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Because, you know, sometimes it's more complicated than what you eat, like when you have, you know, medical conditions like the one stated in, you know, the article.

But congratulations on your weight loss and newfound abilities to generalize a condition that endocrinologists and geneticists have been researching for decades.

I've noticed this general tendency to focus on the edge cases to make the rules. This is how we end up with crazy security theatre instead of real security and pointlessly drifting away from the topic.

He is sharing his experience which probably applies to the majority of the people but no, use edge cases to justify your stance and feel good about having the moral high ground.

Congratulations on your ability to focus on the edge cases and not the majority of the bell curve.

EDIT - Guys, no don't get me wrong. I'm not talking about THIS specific article or about being fat or anything. It's just that for the past year or so I've been in any online community (even the other one) I've noticed this. Sure, I get it - Innocent until proven guilty and all, but sometimes, things really are as simple as they appear to be.

[Oh, and dear parent poster, I'm a bit sorry for the "Congratulations on your ability to ..." but that was just me getting upset that people aren't looking at the bigger picture.]

Haha, I'll bite.

I can turn around and say that treating 99% of fat people as lazy slobs is the same kind of generalization that leads to security theater when we assume everyone is a threat to our national security.

What's the difference between your and my asinine analogies? Yours pushes to look at people in a more judgmental and critical way because you're almost certain they sit towards the meaty middle of the "bell curve" (bell curve of what exactly?). Mine pushes to treat everyone with a higher level of empathy and acceptance. Could an overweight person just be lazy? Sure! Could it be due to more than that? Certainly!

In fact, the type of shitty and ignorant comments this article talks about are most certainly fueled by the idea that most fat people are lazy victim-card playing slobs. Turns out it was a little more complicated for her.

I think I didn't make myself clear in my previous comment (which I've edited btw). It's not about THIS article or THAT article or anything. It's just that I've found when you (not you you, but the general you) focus on edge cases you lose sight of the bigger picture. Sure it may help you win an internet argument by appealing to emotion ("Terrorists will come again", or "She's not lazy, she has a real problem"). I don't disagree with those points but sometimes those are just too small in the probability field that we need to ignore them.

For instance, each iteration of the Rabin Miller test reduces the probability that a number is composite by 10^-4. So sure, you might argue "Well, you never know if the 16384-bit number is prime or not merely on running the rabin miller test 10 times because there's still a 1 in 10^-40 chance it's not prime so you method is invalid." I find this kinds of arguments infuriating.

The question I have is - what good does it do anyone to be cruel and judgmental? Sure, the mean case may be "lazy slob", but so what?

Besides letting anonymous Internet People guffaw in armchair superiority, what does this judgment accomplish?

As a former fatty myself (well, okay, I'm not exactly thin, but no longer huge), I can say without even an ounce of doubt that no amount of ridicule contributed to my turnaround. Support and the complete internalization that the ship can be turned around was what did the trick for me - no amount of haranguing (thanks, parents) nor ridicule (thanks, high school) over years did squat except drive me further away from success.

So we assume that a random fattie is the mean case, and is fat because she's a lazy slob. Then we are justified in saying cruel things behind the mask of anonymity. She feels worse about herself and wallows in another pint of ice cream, and the Internet People tip their fedoras at one another.

Is there any positive to this? Isn't this just entirely negative for all involved except for some people who got a 0.5 second endorphin injection?

I don't know about you, but "things that are damaging to some and provide no good to anyone except ego boosts" counts as a Bad Thing in my book.

I agree that it is bad to be cruel because it does not gain us anything other than bad karma here. I do not think we should call a fattie as a fattie because it's better to not say anything at all if you can't say anything nice. Of course, ridicule is pretty bad. Some people's problems are visible (physical appearances) while others are not (mental problems), and obviously shaming isn't a good idea.

Btw this isn't a debate/argument but just a casual discussion. I was just observing that how quickly a person pulled an extreme card.

Sure, but leaping at "lazy slob" vs. leaping at "medical problem" are both dumb ideas, except one is considerably meaner than the other.

This may be a shitty analogy, but I can't come up with something better:

I give you two boxes. Box A has a 50% chance of being a pizza, and a 50% chance of being $1000. Box B has a 90% chance of being a dog turd, and a 10% chance of being $1,000,000.

Which box do you pick?

It's a trick question of course. The answer is: open the boxes up and take what you want (presumably the million dollars).

It doesn't matter what the bell curve looks like on the causes of obesity - because we're not dealing with aggregates, we're dealing with a specific individual. If you want to know where on the bell curve she lies, ask someone. Leaping to any conclusion because of probabilities is idiotic, because you're not dealing with a probabilistic unknown.

So it doesn't really matter if the majority of obesity is caused by poor lifestyle choices, or if it isn't. It doesn't at all matter how many people are fat due to hormones or due to Big Macs - because in the case of an individual we can directly ascertain it for ourselves. Probabilistic decision making when you can simply observe the individual is nonsensical, and frequently simply represents an attempt to deliberately paint an individual as a generic member of their class.

The part you're missing is the assumptino that your pre-judgements are the bigger picture.

I know you think you are being eminently reasonable, but it's really just another way of saying you intend to keep to those prejudices and not be distracted by treating individuals as individuals. That would be edge case thinking.

You're saying that my assumption is "Majority of the fat people are fat because of intake of food and not because of actual health problems." In this context, yes, that is exactly what my Bayesian priors (so to say) assume but it's not relevant to the point I'm trying to make. I've read things that seem to support this many times over the years so obviously that is what I would assume. If I am wrong, would you kindly care to educate me.

Actually no, don't. Because that is not the point. The point is (like I said in other comments) my gut feeling suggests that we as a society are moving towards optimizing for edge cases and that's not a good thing. (Immediate examples that come to mind are parent fearing children going out and playing, security theatre, crime television, crazy safety labels etc.)

Because, you know, I already stated that there are exceptions, only they're rather exceptional than the norm, as in US or Mexico.

Geographically correlated obesity is explained by nutrition culture, not by geographically selective medical conditions.

We were supposed to learn what from your comment?

You lost weight and now you're spewing judgmental advice. Am I now supposed to look at a fat person with scorn and immediately assume that they're lazy slobs? Should I suppress feelings of empathy? What is the actual point of what you're saying?

You spent 99% of your comment talking about your success and how you've gained insight into the unsatisfactory habits of others, and all of 1% acknowledging that it may be more complicated. And within that 1% you literally state that only 1% of fat people are losing to more than a simple mathematical equation. I know you coders like your elegant algorithms, but life is bit more messy than that.

Are you similarly empathic towards smokers?

Why wouldn't someone be empathetic towards smokers? They got hooked on an addictive substance at some point in their life and are now stuck with an unhealthy compulsion.

I think the unstated assumption OP is making is that fat people got hooked on food, and can't be responsible and give up their addiction. And while it may be hard to do, you only owe your inability to stick with quitting for your continued problems. Born again skinny people are particularly severe in this regard, since they've likely overcome their own personal issues with food (for now, at least) and so see that experience in everyone else. Maybe they made physiological excuses before, and tend to discount those issues in others; maybe their own feelings of weakness don't allow them to be especially empathetic.

And, the analogy to smoking is fatally flawed. Nobody needs cigarettes, but everyone has to eat.

Seriously, I'd like you to back that statement with some hard data. Not because I necessarily disbelieve you (lifestyle is a HUGE cause of weight problems), but because I think you underestimate how many people suffer from medical disorders.

http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/Why-people-become-ove...

In particular these two paragraphs:

Illnesses that affect weight

A few illnesses that are characterized by an imbalance or an abnormality in your endocrine glands can also affect your weight. These include hypothyroidism (an underactive thyroid), polycystic ovarian syndrome, and certain unusual tumors of the pituitary gland, adrenal glands, or the pancreas. However, in the vast majority of people, these illnesses are not responsible for weight gain. Most are extremely rare. Hypothyroidism, which is the most common, is seldom the main reason for overweight or obesity. Treatment with thyroid hormone, while medically necessary, does not usually cause a significant weight reduction.

Genetic disorders

Obesity is also a symptom of some rare and complex disorders caused by genetic defects. These obesity syndromes usually appear in early childhood and are tied to several additional medical problems. One such disorder is Prader-Willi syndrome, a form of obesity associated with mild mental retardation that occurs in about 1 in 25,000 people and has been traced to abnormalities in a group of genes on chromosome 15. People with this disorder are unusually short and have primarily upper-body obesity. A less common disorder, Bardet-Biedl syndrome, is similar to Prader-Willi syndrome, but is caused by abnormalities in different genes. Several other rare genetic syndromes cause obesity, but account for only a tiny fraction of all weight disorders.

Thank you. I appreciate the link.

Medical conditions (and often, medications taken to treat certain conditions) only make it more difficult to lose weight. They don't make it impossible.

I really don't like reading lines like "I eat right (most of the time) and I exercise (an inordinate amount), but it does little, thanks to a struggle with polycystic ovarian syndrome and a failing thyroid gland" because it suggests that weight loss is simply impossible for some people. And yet time and time again people with these and other weight-gaining diseases prove this wrong.

99.99% of the time people who struggle to lose weight are simply not following a successful weight loss plan to the letter. I would bet a pretty large sum of money, that if she got help (either online for free, or from a professional trainer/dietitian for not-so-free) and actually followed through with a proven action plan, the weight would come off. If she stuck to the plan, the weight would stay off.

It would probably be more difficult for her than for a healthy person, but to suggest that she has no choice but to be overweight is disingenuous.

Nowhere did I ever in any comment state or even imply that she had no choice. For you to characterize my position in that way is disingenuous of you.

The problem you have is that while there are definitely people who really need to modify their lifestyle, there are a not so insignificant number of people who cannot reduce their weight.

I think it's great you managed to lose weight (I fight a constant battle of the bulge myself with exercise and diet), but the author has an endocrine disorder called Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.

My point is that when you lump all "fatties" into the same bucket, you also unfairly judge those with medical conditions. Given many of the fat people you see will be strangers, you'll probably never know if it is lifestyle or a medical disorder causing their excess weight.

Food for thought?

PCOS causes insulin resistance. If she counted calories, she would lose weight. She is eating too much, just like the parent comment suggests. Having a very common disorder does not mean it causes obesity, nor does it prevent one from maintaining a healthy weight. It simply makes it more challenging, as she will tend to be hungry more.

"She is eating too much"

How on earth do you know that?!

Because she is overweight. Contrary to popular belief, this is not actually complicated. There are no magic "get twice as much energy from your food" disorders. Disorders that make you more likely to overeat do not mean that you are not overeating.

You realise she has a thyroid problem also? That can cause weight gain. Diet doesn't help much in this case.

While -- as several responses have pointed out -- it is trivially true that diet will help (in that a calorie deficit will always result in weight loss), the real issue with certain thyroid issues is that without a very carefully selected diet and exercise regime, attempting to achieve a calorie deficit in ways that would be easily manageable for a person without metabolic challenge will either leave you completely nonfunctional for life activities (an unacceptable result) or just drop your metabolic rate so that you don't have a calorie deficit.

Weight loss with thyroid issues (and, especially, with other complicating metabolic issues which often occur alongside thyroid issues) is not a simple thing.

People with metabolic issues do need diet/exercise balance to lose weight, but finding the right diet component that allows weight loss while maintaining health and the ability to function can require considerable expert assistance that wouldn't be necessary for a person without those issues.

"Maintain a calorie deficit" is easy to say, but can be very hard to do in a way which actually works.

Yes it does. Are you trying to tell me, for instance, if someone suffering from the same disease as the author, didn't eat a single calorie then they'd still gain weight? Because that is simply impossible (yes, yes.. the body would go into starvation mode).

As someone else has pointed out, suffering from the same problems as the author has, doesn't make it impossible to lose weight, it makes it more difficult. If you provide your body with less energy than it uses, you're going to lose weight. Simple.

She says she's eating healthily, but is she actually?

Question: if not partially caused by diet, does that mean weight gained by people with a thyroid problem is all water weight? Because otherwise you'd still need 9 kcal/g of fat gained?

I tried googling, but the results aren't very useful with regard to the exact mechanism how thyroid problems cause weight gain.

Edit: From more reading I now believe that it's still a diet problem, but the thyroid issues seem to make it harder to eat less.

From what I'd read, my understanding was that thyroid issues, such as hyperthyroidism (this is only one condition AFAIK), are very hard to control, at least via diet.

But the goal is not to control the thyroid issue by diet, the goal is to control weight by diet.

But I don't disagree that the thyroid issue makes diet harder, for reasons like increased hunger, less energy, etc(?)

"Diet doesn't help much in this case."

Aaaaaand all your credibility just went out the window.

No, it does not cause weight gain. Excess energy consumption causes weight gain. Some thyroid disorders can make you more likely to consume excess energy. The solution is still to stop consuming excess energy.

Who is talking about pity? Why not just be polite? Is it so hard to be polite?

Your argument is "I'm morally superior so I get to be a douche." Making the argument proves you're not morally superior, though.

I would also add that people who don't have a medical condition and who overeat cause the stigma people with medical conditions receive for being overweight. If most people who were overweight were so because of a medical condition you wouldn't see as much mockery of it.

This was kind of his point - that you can't possibly be fat, if you don't eat too much. The fat doesn't come out of the air - it comes out of the stuff that goes into your mouth.

So wire your jaw, get a backbone, do whatever it takes and you will absolutely NOT be fat. This is physics, not medicine nor psychology.

I was with you until ...

> while smokers (or meth addicts, or gamblers, or other sorts of compulsive behavior) are almost the worst thing in the world after the Third Reich.

which is just complete BS. There are way worse things in the world happening than that - every minute! (No, I don't smoke, gamble, do drugs or alike)

It was sarcasm. They were saying that society sees smokers as people who are "worse thing in the world after the Third Reich," not that they actually believe that. The point they were making is that people view smokers in a bad light but hypocritically it's taboo to view the obese in a bad light.

The question might be, why show consideration for anyone? You seem to have answered that question to your satisfaction, though.