[keg in kc]

Originally Posted by Baby Lee

People aren't cowering somewhere eating compulsively to mask mental pain. They simply aren't thinking about it. Too large of a meal with too much fat and too many calories is simply too routine and too tasty to resist day in, day out. Processed food pops out of the fridge and heats right up, veggies have to be chopped mixed and cooked, and go bad within the week. It's a pain in the ass to eat healthy. I know because I actually PREFER salads and fresh veggies to processed food. But between going to market, picking out produce, preparing it, then throwing out the spoiled EVERY week, all it takes is one session of tossing some fries or mozzarella sticks on a baking sheet to fall back into familiar patterns.

That's the point I was trying to make yesterday, although I didn't get into the pattern part of it.

Just to take your point a bit further, it basically is a routine, and on top of that those wonderfully awful fried/sugar filled/baked foods themselves affect you chemically, drawing you inevitably back into their clutches with any moment of weakness. And some of us have been eating that stuff since childhood, because as hard as it is for twenty-somethings to believe, there actually was a time when pizza and pop and potato chips and hot dogs and kraft macaroni and cheese weren't evil. We didn't grow up with 24 hour fitness, dieting was a fad that was mostly for women, and generally the only people you ever saw running or biking were kids. Things have changed a lot, just in the last 20 years (and changed for the better, don't mistake what I'm saying...), more than somebody born in the 80s probably realizes. So what they might see as lazy or as a choice isn't really either one. Hell, I'm not sure I ever even heard the word "obesity" until the mid 90s.

I'm now back down to 195#, but it took a volitional realization that I HATED how I looked and an extended period of nearly no caloric intake [never did exercise, didn't have the time].

Here's an area where I know I'm different. I've always hated how I look, whether it was at 175 in my teens and some of my 20s, whether it was 245 in my late 20s, or at 215 now. I've run the gamut from athletic, to thin, to overweight, to obese, and regardless of what my weight or body composition was at the time there's never been a day in my life where I've felt comfortable in my own skin. And I know that's something that's hard to understand. Hell, it's hard for me to understand. That's the mental aspect that everybody wants to lump under "depression". And while diet and exercise can help, it doesn't fix it. I'm not ever going to magically wake up one morning brimming with confidence. Just not wired that way. Because whenever I look at myself, I only see what's wrong.

In sum, for many overeating is a default not a proactive effort. The proactive effort is NOT overeating.

Yep.