Fatist anyone?

[Stravo]

Ok, I have an obese female friend who seems to have cultivated a gaggle of similarly obese women as friends on Facebook. Lately they have been bitching about how their doctors have been really on them about their weight and other health related issues and they have begun throwing around a term I have not heard before. Fatist.

"My doctor did my annual blood test and he gave me some doom and gloom about the numbers and what they mean to me."

"Honey, he's just being Fatist because some people are just naturally large and are just fine that way. My great aunt is obese and she's still alive and kicking despite what doctors have been telling her."

"That's right, and all this talk about bad numbers is just a way to keep us all on meds and line the pharmaceutical companies' pockets with money."

Huh. Fatist. So, when faced with bad numbers that medical science has universally come up with to describe something out of sorts these people decide instead of accepting that things are wrong, conclude this must be some sort of conspiracy to keep fat people down. You're not being rascist, oh no, you're being fatist.

Now I am a large man. I also happen to have been diagnosed with diabetes two years ago. It was horrible and I was depressed for a few months and it was extremely tempting for me to look at that glucose meter and say "You know what, I feel fine. So what if ideally I should be at 120 and I'm at 200. That's just a number and some people are different so there has to be a wide range, right?"

It was tempting but I overcame that little bit of self delusion and while I struggle daily with diet and taking care of myself I have embraced that there are certain things that are immutable and these numbers don't lie. You see you might feel fine now, but 20 years from now your body will be a mess if you don't try to keep these numbers low. This goes back to the analogy of the frog in the slowly boiling pot from and inconvenient truth.

This whole fatist idealogy strikes me as fully embracing the siren song of "I can't be sick, screw them." It seems to be also related this growing movement I see amongst the fat and obese to try and potray themselves as some sort of victims.

"McDonald's supersize menus made me fat." NO. Your mouth did. Ronald wasn't shoving those burgers down your throat.

Has anyone encountered this sort of Fatist idealogy? It's really weird to see otherwise perfectly rational people just do an about face when it comes to their health and relationship with their doctors.

[Solauren]

I've never run into this belief directly, and on my dad's side of the family, well, my aunts and uncles tend to be 'large'.

Meanwhile, my cousins are almost all what you'd call 'thin' or 'in shape'.

Most of the people I know that have a health issue know they should do something about it. They generally try, and have mixed results. (Some people require more effort then others to lose weight).

If I ever ran into someone that said anything like 'doctors are in the pockets of', my reply would be as such:

"Really? So my doctor saying 'cut your calorine intake. That's all you need to do', is making the pharmacies money, how again?'

That's all most people need to do. Limit your calorie intake to around 1500 calories a day (adjust upwards as required by activty requirements), and you'll lose weight.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Stupid people clumping together and trying hard to combine reinforcing viewpoints to avoid reality? No, never seen that before.

Unlike racist or ageist, this kind of thing has no real benefit from NOT being targeted. Girls with a bit of meat on them are fine and dandy. It's when you move into the beached whale category, there actual health is affected and can impact on the bottom line of health authorities, then we have a problem. I have no qualms with being prejudiced against stupid in all its forms, doubly so when it means harming society in general.

A coronary or three and Type II diabetes is its own reward for these people. Maybe they'll change their tune when they finally figure out that biology is innately "fatist" too.

[Tsyroc]

If there's anything I've learned working in a hospital is that a lot of people are on a lot of drugs. What I mean by that is that just because so and so lived to be 80 something or whatever being fat, smoking or whatever, doesn't mean that they didn't take a crap load of drugs and/or have a lot of health issues that they spent a lot of time dealing with that most people they knew were never aware of.

So yeah people can live a long life while still spending a lot of time doing things that are bad for their bodies. The thing is, there are still consequences to those actions and just because they aren't apparent to the casual observer that doesn't mean the person's life wouldn't have been better or longer if they had just cut back on some of those practices, or added a few good ones.

Being fat and 40 myself I currently am only taking medication for high blood pressure. Something that would definitely improve if I lost weight. Only a very few people I know are aware that I'm on any medication. Even fewer of them are aware that quite often I have foot, knee, hip and back pain all tied to being over weight and out of shape. Those are all things that I can either deal with or mask with OTC medications while the casual observer sees me as doing well or getting along just fine. They also see me eating and drinking crap so other than making me fat it must not be doing anything bad to me.

Those same casual observers won't know when I start taking medication for diabetes, or if I'm out for a little while as I get a stents put in the blood vessels around my heart. They might notice if I have to have knee or hip replacement surgery but only if they see me a lot.

These women might be right in that they might live a long life without changing what they are doing. Would it be longer if they were more healthy? Probably. They would most likely have a better quality of life if they were healthier, and certainly at lower risk for sudden death. It's just wishful thinking that being fat is mostly just an appearance issue.

One other thing, just because there are examples of people who lived a long time after abusing their health doesn't mean there weren't a whole lot more who died young when they didn't need to. This applies to all sorts of dangerous practices. Whether it's being obese, doing lots of drugs, participating in dangerous activities (X-game style retardedness) and so on.

[Darth Wong]

Ok, I have an obese female friend who seems to have cultivated a gaggle of similarly obese women as friends on Facebook. Lately they have been bitching about how their doctors have been really on them about their weight and other health related issues and they have begun throwing around a term I have not heard before. Fatist.

There's a group called NAAFA which is all about this sort of advocacy.

"My doctor did my annual blood test and he gave me some doom and gloom about the numbers and what they mean to me."

"Honey, he's just being Fatist because some people are just naturally large and are just fine that way. My great aunt is obese and she's still alive and kicking despite what doctors have been telling her."

"That's right, and all this talk about bad numbers is just a way to keep us all on meds and line the pharmaceutical companies' pockets with money."

That sounds awfully familiar, and it should: it's the exact same reality denial that we've seen for decades from smokers.

Huh. Fatist. So, when faced with bad numbers that medical science has universally come up with to describe something out of sorts these people decide instead of accepting that things are wrong, conclude this must be some sort of conspiracy to keep fat people down. You're not being rascist, oh no, you're being fatist.

Should it come as a surprise? Whether it's obesity, smoking, seatbelts, or global warming, people who really don't want it to be true always find a way to dismiss the science.

Now I am a large man. I also happen to have been diagnosed with diabetes two years ago. It was horrible and I was depressed for a few months and it was extremely tempting for me to look at that glucose meter and say "You know what, I feel fine. So what if ideally I should be at 120 and I'm at 200. That's just a number and some people are different so there has to be a wide range, right?"

It was tempting but I overcame that little bit of self delusion and while I struggle daily with diet and taking care of myself I have embraced that there are certain things that are immutable and these numbers don't lie. You see you might feel fine now, but 20 years from now your body will be a mess if you don't try to keep these numbers low. This goes back to the analogy of the frog in the slowly boiling pot from and inconvenient truth.

Good luck, buddy. I hope you manage to get this thing under control.

This whole fatist idealogy strikes me as fully embracing the siren song of "I can't be sick, screw them." It seems to be also related this growing movement I see amongst the fat and obese to try and potray themselves as some sort of victims.

"McDonald's supersize menus made me fat." NO. Your mouth did. Ronald wasn't shoving those burgers down your throat.

Has anyone encountered this sort of Fatist idealogy? It's really weird to see otherwise perfectly rational people just do an about face when it comes to their health and relationship with their doctors.

Wayne Poe started spouting this crap shortly before he had a big blow-up at me and left the board in a huff. He kept saying that I was a "hypocritical douchebag" for supporting gay rights but simultaneously saying that there should be a junk food tax to tackle the obesity problem. Apparently, he believed a junk food tax was akin to some kind of apartheid for fat people. Ironically enough, if a junk food tax does target fat people, it could only be due to fat people living up to their stereotype of hogging junk food in mass quantities. But I couldn't convince him of that. He even tried to equate scientific claims about the health risks of obesity to pseudoscientific claims about the health hazards of homosexuality. Basically, he went into a screaming rant that could be summarized as: "You think it's OK to be a fattist but not a racist or a homophobe! You're a hypocritical douchebag!"

Frankly, once someone goes down that road, assholery and general dishonesty is pretty much inevitable. When someone has decided that an outright denial of science is necessary for his self-esteem, any attempt to argue with him will only end in anger.

[Akhlut]

Oddly enough, the episode of Taboo on Nat Geo about being fat is on right now.

Anyway, I really don't get these people, but, then again, I tend to trust people who have a lot more knowledge in subjects than I do. Hence, why I'm trying to drop enough weight until my stomach is fairly flat and I lose my moobs. Statistics don't lie about obesity being the main cause of death in this country anymore, having surpassed smoking as the leading cause of death in the US.

And, curiously, portion control and activity are actually seeing me lose weight. I've dropped about 10-15 pounds at last check, but I have to be EVER VIGILANT about it, because it is easy to revert to old habits. Which, makes sense, as apparently fatty food is addictive, similar in intensity to heroin, apparently (source).

[Vympel]

I wonder how much of this is an extension of coddling received when young. I was fat (not obese, but pretty fat looking) for way longer than I should have been by having my relatives and shit say I wasn't fat, it was just baby fat and I'll grow out of it blah blah blah well after the point where that's true, if it ever is.

And I was happy to keep on scoffing down junk in quantity when I heard that, because its what I wanted.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Generally speaking, there's two other factors which go into the lack of health from being overweight, which is having a BMI of 25 to 29.9:

This series of risk factors:

* high blood pressure (hypertension)
* high LDL-cholesterol ("bad" cholesterol)
* low HDL-cholesterol ("good" cholesterol)
* high triglycerides
* high blood glucose (sugar)
* family history of premature heart disease
* physical inactivity
* cigarette smoking

And waist measurement.

If you're within that BMI range and you only have one or none of the above risk factors and your waist measurement is not excessive (i.e., no real belly fat), then you're actually still at a healthy weight and you just need to avoid gaining weight.

But if you have two or more of the above risk factors or you have a lot of belly fat, then you need to lose weight despite being only being in the overweight category to actually be healthy. Or eliminate a risk factor; if you just have two and one's physical inactivity then getting exercise even if it doesn't cause you to lose weight would be enough, but that's just if you have a small waist; otherwise you need to keep losing weight. Generally even losing 10% of your body mass if you're overweight is enough to eliminate most of the risks.

And of course anyone with a BMI of over 30 needs to lose weight no matter what. They generally need to get their BMI down to below 30 and then on top of that they need to go on to losing 10% of their body mass from a weight which brings them below a BMI of 30.

This actually isn't that hard; the overweight range for someone of around 5'10" to 6'2" for instance is about 35 pounds, so if you lack belly fat and have one or no of the above risk factors you can be up to 35 lbs overweight without having any health consequences. But generally speaking, being more than 35lbs overweight will have health consequences for anyone whatsoever. So "I weight 210lbs and my healthy weight is 175lbs but I'm only trying to hold my current weight" is a perfectly acceptable attitude for a person who has no risk factors and very limited belly fat... But anyone with a double chin is pretty much guaranteed to weigh more than that.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

And, curiously, portion control and activity are actually seeing me lose weight. I've dropped about 10-15 pounds at last check, but I have to be EVER VIGILANT about it, because it is easy to revert to old habits. Which, makes sense, as apparently fatty food is addictive, similar in intensity to heroin, apparently (source).

I'm having the same kind of success. Over the last year or so, my wife and I have been on the South Beach Diet, which is pretty much just portion control and avoiding shitty foods, and we've both lost 50 pounds or so, her more like 60 so far, I think. Mostly we've been losing about a pound or two every week, which is still surprising because I'm able to fit cookies or pizza into my diet every now and then. We're both at the high end of the healthy weight ranges for our height right now, and it's pretty simple to maintain this lifestyle even without a tremendous amount of activity.

Unlike some board members, I don't use my weight loss as an excuse to despise fat people. I understand where they are coming from. The initial lifestyle change and the first bit of weight loss are both tremendously difficult accomplishments, but once the process starts it is fairly facile to maintain.

Stravo, if you aren't already looking into the South Beach Diet, you might want to. It is very Diabetic friendly. Most of the advice in the book, as well as the recipes, deals with controlling sugar intake and blood sugar. If you have any questions about it you can PM me.

[Havok]

Ok, I have an obese female friend who seems to have cultivated a gaggle of similarly obese women as friends on Facebook. Lately they have been bitching about how their doctors have been really on them about their weight and other health related issues and they have begun throwing around a term I have not heard before. Fatist.

"My doctor did my annual blood test and he gave me some doom and gloom about the numbers and what they mean to me."

"Honey, he's just being Fatist because some people are just naturally large and are just fine that way. My great aunt is obese and she's still alive and kicking despite what doctors have been telling her."

"That's right, and all this talk about bad numbers is just a way to keep us all on meds and line the pharmaceutical companies' pockets with money."

What a bunch of fucking idiots. Nobody is 'naturally large' i.e. fat, unless you have a medical condition at birth. And no, doctors aren't just feeding you a load of crap, (although I am sure you would eat it) because quite honestly, they don't want to have to operate or deal with your fat asses when you do finally have that heart attack. They want you to loose weight for the sake of not having to look at your disgusting ass in the operating room.

Huh. Fatist. So, when faced with bad numbers that medical science has universally come up with to describe something out of sorts these people decide instead of accepting that things are wrong, conclude this must be some sort of conspiracy to keep fat people down. You're not being rascist, oh no, you're being fatist.

Mike brought this up, but yeah, Poe pulled this shit. I had always heard of if it, but he was the first fatty I had ever seen actually and dishonestly believe it.

Now I am a large man. I also happen to have been diagnosed with diabetes two years ago. It was horrible and I was depressed for a few months and it was extremely tempting for me to look at that glucose meter and say "You know what, I feel fine. So what if ideally I should be at 120 and I'm at 200. That's just a number and some people are different so there has to be a wide range, right?"

It was tempting but I overcame that little bit of self delusion and while I struggle daily with diet and taking care of myself I have embraced that there are certain things that are immutable and these numbers don't lie. You see you might feel fine now, but 20 years from now your body will be a mess if you don't try to keep these numbers low. This goes back to the analogy of the frog in the slowly boiling pot from and inconvenient truth.

Losing weight and changing what you eat sucks doesn't it? Keep up the good fight though. It sucks, but man, you feel like a million bucks when you reach your goal. Then you hit the second part that no one tells you about... maintaining your goal. Oh what a load of horseshit that is, but yeah, it never ends. At least not until you get used to it and stop thinking about yummy food and lazing about playing videogames. From what I can tell, it takes a good 2-3 years of changing, pretty much all, your habits so that they become permanent.

This whole fatist idealogy strikes me as fully embracing the siren song of "I can't be sick, screw them." It seems to be also related this growing movement I see amongst the fat and obese to try and potray themselves as some sort of victims.

"McDonald's supersize menus made me fat." NO. Your mouth did. Ronald wasn't shoving those burgers down your throat.

Has anyone encountered this sort of Fatist idealogy? It's really weird to see otherwise perfectly rational people just do an about face when it comes to their health and relationship with their doctors.

Again, Poe is the only one I have personally encountered. I think the fact that I am also a lazy fat ass leads any fattys that think this way to not bother saying anything to me because they think I must think the same way. It's funny too, because I would be a prime example of someone that could adopt this way of thinking. I have never had a medical problem in my life. I have never had high blood pressure, blood sugar, high cholesterol or any other signs of me being fat come up from any physical I have ever gotten. I even find that I am in better cardiovascular shape than people far younger than I and in much better shape.
I have never had a problem getting around or being grotesquely out of breath or anything else you would associate with being fat, especially as fat as I am. I mean, I'm not running a fucking marathon or anything, but for the activity that is expected of an average person today, I am fine.

The thing is, I know it is coming. The question is, how long is my lazy ass going to put off doing something about it?

[adam_grif]

Some people don't like changing. That's fine. But then they get upset when people tell them that bad things are going to happen if they don't change. I've never heard "fatist" before, that's a fucking stupid term. "Massist" would be more appropriate, although it still sounds fucking stupid.

[mr friendly guy]

I am pretty sure those railing against fat people won't rail against a WWE wrestler just because they have lots of mass for the simple reason, most of them are heavy because of muscle and not fat. Thus "massist" won't be accurate. In any event as you say both "fatist" and "massist" are retarded terms anyway.

[JediToren]

I've never personally encountered these people, although I am familiar with the NAAFA crowd, mainly from topics discussing them on this board.

The funny thing is that, although NAAFA dismisses the enormous body of scientific evidence demonstrating the dangers of obesity, they show off a travel scooter at a NAAFA convention here: .

The crazy thing about the people mentioned in the OP is that if the pharmaceutical companies wanted to keep us all drugged up, keeping people obese would be in their best interest, since fat people usually need more medication that healthy people.

[Coyote]

A bunch of people have formed a self-help group to enable their whining and feelings of victimhood. What else is new?

Taking care of themselves is, after all, hard work. Diet and exercise are difficult, dull, and require something not really advocated much in the USA these days: discipline. It is far easier to stuff another Twinkie in the ol' cakehole and whinge about it with like-minde dpeople who also feel "picked on".

[Simon_Jester]

Part of the problem is that a lot of these people will, over the years, have gotten both sound medical advice against obesity ("you need to lose weight or you'll be dead by the time you turn sixty") and random bullshit that treats obesity as a target of opportunity ("ha, ha, what a fat-ass!")

Because they aren't too bright, they're prone to miss the difference between the first and the second. And it would be reasonable for them to form a mutual support group to help them with the second... if only it didn't screw with their ability to take the medical advice.

[Covenant]

It's just pure, unadulterated self-deception. The difference between a fat person who understands their situation and a person thinking it's a protected status immune to criticism or singling-out is the complete and utter obliteration of rational thought. Fat people are more likely to die of heart disease, or develop diabetes, or end up needing scooters to move them around. So if you make decisions such as using morbid obesity as a tracking statistic for raising your health insurance, telling them that medically it's unhealthy for them, or that they're at risk of developing one or many different ailments... this is helpful information.

There's no excuse or deeper meaning to it. It's just the absolute worst kind of fake identity. I'm not skinny but I eat real healthy and I stay moderately active. I remember that conversation with Poe about this back in the day, and it's really not about weight loss, it's about understanding the risks. We're not looking for a societal scapegoat and say "You are a bad person because you are fat!" It's just that being fat is bad for you, even if your fat isn't really all that bad for me. Except if the you and me in the question are parent and child, which is exactly the reason that obesity has become an issue. Especially childhood obesity and the issue of modeling good food behavior.

[UnderAGreySky]

As someone who went from a BMI of 34 to a BMI of 25.7, fuck these whiny blind people.

[Akhlut]

Something I remembered from that episode of Taboo: this one extremely obese woman (over 450 pounds, as I recall) said that she was through trying to lose weight, even with people saying that it affects her health and that she might get a heart attack because "skinny people get heart attacks all the time" (paraphrase).

That is something I don't get at all: that attitude of 'well, it can happen to other people too, so I shouldn't change.' Shit, I can get into a car crash if I'm sober, so I may as well drink a whole fifth of tequila and get on the highway, right? Same damn logic, yet I can imagine she'd disagree about the analogy.

[spaceviking]

My favourite is when you hear these people talk about dieting, they frequently call it ‘starving themselves’ eating less then 2000 calories a day is not starving yourself, and saying so is an insult to people who actually need more food.

Btw: people keeping bringing up BMI in this thread, it should be kept in mind that BMI is a pretty shitty indicator of health. I’m barely within the normal category for BMI, yet I look pretty scrawny.

[Steel]

Btw: people keeping bringing up BMI in this thread, it should be kept in mind that BMI is a pretty shitty indicator of health. I’m barely within the normal category for BMI, yet I look pretty scrawny.

BMI is pretty rubbish unless you're about average height, proportions and body composition. It isnt useless though, and most people are average enough for it to be decent.

It can easily be 20% out between different body types.

I remember training and gaining weight, I was under 8% body fat, had a 6 pack, but nearly got to 'overweight'...

[Darth Wong]

My favourite is when you hear these people talk about dieting, they frequently call it ‘starving themselves’ eating less then 2000 calories a day is not starving yourself, and saying so is an insult to people who actually need more food.

Sometimes they're more accurate, and they point out that crash diets lead to a yo-yo effect. This is correct, but it ignores the fact that not all diets are crash diets. A proper diet is a lifelong change, not a temporary event. They state this as "dieting doesn't work", which is very misleading. But of course, the whole exercise is about self-delusion anyway.

The worst thing is that they think everyone is hating them for trying to tell them to fix their own health. It's for their own benefit, for fuck's sake. If my own son became obese, I would say the same thing to him. It doesn't mean I hate him.

[FSTargetDrone]

This discussion reminds me of something I saw a few weeks ago:

New Jersey Woman Wants to Weigh 1,000 Pounds

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Fox News

Meet Donna Simpson. She's going to cost you. A lot.

Simpson, of Old Bridge, N.J., is 42 years old, has two kids and a boyfriend, and she weighs 602 pounds. That's right ... 602 pounds.

She's on a diet, of course, because she has a goal in mind:

She wants to weigh 1,000 pounds.

That's right ... 1,000 pounds. It's a nice, extra-round figure — almost as big as what her unhealthy choices will ultimately cost taxpayers.

Simpson claims she is normal and healthy, and she has a right to eat what she wants and weigh what she wants.

“I love eating and people love watching me eat,” she says. “It makes people happy, and I’m not harming anyone.”

But she needs to use a motor scooter when she goes grocery shopping, because she can't walk more than 20 feet. The human body, after all, is not designed to scarf down 12,000 calories a day in the quest to weigh half a ton.

Simpson is definitely harming someone — herself, says Dr. Carla Wolper, a registered dietitian and research faculty member at the New York Obesity Research Center at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York.

And you, the taxpayer, could wind up paying for it.

“We don’t know her medical history, but one of the most dangerous health issues she faces is an increased risk of sudden death from having a heart attack due to electrical problems in the heart,” Wolper said.

Other possible causes of death for Simpson include stroke, immobility, breathing problems, congestive heart failure, diabetes, and inflammation of heart tissue. Each year, nearly 300,000 Americans die from heart failure.

Simpson, experts say, is putting herself at risk for all these medical conditions, and those conditions have a hefty pricetag.

“The baseline cost for someone like to go to the emergency room is $993 for one visit,” Daniel Emmer, public relations manager of Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, the largest health insurance provider in New Jersey, told FOXNews.com.

Simpson’s main source of income to support herself financially is by appearing on a Web site where men pay to watch videos of her gorging on food and showing off her hundreds of pounds of extra bulge in a bikini.

But it's anyone's guess whether her revenue from Web videos will cover the cost of her inevitable health risks.

“Someone with diabetes costs $11,744 more per year to provide health care, which is twice as much as the average person,” Emmer said.

It is unclear what type of insurance Simpson has, if any. But there is no question that whatever her health care position is, it could come at a high cost.

“Obesity causes a minimum $1,429 increase, or 42 percent in medical costs,” Emmer said. “Research shows lifestyle choices and behaviors drive 87.5 percent of the cost for health care claims.”

“When people are very, very overweight, they are at an increased risk for a condition called prolonged QT syndrome,” Wolper told FoxNews.com.

Prolonged QT syndrome is a heart rhythm disorder that can potentially cause fast, chaotic heartbeats, the Mayo Clinic says on its Web site. In some cases, the heart may beat erratically for so long that it can cause sudden death.

"Another problem this woman faces is related to the circulatory system,” Wolper said. “When people are that big, circulation is often impaired in the legs. This can cause blood to pool in the legs leading to formation of blood clots. This leaves morbidly obese people at an increased risk for a pulmonary embolism.”

A pulmonary embolism occurs when one or more arteries in the lungs become blocked. In most cases, pulmonary embolism is caused by blood clots that travel to your lungs from another part of your body — most commonly, your legs, according to the Mayo Clinic. One of the major risk factors is excess weight, which increases the risk of blood clots, especially in women who smoke or have high blood pressure.

“The work of the heart is tremendously increased when someone is that big because there’s so much more blood in the body,” Wolper said. “When this happens, the heart has to pump against the pressure of all that fat that is pressing against the blood vessels, and as a result the heart enlarges, and not in a good way.”

As Simpson’s appetite increases, so will the cost of health care for the severe medical conditions that she is likely to have — conditions that are preventable by healthier lifestyle choices. Whereas her $750-a-week grocery bill is merely gastronomical, her hospital bills will be astronomical — and the taxpayers of New Jersey may well have to pay her tab.

Meanwhile, in her effort to boldly go where no woman has gone before, Simpson says she tries to stay sedentary, so she burns as few calories as necessary.

She consumes five times more than the recommended daily calories for a woman her age.

“My favorite food is sushi. But unlike others I can sit and eat 70 big pieces of sushi in one go,” she told the Daily Mail.

“I do love cakes and sweet things, doughnuts are my favorite.”

The current record for fattest woman is held by a woman also from New Jersey, who weighed an unbelievable 1,800 pounds when she died in 2008. She was 49 years old.

Simpson is proud of the Guinness World Record she holds now for the world’s fattest mother, and her boyfriend is proud of her too.

Philippe, 49, supports her thousand-pound goal, even if that is nearly seven times his own weight of 150 pounds.

“I think he’d like it if I was bigger,” Simpson said. “He’s a real belly man, and completely supports me.”

Someday, the experts say, we all may support her.

Amusingly, this is from Fox and the article is quite happy enough to talk about how this astonishingly bad behavior will cost the taxpayers.

I can understand making excuses for being fat. I just can't understand wanting to be fat. This fat.

Oh, and do yourselves a favor. Do not attempt to Google for pictures for this woman.

[Vastatosaurus Rex]

"Honey, he's just being Fatist because some people are just naturally large and are just fine that way.

I seriously doubt any human being is born with enough fat content to be considered "fat". Animal species with naturally high fat content, such as polar bears, tend to live in environments where insulation is very important, such as places with cold climates. Having evolved in a tropical savanna habitat, humans would not have needed so much insulation, so naturally we're probably a lot less fat than many other animal species living today.

[Krisnack]

This discussion reminds me of something I saw a few weeks ago:

New Jersey Woman Wants to Weigh 1,000 Pounds
-Snip-
Someday, the experts say, we all may support her.

Amusingly, this is from Fox and the article is quite happy enough to talk about how this astonishingly bad behavior will cost the taxpayers.

I can understand making excuses for being fat. I just can't understand wanting to be fat. This fat.

Oh, and do yourselves a favor. Do not attempt to Google for pictures for this woman.

Sadly, I already know about this repulsive 'subculture' thanks to Portal of Evil. Also, FUCK THIS WOMAN. Intentionally gaining weight when one is already morbidly obese is inexcusable beyond words.

[PeZook]

Sometimes they're more accurate, and they point out that crash diets lead to a yo-yo effect. This is correct, but it ignores the fact that not all diets are crash diets. A proper diet is a lifelong change, not a temporary event. They state this as "dieting doesn't work", which is very misleading. But of course, the whole exercise is about self-delusion anyway.

That is what a lot of people trying to lose weight don't understand. "Hey, I'll diet 'till I've lost 15 kilos, and then it's all gonna be fine!". Tell them they need to make some life-long changes and they just stare at you in shock.

It doesn't help that in a lot of cases, people are simply not patient enough: if they try to "lose weight", they expect results now, or the next day, and if the scale says they gained half a kilogram, they get frustrated ; The result is that instead of eating 2000 calories and going for a walk twice a week, they really do try and starve themselves and try to go to the gym every day with all sorts of really (not) fun outcomes.

The best thing is that unless you're completely unable to move, cutting even a small portion of your daily food intake will lead to a rapid crash in weight due to the energy requirements needed just to transport the fat around.

I seriously doubt any human being is born with enough fat content to be considered "fat". Animal species with naturally high fat content, such as polar bears, tend to live in environments where insulation is very important, such as places with cold climates. Having evolved in a tropical savanna habitat, humans would not have needed so much insulation, so naturally we're probably a lot less fat than many other animal species living today.

In nature, starvation is the norm. There were no obese people in hunter-gatherer tribes, no matter how screwed up their metabolism was, because there wasn't enough of the damn food.