this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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I apologize for going into a rant about this but I've spent a good while learning how to lose weight and I've lost over a hundred pounds.
I've dealt with being obese my entire life.
I was given poor instruction as a child.
I was told to continue eating when even when I was already stuffed because my mother grew up in a poor household and she didn't understand that when a child says they are full that you do not need to feed them anymore and you do not need to manipulate them into thinking that they are bad people for not eating until they physically cannot eat anymore for every single meal.
I've been dealing with the compulsion, the almost OCD unwilling desire mandate that I have to eat all of the food in front of me every single time I sit down to eat for my entire life.
And while I have been working and struggling and striving to break that compulsion I've also been trying to learn what it is about food that leaves me so unsatisfied when I eat.
And so I get a little upset when I hear people say any variation of, "put down the fork fatty" even when the concept is couched in an inoffensive phrasing, because every single person that says this has no idea what the actual struggle of being obese is.
It's not an issue of one specific chemical in the food that makes people obese.
It's an issue of the entire available Western diet
combined with the entire Western ideology about food
combined with the post world war II necessity of feeding as many people as possible using the new fertilizers that change the structure of the plants that they are sprinkled on, causing them to grow far faster than they ever did in nature
Combined with the selective breeding of plants to get the largest size and most fat protein and carbohydrates that you possibly can out of every single grain and every single animal that is grown
combined with food companies hiring scientists running an entire industry to make food as unsatisfying as possible so that you never get tired of eating it
combined with the nutrition of food decreasing even as the calories in food increase
combined with every single minor drop of comprehension about food itself and the foods effects on the human body being amplified all out of proportion by the news empire looking for a click-worthy headline
Combined with the fact that tasty food releases dopamine even as being obese causes you to be depressed and therefore want to eat more food to get more dopamine to deal with the depression that eating the more food caused
And once again I apologize for going on a rant about this but I wish I could just shake every single person on the planet until they understood that there is far more going on than just the inability of putting the fork down that causes obese people to be obese.
I just wanna give you a huge hug of support. I'm in the 100lb club too (and still well overweight personally) and so much of what you said is very familiar. Thank you for saying what I wanted to say better than I could say it.