The excuses we use to stay fat.
 

What is your excuse for staying fat? What's the pay off?

For me I used to blame it on my hormones (child birth). The pay off ~ less attention on me.

Interesting questions: My excuses for staying fat?
Ludicrous, but some of them are true: I don't know if I will ever unravel the entire point and the pay-off:

1) My mother, aunt, grandmother, and great-grandmother valued thinness before any other single human quality and I am a rebel

2) I don't want people to be attracted to me; for many people the "fat" are invisible

3) So I can feel sorry for myself

4) Because I allowed myself to get fat when I was too young to understand the reality of the medical complications that can ensue

and like you, Dupont: LESS ATTENTION FOR ME!

I have to admit that when I had my two children I really was not that afflicted: at 9 months pregnant, weighing in at the hospital, I was 151 and 162 pounds respectively. Being pregnant gave me a motivation to eat in a reasonably healthy way. But I was much younger then and recovered from my pregnancies via "starvation" diets. DUH!

Natalie

That is a good question...

I guess I don't have to worry about getting regected or hurt...because nobody wants to get close.

I don't have to feel all the emotions that come up for me...I just numb them or stuff them with food.

I don't have to look at a marriage that I am not sure is working for me.

People just seem to leave me alone.

I don't like these things...and am working very hard to change them...I want to be a strong person. I want to be able to deal with everyday life and not fall apart for every little crisis that arises. That is part of the reason I am here...I want to learn to love myself...and cope.

So I can try every diet around and obsess and spend hours counting calories, carbs whatever ... which just doesn't give me time to think about other things like certain faults of mine that I should be working on, or the fact that I should be doing more for others, or sometimes I'm just so scared to be totally happy because I'm afraid that as soon as you get too happy you'll surely get punished for it.

My obsession over my weight aside I'm a pretty happy person, I guess that somewhere in my guilt filled little mind I don' think I deserve to be so I find ways to make myself miserable. When it wasn't weight it was a really horrible boyfriend!!

I'm learning to accept happiness as a way of life and to forgive myself ... you never know it might even last!! ;)

C.

Never Good enough
 

Why do I feel like...

I'll never be a good enough mother, wife.
I'll never be thin enough.
I'll never be pretty.
I'll never be successful.

Even when I am these things, I don't feel like I deserve to feel happy about it. The pay-off is I don't have to work at any of these things. Sometimes I find life too hard. It's hard work to be a good mother & wife, thin, pretty and successful. I guess I'm just lazy and unmotivated.

I was not always like this though, I used to do the hard work, and then in one moment my life changed. A stillborn child due to a chromosome abnormality. I blame my self for the abnormality, her death, not being a good mother, and wife. Why take care of my body when I can't control what happens to it? I guess I gave up.

Thanks for listening I needed to get that out.

Tough question.....
 

Golly, this is going to take some soul searching.....

Everyone else's answers so far numbed me. I guess I see myself in a lot of them and others made me cry.

In my family, food was the way everyone showed love. I got fed, fed, fed. We were not allowed up from the table until our plates were clean. I became addicted to sugar at a very early age. (I never was clever enough to figure that out.) I was really heavy in fourth grade, got sick, and was actually thin (I only "remember" this by seeing my school pictures) for a while, but always saw myself as heavy. The weight battle began.

I really never knew what to do about it. None of the diets worked (all the low fat, low cal stuff) and I just gave up. Maybe because I too, like the non attention. I don't like making waves or being in the limelight. I have been invisible. I will need to learn to deal with being a person....

Purnois

One of my prominent excuses? Comparing myself to others around me who were bigger - mom, co-workers, friends - and think, "it could be worse. I guess I'm not *that* big." And with that, I'd ditch the whole diet thing and pig out, and abandon exercise. I'd conveniently "forget" that I had never been bigger, and that the only clothes left that fit were those with elastic waistbands, plus some of my boyfriend's things. That's a poor way to think. That's like thinking that if you got a D on a test, you don't need to try any harder since other people got Fs.

So I changed my tune. If you really want something, you can't ask youself whether or not the people around you have it. If you leave others behind in the dust, so be it: that shouldn't stop you from going after what you want. We're talking about your health, after all.

My excuse was that I was in denial. No one ever told me I was fat, so I tried to convinced myself that I wasn't. I could only fool myself for so long. I wasn't blind. I wasn't happy with myself and that's what's most important.

My husband proposed to me when I was at my heaviest. Yet I was so self-conscious at that time. I had no self-esteem and felt awful about myself. I think that's what changed my tune.

Honestly none.
 

I've never had an "excuse" for staying fat.. YET my doctors and family think differently. I blame being fat on being hypo. They say its an excuse. Its so not. Actually depressing and frustrating when nobody believes you. :mad: :( :rolleyes:

But if anything, my excuse at times would be the fact that its NOT me, and nobody helps me or believes me. When you've been struggling with the same thing for a couple years, tried everything, followed diets werd for werd, exercised nonstop and don't lose a pound in sufficient amount of time. (like months)..

Theres a PERFECT excuse to give up and say F* it, its not gonna work, it never did.

Oh easy answer...
 

My excuse? It was EASIER .

Yep, It was easier.
It was easier to be fat to hide away from relationships that were differcult to have and to understand.
It was easier to eat sugar and sweets than go through withdrawal symptoms.
Its easier to repel would-be-rapers, than learn self-defense.
It was easier to blame my weight for inactivity than learn to be more active.

Yep, it was easier.

So many reasons
 

To lower others expectations of me, fear of success, path of least resistance. I think there are such a combination of factors that I'd be hard pressed to pick the dominant one. All I know is that I don't feel the low self-esteem that I did, and am starting to love & accept myself again.

I was taught as a child that my emotions were not to be expressed, so I used food to stuff down my emotions.....I would eat. And eat and eat. Always carbs, which made me feel better for the moment. One time in my life I would eat ..then purge, and eat again.

Also being fat kept away unwanted attention. I didn't want to get hurt.

That was how I stayed fat, in between all those diets. :daze:

excuses for being fat
 

I just logged on to prevent myself from going into the lunchroom and eating " bad" things and saw this string. So many of the reasons others have given I have to agree with.
I was invisble . Looking good attracted too much attention and I was extremely shy growing up and still today, feel inept so being overweight was less threatening .
It was easier to do nothing and be unhappy about the weight than to actually do something and have to keep doing it everyday to acheive and retain results.
Fear of failure. If I tried, then everyone would know what a loser I was ( of course I assumed I would fail)
I didn't want anyone to know I cared what I looked like. I was supposed to be better that that. I didn't need make-up and did n't do my hair, etc. I wasn't supposed to care about such "superficial " things.
and so on and so on... a couple of decades of mindset is hard to get rid of... but I'm getting there. :daze:

Diets don't work
 

That was my excuse. Diets don't work, so why even try.

;-Deb

Drinking Beer!
 

I just could not give up beer drinking - that and sugar sweetened ice tea. I am one of the Atkins types that says I don't eat that much but keep gaining weight. That is because I was drinking much of my sugar! Beer started to get to me anyway so I gave it up almost entirely - maybe 5 beers in the last 3.5 months. The hardest thing was to give up the iced tea. I really don't like all artificial sweeteners and make do with a little sucralose here and there. I have been drinking small quantities of red dry wine which has braked my weight loss some. There are several health benefits with one glass of wine a day. On the other hand I am someone who is perfect for the Atkins diet. I have not eaten much candy except for chocolate for the last 26years. I don't like many cakes or pies. I do not have to have iced cream. I can't stand home fries in the morning. I really like french fries but could also give them up easy and was easy to give up all other potatoes. Also found it easy to give up pasta. So the sacrifices for me to do Atkins were much less than others.

I believe there are legitimate reasons that people are fat, and that blaming the victim really doesn't do anyone any good, except to make thin people feel smug and superior. And that doesn't really do their souls any good, imo.

Study after study after study shows that many--probably most--fat people do not overeat. (let's define overeating as anything over 2500 caloreis per day intake for men, 2000 for women--a random but reasonable definition) These normal-eaters' reasons for being fat include:

1) genetics (what, twenty-odd known culprit obesity genes and counting?)

2) naturally low BMR (see a post I did in research about a month ago for more info)

3) lowered BMR and lean body mass due to overdieting (see a post I did in research forum several months ago)

4) hyperinsulinemia. If there isn't time for glucagon to burn fat, no matter how low food intake, the person will stay fat. not mutually exclusive with the above categories.

....and there are other reasons, several of scientists haven't discovered. Read Adiposity 101 for more info on the ones they have.

For these people, "what is your excuse to stay fat" is as meaningless a question as "why aren't you seven feet tall and an NBA player" or "why don't you have a huge penis/smaller breasts/straighter nose/differently colored skin" In short, because you don't. You aren't. It's the luck of the genetic draw.

There ARE people who overeat or periodically binge. They overeat for many reasons, some of which have to do with physiology -- serotonin problems, leptin problems, neuropeptide Y problems, etc -- and other of which seem to boil down to (I'm oversimplifying for brevity's sake) soothing pain.

Many seriously obese people who overeat do so because they were sexually or horriblly physically abused as children. Without adult coping mechanisms, they did the best they could at the time. Once that's a habit, it's hard to break. The obesity chases them into adulthood as both a habit and metabolic fact (harder to break than habit).

Fat people are the new okay-to-abuse minority, it seems. So many people want to make adiposity a moral issue--including so-called therapists who are nothing of the sort and are only out there to make money off our guilt and shame. The shame, I think, is actually theirs for further abusing such an abused group.

I would counsel compassion for everyone--the fat who eat to soothe unbearable pain, all people with our rainbow of skin tones, the large-breasted and small-penised alike. None of that stuff really matters. None of these physical facts reflect character or spirit. None of that should be the basis on which we choose our friends. Fat MAY (but usuallly does not) reflect some information about "self-control" or "excuse-making personalities."

I hated being mildly fat at every step because of the bigotry against it. I certainly never chose it--not even unconsciously. It was incredibly painful.

My "excuse", then? Because I quit eating 500 calories a day and went way up to 1200 calories, then 1500. That's what made me get back to being fat after a decade of starvation diets. Why this "excuse" is supposed to be cause for symbolic public self-flagellation, I don't know.

Perhaps someone could explain that.

I think there are definitely reasons why we are fat! Metabolic, types of food, lack of nutritional, eating to little, overeating and many others, just as you mentioned.

I think what this thread is getting at why we STAY fat, even though we know what it best for us. For many of us, this is not the first time we have been on a LC diet. This is my second time around - last time I feel I chickened out.

I knew how to do the diet, I had lost 30 lbs, but I was scared of the new attention... so I "invented" reasons to cheat and eat High carb food.

Bottom line I felt more comfortable being fat. No one expects much out of a "lazy fat person", no one pays much attention to you either - they just kind of look through you. I was much happier with that. No pressure. Anonymous. Felt good.

I now have thought out, and am working on some of those issues with the help of forums like these.

There was a moment or two when I lost 30 pounds this time that I felt scared. I had noticeably lost weight and people were noticing and commenting on it. That scared me to get attention. Basically: I am still fat, don't look at me!!! But this time I realized that I was really scared, and worked through it.

People notice me now? So what? I am doing this for me, not them. I feel much better now.

I don't really see this thread as excuses as to why we are fat, just some reasons why we choose (consciously or unconsciously) to stay that way.

excuses...
 

In the past three years I have managed to gain 30 lbs. Some of you may think that it is not a lot, but to me it is. I had lost 15 of it last year, just to find myself regain it all back again. I was (I was) a girl most of people hated because I was (what you may call) a perfection (slim and beautiful). Through most of my adult life I didn't have to try hard in order to survive. I used to go to places and everything was given to me on a gold platter. Everybody feared me. I never had any girlfriends or steady boyfriends. Women hated me because of my looks and guys feared me. I decided to gain the weight. I am not the most beautiful girl anymore but I have more people approaching me. I feel like the eyes don't follow me around anymore. I can go to the supermarket without being harrased. Nobody is paying attention to my looks anymore. Last year I have received my degree in marketing and people really listen to what I have to say (without judging me or without any stupid assumptions). Many of you may think that I am crazy, but for the first time in my life I don't feel alone or underestimated.
Physically I don't feel good. All my life I have been very fit/slim (no junk food - just breakfast, dinner and sometimes supper) and lots of walking. You would be surprised how much food your body really needs to survive - not much. I felt great!!! 30 lbs is a lot of weight. I am tired all the time. My energy level is very low. I can't wait to start eating well and excersising again on a regular basis, but this means that I will lose the weight and be slim again...

kamila
P.S. wish me luck

<i>"Why this "excuse" is supposed to be cause for symbolic public self-flagellation, I don't know. Perhaps someone could explain that."</i>

Simple, and Dr Phil says it best: "The best predictor of future behaviour is relevant past behaviour."

I think it's safe to assume that most people here - surely the ones who've responded to this thread - didn't like having gained weight, and not just because of societal pressure. Whatever the reason for initial weight gain, we've decided to make a change. "What excuses did you use" merely asks what your justification was for putting that change off, and offers no suggestion of superiority over people who are happy being big. We're analyzing our own human nature - which wants us to take the path of least resistance and choose instant gratification over our long term goals.

Peshka
 

Razzle,
I think the point is that we need to stop rationalizing being fat and get to the nitty gritty emotional block that is causing us to stay fat. My question is how do you overcome the emotional block?