Very good and on point post throughout. This part below was especially good and well stated.

Haha, I got a laugh here!

Another problem with over simplifying the whole lazy thing is another aspect of metabolism that isn't genetic. Its the simple fact that you can engage in an activity or have a particularly physically demanding job and when you decide you really despise the activity or you have to change jobs then your metabolism has now been set at a different rate that maybe you can't achieve when you change activities: 1) you don't want to go back to an activity you hate or 2) your lifestyle changed radically and you can't duplicate the former intensity easily.

For example, you might hate running but do it because you're in the military. The minute you leave the military it'll be hard to duplicate your former results without the same effort. You don't want to do what you did before but you now have to and its very hard to find a substitute that will get you the same results.

Or you might be say a mailman that walks 8 hours a day at work. You get moved up to a desk job. You will never be able to duplicate the results you were getting in that job. What you'll now have to do to maintain your weight is probably starve yourself.

So while I agree physical fitness is absolutely essential you can't over simplify and draw conclusions that people are lazy there are a lot more factors that come into play than we even realize sometimes.

Some people say to never "diet or tinker" with metabolism because it isn't that easy to set then reset later, particularly for women who drop weight less easily than men do because less of their body is muscle and more of it is fat. In fact the biological imperative of childbearing dictates women retain more fat and lose it more slowly.

Out of what necessity? The time comes to eschew obfuscation.

If you are content with your belief system, I have no problem with that. But that is a lot different than presenting evidence, which is not something you have done. That laurel is unavailable to rest on.

This is what reasoning is and what it does. Precision is not its enemy. In the case at hand it's certainly of the essence. I'm not sure why you defend so strongly the right to have very broad statements taken as if they were adequate to address a subject that is obviously not devoid of nuance. If it were so devoid, all the different ideas and feelings wouldn't be coming out in this thread and it wouldn't have gone on for so long or with such vigor.

This aspect of the discussion looks like a dead end, so there's not much point pursuing it. I think you have made some broad claims and you have claimed either that they were not or that if they were it didn't matter. If anybody cares, which I'm sure they don't, I think the existing text will speak for itself.

I think I've done an excellent job of advancing that idea through numerous , detailed, and repeated examples pulled from real life over the course of many years. This hasn't been countered yet, and for whatever reason you choose not to credit it. For what it's worth, I'd say what I'm relating is far more concrete than your idea of the overwhelming, er, mass of evidence you have for the media being all powerful in these matters.
[/quote] True enough.

Exactly. I've felt bad and occasionally frustrated about the same sort of issues with friends and family regarding everything from drug use to crime to religious nuttery -- every way of decay you could think of, I suppose. And it's seldom clear how best to deal with it. That contrasts with how easily the first and sometimes wrong answer leaps to mind as the only obvious or only kind or respectful one.

But mostly because I wanted to see other people's ideas, 30 heads being better than one, and all. I've been playing devil's advocate here to tease out people's perhaps truer and deeper responses rather than the politically correct ones or the ones that make them feel better about themselves. One of the best ways to feel better about yourself when your family and friends go downhill is to say nothing. It seems to me we often think we're being our best selves when all we are really doing is giving ourselves an easy way out.

How is any of this not lazy? Being lazy with a good story and being lazy with a bad one come out to exactly the same thing.

You're still right back at ground zero with the rest of us poor schmucks who don't tell such interesting stories.

Wait, what?

How many people with acne have exhausted all the options? I mean, I rub three damned medications on my face, and I still get outbreaks sometimes, but I have it mostly under control. If I wanted to go further, I could start taking Accutane. And I could go much further than that, there are plenty of treatment options for acne. The majority of people with active acne are just too lazy to wash their face five times per day.

I think the mentally ill are a great example of why the idea of laziness falls apart if you consider the implications.

Not that most overweight people couldn't get over it if they worked hard, but let's face it, very few people ever work that hard at anything. All it takes is some (extremely hard) work to quit smoking cold turkey!

When people are sacrificing things and people that they value in support of a habit, I think that's a good indication that the habit is more compulsive than voluntary. But I don't think there's a real difference, it's all a matter of degree.

I think you're going too far on the acne thing. Taking drugs to cure acne, some of which have significant side effects, is probably too much to expect people to think of as a natural or healthy or maybe even sometimes affordable thing.

Another important distinction is you don't have to have bad health habits or hygiene to get acne. You could arguably make it worse, but I think most of us are aware that some people get much more and/or much more severe types of acne than others on the same diet, and it's hardly the case that hitting puberty makes you filthy or anything. Anyway I think that the two really aren't parallel cases at all.

Well I did get some inspiration out of this thread. Yesterday it inspired me to buy that Pilates ball I'd been thinking about. Now if I can just get the pump out of the box and pump it up...Maybe tomorrow....

Okay okay. I'm a liar I do not want to see a large, out-of-shape lady in a bathing suit. There, are you happy now? I get grossed out at the beach if there are obese people in skimpy suits. I just want them to cover up some. I have this thing about the human body in general. I don't really want to see it without clothes unless it's a youthful human body in spectacular shape. Anything short of that, well, just cover up already. And don't even think of sitting down at my kitchen table without a shirt, ok? I really don't want to see anyone's skin in general, including yours.


haha you think I sit around with my friends and laugh at other peoples' bodies? What the heck? Like I'm trying to picture this...so here I am sitting around the kitchen table with my girl friends and we're laughing at some other woman's butt size because we can't believe she let it get so huge? Yeah that's probably not a conversation that I will have with my friends, like ever. Now I might laugh at the way some mean blonde neighbor of mine runs. That I might do. But her butt size? No.

Would I change my stance if it turns out that most obese people are fat because they are lazy? Well, perhaps. Perhaps I would be more outraged if I could be convinced that people ballooned out of control for no reason other than pure gluttony and laziness.

They're probably just all on chemotherapy or have rare genetic conditions. Really, what are the odds against it?

Don't know how to figure the odds on it but there is some genetic factoring.

excerpt:

Genes play a part in how your body balances calories and energy. Children whose parents are obese tend to be overweight too. A family history of obesity increases you chances of becoming obese by about 25 to 30 percent.

Heredity doesn't destine you to be fat. But by influencing the amount of body fat and fat distribution, genes can make you more susceptible to gaining weight.

Body Shape
Your body shape, for example, generally falls into one of three categories - ectomorph, endomorph or mesomorph.

The slight frames of ectomorphs reflect a low capacity for fat storage. Endomorphs have the most fat-storage capacity. And mesomorphs have an ability to store fat that falls somewhere in between. Fat storage is also more evenly distributed.

If you're a rounded endomorph you may never have the lean body of an ectomorph or the muscular build of the mesomorph regardless of your weight. Most people, however, are a combination of all three, with a tendency to be more like one or two of them.

Some people have a naturally high metabolic thermostat -they tend to burn more calories than average even when they're asleep. Other individuals need fewer calories for the same physical activity. These metabolic differences alone, however, aren't great enough to account for weights that exceed the healthy ranges in weight tables.

Gender and Weight
Why does it seem men can eat more of everything than women without gaining weight? One explanation is that men have more muscle and less fat than women.

Muscle uses more energy than fat. Because men have more muscle, they burn between 10 and 20 percent more calories than women during rest.

SOURCE: mayoclinic.com

The "seem" is a very important part of this. Until recently, neither European nor Asian women tended to do any exercise outside of what was strictly part of the ordinary round of daily chores. In fact it was often forbidden them, and there seemed little need for it in the days when being chunky was a sign of status and taken for both health and sexiness too. To this day, I wouldn't be surprised if it weren't much more women than men who tried to control their weight largely or primarily through diet, and who bought many more books and videos on dieting than men do.

Ummm...which class of Asian and European women are we talking about here? Your statement is only applicable to the upperclass woman. The majority of Asian and European women would have been peasants and peasants work their asses off, whether they be male or female.

One final reply, Blarg.

I'd be convinced, perhaps, (I'm stubborn) if everyone who has been discussing the issue here feels that the acceptance of obesity comes anywhere close to the pressure to conform to a standard of beauty based on thinness.

Perhaps I also believe that people who seem to revel in their obesity are much like my students who claim a Carver story or Hemingway story is boring. I simpy take that to mean "I don't understand it."

(Oh yeah, "A Small Good Thing" is still better than "The Bath." ;-])

That was well covered by the phrase "ordinary round of daily chores." Obviously upper class people did few physical chores of any type, and that helped them attain what was then considered a gorgeous plumpness. The lower classes, which until recently comprised pretty much eveyrbody, often worked like hell, and that helped keep almost everyone from being as big as was the style of the times.

I infer by this that you may well be agreeing with me that the answer depends upon whom is asked. Clearly I've been running with a different (much fatter) crowd than you have, for a very long time, and it looks like the divergence of our ideas about the social acceptability of fat is likely strongly related to our direct personal experiences.

heheh! Avast, ye middlebrow scoundrel!

No Blarg it was due to there genetics ldo

Plus genetics changed overnight!

No, that would be rude and mean given typical beliefs. It's assumed that being overweight is often not the person's fault, or very hard to fix. It's almost a taboo to discuss fatness in a way that BO or weird teeth or hairy legs isn't.

Just pointing that contrary to your assertion, women in general do have time to be nosy and judgmental, and make good use of it too.

I suppose I'll just have to put myself in the "obesity isn't about laziness" camp, then.

I can eat anything I please and never put on a pound. It only seems reasonable that some people would have to virtually starve themselves in order to maintain a good weight.

And yes, this is a matter of choice to some degree. But cutting my calorie intake down to 1500 seems much more onerous to me than acne treatments. That's a huge lifestyle change, and it could leave them perpetually hungry. I mean, they could eat cabbage to fill up, but let's be honest.

I was like that my whole life too. But a couple of years ago when I worked a late night job and started relying on junk food, I packed on 10lbs in around 3 months. Going back to good eating habits and taking up swimming shed it pretty quickly.

I think you're wrong about being able to eat anything. I think if you did a calorie and activity assessment, you'd find that input and output are in good balance, and that you naturally regulate your intake over the long term without thinking about it. I think if you did the same thing for most fat people, you'd find the opposite. It's not like calories disappear into thin air or get passed out of the bowels without being absorbed. I think you'd also find major differences in the amount of refined sugar, fats, nutrients, and frequency of large sugar spikes.

I am surprised you don't see that there is no logic operative there.

You guys may be right.

I've got nothing in terms of evidence, even anecdotal.

But it's pretty easy for me to imagine a person getting by and even exercising regularly without using too much energy. Or a person whose sense of appetite is distorted, for whatever reason. Or a person who compulsively eats in the same sense that people compulsively smoke.

Dismissing all that out of hand strikes me as hasty.

We definitely all have our crosses to bear. Lots of us are unlucky. Some of us are kinda screwy. Plenty of us are both.

Therefore, harass people over their weight?