What are your thoughts on fat acceptance?

[Regina]

Not sure if this was already mentioned (didn't feel like wading through 8 pages of back and forth to find out) but....

Not everyone that is obese is that way because they ate too much. There are medical conditions which cause people to be obese.

Being stressed out can cause someone to gain weight.
Having insomnia or not getting enough sleep can attribute to weight gain.
Psychological trauma that leads to someone using food to comfort oneself, can lead to weight gain. And yes - while food is there, it is NOT the main factor or cause. It is the catalyst. The trauma is the main factor.

There are medicines that cause people to gain weight. I work with a person who is on chemo and steroids for an auto-immune disorder that I can't even pronounce. It causes her to gain weight. People keep asking her when her baby is due. She's not pregnant. Her youngest is six years old. But so that she can live, she has to take a pill form of chemo, daily.

People need to consider all the reasons to why someone is obese and not just contribute it to over-eating or eating the wrong thing.

I think in a lot of these cases though, the weight gain isn't so dramatic. You are absolutely right, some people do have issues, both mental and physical, that make it harder to keep some extra weight off and easier to gain weight.

That said though, a lot of these people who only gain weight due to stress, due to medicine or even due to a thyroid issue or slow metabolism, they only end up being moderately overweight at most and often the weight gain is temporary. I don't think any of these issues, alone, would make someone actually obese, unless it was like a very rare extreme case. My Mom has struggled losing some of her extra weight over the years, I guess genetically she is a bit more predisposed to put on weight. But even then, she's never been like crazy obese, she's never had serious health problems or been left physically inactive from it. She is quite healthy.

For me there's a distinction to be made between merely being overweight and being outright obese, and I do think the difference between that is almost entirely lifestyle. It's incredibly difficult to sustain extreme weight without constantly eating and being physically inactive. You can see that because as soon as someone very obese starts eating right and getting even light exercise, the weight drops off them very fast. I also think, statistically, the concentration of obesity in developed/Western countries is a dead giveaway that it has more to do with lifestyle than genetics.