“Taste worth dying for.” 
Blair River was a big guy with a big heart.
River, who stood 6-foot-8 and weighed about 575 pounds, gained a measure of fame in the past year as spokesman for the Heart Attack Grill, a west Chandler restaurant that specializes in thick hamburgers and fries. He died on Tuesday at the age of 29.The cause of death is currently unknown, but friends are speculating that it was the result of his contracting pneumonia after a bout with the flu.
Heart Attack Grill is an unabashedly unhealthy restaurant – the menu consists of huge burgers, milkshakes and fries cooked in lard – and having such a big man as a spokesman was part of its tongue in cheek “glorification of obesity.” But those who knew River said he was more than the larger-than-life caricature he portrayed in promoting the restaurant.
Restaurant founder Jon Basso said he got to know River, first as a customer at the restaurant before working with him after he became the grill’s spokesman.
“Cynical people might think this (River’s death) is funny,” Basso said. “But people who knew him are crying their eyes out. There is a lot of mourning going on around here. You couldn’t have found a better person.”
Uh, no. Cynical people won’t think it’s funny — the man is survived by his daughter and there’s nothing funny about that — but cynical people might wonder why any of the people who are “crying their eyes out” bothered to tell this young man that he was morbidly obese, that his lifestyle was unhealthy, and that eating six thousand-calorie “triple bypass” burgers or eight thousand-calorie “quadruple bypass” burgers with a side of fries doused in lard will fucking kill you.
But let’s ignore the real-word ramifications of these spite eaters. Instead, let’s discuss how fat Michelle Obama is, and let’s clutch our pearls about the broccoli mandate. Meanwhile, River’s daughter just lost her father because no one had the sense to tell him to make a lifestyle change.
People are asshats.
[cross-posted here at Angry Black Lady Chronicles]
Mattminus
Michelle Obama is actually fatter than teh 600 lb anus burger guy because only fat woman are fat.
Bulworth
It’s possible someone did, but if so, he didn’t listen in time.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
When you are the 575lb spokesperson for the Heart Attack Grill, you’re basically begging to die an ironic death.
mr. whipple
I think he might have known that.
taylormattd
They have this up at Wonkette too. The assholes here are those fuckers that thought it would be oh-so-contrarian-antiPC-funny to actually center a fucking restaurant around a “heart attack” theme. What a bunch of pieces of shit.
Villago Delenda Est
Yet, the Muslim-Nazi harridan Michelle Obama would have advised him to lay off mainlining lardburgers for some broccoli, and she’s the evil one.
Lee
That was not even slightly uncomfortable. I was hoping for something much more disturbing.
General Stuck
there is nothing fattening about Arugula, unless you are a wabbit twapped in Michelle’s soshulist WH Garden Plot.
Downpuppy
Nobody told him?
Every inch of that place is covered in warning labels.
The belief that they’re meant for the Other Guy is pretty hard to shake.
Me, I’m going to get real serious about health. In a few more days.
Bulworth
Especially when you’re only 29. Only people older than 50 die of heart attacks.
Lee
@Downpuppy:
Me too…right after this next beer :)
Triassic Sands
I would enjoy reading about the bankruptcy and Grand Closing of the Heart Attack Grill. Sadly, I doubt I’ll get the chance.
The burgers look disgusting. I’d puke after one or two bites.
America. Where Too Much Is Never Enough.
Somebody should tell Rush Limbaugh about this place — and send him directions to get there.
long ago
“but cynical people might wonder why any of the people who are “crying their eyes out” bothered to tell this young man”
editing question: don’t you want a negation in there somewhere?
like: “wonder why none of the…”
or
“…failed to tell…”
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
since drug addicts are more acceptable in polite society than the morbidly obese, an analogy.
at some point in the life of many a junkie, they have heard all the warnings, they have been progressively consequenced, they have endured all the losses, they have lived with the guilt and shame, they often come to the guilt and relatively painfree decision that they are going to use until they die.
it is acceptance in the kibler-ross sense. i think the disgust and the anger at the junkie or in this case the fattie, is at the fact that they don’t love life, living,or society enough to change.
Glen Tomkins
Even people who are merely 35lbs overweight do not lack for friends, family — even perfect strangers — constantly reminding them that they are fat. Our culture doesn’t let you forget that, ever. Not the fact of departure from ideal body weight, and not the judgment that society puts on that departure, that you are a pathetic loser and slob who deserves the scorn of normal people.
People who are 350 lbs overweight are clearly a different matter. While we don’t understand the exact mechanics of how appetite works, these people clearly have some profound dysfunction of that mechanism. You and I couldn’t get to 575 lbs if we tried. Maybe 35lbs overweight is a matter of lack of discipline or self-control. That’s debatable. 350 lbs overweight is clearly not a matter of self-control. That’s not seriously debatable.
We may not understand exactly how appetite works, but we understand it quite well enough to know that this person did not die because the people around him failed to nag him enough to lose weight.
Rainy Day
Well… he was honest. His establishment was/is honest.
He didn’t/doesn’t serve crap under fake names. And, now everyone knows he died at age 29.
Live by the saturated fat; die by the saturated fat. He was unapologetic in his convictions. Fair enough.
When you want truly personal freedoms, you can’t get upset by HIS choices.
Keith
Yeah, but Rush Limbaugh says just go to a sauna to sweat it out of you.
Seriously, though, I was getting nauseous just looking at those burgers. I look at all the lard, cheese, and beef fat and imagine it would need half a jar of pickles just to cut the richness.
aimai
@Glen Tomkins:
Agreed. One hundred percent. This poor guy probably heard, all his life, that he was too fat. At least at the restaurant he was celebrated for it. I’m really terribly sorry he died, and I think the promotion of an unhealthy lifestyle is a terrible thing for our society. But people die at 29 all the time–they die in accidents, because they don’t have health care, etc…etc…etc… I don’t like to join in some kind of ex post facto blaming of the victim. Its terribly sad. He looks like a sweet guy.
aimai
WyldPirate
Keep the government out of our lives!! We don’t need a rib-eating First Lady who isn’t ready for the cover of the SI swimsuit issue in her mid-40s telling us to eat arugula!
Fat doesn’t kill! Fat, rib-eating First Ladies do!
I want my damned Palm Oil milkshake and one dozen Krispy Creme donuts to go, dammit!
Shinobi
Uh as a “morbidly obese” person who does not eat at the heart attack grill and just had a salad for lunch, let me unequivocally say, that someone told him. In fact, I bet a lot of someone told him. I bet so many people told him that he was fucking sick of fucking hearing about it.
Several points:
1. This guy may have had an un treated case of a binge eating disorder.
2. Fat people get shitty medical care and are reluctant to go to the doctor. This is largely because every time we go to the doctor they tell us that if we lose weight we will not be sick anymore, like magic. Thin people never the the flu, or pneumonia. (See this blog for some truly horrific stories.)
A friend of mine from high school died at 26, he was on dialysis, but they wouldn’t give him a new kidney, because he was fat. Did he die because he was fat? Or did he die because our society likes to punish people who are genetically predisposed to gaining weight. (Studies show that weight is as inheritable as height.)
3.”Stop being so fat” is the least useful advice ever. There are currently no good methods for long term weight loss. During some previous research I dug up that about 1 in 100 people who get gastric bypass or lap band surgery die from the surgery or complications there of. Those who don’t spend the rest of their lives in and out of the hospital often begin to re gain the weight after a few years.
Diet studies that follow people for longer than 5 years show that even when people continue to follow a diet, the weight slowly creeps back on.
Honestly there is just no good way to lose that much weight. So this is not particularly helpful.
4. Blair River had the right to live his life however he wanted. People die in car crashes at 29 too, and no one says what a shame it was that no one told them driving was dangerous.
I’m sorry for Blair River’s death, but what I am most disgusted by is all of the ridiculous things I”m going to have to read about fat people for the next month.
aimai
Ok, I want to revise my comment after seeing the video. You can’t see the “doctor” and the fake “nurses” without looking at the patrons and seeing a bunch of animals literally being led to the slaughterhouse. There is something deeply disturbing about the marketing of a “fuck you? no fuck me!” lifestyle in which chronically unhealthy individuals are encouraged to see killing themselves with overconsumption as some kind of radical statement of free will.
aimai
Mike Kay (True Grit)
They just hired Chris Christie as their new spokesperson.
RSR
The bigger issue is that many people live in areas where there is little alternative to such ‘nourishment.’ Or the cost of healthy alternatives far outstrips the subsidized beef, and oil, and high fructose corn syrup ‘meals.’
Fries cooked in lard? Not a problem (except if you don’t want to kill/eat animals) as a once in a while treat. I live around the corner from a trendy burger joint devoted to wild concoctions, some a lot less healthy than others. (And the adult milkshakes are great too!)
But we average maybe 4 or 5 meals a year there. A fan-fucking-tastic burger becomes less so if you’re eating it all the time anyway.
But access to healthy, unmodified, natural products at an affordable price is critical to reversing the bad diet trends of the last few decades.
Midnight Marauder
@Bulworth:
Unless they are 575 pounds.
David Koch
We can fix Social Security and Medicare if we listen to Sarah Palin and ate more dessert.
WyldPirate
@Glen Tomkins:
sorry bud, but blanket statements such as this one from you are rarely ever correct.
some people can’t control their appetite. That’s true. Some people can become 350 lbs overweight simply because of a lack of discipline and self-control.
If the majority of people consume far more calories per day than they expend, they will generally can weight. If they they do that for years, they can become morbidly obese like this guy did.
Brazilian Rascal
“4. Blair River had the right to live his life however he wanted. People die in car crashes at 29 too, and no one says what a shame it was that no one told them driving was dangerous.”
Indeed. But when you’re driving a car called “The Neckbreaker” that advertises being the most unsafe vehicle never approved by any oversight agency that proudly boasts seatbelts made out of toilet paper and give the finger to people saying maybe a smaller, safer car would be, you know, safer, it IS more of a shame.
The Dangerman
Do you think there is a chance in hell he had life insurance? Or is his daughter SOL? Nothing funny there.
gnomedad
So will CBS do a follow-up at this place?
Agree with the compassion for Blair River, but it would have been cool if he could have found acceptance as something other than a mascot for this place.
BGK
I’m going to say the following uncomfortable-for-me things up front to establish that I’m asking my question in all honesty, not as a troll.
I used to be “super obese.” I’m not any longer. I became so despite eating fast food fewer times in a year than I could count on one hand. Based on my appearance, I was accused of being everything from a Limbaugh-loving fascist to the reason our company’s health plan was so expensive. (This I found particularly ironic, as during my obese years on a non-self-funded plan, my employer and I shoveled about $60,000 into various plans which paid out on my behalf about $300 in benefits). I think saying “heart attack” anything in relation to food is puerile.
In other words, I’m reflexively defensive about beating on anyone because of his or her weight.
Would you-plural feel the same sense of disdain, outrage, whatever, if this man had been thin and a BASE jumper? Or a mountain climber? Or partook of another elective physical activity putting his personal safety at risk?
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
The mister here says he thinks he saw an interview with this young man, and when he was questioned about the need to lose weight and eat healthier told the interviewer that it just wasn’t worth it.
Aside from whether or not he suffered from an appetite disorder, and he very well may have, I think he didn’t want to be here any longer and the fact that he had a child was not enough to sway him to stay and take care of himself.
P.S. I like burgers but those just looked disgusting.
gnomedad
@aimai:
I felt that too and you found the words; thanks.
Brachiator
The guy was a spokesperson for “Heart Attack Grill,” but the news article doesn’t have a word to say about Blair River’s life, food habits, or personal or family medical history. It doesn’t even mention how often he ate at the grill or any place else. I can’t play the video at my current location. Does it mention or feature him?
Still, haven’t we learned anything about the futility of doing long distance diagnoses? I guess not.
wengler
Watching the video, the restaurant is more of a gimmick than anything. And also it looks like the server “nurses” are likely more of a draw than the food. It looks like a perfectly fun place to go once a year. Most importantly it isn’t lying about what it is serving.
I think the anxiety people have around government curtailing junk food derives from those same people using food as a stress reliever. Food is the new cigarette at the end of a long shift. It has also been discouraging to see many progressives going out and adopting a very conservative framework when talking about food issues. It allows rightwingers to play up “choice” angle while not addressing their practices like factory farming and chemical processing that puts money in their pockets while letting our people rot.
Douglas
I must’ve missed our crack-addicted governors…
David Koch
His grave diggers are gonna have to dig a big hole.
Glen Tomkins
@Midnight Marauder: The story says that Blair River died of pneumonia. That has nothing whatever to do with Coronary Artery Disease.
The morbidly obese generally don’t live to MI age, so it’s hard to say how much their condition advances the age of risk for MIs. Probably some, but it’s a fairly theoretical question.
MobiusKlein
@aimai: true, considering that the ‘nurses’ could not retain their skinny sizes if they actually ate there.
I consider that deceitful and misleading.
Well, I suppose they could eat there if they have a special room for them to vomit in.
Geri
Umm, so has anyone noticed that they think he died of pneumonia and the flu, which are not caused by eating too many burgers? He quite possibly was not treated properly if he went to the hospital because doctors have a tendency to focus on weight rather than what is actually wrong with you.
I have a friend who ended up hospitalized with dehydration because when she went to the doctor about her sore throat she got a lecture on diet and was tested for high blood pressure and high cholesterol, while the fact that her throat was swelling shut and she couldn’t swallow anything was ignored.
And believe me, if you’re even half his size you can’t turn around without some total stranger telling you that you’re going to drop dead any minute if you don’t lose weight.
General Stuck
Some doctors are real assholes when it comes to weight and the BMI. They are usually skinny ones by personal metabolism and love to preach why can’t everyone be like them.
I agree extra weight is a catalyst for medical problems in general, but I am, at 200 pounds and 5’10” considered by my fat crusading doc, as fatter than a hog obese, where optimally, I could be normal at 180, for a lifelong stout (fairly muscular} person. That’s 20 pounds and no call for imposing the O word. Scrawny fucker.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
Nobody was forcing this guy to become the spokesman for a cutsey-poo restaurant that titters and winks at the notion that bad food is bad for you. He might’ve been a solid guy all-round, but he chose to endorse a stupid thing.
As an aside, it must suck to work there. Imagine telling and hearing the same barely funny joke every day where you work. Day in, day out. Ugh.
Legalize
I always have a hard time with these kind of stories. I’m sorry dude died, and I’m sorry that people who loved him are left behind missing him. But, he celebrated this totally gross lifestyle, and by the sound of things, his restaurant is pretty popular – which means that other people celebrate the same gross lifestyle. And I am dubious about the assertion that it’s hard and expensive to find healthy food,a and to exercise. It’s not. This fella didn’t have to eat like a saint and pay for personal trainers IN ORDER TO NOT DIE. This goes for most people.
Mattminus
@Douglas:
We make the crack addicts mayor of D.C. instead.
Maude
@Shinobi:
No one knows why some gain weight and some don’t.
It creeps me out when people feel they can tell someone to lose weight.
I don’t care what someone weighs. If I like the person, I like the person.
I think it’s another outlet for cruelty.
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@Geri: Oh hell, the doctors completely missed that I had pneumonia twice, and I was only 15 pounds overweight. Of course, it may be that I was the wrong gender because they immediately spotted that my husband had it even though I was a lot sicker. Took them an extra week to figure out what was wrong with me.
Poor guy. I am now 40 pounds overweight and it feels like any respiratory problem is worse because of the excess weight and that may just be wrong, it may not really be any harder, but it sure feels harder. I can’t imagine having pneumonia and trying to catch my breath if I was any more overweight.
Midnight Marauder
@aimai:
At some point, it becomes less of something that you can facetiously joke about, and more of an illustration that you don’t place that much value on yourself. You can say that you care about yourself, but it is hard to take those words seriously when you are dining at a place whose mission statement from the beginning has been “the declared intent of serving “nutritional pornography,” food “so bad for you it’s shocking.” Those are the kinds of things the owner of the Heart Attack Grill was saying in 2005. We are talking about an establishment who celebrates customers who weigh more than 350 pounds by letting them eat for free if they weigh in with a doctor or nurse before each burger.
Let us also not overlook the owner of this fine establishment, Jon Basso. Take a look at these exchanges from the time Basso appeared on Neil Cavuto’s show back on November 12, 2010:
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@MobiusKlein: I wondered if the guy doing the show was going to go puke off-camera after eating that horrible thing.
WyldPirate
@Shinobi: @Shinobi:
There is a lot to take apart in this post…
Perhaps they didn’t give him a kidney because they couldn’t find a match. Perhaps he was so morbidy obese that he wasn’t a good candidate for transplant surgery.
Whatever the reason, I seriously that the doctors were “punishing him” because he was fat.
all surgery has risks. They cut a hole in your body, snip open your GI tract, staple it, remove and reconnect your small bowl. There are risks of infection and blood clots at a very minimum.
That’s why it’s caused a lifestyle change, not “following a diet”. and yes, there are ways to lose that much weight, they either take a long time and a lot of effort or they involve surgery and a lot of effort. No matter the method, it takes hard work and dedication.
Do some people have a genetic predisposition to put on weight? Yes they do. Does that mean that all of them that do are condemned to a life of obesity or morbid obesity? No.
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel): Imagine the smell of that place on your clothes and in your hair when you get home.
zuzu (not that one, the other one)
What Shinobi, BGK and a few others have said.
He knew he was fat. The people around him knew he was fat. The people around him could not have failed to inform him he was fat. This likely included random strangers — including strangers on the internet! — because if there’s anything the public likes to comment on, it’s the size of someone else’s ass.
Fat people are being blamed for everything from global warming to the cost of health care to the shrinking size of airline seats to the decline of America’s schools.
Yet despite all this public shaming going on of fat people, it hasn’t done a damn thing for the “obesity epidemic” you hear so much about (and when you hear about it, you usually hear about how much more “obese” everyone has gotten in the past 20 years, which manages to sweep in the period when the CDC changed its definition of obesity, so that people who were previously considered overweight were now considered obese, and people previously considered normal were now considered overweight. All without gaining an ounce. In the past 10 or 15 years? Not much change at all, but a whole lot more shaming).
By all means, talk about the restaurant and its Sarah-Palin-esque adolescent-rebellion marketing. Talk about agricultural policy distorting the food supply. Talk about school lunches and soda machines in schools and advertising crap to kids. Talk about a car culture that prevents resources spent on safe places to walk. Talk about food deserts and the fact that until very, very recently, government nutrition programs were far less interested in good nutrition for people on public assistance and much more interested in finding a place to dump high-fat, unhealthy agricultural surplus. Talk about how equating thinness with healthiness and fatness with ill health means that fat people are too ashamed or embarrassed to go to the doctor and thin people often have problems that are overlooked.
But to talk about how this guy could have been thin IF ONLY SOMEONE HAD TOLD HIM HE WAS TEH FAT? That’s just plain ignorant.
kth
@Shinobi: It really isn’t about the poor schlub, but about the mass marketing of perpetual adolescence. Like it’s cool to eat shit that’s bad for you. Don’t listen to your mother!
Xecky Gilchrist
I find shows about people eating to be kind of gross regardless of the foodstuffs or people involved. Sad that large chunks of time on the Travel channel and the Food network are devoted to panning lovingly over restaurants full of masticating tourists.
That said, these burgers do look pretty nasty.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Triassic Sands:
No, no, no. Ur doin it rong.
Liberals don’t want Rush Limbaugh to go there because it would really piss us off if he did that. In fact we are drafting legislation to make it a Federal crime for him to go and eat there twice a day and three times on Sunday.
Mnemosyne
@BGK:
Yes, it’s true — when Jan Davis died in 1999 trying to prove that base jumping in Yosemite was perfectly safe, I felt the same sense of irony fulfilled that I do with this story. And I thought she was incredibly, incredibly stupid to have endangered her life doing something that she knew perfectly well was dangerous.
Sorry, I guess yours was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but, yes, people do mock people who die stupid and ironic deaths even if they aren’t obese. What do you think the Darwin Awards are?
Marc
At least smokers, alcoholics, and drug addicts don’t play make-believe that their habits aren’t unhealthy. If you are 350+ pounds overweight there is a problem – maybe physical, maybe psychological. But places like this one aren’t helping you, and people who tell you it’s OK to eat 6,000+ calorie meals are no different than someone advertising “drink a bottle of whiskey in one sitting for 50 bucks” specials. The sort of people who’d be able to do it are precisely the people who, you know, really shouldn’t be doing it.
I do have to admit that this does come across sort of like having the “no seatbelts, no speed limits, no brakes” spokesman die in a messy car crash.
WyldPirate
@zuzu (not that one, the other one):
This is simply bullshit. The weight of Americans has gone up across the board over the past 30-40 years. Most profoundly in children. These children will be developing diseses in their 30s and 40as that were nearly unseen until the 60-70s a generation ago.
The obesity epidemic is real and is the primary cause in the increase in rates of Type 2 diabetes and all the problems associated with it. Additionally, the increase in obesity has almost offset the progress made from the decrease in cardiovascular disease because of decreased rates of smoking.
Sarah, Proud and Tall
This reminds me of the Flarety family who used to live in a trailer on the outskirts of town. They had two daughters – Big Tina and Little Tina.
Big Tina was the older daughter. She weighed about 300 pounds. Little Tina was younger but she weighed about 500 pounds.
Of course, Big Tina died in a plane crash, while Little Tina ended up moving to Arizona and marrying a state Senator after a successful career as a “very big and very tall” model.
Goes to show you never can tell.
Marc
At least smokers, alcoholics, and drug addicts don’t have online advocates playing make-believe that their habits aren’t unhealthy. If you are 350+ pounds overweight there is a problem – maybe physical, maybe psychological. But places like this one aren’t helping you, and people who tell you it’s OK to eat 6,000+ calorie meals are no different than someone advertising “drink a bottle of whiskey in one sitting for 50 bucks” specials. The sort of people who’d be able to do it are precisely the people who, you know, really shouldn’t be doing it.
I do have to admit that this does come across sort of like having the “no seatbelts, no speed limits, no brakes” spokesman die in a messy car crash.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
Eat Baby, Eat.
mad the swine
Point one: that food looks good. Am I the only person in this thread who’s going to stand up for traditional American cuisine?
Point two: the dead man died of pneumonia, not a heart attack or diabetes. It’s fair to speculate that his obesity made it worse, but I don’t think you can blame that strictly on the “Heart Attack Grill” – he was fat before eating there, after all.
Point three: the idea that fat people are lazy and should be treated with contempt until they slim down needs to go away, like, now. Morbid obesity is a disease. You can ask the AIDS epidemic how well shame and stigmatization work to control diseases.
ABL thinks the problem is that this guy’s friends and family didn’t put enough pressure on him or penalize him enough for being fat. Bullshit. There are many reasons why people are fat; ‘because people don’t criticize obese people enough’ is not one of them.
Cermet
Just had my doctor appointment and my MD yelled at me for losing too much total weight (been loosing 6 lbs/month for six months straight – far too easy thanks to zero dairy, sugar, and bitter mellon (1 gm x3/day.) That said, my BMI is 23.0 and I’m too thin?! Not by that scale.
Aside, for years I ran five miles every F’ing single day and never lost any significant weight, and now I run three miles twice a week (slower pace, too) and I am loosing fast – it is all about intake, not excerize.
Ok, most people say that I look too thin but 23.0 is on the high end of normal – please, which is it? Are all these people and the doctor wrong? Looking in the mirror even I say too thin … I’m only a little above average in height and maybe I gatta stop (but I’ll never go back to dairy no matter what.)
Those scales can’t be right … I hope or else we are chasing a very hard moving flag.
Jeremy H
@RainyDay: “Live by the saturated fat; die by the saturated fat.”
Good god, the nutritional vampire myths that simply won’t die…
Saturated fat is not the problem.
I’ll say that again, because it bears repeating:
Saturated. Fat. Is. Not. The. Problem.
Fructose, refined carbohydrates, gluten grains, industrially-extracted seed oils. These are the crux of our obesity epidemic.
Fructose, at least in the quantities commonly consumed today (thanks, corn syrup manufacturers!), is a liver toxin that causes non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and contributes to insulin resistance and, eventually, Type II diabetes. As Dr. Robert Lustig of UCSF says: “Alcohol without the buzz”.
Refined carbohydrates cause elevated insulin levels – and thus an increased tendency of fat cells to store lipids – and eventually to insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome and Type II diabetes.
Gluten grains fuck with so many body systems that I can’t even begin to get into here. But look up leaky gut syndrome, leptin signalling (critical in appetite regulation), lectins, etc.
And seed oils (canola and all the other crap used in so many restaurants) contain very high percentages of easily-oxidisable O6 fatty acids that in excess are also hepatotoxins and contribute – yet again – insulin resistance.
This poor chap was the victim of a diet that was stuffed full of refined carbs, fructose and poor-quality fats. If he’d stuffed his face with just meat and lard every day and skipped the buns, fries and shakes, I can guarantee that he would have remained a lean, svelte 175 lbs and with blood lipids to make his cardiologist sing with joy.
Quiddity
@General Stuck: The BMI can be misleading at times (I have similar numbers to yours, and getting out of the “overweight” bracket is near-impossible), but for this guy, 6’8″ at 575 the BMI is 63. That’s way bad.
Midnight Marauder
@Glen Tomkins:
I am aware that Blair River died of pneumonia. However, I took exception to your previous statement that only people 50 years old and older die of heart attacks. Plenty of 20somethings die from heart attacks and other heart disease related issues because obesity is a major problem in this country. Plenty of people just entering the prime of their life are struck down by massive heart attacks because they did not have any awareness of the threat that was continually encroaching upon them. People do not take care of themselves physically as well as they should because they usually don’t have the knowledge, time, and/or care to follow through on those pursuits.
Take a look at just a few of the numbers from the American Heart Association’s “Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics” updated for 2010:
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland: Definitely. My first job out of high school was as a dishwasher at a local greasy spoon. I was only there long enough to earn enough money for a car but I think I lost about 10 pounds just from over-exposure to food.
liberty60
I do think that we (collectively America) have an unhealthy relationship to food and bizarre image of our bodies- we celebrate anorexic models even as we collectively grow more obese each year- how fucked up is that?
So to the obse among us, I do sympathize- but only to a point; there IS in fact a “normal” range of body weight, and since eating is one of the few things we actually control in our lives, I don’t think it is any kindness to encourage people to be unhealthily obese.
Triassic Sands
@Brachiator:
No and no.
The video is far too obsessed with the scantily clad fake nurses and food oozing fat.
The owner is an ass: “I run perhaps the only honest restaurant in America. Hey, this is bad for you and it’s gonna kill you.”
Wow, what admirable honesty.
Mnemosyne
Also, please notice that we haven’t picked an obese person at random to whinge about. This is a guy who was an actual spokesman for a restaurant that celebrates binge eating.
Are we really not supposed to notice that any less than we would notice if the host of Three Sheets died in a drunk driving accident?
Mary G
@Glen Tomkins: Yeah. I’m disappointed in you, ABL. He didn’t need people to tell him, but they probably told him all the time. They love to shame fat people; it makes them feel all superior and stuff.
Some thin people also love to feed fat people. It’s like they expect you to be their proxy or something. I lost 120 pounds on Weight Watchers and got so fed up with people at my work, and even a few family members, who wanted me to “just eat this one” donut, slice of birthday cake, etc. I finally blew up at the worst offender when she gave me a pound of See’s candy in the office Christmas swap. I said she might as well have given me a box of poison.
@BGK: Good for you. You are the rare exception, and I’m so glad you’re not one of the 5% who goes around saying, “If I can do it, anybody can.”
@Shinobi: This. Also, too. I’m going over to your blog.
And yes, I skipped the comments to come down and write a comment, thought again, deleted it and started over.
zuzu (not that one, the other one)
@Mnemosyne: Pneumonia and flu are stupid and ironic ways to die?
b-psycho
This is dripping with so much “no shit sherlock” that I don’t get the outrage. At all.
You don’t go to places like this and regularly eat lard-slathered burgers and fries and expect to live to 90. He knew the risks, and clearly didn’t give a fuck. Sucks for his daughter, but hey, the man picked his priority. Why get mad at the restaurant when they tell people right up front and they eat it anyway?
chopper
@Shinobi:
depends on how fat he was. i mean, being obese puts stress on the liver and kidneys. and kidneys are in short supply vs the people that need them. transplanting a kidney or other organ into someone who is, say, morbidly obese is similar to putting a lung into a smoker. if there wasn’t a list a mile long after the guy begging for an organ it might be a different matter to people.
Glen Tomkins
@WyldPirate: What’s the most you’ve ever weighed?
Do you maintain your present weight, or your personal maximum weight, by counting how many calories you expend and consume every day, so as to keep them in balance?
Very, very few people do that, do what you imagine this person could and should have done. More people, but still the clear minority, bother to exert any control whatsoever on their appetites. Most people just eat whatever they want. There’s no thought devoted to caloric content, and no control exerted to avoid excessive intake. Despite this total lack of control, most people under this regimen get no more than 20-30 lbs overweight. Many of them stay at a decent (if not the theoretical IBW) weight, not 20-30 over. Something kicks in that stops further growth.
We simply do not observe what you hypothesize, that someone who added x amount overweight this year will add a further x pounds every year without end. The overwhelmingly predominant patterns are:
1) overweight from childhood on
2) go from decent weight to stable overweight over 5-10 yrs in late 20s-early 30s
3) gradual increase from 40s through 60s.
The 575 pounders are almost exclusively from pattern 1). They are over, usually way over, even as young children, then they get to their massive end-weight relatively quickly over their teens, especially late teens, then stay there until their premature deaths.
I’ve been practicing medicine 25 years, and I have never seen the pattern you describe, steady weight gain over decades. Even the 575 pounders almost always have a natural limit that their appetites impose. They increase to that limit, then stop. The morbidly obese clearly have a defective “thermostat”, that is simply set higher than yours or mine, set to 575 rather than 200.
WyldPirate
@Midnight Marauder:
Thanks for looking all that stuff up, MM. I was just about to post data from the very same link.
timb
@WyldPirate: I’m guessing you don’t know much about medicine. Or, to put it in familiar terms, much like your political analysis, your medical analysis is off.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Surely I’m not the only one who thinks the fucking corpse should be allowed to reach room temperature before people gather to tut and gawk.
Humans are some weird assed bastards. Clearly non-union labor was involved in the assembly process.
Mike Furlan
@Jeremy H:
Jeremy H I think is correct.
However, as I understand it, a “low carb” diet to be effective must be very strict. Maybe even to the point of inducing ketosis.
Not many people could do that. We are talking about on the order of 10 grams total carbohydrates a day for an adult.
JCT
I’m not going to wade into the weight morass here as it is nearly impossible to determine what all of the contributing factors were in his morbid obesity — but the trends towards obesity in this country are an absolute disaster. As multiple people have pointed out however– this guy didn’t get to 575 just by eating poorly, not even close.
I wanted to highlight this and play public service announcement for a moment — but what they are describing here is a classic picture of bacterial superinfection post a viral upper respiratory syndrome. This is a potentially devastating complication that does not get enough attention and can happen to anyone — this is exactly what killed Jim Henson (Muppets). The warning signs are a sudden onset of high fever and sometimes some chest pain and shortness of breath/cough on the back end of a viral illness. The fever is usually the tip-off, people often do not seek medical attention in time because they think it is part of their viral syndrome and they end up septic and dead.
Figured I would toss this out.
Midnight Marauder
@zuzu (not that one, the other one):
Because, of course, the two statements that you are pithily trying to add to were specifically addressing Blair River?
No, they were general comments on the larger picture.
mad the swine
You obviously haven’t been paying attention to claims about the health benefits of wine and marijuana.
Look. Morbid obesity is unhealthy. Being twenty pounds “overweight” is a fairly minor risk factor among many other risk factors. In fact, studies suggest that for people who are merely overweight, the health effects of yo-yo dieting may be worse than the health effects of simply being overweight. Blurring the two, and showering contempt on anyone who looks a little portly(*), is why ‘fat advocates’ need to exist in the first place.
(*) Especially women. Michelle Obama is not ‘fat’. But Michelle Obama doesn’t conform to the socially constructed ideal of the female body, so she needs to be mocked and scorned. It’s the same for men, really; it’s just that there are a wider range of acceptable builds.
timb
@Glen Tomkins: There are PLENTY of morbidly obese men who die in their 30’s from MI’s.
You don’t know the pneumonia wasn’t caused by endocarditis or CHF either
PhoenixRising
@Glen Tomkins: this person did not die because the people around him failed to nag him enough to lose weight.
You win and this thread is closed. In all seriousness, this tragedy is hard enough on the bereaved without strangers making fun of him.
My best friend’s little bro, who was about this obese but didn’t get any endorsements out of it, died almost 2 years ago. His nieces and nephews miss his quiet presence and his 3 surviving siblings wonder what more they could have done for him.
Mnemosyne
@zuzu (not that one, the other one):
Since his weight made them more difficult to treat when they became life-threatening, yes, they are. We also don’t know what his pre-existing health problems were — asthma is strongly linked to body size and having pre-existing breathing problems is not going to make it easy for you to make it through a bout of pneumonia..
Are we now going to argue that none of the 600-pound people you know have asthma so therefore it’s impossible that his weight could have complicated his death?
BGK
@Mnemosyne:
No, I wasn’t trying to make a point just by asking. You and others answered in a way I wanted to hear.
As I said, my question is a reflection of my own sensitivity. Not to go all random-conservative-blogger, a-liberal-ran-me-over-in-his-Prius and all, but I’ve been surprised any number of times by the Beck-caliber vitriol otherwise liberal people are willing to spray all over fat people.
zuzu said much better than I could at #50 anyway.
Bill in OH
@Glen Tomkins: Although, pneumonia can put an additional strain on an already weak ticker. It’s how my father died. I, obviously, have no way of knowing, but it is inside the realm of possibility.
Megalonomalous
There are so many psychological issues surrounding obese persons, and shaming them typically only makes it worse. You look at someone who is morbidly obese (and many people who are only obese or overweight) and they often eat too much because it brings them pleasure or comfort. Shaming them makes them turn to, naturally, food. As someone who has been there, I can say that simply telling them to exercise isn’t good enough. Going to the gym, being exposed to all those fit people, is embarrassing and not conducive to maintaining a regular workout.
Shame the phenomenon, not the person. It does seem like smokers, alcoholics, drug addicts, and other individuals who partake in harmful behaviors really don’t get as much shit as fat people (partly due to the fact that a fat person displays their state of unhealth 24/7, I’m sure), even if the behavior it self does.
That said, I am also tired of morbidly obese individuals going on about how they only eat salad yet still can’t lose the weight. If this is true, then you have violated the laws of physics. Congratulations. When I was fat, I was fat because I didn’t eat right. I had to change my lifestyle to lose the weight and keep it off. I educated myself about what constitutes healthy food, I found exercise I liked, and I kept track of my calorie intake and expenditure (the internet is a wonderful place for ALL KINDS of information–not just porn and political blogs).
In short, fat people: stand up for yourself, but don’t justify yourself. I’d expect a smoker to assert him/herself if I started railing on them, but when they start explaining why it’s okay or not so bad that they do so, it just becomes pathetic.
timb
@Maude: I think the general conclusion here is that it’s a moral failing….
which ignores medical research and experience and human history, but Michael Pollan said it so it must be true
Shock Trooper in the War on Christmas
@BGK:
For me the difference is that mountain climbing, at least, is hard. Getting to the top of a decent mountain tends to be a serious accomplishment. Even though the risk is significant, it was undertaken to accomplish something hard (and thus to some extent worthwhile). Getting morbidly obese doesn’t really fall in that category.
But I agree that it remains a judgment call.
jimmiraybob
But when you’re driving a car called “The Neckbreaker” that advertises being the most unsafe vehicle never approved by any oversight agency that proudly boasts seatbelts made out of toilet paper and give the finger to people saying maybe a smaller, safer car would be, you know, safer, it IS more of a shame.
Reminds me of when I was young and invincible. I actually owned and drove a ’65 Corvair for awhile. I would have eaten the quad heart attack burger too. It’s good to be the king. Of course, I eventually got over the death wish.
Midnight Marauder
@JCT:
For those wondering, CVD stands for “cardiovascular disease.”
pk
Yes if he made ads encouraging everyone to climb mountains or base jump without safety equipment. The contempt is not for his obesity, but for his stupidity and that of the utter morons who think somehow its so clever name a restaurant the heart attack grill and serve garbage.
There are some people who just want to get into other people’s faces and proudly display their ignorance. Did the owner or Blair show any concern or care for their customer’s health? Its unfortunate if you are obese, but its pretty stupid if you are going around encouraging everyone to eat grossly unhealthy food. Why should anyone not have contempt for this behavior?
Triassic Sands
@WyldPirate:
Actually, I think this is simplistic at best. People live in a wide range of environments. Some come from backgrounds with plenty of resources and lots of support. Others grow up in households with obese parents who build obese children.
Genes play a huge role for many people and while you can fight genetics, you can’t beat genetics.
I know people who have exercised vigorously their entire lives, eaten a heart healthy diet (at least once they were rid of their parents and free to make their own choices), never smoked, and in general structured their lives to be very healthy. Their reward. Myocardial Infarction. Had they lived an unhealthy lifestyle it’s entirely possible that their heart attacks would have been fatal or occurred years earlier. So, their choices may well have paid off. But how many people do you know who have very unhealthy lifestyles and never suffer a heart attack? I know a lot.
Full disclosure: I’m one of those people “I know” and when I sit it the doctor’s office and my doctor is significantly overweight and marvels at my “bad luck,” the irony does not escape me.
I really feel for obese people. I wish all of them had the support and resources needed to beat what must be an incredibly difficult adversary. But I don’t pretend they do.
WyldPirate
@Glen Tomkins:
The reason you don’t see that is that I hypothesized nothing like what you claimed I did. Nowhere close.
I agree with what you say and with what you propose regarding patterns of weight gain. I also agree that most people reach a “self-limitation” with respect to max weight based on a lack of conscious monitoring.
The most I ever weighed was 275. I fluctuated between 200-230 in my 20s and between 230 and 275 from age 30-50. I’m 6’1. I had a heart attack at 51 and was diagnosed with diabetes at the time of my MI 15 months ago). I ate a crap diet, got zero exercise and had a high stress job and loads of family history. I weighed 265 at the time of my MI.
I weigh 195 today–25 lb less than high school. I lost all that weight while controlling the diabetes with insulin. In my case, it was a matter of calories in and energy expenditure. It matters, in my case, it matter a lot.
Anne Laurie
… which, of course, never kills young adults of “normal” weight, except when it does. While I’m sure weighing 575 pounds was “stressful” for his cardiovascular system, so is severe caloric restriction — check out the ’cause of death’ for people with anorexia and/or bulemia — and most of all, the yoyo dieting that so many of us lifelong Fat Folk pursue. (Hell, being six foot eight is a cardiac stressor, and even the most dedicated fat-shamer is going to have trouble making Rivers’ height “his fault”.)
A (relatively) young man is dead, and his job made him an easy target for the shame assaulters, because one of the few almost-universally agreed shibboleths in our culture at this precise moment in time is that Fat Is Bad. Just like every time a high-school or college athlete dies unexpectedly, “everyone” immediately assumes that “the kid must’ve been on drugs” (illegal steroids if it’s a white suburban kid), since Drugs Are Bad.
All that separates us from our medieval ancestors blaming every ‘unexpected’ death on the evil eye is that we have so many more sophisticated resources for picking out the source of the curse and the witch to be burned in retaliation.
Emma
Shinobi (and others): Yes.
I am by all measurements morbidly obese. I also have normal blood pressure, normal blood sugar, in fact, normal everything.Until recently, when I damaged a knee while on a photography trip to the highlands of Scotland, was very active. I finally ditched my doctor after the third year of “we’re going to have to redo these tests, they can’t be right”. I had a previous doctor put me on a supervised low-fat diet that made me gain weight; he wouldn’t believe I wasn’t sneaking food.
We’re not “one actuarial table fits all” people.
But I’ll hear from someone. I know I will…
Mnemosyne
I think I’m going to head out now, because I can already tell that I’m going to be goaded into saying things I don’t actually think just to score points in an argument. So I’ll be going back to doing work now.
Lysana
Seriously, ABL, this post was below you. For the reasons already enumerated.
Midnight Marauder
@Anne Laurie:
I get the point you are arguing, but the last portion of your sentence is total bullshit.
Valdivia
@Megalonomalous:
What you said.
Becoming healthy is a lot of hard work but very worth it. There are so many tools on the Internet to help too as you mention. Even a very small change in weight can have immense health benefits. And those who diary their food and activities keep the weight off for years. As someone mentioned upthread is about lifestyle not going on a diet.
Tim
Oh, dear, sweet ABL…you are so insensitive.
And so right.
General Stuck
@Mnemosyne:
Good decision. Wasting ammo on fat/skinny wars doesn’t seem all that wise for any of us. I think I will have a Little Debbie brownie, or two, myself. Since I just walked the dog a mile or so, I can call a personal truce on the horror of it all.
stuckinred
Should I ask my brother, he was on the training staff at Mesa College where he played football?
zuzu (not that one, the other one)
@WyldPirate: Well, you could read Katherine Flegal’s review of the CDC’s own studies, in which she found that the CDC had greatly exaggerated the risk of death from obesity, and in fact found that being underweight was a greater risk factor for dying than being moderately overweight (like around 25 pounds or so). The average increase in weight over all that time that everyone’s been panicking about, 20-30 years, is something like 12-15 pounds for adults. Yes, “obese” doesn’t mean “575 pounds,” except in a practically statistically-insignificant group. In fact, there are a lot of people who are obese that you wouldn’t think are.
The mistake you’re making is assuming that weight, alone, is the problem. More likely the real problem is systemic, and it’s just showing up as weight gain on more kids.
People don’t get concerned about what’s in school lunches (hint: a lot of high-fat agricultural-surplus dairy and high-fructose corn syrup, because the USDA needs somewhere to dump all those subsidized products) until more kids start getting chubby. Then it’s all ZOMG! OBESITY EPIDEMIC! SHAME! SHAME! YOU’REGONNADROPDEAD!
And then the focus of the moralizers, such as yourself, is on the kids, and their parents. Lots of tut-tutting about bad parenting and greedy kids and DIABEETUS and whatnot.
Which is a great way of ignoring the systemic nature of the problem. Communities that aren’t walkable; cuts to school funding made up for by cutting physical activity and recess and the sale of soda; fruit juice and candy; food deserts where decent fresh food can’t be had at any price; rising home prices and spiraling cost of living meaning that both parents work, and live far from their jobs so they don’t have time or energy to cook; agricultural subsidies which distort food prices so that healthy food is expensive and unhealthy food is cheap; dumping of agricultural surplus on the schools and the poor; etc.
Lifestyle factors are more a problem than weight by itself. In fact, someone who is fat and active is probably healthier than someone who is sedentary, eats crap, smokes and remains thin due to high metabolism. But who do you think will be shamed and presumed to be lazy and unhealthy?
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to schlep my commodious ass over to the gym and go have a run. Ta.
stuckinred
Nag-ass Mika wants everyone to tell Sheen that he’s on the road to ruin, like it will matter.
General Stuck
And FWIW, I thought this was a fair and thoughtful post by ABL, on the broader implications of obesity
Valdivia
@WyldPirate:
Just wanted to say hats off to you on the healthier you. That’s all.
zuzu (not that one, the other one)
@Midnight Marauder:
Oh, you speak for Mnemosyne now?
Steve
@Midnight Marauder:
You took exception because someone made an obviously sarcastic statement and you missed the sarcasm. Please don’t be dumb.
On a separate note, WP is such a nutjob on the topic of Barack Obama that I find it impossible to take anything he says seriously even on a completely unrelated topic like this one. This is probably wrong of me, but I bet I am not the only one.
stuckinred
My brother says he was big but not like this when he played college ball. Says he was a really good dude.
General Stuck
@Steve:
safe bet
zuzu (not that one, the other one)
@Mnemosyne:
How do you know any of that? We don’t have an actual cause of death, let alone do we know what happened in the ER. As someone pointed out above, pneumonia following a flu is fast-moving and kills thin people, too, so how difficult he was to treat is just speculation.
I don’t actually know any 600-pound people. Do you? I don’t see a whole lot of them, even though they seem to be EVERYWHERE when these discussions come up.
You
stuckinred
This is swell, all you boozers will love it
bago
Needs a hoocoodanode tag.
Alan
It’s the bun and the coke that’s the killer. I’d love to have a french fries cooked in real lard. Better yet, cooked in 100% grass-fed tallow. Give me real fat, not the supposed “healthy” industrial–inflammation enhancing–vegetable oils ubiquitous in most restaurants.
David Koch
@stuckinred: That Mika is a piece of ass.
Midnight Marauder
@Steve:
Fair enough, I missed the sarcasm in Bulworth’s original point. I still stand by the arguments I articulated in my back and forth with Glen Tomkins.
Moreover, I will admit that my ability to detect sarcasm with a statement like that is substantially hindered by my own past experience of watching my father (who was in his early 40s and had just begun to get serious about dropping the weight he gained after he stopped playing football in his 20s) drop dead in front of me in the middle of a basketball game due to a massive heart attack when I was 11.
So my apologies for being dumb.
stuckinred
@David Koch: God, she’d talk your ass to death.
Sentient Puddle
@stuckinred: OK, that more than makes up for him drinking a Budweiser at the beer summit.
General Stuck
@Alan:
I hear if you eat enough of that stuff, you can float yourself all the way to China like a human dinghy.
The Moar You Know
Bullshit. I’m sure multiple people called him out on his insane lardiness every day.
I weigh too much. 6′ 2″, 230lbs. That’s WAY too much. Shit, my knees hurt from carrying it around. This guy was more than double my weight. I guarantee you every day someone called him a fucking lardass, and every day he went to bed knowing he was fat enough to die. If the daily abuse he got wasn’t enough, his inability to climb a flight of stairs, sit down in a normal chair (I guarantee you he could not do that without breaking it) or lie down in his bed without that breaking as well should have been enough to tell him to put down the fucking 1 pound burger and start trying not to die.
I could go on. I work a desk job and there’s a reason I am in the shape I’m in; shit diet and no exercise. Totally my fault, under my control. Any fattie who tells you that they can’t control their weight is a fucking liar, and you can take that from someone who is one. Lack of self-control ain’t genetic, folks. And this tub of lard died from it.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@Steve: No, you’re not the only one.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
Just on Tweety: Log Cabin gays come out in favor of DOMA.
They’re really a piece of work.
Midnight Marauder
@General Stuck:
Looks like your pockets should be pretty empty right now.
David Koch
@stuckinred: Gag ball. Plus, I love them blonde and dumb.
General Stuck
@Midnight Marauder:
Can’t help but wonder what this means.
Seanly
@mad the swine:
That food looked good? I love a greasy spoon burger much as the next guy, but literally larding it on just to lard it on ruins a perfectly good burger.
I was running pretty obese. Over a year ago, I was 270 lbs in a 5′-7″ frame. I was being treated for sleep apnea. I starting paying more attention to what I ate, went for fruit & low fat yogurt and cut back on portion sizes. I’m now down to 185 lbs – stabilized around 190 lbs but dropped another 5 lbs after I got fired. I know that people (on average) gain a few pounds each year, but I know I never want to be where I was before. Sleep apnea has cleared up pretty well.
JCT
@Midnight Marauder:
FWIW, I’m a practicing cardiologist. I’ve spent my career managing people’s “CVD” risk factors. I work in an underserved outer borough hospital in NYC. We see many morbidly obese patients in the 300-400 range. We have had to invest in a reinforced cath table and MRI bed to accommodate these unfortunate folks. Obesity is multi-factoral, but I can count on one hand how many I have treated where the rest of the family is thin– all the way down to the kiddies.
In my entire career I have seen maybe 5 patients as large as this young man. Again, multi-factoral and impossible to say based on what we know.
David Koch
@Seanly:
Is this Haley Barbour?
Dennis SGMM
It’s tragic that this young man died and, for me, any speculation or blaming is out. Me, I’m beginning to feel like a fugitive from the law of averages at age 62, six feet tall and 185lbs.
Say what you want about diet, etc. but something is definitely going wrong in this country:
From the American Diabetes Association.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
Far be it from me to shame others for anything that is beyond their control. I was always the fat kid’s best friend in school because I would never tell him he was fat. That said, I’ve known a lot of junkies over the years and one thing most of them will tell you is that it is ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE TO QUIT HEROIN. Cannot be done.
I see striking similarities in tone here. In fairness, I’ve known junkies who sound [email protected]The Moar You Know too.
Mark S.
Shorter Richard Daley:
It says Daley is hoping to land on a lucrative public speaking gig. Maybe he could do a duet with Tom Friedman.
Midnight Marauder
@General Stuck:
It means I shouldn’t be trying to post when I’m super distracted at work, since gibberish comes from my fingers, apparently.
Dennis SGMM
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel):
Wrong. I did smack in Vietnam for a year. It was so pure that it would melt in your hand so shooting it was out. We smoked it and snorted it instead. When my outfit came back to the states that was it – no more heroin even though it was easily available to me. Withdrawals? Well, in my case it just felt like I had a bad cold for a week. Being a junkie is as much a lifestyle choice as it is an addiction.
Joy
Aside from the obvious nutrional factors of the burgers and lard fries, I’m not about to go into a place that lets their barely clad servers set their ass on the counter my food is served on.
General Stuck
@Mark S.:
Maybe he’s pining for political prisoner camps here in the states, so as we can compete with the Chinese.
kdaug
Meh. Gotta go somehow. If you go by doing something you enjoy, beats the hell out of being tied to a machine for your last 6 and draining the family coffers.
punkdavid
I used to live in Phoenix, and there was a Heart Attack Grill at 44th and Thomas. I ate there once, the food was OK.
The real attraction of the place was two-fold. First was the simplicity. The only thing on the menu was burgers and fries (of various sizes), and the only things you could order for drinks were Coke, Bud, or High Life.
The second thing was that the waitresses were hot girls in naughty nurse outfits that were basically just a red bodice under a tiny white lab coat. That was nice.
Anyway, I’ll weigh in on the “at least there was zero deception with this place” side. RIP, fat man.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Which explains a lot of the moralizing, but still does not explain the guy’s death.
Unless you know that the host of Three Sheets was driving drunk, how would you know that what you had “noticed” was relevant to the death?
Kind of reminds me of the death of John Candy. A lot of people were certain that his death was related to drug use. But the medical examiner said that there was no evidence of drug use in the actor’s death from a heart attack.
WereBear
Not so. In my forties, I lost on Atkins averaging 60 carbs a day. And a LOT of fat, so, 2100 calories a day, or so; and I lost 70 pounds.
My husband loses when he goes down to 100 carbs a day. Ketosis is not necessary.
chopper
@General Stuck:
yeah, of course i want the lard. what do you think i have, integrity?
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@Dennis SGMM: Yes, exactly. I’ve been through withdrawal from legally prescribed pharmaceuticals for chronic back pain. It sucked, but no worse than having the flu for a couple of days.
Supposedly, when Mao outlawed opium addiction and made it punishable by death, China’s 1 million opium addicts disappeared.
A junkie’s fatalistic arguments are the same whether it’s calories or drugs.
I exempt nicotine which, I have heard, stimulates a different pleasure producer in the brain than any other drug. Not hard to believe if you’ve ever been addicted to that most perfect drug.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@Dennis SGMM: I’ve known people who committed suicide because they couldn’t quit. Not overdose, but literally jumped from a roof top and used a gun.
Dennis SGMM
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel):
Shit, I’m down to a pack a week and that is, for me, irreducible. Kicked smack, kicked speed, got tired of how clever pot made me feel but I still gotta smoke a Camel straight now and then. Go figure.
Anoniminous
Obesity is an observable stemming from many different causes. Off the top of my head and no particular order:
1. Genetic
2. Epigenetic
3. Metabolic
4. Psychological
5. Neuro-psychological
6. Natal nutrition exposure
7. Breast feeding (or not) and how long and quality of the mother’s milk and lactation cycle(s)
8. Diet “programming” during maturation
9. Societal expectation pressures — although this may be more affective for anorexia and bulimia
10. Neuro-endocrine
and etc. and etc. & blah-yadda-blah
Obesity is a medical problem. “Being over-weight” may mean a person has a medical problem XOR the person may be within the proper weight boundaries for them.
It’s hard to state without knowing what the trigger is/was and how to (medically) intervene.
A second problem, that is a problem, is our culture’s obsession with skinny people. The poster child is the societal indoctrination of young girls with images and approval of professional model body types; which are not only extremely rare — that’s why they get the big bucks — but extremely unhealthy. I hasten to add: men who appear to be overweight receive same sort of societal disapproval and disdain … but not to the same extent as women.
Third, the “standard” US diet starts-off unhealthy and then veers to the disastrous. Sugar (sucrose) addiction is a very real problem, and getting worse. The rates of early-onset Diabetes are beyond alarming. It’s no wonder ADD diagnosis is going asymptotic when the kids are stuffed with sucrose-energy and then expected to sit quietly.
I’m trying to get across here: Things Are Complicated. Appealing to Will Power to solve, assuming it does need to be solved, somebody being “over-weight” (and who says so, what is their criteria, how did they derive the criteria) in the best of circumstances is going to have the same success rate (lousy) of using Will Power to cure any other medical problem, e.g., alcoholism.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@Mark S.: ironically, he’s whinning about whiners.
Dennis SGMM
@Mike Kay (True Grit):
That’s too bad because, if they’d just waited a bit the drug would have killed them. As a junkie goes on their maintenance dose grows ever closer to a fatal dose. One score of something better than you’ve been getting an you’re out permanently. I’ve buried people behind that.
Cassidy
Buy a copy of some exercise program, go over to his house every day, sacrifice your sweat with him and be supportive/ positive.
I guess I don’t understand what’s so hard about this. Gluten’s this, genetics that….although I do agree with the overabundance of HFCS in our foods. This isn’t all that hard. You exercise every day; enough to push yourself, but within your own limitations. Eventually you’ll get better and able to do more. You eat a reasonable diet. If you feel like pizza or a burger then eat some pizza and a friggin’ burger. Tomorrow, eat a chicken breast. Drink lots of water. And stop looking at the friggin’ scale. Being fit and healthy is not hard.
Dennis SGMM
@Anoniminous:
Oh yeah, Will Power. Fuck, I’ve known alcoholics who were bleeding at both ends and the first thing they’d do in the morning was take a drink, throw up, take another, throw up and keep taking drinks until one of them stayed down.
That’s Will Power.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@Dennis SGMM: Dude, if I had a nickel from everyone I’ve met who told me that…I’d go buy a pack of smokes.
No no no. I quit 8 years ago. It took 3 years of quitting. And then I quit again last year because the quitting didn’t take. Oy. Did I mention I had a smoke last night at the bar? Don’t tell my gf.
Dennis SGMM
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel):
Heh. I quit once for eight years. Then one day…
Anoniminous
@Dennis SGMM:
That’s a curious thing, too. People will use/abuse a drug in certain social, psychological, or social-psychological settings and then stop when any of those change sufficiently. Other people only have to ‘experience’ a drug once and they are immediate addicted – a not uncommon cause for alcoholism; the person may not even like the taste/high but KNOW they want more.
By your account you were a heroin user but not a heroin addict. The difference is crucial.
Dennis SGMM
@Anoniminous:
IIRC, when heroin was originally concocted by the Germans as a pain reliever it was tested on personnel in the lab. By a huge mischance it turned out that the people whom they tested it on were not capable of becoming addicted.
Edit: I met people in the Eighties who were addicted to cocaine after one exposure. Never liked the stuff myself.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
It’s all about body chemistry. I injured my back and they gave me vicodin, it made me vomit. For others, it’s addictive.
My best friend n high school was Rasputin, incarnate. Others would be laid-out, wasted on the beach, and he would be surfing the pacific after doing twice the amount of crap.
laura
But being fit and healthy doesn’t always mean a non-obese BMI.
WereBear
If taking the drug was all it took to be addicted, everyone who has broken their leg or had a tooth out would be addicts.
And while I appreciate everyone who has lost considerable weight eating fruit and sugary yogurt and taking the stairs; good for you. But that doesn’t work for everyone.
In my case, eating sugar makes me hungry. Then I have the choice of being hungry all the time, and still gaining weight because it messed up my insulin; or eating low carb, lowing the weight, having great blood pressure and blood lipids, and not being hungry. Oh, and eating lots and lots of fat.
Which is good for you; in the absence of carbs.
Anoniminous
@Dennis SGMM:
I’ve known people like that too.
A paramedic friend was on a call with an over-dose patient. They shot him fill of naloxone, had to ‘jump-start’ his heart, had him in the ambulance on the way to the ER and the guy woke-up, mad as hell his high was gone, and jumped out of the back door.
With the ambulance doing 60.
The druggie was doing fine until the semi ran over him.
Tax Analyst
@General Stuck:
General, I think you ought to consider obtaining the services of a less assaholic medical professional.
Assaholism is a terrible thing. It might even be worse than being 10% overweight, although I admit that I lack the medical credentials to make that assessment.
sw
Oh for fuck’s sake, how do you know who told him what? This guy’s life probably involved some sadness, but that’s pretty much everybody alive, and maybe his sadness had nothing to do with his weight. Maybe like Kramer, he was never able to become a banker. Nobody knows anything more than he was overweight, he was a spokesman and he died.
Mako
Oh right, blame the victim.
Hubris
“Meanwhile, River’s daughter just lost her father because no one had the sense to tell him to make a lifestyle change.”
You’re really just a dick. Hope you still feel bad-ass about this post when his daughter reads it someday.
suzanne
This restaurant is literally less than two miles from my house. I forbade my husband from eating there. Heh.
General Stuck
Speaking of heart trouble
Okay ladies, you have the health of our tickers firmly in your bosoms/ ogle
edit – seriously, it’s no wonder the world is as fucked up as it is.
Wile E. Quixote
@WyldPirate:
I have said a lot of bad things about you in the past and will probably continue to do so in the future but I admire the Hell out of you for doing this. I’m 5’11 and weigh about 260. I’ve been fighting a battle with this for years and want to get my weight down for a lot of reasons, health reasons, looking better reasons, feeling better reasons, riding my bike faster reasons, never again wanting to be a patient in a hospital reasons and it’s not easy. You are seriously hard core for having accomplished this.
formerly morbidly obese
Food is the only thing that an addict will never be able to totally separate from – you still have to eat everyday. With any other addiction the substance can be avoided, or totally removed from your life. For someone dealing with food issues, it can be very difficult – you have to face your temptation up close everyday.
Caoimhe Snow
This is a fucked up, fat-phobic, holier-than-thou bullshit post that you should be ashamed of. I expected better from this site, and you (and a lot of the commenters) have really disappointed me.
Caoimhe Snow
PS: I hope you never have a heart attack, because everyone will be “well that’s because she was SO ANGRY” — or hell, if you die from flu complications people might say that anyway.
So disappointed with the hatefulness of this post.
Cliff
One of my good friends is a severely overweight lady – I would guess 5’10” and 300 lbs. I think she had heavy genes to start with, but she also had a nasty spinal injury in high school.
She hasn’t said as much, but my guess is that the injury is a direct cause of her physical condition. She could definitely eat better than she does, but I’m guessing she feels there’s no point.
On the other hand, I’ve got a Teabagger coworker who’s shaped like a basketball.
He pounds Mountain Dews like they’re the Elixir of Life. I’m guessing he gets no real exercise, but I try not to talk to him so it’s hard to be sure. He does blame boot camp for his weight gain, so I’m not sure how that works.
I feel perfectly comfortable blaming his weight on him.
Karri
This is sad. I have lost over 60 lbs in the last 6 months with hCG. I wish had found it before it came to this.
WyldPirate
@Wile E. Quixote:
It’s hard to do but it can be done. I was in your shoes for years myself and didn’t get it done. I nearly paid with my life. Nothing quite focuses the mind and the will like facing your own mortality.
Don’t sweat the other, harsh word stuff on here. I don’t hold any hard feelings about it.
Hang in there Wile E. Don’t give up as the effort when you make the breakthrough will be worth it.
I’ll be rooting for you.
Karen
Weight gain can be caused by a lot of factors, not just eating too much. It seems like obesity is fair game for people to judge you, stare at you, call you names and harrass you. In fact, it’s often by people who claim they’re only trying to help you. As if it’s a new idea that all you have to do to lose weight is to burn off more calories than you take in. You don’t think Blair Rivers heard that every single day? You think he didn’t know he was obese?
And yes it’s personal. I didn’t inherit the fast metabolism, my sister did. So as I grew up, my sister was constantly known as the pretty one and I was the heavy one who had no right to wear the pretty clothes my sister could. My mother had this sick little obsession with my weight when I was a kid and had a habit of giving me clothes she “outgrew.” She also would say things like “How did you like the brownie” even though I never took it or “If you don’t get thinner, you’ll never date and no boy will ever want you.”
Even now if she says I’ve lost weight, that’s the biggest compliment she could give but she usually only says it when she knows I haven’t and is trying to be nice and she really is.
I know that when I was a teenager, at 5’3 and 148 when I was 18 I was overweight but not quite obese. I know I’m obese now and my struggles with sweets, compounded with my health problems which I would have had even if I was thinner (Rheumatoid Arthritis and hypthyroidsm.) I also know that people feel that if you’re obese, it doesn’t matter what the actual cause is, obesity is always the cause. Sorry, that’s not always the case.
Glen Tomkins
@WyldPirate: As a pure coincidence, I personally top off at your present weight, 195, that I am sure cost you much effort, when I go completely into dietary free-fall, no restrictions at all, eat whatever I want. I make any effort at all, a level of effort that is, I am sure, nothing compared to what you have to do to stay at 195, and I’m 180-185.
I learned a long time ago not to imagine that all my patients really were like me, and if only they put in the effort I put in to stay below 195, they could lose that 50 lbs that is probably all that’s keeping them needing insulin. As a doctor, you have to get people’s full story, and when I see people that I know, from details of their work life and family life that I have to inform myself of to treat them effectively, that in every other area of their lives, their dedication and self-sacrifice and capacity for hard work put me to shame, and yet they still struggle to lose more than 5 lbs and keep it off, when they are under the most pressig need to lose 50 and get down to something like my weight — I can only conclude that they are, mechanically, not like me. They simply can’t have it as easy as I do in keeping weight off, or they would outshine me in that effort as much as some of them do in much harder life tasks.
At a maximum, top-off weight of 275, you indeed clearly have a much rougher row to hoe than I do. What I’m asking you to accept is that someone with a 575 lb problem is in a different league from you and your 275 lb problem, just as you are in a different league from me. I’ve seen patients with a 275 lb problem manage to do what you’ve done. That much weight loss, sustained, is not easy and not common, but is clearly doable for at least some people with a 275lb problem. I’ve never seen a 575 pounder manage the same thing. They are simply different from you and me.
Empathy, projecting your own experience onto others, is almost always a wonderful thing. But in matters such as this, it can lead us astray. You’ll see an alcoholic’s friends, with the best of intentions, try to ease him back into drinking with them, because they think that society and companionship will help the alcoholic be able to drink temperately. They understand their own tendency to abuse alcohol, which extends no further than using it to occasionally get oblivious, and cannot accept that an alcoholic has a much more profound problem than theirs, that the difference between their problem and his is precisely that the alcoholic cannot drink temperately, cannot restrict getting oblivious to only socially acceptable levels. Same level of will-power, same level of overall self-control, but the alcoholic cannot control this particular thing, the use of alcohol, at any dose level, in any circumstance.
Angry Lurker
Wow, I’ve never been so ashamed to be reading this blog.
You guys fancy yourselves more tolerant and open-minded than the wingnuts with respect to gays, Mexicans, Muslims… and you are. But show you some super-fat guy and you devolve into a spiteful mob as judgemental and self-righteous as any gathering of teabaggers.
I’m not a troll, I’m on your side politically, which makes it all the more distressing to hear you bleating like a pack of Sheeple about how inferior fat people are to you, how terrible it is that someone could open a restaurant that sells food you don’t approve of, and why can’t that fat guy just show some self-control and just, you know, stop eating? etc etc
Seriously, fuck you people.
/rant
C.S.Strowbridge
“Honestly there is just no good way to lose that much weight.”
I lost 160 pounds. Took about two years to lose it, and it’s been off for about two years.
And by the way, losing just a small amount of weight can have a large effect on your overall health, so even if he lost 50 pounds, there’s a chance he would still be alive today.
C.S.Strowbridge
“If you go by doing something you enjoy, beats the hell out of being tied to a machine for your last 6 and draining the family coffers.”
The healthier you are, the more likely that will happen.
Wile E. Quixote
@Cliff:
Yeah, I don’t either. I had Boot Camp on two of my Macs and it worked just fine, and adding it and deleting it didn’t affect my weight at all.
I gained a few pounds when I was at basic training and it was all muscle from doing about 2 billion pushups a day (that’s a McEstimate by the way) and from all the running I did to avoid being caught by a
homicidal maniacdrill sergeant. Breaking track at the motor pool also helped.Sounds like a future Medicare scooter customer. You know, one of the ones that carries a sign saying “get the government out of my Medicare!”.
Wile E. Quixote
@WyldPirate:
Thanks, I appreciate it.
In theory it shouldn’t be too difficult to lose this weight. Assuming that I can burn 10 calories per minute on an elliptical trainer that says that I can burn 350 calories, equivalent to one pound of fat, in 350 minutes, or 5 hours and 50 minutes. Let’s make that math simple and call it 1 pound in 6 hours. OK, so I have 70 pounds to lose. 70 pounds times 6 hours equals 420 hours, which works out to 17 days, 12 hours.
So if I left work right now, and got to the gym by 10:30 PM PST and started working out at 11:00 PM PST, I could in theory, be at my target weight some time between 10 and noon on the 22nd of March.
The astute reader will note that I have made certain simplifying assumptions here, such as the fact that in order to do this I would need to work out for 420 hours straight without sleeping, eating, going to the bathroom, going to work or dying. In this my diet plan is kind of like Paul Ryan’s budget plan, although I think my numbers are better.
C.S.Strowbridge
For all the people who are saying we shouldn’t blame this guy for being overweight… 8000 calorie burgers. If you eat 8000 calorie burgers, it is your damn fault you are fat.
There are people out there who could diet and exercise all day long and will still struggle with weight. There are people with actual medical conditions that cause them to gain weight.
But if you eat 8000 calorie burgers, then it’s your own damn fault you are fat.
And if you are 300 pounds to 400 pounds overweight, then you have a much harder time dealing with illnesses, including pneumonia.
C.S.Strowbridge
“Assuming that I can burn 10 calories per minute on an elliptical trainer that says that I can burn 350 calories, equivalent to one pound of fat, in 350 minutes, or 5 hours and 50 minutes.”
One pound of fat is 3500 calories.
The first step I took to lose weight was to start a food journal. Wrote down everything you eat, the weight (got a small kitchen scale) and the time. Figure out how many calories I was eating and how long I stayed full after eating them. I did this and noticed that bread didn’t fill me up at all. Not one bit. I then eliminated bread from my diet and started losing weight. I also found certain foods that really filled me up but didn’t have a lot of calories. (Bell Plantations makes this food called PB2. Google them. It’s powdered peanut butter, but with 85% less fat. AWESOME.)
Also, I stopped buying foods that tempt me. And when I feel hungry, I drink a glass of water first. Sometimes I was not really hungry, only thirsty. I use smaller utensils and eat off smaller plates. I either cook for one meal, or immediately freeze leftovers in single serving containers. (And by that I mean I put the containers in the freezer before I start eating.)
After more than three years on a diet, I will get sick if I eat as much as I used to eat on a normal basis. I’ve retrained myself to have a healthy diet.
Jasper
@formerly morbidly obese:
That put a new perspective on the issue for me. I know all about alcoholism, and it’s just fact for me that my own imaginary version of hell is being given one drink, and ONLY one – the desperation for six or eight more would be unbearable. But it’s quite easy being sober now because I don’t take the one.
It just never occurred to me that my own idea of a personal hell of a single drink, and one that’s easily avoided, is one that a person with food issues really HAS to face every day.
Petorado
That’s some serious projection coming from this eatery’s founder. You get a 575 lb. guy, that dies at the age of 29, to be the public face of a franchise that does everything it can to tweak the nose of all that is known about eating reasonably — all for the sake of a marketing gimmick — and this guy goes on to berate others about cynicism? The only thing laid only heavier than the fat at the Heart Attack Grill was the cynicism from Mr. Basso himself.
For every move that “the market” does to make living on this planet better, there appears to be an equal and opposite force to take things in the other direction, led by guys like Basso, just as a frickin’ marketing ploy. Hence the health plans out there that are the insurance equivalent of the Heart Attack grill.
Cliff
@Wile E. Quixote:
I was wondering about the muscle gain in basic training, too. That seems to me to be the likely cause for his weight gain. The way he tells it, though, he put on fat in basic training.
I dunno, he also thinks there’s no link between smoking and cancer.
I don’t have the courage to discuss diabetes with him.
Angry Black Lady
Some of you have gone way beyond anything that I said. Fat shaming? Blaming fat people for global warming? Huh? Thin people making people fat? What?
i will concede that I shouldn’t have placed the onus on “the mourners” to tell this guy eating the shit he was eating could kill him. So I take that back (and it is not true that obesity has no effect on pneumonia). The defensiveness of that comment annoyed me. That the comment was “cynical people will think it’s funny” instead of “cynical people, we really tried to help him” pissed me off.
I don’t dislike fat people, nor do I tell fat people to lose weight. Some of you put words into my mouth and then tsk tsk me for shit I didn’t say. That’s bullshit.
And if you want to defend a 600 pound guy who was eating 8000 calorie burgers at a place that celebrates and politicizes the constitutional right to eat whatever the fuck we want as some testament to freeeedom, then go ahead. But you’re being ridiculous.
Noss was a fucking nutritionist. Why did he even hire him? To stick it to the Democrats?
Maybe I’m insensitive. Fine. But this guy:
knew what he was doing. It’s one thing to struggle with weight and try to eat well. It’s quite another to say fuck it and eat ten thousand calories a day. And to the extent that the people around him were all ::shrug:: they suck.
And I’m the asshole for pointing out the obvious? Yeah. Fuck me.
ETA: I could have provided more information in the post, yes. But seriously. Fuck me, right?
Lysana
You were the one being incomplete and fatphobic. Fuck who?
Angry Black Lady
I was NOT being fatphobic. Are you kidding me? That’s ridiculous.
Angry Black Lady
Like I said, I could have provided more information, but the comments went far beyond “shame on you for blaming his friends.” Yes. Shame on me for that. I shouldn’t have said that. But fatphobic? People accusing me of shaming him for being fat? He was morbidly obese (that’s a fact) and thought eating 10K calories a day was a joke (his words.)
I didn’t say he needed to lose weight. I said he needed to make a lifestyle change (actually I said, someone should have told him to make a lifestyle change which, again, I will concede was unfair.)
But fatphobic? No. That’s projection, pure and simple.
Angry Lurker
@Angry Black Lady
But fatphobic? No. That’s projection, pure and simple.:
Fine, you’re not ‘fatphobic’… just self-righteous, judgmental, and lacking in empathy. Just like all the troglodytes on the other side of the political aisle that you spend so much time in condemning.
But hey, what do I actually know about you. You might have Asperger’s or some other condition that makes you unable to display an acceptable level of humility and human charity. So I’m guilty too of being intemperate last night.
The point is that ALL humans have this issue. Wingnuts just display it a little more openly. We’re just clever monkeys, and it’s built into our primate psyches, this need to feel superior to our fellow prisoners on this dying planet. We ALL need to work to keep this tendency in check.
So rather than getting up in your face and making you defensive about it, let me try a different tack. I generally enjoy your posts, and I have nothing against passionate rants. But PLEASE try to aim your venom a little better. There are plenty of good targets out there, people who are hurting other people, rather than just hurting themselves by overeating.
You’re not any better than that 600 pound guy. Try picking on someone your own size. Please.
electricgrendel
You know. I hope he did die of a heart attack. He’s dead either way. At least if it was a heart attack, then it’ll be even more of a PR disaster.
Also- obesity is a complicating factor for just about everything you can get sick with. It’s not just your cardiovascular system that obesity complicates.
keestadoll
I don’t recoil at this place’s existence any more than I recoil at the existence of a Fair Trade Vegan Bistro. Vive la difference!
General Stuck
@Angry Lurker:
This might be the mother of all projections. What You are guilty of, are all the false accusations you have made on this thread.
And yes, a lot of us struggle with eating and weight issues, and the enablers from sensitivities, like with other types of addictions, are not doing anyone any favors with their “human charity”.
ABL’s post was not the least assholish, but there is likely no respectful way to point out suicidal behavior performed in a public way. The self righteousness is mostly on you.
D. Mason
@Lysana: Shes a minority, everyone knows minorities are incapable of prejudice.
Angry Lurker
@General Stuck:
Hey, I didn’t start the foodfight. That would be ABL. It just makes me sad and pissed off to see this kind of nonsense posted on a website I love. I’ve lurked here for 5 years and this is the first time I’ve ever been motivated enough to join the conversation. Sorry if my first post was harsh, but I was kind of worked up.
I’d tell you to go back and read my 2nd post, but since you block-quoted the exact paragraph where I admit that I was being judgmental myself, I’m not sure exactly how to help you see my point. I’ll try one more time, tho I know that trying to reason with a health scold is about as productive as trying to reason with a Glenn Beck fan. You’re both so sure you’re right that you won’t bother to listen.
1) People who talk about OTHER people needing to exercise ‘will power’ and ‘self-control’ are almost always displaying ignorance. None of us like to hear it, but our ability to control outcomes, especially as related to personal biology, is far more limited than we assume.
I don’t see how shaming a fat person for not exercising ‘self-control’ is qualitatively different from homophobes who claim gayness is a ‘lifestyle choice’ and that the gay person merely has to exercise ‘will power’ (or pray) to overcome it.
2) 95% of all people who go on diets regain all the weight plus a few new pounds within a brief period. If you want to end up weighing 600 pounds, short of being born with the proper genes for hyper-obesity the best way to go about it is yo-yo dieting, not consistent overeating.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t a fortunate few who manage to lose a lot of weight and keep it off. Similarly I am sure there are a few “ex-gays” out there who managed to permanently change their behavior, if not their underlying orientation. That doesn’t mean that this option is accessible or desirable for all gay people.
3) ABL defends herself by claiming she’s ‘pointing out the obvious.’ Left unanswered is the question of why she thought that ‘pointing out the obvious’ would make for an interesting blog post.
Having been moderately overweight for most of my life, I can answer this question for you. People take a perverse pleasure in looking down on other people. As it becomes socially unacceptable for people to look down on the traditional out-groups (jews, blacks, gays, etc), they subconsciously seek out new groups to stigmatize. You know, people who ‘deserve it.’ Like fat people. Or insensitive bloggers.
I’m only pointing out, in my clumsy way, that the urge to stigmatize is no more attractive just because it has been transferred to a new target.
4) I know nothing about the life and psychology of the guy who died, but as so many others have pointed out above, I can guarantee you that his weight is something that the world never let him forget. If I had to hazard a guess, it would be that his career as a spokesperson for a silly (and unappetizing-sounding) restaurant was his attempt, for better or worse, to make lemonade out of lemons.
Most people are doing their best, most of the time. Shaming and scolding are rarely helpful, and should only be aimed at sociopaths in positions of power. Seems like there are plenty of those around these days, so why waste time picking on fat people?
eemom
I’ll just, er, weigh in here to say I agree with the General.
And I will add that despite all the nastiness on this thread, there is also a lot of heartfelt sharing about people’s weight issues.
Shit, there’s gotta be something good about a topic that gets Wyld and Wile E. to be nice to each other.
Cassidy
I have to disagree. Here’s the problem. Typically, when an overweight person decides to lose weight, it’s “I’ll eat salda at lunch” or “only snack on apples”. And it works for about a week, maybe two, but the person is miserable. And then they fall off the wagon.
Why? Because it was a half-assed attempt. Living healthy isn’t always about what we put in our mouths. The best diet on the planet, fyi, is on the FDA website; basic food pyramid shit we learned in elementary school. But back to will power. It’s a half-assed attempt, much like a smoker saying “I’ll only smoke this much today”.
You exercise, you drink water, and you eat a reasonable diet. It isn’t more complicated than that. It isn’t about weight, but it is about the willpower to live a healthy life.
General Stuck
@Angry Lurker:
You direct your venom at what ABL wrote, and don’t actually quote anything she said to equate your charges of shaming and scolding,
Where does ABL mention these things? There are commenters that do this, a few, but that is going to happen anytime something like this is talked about.
I grant that overeating is an addiction at it’s core in most cases, but it is not equal to bashing gays, race, or any of the other things you mention that people don’t have a choice in. That is just bullshit. Where in cases of addiction, another substance abuse case, the worst thing that can happen is no one says anything about the behavior, and the addicted ends up dying. That is true for drugs, alcohol and food. It is, often a disease, whether metabolic or purely psychological, it is not being born gay, or black, that cannot be changed.
And I will repeat that this post was well within bounds, especially given this guys public posturing on it’s ok to eat till you drop dead. It’s not, though it is a choice for anyone to make freely, it is not okay to preach it to others, and then have others make charges of reverse prejudice when it is pointed out in a thoughtful way. Which it was by ABL, imo.
And the only one being callous is you cerebrus, and a few others. in the mother of all over reaching comments on this blog. But that is what you do.
I am a person that is struggling mightily with weight to stave off the daily insulin needle, that is currently straddling the A1C blood sugar test. And I will take all the tough love handed out to stay on the needle free side.
Empathy is a virtuous trait, as is consideration of the feelings of others. In the case of obesity, taken to the utter silence zone, can deny the chance to save a life.
LongHairedWeirdo
Yeah, what kind of world do we live in where no one will tell a fat person that they’re a disgusting pig who’s going to die.
Okay, sorry… a bit.
Yes, his death is a tragedy, and yes, the kind of spiteful, “fuck feeling good and being healthy” attitude is stupid.
But the problem isn’t that no one was going to break the bad news to him that, wow, this isn’t healthy. Fat people hear it all the time. In fact, they hear it so much, from so many people, spoken in such ugliness, that it becomes easier to scorn the idea that if you eat good, nourishing food and exercise, you’ll *feel* better and enjoy life more.
Angry Lurker
@General Stuck:
Sounds familiar. How many people who’ve experienced oppression turn around and behave badly towards the group they dislike? How many Jews use the holocaust to justify persecuting Palestinians? How many black reactionaries resent gay activists because being gay ‘isn’t the same thing’ as being black?
Of course these situations aren’t ‘the same’… it’s never exactly the same thing, but the pattern of disrespect and callousness is always similar. The oppressor always has a good reason (in their own mind) why their own judgmental behavior ‘isn’t the same’ as the persecution that they themselves have suffered. That’s old, old news.
Nonetheless, it depresses me immensely when people who are at least trying to overcome these dark aspects of human nature prove so blind to their own prejudices and so insensitive to the hurt they cause with their own actions.
I’m sorry to hear of your medical issues, and believe me I sympathize. But it also depresses me when people who claim to believe in science and rational thought spout happy talk about how your really, really can be thin if you just try hard enough, even though extensive scientific research has proven this not to be the case. You can eat right, exercise, and still be overweight. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat right or exercise. But many very overweight people give up because they try to meet society’s ideal and fail. They don’t get credit for trying, people just see that they are still fat and scold that they aren’t trying ‘hard enough.’
It also makes me sad when people who should be intelligent enough to know better address complex, multidetermined issues like obesity with glib generalizations about overeating being an ‘addiction.’ It is for some people who are overweight, but there are literally dozens of other causes. This is also true for homosexuality, by the way. Not everyone who is gay is born gay. Not everyone who is gay is incapable of changing.
But who cares? It’s not your job to go around judging everyone’s personal life choices In the first place, you’ll often be wrong, and in the second, it’s not your business anyway. Judge not, that ye be not judged.
By the way, my initial post wasn’t even aimed at ABL, it was much more a reaction to the early comments in the thread, which were mostly self-satisfied, callous, preachy bloviations from people who obviously have thought very little about this issue and were mostly taking the opportunity to congratulate themselves on their superiority. At least that’s how it came off to me. I didn’t actually get pissed at ABL til I woke up this morning and read her rather defensive posts in the thread.
I also agree that after the first few dozen comments, interesting discussions developed. That’s one reason I regret my initial comment; I hadn’t read all 140 odd comments before I decided to put my foot in it. But again, it’s quite typical for humans to recapitulate injustices they themselves have suffered. I’m not immune! :)
Angry Black Lady
Um… Excuuuuuuuse me?
Angry Black Lady
you’re projecting. neither stuck nor i said anything about not liking fat people. that is an assumption that YOU made and then you go on about personal life choices and say that being gay is one of them? where do you even get off?
i thought the post would be interesting because it taps into the red state “fuck you i won’t do what you tell me” attitude. rush limbaugh blaming people who exercise for the cost of healthcare. sarah palin screeching about how no one is going to take her dessert away from her.
freedom isn’t free unless it’s 8000 calories and kills you.
i wasn’t judging everyone’s personal life choices. i was judging this man, and the people who operate this restaurant. i was judging a guy who ate 10k calorie meals more than once a week and called it a diet.
and by the way, the restaurant is open for business, this noss character has no remorse because ha ha ha, the triple bypass burger is so delicious and lard fries are good for you.
right, and i have asperger’s and no empathy.
um ok.
and whoever made the crack about me being a minority and therefore not able to be prejudiced: fuck you. seriously.
i have a cousin who is 500 pounds. so yeah. some of my best friends are fat.
Angry Lurker
@Angry Black Lady:
I think you should read the post that you are quoting a little more carefully. I did not write that being gay is a personal life choice, I wrote that “Not everyone who is gay is born gay. Not everyone who is gay is incapable of changing.”
Bolding added to aid your reading comprehension. Sexuality is exceedingly complex. If you can’t agree with the above quoted statement, then you are as guilty of binary thinking as any rightwinger.
Furthermore my point was that the reason it is wrong to discriminate against gays is not because they have no choice in the matter (that’s usually true, but not always), it’s because discriminating against people because of personal choices that don’t harm others is wrong.
You also appear not to have read the rest of my post, as I stated that (quoting again) “my initial post wasn’t even aimed at ABL, it was much more a reaction to the early comments in the thread.”
However, having read your defensive responses this morning, including the most recent ones, it appears to me that you are indeed part of the problem. Next time just save yourself some work, link to the Gawker article, add a nice passive-aggressive “heh indeedy” a la Instapundit, and just sit back and let your winged monkeys do your dirty work.
PS “some of my best friends weigh 500 lbs…” ! Dang, get the old irony meter fixed before you do real some damage.
Angry Black Lady
I read your post. I disagreed with it. Hurl all the self-righteous insults you want. Be as annoyingly patronizing as you want. Just because people agreed with me doesn’t make them winged monkeys, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.
My reading conprehension skills are top knotch as are your bloviating skills. Your sarcasm meter needs calibration if you thought the last line was serious. Sarcasm isn’t for everyone, I get it.
I’d be interested to hear your theories about how gay people are capable of changing.
Actually, no I wouldn’t because it is a stupid remark notwithstanding your attempt to explain it. What are you even talking about? Who said anything about discrimination against fat people?
Your reaction is bizarre, indeed. Your explanations are even more bizarre.
Kat
Okay, am gonna try the PB2 peanut butter and bitter mellon caps. Will stay away from the Heart Attack Grill. Have been exercising, and at age 57 all suggestions to fight the battle of the bulge is appreciated.
Angry Lurker
@Angry Black Lady:
Then you’re simply dishonest as rather than counter my argument you simply removed the many qualifiers I included, twisted the basic meaning, and tossed it back with a few gratuitous insults added. Or am I projecting again? :)
Also, too: spell check. look into it.
D. Mason
You’re speaking out of pure ignorance here.
My senior year in high school, a time when our bodies are still quite changeable, I went on an extremely strict diet. For 8 months my only liquid intake other than water was the half cup of skim milk I had with my cup of nutritionist recommended cereal. every. single. shitty. morning. I ate exactly what was prescribed on my daily dietary plan and not a single extra crumb. I was miserable the entire time btw. Not just for the first week, and not just when other people were pigging out around me. Oh yeah, I took an extra P.E. that year and I had a job that kept me active from just after school let out until 9pm, 5 days a week and all day on Sunday. After the water weight was gone in the first 2 weeks I lost 12 pounds and had almost no visible change in appearance. I gave up when the progress had been halted for a solid month and within 2 weeks it was as if I had never been on a diet.
The only good thing to come of the whole expensive ordeal is that I learned people who make fun of you for being fat will also make fun of you for being on a diet because some people are hateful fucks.
Angry Black Lady
@Angry Lurker: classic. you rattle on about asperger’s and winged monkeys and my reading comprehension skills and then call me out for gratuitous insults? please.
That’s what you said. I didn’t twist the meaning. That is what you said.
What does “incapable of changing” mean? Overweight people are capable of changing by losing weight (I understand that is not always the case). Overweight people can certainly make choices about living a healthier life, whether or not that leads to weight less. What are gay people supposed to do to change? Be less gay? That makes no sense. That’s like telling black people to be less black. It’s patently absurd.
What argument did you direct towards me that you expect me to counter? I agree that discrimination is wrong. Nowhere did I advocate for discrimination against fat people. Likening gays to fat people is a false dichotomy. There’s no qualifying “gay people can change.” When you break down your statement with or without qualifiers, you are claiming that there are some gay people who can change. That’s what I’m taking issue with. And that’s the issue you are dodging.
And in this particular case, arguably, he WAS doing harm to others. As someone upthread said, it’s like leading people to the slaughter. And the owner couches it in terms of “freedom and rights”.
As for spell check, I was typing on my iphone while laying with needles in my face, so I think I get a pass this one time.
D. Mason
I understood the meaning of the original poster actually quite plainly. Sexuality is something that people are born with but at the same time can be changed by choices or events. For example, a woman who is straight for many years can have a very bad encounter with a man(rape, spousal abuse etc.) and become gay because she doesn’t want to give up her sexuality but is no longer comfortable with men. This is a completely understandable choice but is not something she was born with. I’ve personally known a gay man who met a woman that was such a soul mate for him that he married her despite generally being attracted to men. I’m not sure that he stopped being gay but he certainly stopped living a gay lifestyle after having done so for a few years. Each of these scenarios, one that I’ve only read about and another that I’ve witnessed in my own life, are completely valid reasons to act contra to ones birth sexuality. Ones appetite is also something that can be a certain way from birth as well. Ever known anyone who had to force themselves to eat because they had no appetite? Ever known someone who should but didn’t?
Oh, and I’m the one who tried to defend you from peoples accusations of fatphobia upthread. Fuck you back.
Angry Black Lady
fuck you, fuck me, fuck we, fuck they.
i’m done with this thread.
Cassidy
@D. Mason:
No I’m not. You actually proved my point (from same post or earlier). You went on a “diet” as opposed to eating a healthy diet. You denied yourself. You made yourself miserable. There is nothing wrong with any kind of food, in moderation. People are way to preoccupied with what they shove in their mouths.
My guess is that 1) you sent your body into starvation mode as you weren’t taking in enough calories to sustain your level of activity and 2) you over-trained to a certain extent, never allowing your body to recover. You probably weren’t aware of these things, but that doesn’t mean regular exercise, regular water intake, and making reasonable eating choices isn’t the right way to go.
Angry Black Lady
Actually, no I’m not done. So in these cases of gay people going straight, then what discrimination are they going to face? Discrimination is directed towards what people can see, generally. If a formerly gay person straightens up, then they’re no longer gay in the eyes of society anyway.
In the context of what Angry Lurker was discussing, what you’re saying doesn’t make sense.
D. Mason
@Cassidy: I got up at 5 am to see a nutritionist 3 times a week before school. I practically worked to pay for their services(my single mom paid for my expensive diet food but the nutritionist and supplements were on me) so I did exactly as instructed. If following their instructions didn’t work then wtf should I have done? Seriously I want to know.
As for eating a healthy diet I have try to balance healthy with available as best as I can, it’s far from ideal but much further from what people estimate as my food intake. I admit to overeating as a young teen but after that, into midlife, I have made it a point to eat comparable meals to those around me who are thinner than I would ever expect to be. I’m not some kind of binger who pigs out on fatty unhealthy shit 24/7 nor do I eat for comfort, I’m not depressed. My BP, cholesterol and sugar are all within normal range for someone my age and my immune system kicks much ass so I don’t get to the doc much. I would love to lose some weight, but without a radical change in food availability I wouldn’t know where to begin.
D. Mason
@Angry Black Lady: I’m not talking about discrimination, I suspect there is none. I’m simply talking about the notion that choice can play a part, which you seemed to dismiss. If I mistook your words as a dismissal of the notion that sexuality can be both a thing we are born with and a thing we choose then I stand corrected. If you acknowledge that people can choose a sexual lifestyle, regardless of the discriminatory consequences, then we are in agreement.
Cassidy
@D. Mason:
Then what’s the problem? I said earlier, stop looking at the damn scale! Healthy is not skinny. Healthy is simply healthy. Do you exercise? If you aren’t, add it in. Nothing serious; a refreshing walk around the block after dinner is suitable. But that’s the other thing about exercise…you have to find something you like.
The key to healthy is not obsessing about it. If you’re vitals are healthy, then be happy. If you like pizza, eat pizza. Just don’t eat the whole damn thing. Tomorrow have a chicken breast sandwich with no cheese.
Now, beyond the healthy, if you’re serious about getting fit and losing weight, then you really need to sit down and find something that works for you. Plyometrics is great, but not for those with damaged knees. I’ve personally found that heavy bag work and swimming is some of the best cardio ever. But I like swimming and hitting things. Running is great, but wears on the joints. The elipitical is easier but only goes so far. But, the end result only happens when two other things happen 1) stop obsessing about weight and 2) stop criticizing what’s in the mirror.
A big mistake people make is thinking they have to cut food intake in conjunction with exercise. This is the worst thing you can do. Your body needs calories to operate or you start eating muscle mass. No muscle, no weight loss.
And just for the record. I wasn’t trying to fault people for being fat. It is what it is. But, living healthy is not hard. Losing weight can be hard either from genetics, poor habits, depression, etc. I get that. We, as a society, have an unhealthy obsession with weight and what we put in our mouths.
D. Mason
@Cassidy: There is no problem for me, I just disagree vehemently with your statement of how easy it is, it’s a view encountered frequenly.
After my failed dietary experiment I resigned myself to being fat and honestly haven’t felt bad for it. I don’t have an exercise regiment, I still stay active with some of my work(some shit just has to go down in an office), but the realist in me knows I will never set aside time for exercise. I don’t eat pizza, greasy foods give me heartburn.
If I consider it objectively I would like to lose weight, on the scale, and look better but the cost is excessive for the actual results I can expect. I guess one day I will develop some health problems, according to what everyone says, but I will still be in the same situation.
Cassidy
@D. Mason: It is easy. It’s just hard to break old habits.
D. Mason
lol?
Angry Lurker
@Cassidy:
Thanks for clarifying, I completely agree that good diet and exercise are desirable in and of themselves. I don’t quite agree that living healthy is easy in our society as it’s currently constructed, but for most people it is doable. And most people, if they do these things consistently for a long time, will lose some weight.
However, for most their body won’t be transformed into the Hollywood-style exemplar they’re hoping for. That shouldn’t matter- but for many people it does, and the constant criticism the overweight person gets, not from haters (screw them) but from friends and family who think they are ‘helping,’ only makes it worse.
I think it’s really a separate issue. There are plenty of people leading unhealthy lives who look great. And there are plenty of fat people who are healthy- in large part because they do all the things you recommend.
Angry Lurker
@D. Mason:
…And I’ve also found the same to be true. I’ve lost 30 lbs many, many times through exercise and a careful diet (not dieting). But sooner or later something happens– a sprained ankle, a busy month at work, family crisis, etc– to knock me out of my regimen, and when that happens the 30 lbs fly back on fast. From what I’ve read, each human body has its OWN idea of what its optimal weight should be, and moving that set point is difficult at best, and for many may be effectively impossible.
Mostly, different bodies are… different. We come in various sizes, shapes, and colors, and none deserve scorn.
WaterGirl
@Cassidy: I think the most you can say is that IT’S EASY FOR YOU. You have no idea what it’s like for someone with a different metabolism.
C.S.Strowbridge
“I went on an extremely strict diet. … I gave up when the progress had been halted for a solid month…”
And there’s your problem. You went on an extremely strict diet instead of finding a food plan you could stick with for the rest of your life.
Here’s what worked for me:
1.) Get a scale and weight and write down everything you eat and when. EVERYTHING.
2.) Do this for about a week without changing your diet.
3.) Check the calories of your past week and see how long you stayed full after eating what meals.
4.) Remove items from your diet that have too many calories but don’t fill you up. I did this and dropped pasta out of my diet. I don’t buy chips or other salty snacks.
5.) Experiment with foods that do fill you up for longer. Instead of chocolate bars, I take cocoa powder, mix it with PB2, Splenda, and sugar-free coffee falvours. I call it a liquid chocolate bar. 450 calories, 30 grams of protein, 20 grams of fiber, 75% of the iron you need. I eat it with what I think is a demitasse spoon (I call it my comically tiny spoon) and I have one or two spoonfuls every so often throughout the afternoon.
C.S.Strowbridge
@WaterGirl:
You can change your metabolism, for the better through exercise and healthy eating, or for the worse through inactivity and eating at places like The Heart Attack Grill.
Cassidy
@WaterGirl: No. Those are excuses. Water is available to everyone in this country. Eating in moderation is something everyone can do. Thirty minutes to an hour of exercise 4-6 days a week is doable by any standard. It’s about deciding to live healthy and stop making excuses for why you can’t. Your metabolism doesn’t force you to eat a bag of Doritos. Your metabolism doesn’t force you to down a case of Mountain Dew during the day or drink 3-4 Monsters. Your metabolism doesn’t force you to take the elevator when the stairs would be just fine. Your metabolism doesn’t force you to sit down and play WOW for 8 hours instead of going outside for some fresh air.
Healthy living is easy. It’s not as expensive as people think. And it doesn’t take a lot of effort. I’m not talking about training for the Olympics. I’m talking about easy lifestyle changes to make.
Cassidy
This is where people go wrong. They decide one day that they are eating healthier. So they think they can only buy fresh vegetables, or gluten free this, or stop eating something they like forever. This is simply not true. Fresh veggies are great, absolutely, but if it’s too expensive a bag of frozen broccoli will do just fine. You’re still eating veggies. Tap water is good for you, except in Pennsylvania. You don’t need something melted off a glacier in Norway to be healthy. Or organic…god that is one of the most successful marketing schemes ever.
You want to eat healthy? Easy plan. You take your plate, right, split it into quarters. Half is veggies, a quarter is starch, and the other is meat. Done. Healthy diet. Not hard.
WaterGirl
@Cassidy: You wrote post #220 as if you know who I am or what my lifestyle is. All I said is that you have no idea what it’s like for someone with a different metabolism. And that’s a fact.
You are preaching instead of listening. Over and out.
General Stuck
This thread is still going and only confirms, a waste is a terrible thing to mind. Starving myself didn’t work for me, it took a rethink of habits learned from childhood. Three squares a day, or you are communist. So I scrambled that up some, and now eat a breakfast, but not a formal lunch or supper, grazing on peanuts, or PB sandwich, in the mean time till an hour or so before sleeptime, where the only watchword is to not go to bed hungry, so a small snack, or small meal will do. Something I like to eat, like a bowl of black eyed peas, or a boiled egg/ And since the dog takes me for a walk every day, the exercise part is taken care of. Now, if I could get the Little Debbie brownies monkey off my back, the last 20 pounds to lose should be a cinch.
Point is, it takes a lifestyle change, of some import, at least for me. Just promising myself I was going to eat less at culturally approved meal times, did not work for me. YMMV.
It doesn’t bother me to get called fat or stupid, just don’t diss my jokes.
Cassidy
@WaterGirl: Bullshit. That’s an excuse.
WaterGirl
@Cassidy: See last line of #222.
anonymous
I know this thread is long dead. But seeing as how I read it this late, someone else also might, so I’ll throw in my two cents.
I suffer from dysthymia/major depression, which is refractory; I’ve been treated for it for twenty-five years with modest success. Medication, therapy, exercise, and so forth certainly improve matters. Even so I suffer from episodes of quite severe depression which are inexplicable to me.
In my experience, online discussions of depression typically involve four kinds of people.
The first two among these are sufferers like me, and psychiatrists or other mental health experts.
The third is non-experts who have been (so far) free of depression or mood difficulties.
The fourth is non-experts who encounter mood difficulties at some point in their lives, and who are able to overcome this through the application of common-sense mental hygeine measures — introspection, elimination of stressors, seeking greater emotional and social support, etc.
Naively, we might expect that certainty in one’s judgments about the nature of depression and its proper treatment to be greatest in the first two groups. And, also naively, we might expect some deference to these judgments from the other two groups.
In practice, however, we find much greater certainty in the third and fourth groups, and not much deference to the first and second groups at all.
There are exceptions, of course. Some in the third group recognize and admit their ignorance of the lived experience of depression, its nature, and its proper treatment. They may even be curious about it, and so make use of expertise of either professionals or sufferers to educate themselves.
Of course in the third group are also those who prefer their own expertise and who consider the problem trivially simple. Their prescription is often “snap out of it,” which alerts the astute sufferer to the prescriber’s ignorance and lack of empathy, and of the wisdom of disregarding the prescriber’s opinions utterly. Even so, such people are, with patience, occasionally teachable.
But it’s among the fourth group where we find the most ignorance, the least empathy, the least deference to professionals and the lived experience of sufferers, and the greatest resistance to education. Their having overcome their own difficulties by their particular method has often become a powerful, even central, element of their biography and identity, and the possibility that this method might not be generally applicable they experience as deeply invalidating. This is a serious barrier to their ability to recognize that the suffering of someone with dysthymia or major depression is of a fundamentally different kind than theirs.
The degree to which this discussion of obesity mirrored these dynamics is striking.
Angry Lurker
@anonymous:
Thank you for this. I agree that the parallels are striking. You did a much better job than me of laying out your argument in a non-confrontational way that might actually result in a ‘teachable moment’ for some people.
I remain frustrated that purportedly liberal, tolerant, and science-accepting people are not able to generalize the lessons they think they have learned and instead revert to callous insensitivity when the criticized group is not on their official list.
Angry Lurker
@anonymous:
Angry Lurker
(apologies for the double-post, WordPress does not seem to allow me to delete the original with the misplaced blockquote tag).