Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
Being fat is a choice the vast majority of the time, and I have a huge bias against big people.
I used to be fat (250ish lbs (110ish kg) at 5’8"ish (172ish cm)), and as much as I would like to blame my shit on anything else, the person feeding me, the person sitting at the computer for hours, the person actively avoiding all physical activity was me and no one else. After I got diagnosed with some weight related shit, I turned my entire life upside down, am at a much healthier 150 lbs (68ish kg), and feel so much better, both physically and mentally.
I’m aware of my bias, and I make every active effort to counter it in my actual dealings with bigger people. Especially because there are certain circumstances, however rarely, where it may not actually be their fault. But I’d be lying if I said my initial impression was anything except “God, what a lazy, fat fuck.”
Edit: Added metric units
I used to be fat, and when I watch morbidly obese people talk about how much they love food and it makes them happy and makes them feel better that is 100% me. Food is absolutely an addiction for some people, including me. Thankfully I have it under control to be at a healthy weight and lose weight when I need to, but some of these people have absolutely tragic childhoods or life experiences and I don’t blame them at all for coping in that way. I could 100% see myself in that position if I had been through what they have been through.
However, those people are self aware that they are unhealthy. The people I can’t stand are the “healthy at every size” fat acceptance people. Healthy at every size was SUPPOSED to be that you can make positive health focused changes at any size and there is no point of no return. But it got twisted into I can be morbidly obese and I am still 100% healthy forever. And they even make people feel bad for wanting to lose weight, even if it’s for health reasons. Those people are trash and fall on the same level as antivax people IMO.
Everyone deserves to be treated with respect, until you start spewing harmful bullshit and then I will judge you as much as I want.
I’m also a comfort eater. Huge sweet tooth, and almost 0 self-control when the hunger kicks in. My diet fix was making sure I only buy and order what I should eat, because I will clean my plate. I’ve accepted that, and making sure there’s only the appropriate amount of food in front of me has worked wonders. Holidays and special occasions are sometimes tough, with family shoving food in my face, but I just exercise extra hard afterward, lol.
I definitely agree with you about the fat acceptance movement. I have to leave those conversations before I start saying things I regret. Again, I try really hard to manage my bias.
I have a weight problem and I told my wife, who berates me for it, that if there is food I shouldn’t eat in the house, then I will eat it. It’s that simple. I’ll eat a lot of what’s available.
I’ve lost 30 lbs before with intermittent fasting and taking calories. I know what works for me.
Anyways, she insists that I’m being unreasonable and that I should eat in moderation. She buys ice cream and then will eat a spoonful every 30 days.
I wish I could do that but I simply can’t.
In general avoiding situations when you only rely on your willpower gives much better results than fighting yourself. When I think I should loose weight I only buy boring ingredients that require preparation to be tempting in any way. If I get strong cravings I just eat some random vegetable and try to better plan mealtimes next day. It’s much harder when living with uncooperative partner or parents that like always having snacks in their kitchen. We’re literally built to eat food whenever it’s available.
I’ve been very lucky in that my wife has been very supportive and understanding, but I’m the same way. My rule is that I’m not allowed to shop hungry, because I’ll buy shit I don’t need to eat, and then I’ll eat it because it’s there.
This happened with my ex - the kids and I, we are all built more lean and spare, but ex hung on to weight. So I cooked or he did, we all ate the same food but somehow he got fat, we stayed skinny.
Well I am like your wife, low tolerance for sweet stuff - usually when I want something sweet I want to taste it, not really eat it, if that makes sense. So yes, a big spoonful of ice cream, one twix candy & save the other one for next week. Emergency chocolate bar at work lasts a month.
Ex was the other extreme, could binge sweet foods. So even with the metabolic advantage of being a couple inches taller and male, his natural intake kept him on the heavy side.
Intermittent fasting is such a good way to maintain weight, but not if you can eat a bag of candy in your eating window!
I think that’s the best way to go about it, eating like a monk literally all the time is much harder than eating well the majority of the time, at least for me lol.
The guilt is an enemy as well, I’m the type to go “well, I’ve broken my diet strike, might as well eat a sundae” in a sort of self hate spiral that makes no sense. If I allow myself to indulge in expected moments I feel much better. Like, literally everyone around the table at christmas goes like, “I ate way too much”, I shouldn’t feel bad for feeling the same haha
I totally get that, same here.
But ultimately you can’t just blame people. There is literally an entire industry trying to sell you cheap carbs and fat. Down to the sound a bag of chips makes when you open it (this is not a joke).
So on one hand you have evolution, your body still being stuck in the past where food was scarce. On the other hand you have too much food and it’s highly engineered to be addicting on purpose.
It’s no surprise most people are going to lose that challenge.
I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot lately and your comment is interesting. Your first sentence is definitely phrased in a more controversial way than the rest of your comment, but I can’t help seeing it as very similar to “Being depressed is a choice the vast majority of the time, and I have a huge bias against depressed people.” Is that an unfair comparison?
I know that treating fatness/obesity as a disease is kinda controversial but I feel like folks give people dealing with mental health a lot more grace than people dealing with health issues related to being fat. I’ve also heard that for some people they can be perfectly healthy at a higher weight (though this is clearly not the case for many fat people who are seeing health impacts). I guess I’m assuming that a lot of fat people would potentially like to be less so, but can’t (for any number of reasons) quite get there. This seems really similar for me to people dealing with depression, anxiety, etc who want to change things but keep falling back into the problem.
I guess my question is do you have bias against people who can’t escape other bad cycles like mental health or even stuff like alcoholism? Or is it more just that you think it’s fair to judge people without the discipline/willpower to get out of a state they didn’t want to be in, like you did.
This is a fair question. I guess maybe my statement could’ve been less broad. If just “being fat” is the primary problem, that’s what I take issue with. If the problem is deeper, and being fat is a secondary issue (like a result of depression, hypothyroidism, or some other mental/physical ailment), then that’s a different situation. My stance in that case is that the person should be actively trying to treat the primary problem. I know depression almost never just goes away. Sometimes it even sticks around with therapy and medicine, and that sucks hard. But at least they’re trying.
Thanks for your reply. I appreciate your personal take on the whole thing. As someone who has never been fat, I’m trying to figure out what’s the whole deal with the various movements around it. I feel it’s gonna become a much bigger cultural discussion in the next decade. And congrats on getting down to a happier weight for you! Setting and reaching goals is definitely something to be celebrated.
This is an old thread, but taking your first comment into account, doesn’t this make them guilty until proven innocent in your eyes? If your first thought is “what a fat lazy fuck” without knowing their story? That seems unnecessarily judgmental, and I can’t help but wonder if it comes from a place of insecurity, maybe left over from your own history with weight
I especially hate when everyone’s conclusion is genetics. That’s such a minuscule percent of obese people that it’s ridiculous.
So silly. Genetics can make it harder to lose weight, but not impossible.
I’m related to several people diagnosed with hypothyroidism, but none of them are obese because they know the condition makes weight loss hard and actively work harder because of that. The biggest one is what I’d called “chubby”, and that’s more likely because her thyroid numbers are in flux at the moment, and she’s currently working with her doctors on that.
totally true
Sure.
But that doesn’t mean go out and harass fat people. Trust me we fucking know. You can’t lose weight instantly. Some of us may actually be working on it.
Also fat people have the right to be happy. People hating on “happy at any size” is just being assholes for the sake of it.
I agree with you. I don’t go out of my way to hurt big people and I don’t outwardly do so on ourpose. I just have to catch my initial bias and push it aside first, which I’m working on, I know it’s a me thing, for sure.
I agree “happy at any size” can be an acceptable attitude, for sure, but I disagree with “healthy at any size”. Obesity puts stress on organs and body parts, simply just because of the extra weight, even if everything else is fine.
I agree completely. What makes me irrationally angry is when people say stuff like it’s there’s no correlation between being fat and being unhealthy. Like if I went to work drunk or started smoking cigarettes or doing weed, people find it acceptable to be concerned and try and help me be more healthy but you can’t mention it at all if I’m stuffing myself with unhealthy crap.
I don’t believe that anybody deep down is happy at being fat. That’s a lie and they know it.
Nobody I know who’s lost weight has said they were happy with the Extra weight.
Oh I’ve actually been told by fat people that there’s no way that I actually enjoy working out and that I’m forcing myself to go to the gym while not enjoying it.
Guess it’s weird I like improving my physique and enjoying seeing how I can reach new goals ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Something disillusioning from the field of psychotherapy research: Our best, most interdisciplinary, low-threshold therapeutic strategies allow people to, on average, lose and hold the loss of up to 7-10% of the weight they’ve started with. Which isn’t even enough to get most people out of the obesity range. What you’ve been through is exceptional. By far most people will never manage to lose that much, not even with professional help.
To put it this way: If we look at obesity like a mental disorder it’s one of the hardest to overcome, harder than depression or anxiety.
I get why so many people share your opinion on this, I just feel like it’s missing context. Because sure, physiologically its possible for a depressed person to “just go out more” or an anxious person to “just stop breathing so fast” or an overweight person to “just eat less and move more”, but this is such an oversimplified way to look at how humans work and why they do what they do that is simply stops being correct. Every now and then you’ll meet someone who managed to do all this just like that, but for the vast majority it’s an unrealistic and unfair thing to ask.
Obesity is a chronic disorder and will continue to be until we get better treatments.
Well, anything that can consistently be changed with hard work is ultimately a choice in the same way. Not everyone can deal with the amount of effort needed to lose weight. When you have accumulated awful habits, you need a lot of both time and willpower to change them.
I used to agree with you and still do in a way since I have quite negative attitude towards fat people. However I now realize that while calories in - calories out applies to everyone we’re still different especially in the way we experience hunger.
I’m thin and fit myself but I eat like shit. What differentiates me from fat people however is that I only eat about 3000kcal of shit and then I’m full and it may take quite a while before I eat again but I also go to gym and mountain biking and stuff so I use all the calories too instead of storing them as fat. I also sometimes simply just skip dinner altogether because I don’t feel like eating. I’m just lucky that I can still function just fine even with an empty stomach and I don’t experience aggressive sense of hunger like some other people do. Also I hate cooking and eating. Takes too much time.
My theory for why this is is that my body is just better at switching from carbonhydrates to burning fat (converting it into glucose) and thus I don’t experience the drop in blood sugar levels the way some other people do to whom it takes a while for this process to kick in so they crash hard after all the carbs are used up.
Yeh I’m exactly the same. My friends can’t seem to understand how 1 meal a day can be done.
Try Yfood. It’s great to just get something quick in you.
You seem to have found the main nerve
Hmm I think that for a lot of people, it wasn’t a choice to get fat. I know a lot of kids who are already obese and they aren’t even in their teens.
However, I do think it’s a choice once you’ve realized it and have the ability to actually do something about it.
Kinda related but unrelated: it irks me when someone comments how easy it is for me to be skinny, bc it isn’t. As a previously underweight person, I think gaining and losing weight are just as hard. I had to control my diet, work out, and have a lot of self control to not lose the habits I was building. I folded and stagnated a lot, and yeah it was demotivating but I still had to make a choice to keep going.
It’s hard to change habits that have be ingrained into you since childhood.
Not impossible, but really fucking hard.
It really is difficult. I feel for people who have had food addiction since chikdhood. Or any othet unhealthy habit
I would’ve thought you would’ve learned kindness out of that ordeal. Didn’t people make fun of you? How’d it feel, even if you knew they were right? It’s just rude and inappropriate. There’s no need. eve
Unfortunately if this is the only route to losing weight that is out of reach for many, many people who are already getting totally fucked by the system and struggling to get by.
I’m 265 and 5’9", and I spent my whole life feeling like this was my fault. I’ve changed my diet, I’ve tried exercising, but I was always met with extreme difficulty. I thought exercise was supposed to be difficult and I was just a big baby. People would say, you just have to build up stamina. It gets easier. But it never did. It would get to the point where I’d be crying and pushing myself and still not accomplishing as much exercise as even an average unfit person could. I’d walk a few miles every day and never build stamina, never feel better, never lose weight.
I just found out I have an issue with my pituitary gland, likely a tumor (going for a scan). I just had the tests to confirm the issue is in my pituitary (the tests were miserable). I’m actually not producing certain hormones, so it turns out I’m incapable of building muscle. That’s why I can’t build stamina or convert my fat into muscle. I’ve been told this was “almost certainly” my issue for 2 months, (after my mom, aunts, and cousins were all diagnosed; we likely share a genetic defect causing pituitary tumors) and I’ve had the confirmed test results for over 2 weeks. It’s really hard to shift my perspective away from “this is my fault, I just need to try harder.” I expect to battle with health insurance a couple weeks to months before getting my hormone replacement. My mom only took 2 weeks (averages 2 months), so fingers crossed.
I’ve always thought more people were overweight for medical reasons than assumed by the general population, I just didn’t think I was one of them. I see a lot of moms like me hustling after their toddlers, eating well, trying their best, and still being overweight. I wonder if it has something to do with all the “endocrine disruptors” I’m always hearing about. I definitely think some people are overweight “by choice” (or by a mental disorder rather than a physical one), and I have major problems with “fat positivity” (I believe in body neutrality), but I think it’s more people having a medical problem than you’d expect. Same with my wife and child who both eat like horses but have BMIs of 13. It’s not like they’re not trying to gain weight.
I try to be nice to everyone as none of us are perfect and fat is just a more easy to see imperfection, right?
But as far as it being mostly lifestyle choice, I agree. I am older. When I was in school there was ONE fat girl, Tanya, and a few “husky” boys. The rest of us were thin.
Do I think Tanya chose to be fat? No way. I think she had some medical issue that made her body hold on to all that fat. But I think the natural incidence of that sort of issue cannot have increased, in one or two generations, from that 1/400 to 1/3. It’s not possible.
The ones that get me are the obviously overweight couples with rotund children.
There are a lot of people with eating disorders that result in them being overweight. Some people who have been neglected and abused as children can turn to food as their only source of comfort. If you have not been safe as a child, you will likely not have a basic sense of safety as an adult. If no-one has been kind to you and took care of you, you will likely not know how to be kind to yourself and take care of yourself.
So, you use food to feel safe and to get a sense of comfort. You use it to numb the feelings, to feel something nice. Because you do not have the resources to cope with the world that others that were loved as children do have, you do not know how to deal with it another way. And you survive and fight to make something of your life after all that has happened to you.
And then you get overweight. And society will tell you that it is your own fault. That you should show more restraint. That you just should eat less. That you lack willpower. That you are repulsive. That you are inferior to people who are not overweight. That you are unlovable. Basically, that you are everything that they used to tell you that you were when you were a child.
And you try to lose the weight, but you feel awful. You feel unsafe. You have nothing else that gives you a nice feeling. People will compliment you and be nicer to you and say that you look better. But you are constantly stressed. You think about food day and night, constantly, until you break. And you eat and you gain the weight back, and more. And you will feel like a failure, and you will feel unlovable and repulsive. And you do not know how to deal with these feelings in any other way than by eating.
And so, the stigma around being overweight actually makes it more difficult to love yourself and to be kind to yourself. The focus on food and the idea that everything will be okay if you just lose the weight will make you put all your effort into weight loss, instead of solving the real problem. Namely, that you need to process trauma and find other ways of coping with feelings and the world.
I think this is what is happening to a lot of people who are overweight. And they might not even be aware of it. They might think it is just about food, because that is what everyone is telling them. That they should just work harder at losing weight. That they just should have more willpower.
But I think that many people who are overweight do not lack willpower at all. They have survived horrible things. They did not get basic life skill lessons that others did. They did not grow up with a sense of safety and feeling good about themselves. But they survived. And they try to make something of their lifes. And that takes a lot of willpower. And for them to get better and to lead a more happy life, they need help with learning new ways to cope, they need their strength to be acknowledged, they need to be accepted, and, above all, they need to be loved.
As a disabled person who struggles to maintain a healthy weight, I’ll tell you that yours is not an unpopular opinion. I know that mine is not the typical experience, and there are far more people who are overweight for reasons within their control, but let’s not pretend the people celebrating obesity are the norm.
Regardless of your problems, shame is never productive. Looking down on people you perceive as “fat, lazy fucks,” is just a way to make yourself feel better about yourself. “God, I’m glad I’m not like that piece of shit anymore.” It’s a form of self loathing, hating the way you used to be.
Be kinder to the person you used to be. That person probably could have used to positive support and thoughtful advice. Maybe then you wouldn’t have needed to turn your entire life upside down just to get healthy. Don’t be ashamed of your past choices. Own them, recognize why you made them, and learn how to be a better person tomorrow.
Being overweight is an overblown focus on people’s health. Most mildly overweight people lead a normal life. There are more important focuses that also impact weight gain without all the shame.
Unpopular opinion follow-up: You should be using proper units of measurement.
Don’t get me wrong. I can perfectly infer from the story what you’re saying. But 150 or 250 lbs just doesn’t mean anything to me. Neither does the height or what people write in the other comments.
Totally agree, but at least they don’t measure in stones. Pounds is at least relatively easy to convert to real units.
“Proper units of measurement”? Come on man, don’t be a pretentious ass. We all know metric is better, but don’t shame the man (or woman idk) for using the system of measurement they’re most familiar with!
Hehe. I hope I phrased it nicely enough for them to understand i wasn’t yelling at them. I think it’s mildly ignorant to comment on the internet and not to translate it into proper units. They even edited the comment and it made me ashamed a bit. This is not the job of one individual.
What I was really trying to do is shaming you, the people of Myanmar, Lyberia and the US. And your culture. For living in the 21st century and not even adopting the proper system that would make lots of things easier for you. And for being ignorant towards all the people on the internet who are not offended by progress. (or at least their ancestors hadn’t been…)
Ahem. Didn’t several spaceship explode so far? Planes crashed… People died. And I think many US scientists have already switched to metric and many engineers have not. I bet they currently waste large sums of money for doing double the work when working together. Combined the sum of not switching is already a ludicrous amount of billions and billions. And the world isn’t getting less globalised. So true. It costs money to switch. And it’s probably yet another man’s pocket that money comes from. But the sooner you do it, the more money it’ll save you and everybody in the long run.
Edit: And after a while even your engineers might thank you for the easier calculations. And it’s not that a two-by-four has two by four inches anyways.
Tragedy of the commons though. It’s in nobody’s individual best interest to switch, even if the cost was justified.
Isn’t tragedy of the commons when you share something and it for example gets overused and destroyed in the process? Tragic referring to the part where everyone is trying to get the max out of it for them individually and causing the demise?
This is something else. And also it IS in everybody’s best interest. I’d assume it’s not the most fun activity to learn your feet in a mile, yards… And translating recipes is just madness. I imagine you need all sorts of little helpers, the measuring cups, smear butter everywhere to measure it by volume… and need to whip out a calculator if someone stays for dinner. I think it costs money and people are lazy and fail to see the bigger picture. Because they haven’t tried thinking about this for 5 minutes and are already complaining. It’s not that they wouldn’t also benefit.
Disclaimer: I’m also not perfect and sometimes fail to see some bigger picture.
That’s fair! I dislike that the US still hasn’t adopted metric for most things, myself. I’ll edit my comment.
Sounds like envy. Working out is painful and exhausting, you aren’t allowed to eat tasty things except on extremely rare occasions, and that “lazy fat fuck” has neither of those problems.