> I don’t generally view my body size as positive or negative — it simply is. 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. I’m strong, I’m flexible and my doctor assures me my health is good, but the fact remains: I’m larger than someone my height should be.
I feel for her and the negative comments are reprehensible, but what I hear in this particular paragraph are excuses. Having issues with POS and the thyroid gland do not make it impossible to lose weight, just more difficult. My advice: ignore the haters and come up with a game plan with your doctor to lose the weight in a steady and health way.
This is one of the more insidiously cruel comments I've seen here.
Never mind PCOS, hypothyroidism is a condition that can suck you of your energy, lower your metabolic rate, put you into depression, and much more, all contributing to weight gain. Point is, it can be a vicious cycle that feeds itself.
But who gives a damn? Who am I to start judging the accuracy or severity of her diagnoses? What if she made it all up? It doesn't matter a damn bit, to me or to you. But at the end of the day, we have no reason to believe she's lying.
Wording your comment in a more civilized manner does not make it that much less childish than the "yeah, nice excuse, fatty, now go run" that we expect from reddit.
Well, I'll try to be more uncivilized next time. I am not accusing her of lying. I take what she says at face value, but I challenge the claim that these conditions make it impossible to lose weight. If she wants to be at the weight she's at, then my advice can be safely ignored. If she is, however, interested in losing weight, then she should do her best to overcome these conditions instead of using them as an excuse to give up.
Dear God man! You don't know anything about her. For all you know she's already tried everything.
For that matter, the article says she is healthy and the doctors have given her the all clear. So she's of a somewhat larger build - big fucking deal!
This is probably coming off wrong. I'm sure you mean well. But don't be so quick to give healthy living advise to someone with a medical condition (or for that matter, really anyone) you don't know. Put yourself in their shoes - the point of this article really - how would you like unsolicited, judgmental advise about something you have little control over?
What marknutter says ("do not make it impossible to lose weight, just more difficult") is tautologically true. What you say ("For all you know she's already tried everything") can not possibly be true.
This is irrelevant pedantry. When people say "... already tried everything." they don't mean everything. This isn't first-order logic, it's conversation!
They mean that the subject has tried many things, to the point of frustration.
Unless we accept that losing weight is the highest possible priority, then it will necessarily be balanced against other priorities. These will be generally inconsistently pursued, because people are not rational.
In part, people who are calling for acceptance of a wider range of body weights are arguing that there is too high a priority placed on a person's weight.
> This isn't first-order logic, it's conversation!
Thank you for that eloquent retort. Though I've been on both sides of a pedant's argument (often the wrong side), it's helpful to set the context that a conversation is happening in. Some folks will grab onto anything if it allows them to say, "I'm right, and you're wrong!"
Actually, my premise is based on a universal predicate, which should be falsifiable (it can be true if she did indeed try everything). And his statement is not a tautology in logic, though perhaps in rhetoric it may well be.
Just a book in discrete mathematics :-) sorry, the comment I responded to was quite pedantic, but unfortunately wrong which I find to be the worst form of pedantry.
I really shouldn't engage in these sort of back and forths, but sometimes I just can't resist...
> For all you know she's already tried everything.
For all I know, her body might not obey the laws of physics that every other object in the universe obeys. But I find that possibility somewhat unlikely.
If your food intakes contains less metabolisable energy than you use, you'll lose weight. It's as simple as that.
Yeah, that endocrine disorder that scientists have been trying to cure for the past 30 years or so can be solved. By diet.
I reckon you should make a phone call to the Polycystic Ovary Syndrome Foundation with your astounding discovery, I'm sure they'll be really happy to be told that sufferers can just eat less. Who knew all this time?
You've replied to this story about 15 times defending the woman's eating/exercise habits. What's the agenda here? Most of the people you're taking umbrage with aren't remotely disagreeing with the disorder; merely the assertion that everything is a-okay and nothing more can be done.
The world doesn't work in absolutes and neither should you.
No agenda. But you're right, I have made a few too many comments here. Something must have struck a nerve. Possibly the sheer mean-spiritedness of the comments made (not here) about a stranger.
Indeed. But she makes it clear her diet is under control. The point being made by the poster is what exactly? The poster states that her body can't "defy the laws of physics", like that's helpful or even insightful.
The poster was commenting about weight loss, not mitigating her disorder!
You are arguing a point the parent post never actually made.
She has a fairly common endocrine disorder (5-10% of the female population is millions of people) that makes it easier to gain weight. That does not mean that her body defies the laws of thermodynamics or the conservation of energy, and I'm fairly certain that there are people who suffer from the disorder without being obese.
That isn't to justify the many "Easy!" type comments: Life is tough. We all face tough battles. We all have ways that nature seems to conspire against us. But it does dispute the "I have {x} therefore I am without choice".
As one scientifically vapid, completely and utterly unproven sidenote just because it came to mind during this comment: one observation I've made about people who have difficulty controlling their weight is an almost perfect correlation with an innate desire to maintain warmth at all costs. Very warm houses with the heat set high, thick sweaters, giant comforters, no temperature setback at night. Generating heat is an expensive exercise for the body (calories, of course, are the measurement of the heat potential of foods), so I have to think that these environmental controls contribute to what people call a "low metabolism". I'm the sort of guy who wears a t-shift in the winter and uses the skimpiest threadbare sheet in the 58F house at nighttime, and people always marvel about my "incredible metabolism" as I devour a whole pizza.
I'm a Type I Diabetic. If I eat something containing glucose, my blood sugar will rise to unhealthy levels. Clearly the solution is to never eat anything containing glucose again. It's as simple as that.
And there's something rather neat about physics, chemistry, and biology.
Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. So, that means garbage in = fat + garbage out. You really are what you eat.
I know this by my own diet. When I gobbled up everything in sight, I <gasp> got fat. When I quit packing my face full of food, I lost weight. Interesting how that works.
You're a right idiot if you think it's as simple as that. And your reference to the laws of physics does not make you any more knowledgeable than the hordes of assholes who simplify these issues for an easy insult.
Go google hypothyroidism and PCOS. Then come back and tell us what you learn. I'll have crayons and paper so you can show the whole class.
Where PCOS is associated with overweight or obesity, successful weight loss is the most effective method of restoring normal ovulation/menstruation, but many women find it very difficult to achieve and sustain significant weight loss. A scientific review in 2013 found similar decreases in weight and body composition and improvements in pregnancy rate, menstrual regularity, ovulation, hyperandrogenism, insulin resistance, lipids and quality of life to occur with weight loss independent of diet composition.[41] Still, a low GI diet, in which a significant part of total carbohydrates are obtained from fruit, vegetables and whole grain sources, has resulted in increased menstrual regularity than a macronutrient-matched healthy diet.[41] Vitamin D deficiency may play some role in the development of the metabolic syndrome, so treatment of any such deficiency is indicated.[42]
..... In other words, eat your veggies and don't be a pig. Medically speaking, of course.
I was a lard-ass like you, until I took a doughnut to the knee.
It is pretty simple though to lose weight, from a logical level. You need to consume less calories than you burn every day. The problem is it's not fun for most people and it can take considerable dedication.
That's not in question. But the lady who wrote the post has Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, which has no cure and can only be managed. For many sufferers there is no way to reduce their weight. It's a quite serious endocrine disorder and they're still looking for a cure.
Do you suffer from polycystic ovarian syndrome and a failing thyroid gland, too, or something similar, or do you just think that it's gonna work for everybody because it worked for you?
Overweight people are not spontaneously generating matter, sure, but it's not like people can just stop eating until they hit the weight you'd prefer them to have, they kinda stop working before that happens.
Wikipedia tells me this has little to do with "gobbling up everything in sight". Sadly, physics, biology and chemistry don't know what cause it (yet), nor is there a cure (yet).
I think the point is she shouldn't have to try EVERYTHING. If she's healthy, meaning her medical tests come back fine, and she's getting exercise the amount of work she might have to do to LOOK thin might not be worth it. In fact it might even be counter productive and make her less healthy.
Of course it's far easier to complain that she's unfit and that everyone loses and gains weight at the same rate than to say you don't like the aesthetics of her body and she should lose weight because being fat makes her unattractive.
Decent point. I don't know her either, and it was wrong of me to imply she should try everything to keep her weight down. I actually didn't mean to say this at all, but the comment does look that way.
"For all you know she's already tried everything." - well, not really... By her own admission, she doesn't "generally view her body size as positive or negative". Why would she have tried "everything" then?? It's illogical. Generally, if you don't see something as either positive or negative, you don't go to great pains to do something about it.
Of course, but that wasn't the context. 'marknutter' said that she should try and lose weight. You replied to that that for all we know, she's tried everything. 'marknutter' did not criticize her for not curing herself out of the disorder.
marknutter should a. Not be so concerned about her weight, and b. reread the article where the author assures us that her PCOS is under control.
Her doctor says she is ok, and she states that she is reasonably careful with her diet and does a large amount of exercise, which - because of the endocrine disorder she suffers from - does very little to change her weight.
In some of the comments here I wonder if I've been reading the same article! She makes it clear why her body shape is what it is, she says she's pretty healthy and looks after herself, gets checkups from her doctor and lives a full life. She seems pretty much at terms with her body shape... why are there so many comments telling her she needs to lose weight?
I'm not a doctor, so I can't argue about the medical aspects. Even if I was a doctor, I couldn't rely on what someone wrote on a blog that their doctor told them (we even have no way of knowing if it's true). And even if it is, this does not prove that "she's tried everything" (in terms of diet) within the limits imposed by her unfortunate disorder. I am not saying that she hasn't, but given that she thinks her body is just fine - in the visible aspect - I have a good reason to find this unlikely. Having said that, I do not hate her (or any obese people for that matter), and I'm not personally concerned in the slightest whether she loses weight or not :)
> Why do you think it’s proper to give random people unsolicited health advice
Why do you think it’s proper to give random people unsolicited internet posting advice? Is there any good reason I shouldn't regard you as a hypocrite?
Is it really so hard for you to see the difference between medical advice and advice about polite behavior? The difference seems very clear cut to me. One is most definitely not like the other.
Now, I’m just speculating, but I would guess that most doctors would shy away from giving random people they read about on the internet health advice. Health is personal and private, discussing it with someone in an appropriate manner requires either expertise or at least strong personal ties to that person and is usually done in private. That seems like a pretty standard societal convention to me.
Other members of society are in a position to correct your social misbehavior. People other than this woman's doctor are in no position to correct her approach to her own, personal medical issues that you are neither adequately informed nor qualified to judge.
To be honest, I didn't give much thought to that piece. It was an interesting side-fact -- that her doctor had said she was in good health -- but that's about it.
It's really not up to strangers -- especially those not qualified -- to identify whether she is healthy. It's not even the point of the article.
Not saying that you are making it the issue of the article, just saying I didn't really even give that part of it much thought.
Really. Most people only have one day or two of food at home. In cities, stores have two days of stock at most.
The federal government shut down. If anything else happens, God forbids, that breaks down the provisioning circuits, panic will soon ensue, and for city dwellers, only 2 days before they start dying from thirst, and 42 days until they die of hunger.
Now, I'd like to see all those lean people, how they'll fare after one week. If us the fat people can hide for a week and avoid being eaten by them, then the world will be ours!
No offense, but your advice sounds similar if you are saying to a woman to not to wear shorts or do not go out after 8PM otherwise she deserves to be get raped.
Why should she have to? If she's healthy and going further requires committing tremendous personal resources to weight-loss? For somebody who has a medical condition that causes their body to commit an inordinate amount of energy into fat production, reducing their intake to weight-loss levels may leave too little energy for the person to function effectively day-to-day. Or they may have to slave away on burning calories five hours a day. Is that a realistic project for the sake of vanity?
I feel for her and the negative comments are reprehensible, but what I hear in this particular paragraph are excuses. Having issues with POS and the thyroid gland do not make it impossible to lose weight, just more difficult. My advice: ignore the haters and come up with a game plan with your doctor to lose the weight in a steady and health way.