this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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I used to judge overweight people. Now I understand that I was an asshole.
I have gained 25Kg in the past three years for no apparent reason. I eat the same kind of food, I exercise regularly... yet something is slightly off and my weight continues to slowly creep up.
People talk about calories in, calories out. What is missing from that argument is something as obvious as hunger: in the real world, over the long term, people eat until they are satisfied and no sooner than that. "Count your calories" means "Go hungry every meal". You can soldier on for a few months or a year, but eventually you will simply eat until you are no longer hungry.
If your hormones are slightly off and you feel a little too hungry for how much energy you actually need, you will slowly gain weight. Healthy people don't feel hungry every meal, that's simply not how they maintain a healthy weight.
That is why drugs like Wegovy are so important. They slightly adjust your sense of hunger so that it matches the amount of energy you actually need. Being overweight is in itself a chronic disease with all sorts of complications, from hypertension and diabetes to heart disease and joint problems. We need to stop judging people who suffer from it and start treating them now that we finally can.
I agree that we should treat them, but I don’t like people who are proud of them being overweight. This is a serious health condition and shouldn’t just be accepted.
I am overweight myself, with exactly the creeping up of weight over the years as you described. Every few years I have to do a weight loss diet for a few months to get back to the upper range of normal weight. That’s just how it is.
Also, there was a significant shift of people’s perception of what normal weight actually is due to the issues I mentioned in the first paragraph. If you have problems sitting in normal chairs due to your ass being too large, you’re morbidly obese.
There’s no point in ostracizing overweight people, but it should also not be treated as being normal.
I suspect the whole "fat acceptance" movement arises from the overwhelming amount of judgement that fat people suffer, combined with the fact that until recently there was no practical treatment for it. It's the same process behind gay pride: it's not pride as in "I'm better than you", it is pride as in "I am not worse than you, no matter how badly you treat me".
Being overweight or obese is a medical condition, not a moral failure. If you can't fit in a normal chair, yes, you are morbidly obese, but that means you deserve more kindness, not less, just like we do with people who suffer a more severe form of cancer.
People who are fatter than you are not worse than you, they are sicker.
Hmm, many overweight people I know don't treat it like the disease it is. Some even got diabetes, but don't want to give up their eating habits. They just don't want to.
That's as close to a moral failure as you can get in my opinion. It just might be medical in the same sense that drug addicts might not be able to control their compulsions, but otherwise no, it is all on them.
It's a bit like drug addicts. Yes it is a medical condition, yes they need help and kindness and not judgement, but deep inside of us we still judge the heroin addicts for their choices. Same goes with the sugar addicts.
If we could just accept that sugar addiction exists and is a widespread problem we could make progress, but the addicts won't
Speak for yourself. My father was an alcoholic and I don't judge him for that. I know the history of child abuse that led him to the bottle.