New Study about Attitudes Towards Obesity

[Inner Surfer Girl 12,015]

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/health/americans-obesity-willpower-genetics-study.html?linkId=30620817&referer=http://m.facebook.com

[PorkChopExpress 821]

Anyone suffering from obesity and a repeated failure to overcome it could tell them what the "average person's" opinion was on the topic. Somehow, people equate needing to lose 10 pounds with losing 200 pounds. They have not a single, solitary clue about the challenges obese people face, trying to lose weight and get in shape. Not one. They don't get that the amount of willpower that is required to last two straight years or so on a calorie restricted diet, when your entire body will fight to maintain homeostasis and will require you to bust through month-long plateaus while feeling like your stomach is eating itself alive all day long, every day and you are quite literally BOMBARDED with signals to eat all day long, every day...not to mention you have behaviors and attitudes well-worn into your psyche that uses food as a tool to cope with issues in your life, and taking that away creates even more difficulty in staying on a program for years, to lose that much weight...it's asinine. Especially given that most people who are morbidly obese have a lot of co-morbidities that interfere with fat loss, like diabetes...and their entire metabolic system is different than a "normal" person's.

If you have only ever been 10-20 pounds overweight, you frankly have absolutely no business commenting on what obese people should or should not be doing, in my opinion...because you don't have a clue what we have to deal with.

[summerset 5,265]

@@PorkChopExpress I couldn't have said it better. I always get a blood pressure spike when I see that people equate having to lose 20 lbs with having to lose 100 or 200 lbs.

[summerset 5,265]

On a side note:

“We would never treat patients with alcoholism or any chronic disease this way. It’s so revealing of a real lack of education and knowledge.”

I think it's true that patients aren't blamed for chronic diseases like e. g. rheumatoid arthritis or type 1 diabetes or MS etc.

However, when it comes to diseases like alcoholism or type 2 diabetes things are different. Patients have to take a lot of blame when it comes to type 2 diabetes ("just stop eating") or alcoholism ("just stop drinking").