To think that people pretend not to understand obesity

[Mezzoprezzo]

After 30 plus years of failed diets I've recently started on mounjaro. Because I've placed an order and spent weeks searching stuff about weight loss medication, my Facebook feed is full of adverts from suppliers, many of which use vlogs from real clients who have lost weight. And the vast majority of comments are along the lines of, couldn't you just eat less, haven't you heard of exercise, why not just stop eating crap etc. Surely people are faking ignorance to have the fun of fat bashing. Obesity is rife! Everyone knows someone who struggles with their weight and who talks openly about it. I and every other obese person I know have tried every diet under the sun. Walk into any gym and you'll see a fair number of larger people trying bloody hard. And I know someone's going to reply to this post by talking about an obese friend who they once saw eating an entire packet of biscuits. Well numerous times I've given in to the overwhelming urge to do that too. And hated myself afterwards. It's part of the horrible condition. People have got eyes and ears and they seriously know full bloody well how hard obese people try to lose weight. They just pretend not to so they can have the fun of hating.

Its about choice and also moderation. Plenty people drink alcohol and are not alcoholics. Smoking that's a choice same with drugs. But we all eat food.

Come on really. People themselves know about their own habits and lifestyle.

No, I think there are unhappily obese people because of poor education around food, meaning people get trapped in a toxic cycle of dieting and bingeing. And because it sucks to deprive yourself 24/7, which is what is required to lose a lot of weight.

It simply cannot be compared to trying to kick a heroin addiction!

Having said that, I think if people want to take weight loss drugs they should crack on. Anything to bring people's weight down to healthy a limit should be encouraged. My inlaws are morbidly obese and it's not an old age I'd wish on anyone.

Food can't really be compared to alcohol or drugs, because those are optional substances we control at a societal level by laws and approbation. Whereas food is something we all need. And an individual's desire for food, satiety levels, tendency to see food as good or bad: all individual, all able to be manipulated, all hard to self-report. Plus it's perverse to take an issue that's fraught with personal, societal, familial emotional issues - and medical context matters so much as well - and boil it down to 'I don't understand why people don't simply eat less and better'. It's a bit dim when we all know instinctively how humans vary.

Eh? People drink alcohol but are not alcoholics? Yes, just like people eat food but are not binge eaters. But there are binge eaters, and there are alcoholics.

That wasn't what I said.

What I said that women in menopause may not be able to lose weight even if they fast. I know this, because I did it. While being monitored by my GP.

I didn't say all women.
Or that we need to fast.

The point I was making was that it becomes almost impossible for some women to lose weight no matter how much they reduce their food/calorie intake once in or through menopause.

Just because you don’t ’believe it’ doesn’t mean it’s not a fact.

EXACTLY! You said it yourself- binge eaters. Or as another person said 'cake monsters' you and she are using those words to describe potentially what causes someone to be obese.

It isn't all about moderation though. I had to get down to below 700 calories a day to lose weight while in menopause which isn't sustainable long term. And even then, once I'd been doing that for a while, I was eventually unable to lose any weight. I did that for a year and a half with GP monitoring.

That isn't moderation. It's starvation.

Yes, being addicted to food and being unable to stop oneself from overeating? Why are you shouting “EXACTLY!” like you’ve made some kind of gotcha?

And what caused you to be overweight in the first place that resulted in you having to only eat 700 cals a day.

I'd say I'm addicted to food. I crave it all the time. I notice my weight go up after several months of not eating or exercising like I should. Moderation!

No, they often don't.

I thought I was a lazy arsehole and a picky eater. Despite being very active during childhood/early teens (basically when I had no actual choice, and the access to activities i really enjoyed).

I was avoiding exercise due to extreme pain (Ehlers Danlos), and 'picky' due to ARFID. Having the pain removed and understanding why I eat the way I do made it so much easier to address things.

Unfortunately by that point the damage of forcing myself to move and do things that hurt was done, my back is fucked, my heart is fucked, I take a cocktail of meds to stay basically upright and vaguely functional (in my power wheelchair).

I thought I was weak, I genuinely thought that everyone was in pain standing up/walking, they were just stronger/more stoic than me.

I realise that sounds absolutely ridiculous now but I was 23 when it dawned on me that other people were not forcing themselves to move through awful pain, because this crept up through childhood, slowly getting worse. It was my normal and it wasn't until I a/got on the right pain meds and b/got a manual wheelchair that I realised this wasn't right.

To be honest, yoyo dieting. I've been on diets almost all of my adult life.

I first lost weight when I was 11 and it's been more or less constant since then. I can't naturally maintain a healthy weight without cutting down to an unrealistic level and then when I return to a normal calorie intake, (1500ish cals) I put on weight again.

Doesn't matter how much I exercise. At one crazy point, I was gyming before and after work in an attempt to attempt to stabilise my weight.

I was very lucky to have a good GP who supported me and recognised it was a genuine problem, rather than some sort of binge eating disorder.

Food doesn't have the same physiological effects on the body as drugs, alcohol and tobacco.
Just because you want it to be a fact, doesn't make it so.

Ok but you have to admit being in extreme pain when moving is not likely to be the common factor in why the majority are overweight. We're not saying everyone who is overweight is like that due to overeating or lack of exercise.

Why do you think your mum would eat all the bread then? Does she want to? No. That’s why she doesn’t buy it, because if it were there she would. It’s a compulsion.

Sorry to hear you were overweight so young!

Me too. We had a pretty healthy diet, too. Father shot a lot of what we ate. So wild fowl, homemade food.

And it's sad to think its happening with more and more kids these days. One thing I definitely miss about being a kid is having the flexibility and energy to be running about and playing all the time. I've seen kids out of breath after only brief play (and not due to asthma or similar).

It's 28/29% of the UK population are obese, so nowhere near 75% . Up to 64% are overweight (including those who are clinically obese) but I really don't know how they measure that. People with medical conditions obviously don't account for all of that percentage, but they're not a distraction. They exist and should be acknowledged, rather than being brushed aside, or, worse, disbelieved and made to feel worthless. I do object to people spouting nonsense about it but sadly, armchair experts and dilettantes have very loud voices because as they say, empty vessels make most noise.

I tend to go with the NHS website when it comes to understanding a lot of illnesses etc. Obesity is talked about on the NHS website and it definitely makes mention of the section of people who are overweight due to medical conditions. Even fairly common things like under active thyroid.

I’m happy to say that you’re very uneducated!!!!

if you spent as much time understanding GLP-1s as you have asserting such rubbish, you’d see that they are hugely helpful for people to gain clarityover ‘normal’ eating patterns and learn how to break habits/learn mechanisms to address reasons for overeating that may have existed.

There are people who have genuine medical reasons for being overweight and there always have been.

A friend of my mum's was always slim until she had steroids for infertility in the 80s. She became very big while her diet hadn't changed at all.

But these medical reasons don't and won't apply to everyone or even the vast majority. There hasn't been a huge medical crisis in the last 40 years. Its a dietary one. The availability of crap food. A lack of understanding around crap food. And a lot of people.just like the taste of it (no matter how crap it is) and want to eat it.

The way UPFs are designed, they trick your brain.

It's not real food and your body doesn't recognise it as real food, which is why the normal 'full' or 'enough' triggers don't work.

I could eat a whole medium sized dominos pizza by myself in one sitting. And have done. I couldn't eat that amount of food of something I'd made myself from scratch because I'd be full after the equivalent of 2 or 3 slices. If I ate the equivalent of a whole dominos pizza to myself for one of my meals every day, I'd be obese too. And some people do.

And are still hungry because that's how those foods work.

And there's just no getting away from that.

And I say that as someome who has been 'very overweight' although not obese; someone who is related to people who are/have been both obese and slim; and someone who has lived with people who are/have been both obese and slim.

In no case were there any 'medical' reasons for the differences in size. But a huge difference in terms of food choices and quantity of food consumed.

@Winifredtabago

i started gaining weight at 5… the only fat person in a thin family.

i was put on appetite suppressants age 8 (sadly true - 1970s).

the doctor made a note of me weighing 11 stone aged 11 - “keeping up with your age?”. I was 5ft 1.

i’m now late 50s. I’ve yo-yo’d from underweight to very very overweight my whole life.

I’ve run marathons,
cross-fit, been a couch potato, and everything in between.

No thyroid or identifiable reasons for it.

Mounjaro has made me a different person.

do you think I just wasn’t trying hard enough?