I've struggled with my weight all my life, from a very young age. I got up to almost 400 pounds in my late teens, and I got back down to about 230 (I've since gone back up to about 260).
Laziness is a tricky qualifier. If you're physically fit, with good exercise and eating habits, you can say it's not difficult to lose weight.
However, if you were never taught good habits from the start, it puts you at a tremendous disadvantage. It's hard to go out and exercise if you're already overweight. It's a habit that you have to make, to do an activity that may be difficult, to get results that take a while to really show. On top of all that, if you've never had to be significantly overweight, you don't know how crippling it can be to expose yourself to the ridicule of being fat. I had people make fun of me for being a fat kid who was trying to do something about it. Even without outright ridicule, I always felt everyone's eyes on me. It was terrible. It still makes things bad because even though I lost a lot of weight, I never lost the mindset of a fat boy. Being self-conscious to the point where you understand you have a weight problem is being self-conscious enough to be very, very aware of how other people think of you for having a weight problem.
There are also other factors. One of them, for me, was that I had to work a lot of hours at two low-wage jobs to make ends meet, which makes actual exercise a luxury I often couldn't make myself enjoy, as well as much of my food being purchased with convenience, rather than health, in mind.
Are all these things excuses? Probably not. But, what good does it do me to have someone tell me that? Shaming a fat person is a terrible way to encourage them to do something about it.
Telling overweight people that they're dumb is dumb. I don't know a single fat person who wants to be fat or enjoys it. There are many reasons people are fat, and few of them have anything to do with intelligence.
Laziness is a tricky qualifier. If you're physically fit, with good exercise and eating habits, you can say it's not difficult to lose weight.
However, if you were never taught good habits from the start, it puts you at a tremendous disadvantage. It's hard to go out and exercise if you're already overweight. It's a habit that you have to make, to do an activity that may be difficult, to get results that take a while to really show. On top of all that, if you've never had to be significantly overweight, you don't know how crippling it can be to expose yourself to the ridicule of being fat. I had people make fun of me for being a fat kid who was trying to do something about it. Even without outright ridicule, I always felt everyone's eyes on me. It was terrible. It still makes things bad because even though I lost a lot of weight, I never lost the mindset of a fat boy. Being self-conscious to the point where you understand you have a weight problem is being self-conscious enough to be very, very aware of how other people think of you for having a weight problem.
There are also other factors. One of them, for me, was that I had to work a lot of hours at two low-wage jobs to make ends meet, which makes actual exercise a luxury I often couldn't make myself enjoy, as well as much of my food being purchased with convenience, rather than health, in mind.
Are all these things excuses? Probably not. But, what good does it do me to have someone tell me that? Shaming a fat person is a terrible way to encourage them to do something about it.
Telling overweight people that they're dumb is dumb. I don't know a single fat person who wants to be fat or enjoys it. There are many reasons people are fat, and few of them have anything to do with intelligence.
