squeeeb's already made it pretty clear this thread is meant to be a troll....

I don't think it's a troll but it sure is a dumb way to make a point.

I've got nothing mean to say about you squeeb.

Love ya, buddy.

I don't think he has.

And I think irony is lost on some of you guys.

What seems obvious to me is that Squeeb's posts along with the rest of this thread should be read as a critique of the manner in which this board and all of it's resident pricks are quick to jump down the throat of anyone who is foolish enough to make a point without having first corroborated it with an article published in a journal or a major publication.

As evidenced by my previous post, I don't care enough to agree or disagree but since you brought up irony, I will say that I find the timing of this thread strange when the cumulative IQ of this forum seems to have dropped lower than ever.

So, someone posting "You guys are a bunch of blithering idiots because I made a post with a hidden agenda and you didn't 'get it'" is not trolling? Interesting.

Oh, and on topic, fat people smell like cheeseburgers when they are burned at the steak.

so what is the point, again? "You guys are all assholes because you reply harshly to a harshly stated original post - better yet, a harshly stated unsubstantiated original post?"

You get out what you put in.

Best Freudian slip ever?

I demand a hug!

I will hug you Fremen.

I think the causes and effects are a bit off on this one. In any case, fat people are a symptom, not a cause. The consumer culture is fucked up, capitalism run wild, domestication run wild, population run wild. Society eats itself.

so basically, fat people can just say that "society made them fat"?

while fat people aren't ruining anything, I think all this crap about being comfortable with yourself when you're 300+ and you're a BBM or BBW is just plain stupid. You're a walking heart attack. People who are grossly obese or obese and complain about it an do nothing need to take culpability for their own weight and do something about it. (this excludes medical reasons naturally)

placing the blame on society or culture is doing nothing but harm. Nobody forced you to eat that Double Quarter Pounder with large fries and a huge soda.. only to top it off with an apple pie or an ice cream. nobody forced you to sit on the couch and consume massive amounts of calories before going to bed.

People need to quit thinking that some pill or shake is going to make them ok. it takes work to make yourself into a healthy and in shape person. it's ok to spend an hour off the couch .. really.. it is.

People love the blame game. Hell, after Columbine... the country was ready to blame Doom for the homicidal rampage of two bullied teenagers. A fucking video game featuring space demons was the scapegoat. America is great at responsibility hot potato. Especially parents and overweight individuals.

But... apparently this wasn't the point of the thread. And I'm not smart enough to get that far.

...

You know what else is hard, Gucci? Being physically fit. It's really hard. People look at me funny. They tell me I'm "so thin."

Sometimes they throw Hostess products at me. My life is a nightmare of pants that fit and a low resting pulse rate.

In defense of fatties
 

Fat people are prone to a ton of health related problems. They require constant medical care and stay hospitalized for greater periods of time, thus creating a demand for medical professionals.

Fatties like to eat. A lot. Thus creating a demand for workers in the food service and agricultural professions.

Fatties also lead to lower crime rates. If 31% of Americans are obese, that means that only 69% of Americans have any chance of getting away from the police in a foot chase. Those 31% are easily caught and locked up the first time they commit a crime, thus lessing the chance of a long criminal career.

Fat people could save your life. Imagine you and your obese buddy are out for a (slow) walk in the woods. You round a bend and come face to face with a bear! You don't have to be able to outrun the bear, just your fat friend.

Fat girls provide a viable "last call" option. We've all spent nights at the pub, getting shot down left and right. If you happen to strike out with the hotties, you have a fall back plan with the notties. For the price of a supersized value meal, you get laid and they get a much needed self-esteem boost. Everyone wins!

Yes, yes, YES.

Good show.

Eat the damn twinkie.

I don't care about the meta aspects of this thread, largely because I don't particularly care for meta-discussion in general. There's something interesting to be found in discussion of personal responsibility vs. personal freedom and how it relates to the 'obesity epidemic,' but I'm still waiting to see how that goes.

As an aside, I always thought that calling obesity an epidemic was odd. It's not as though you've caught an airborne contagion that makes you fat.

I also feel that 'airborne contagion' leads into some sort of joke about Crompsin. I can't quite peg it, though.

Being physically fit is hard, in that it requires effort. It's a lot more work to eat healthy meals and exercise every day than it is to eat meals in a box and attempt to become part of the couch. The evidence clearly shows that not everyone is willing to make those kinds of commitments, and I don't see that it's my place to dictate someone else's priorities in life. This is why my sole objection to obesity comes in the form of the responsibility argument. If you don't like it, change it. If you can't be bothered to change it, learn to live with it and stop the bloody whining.

Yes, the beer belly is the final battleground of personal responsibility and personal freedom, but honestly it seems like shaky ground (like a bowl full of jelly?). I don't think anyone is talking about forcing people onto treadmills chained to a cartoon ball or suicide bombing a bacon factory. It's a matter of restraint.

Still, I'd like to delve into the overweight women stealing babies thing. What the fuck is up with that?

No, but it's also a half-solution to look at the individual abstracted from their context. Every one of us walks around with what we think are our own thoughts and feelings, the vast majority of which are instilled in us by our culture and our upbringing. We don't have a culture that values responsibility and restraint. We have a culture that values consumption and super-sizing. So, as true as it may be that obesity is a question of personal responsibility, just saying that isn't going to have one person lose one pound. You've got to tackle the context that gives rise to people's behavior.

And I'm including about myself here--I weigh more now than I've ever weighed in my life. Not by much, I'm within a pound or two of my previous all-time high, but still. And I'm not happy about it, and I have started taking action to deal with it. But I can guarantee you that making me feel bad about my gluttony is NOT a workable approach for me to win at a fitness regimen. What works is for me to start to inquire into what's behind the actions I take and the thoughts I have. When I really look, most of the time I realize that those originated outside myself somewhere. Have I adopted them as Truth and operated from them at the damage of my health? You bet. But not breaking those down leaves me like the guy standing on the bow of the Titanic yelling "Iceburg!". If you want to actually do something to make a difference, run to the bridge and turn the wheel, you know?

That's deep, and uncanny. I had a dream about this same "our thoughts and cumulative learning are not really our thoughts at all" last night, and was pondering if I would have forgotten about it, or somehow make a stand to enlighten this ethereal urge of mental crossfires unto others.

Or maybe there's too much rationalization... too much Dr. Phil mushy feelings shit.

Pick up your ass and go for a walk. The journey to a 32 inch waist starts with a single step.

I wish they made irony-flavored snack cakes. I would totally start eating those.

I'm gonna go get my broom.

while I can certainly agree that society does play a part as you listed, for me it's still up to the individual. If someone is truly comfortable being fat, then that's on them. I'm mainly pointing my response to people who complain about being a certain weight but they just sit on the couch and watch Biggest Loser thinking how easy it is, and they are consuming loads of calories and then continue to complain because they just "can't find anything that works."

People have lost their sense of self-worth and the ability to understand that things take time and dedication. These diet pills and fads only further our feeding of the complacency and instant gratification machine. Is this society's fault, or does it really boil down to personal responsibility. I don't care how many ads you throw at me for a certain type of food, if I don't want it because I'm in the middle of a training segment, I'm not going to eat it.

and Crompsin has a point... people rationalize with themselves to make themselves feel better because they are lazy. Sure you can call yourself a BBM or BBW, but how do you really feel? Are you sniping at girls because they "need to eat a sandwich" or are you just eating because you feel justified that you don't have to conform? It's not about conforming, it's about being responsible to yourself and your wallet and in the end your family.

It's not "society's" fault, it's just as Halx said:
...I mean:
Society is too big a brush to paint with. It's not all of society, it's consumerism, marketing and product development. It's chemically addictive foods made of the worst stuff a person can eat. It's subsidizing corn so that we can put a cheaper sugar in our sodas that convinces our brains that we're not full. It's combining chemicals made of god knows what in order to make our chips taste kinda like barbecue sauce, but without using expensive tomatoes or onions or garlic. It's about attacking our brains with insane advertisements every five minutes for carb-rich, empty-calorie beer or ice cream with 20x your daily allowance of fat. I've never even seen a commercial for an orange or a bell pepper. In my entire life.

On the other side, it's not like we tried to fight off the zombies, we allowed the zombies to attack us, bite us, and then we continued right along with them eating whatever flesh we could find. We never banded together in a mall that has a curious amount of chainsaws and guns to protect ourselves. Every time you are standing in the chip aisle thinking about what over processed piece of crap will momentarily satiate your impulse control problem, you're acquiescing.


But seriously, how serious is this overweight women snatching babies thing? Shouldn't we be protecting the newborns or something? What are the overweight women doing with the babies?

I still don't get this thread, but for all intents and purposes, I may as well be fat.
I sit at the computer a lot, I don't work out, the most exercise I do is a mile or two on my bike, to and from work, and sometimes I eat like a pig. Double Quarter pounder, double cheeseburger, large fries, large coke (which is like a liter), a second dinner a few hours later (sometimes), eat chips all the time, drink a lot, smoke a lot, and I'm generally a slob when it comes to a lot of things.
Yet, I'm 5'9 and about 137 lbs. I can count all my ribs, I'm disgusted by the way my body looks.
But it sounds like you're describing me, except for the rolls of blubber which I lack, when you talk about these "unhealthy" people.

I would like a better explanation of the OP, instead of squeeeb toying with us. I think we deserve a bit better. This guessing game is not my thing.

unhealthy != fat in some cases.

Fat people are harder to kidnap, easier to recognize on surveillance tapes, and less likely to be able to run from the cops, so they actually help cut down on crime.

But fat people should thank their lucky star crunches that there will always be enough normal folks out there to care enough to tell them how wrong they are. I, for one, think we should honor these caring souls by naming a playground after them.

I personally blame gravity. Damn Newton.

Has squeeeb come back to this thread to explain how it's not really about what it's about and how we're all dumber than a sack of doorknobs yet? I keep waiting for that.

Indeed. I'm 6' 1", 250lbs, and my cholesterol, heart enzyme levels, and BP are, according to the tests I had done about two months ago, very VERY good.

I have nothing to add to the OP but I would like to comment that if I ate that on average, I would balloon up to 275 pounds within a few months. And yes I work out every single day, and yes I do power walking/jogging 4-6 times per week for at least 30 minutes a session, yet I'm still 225 pounds at 5'10", the definition of a fat person.

Exactly. I eat the complete opposite -- high protein, low in carb, 1500-1800 calories per day, stay physically active, and I'm 225 pounds. If I did what you do I would be 300 pounds within 6 months.

I know it's off topic but it's important. Sometimes these dreaded fat people aren't the ones that drove themselves to fatitude -- sometimes people are just shit on when they're born with some really crappy genes.

It's a generalization of the description of the supposed perpetrators who are most inclined to snatch newborns, i.e. rotund, middle-aged housewifes (lonely or not).

In the instances of cases that are reported of missing children in or around hospitals, there usually is a vague description of "a suspicious-looking heavyset woman wandering around the scene"; this would not at all be uncommon, given that the most likely area of a hospital where a newborn were to be abducted would be the maternity ward. Lots of big-bellied women there, right? But it goes deeper in that the more highly-publicized cases of abduction are indeed perpetrated by mentally-unbalanced, unattractive, and yes, sloppy women in the range of late 20s-to-early-60s in terms of age. It would be just speculation on my part, but the supposed reasoning for the kidnapping is in most ways attributed to the woman's inability to produce a child of her own, or at least find a good man/keep a healthy partnership, so they endure some kind of "mental lapse" in which they seek to end their suffering by connecting with what they have yearned for for far too long, a tangible progeny. Some maintain a sensible and functioning level of sanity during and after the period leading up to the crime, but some do not. All that is being processed in their warped mindset path is to embrace a child that they could never have envisioned having in reality, and it crosses over blindly.

It's downright depressing, yet this malignment still needs to be broadcast and made aware. Again, this is just speculation, but I'm sure this did not just pop into my head all of a sudden, and it probably has some kind of medical/psychological-identifier, in the form of "maternal-snatching syndrome" or something. I'd check the archives on medical ailments, specifically those that are mental, but my books are sorely outdated, like from 1978... so this might be a new trend.

What-the-shit? How the hell do I weigh ~85 pounds less than you?! That's like an Olsen twin.

...

But yeah, I concur with the insulation-intense does not always equal unhealthy.

Well, I have a big frame. My fighting weight is probably around 200 or 205.

I'm telling you... I want to set up some kind of TFP MMA event. I'll invite StrangeFamous and he can argue whether or not if me hitting him is part of a sport.

...

OP: White people are ruining the world.

FTFY

I'll referee...

I'm a lover, not a fighter.

I'll participate in the MMA event so we can argue some more about whether it would suck more to be punched in the face by a guy who can bench 45 or a guy who can bench 225!!!!!!!

I would be honored to fight you. I think 225 was my max two years ago. Man, I'm slackin'.

I've never been in a fight before. You just flail around right?

Coward, lover...

Same thing.

I'm so in on the MMA tournament.