I was posting on another thread about how I think the reasons why we think we got fat have a big influence on how we think about trying to help our kids avoid getting fat.
I have the impression that there are two basically different sorts of fat people, although, of course, nobody is every really one type or another.
But, in general, which type do you think you are?
Type One: I was normal weight or on the bigger side as a child/teenager. It was a very big deal for me. I tried to diet to lose the weight and the more I dieted the worse things got. I think I am fat because I had a negative self-image as a young person and I ended up with a messed up relationship with food and my body.
Type Two: I have always felt pretty good about myself, but I really didn't eat the right things. In my family we always eat a lot/eat junk/eat high calorie foods. I just kept eating that way until I got fat. I think I am fat because I did not really learn how to eat properly and/or incorporate exercise into my life.
And, along with this: My biggest obstacle to losing weight is:
1. overcoming my complicated relationship with food/learning not to binge/emotional eat...
or
2. Unlearning how to eat all the high calorie stuff I love and learning to eat in a completely different way.
I typed four different posts and erased them all. The weird love triangle between me, my mother, and food is so f--ked up I can't even describe it. I'm not fat because of anything my parents did, but there's no doubt that food and weight are all tangled up in that relationship.
here comes the dragon to screw up the categories! heh heh well, sort of....
I was a fat kid and very fat teen. I didn't diet until late in high school when I lost 100 lbs on weight watchers. My family had a habit of eating too much, but not necessarily/really junk or fast foods.
I had a bad self image and low self esteem in part due to my weight (was unusual at the time I was a kid to see heavier children) and the social stigma.
my biggest obstacles to losing weight would be 1 AND 2, but I'd say by far 1 (comfort and stress eating, I enjoy eating veggies, fruits, many healthy lower cal foods, I'm not a picky eater)
being a heavy kid and very heavy teen I really had to learn what it meant to exercise and be active after I became adult. and I had to learn to overcome negative feelings surrounding exercise (embarrassment, feeling like I couldn't do it, etc.)
I am in a stable relationship now, but yes mom issues as well all my live long. Self worth issues defiantly, was heavy as a kid as well and tried diet after diet, but you all know how that ends
I typed my response before I realized that this was in the 100 lb club...hope you ladies don't mind....
I am definitely Type One and my biggest obstacle is by far overcoming emotional eating. I still haven't managed that. I've always been consumed with my weight and appearance and in the midst of trying to lose weight or fix it. This is my first somewhat successful attempt...
Good thread idea...please don't throw rotten fruit at me...
Definitely a #2 here Everyone in my family eats like starving wolverines LOL but exercise a lot -- but not me, I always hated sweating, yuck LOL I just figured I should be able to eat what I want and be thin -- crazy business! Even at my heaviest, I had very high self-esteem and didn't tie my value as a human being to how big my a$$ was, that's a recipe for disaster in my humble opinion.
I think I'm a type 1... I have always hated my body and I've been trying to lose weight since I was 8 years old(8! 12 out of my 20 years have been spent obsessing over weight). My relationship with food and body image is definitely screwed up.
Hehe Trazey I thought for a second your ticker said "104" and I was like "WHOA. For 5'8"????????? and then I saw that it was in fact 184. You had me worried!!!
I am mostly Type 1, but No. 2 also contributed big time.
My mom didn't, or rarely, cooked home-made meals. When she did, it was meat, potatoes and corn. Veggies were always frozen or canned. They were always soggy, so I rarely ate them. (I only discovered a couple of years ago that you can cook FRESH veggies only SLIGHTLY so they aren't mushy.)
Whatever she made was overcooked because she has this weird fear of food poisoning. I didn't even eat steak until several years ago because every time I had it, it was tough, dry and chewy because it was well-well-well-done.
We ate frozen meals, frozen pizza or fast food nearly every night. There was plenty of junk food in the house if I had a bad day to pig out on. And the more I ate of it when I was 10, 11, 12, etc., the more she bought.
Mom's obese, Dad's overweight and brother's overweight.
To this day, I have a very difficult time not reverting to unhealthy eating habits and binging in that house.
Last edited by Athenacapella; 07-20-2010 at 08:20 PM.
Reason: typo
I was raised on total junk food~my Mother bought nothing but Junk Food(cookies,cakes,pies,Anything sweet ~we had it everywhere ~so she didn't have to cook but once a day~LAZINESS~) Anyways I brought that into my home ~although I cooked more than her~So I totally blame it on her for being taught to eat wrong as a child~we all have stress~We all have stress relievers But ~I blame it all on being taught wrong to eat ~forr me personally~I am hoping I changed that for my kids quick enough~cause the pounds have dropped off them too~we now have healthy snacks in our home~Or limits on a few so so ones~The rest of my family (I grew up wth My 4 brothers & sister are still Morbidly obese & so out there children basically & so was I & so is my mother still to this day & My father was when he passed away ~he was overweight.) I decided to change ~I hope my kids keep these new habits I have placed on them for the last 19 & 1/2 months!
(& yes I had to eat the sweets or go hungry basically~I SWEAR! My mom was a nurse & I think she was a hoarder of sweets! She had them everywhere always ~it looked like a bakery there always~Still does.) She did usually cook once a day But We ate thousands of calories a day in sweets.)
For those brought up eating healthy & eat bad now~I think u got to try new things when u got out on your own & Loved them ~the bad for you high calorie items & let them take u over~Mine though was totally a time I can say I blame my mother.
Hope that made since~I have dial up so not checking for mistakes~Ignore typing errors Please~
Edited to add:~So # 2 Is my answer but Only because there was no other food choices in my home(blaming My mother cause she was the grocery shopper.~Can that be a choice # 3?LOL) ~Cause when I was a kid I ran outside all day long cause my parents liked us to play outdoors so I got plenty of exercise ~Plus I was the oldest daughter & had to do every chore daily in the home I grew up in so exercise was no issue.~Just to many calories was being consumed.
I'm not really either type, but if I had to pick I'd probably say type 2. I can honestly say that I've never been normal weight one day in my life ok maybe the day I was born. However, I had the most awesome parents and the best self-esteem until I was maybe about 18. One of my earliest memories is being 3 years old and my 5-yr old brother putting my mom's copy of Jane Fonda's New Workout into the video every afternoon for me so that kids at my preschool would stop calling me fat. And I don't know what happened after a while, I felt sooooo loved by my parents that I didn't really care I was fat. People teased me and made comments but it didn't really bother me so they were forced to get over it. I was popular, did really well at school, was involved in lots of activities and ate pretty healthy food (we didn't really have junk or soda or fast food at our house, just lots of food in general) just in absurd quantities and preferred quieter pursuits like devouring book after book (so was pretty sedentary). So confident was I that after high school, I went to a prep school in a small town in Switzerland for a year where not only was I the only black person in the whole town, I was by farrrrr the fattest person in the town, my school included (grannies and pregnant women included), and I still wasn't self-conscious.
My horrible relationship with food upon reflection, is actually pretty self-engineered. I decided I'd gained sooooo much weight off Hot Pockets in freshman year of college, I was having a tough time with some of my courses so became even more sedentary studying, stopped sleeping properly, had some general depression and some other serious health issues that had been misdiagnosed as PCOS, and I just ate and ate more than ever before. And the more I ate, the fatter I became, the more depressed I became. Anyway, by the time I sorted out all my issues, and re-stabilized, I was left with a horrible attitude to food, particularly how it "comforted" me during my difficult times. I mean obviously I've always had overeating issues but it's hard to link them to my parents.
Edit:
I've re-thought my last sentence. I sucked my thumb furiously from birth and according to my mom, so dedicated a thumbsucker I was, that I didn't like to take my thumb out of my mouth long enough to eat a full meal. So she used to get wider teats for my bottles (apparently didn't have the patience either for breast milk) and basically pour the food down my throat so I finished it pretty quickly, and could go back to sucking my thumb. And till today, I'm a vacuum, I eat pretty quickly. So maybe I got used to doing that as a baby and that has carried over to my adult life. I dunno...
Last edited by toastedsmoke; 07-20-2010 at 08:50 PM.
Reason: Upon further reflection...
I think there are far more "types" of overweight people. I think there are dozens, if not hundreds of factors that contribute to weight gain, and also that there are just as many factors that contribute finding success with weight loss and maintenance.
I think that's why it's so hard to find a diet plan that works equally well for everyone. Eventually, there may come a day when we have a diagnostic tool that can identify the factors (ideally before they result in obesity) and predict which types of diet/exercise therapy will be the most effective.
I've been dieting since I was 5 years old, and although I learned early on that fat people were supposed to hate themselves, I never did a very good job of it. I was a chatterbox who made friends easily. I didn't really understand why I was supposed to hate myself, I just knew that I was. In high school I got the closest to feeling as bad about my weight as I was supposed to. Ironically given prescription amphetemines, I was at my lowest weight ever by junior year.
I was well-adjusted and I didn't eat horribly (quality-wise). Most of the time I ate very healthfully by the standards of "common wisdom."
In hindsight, I think my primary issue was a sensitivity to carbohydrates. The answer seems obvious, a low-carbohydrate diet, but I never learned the answer because I didn't understand the problem. I thought low-carb diets were bad (and my few attempts at them, seemed to prove it), so I never gave them a serious attempt.
I thought I had a binge-eating disorder, but I've since learned two very high physiological components. Hormones (birth control helped tremendously in reducing the ravenous hunger I experienced around TOM) and a low-carb diet (binge eating disappears when I'm eating under 100g of carbohydrates per day and reappears with a vengence if I eat much more than that).
Ironically, I didn't learn about the benefits of birth control until I was almost 30. I had avoided using birth control pills because I was warned that they usually caused weight gain, and I wanted no part of that. It was only when my pms symptoms were so severe that I was missing work, that I was desperate enough to give bc pills a chance.
I spent decades looking for the psychological components to my obesity - and also decades studying weight loss methods and nutrition. I think I even chose psychology as my field (bachelor's and master's degrees) because I hoped to figure myself out. But I was looking for the answer in the wrong place. My issues were physical, and the diet I would eventually find the most successful, was one considered "unhealthy" by virtually all of the nutrition "experts."
I did everything "right" and still failed, because my problems weren't what everyone was telling me they were. I had the right answers for someone else's situation, not my own. I didn't even know what mine where, or how to fix them, because no one was talking about those issues at the time. Most of the experts were also categorizing people into the two types mentioned in the original post. Obesity was either a mental health (especially self esteem) issue or a dietary issue (choosing an unhealthy diet out of ignorance, habit, or poverty).
If your peg didn't fit those holes, you were crammed into one anyway.
I'm not a stupid person, and yet I can't believe I didn't consider low-carb earlier. I trusted the mainstream "experts" too much and when I was told "low-carb is unhealthy and unsustainable," I believed it. For almost 40 years I believed it.
Even then I can't credit my own ingenuity and determination in finding an unconventional answer. Instead, it was not one, but two different doctor's recommendations, and a lot of study of low-carb and low-grain diets that convinced me. I needed to understand why I was choosing a diet that I'd always been taught was so unhealthy.
I had to unlearn almost everything I thought I knew about weight loss. I had to be willing to accept that my problems might be physiological, and that my solutions would also have to be.
Every time someone mentions genetics or physiology as a possible contributor to obesity, there's a loud hue and cry in response - accusing the person of giving obese people an "excuse to stay fat."
I never looked for a physiological reason, and so I never looked for a physiological solution. It wasn't until I started hearing more and reading/understanding about physiological factors, that I considered them a possible source of information/solutions for me.
If only I had considered the physiological factors at 12 or 14, instead of at 41.
The opportunity was there, but not the insight. Although I began reading adult diet books at age 8, and had even tried Atkins by age 14, I didn't make the connection. Atkins worked great, for weight loss, but it made me sick, to the point I was passing out. Sure seemed to prove the diet was dangerous (what I didn't know is that raising my carb level just a bit would have fixed that problem and would have allowed me to lose weight well).
Diet and exercise advice still tends to be fairly extreme advice. As a result, it's very easy for people to try methods that are extreme - and when they don't work well, the logical choice is not "try something less extreme," it's "if extreme didn't work, I need even more extreme."
But the body fights crash dieting. You can hold your breath only so long, before your body will make you breathe. And you can only crash diet/starve yourself for so long, before your body makes eating irresistable.
But even when I knew crash dieting was the wrong approach, the desire, the NEED for quick weight loss over-rode my common sense.
I still can't entirely say why, except that it's just the way dieting is done in this culture, and I'm not much of a nonconformist, when it really boils down to it. I can think outside of the box, but not too far out of the box. I tend to believe that the majority opinion is usually the right one, and it took me most of my life to realize that my weight loss was any different. If the experts said it was because of poor self-esteem, I must have poor self-esteem. I just must not know that I have poor self-esteem.
Try to convince yourself that you're not crazy, when everyone is telling you that you are.
Weight loss is a matter of trial and error, and I think sometimes the largest factor in lack of success is trying the same experiment over and over, and looking for it to succeed where it has always failed before. And largely because we're told success is a matter of "willpower," which means we don't have to find a different way, we just have to want success more. As a result, people find themselves repeating the same failed experiment far more than they need to. Instead of finding a better way, they try to put more effort into the way that didn't work last time, and very likely isn't going to work any better this or next time either.
I am type 1. My mother was always commenting on people's body size. When I was about 10 she said that me and my sister were too big to wear shorts or swimming suits. That was the same time I quit going outside to play. We would have been so much better off if she put us in the shorts and sent us out to play.
The sad part is that I really was not fat. Looking at pictures of me as a child, I wonder why she thought I was fat. I remember when I was 18, my boyfriend had a boat and like to go skiing. I would not wear a bathing suit so I just rode in the boat. I missed out on so much. I weighed 118 to 120. Not fat by any stretch of the imagination. I remember hitting 125 and thinking that I was so huge that I might as well give up.
I saw myself as fat so I became fat. I really did not see a difference in 125 and 200 pounds.
PS - I also really liked chips, candy, and Coke too!
I am a type I and a mix between 1&2. I have always had a poor body image. In high school I weighted @145 and thought I was fat. I guess it had something to do with not have "twiggy" thighs.
I dunno, I was a normal weight, ate junk food but not a lot of it, but after I lost by baby I went nuts and started eating whole loaves of bread for comfort, out of the blue, and gained some weight, to like 165 pounds.
I was ok for awhile, started doing a lot of baking for the family and eating too much of those things and got to 200... but when I got divorced I went insane and ate everything I could find, which was mostly donuts from the food bank. 245. Then 278.
I think I learned in there, somehow, to binge when stressed. That's what got me fat.
I think I am fat because....
