How do people allow themselves to get fat?

Kazza

Kazza

Member
I'll try to keep this short and sweet.

On Monday, as I put on a pair of trousers, I noticed that they felt really tight around the waist as I did up the top button. It felt even more uncomfortable when I sat down, to the point where I actually undid the top button to relieve the pressure. While I was aware that I was putting on some weight around the waist, I had worn these trousers with not much problem just the week before, so I was a bit surprised by the sudden change. As a result, at present I am faced with two choices: buy a new (larger) pair of trousers, or else lose the belly fat. Which brings me to my point:

How do people allow themselves to get fat?

On the way to getting fat, there must be many separate moments like this, when a person has to buy bigger clothes due to their expanding waistline. For me, that is the point at where I am forced to say to myself, "hey, something's going wrong here, it's time to get your shit together". It happened once before a couple of years back where I went to buy a pair of jeans and even the 34 inch size waist pair didn't fit properly. That was a big warning sign and I refused to buy the jeans and lost the weight instead.

I don't mean to fat shame here, just to understand. On the way to, say, a 40+ inch waist, why does a person ignore these multiple "warning signs" and keep on buying bigger and bigger clothes?
 
Just for context, I'm a little over 6 foot/184cm and weigh around 200lb/91kg. I've been lifting weights these past few months, so the weight gain hasn't all been fat. For example, my shirts have gotten tighter around the shoulders and arms (the fat tends to concentrate around the hips and belly for me), so part of the gain has been muscle. However, with the summer fast approaching, I just tried on my shorts and, while I can just about get them on, there is some serious "muffin" action going on around the waist. I consider myself a little chubby rather than fat.

As I said in the OP, I've experienced this problem before, so I know what works for me. My plan is to do intermittent fasting (12:30pm-6:30pm eating period) and add 3 days a week of cardio and yoga to supplement the weight training I already do. I want to get down to 85kg/187lb by June, which shouldn't be too hard. I'll take another look at the situation then.

This is the third time now that I've gotten chubby, so I need to be more careful in the future and try to work out some healthy long-term habits.
 
I've always wondered this myself. Some fat people I know just dont have the will power to put the fork down. They eat shit all the time and gleefully celebrate their junk food, then mope about being fat at other times. It's an addiction to them, like smoking.
 
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I was a record holding 100 and 200m sprinter, district and region Champion, a state level soccer player.....I used to ask myself the same thing.

………….now I just wonder whether I'll meet a girl with bigger tits than me.
 
DunDunDunpachi said:
Sugar. It fucks up your metabolism.
Click to expand...

Sugar (not beer, fat etc) is definitely my weakness. I find that it doesn't matter too much when you're intermittent fasting and working out, but I'm still going to restrict high sugar foods to the weekend only
 
Kazza said:
Sugar (not beer, fat etc) is definitely my weakness. I find that it doesn't matter too much when you're intermittent fasting and working out, but I'm still going to restrict high sugar foods to the weekend only
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If you cut out sugar, it is (anecdotally) much easier to do intermittent fasting. The Standard American Diet trains our brains to expect easy energy (a la sugar) and will throw a fit (a la "low blood sugar after lunch"), but when you break out of this cycle, your body burns calories and repairs itself much more efficiently.

Sugar is processed in almost the same way as alcohol. Consider that: your liver is working 24/7 to process the sugar you eat and is turning it into fat cells.

Edit: if you need a sweet alternative to sugar, try messing around with dried licorice root. I use it in my tea as a sweetener sometimes. It's also really potent as a natural medicine. Again, speaking anecdotally.
 
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If only we knew the answer to that!

Some younger folks in my family just grew into it and normalized behaviors passed on from parents. In some cases there's little to no health education or awareness to influence them any other way.

I'm on the slimmer side and don't gain very easily, so it's not my place to speculate on any general basis. I think I got it lucky and am not sure, based on my own discipline history, that I'd be able to fight off obesity, were I to have that issue.
 
John Lee Packard said:
They laugh.... and grow fat!
Click to expand...

nGMrD.gif
 
Sugar. Pizza. Etc. Along with poor eating routine due to unstable home environment.
Lack of exercise.
Low self esteem.
Major depression with ...umm... yeah.

Those are my reasons.
 
If I had to say only one word, I'd say

Addiction

When you're addicted, it takes a huge amount of will-power to break it. I mean life-changing levels of will-power.
I have addictions. For example, I smoke. I know it's bad, but knowing it's bad does not at all help me quit. Almost the contrary actually. I'd have to change myself literally.
If you haven't experienced it it's hard to understand.
Unfortunately society is more and more telling us being fat is OK and so on, when it's not. It's not how you fight addiction.
 
I can only speculate.

Currently I'm 37, 6', and no more than 155lbs (I weigh myself maybe two times a year). Being overweight has never been an issue for me so I can see how my eating habits are not as healthy as they could be. Sugar is definitely a big issue. I know I should prepare for when my body flips the old age switch, yet I haven't done so in a matter that sticks. One thing I'm taking notice of more recently is that I definitely stress eat. Taking that into account I can definitely under why people gain weight when they are in my current mindset and have a different metabolism. One basically gets stuck in a mental rut.

edit: julio_grr julio_grr ,

Addiction, definitely.
 
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Low self-esteem and depression. Food becomes a temporary feel-good boost...only to crash in upon them later, and the cycle continues.

That, and the cheapest foods these days are usually the unhealthiest options, and can often carry addictive additives.
 
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julio_grr said:
If I had to say only one word, I'd say

Addiction

When you're addicted, it takes a huge amount of will-power to break it. I mean life-changing levels of will-power.
I have addictions. For example, I smoke. I know it's bad, but knowing it's bad does not at all help me quit. Almost the contrary actually. I'd have to change myself literally.
If you haven't experienced it it's hard to understand.
Unfortunately society is more and more telling us being fat is OK and so on, when it's not. It's not how you fight addiction.
Click to expand...
Being from an addiction prone family, even prior to the admission/quitting phases, it's the nature of addictive behavior to slowly sneak up without knowing it's happening until it's too late. So yeah, once your dependent, without serious help it can be difficult. I kinda think it's not necessarily only low-self esteem, but the need for extra high self-esteem to break dependency.
 
Ailynn said:
Low self-esteem and depression. Food becomes a temporary feel-good boost...only to crash in upon them later, and the cycle continues.

That, and the cheapest foods these days are usually the unhealthiest options, and can often carry addictive additives.
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Yeah. If you have multiple areas in your life that is empty, filling up on bad for you food can temporarily make you happy.
 
Hunger is a strong feeling.
In fact, it's so strong, only a handful out of 1000 obese people manages to escape obesity.

To my knowledge, there are at least 2 factors at play, not sorted by importance:
1) slowed metabolism (not consuming as much calories as other people when idling, when being active, you spend them no matter what, because physics)
2) some people feel hunger even when they are not hungry

Obesity is highly heritable (more than 70%)

It doesn't make a person with bad combination of genes automatically become obese, but it turns his/her life into a small struggle to keep weight down.
 
The one time I got a bit overweight (but it was several years ago and I've since lost that weight) it was a mix of not working out a lot , a job with long hours I'd mostly spend sitting down, and all affordable food places that would take the "restaurant tickets" provided by our company (don't know what they are called in english, our company gave us tickets you could basically use as money to buy food in a bunch of places) were fast food joints.

Even with all that I had maybe like 10Kg too much. Having a healthy diet outside of work and not being into sweet stuff definitely helps. Plus at some point you realise your are getting fat and make changes.

How people get morbidly obese is also beyond me
 
Thanks for the honest replies everyone. I'm living in China at the moment and China don't give a fuck about sparing peoples feelings when discussing physical appearance, and I think that insensitivity is rubbing off on me! Apart from the trousers situation, another motivator for me was what someone said to me at the gym yesterday. Just as I had finifshed a set on the bench press, one of the lads who worked there walked up to me, shock his head disapprovingly and said "Dude, how come your stomach is still so big, you've been working out here for months now!" I'm pretty thick skinned, so wasn't upset in the slightest (I actually find the Chinese attitude to these things quite refreshing),
 
DunDunDunpachi said:
If you cut out sugar, it is (anecdotally) much easier to do intermittent fasting. The Standard American Diet trains our brains to expect easy energy (a la sugar) and will throw a fit (a la "low blood sugar after lunch"), but when you break out of this cycle, your body burns calories and repairs itself much more efficiently.

Sugar is processed in almost the same way as alcohol. Consider that: your liver is working 24/7 to process the sugar you eat and is turning it into fat cells.

Edit: if you need a sweet alternative to sugar, try messing around with dried licorice root. I use it in my tea as a sweetener sometimes. It's also really potent as a natural medicine. Again, speaking anecdotally.
Click to expand...


I already cut sugar from my tea and coffee a few years back, so fortunately I don't need to mess about with sweeteners. For me, chocolate and cake is a weakness. I think any diet needs to be realistic and long term, so I would never promise to cut them out completely, but I should definitely limit them to one or two times a week. I've actually done this before and it makes me appreciate the taste of the food more (rather than just being an addictive or compulsive action). Unfortunately, I seem to have fell back into bad habits.
 
Kazza said:
I already cut sugar from my tea and coffee a few years back, so fortunately I don't need to mess about with sweeteners. For me, chocolate and cake is a weakness. I think any diet needs to be realistic and long term, so I would never promise to cut them out completely, but I should definitely limit them to one or two times a week. I've actually done this before and it makes me appreciate the taste of the food more (rather than just being an addictive or compulsive action). Unfortunately, I seem to have fell back into bad habits.
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Mixing raw cacao powder into my tea gives me my chocolate fix. :messenger_savoring:

I also have a hard time resisting those sweet treats.
 
I guess it depends on the person. For me I'm so self conscious on how I look that I'm in the gym 6 days a week for 1.5 hours or more a day which usually consist of heavy lifting.
 
I agree with the people here who have said that sweet food and junk food can become a comfort and easy feel-good boost. I remember hearing someone say something once about how dogs are rewarded with food, and not being a dog, you should stop "rewarding" yourself in that way (on the Joe Rogan podcast, I think). I think that's what led to my recent expanded waistline. I bought a whole load of chocolate a little while back because it was on sale, thinking at the time "great, this will last me for weeks and weeks". Suffice to say, that supply disappeared pretty quickly. In hindsight, there are a couple of things I've been dissatisfied with recently, and I've been using eating to cheer myself up. That needs to end.
 
Azzurri said:
I guess it depends on the person. For me I'm so self conscious on how I look that I'm in the gym 6 days a week for 1.5 hours or more a day which usually consist of heavy lifting.
Click to expand...

Is it possible to lift heavy 6 times a week? I've been limiting myself to 3 times max, to allow for recovery.
 
Thinking about the original question in the OP, I suppose it comes to a point where people simply buy jogging bottoms/sweat pants and so don't have to worry about buttons.
 
It is also has to do with getetics. Some get fat easier than others and women face more difficulties due to pregnancy
 
Azzurri said:
Depends on you. I do different muscle groups each day, plus I've been lifting for 20 years.
Click to expand...

While you're here, can ask you, do have any particular advice about lifting while trying to lose weight? Would it still possible to gain strength and muscle during that time?
 
In the west I feel that it is a lot more "acceptable" to be fat. When so many people around you are also overweight, you just don't care as much.
 
I honestly wish I would know. Because I have the opposite problem. I am eating so much fast food, chips etc in between. I often eat at midnight. Do not move much except my 20 minute walk each day during my break. But otherwise I am lazy as fuck and I can not get over 69KG by 190 cm.......

And no this is not bragging this is fucking terrible and I feel bad for it.
 
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When I was abroad, I used to eat 3 times a day at McDonalds because it was cheap af, after a while I gained like 15 kg surplus and It took me months to loose them. The second time I started to get chubby when I was kinda depressed so I didn't leave my home for weeks and my favourite way to spend time was to eat trash food while binge watching tv series on netflix.
 
Exercise sucks and the best tasting food is bad for you.
 
Addiction is the answer OP. People only think of it in regards to drugs, but things like sugar are just as (actually MORE) danagerous. Sugar does super weird stuff to the body.
 
There are other factors, but more than anything I think it's the rise of the automobile. Here's one study on that link.

We used to have to walk everywhere to get things done. Want to buy bread or eggs? That's a walk. Want to go visit family? That's a walk.

Now, we just drive everywhere -- and I don't exclude myself. So we have to make up for all that lost walking by artificially reintroducing exercise into our lives, which is quite a bit harder than walking out of necessity.
 
Yeah, dopamine sure is.

One of the meds I take affects dopamine in some way (doctor explained it but I didn't retain everything he told me) and was warned weight gain could happen. So far I am steady on the scale but have had a couple big time cravings that try to squash with something like a peanut butter sandwich or beef jerky, something to appease the "I need 20 dollars of Taco Bell NOW!" urge

iconmasterX said:
There are other factors, but more than anything I think it's the rise of the automobile. Here's one study on that link.

We used to have to walk everywhere to get things done. Want to buy bread or eggs? That's a walk. Want to go visit family? That's a walk.

Now, we just drive everywhere -- and I don't exclude myself. So we have to make up for all that lost walking by artificially reintroducing exercise into our lives, which is quite a bit harder than walking out of necessity.
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This reminds me of Wall-E and all the fat space humans being hovered everywhere by robots
 
I started having issues related to weight as a kid. My mother took laxatives and eventually got addicted to them (so the fear of weight has always existed in my life). I was a chubby kid. I got made fun of and lost all of it going into high school. I was still technically "overweight" at the time. My parents told my doctor I had an eating disorder and said I was obsessed with weight. I took that to heart and eventually I couldn't make up my mind. I never wanted to be fat. I then lost a ton of weight in my mid 20's. Probably around 50 lbs. I am 6'1''. I was under 200 lbs at the time. I went to nursing school and got depressed. I failed clinical twice and left town. I started to work in another field, so that made me feel better. I think what started it all up was getting too comfortable. I went on a cruise and ate/drank a lot. Those 3 course meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner made me gain 10 lbs. Swallow enough alcohol and I was pretty big by the time I got back from the Bahamas. Thankfully I lost that weight, but I'm still staying on track.

I don't understand some of it. Even though I had parents arguing with me about and people making fun of me. It is still my decision to eat large quantities of food and to not work out everyday. I hate that feeling when you can't look at yourself in photographs because you're afraid of someone seeing all the weight you gained.
 
Gaining weight is a slow process, and once they notice it its often too late for many people as they tell themselves its fine or ignore it. Then they gain even more, might try sports or diets that fail, when finally acceptance kicks in.
The trick to getting out is to be strong inspirit. Heavily obese people are often slaves to their desires, and while they might not like it they lack the mental strength to get out of it.

Of course nowdays you cant say such things openly because people are triggered.
And while I understand that it hurts to hear the truth sometimes, it is still the truth.


Edit: same goes for body building by the way: If you want that biceps, that bullneck, that greek-god breast,... you have to be stronger than your laziness. Remember that YOU are in control, not your body.
 
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Joe Rogan has had a lot of great discussions about weight gain/loss and why it is so hard for many people to manage. I will try to find some of the clips

here is one

 
My therapist thinks I went from being a healthy eater with heavy exercise to a fatty because of trauma.
There is a link, supposedly, with childhood molestation and being overweight. I think the current theory is it's a easy way to feel comfortable and there is a hope that becoming fat will make them less desirable. I'm not sure how true that is for me, but it's a thought.

I was eating full sized meals when I was pretty young, but I also took tae kwon do and did weight lifting in middle school and high school.
I ate a lot to keep up with how much I actually did then one day I discovered that I fucking hated working out and sweating. I was only doing it to be able to fight bullies. By the time I was in high school people no longer fucked with me so I stopped exercising and my mom barely had the money to keep me in tae kwon do anyway so I stopped.
I still ate big meals and by the time I was 1st year college I ballooned to 220lbs and started talking about my childhood abuse and started having some major mental health issues.

A few years later that 220lbs grew to 300 and I finally got tired of it earlier this year and I've changed the way I eat. I've lost over 20lbs in 3ish months.
 
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It's interesting that weight doesn't always coincide with "being in shape" technically.

As a senior in high school I was 280 pounds but could run under a 7 minute mile. That's not very fast, I know, but I was proud for being a big guy. Right now I am 211 pounds but couldn't even jog one whole lap without stopping if I tried due to sedentary lifestyle.

Remaining active is just as big a piece, if not bigger, than actual diet

M1nion said:
I just gave up on caring. Currently 300 lbs, but i still can bench press 450, so i dont i really dont care.
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Wow can you really put that up? That's awesome

At my physical peak, like absolutely working as hard as I could back when I was 19, I only got up to 330 pounds max bench.

If I tried to bench even just 135 right now I would probably tear every muscle in my upper body. I haven't worked out in far too long.

That's an awesome rep though, 450 is serious weight
 
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