But congratulations on your weight loss and newfound abilities to generalize a condition that endocrinologists and geneticists have been researching for decades.
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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Geographically correlated obesity is explained by nutrition culture, not by geographically selective medical conditions.
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.
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.
And, the analogy to smoking is fatally flawed. Nobody needs cigarettes, but everyone has to eat.
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.