, though. And all the question marks.

Alzheimers is now starting to be called type 3 diabetes. That horrifies me.

I've read everything you've posted and it's nonsense. How the actual fuck do you equate acknowledging that your behaviour comes with health risks as telling yourself that you are disgusting? Honestly? That's a really, really messed up way of thinking. Taking stock of your actions, realising some aren't great and changing them, isn't telling yourself that you are disgusting. It is the literally the absolute opposite. It's caring enough about yourself to realise uncomfortable truths and make hard changes that will benefit you.

You however clearly haven't read anything that the multiple people who have posted here describing how they were overweight and realised they were damaging/potentially damaging themselves have written. You are stuck on the really, really messed up idea that acknowledging the negative implications of the decisions you are making is self hating. We aren't newborns, we don't have to and we shouldn't be protecting ourselves from all negative feelings and realisations. And acknowledging something about ourself that we don't like isn't self-loathing.

No, you don't understand what I've been saying and it's making you very angry, so if you do care about your heart health, I suggest you read again, because I'm not saying what you think I am. Or just step away if you can't.

You seem to think I'm saying that healthy weight loss is self-loathing. I'm saying nothing of the sort.

I'm saying that it takes a positive, self-caring mindset to lose weight sensibly and keep it off. That mindset is not engendered by sensationalist, negatively spun shock stories about how revolting fat is. Anything that encourages a person to feel like shit won't work. A positive approach - lose X pounds and your risk of diabetes will drop by Y% and so on - is much more effective than "eurgh, look at all the disgusting fat, think of all the disease, yuck".

You cannot hate yourself healthy.

I don't think you disagree with this. But because this is such a personal issue for you - as evidenced by your long, passionate posts about yourself in response - you've leapt on to my use of the term "self loathing", not read what I'm saying, and therefore taken it all as a great personal insult based on a complete misunderstanding. Although I think I've been clear.

As before, we had plenty of fat hating in the 90s and the population has only got fatter since then. I don't know what the solution is but I know it's not self loathing. And if you still don't understand what I'm saying, well, I'll just have to hope that more dispassionate posters do.

It came before. I was always a healthy weight and really active, I had an active job and spent most of my free time participating in different sports and running marathons.

When I was 23 I started feeling achey and thought that I’d just overdone it, but the acheyness and then lack of energy persisted for over two years and I slowly became less and less active. I deteriorated really quickly but all tests came up clear so I got diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. I gained a bit of weight but was only 10lb over healthy weight after about 2 years, but then I got covid and things got 100x worse. Now I’m mostly housebound, can’t do any form of exercise or I end up bedbound for over 2 weeks and I really struggle with the effort of cooking so eat mostly convenience foods. I gained weight really quickly but have been maintaining for the past year, I’ve tried to lose it plenty of times but calorie deficits make me bedbound which is really annoying and I get sick of being stuck in bed feeling awful after a few days so go back to maintenance calories so that I’m able to get up and shower or spend time with my young DC.

It will be hard for me to lose weight because I’ll have to just accept being stuck in bed whilst I do it, but scare tactics are the only thing that seem to work for me because nothing else feels worth putting myself through that😅

This is really powerful, it’s exactly how I feel too! When I use scare tactics to motivate myself I’m not thinking ‘Ew I’m such a fat pig, I must deprive myself of food because I’m a bad bad person and making myself sick because I’m greedy and stupid’. I’m thinking ‘Omg what have I been doing to myself? My body is a temple. I love my body, I need to treat it right, I need to stop poisoning it and fill it with goodness and kindness because this is the only body I’ll ever have’.

Ok so I had Covid fairly badly in March of 2020.

I'm 53 been around 9stone all my adult life, I lost a stone and a half over the first four months as I couldn't eat or sleep, absolutely bizarre. I was scarily thin.

Then as I recovered I put on 4 stone 🤷‍♀️ I'm sure it's a covid thing but I was uncomfortably big at 5'6".

I've settled back now at 10stone 10lb.

I've long covid and now following another infection post Covid nervous system disorder meaning I can only (currently!) sit up for a couple of hours a day and can't even walk as exercise.

I'm 100% confident a low carb diet will work for me again despite being almost bed bound.

I had ME for 17 years previously and my consultant recommended that way of eating to recover which I did.

I really urge you to check out the low carb boot camp on here, if I can do this so can you.