To think you get less respect if you are fat

[Jojobears]

I’m currently fat (16/18), but have been slim previously.

I don’t know if it’s just my self esteem levels, but I really feel that I have less respect from people when I’m fat. Although I could be imagining it.

So, can I ask, do you treat people with less respect if they are fat.

Ps I’m not a daily fail journo. Heaven forbid they employ anyone with a house worth less than 500k

People are less active and feeding themselves full of the shit that is available 24/7.
Jobs are much more sedentary now, with people working long hours at a desk. It's then a total ballache to cook something from scratch using fresh produce. Why do that when you can order enough to feed your family for £25, no cooking, no washing up and it's with you within 30 minutes.
The fact that it's so easily accessible now isn't a help but people have to take responsibility for their own choices!

Takeaways, 24 hour supermarkets and fast food places, late opening restaurants.
People don't even have to walk to get their food now - you go to the drive thru or get it delivered to your door.

People are eating more and exercising less. The food we're eating more of is full of shit. Pizzas, burgers, fried chicken.
It's normal to eat a large takeaway pizza to yourself, instead of sharing. Then you have the garlic bread, other sides, tubs of ice cream and cake/cookies being delivered.
That is why people are becoming obese.

I associate those things with a degree of laziness or lack of restraint/control, and find it personally difficult to respect people who exhibit those characteristics.

Do you feel the same about people who smoke or who get drunk - i.e. that they lack restraint/control and that you find it difficult to respect them too??

If this was ever in any doubt just have a look at any of the weekly fat threads on here.

I think it's more to do with attractiveness and youth, tbh
I don't believe this, even in older women weight is judge, my DM and most of her neighbours are obese, the few who aren't are looked on as she takes care of herself, they are usually more active too.

@Kazzyhoward yes i do. Everything in Moderation. All addictions show weakness by their nature. A healthy trim not smoker who doesn't drink to excess is evidently more sorted surely?

I grew up outside the UK and there were fat and obese people around even though the society wasn’t as plentiful as today’s Western World. I know for a fact that one can eat very little and stay fat or put weight on.

Because obesity is not about how much one eats and how much they exercise. Indeed, the more enlightened research specialists believe the above are the consequences of one’s weight and symptoms of a problem rather than the cause.

I take it you haven’t suffered from PCOS to experience the weight gain from nowhere or been unlucky enough to have genetic insulin resistance where you sniff a biscuit and put on 4lb.

The calories mantra is ignorant and fallacious at best.

The World Health Organisation would disagree with many if the statements above. They state:

Worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975.
In 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 650 million were obese.
39% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight in 2016, and 13% were obese.
Most of the world's population live in countries where overweight and obesity kills more people than underweight.
41 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2016.
Over 340 million children and adolescents aged 5-19 were overweight or obese in 2016.
Obesity is preventable.

complete nonsense.

There are enough documented cases of people under-fed for various reasons, there wasn't ONE overweight or obese among them.

Excuses for over-eating are one thing, but the simple fact is that over-eating cause being over-weight.

The fundamental cause of obesity and overweight is an energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended. Globally, there has been:

an increased intake of energy-dense foods that are high in fat; and
an increase in physical inactivity due to the increasingly sedentary nature of many forms of work, changing modes of transportation, and increasing urbanization.
Changes in dietary and physical activity patterns are often the result of environmental and societal changes associated with development and lack of supportive policies in sectors such as health, agriculture, transport, urban planning, environment, food processing, distribution, marketing, and education.

Watch Lizzo!

In all seriousness, there are some study that there is a correlation between adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and obesity.

I turned down taking an anti-depressant well known for causing weight gain (mitrazapine) despite being very ill. Was afraid of being fat-shamed. But I wonder how many do take it to try to save their lives, yet on here they are lazy, greedy and it's all their fault they are fat.

Obesity is a very complex problem which cannot be solved with one size fits all, dreamed up solution like eat less and move more. People move less because they are larger and it is harder to do, when they lose weight they naturally get more active.

The very fact that we cannot get a handle on obesity as a society (and individuals) tells us that what we are doing isn’t working, and haven’t been working for the past 30 years, this eat less, move more mantra.

Body isn’t going to just sit there and take it when you cut calories and undereat persistently. It fights back ferociously, slows down activity levels and physiological processes, scales down growth and repair, ramps up appetite. It has been scientifically proven that every single dieting episode permanently lowers one’s metabolism, so when you stop, you put weight on twice as fast.

This is no solution, it is torture which isn’t even effective and has little lasting effect.

Certain foodstuffs are addictive, as much as tobacco and alcohol and need to be restricted accordingly. But no, we blame the individual for not having the breaks when it comes to cake and sweets. Funny we don’t say to an alcoholic, just drink less, move more. I don’t know what’s so hard.

In fact, we do say to alcoholics drink less. We tell them not to drink at all. I know this fact first hand from my mother.
She didn't listen and the school of thought was 'she's doing it to herself.' Applying that to people who are overweight 'You're eating too much, you're doing it to yourself' and someone will act out, because their feelings are hurt.
Please don't compare obesity and overeating to something you know very little about.

I think a large part of the problem is accountability. No one is to be held accountable for their actions and, as such, we tiptoe around people who are overweight for fear of upsetting them and being labelled as 'fat-shaming.' We also blame the manufacturers of such food.

There's currently a campaign to ban junk food advertisement to prevent obesity - this shouldn't be necessary.
Apparently, advertisement is like 'planting seeds' in the mind, but if that was the case surely nearly everyone would be obese?
The public should be taking responsibility for their own choices and exercising a bit of restraint.
We're mollycoddling those who are overweight by protecting them from the junk that others can enjoy occasionally without issue.

Yes, some people are obese due to health conditions, medication and mental health - but the large majority are not. They are obese because they eat too much and do not exercise enough.

If eating more isn't causing obesity then what is?
Medication aside.
If you don't stuff yourself full of the wrong food, you're not going to become overweight.

Sorry Holy, I don’t subscribe to neoliberal views. I have got enough awareness to realise choices aren’t made in a vacuum. Why should we be put (already are) in a situation where the majority of food and drink available is junk. It is a bit middle class privilege to say just cook a pot of lentil daal then. I now can cook that daal, because I am more or less a SAHM and have got the time and headspace to ensure a good diet. But I am not blinkered enough to think anybody can do it, especially people on lower incomes who have to work twice as hard for little wage and who have little energy left at the end of the day to devote to lentil weaving. They also can ill afford healthy prepackaged foods, but cheap kebabs/chips are everywhere. Yes, you can buy a big bag of hot chips to feed a whole family for just under £2. This is pure junk, yet so affordable and accessible. Food outlets like that should absolutely be restricted.

I have alcoholics in the family and nobody in the right mind would suggest to them to drink less, the only way is not to touch the stuff at all. For any hope of success.

If eating more isn't causing obesity then what is?
Medication aside.
If you don't stuff yourself full of the wrong food, you're not going to become overweight.

It is not a matter of eating less or more, or exercising less or more. There have been experiments where people were fed stupidly high calories, 6 000 or more per day, but they either did not put on weight or put only a small amount on (which did not correlate with the amount of food they consumed). After the experiment finished, they promptly lost that extra weight. If your theory was right, they should have ballooned. But that wasn’t what happened.

Conversely, the conventional wisdom tells you if you cut so many calories out, you will steadily lose so many lbs of weight (until there is nothing left of you presumably). Except it doesn’t work like that. Weight loss is anything but linear and doesn’t neatly correlate with the shortfall in calories. It can stop altogether although you are still in deficit. It just doesn’t work. Or works due to other factors (like cutting out junk out of your diet, improving your sleep, lowering your stress levels etc).

It is always better for fat people to eat less. The difficulty is how to you get them to do it. It's the same with alcoholics. Of course they need to drink less but they know that already so it is not helpful to just say that.

Re: alcoholics. If you care to read my post properly, that's what I said. 2nd sentence. My mother died through her alcoholism. Believe me, I know.
So, if it's okay to tell an alcoholic (who will become violently ill whilst withdrawing from alcohol) to not touch a drop, why can we not tell those who are overweight to not eat junk? Why is that such a wrong view in your book?

If holding people accountable for their choices is a neoliberal view then no wonder this country is becoming ridiculous. We are such a nanny state as it is and that still isn't enough.
No one is uneducated enough with regards to food that they don't know junk = calories.
Healthy food being expensive and arduous to prepare is a myth.
There are plenty of cheap, easy, healthy recipes out there. Tin Can Cook is a book full of them.

It's very easy to find excuses when you are looking for them. I am in a privileged place now, but I haven't always been. I have been the single parent with a full time job, running on little to no sleep and with stress levels through the roof - yet have always managed to cook something healthy of an evening and not chuck on the lbs. It is possible.

Of course different individuals possess different metabolisms, but no one knows their body better than the person themselves. If you know that the high calorie junk is going to push up the scales, why eat it?
Being overweight is detrimental to your health - why wouldn't you want to prevent that in anyway you can?

As a pp mentioned there is no obesity throughout history if there is a famine, or government withholding food.
As hard as it is to hear, over eating causes weight gain, the reasons for over eating can be greed or emotional issues.
DP is overweight but he eats massive amounts, he'd have a takeaway every night of the weekend when we were first together, he works out and is active, he'd definitely be morbidly obese otherwise.

@EmeraldShamrock someone talking sense finally!

Yes as a pp said, I subconsciously associate being obese with laziness and lack of self control. Why should I respect you when you clearly don’t respect your own body?

However I would never voice or act on those thoughts.

And yes I think the same for smokers. As soon as I realise someone smokes, I lose a bit of respect for them.

A better question to ask is why people overeat. If health authorities and governments asked the questions beginning with Why? more, we would get a lot further on the topic of the population getting obese. I am not looking for excuses, I am merely pointing out why too much junk gets consumed (and it doesn’t boil down to the personal responsibility only). Appetite, for one, is largely hormonally driven (leptin, ghrelin, insulin are among the factors). It is not a simple case of I decide I am going to eat less. When faced with ravenous unabating hunger, not many people can stand up to it or not for very long. And the hunger is shown to grow stronger the more calories get cut, and also the longer the calorie restriction carries on. The research findings on this are widely available online. This is why diets fail. Always.

Hmmm.... a few people have been really honest and said, yes, I do respect you less for being overweight. Thank you for your honesty.

I’ll be honest and say I don’t particularly respect those who’s mindset is so limited that they do not respect people for being overweight.

There are myriad ways that people are overweight (or course, eating too much is part of it for most of us). But the reasons why people eat too much are plentiful. (MH issues, convienience, long working hours, poverty, stress) and I really believe that some people are just really unfortunate that they have bigger appetites and are more likely to eat more.

On maternity leave I was a lot slimmer than I am now, but probably ate the same number of calories as I was moving constantly. But with a desk job, even when exercising on a daily basis, I was still fat. I recall a baffled colleague asking why I was fat as I ate so much healthy food and did a lot of exercise.

I’m also from a poor background, and treats were rare as a child. So I suspect that bingeing on sweet good has something to do with that. The fact that the food is available makes me feel that I need to eat it. I suspect many slim people who judge so much have been dealt a good hand in life: either privileged backgrounds or naturally slim or naturally small appetite (although not all: some work bloody hard at it)

Years ago people were slimmer because they carried out more physical work in their day to day lives: not as many cars or desk jobs. Housework was physically harder. Food was much more expensive (compared to income) and food wasn’t as unhealthy and processed as it is now. And many many people kept their weight down by smoking. People were slimmer then, not because they were morally superior or more “sorted”. But because they just didn’t have the opportunity to be fat. If those people lived in the same timeline as this generation, they do would have similar issues with obesity.

With rates of obesity increasing, I would hazard a guess that this is a societal problem rather than a individual issue.

As to being less “sorted” because I’m fat, well, that’s ridiculous. I’m extremely organised , assertive, have a good career, a lovely family and home, plenty of friends and an excellent relationship with my husband. And importantly, I’m a kind person.

I know lots of slim people who’s lives are far from sorted in most of these areas. But hey, they have a BMI under 25, so yip, they are automatically seen as sorted

Modern life is stressful.
There are so many shortcuts available which are unhealthy.
Snacking and fast food are normalised in our culture.
People want a quick fix and sustainable weight loss takes time.
Portion sizes are enormous in pubs and restaurants.
Speaking of pubs, many people drink too much alcohol which packs on the calories, increases appetite, decreases inhibitions and switches off fat burning.
People are uneasy about / afraid of being hungry and not used to following their natural body signals to read their hunger and fullness.
Emotional eating.

It is a complex social issue as well as a (usually) straightforward biological one. Calories in vs out. I don't know what the official statistics are now but a large percentage of the population seem to be overweight or obese now.

People assume that I am stupid and common when I'm heavier. That being said, fat me is more approachable. Thin me is viewed as intimidating. Fat me (14-18) is friendly and fun for some reason and therefore has more friends than thin me (8-12).