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.
Okay…there are of course medical conditions that let you put on weight. Also medicines and problems with your hormones. But how many overweight people are just eating to much and don‘t exercise a lot or at all?
So I kinda agree with you here. You shouldn’t insult someone. But just to say: it’s not your own fault… I think this is a easy excuse.
But how many overweight people are just eating to much and don‘t exercise a lot or at all?
Counter-question: how many non-overweight people eat too much but don’t gain weight because of differences in metabolism, calorie absorption, etc?
But how many overweight people are just eating too much
How do you determine what is “too much”? If you measure it by weigh gain, then all of them are eating too much. But if you measure it by “they eat until they are satisfied and no more than that”, probably most of them aren’t eating too much.
and don‘t exercise a lot or at all?
That I suspect is very common. Then again, many modern jobs involve sitting all day and the day has a finite number of hours, and at least in North America cities are car-dependent so many people don’t even get to commute by foot. It’s an environment that produces very sedentary people.
There is also lack of sleep, which I personally suffer from. How many of us are getting a good eight hours of good quality sleep every night?
There is more to it than “personal responsibility”.
One of the mechanisms that is thought to affect long term weight gain is the following:
Your body offets heat loss by burning calories from food intake. In healthy people this is well regulated so that the body radiates off about as much heat as you gain through food. Some medications or conditions however can mess with hormones involved in regulating your body’s temperature. Even just being slightly colder (it’s imperceptible, you won’t be shivering or anything) kickstarts a different homeostasis mechanism which essentially tries to make up for the heat difference by upping the other side of the equation: more food intake. That means you feel more hungry than usual and eat a little more than you need. Over time this adds up and you gain weight.
Of course in the real world many more factors are involved, for example how much you move or how much sleep you get. But it’s still an interesting piece of the puzzle.
You can eat different to reduce the amount of hunger you feel. Things like keto and intermittent fasting go a long way
You are correct in everything you said.
But let’s be real here. 40% of the US population isn’t obese because they have a medical problem. They just eat too much and eat the wrong things. People eat for entertainment, not because they’re hungry. Others make no difference between “wanting to eat” and “being hungry”, probably because they have never experienced actual hunger in their lifes.
We evolved in a way that we really like calorie dense food. In the past that was a feature. The modern world by itself isn’t harmful. But human demand will ( and in the us has) shift supermarket offerings away from what we evolved with and towards what our brain rewards. It’s subconscious, and no one is really to blame. Some people with a more conscious approach are less affected, the rest just follows instinct.
I recommend you to go read or watch anything including the geneticist Giles Yeo. There are reasons people eat more than they should and it has lots of variables including genetics, personal variance, food environment and the composition of foods.
Bashing americans is fun and all, but if you want to solve a social problem you need a social solution, not blaming individuals.
“Count your calories” means “Go hungry every meal”
You ignore the factor calory density here. So, yes you can put your effort into restricting how much you eat, if you want to keep constant what you eat. But you could reinvest the effort in restricting the quantity of your food into restricting its quality. Furthermore, you could confuse hunger for appetite and - no judgement - this could come from a misalignment of your dopamine system and hence mental health.
Furthermore, you could confuse hunger for appetite
A distinction without a difference: if you don’t eat some more, you will suffer. In the long run, people eat until they are satisfied. Call it hunger, call it appetite, call it cravings, call it whatever you want. Stop eating too early -> suffer.
That’s exactly why I mentioned effort. You can suffer from your effort or from the lack of it and most of the times, suffering from effort is awarded with pleasure, while suffering from the lack of effort spirales into more suffering.
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.
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
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The maker of weight-loss drug, Wegovy, has become Europe’s most valuable firm dethroning the French luxury conglomerate LVMH.
Wegovy is an obesity treatment that is taken once a week which tricks people into thinking that they are already full, so they end up eating less and losing weight.
Famous personalities such as Elon Musk are among the reported users of the drug, which has captivated Hollywood and the public more widely since it was approved by regulators in the US in 2021.
There has been a global shortage of the jabs so only limited stock arrived for the UK’s National Health System (NHS).
In the UK, NHS guidelines say patients can only access Wegovy, which contains the drug semaglutide, if they are significantly overweight and have weight-related health problems.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), nearly one in three adults are obese in the UK which is the highest level in Europe.
The original article contains 307 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 49%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
