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(thread) Anyone pretending that losing weight is easy is a liar. And there's a lot more to being healthy than your weight - you can have a healthy lifestyle & diet and still be a bigger person.
Focusing on one measurement leaves out crucial factors like economic deprivation.
Focusing on one measurement leaves out crucial factors like economic deprivation.
I celebrated my 19th birthday very close to the morbidly obese BMI threshold. Something happened that made me rethink my whole relationship with food & exercise (I didn't do any until that point), and a year followed of gruelling changes that saw me lose more than 6 stone (+40kg)
Everyone praised me for losing weight and wanted to know the "trick". People who treated me like I was invisible, perhaps contributing to the anxieties that had made me reach for food in the first place, were now treating me like I was finally worthy of being acknowledged.
Our societal obsession with the perfect physique - which isn't new, and has existed across many eras and cultures - can make life impossibly hard for those who don't fit into such ideas of perfection.
No one - no one - should be judged for their body size, be it small or big.
No one - no one - should be judged for their body size, be it small or big.
The only thing worth praising about my weight loss - which is still an ongoing fight, and will be for the rest of my life, as I have Binge Eating Disorder (BED) - is not the weight loss itself, but that I started exercising and being more conscious about my food choices.
Exercising regularly, cooking nutritious and varied meals, knowing what you put into your body and what it does, and making sure that those on lower incomes are not destined to low quality, unhealthy food; these should be the aims of any strategy wanting to deal with obesity.
Anxiety, depression, financial instability, work insecurity, stress, etc - all of these things play a role in our health, impacting our body and mind. Telling people to run more and eat less won't solve this problem, because it never is that simple. There are also no miracles.
We must not lose our empathy. Don't assume that overweight people are too lazy or too stupid, and don't assume that underweight people have easily explainable mental health disorders. It's perfectly possible that these people are healthy and you are judging them erroneously.
So, to tackle obesity, we need an approach that looks at food and exercise, yes, but also at the gig economy, exploitative rents, mental health and stress.
You can't outrun a bad diet, and you certainly can't outrun poverty. Obesity is not explained by a single factor. (/thread)
You can't outrun a bad diet, and you certainly can't outrun poverty. Obesity is not explained by a single factor. (/thread)
