obesity

Enkrod , 1 month ago

Fun Fact:

A northern German youth-slang word for “Bro” is “Digga”, which is a friendly way to say “Fatty”, from “Dicker - dick” (lit.: Fatty, fat/thick), but with the implication of being very dear friends, “dicke Freunde” (lit.: thick friends) just has the meaning “close friends” with no implication of being fat and “dick miteinander sein” (lit.: being thick together) is also an expression of closeness, not of weight.

Interestingly, Digga is being used in exactly the same way as black people in the US use the soft n-word with each other. “Mein Digga!” (lit: my thicky) is 1:1 analogous to “My n-word!”. It’s common for tourists to do a double take when they hear some very German and very white youths yell at one another “Ey Digga!” and many German rappers definitely use it as a stand in for the soft n-word, but It’s use and etymology is rooted in the old dock workers culture of Hamburg and has absolutely nothing to do with the n-word.

janNatan , 1 month ago

I’m from the USA, and when I first heard “digga,” I was certainly confused! It seems the youth say it even more than the generation that invented the phrase now.

Anyway, English speakers have an old phrase that is similar and might help some understand the usage of the word “thick” here. The phrase is “thick as thieves” - meaning thieves stick together.

Nerrad , 1 month ago

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Krzd , 1 month ago

Lol, no she’s not.

Superfool , 1 month ago

That is not what she is saying.

She is equivocting a medical term with a racist term, and by extension implying obese people as oppressed victims.

She is objectively wrong.

werefreeatlast , 1 month ago

Chris Rock… There are two types of obese people. There’s fat people, and then there’s Biggas and the Biggas have got to go!

ealoe , 1 month ago

Obese people acting like they can’t control it is precisely why they’re obese. It’s vile to discriminate against someone for their height, race, sexual orientation, and other factors because they have no control or choice over those things. But if someone makes a bad choice that negatively affects their own health and others around them, it’s acceptable to tell that person it’s unsafe. Shaming them is ineffective, but just pretending being obese is normal and healthy isn’t ok either. These folks need help.

Don’t even start with me on thyroid disorders, those are a small fraction of people who are obese and even they do not defy basic laws of thermodynamics. Eat less than you burn, it’s basic math. You may not be able to control the disorder but you are in control of how you respond to it.

shinratdr , 1 month ago

It might be acceptable but is it effective? Thyroid disorders are not common, but food addiction is extremely common. The same way you couldn’t understand what drug or alcohol dependency feels like if you’ve never felt like that before, you couldn’t understand what food addiction is like if you don’t have that experience with food.

It’s clear that there is a spectrum of how people respond to food, from “always hungry and literally never not wanting to eat” to “forgets to eat for days and barely notices until they pass out”. I personally know people on both ends of that spectrum and every place in between.

So I think your response is a little insensitive, or at least lacks empathy. To boil it down to the classic “stop stuffing your face” or “basic math” assumes your level of willpower required to not overeat is applicable to all people and it can’t possibly be different or harder than it is for you, so the only explanation is that everyone else must have less willpower than you.

Either that, or they feel like they are starving all the time and are literally addicted to food. Most science shows that it’s that one, but feel free to believe whatever you wish.

ealoe , 1 month ago

I understand the level of willpower is different, I have an eating disorder myself. But the fact remains it is something that can be willed. Changing myself to be a different race or sexual orientation isn’t a willpower issue, it’s simply impossible. Hence why the comparison in this tweet is ridiculous.

shinratdr , 1 month ago

Agreed, I’m not defending the tweet or saying it’s the same as things you literally cannot change. It’s stupid. I just take issue with your characterization of it just being math, feels oversimplified to me.

ealoe , 1 month ago

Makes sense, enjoy your day

Lets_Eat_Grandma , 1 month ago

Weight is a technical problem. Eat less than you need and you lose weight. Eat more than you need and you gain weight. Simple.

Willpower to follow through with the technical steps to lose weight is a mental health issue. That is way more nuanced, complicated and ultimately why so many people can’t lose weight. I think you consider them holistically, whereas those who disagree with you keep those concepts separate. There is a logical argument for both and neither argument is wrong.

meliaesc , 1 month ago

I went from a perfect healthy BMI to gaining 50lbs over the course of a year (lockdown wasn’t great for my mental health). I’m obese now, and I need to stop stuffing my face. There’s explanations for every behavior, especially addiction, but there’s no “cause” or solution for something like skin color or other genetic features.

shinratdr , 1 month ago

Yeah just to be clear, I never said there was. Obesity is not race, I am in no way trying to defend the tweet itself. Although I would say that I think with near 100% certainty that how you respond to food and how addicted to it you can be is absolutely something in your genes. People have wildly different reactions to things like stress or depression, some don’t eat at all and can get very sick and waste away, others get ravenous.

So I wouldn’t be so quick to put everyone in the same bucket, even if the end result is the same that they need to consume a healthy amount of calories. That may be much harder for them, in both directions.

UnderpantsWeevil , 1 month ago

Obese people acting like they can’t control it is precisely why they’re obese.

Body Mass Index doesn’t do a good job of scaling by height. Its much easier to qualify as “obese” when you’re 6’ tall, simply because your frame is so much larger. And quite a few people really are just larger. Samoans are large folks, which is why they produce so many football linemen. South Americans tend to be a lot smaller and leaner by their nature.

You can change your diet to cut out the excess sugars and limit your carbs, but a person whose body demands 5000 calories a day is simply not going to be the same size as someone who can get by perfectly fine on less than 1500.

ZILtoid1991 , 1 month ago

I hope you also saying it to smokers, drinkers, etc.!

Maybe bring back the “slow suicide” and “brain damage” jokes for them, or at least call them “self harm”, that will be totally not counterproductive or anything!

MystikIncarnate , 1 month ago

It’s a clinical term, and being obese is something that 90%+ of the time, you have a choice in.

Nobody picks their race. You cannot change your race.

What I’m saying is, no, those terms are not remotely the same.

BruceTwarzen , 1 month ago

Retard was a clinical term as well, so was mongoloid idiot and imbecile.

I don’t agree with the fatty in the post at all, just saying.

Zoot , 1 month ago

Neither of those things are something you can choose to be. Similar to race, its something you’re generally born with. (Or a tragic accident could cause brain issues as well)

They are not the same as obesity. Some people don’t have a choice, and it can be genetics, but the VAST majority it is a life style “choice”.

meliaesc , 1 month ago

Retard isn’t the same as the n word either.

zerog_bandit , 1 month ago

I’m not gonna lie, I miss the R word so much. Everything else I totally get and can self censor. But when I see someone cut across 3 lanes of traffic without a blinker… They’re just a tard!

Tlaloc_Temporal , 1 month ago

I’m a little disappointed that it was a medical term at all. It’s a very functional word, like in flame retardant, or an engine retarder.

I think it would have been much more applicable to methods of thinking and epistemology, like thought stopping techniques and special pleading, as these also severly restrict one’s critical thought yet can be overcome socially. There’s no sense having a social label for a medical condition, so don’t use such a punchy easy to use word for it if it’s not a choice.

UnderpantsWeevil , 1 month ago

being obese is something that 90%+ of the time, you have a choice in

A big part of an individual’s build is genetic. Saying you “choose to be obese” is akin to saying you “choose to be tan”. Truer for some people than others, and often more a question of degree than state. But telling a Samoan to just stop being big is about as practical as insisting a Swede needs to stop being so fucking tall.

Nobody picks their race.

Race is a social construct. You’ve got significantly more control over your perceived race than your perceived weight, as even adjustments to your outfit and accent can cause people to place you in radically different ethnic groups.

My sicilian mother was regularly mistaken as hispanic, simply because she was shorter, slightly tanner, knew more spanish than her Mayo-American neighbors. I’ve got a Philippian friend who regularly code-switches between East Asian, Polynesian, and White depending on who is around. And even generic whiteness becomes extremely relative when you’re in Europe. Being from anywhere east of Germany might as well make you a filthy mudblood (nevermind the beef between English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian folks). A bit of accent work and a certain haircut can put you on the other side of the continent.

Lets_Eat_Grandma , 1 month ago

Diet determines someone’s body weight. If you don’t eat, you don’t gain. Once you gain it’s incredibly hard to lose. Once you lose it’s incredibly easy to gain.

I have lost 21 pounds in 2 months from calorie counting. I gained 60 pounds in 3 years by ordering a ton of delivery. I yoyo’d many times in the past 2 years trying to lose the weight using various programs before finding a routine that works for me. All weight gain was due to me making choices that increased calorie intake. No one forced me to eat anything, I did it to myself.

Genetic factors may make weight loss more difficult but it is never impossible. There is no possible way that if you do not eat you will gain weight. Unless you have a handful of extremely rare conditions it’s going to be the things you choose to eat and how much of them you eat that determine weight gain, alongside exercise. Some people swear that they do everything right with calorie counting but still gain weight but the reality is that if the average XXX pound person needs 1800 calories to maintain and you eat 1600 and still gain, perhaps your unique body really needs 1400 or 1200 to lose. Or maybe you’re blessed with a great metabolism and 2500 calories will be burnt for you so you can eat up to that without any issues.

Mental health challenges make it hard to stick with a routine diet for some but it’s still technically possible to lose weight even if your brain won’t let you stop eating. If someone gave you an appropriate balanced diet and there were no other possible source of calories for you, you’re gonna lose weight. You might go crazy because you can’t have dressing on your salad and perhaps even wish you were dead instead of eating less, but you would lose weight.

Beyond weight

In terms of height, diet can influence height somewhat (especially in terms of deficits causing stunted growth) but your maximum height is almost entirely due to genetics. You get very little choice in that. You can’t choose to drink more milk and gain a foot of height. Once your body stops producing the right growth hormone you just stop getting taller.

In terms of skin color, there’s very little you can do about that beyond genetics. You can paint your body with fake tan or sit in the sun to get darker or hide indoors out of sunlight to be “lighter” than if you went outdoors but there’s no way to will your body to stop producing melanin.

In terms of “cultural behaviors” that you seem to call race based on how you describe it, you can choose to behave like someone from any walk of life if you learn how to do so. You can learn other languages, social norms, customs and beliefs and act on them. You are not born any more “white”, “italian”, “irish”, “kenyan” or “thai” culturally than anybody else. You learn the local culture from your experiences. Switching between the cultures has nothing to do with genetics. We’re just most likely to be born into cultural groups that have the same genetics as us, the exceptions tend to be when you’re adopted or your parents happen to already be a different culture than their genetic heritage’s or your parents have different cultures.

I can’t believe I had to write any of this out. I’ll probably get downvoted because no one wants to hear the absolute truth of whatever thing they can’t do that they want to blame something else to feel better for their lack of discipline, but we can choose to behave however we really want to. I don’t give a shit how fat or skinny someone is, I care about the content of their character, their beliefs and their actions. I’m not going to point this shit out in polite company because it’s not my business and I believe everyone should be able to choose to do to their bodies and their lives however they wish. Doesn’t change the facts though.

UnderpantsWeevil , 1 month ago

Diet determines someone’s body weight.

Dietary needs vary by individual need. You need more calories to feed an adult than a child. You need more calories to feed a professional athlete than an office schlub. And that’s before you get into food availability by region or the opportunity cost of accessing nutritious foods in a given neighborhood radius.

I can’t believe I had to write any of this out.

You’re overly simplistic and reductive, just like every other high minded bigot.

Lets_Eat_Grandma , 1 month ago

I love how you glossed over what I said to pick up a strawman argument which is aligned with what I said. e.g. everyone’s needs are different. My exact quote from the post you replied to:

the reality is that if the average XXX pound person needs 1800 calories to maintain and you eat 1600 and still gain, perhaps your unique body really needs 1400 or 1200 to lose. Or maybe you’re blessed with a great metabolism and 2500 calories will be burnt for you so you can eat up to that without any issues.

You can believe whatever you want but assuming i’m bigoted means you probably didn’t read everything I wrote. It’s a really, really long post for social media. The irony is your complaints of it being reductive though. If you want scientific papers perhaps you should be looking at nature instead.

UnderpantsWeevil , 1 month ago

You can believe whatever you want

This isn’t a question of belief but of established nutritional practice. “Just eat fewer calories” isn’t a panacea, because people don’t respond in the same way to calorie deficits. Composition of diet, opportunity for exercise, age, physical health… you almost seem to hit on it when you talk about metabolism, but then you skitter right past when you conclude “Just eat more/less”.

It’s a rudimentary understanding of how people gain and lose weight, and it inevitably leads people towards crash diets and weight loss drugs that ruin your body in pursuit of a certain popular aesthetic.

MxRemy , 1 month ago

Not saying that the person in the post is correct in conflating those words, I don’t think that’s accurate at all.

However, it is disheartening to see so many ill-informed comments about fatness here… It’s way, way more complicated than just “calories in/calories out”. Even the extent to which it’s unhealthy is more complicated; obesity is linked to higher risk of heart disease, but also linked to higher probability of surviving strokes/etc. A lot of the problem stems from the fact that BMI is a nearly useless metric.

snow_bunny , 1 month ago

Yeah, CICO is a subtraction problem, but it’s just one part of a massive system of nonlinear equations when it comes to health.

sploosh , 1 month ago

Human beings are subject to the laws of physics. If you eat more calories than you consume and do not otherwise eliminate from the body, they will still be in the body. The body stores them as fat. This is simply the mechanics of biology. If it weren’t, things like Ozempic would not spur massive weight loss.

We have more obese people now than have ever existed. Countries that do not have US/Mexico levels of easy access to heavily processed, calorie-dense foods do not have obesity problems like we have. Clearly, calling people names and making them feel bad is not a good way to get them to adopt healthier habits. However, there are plain, uncomplicated things that people can do to lose weight that will work, but they will ONLY work if the people want to change, are honest with themselves and truly stick to the changes they need to make.

Losing weight is absolutely within reach of 99% of obese people, but comments like this reinforce the absolutely incorrect notion that getting healthy is some big mystery that’s for a different class of people to solve. It’s defeatist and makes it seem like a problem that a person can’t solve on their own, which is straight up wrong.

The plain, uncomplicated things you can do? Find out how many calories a body of the weight you want to weigh uses in a day. Limit yourself to those calories. Given time, you will be that weight if and only if you stick to the plan. It may shock some people how many calories they actually consume in a day, especially if they drink soda or juice with any regularity.

Smokeydope , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Just wanted to give some input as someone who dealt with lifelong obesity. As a fat person, some people just don’t like to face the music or give themselves an honest look in the mirror. They don’t want to call a spade a spade. Changing around words to describe things in more complex and softer language doesn’t change the situation any, it just helps you psychologically cope.

The same with playing the blame game on outside factors like genetics and disability. Blaming everything you can but yourself and your own choices and failures and unaddressed mental insecurities. Thats not a fat person thing though, thats a general human being thing I tend to see in most groups of people one way or another. Its easier to convince yourself that you never had a choice, than it is to acknowledge the bad personal choices that lead to the consequences of your failures.

When you have fat rolls, and stretch marks litter your stomach, and you look more like a slug than a human being, and you need help wiping your own ass or a bigger toilet to support the weight, when you have to go shopping at specialty close stores (before amazon) just to find a size that fits, and you have no self control or desire to change your habits to stop the self destructive spiral as your stomach swells like a balloon, thats obesity. Regardless of arguments on BMI or CICO or genetics or whatever else, you’ve got a serious problem that needs addressing or it will destroy you slowly but surely.

“At least I’ll die happy!” my type 2 diabetic father would always gleefully tell me as he shoved another tasty cake in his mouth before jabbing himself with an insulin pen. I don’t think the junk food ever did make him happy though. He had mental health issues he never worked through in life. Instead, he relied on the temporary relief of junk food for pleasure, eventually having his addiction dominate and guide his existence.

As for me? I’ve gone through cycles of gaining and loosing 100 pounds. Right now im on a downward trend, lost 40 pounds this year. Hope to loose another 40 by this time next year. I gain the pounds during cycles of extreme depression, and loose them during cycles of great determination and self-agency. Our physical well-being is tied to our emotional and spiritual well-being. Self destructive cycles are much easier to enter when you feel nihilistic and out of control of your own life.

How do I loose weight? I don’t eat. CICO, Simple as. I eat one meal a day, if that. Maybe snack on some dried preserved nuts and fruits once or twice.I drink water and lemon juice. I am a 6’1 man the calorie calculators tell me I should have around 2000 calories daily and cut down by 500 to loose a pound every once in awhile. Fuck that, I have maybe 500-1000 calories daily.

Im a little hungry a lot of the time, but I see the results of my conviction when I step on the scale expecting it to raise 5 lbs and seeing it drop 10 lbs. I look at myself in the mirror, examining my fading stretch marks and receding folds, I examine my skin tightening around the muscles and notice my face not quite as round as it once was. Thats the reward physical evidence of improvement. That my efforts aren’t for nothing. It helps to remind myself of what im doing it for, and the price ive already had to pay for my insecurities and failures to control myself.

The physical act of loosing weight is hard and requires self-control over a very long time often multiple years. The mental act of introspection and reflecting on what lead to your obesity often requires analyzing the roots of your negative aspects while confronting those past traumas. That requires a mental strength and intelligence many people lack. At the end of the day, its easier and feels nicer to twist words and point fingers than fix your own problems.

StormWalker , 1 month ago

Wow thank you for sharing your personal experience and thoughts. I think you hit the nail on the head. To add to that, I have noticed with a family member of mine (who has been trying to loose weight for 20 years, unsuccessfully) that mental wellbeing = willpower. If something get you down, the weight usually goes up. It’s hugely complected of course. My heart goes out to all.

boatsnhos615 , 1 month ago

Where do you set the weight loose

EmperorHenry , 1 month ago

Fat fat fat fat fat fat fat fat fat