I’m 370 lbs and today I had a doctor tell me that people who are skinnier than me are all like that because they work out and eat right. Can I get a roll call for the people who are less than 370 lbs and eat like shit or don’t work out? Because I’m pretty sure you exist.
Also, one time I had a doctor ask me “are you sure?” 4 times after I said I didn’t have any breathing problems. Like nah I’m just big.
Anti-fat bias in medicine is so harmful. It literally kills people. I’m sorry you have to go through this.
Honestly, I’m a small fat (I like to say TV fat) and they still treat me like shit, assume I am sedentary, assure me that all my health issues will be solved by losing weight, and casually tell me to
CW: ED trigger
eat literal starvation level calories while exercising
I’m sorry people here are being shitty in the replies, too. You deserve to be treated with respect by your healthcare providers and you deserve support from your community.
I am now roughly 80kgs, so I've lost around 5kg since moving from Australia back to China without actively doing anything.
I think the west (but especially the USA) has created an environment that facilitates obesity and shames people to pay their way out of it.
I don't actively exercise, but living in a walkable city vs living in a suburb (without a car) has probably doubled the amount of exercise I get. Like in Australia, I'd walk to work, walk around for several hours (line cook), walk home, and usually at night on weekends walk from home to pub to pub to pub to home. But on my days off from work/drinking, nothing was close enough to my suburban ass house so I'd just stay at home unless I was particularly motivated. Also I had a diet of white people food since that's what my work serves and it's therefore obviously what I steal from work.
Back home now in the People's Republic, I've been walking 9-20km per day. Night or day. It's safe to walk around alone. There's people out and about in common spaces so you don't look/feel like a weirdo. Pedestrian friendly, bicycle friendly, parks, plazas and monuments everywhere. Seen everything in your immediate surroundings? Drop 4 RBM round trip on the metro to another part of the city with another dozen vistas and attractions and parks and running tracks. And most of the things you can do on a stroll are free. I find myself enjoying going for a light jog/stroll in sub zero temperatures in China more than a lovely spring afternoon in the Australian suburbs.
My advice is to leave the USA as soon as possible (I assume you're American because you used lb). Wash your hands of the evil empire. I can't imagine the motivation for exercise is as great if your options are to walk past cookie cutter houses in a suburb that might not even have a footpath, a stroad with no barriers where American motorists drive an arms length past your body at 100km/h, a cookie cutter gym playing terrible music and costing money.
If you're very lucky a nearby hiking trail or public park... that requires you to drive there and back and probably pay for parking.
God forbid if you're a POC and some right wing chud with a gun doesn't like the notion of a coloured person strolling through their neighbourhood.
Not even to mention all the "healthy" food in the US apparently sucks ass, costs double and might not even be available due to food deserts.
My advice is to leave the USA as soon as possible (I assume you're American because you used lb). Wash your hands of the evil empire.
It's good advice generally and I enjoyed reading your comment bragging about how nice PRC is and how shit Australia is. But I think you may have misunderstood the post, OP was complaining about always advice to get more physical activity etc in relation to their weight. And here you are just doing that.
Just about the only situation in which an adult person can lose weight long term is if there is a specific, identifiable cause for them to have gained weight as an adult and that cause is modifiable. Your example of a person who moves to US/UK/Canada/Australia and gains weight is a known phenomena, for the reasons including which you described. And they may be able to lose some of it if they are able to make their life (not lifestyle) more like it was previously. Another example would be like if someone is taking a medication that causes them to gain weight; stopping the medication will likely result in some weight loss. Especially if the weight gain has been recent/brief. Often these causes are extrinsic to the person, like your example of living in a shit country.
However, most people do not have something like this in their life. If they do, they have one thing. You lost 5 kg by moving back to PRC. You might continue to gradually lose for a little while (don't know your timeline) but eventually it'll plateau when you back to your baseline balance for your body. Once that happens, it would be very difficult to lose another 5kg permanently.
People who are fat as adults and were fat as children have very little chance of becoming permanently skinny (or even much less fat) other than by illness, surgery or ozempic for the rest of their lives. It's just how they are. And people who have been fat for a long time, regardless of their age, will probably be fat forever too. So offering advice about losing weight is a strange and unkind thing that everyone always wants to do, which was the gist of the post.
I think the west (but especially the USA) has created an environment that facilitates obesity and shames people to pay their way out of it.
This is very much true. I would love to be able to ditch my shitty car for a bike, and I would be in much better shape if I did. However doing so is extremely dangerous, because I have to drive 15 minutes down a 55mph stroad just to go get groceries, and I don't even really live in the suburbs. I live in a shitty apartment block that is 5 minutes (again by stroad) away from my manufacturing job.
If this were a sane society everything would be built to scale with the travel abilities of the human body in mind, but it's not, it's built exclusively with the private automobile in mind; and everything else flows out from that.
I’m going to drop some studies here that seriously cast doubt on the idea that there is a causational link between weight loss and health.
https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/spc3.12076
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26841729/
Also Health at Every Size is challenging the weight loss paradigm within healthcare:
https://asdah.org/haes/
https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2891-10-9#%3A%7E%3Atext=Evidence+from+these+six+RCTs%2Cmood%2C+self-esteem%2C+body
Fatphobia in the healthcare system is MAJORLY behind the poorer health outcomes of fat patients.
Here's one for your doctor. A meta analysis that correlated obesity with bad outcomes during h1n1. However, a different group took a second look at the same data. They realized that fat people were treated differently by the care team. Specifically, they were allowed to get sicker before being given medication. If you adjust for late treatment, there actually wasn't a difference.
And of course we know that fat people delay going to doctor/hospital because of their many bad experiences, trying to avoid getting harangued etc. So they are already getting treatment later. So even if you get a great individual doctor you're already at a disadvantage.
citation
Results: We identified 22 articles enrolling 25,189 laboratory confirmed patients. The pooled estimates indicated obesity significantly increased the risk of fatal and critical complications of influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 infection (for fatal, OR = 1.81, 95% CI: 1.23-2.65; for critical complications, OR = 1.67, 95% CI: 1.13-2.47). However, we found significant interaction between early antiviral treatment and obesity (β = -0.28). After adjustment for early antiviral treatment, relationship between obesity and poor outcomes disappeared (OR = 1.14, 95% CI: 0.94-1.39).
Conclusions: The results of the meta-analyses showed obesity significantly increased the risk of death, critical complications, and severe complications for influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 infection, especially among high-quality studies and in Asia region. Importantly, the result from our meta-regression indicated that the conclusion should be interpreted with caution, because early antiviral treatment might be a key confounding factor.
I heard about this study a long time ago. It's from 2016 so maybe it has been replicated or refuted by now. Given the method of reinterpreting existing data it should be easy to bang this kind of thing out. But I don't know stats so wouldn't even start to look.
Can confirm, I'm one of those lucky good metabolism bastards that can eat like shit without thinking too much about it
When I was about the same weight as OP (a little heavier actually) people would say this to me, that they have great metabolism and pig out all the time but just never get fat, and when I would ask them to elaborate on what they specifically ate, it was universally a fraction of what I was eating. One guy described a day where he went totally nuts and ate a bunch of food, and after listing all the food he ate on that day I was like, "Aight cool now eat that same amount every single day for a decade and you'll get on my level."
Anyway I guess my point is that it was very demoralizing for me when I was trying to lose weight to hear people brag about their souped up metabolism, and conversely very encouraging when literally all of them were exposed as over-blowing their actual calorie consumption once I started asking them for details.
*my other point being, variable metabolisms aside, not a human on this earth is eating 3800+ calories a day with little/no exercise and staying fit
Yeah the body learns, like for examples stomachs have elasticity so (as I understand it, crudely) the sensation of fullness is something that will incrementally change if you overeat to the point of really stretching your stomach.
I learned this from an ex who liked to eat them fancy 7-12 course meals at restaurants and taught me the importance of pre-gaming so our stomachs wouldn't shrink over the course of a day waiting to eat big for two+ hours straight. So it's in the "folk knowledge at best" category of what I know, but I assume those gastric band things work the same way in reverse etc.
The impression I get with big people who are "just big" and who don't want to be, that it's a multifaceted issue they have to address, and often a fairly unique-to-them combination of factors.
Like, I remember listening to how Kevin Smith would talk about food and eating before his heart attack and his philosophy of, essentially, hedonism-first life fulfillment. I could never have imagined he would lose all that weight. Even after the heart attack and his tearful realisation that he wasn't gonna live to see his daughter grow up and go through all the interesting phases of life (ie the moment that genuinely in retrospect did change and likely extended his life by decades) even after that I was like, nah he's going to try, but there's no way a man like him can drop the weight and keep it off and start a whole new health oriented lifestyle this late in life. I just didn't think he had the psychological discipline to make such drastic changes to both his philosophy on life AND his tolerance for discomfort etc.
Now I feel slightly ashamed that he was able to fix his shit in what now looks like the blink of an eye and here I am still with all the same bad habits and poor discipline I've always had. I know there's (apparently) a lot to hate on Smith for but I genuinely admire the way he just started holding himself accountable and streaming his early walks up the hills and complaining like a baby the whole time. Look at him now. It's hard not to be impressed.
I'm skinny tho, so nobody gives me a hard time about my shitty self destructive lifestyle (and useless philosophy lol.)
None of this is commentary on OP. I don't know a damn thing about them except their doctor sucks and that they're heavy.
This was well written, it was pleasent to read. Idk, like how something can roll of the tongue, it was like that but with reading. Disclaimer: am not a native speaker of English
Now I feel slightly ashamed that he was able to fix his shit in what now looks like the blink of an eye and here I am still with all the same bad habits and poor discipline I've always had.
he (probably) has more money than you; not worried about rent or car payments or work or whatever, hire a personal trainer and a nutritionist, get someone to buy your healthy groceries. i can't comment on how he actually did do it but if i was rich or at least had dough that's how i would.
I do think it is true to an extent, my sister had a pretty high metabolism and would never gain despite what she ate.
She was decently active though which also increases your metabolism...either way I do think there is a difference it makes, but like you said I don't think it's a massive difference where someone on a Super Size Me diet would remain bone thin (or the inverse someone on a moderate diet gaining a crazy amount of weight.I was posting something in a similar vein on the trans mega actually , where you hear about how much someone eats and it's more than you despite them being skinner because of their height and metabolism.
I think a lot of this is death by a thousand cuts type stuff that's kind of impossible to accurately scope out unless you were scientifically observed 24/7 for a while without your knowledge so as to not change your behaviour, which is obviously horribly unethical.
I don't care for the exact numbers too much for this example, those vary depending on source and study but just as an example if you take identical people with identical lifetstyles and diets you can easily get quite wild numbers of different caloric rates.
- Fidgeting burns 350 calories a day
- one person likes a beer (0,33L / 130 Calories) after dinner, one person likes a chocolate bar (250 Calories)
- One Person smokes (200 Calories per day) with the associated going outdoors (let's just say further 100 calories) vs. just not doing that
These two otherwise exactly identical people doing the exact same thing every day eating the exact same things, portion sizes etc. except for those 3 things mentioned above would lead you to a 770 Calories difference in calories needed a day. And there's so many variables here. A splash of oil is easily 200 calories apart depending on who's splashing, there's another 100 calories a day if we assume both of our theoretical people are avid home cooks who cook for themselves every second day and never throw anything out.
Fidgeting burns 350 calories a day
Just wanted to look into this because that number seemed absurdly high for fidgeting alone. I'm not great at reading scientific articles so please correct me if I'm wrong, but the main difference noted between the 'lean' and 'obese' groups in the study seems to be that the former is on average seated for two and a half fewer hours a day. I don't really see how fidgeting comes into it.
As noted in this context I don't really care for the actual number. Knock it down to 50 for the fidgeting and you'd still end up at a ~500 calorie difference between two otherwise 100% identical and synchronized people, or a pound of fat up / down a week.
My point here is that any assessment about how many calories a person eats or burns, unless done with actual 24/7 tracking, is basically just guessing because the numbers of variables is so high and even a few of those can add up to quite a lot of difference over time.
Oh for sure, I won't argue about your broader comment, just on that specific point I looked up that article for my own clarity and thought it'd be interesting to share.
Should've put a minus there to make it clearer, smoking cigarettes burns about 200kcal a day because it raises your heartrate. The other 100 is from the assumption you don't smoke inside and so include more walks outside for it over the course of a day.
I’ve had that experience and I’ve also known people who out eat me by a long shot and are still pretty skinny. I think people are just bad at estimating others’ relationships with food and weight in general. People are always so surprised when I tell them how much I weigh.
I had two friends for a time that had really inefficient metabolisms, one of them had a condition where his intestines would simply only absorb a third of what went in, and no one knew what was going on with the other guy but he would eat over 10k calories a day.
I always thought I was the same but apparently we don't actually scientifically exist.
Turns out I was eating like shit, but just never actually a lot of shit.
I know what you're trying to do but you do have a problem and need help.
Could you not have posted this entire thing without this one sentence? It betrays whatever intention you have, here.
e. actually nah I don't really think any of this was necessary at all, in fact.
This kind of comment should not be allowed here. The OP did not ask for advice, you are not a doctor and you’re definitely not their doctor. Rethink the urge to say and post this shit when fat people want to vent about their experiences with fatphobia and anti-fat bias in medicine.
you do have a problem and need help
Kind of weird to assume I’m unaware of this. Estrogen and therapy have already lost me more weight than diet and exercise ever have.
I am literally so sick of men in particular giving diet advice to women in particular when they have absolutely zero knowledge of or experience with the way hormones impact this shit.
Yeah, I think physiologically the estrogen has made things even harder. Luckily, I also care about my body for the first time in decades.
When you say Estrogen has helped you lose weight, is this because you're in a better spot mentally?
Because it has absolutely had the opposite effect on my weight.
Yeah I gained like 10 lbs right out the gate after being stable in my weight for years no matter what I did. But the mental health benefits and in particular being connected to my body for the first time in my life has done wonders for my motivation.
That's wonderful. Unfortunately my appetite has had a harder time slowing down than my metabolism. I'm nowhere near an unhealthy weight but I would like to lose some for my own vanity. To that end, I've recently discovered that salads are delicious.
Yeah my friend who is on estrogen has definitely gained weight since she started HRT and she’s actually way more active now bc she got a job where she’s on her feet running around all day.
My mistake then, I was influenced a bit by the general vibes of rest of the thread.
Losing excess weight while otherwise maintaining proper nutrition is good, regardless of your methods.
It's not mainly genetics, if your metabolism was so significantly low that you got to that weight eating a normal amount of calories then it'd be too dysfunctional to keep you alive.
If you don't have any health effects now, you will in the future. Your joints will wear at an increased rate, your heart and lungs will age faster until you can't continue. Even if it doesn't cut your life short, your quality of life drastically decreases. Yes, otherwise healthy people can suffer these problems too but excess adipose tissue is a major risk factor.
This isn't to scare you, it's your life at the end of the day. Sincerely, someone who went from 300lbs and a 16 minute mile to 167lbs and running half marathons.
not saying exercising and eating healthy foods at appropriate volumes isn't healthy but uh, you wanna cite some sources or something? just because you did it doesn't mean this person is the same.
You want sources on exercise and a good diet being healthy? I'm not sure if I'm reading you correctly, but this is common knowledge. Obesity has all kinds of health risks (early mortality, cancer, stroke, diabetes, myriad joint issues and pains) and is a public health issue on par with smoking. Exercise and diet are both recommended to combat that, and they also help everything from mental health to immune response.
Just in case I understood you correctly,
https://www.cdc.gov/physical-activity-basics/benefits/index.html
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/fitness/in-depth/exercise/art-20048389
https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/php/resources/healthy-eating-benefits-for-adults.html
please read through some of the links i’ve provided in this thread and do some self-crit. any analysis of health outcomes for fat people that doesn’t factor in medical fatphobia (doctors literally KILL fat people) is a fat phobic and unsound analysis
would you like to know another public health issue that is currently on par with cancer for the amount of damage it's doing? that no one talks about, cares to mitigate, or even acknowledges anymore? with a concerted effort on the part of almost every government on earth to conceal the damage it's doing? when is the last time you heard a doctor seriously mention covid in the last two years? you people love to come out of the woodwork and profess how much Health and Wellness you care about whenever A Fat does or says anything but you motherfuckers stopped wearing masks and giving a shit about the actual fire in the room since 2022 when everyone else stopped because it lost the capitalists lots of money and made your treats stop, i bet. but go on and tell me how much you really care about the health and well-being of fat people specifically, sure
ngl, unless she's been a covid-denier in other threads of something, it feels incredibly weird to baselessly jump on her for not caring about covid out of the blue.
Why though? If you’re gonna be concerned about health at least be consistent. Her post history contains nothing about covid that isn’t jokes. I can indeed make a pretty good assumption about this shit because how many masked faces do you see out and about anymore? But you and me both know what this is, because it’s about fat people. It’s certainly not about health.
I think you may be assuming bad faith here when that’s not completely applicable. This thread isn’t about Covid so why would that commenter bring it up? Considering that you’re basically accusing this person who you know next-to-nothing about of being a Covid spreader, I think you should take a step back and disengage.
No because thin people love to cherry pick concerns about public health and surprise, their number one concern is almost always related to fatness.
I'm not going to address what others have, but I specifically meant sources for the very specific medical claims being made, not generic resources about "diet and exercise." Such as the claim about the relationship between obesity and metabolism.
OP’s doctor said that ALL thin people exercise more and eat better than OP, which is patently untrue. This is an issue of medical fatphobia.
Do you have a source for this “statistic” other than your own anti-fat bias?
I exist, but I wouldn't recommend using me as an example of anything (especially since i have body dysphoria). Do what is right for you instead of comparing yourself to other people.
My partner is the thin guy who ate everything all the way up to middle age and then covid gave him type 2 diabetes. He has always been treated decently at the doctors. He is very thin and also has sleep apnea, imagine that. Everytime it is brought up, people comment with "but you are not fat". And that is a perfect example of what this crap does.
I however am the weight lifting large and medically fat woman and have for example several sporting injuries that were never treated because of shitty treatment by medical staff due to my bodysize. I was also told at age 25 after giving birth that I would leave my kid motherless unless I lost weight because I would die young because I am fat. I was put into a special fat shaming program and shown boxes of healthy foods because apparently my at the time genetics studying ass was just that uneducated. I could go on and on with these stories and they start from school nurse appointments when I was just a kid.
I've never eaten more than once a day, I tend to forget to do it. I have dieted most of my life, almost to my death until I decided to stop consuming the images and ideas my body will never meet. After I stopped dieting I got healthier and of course my body went back to the size it likes to be.
My latest doctor visit however was different, been avoiding doctors for some years because of all the past shaming, but this time a young woman doctor chose to:
-not start talking about weight as I wasn't there for that
-not open the write in she did with my bodysize, but instead mentioned it accurately later within other desciptors and mentioned the muscle mass as well
-never needed me to go on a scale or assign a bmi to me, yet was able to treat me for what I was there for just fine.
The younger doctors are doing better, there is hope.
Edit. Gonna have to hide this thread if i can so if anyone replies, might not see it. It's starting to show issues that bother me about Hexbear and body size /weight talk.
Someone on here linked to the online text of the book "A Chemical Hunger" 3 years ago. I thought it did a good job of elaborating all the complicated things that go into weight gain and why it's really not as simple as willpower or "calories in, calories out".
Can I get a roll call for the people who are less than 370 lbs and eat like shit or don’t work out?
I'm 64kg (141lbs) with a BMI of 21.1, and while I do work out (although admittedly way less than I should, just an hour or so each morning), I also overeat and eat a lot of shitty, fatty foods.
So much of medicine seems to be trapped in viewing body weight via a lens of, like, a perceived moral failing of the patient.
That's significantly more than the average person, and is about what is recommended in terms of "extracurricular activity" medically speaking.
No shit?
When I was a little one there were all, like, PSAs and stuff telling people to get at least five hours of exercise a week, and it was everywhere. I'd internalised it and assumed most other people had grown up being exposed to similar propaganda. Here I was thinking I was just doing a bit more than the bare minimum.
The answer here is "Well yes, but actually no."
Those PSAs assume a generally sedentary lifestyle typical of the middle & upper classes. Owning a detached home away from urban centers, driving everywhere, and working a desk job, that kind of thing. If you live that kind of lifestyle, then you will have to actively count calories, and do extracurricular exercise in order to stay healthy because you won't be doing enough physical work at any other point in your life in order to do so passively (and this is before we get into matters of diet composition, which is another thing entirely).
This is also why the biggest assholes who insist that obesity is a personal failing, and not a structural problem are almost always middle class strivers, or those looking to join their ranks. They're fully aware that attacking the actual structural causes of obesity means attacking their accustomed lifestyles, and they don't want to do that.
I suppose that seems like a lot to some people, especially if they're so pressed for time that they can't spare an extra hour every day.
Class can represent a fundamental difference in how individuals perceive time.
Fuck that doctor, I eat like shit and used to be really inactive and have always been on the small side. I have family who eat better and exercise that are much larger, it's definitely more than just eating right. I used to want to be a doctor, for such an 'admirable' profession they really can be massive assholes often.
people who are skinnier than me are all like that because they work out and eat right
As a skinny person, no we fucking don't
