Good post. To put it simply... losing weight is hard. Motivating yourself to go from very obese to fit is extremely, extremely hard.
We have a society have made losing weight a massive undertaking. Which makes it close to impossible if you're very obese. We don't know how to cook anymore, we've become too reliant on our cars, and you need a PhD to understand how to read food labels. In addition to that, we've made buying the right foods so ridiculously expensive while you can buy a cheeseburger at McDonald's for $1.
So I sympathize with obese people. It's very hard to be proactive, commit, and continue that commitment. I would think and expect that keeping that motivation would be easier if the process was easier, but it's not. It would also be easier if we had the right things in place by preventing people from becoming obese in the first place (e.g. teaching kids how to grow their own vegetables). We don't. We've made a hard thing to do border on the impossible.
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Originally Posted by keg in kc
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.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.Yep.
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