I love you, but every few months you go on a rant about fat people. You find overweight people infuriating for some reason that I just can’t understand. As a liberal-minded celebrity with incisive intelligence and a razor-sharp wit, why this blind spot?
As someone who is currently thin but formerly quite fat, I can tell you that I was just as interesting, just as valuable then as I am now. I have struggled my whole adult life to lose weight and keep it off, and I can tell you that it is extremely difficult to do. Five previous times, I have dieted down to my goal weight. Five times the pounds came back, unbidden. This time I have kept the weight off for three years through Herculean effort.
“While I have you on the line, let me share some facts about overweight and weight loss that you might not know. My hope is that, rather than blowing a gasket, you will just chill the next time you encounter someone who is not the size and shape you would prefer.”
- People do not “choose” to be fat or thin. For an overweight person, maintaining a lower weight requires a complicated set of skills and a great deal of work (Karasu & Karasu, 2010).
- Overweight people are psychologically indistinguishable from normal weight people. There is no overarching psychological reason that people are heavy (Kolata, 2007).
- Dieting and regaining weight is not an indication of a character flaw. Instead, biology, psychology, and temptation are all factors in our weight management (Mann, 2015).
- Weight regain is the body’s response to a biological mechanism to prevent starvation. The thinner body goes on a “single-minded pursuit for more fuel” (Mann, 2015).
- Being overweight is not a personal choice. Overweight is due to a complex interaction between genetics, the brain, metabolism, and the environment (Karasu & Karasu, 2010).
- There is a huge financial stake in keeping the blame on people who are overweight. Researchers, drug companies, and the diet industry depend on the myth that weight is completely under the individual’s control (Kolata, 2007; Tara, 2017)
- Overweight may be an adaptation that preserves fat and seeks out calories; it’s part of our genetic code (Karasu & Karasu, 2010).
- Some extra weight is actually protective. It is not an indicator of poor health (Bacon & Aphramor, 2014; Mann, 2015).
- The complexities of losing and maintaining weight are not currently understood by researchers and scientists. Being overweight is not simply an imbalance of input and output as we have been taught to believe. Instead, the weight loss literature presents various, sometimes competing schools of thought (Karasu & Karasu, 2010).
- The body has many redundant pathways to prevent weight loss and to prompt regain. These mechanisms have been essential to our survival as a species but, in a world of plenty, can be problematic (Lustig, 2014).
So please stop it! I want to love you but you make it very hard when you dis overweight people. Someone who carries a few more pounds than you is no less worthy than your skinny ass is.
Stop Losing and Win 