I climb Everest every day.
filed in Tech Stuff on Feb.15, 2008
There have been a few posts on Digg which depressed me of late, regarding obese people and methods used to lose weight. The most depressing sentiments I read were the following:
if you cant have the restraint to eat healthy and exercise doesnt that say a lot about the kind of person you are
and:
… Just watch the way obese people are treated. Being obese simply shows a lack of respect for yourself or simply the inability to take good care of yourself.
and here’s a doozy:
you people are seriously all that is wrong with America. I am pretty sure everything from our high crime rate to unnecessary wars to westboro baptist church is because of gluttonous “people” such as yourself. If you want to eat like a cow you should be treated as a cow and be put onto farms, fattened up, and executed for the feeding of normal people.
This guy almost hits on the right thing:
Bullshit. People abuse themselves in a wide variety of ways. Being fat is the result of one of them, the most visible result. So because you are skinny you are the picture of restraint and self-respect? That is the most ridiculous crap I’ve ever heard. It is stupid to claim that lack of self-discipline in one part of your life means that you completely lack self-discipline altogether. All you really mean is that you find obesity repulsive, but you don’t want to seem shallow, so you claim being fat is somehow a litmus test of character. Just man up and admit you find fat people ugly or gross. Fat IS not pretty. There is no reason to pretend it is. But stop trying to justify your revulsion with ridiculous (and unfounded) assertions.
This whole thread angered and depressed me, for a few days. As someone who has struggled with weight problems their entire life, I get pretty angry with people who dismiss the efforts that people like me need to go through to lose weight.
Lets get something straight; I don’t enjoy being overweight. It comes with a whole bunch of negatives, some of which are obvious, others which are less so. The most obvious one is the health aspects; if you’re overweight or obese you have a higher chance of dying earlier from weight related complications. Not cool. Some of the other issues are personal and aren’t something you talk about on a blog. Then there is just the whole walking around thing. I was nearly 140kg at christmas, and standing or walking for more than 100-200 meters was a huge effort, and incredibly painful. I knew I was overweight, and I knew my eating habits were killing me by inches, but I enjoyed what I was eating more than the threat of an early death or a pain filled life.
And really thats the problem; good tasting food … tastes GOOD. It can make you forget all of your weight problems, and while you’re sitting there eating you really don’t care that your ankles are swollen from the walk to the restaurant. And for someone like me, who loves food, all foods from so many cultures, the idea that I’d need to give up eating good, filling, tasty meal every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner, is unthinkable.
Now, I’m on a diet. I’m exercising. And it’s hard. I eat a piece of fruit for breakfast and another piece of fruit for lunch and I drink 2 liters of water during the day to suppress my appetite. I walk home - climbing Everest - the 6km from my office. My wife prepares me something small - delicious to be sure, but not filling for me - and I eat it. I drink more water. My body aches constantly from hunger and from the pain it feels from being pushed to walk home every day, and walking through Newtown (a popular restaurant district) on the way home is a huge test of willpower.
Have I solved my problems? Will I have solved them if I manage to bring my weight down to a reasonable level (the goal is 85kg) in 4 months time? I don’t think so. I think it will require constant vigilance and a level of self control that is immense, every day, for the rest of my life. I enjoy food, and that will never change. I will need to eat less, and deal with my stomach always telling me I need more.
It angers me when a skinny ‘nutritionist’ or some skinny asshat posts on some site somewhere that its just a lack of control, that if we tried a little harder, it would be easy for us all to lose weight.
Bullshit. The amount of control I’m exercising to keep this going feels like climbing Everest every day. I don’t care how much self control you think you have; if you’re thin, chances are that your self control had nothing to do with it but rather your metabolism and body chemistry conspire in such a way as to make it easy for you to not gain weight. If you have a big meal the night before, you probably don’t feel hungry the next day, whereas I’ll feel hungry 2 hours after a big meal.
If you’ve never been overweight, please refrain from having an opinion. You just don’t know what it’s like, either to be overweight with all that entails, or to try and lose it once you’ve there. You’re just not qualified. You might have some numbers to look at, but you don’t understand the human part of the equation. The effort that is required, the mindset that is required to make the change, to take the steps to lose weight.
I know one thing for sure; I wouldn’t be able to do it without my wife encouraging me every day. Coming home to her every day is the best part of the day.
