yes, I would say to a drug user to accept themselves and love themselves for the person they are inside, to not beat themselves up solely but educate themselves about the nature of their metabolic disorder. We can only grow as human beings from a point of self-love, never from a point of self-hatred. Drunks who get dry starting with self-hatred are never recovering alcoholics; they are only dry drunks.

Am I defensive? I read through my post and see mostly love and caring for any new person arriving here, not anger. Perhaps I am defensive though. Ten years of anorexia (talk about "self control!") , rebound weight gain eating only 1200 calories a day, and then later understanding the nature of obesity and eating disorders has made me both more rigid in some ways (we must work towards self-acceptance and acceptance of the variations in body types of others) and less rigid in others (knowing that the nature of obesity is not behavioral for most people but metabolic and knowing that each individual's experience and background is going to be different).

You might want to read this: Adiposity 101 to self-educate a bit about situations other than your own. I see from your posts that you're missing a lot of facts--which is not shameful or anything, and can be remedied. Rarely do women end up overfat (a definition that is more cultural than carved in stone and objective) because of overeating, though that is more common for men and may be how you got overfat. European longitudinal studies show that the lowest rates of morbidity and mortality are in women from 30-40% body fat, so "thin" isn't clearly the healthiest state. Weight loss from all sources (including 'healthy diets") always results in increased mortality rates and decreased life expectancyy. What about neuropetptide Y research, the role of lipoprotein lipase, the metabolic response to weight loss? And so on. There's a lot to learn about obesity as both a physical and social phenomenon, and much that reseachers don't yet know a thing about. Most family practice MD's are woefully ignorant about metabolism and obesity, too, much less your typical morning talk show host, who informs the typical person of all his 'facts'.

Trust this claim: obesity is such an unpleasant social situation that no one would choose it voluntarily or avoid it if a simple act of will for six months were all it took to remedy it. If weight were easy to keep off, 99.8% of women would not regain their lost weight within 7 years of taking it off.

And controlling metabolic obesity has little to do with looking in the mirror and admitting we're bad or weak. Most of the women here work, raise kids, keep a house with precious little help, may have worked their way through school, are upstanding members of both their real life and on-line communities. They are not weak. They are not bad. And beating themselves up further will help them not one little bit. Self-hatred has never been shown to speed weight loss. But it surely can sap all the joy from a life.