| I couldn't agree more (see my comment interactions in this thread.) It surprises me how ideological people get about it in several ways: 1. You must feel ashamed for your laziness and greed - anything other than humble capitulation to this is 'making excuses' and maybe you're 'not ready' to make the changes you need. 2. Dieting's easy - just eat less, fatty! 3. Dieting is literally energy in/energy out and weight/BMI is a perfect measure of progress. If you eat X calories a day and log it accurately you will ALWAYS lose weight Y/week and if you keep this up permanently you will keep it off. If anything happens that this model can't explain, it's because you fucked up and are being lazy/greedy again/lying to yourself. 4. I absolutely discount any possibility of this being a psychological crutch that will not be replaced if you lose weight (often the person doing the judging has several of their own that would render them miserable if they gave up, but those are not 'special' topics that are allowed to be brought up in polite conversation.) 5. I am saying all this only because I am concerned for your health, not due to this being a good source of feeling superior or insecurities in this area or just finding fat people amusing. And I'm sure I could go on. I should point out that I am very much _not_ in favour of the whole 'fat pride' movement stuff - having digs at people for being fat is not ok, but being significantly overweight is a serious health hazard and extremely bad for you. What most people miss in this is how incredibly hard it is to actually get your damn body to lose weight and keep it off. A lot of the problem is psychological, and we genuinely do need to look at means of being smarter about how we tackle the problem, instead of using the blame game as an excuse when we are facing an absolute epidemic of obesity. Blaming is not making those numbers any smaller. |