Online, yes. Unless you know the person, their eating and activity habits, you're in no place to give any sort of advice unless the person asks. That's all. For someone actively working on losing weight and having trouble, casual advice isn't gonna do shit, they've heard it a million times and calling it "easy" (not saying you did that) is only going to frustrate them. Advice like "eat healthier and do more activity" can be insulting to their intelligence.
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Most common reason kids get bullied? Weight (NYT)
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Online, yes. Unless you know the person, their eating and activity habits, you're in no place to give any sort of advice unless the person asks. That's all. For someone actively working on losing weight and having trouble, casual advice isn't gonna do shit, they've heard it a million times and calling it "easy" (not saying you did that) is only going to frustrate them. Advice like "eat healthier and do more activity" can be insulting to their intelligence.
Zoe
Member
There are always going to be bullies. What do you expect us to say?
I don't think depression and being overweight are directly comparable. While some advice and talk-therapy can definitely be helpful for some people with depression, most require some kind of chemical therapy in order to feel and be healthier.
Where as with most fat people, they really do just need to be better educated on where, how, and when to eat and where, how, and when to be active.
The anti-bullying measures in many school are making great strides in teaching kids how to recognize and stop bullying before it gets too far.
However, social norms of groups require a certain amount of bullying it seems.
I think the obesity problem in our children is a much more pressing problem to be solved than the bullying problem in our schools. Bullying a fat kid may cause him to get fatter, but removing the bad habits that make them fat will certainly make them less fat.
Your fit privledge is showing
Bullying is bullying regardless of the cause. It's absolutely deplorable and there should be something done about it, but schools have no backbone- from personal experience. The toll it takes on confidence and mental health can be absolutely devastating. Even if these kids weren't being bullied for being overweight, you can guarantee bullying would continue for other reasons.
Something needs to be done about the deplorable state of school lunches (having worked in a school, they are awful), as well as the problem of rampant childhood obesity, but let's not pretend that this is an issue of just losing weight, and that that would make everything better all of a sudden.
Plus several of the bullies in my school were the bigger kids, so irony, I guess.
Something needs to be done about the deplorable state of school lunches (having worked in a school, they are awful), as well as the problem of rampant childhood obesity, but let's not pretend that this is an issue of just losing weight, and that that would make everything better all of a sudden.
Plus several of the bullies in my school were the bigger kids, so irony, I guess.
While I do refrain from targeting advice unless specifically asked, the general advice of "eat healthy food and maintain an active lifestyle" is going to help most of the time. Threads like these are a perfect example of when someone can come in and say "if you feed the kids right, they will lose weight" because it's 100% true. There is no nuance to that advice. Overweight adults are an entirely different matter that needs more nuanced advice of course, and getting adults to feed kids right is a battle in and of itself.
Your negativity triggered me.
Another problem is that public schools have cut physical education and recess, which were instrumental in keeping kids active.
Now, they're not active at school. Then they go home and play video games or watch television and eat shitty food.
It's a recipe for getting fat.
Now, they're not active at school. Then they go home and play video games or watch television and eat shitty food.
It's a recipe for getting fat.
Your sarcasm is showing.
BladeoftheImmortal
Member
Getting made fun of just made me eat more, because it would make me feel happy.
dammit
Vincent Grayson
Member
Advice isn't generally a non-targeted statement like "if you feed the kids right...".
Unsolicited advice about things people tend to be sensitive about is, IMO, one of the shittier and more insidious forms of bullying. People couch it in "I'm just trying to help", but really, you're just more subtly being an asshole.
I can't speak for anyone else, but growing up, especially in high school, that was the bullying I was most familiar with. I was a fat kid, but I was also big enough and built well enough that physical bullying was never an issue. Instead, it was shitty statements that almost always started with "You know, if you....(insert condescending and obvious advice here), you'd be a lot cooler/more popular/etc".
SolidusDave
Member
I have a different interpretation:
- Kids are cruel and some little shits are basically groomed to be bullies by their entitles parents etc.
- Bullies will lash out at anyone they don't like / seems weaker then they are.
Now. What does literally any human do when he/she tries to insult someone? Attacking the first (negatively implicated) thing they notice about that person.
Someone is small -> lol shorty
Someone wears flashy pink -> lol gay
Someone is fat -> lol fatty
etc.
The US has the most fat kids = more kids get bullied for being fat than for other things.
But if fat shaming were a no go like usually race is nowadays, bullies would just pick something else to mock you.
Though to be fair, being fat usually has the double-whammy of being bad at sport which is a target (for boys) in itself. Similarly, fat = ugly which is especially bad for girls.
IMO, programs that want to reduce bullying in general would help more and avoid a situation in which obesity gets a pass instead of being something that you should change in your own interest (and the public interest regarding health care etc.)
- Kids are cruel and some little shits are basically groomed to be bullies by their entitles parents etc.
- Bullies will lash out at anyone they don't like / seems weaker then they are.
Now. What does literally any human do when he/she tries to insult someone? Attacking the first (negatively implicated) thing they notice about that person.
Someone is small -> lol shorty
Someone wears flashy pink -> lol gay
Someone is fat -> lol fatty
etc.
The US has the most fat kids = more kids get bullied for being fat than for other things.
But if fat shaming were a no go like usually race is nowadays, bullies would just pick something else to mock you.
Though to be fair, being fat usually has the double-whammy of being bad at sport which is a target (for boys) in itself. Similarly, fat = ugly which is especially bad for girls.
IMO, programs that want to reduce bullying in general would help more and avoid a situation in which obesity gets a pass instead of being something that you should change in your own interest (and the public interest regarding health care etc.)
No, it really isn't. Not all kids are the same. I speak from experience. And again, shit like this can be insulting to parents who've been trying their hardest to ensure their kids are in good shape but are having no luck.
Deified Data
Banned
I think a lot of it on GAF at least comprises of formerly obese couch potatoes (as gamers are wont to be) who turned their life around and now operate under the assumption that if they can do it, others can do it just as easily.
This is an odd and maybe even anti-social view. I understand that you obviously can't help how you feel about the advice given, but I guarantee that most people give advice not as a way to bully, but because they feel it will genuinely help.
No, it really is. Unless your child has a specific medical issue (in which case, the doctor that you've surely taken them to will have specific advice) then not feeding them sugary crap and junk food will result in weight loss. If a parent is having problems with their children losing weight even though they have taken the necessary steps to ensure they are feeding the child well, then they should take the child to a doctor.
And there you said it yourself, your advice does not apply to everyone. Exactly my point. Unless you know the person, giving out casual advice to someone you don't know (even if it's about children) or calling it easy can become insulting to them. You don't know the situation they're in so don't give advice unless they've asked or you know about their situation personally.
Sorry, but the purpose of this and threads like this is to share one's opinion on the topic. If that opinion is 99.9% factual (excuse my earlier hyperbole in using 100%) then while some people may find it offensive, it's not the cause of the person sharing the generally easy and medically sound advice to make sure that their entire audience won't feel bullied by that advice, especially if said opinion and advice is well meaning.
Now, some people would say that the above paragraph is a slippery slope that would allow for all manner of bullying on the internet and in other public forums, but that's only because they'd want an excuse to be dicks to people they don't like.
Most people obviously feel sympathetic toward someone who is overweight and doesn't want to be, but we're talking about overweight children who bare zero blame for their condition and we should all be working very hard toward making sure that they have every opportunity to lose weight.
The_Poet said:
The problem is that for some kids and adults alike, it's not as simple as that. There are, contrary to the nonsense spewed from some corners, many different things that cause weight gain. The reason many people gain weight is often associated with a complicated mix of factors, not all of which are easy to fix at all.
This is just a sample of some of the factors impacting weight gain in some. They discuss a whole range of factors, and conclude that even though some things like exercise and diet may work for some, in other cases a complete restructuring of environment is necessary. How easy is this for a kid to do precisely (indeed, it's a difficult thing even for an adult to do, where money is a factor or where country of origin matters)? When they're surrounded by a country that advertises fat food and they have access only to what their parents buy or what the cafeteria offers? Right, not easy at all. In fact this study goes out of its way to discuss the difficulties involved.
And that's just one possible avenue. What about people with cushing's syndrome? What about if you're given some medications, which can lead to weight gain of 10lbs a month or more in some cases? What about if you're faced with clinical depression and you eat to try to feel better?
See, that's the problem with discussions on the subject. People really wish it was simple. Sometimes it may be easy to fix weight gain, but many, many times it is not. There is a whole host of possible issues ranging from genetic to environmental to diseases and medication that cause significant weight gain. None of these things are then easy to fix. We don't even actually have a statistical number we can point to which says the number of cases where it's easy vs. the number of cases where it's not.
This is why people need to teach their children and themselves empathy. There is no way you can look at any obese person and automatically divine whether they just lack self control (itself an issue having to do with how you're wired plus environment) or whether they have one of these larger problems which impact ones weight. People have been taught that it's OK to go into a store and joke about fat people, because it repulses them.
Discussing obesity on GAF is one of the only times where posters are actively allowed to come in and voice broad disgust for an entire group of people for something they literally may have little control over. These posters have no way of knowing what complicated set of factors led to someone being obese, and yet they make these awful snap judgments to try to make them feel better about themselves for being terrible human beings. And it's sick really.
To be sure, marrec, yes there are steps parents and the country can take to reduce obesity, no doubt. But that wouldn't change the stigma involved, or that some people would stay be obese. And that's the problem... when people preach that it's so easy and you just need to utilize self-control and stop stuffing your face, people then begin to blame the fat individual for somehow not exercising that control. It's ridiculous.
Vincent Grayson
Member
There's a world of difference between sharing factual information and specifically-targeted advice. In a broad discussion, saying "If people exercised more and put more effort into eating a balanced, healthy diet, they'd lose weight." is perfectly reasonable and anyone taking that personally or feeling insulted would be in the wrong.
But if you say "If *you* exercised more...", you're being a condescending asshole, because your "helpful" advice isn't new information, trust me. Fat people know they're fat, and they know all the "advice" that comes on a general level. Speaking of your own experiences or sharing a thing that worked for you, again, that's totally different.
It's not exclusive to diet or weight loss, either. When in doubt, it's safe to assume that most people have no interest in unsolicited advice.
I'm assuming you missed the part about the bullying and stuff.
How is it not true? People are fat because they over eat..
I really like how you put this. Self-inflicted harm is a fair assessment.
Thing is this isn't true in almost all cases and everyone knows that.
Or it is and the US is very special in that regard.
Tell that to my 18 year old self that was on a 1600 calorie diet approved by a nutritionist (no sugars or junk) with 3 hours of dedicated exercise and still gaining weight (fat, not muscle).
Ami, you and I agree on a great many things but we have to disagree on this issue.
Yes, there are specific disorders and genetic issues that confound weight loss. These are, however, rare and in most cases THE FIRST STEP in diagnosing these disorders is a dietary regimen that will induce weight loss in most cases.
We cannot change the attitudes and stigmas surrounding fat and obese people without first educating and fixing the VOLUNTARY obesity epidemic. Once we've established proper nutritional guidelines from the top to the bottom of our culture and we've stopped people from slowly killing themselves with sugar laden sodas and fat injected deep fried bullshit, then we can focus on increasing acceptance and awareness of non-voluntary obesity.
The answer is, in most cases, eat better and be active. So the question then becomes, what can we do to help people eat better and be more active. We shouldn't focus a disproportionate amount of energy on maintaining the feelings of those who're involuntarily obese because there are systems in place to diagnose and care for these people.
Now, I agree, that educate on non-voluntary obesity needs to be better and awareness of these issues is piss-poor. We can't let that get in the way of proper healthy advice for people who need proper healthy advice. We are, in this thread, talking about children and their influences. For the most part the reason we have an obesity epidemic amoung children isn't bullying or cushings syndrome or glandular issues, it's because parents don't know how to feed their children and giant food conglomerates make too much money on keeping our kids fat.
Then you're lieing to yourself. You probably (assumption) snacked alot and was stationary for most of the exercising (or did something else that causedyour plan). Youre fat because to eat more than your body burn. It isnt genetic or anything like that, just simple math.
EDIT; Thought you were talking about your daughter (must'a misread), corrected it. Point still stands.
The poster is talking about themselves. So they may be telling the truth, it's unknown, but they are an extremely rare outlier who is not representative of the vast majority of obesity cases.
I was talking about myself. and there we go, as expected, some good old unwanted advice. Like clockwork.
Gotdatmoney
Member
The whole "I have a fast metabolism and can eat anything I want without losing weight" thing is usually not true. I was one of those people but it wasn't just metabolism. I was active as a child all the way until I went to university. I rarely had junk food and I didnt over eat. I could eat big portions but when you run 7km a day, play sports 3-5 times a week and generally eat okay you don't gain much weight. And just because you "can" eat what you want it does not imply you do "every single day".
Since I started going to the gym I actually have put on nore fat specifically because I eat more. The once "I can eat anything" metabolism is no longer so most realistically because it didn't exist. I'm still thin but I also am still active and still don't gorge myself. Anyine sitting here acting like they can eat 5000 cals a day and not gain weight, I dont genuinely.believe that
Since I started going to the gym I actually have put on nore fat specifically because I eat more. The once "I can eat anything" metabolism is no longer so most realistically because it didn't exist. I'm still thin but I also am still active and still don't gorge myself. Anyine sitting here acting like they can eat 5000 cals a day and not gain weight, I dont genuinely.believe that
Saying that youre lieing to yourself isnt unwanted advice, its the truth.
Listen, I agree that exposure and awareness of non-voluntary weight gain needs to be better, but you have to realize that your situation was extremely rare and in most cases the person you're quoting would be correct in assuming the sneaking of snacks and slacking off of exercise.
Andrew Korenchkin
Member
How about being skinny as hell? I was in this boat.
Keep on posting, you're basically strengthening the points I made in my previous posts.
Yeah I know it's rare
(edit: or maybe not according to amir0x's post), I think the the "100%" and "everyone" generalizations just kind of triggered me cause this is something I've faced throughout my life, people assuming to know my eating and activity habits by taking one look at me (or heck even without looking at me in this topic), while the people in my life actually respect me greatly after finding out what I've been struggling with the majority of my life and seeing how hard I've been working.
I actually avoided bullies in school because I always took phys. ed in my high school years (it was only mandatory for one year) I took it every year. Those usually involved having the "cool kids" as part of the class. They actually saw I tried quite a bit, heck despite being the most unfit person in terms of weight in the class, I was probably in the top 10% in terms of sports ability as I seem to be a natural in some of them. And pretty much any spare moment I had throughout the day they would see me outside on the basketball court just playing, even alone. Because of this I gained respect from those "cool kids" and I was pretty much protected throughout school. I was lucky in that sense. Any attempt at bullying was pretty much shot down quickly. "He's off limits' basically
Yea, me and my friends were the same when we were teenagers, Whenever we were outside we would eat mainly unhealthy food, this went on for years and at the time we tought we had fast metabolism. It was more so that we would spend all of our school recess playing soccer and we also played alot in our freetime + we were fed healthy food at home and school.
Why did you inserted yourself into this discussion if you don't want to hear what others have to say about this subject?
As I previously stated, the "fast/slow metabolism" thing is a myth.
Generally, an average overweight person has a "faster" metabolism than an average person of normal weight.
DoktorEvil
Banned
Hmm.
I mean, kids don't know any better unless their parents tell them whether or not they lead a healthy lifestyle, but there are forces at work that work against kids leading healthy lives, one of which is an inordinate amount of video games that dominate kids lives moreso than going out to play.
M0nochromatic
Member
Very true. It's similar to concern trolling on the net. There's a bit of feigned helpfulness layered over broad and simple "advice" that's worthless and only serves to be hurtful in the end.
The real nefarious aspect is that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the ignorant but well intentioned, and those who are genuinely doing it to inflict psychological harm.
I can't begin to understand what it's like to live with that kind of condition and mental strain. The first 8 years of my left were spent being starved by my biological father and then the next 10 were spent by my mother trying to make up for it so I had wild weight swings from my childhood too my teenage years. Luckily by the time I graduated high-school I was able to shed most of my excess weight by simply stopping drinking Soda and having a job with high levels of physical activity.
So while I don't have any room to talk about how hard it is for you to lose or keep off weight (I'm sure it's maddeningly difficult) I do know how easy it is to GAIN weight. Luckily, for most people, it's just as easy to lose it... it's just a matter of reversing the bad habits that got you there in the first place.
What you describe though, that fucking sucks. Sorry to hear it.
Where is your scientific proof that says these things are rare? They're actually not rare at all. Genetic and environmental issues are a huge component of this story.
And telling people to eat healthy and exercise is nice (and we absolutely should try to do this in more active and engaging ways), but someone with some of these issues will have an infinitely harder time of it. A comparison would be the way institutional racism works (bear with me - I'm not comparing obesity to racism, but the statistical probability of success in either case). Yes, an individual of color can still possibly achieve success despite the road blocks that make it significantly harder to achieve that success. But telling that person it's easy if you just do X, Y and Z is nonsense. It's just not true. They live by a different set of factors than you do. For someone with these issues, it is exponentially more difficult to be successful in not just losing the weight but keeping it off. That's indisputable science. That's why it's important to actually be able to take yourself out of the equation and put yourself in someone else's shoes.
Let's just bulletpoint some of the issues at play:
● Genetic (More than 400 different genes have been implicated in the development of overweight or obesity)
● Physiology (metabolic rate or how fast you burn calories for ex.)
● Behavior (types of foods you choose to eat, for ex.)
● Satiety (your ability to feel "full")
● Your level of mobility (some people physically cannot be more active for one reason or another; heart problems, disabilities, access to safe environments for play)
● Your family history ("If both of your parents have obesity, your likelihood of developing obesity is as high as 80%.")
● Environmental (access to types of foods, the way a country advertises or prices certain foods, your level of economic prosperity)
And the issue is you and everyone else have no clue where someone falls on this spectrum. Much like one person may be able to quit drugs easily and another may fight the disease their entire life, it shows a profound lack of empathy to not understand just how different the human experience is from person to person. And this is why it's important we teach that skill of empathy. Because there is so little true understanding people have for life experiences outside their own narrow sphere.
We absolutely can. Because the first thing we should be teaching everyone on this planet is not to be a hateful little shit. We must punish the perpetrators, not the victims. If someone makes a poor life decision that is inflicted harm to themselves, the appropriate response is not being an asshole to them. Not only does this usually make the situation worse, but it's just a gross way to be to people. So, teaching people to be kind to others is actually part of helping improve the odds of weight loss or quitting drugs or whatever issue there is. Until the day you have superhuman mental capacity to see what precise issue made someone obese, this whole behavior needs to be squelched in the most dramatic way possible. Yes, we'll never stop it completely. But the reason it is this bad is because society as a whole has made it acceptable. Kids see their parents fat shaming people on television or discussing impossible standards of beauty. They internalize it. And then they become the monsters themselves.
Everything else follows. If you have empathy, you will create proactive campaigns of weight loss where the entire community might be lovingly involved. You can create systems of improvement wherein it is understanding for the individual suffering (few people actually want to be obese), rather than trying to say such hurtful things like "it's easy." It's not much of the time: science proves it. And I believe in the research, not my gut feeling.
Nobody is saying don't give healthy advice. We're saying that giving the advice is just a reduction method; many will remain obese, and many of those people will be obese for either reasons completely out of their control or for reasons of it being incalculably more difficult to lose and keep off the weight than it is for you.
So we can and should have these campaigns for healthy living while coming down fucking brutally hard on people who think it's OK to be awful little shits to their fellow human beings.
There is no actual way to quantify how often it is true. That's the problem. Because in every case, it is always a complicated mix of factors. Those factors may simply be easier for some than for others. And those factors range wildly from person to person. Trying to 'default' to mistreatment of a group of people whom you have literally no idea what led them there is just inherently wrong. It's a far bigger social problem that there are people who think that's an OK way to be behaviorally.
Sort of.
Yes, obese people have faster metabolisms vs thinner people. However as those same obese people lose weight, their metabolism actually slows to be even slower than those whose weight they match but weren't losing weight.
the NIH have a few papers on this.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22535969
The problem is, as obese people lose weight, their metabolism tries to stop them from losing the weight.
And then to add into this, BMR isn't an exact science anyway unless you have the BMR body test done, which is expensive and most of the time not entirely worth it.
So duder who was eating 1600 calories and gaining weight, depending on where he was within his weight loss, could actually have been gaining weight at 1600 calories.
I have mad respect for a lot of stuff you say Marrec - not that this means anything to you, but when I see you post, I tend to pay more attention because you're a very smart guy. But when you say it's just as easy to lose it, you're discounting the mental struggle that goes into losing it. It's not just as easy to lose as it is to gain. You can't just carelessly lose weight like you can gaining. Changing your eating habits is great, but it takes time, perseverance and a HUGE amount of willpower - and, as you've pointed out, all the amazingly awesome food that's out there.
I've started eating berries for my sweet tooth, but eating berries is nothing compared to what I could (and would rather) do to a bag of M&Ms. The shit food is so prevalent because it's tuned far better to what our tastebuds like vs what's actually good for us (which isn't tuned to anything but what it is.)
This was definitely the case when I was at school in the 90's. The vast majority of the bullying was ok fat kids, or quiet lonely kids. Hell it happens on GAF too, where although the forum is against all kinds of abuse a good portion of the people here think its ok to fat shame and make fun of fat people.
I think its good to promote healthy living but at the end of the day its disgusting that people think its ok to ridicule someone just because of their weight.
I think its good to promote healthy living but at the end of the day its disgusting that people think its ok to ridicule someone just because of their weight.
Gotdatmoney
Member
Pretty much me. And to add I encourage everyone who says it's easy to lose weight to hop on a treadmill and run at any speed they choose until they have burned ~500cal. The amount of physical activity necessary to burn 500cal is absurd and time consuming if you are not already fit. Its not an hour of walking a day. Its not even a 30min jog for the average person. The whole exercise and eat right thing is way more slanted to eating right.
I'm in good shape and it annoys the shit out of me when.people imply all you need to do is go to the gym and lift for an hour and the weight just falls off. The vast majority of people who lift weights at the gym will not even burn 200cal by the end of a weights workout. The diet is more responsible for the thin physique.
The Faceless Master
Member
indeed.
Tal Shiar Agent
Banned
They also weren't pumped full of HFCS in almost everything they ate and drank either.
Sugar, in all its forms is the biggest issue. Even artificial sweeteners as they mess with insulin production.
Bullying is always a terrible thing to do. What I would like to see though is better education on just how seriously damaging being obese can be (It can shorten Life Expectancy by up to 14 years) . I hear a lot of parents think that being fat is perfectly fine and doesn't harm their kid at all (a quick google showed that 31% of parrents think their obese child is perfectly healthy)
It's a pretty serious epidemic and one that I don't see many people caring about.
It's a pretty serious epidemic and one that I don't see many people caring about.
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