Is being Obese an illness?

[agel]

Yes or No
Im really not trying to start an argument. I want to understand what people actually think/know/believe about this.

I am obese and am trying to gain some sort of control over my eating through therapy at the moment. I’ve tried diets and exercising that do work but long term I don’t seem to be able to change my lifestyle enough to keep the weight off. I hate living like this and how people treat me differently because of my size. My family don’t understand at all. My partner is not understanding and it’s seriously affecting our relationship in many ways. It seems unfair because I don’t feel I have much control over this. It’s actually very lonely being in this situation. I rarely mention the topic of my health or weight to others because pardon the pun it’s always the elephant in the room! But you can almost hear what people are thinking. I hate the judgemental looks and comments. I rarely go out now because of anxiety and panic attacks brought on by this situation.

Thank you @OrangeBlaze yes you’re right, just gets to me. I know that many posters on this thread understand, and we can all learn from each other, and there has been some very interesting discussion.

I think it’s the fact these drugs work, it brings out envy and resentment, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a time where fat people, and by that it’s women in the mains are attacked and insulted so much by other women, all because they can take these meds,

No, for most people, it is not an illness.

I think there are posters who used to love the obesity threads pre-WLIs because they could roll out all the classics about eating less and moving more and shoving food in your mouth and personal accountability on and on and on forever. Now that fat people are taking accountability for their health by paying for medication that enables them to eat well and exercise, it's ruined a lot of people's fun. We were never supposee to take accountability in a way that actually worked!

And now weirdly one of the main lines of attack seems to be about mental health support, presumably because it's almost impossible to get and therefore puts fat people back in the trap those posters prefer. Once an obese (or formerly obese) person can come on a thread and explain that on Mounjaro they eat nutritious food in moderate quantities and exercise regularly, just as the sanctimonious and superior posters were always telling us we should do, all they have left is declaring that the medication isn't the 'right' way to do that and we should all be in therapy to 'tackle the root cause'. But for many of us, the root cause is in the body and not the mind. I've had tons of therapy because I was able to pay for it, it didn't fix my eating habits. And anyone without the resources to pay for therapy will find zero support in a GP's office - if you walk in and say you need help losing weight, they will give you a leaflet with the eatwell plate on it and tell you to be on your way. WLIs have enabled a lot of people to take control of their health like never before, and it's definitely caused a ruckus.

This thread has moved really far away from the OP now, but if she's still reading I want to say that obesity absolutely is a disease and there is treatment for it. But unless you are one of the people for whom overeating is actually rooted in trauma rather than in a hormonal imbalance or other physical cause, then therapy may not be all that useful in fixing that. It can be very helpful in other ways, of course. But for my obesity, it was medication that enabled me to fix the problem.

Of COURSE Augustus Gloop would say that!

Brilliant post x

I agree but it's also given me real pause at how unreasonably cruel people can be.

yes and I think for many of them it’s they can’t access the drugs themselves. They think why should we have to work at it when they get it easier, or they think it’s shit I can’t afford them,

It’s a constant theme on here why women shouldn’t take them or how it should be made harder for them to, with everything from we all need therapy or doctor monitoring , will regain the weight, won’t we think of tne anorexics, no one knows the long term effects and a whole pile of nonsense,

I’ve seen some shocking posts, from one poster who wrote fhey couldn’t wait till we all got cancer, to another poster exclaiming everyone should be stopped before they became fashionably slim and not allowed below bmi 25. Just so we all stayed just chubby enough not to piss anyone off,

but the urge from those not on them to discuss them, discuss obesity, discuss how we should behave on them, how we should access them, is off the charts, no one is on the low carb forum or the slimming world forum obsessively wishing to discuss obesity and giving advice , but weight loss injections due to their success has lit the blue touch paper,

It is hard to fathom how anyone could read the first post and reply with a flat 'no, it's a choice' to a woman in some considerable distress. I think some people don't even actually read a single post and just reply to the title - but it's fat people who are lazy, right?

I view obesity as a mental health illness, in the same way that anorexia and bulimia are mental health illnesses. None of these conditions are easy to control.

Any disordered eating is complex but obesity IMHO gets worse judgement as being slim is still rated highly by society.

That's you.

When I use WLI, I feel like I used to feel before I became obese - I was a healthy weight until I was 30 or so. Then overnight it was like a switch was turned and I just couldn't feel full no matter how much I ate and keeping to a healthy portion became increasingly difficult. I have good knowledge of nutrition and I ate healthy, hope cooked food. We don't eat UPFs as a normal part of our diet and DH was not gaining weight. My portions kept increasing and I gained weight.

I then got pregnant and once again felt normal - could eat normal portions and feel full, didn't constantly graze. I didn't gain any weight in pregnancy and 2 days post birth was a stone lighter than pre birth.

Between pregnancy it happened again and I gained loads of weight - second pregnancy was the same as the first.

I then took WLI and felt like I did before the obesity. A normal, healthy appetite, a feeling of fullness. A renewed enjoyment of food but the ability to stop when full. Occasional if something is really tasty, I'll push through it and then feel uncomfortable but not unwell.

I call that a good and healthy appetite. My normal attitude pre WLI was definitely not healthy, but it was normal for me.

I think it can be for some people, but for me e it definitely wasn't (and I do have some mental health issues, they just aren't weight related). Mine is very definitely a hormone issue. My mental health is also a hormone issue though. I'm clearly very susceptible to hormone issues.

You're not the first person on the thread to argue for that. I would say that binge eating disorder as defined by eg NHS/BEAT is similar to anorexia and bulimia, but that is in no way the only or even main cause of obesity.

I don't have a mental health issue. My obesity has been addressed by medication, like lots of other people.

The pregnancy thing strikes a chord with me - when I was pregnant was the first time in my life I felt (what we would like to think is) normal - I felt no need to eat more than one biscuit, in fact I often didn't want even one biscuit. I often wouldn't finish a meal.

So I knew that how I lived day to day wasn't the only way, I knew it was possible, the drugs to make me feel every day as I did when I was pregnant just didn't exist.

I wonder why when I was pregnant it all worked as it should, but the rest of the time it doesn't!

I definitely think for some people it is. But I also think for some people it most definitely isn't. The traditional bon viveur who enjoys too much drinking and eating doesn't have obesity due to a mental health illness, neither does the person with PCOS, insulin resistance, Type 2 diabetes or hypothyroidism.

I could possibly fall into the mental health illness category, as I have "food noise" but I don't know whether it is a mental health issue, or simply a deficiency of GLP-1! I have pondered this a great deal.

Undoubtedly, people who overeat because they have been abused or traumatised are obese due to mental health issues.

As for those who became obese as children due to poor learned dietary habits, I don't know where they would sit in the mental vs physical health obesity diagnosis.

I was not mentally ill either, I stopped smoking and developed high cortisol during peri, got uo to a size 18 from a ten, id have been very surprised to find out some people looked at me and would think I must be mentally unwell.

but surely it begs the question if it’s mental illness, then why do the drugs work, we all know you can push through and eat more should you wish. So surely if mentally ill the drugs would not work,

There is no one cause of obesity.

Hormones?

The drugs do work on the brain as part of their mechanism but it really depends what we mean by mental illness; is it habits, behaviour, thoughts, emotions - because that's all part of being a person and can equally be thrown out of whack via the environment, beliefs, learned behaviour as it can having a 'serious mental illness'. I don't personally find mental illness a helpful term - obviously that's very against the grain but there are other ways of describing unhealthy behaviours and normal responses to unhealthy environments and behaviour from others.

Oh dear, yes I didn’t realise the irony 😁🤭

It must be.

Wegovy and the other one before that did nothing for me. Mounjaro is the one that works for me, and I have no side-effects. I wish there was a way to feed this stuff back so that they can learn more about what works for who and why.

My lack of satiety problem started in my forties and continues. Before that I don’t recall food noise and I wasnt obese. I do believe that for me it is hormonal. Since then I’ve just yoyo’d and struggled with feeling hungry. That radio 4 series The Hunger Game - professor Yeo - made a lot of sense.

The difference is that Anorexia and Bulimia are descriptions of disordered eating behaviour, thoughts, and emotions. Anorexia literally means lack of appetite in medical terms then Anorexia Nervosa is latin for fear of being fat while Bulimia is latin for appetite of an ox. If it seems weird to retort such knowledge it's because I'm a nerd and have had diagnoses of both in my teens so ended up learning things like this and say the calorific content of a chocolate digestive are likely to stay with me for life judging by the fact this is some 25 years later lol.
Obesity on the other hand is a weight category, and while it is a risk factor for many serious health problems I believe it only recently has been classified as a disease in its own right. What's useful to include I think, when describing it as a disease as the World Health Organisation now do is to include their description of how obesity 'Is driven by complex interactions between environmental, social, biological and behavioural determinants.' because that one sentence packs a punch against those who flail around trying to say it is some sort of lack of will power, greed etc or any other veiled insult centred on the individual.
What doesn't help at all is the Christian 7 sins ideology that is still very much present in everyday belief systems around gluttony. It might be useful for anyone still firstly to be so reductionist about something so complex given our ease of access to information now and attached to such an antiquated concept to look at what else was happening in society around the time the concept of sinning was created. If you agree with that too then do carry on, but if not then perhaps consider updating your belief system beyond 4th century AD.

Personally I find the suggestion all obese people are mentally unwell offensive,as well as laughingly ill informed.

as said earlier most women a size 16 of above are obese, many size 14s obese if shorter, so announcing they mist all be mentally unwell is both offensive and mind boggling.

I've never seen this idea suggested by any reputable sources so who is actually saying it? Anyone worth listening to?