Clichés.

It’s getting harder to think of things to write about.  What do I write about when things are going well and there’s no horrible temptation or depression or negativity to talk about?

One of the things I do like to do with this blog is to counteract all the clichés that surround weight loss.  And they come from everywhere.  There’s the fat people saying “fat people don’t eat any more than skinny people”.  Now, this may be true for some, but if that’s a hard-and-fast rule, then it’s shocking how many fat people lose weight when they eat right and exercise.  Could it be that maybe they do eat more?  Or perhaps they’re burning less than active, healthy people.  You know why I gained weight?  I was a lazy fatass that ate too much all the damn time.  Not only that, I ate too much of the worst food there was. 

I also know from experience that a lot of fat people cut calories by starving themselves.  I’ve seen many a fat person sitting down to a lunch of a handful of bagged iceberg lettuce mix, throwing a little bit of dressing on and calling it a meal.  You know what I had for lunch today?  Two wraps packed to the brim with grilled spiced chicken, sautéed peppers and onions (with no fat but oil spray), hummus and feta.  Which one of us is more likely to binge?  Oh, and binge many will.  Binging is a secret of a great number of fat people.  When you skip breakfast, eat a salad for lunch – check that, eat some nutritionless iceberg and a tablespoon of dressing for lunch – and then head home for dinner, your body is sending urgent signals to find food, a lot of food, and fast.

So you find ways to get the food your body is demanding.  If you live by yourself, maybe it means grabbing a bag of chips and one of those giant sandwiches from Safeway on the way home.  By the way, those sandwiches blow and it doesn’t matter a bit.  Safeway is selling those things on nothing but evening work meetings and fat people.  Do you live with someone who’s making dinner?  It might even be a delicious and healthy meal.  No matter, your body needs food.  Time to stop by the McDonald’s (drive-thru, of course) on the way home, get an extra value meal and eat it on the way home, then pop a mint and sit down to a normal-sized plate of dinner.  Hell, since you’ve already eaten an entire meal, you might even stop before your plate is finished.  That’s a nice little ego boost, except most people possess the ability to feel shame. 

I’m not saying this as a way of shaming fat people.  But it is a shameful act, eating a meal while on the way to eat a meal.  So predictably, the weight goes up.  Not only that, you’ve expanded your stomach and increased your body’s calorie needs going forward, and you’ve done this without gaining any knowledge on the proper way to fuel your body, so you’re set up for another binge. 

Then there are the people that remain skinny “no matter what”.  These are the people that “don’t exercise, eat like shit, and stay skinny”.  The small problem with that is that it’s complete bullshit.  Look, it’s simple science.  Your body requires a certain number of calories to function and perform all the activities you do during the day, from sitting at the computer to running a marathon.  If you eat more calories than that number, you gain weight.  If you eat less calories than that number, you lose weight. 

So the skinny person you see eating a lunch with twice the calories of yours?  Maybe that person was up at 4:30 in the morning running six miles.  The guy you know that never works out, sits around watching TV and stays slim?  Maybe he’s so wrapped up in the TV that he forgets lunch and eats 1500 calories a day.  The guy at the party who eats and drinks everything but doesn’t gain an ounce?  When’s the last time you saw him that wasn’t at a party?  Maybe he lets loose because he eats right.  You know, when he’s not at parties.  There are variations in everyone’s metabolism but what contributes to healthy weight is the calories you eat compared to the calories you expend.  That simple.

The last bullshit cliché I’ll address today is the one that people use when they’re selling something to fat people.  “Eat more and you’ll lose weight!”  “Lose weight without feeling hungry!”  “Lose weight the easy way!” There are a few problems with this.  First, everyone seems to use “simple” with “easy” interchangeably.  Like I said before, losing weight is simple, but it definitely is not easy.  Losing weight by eating more is also disingenuous.  Something has to give when you want to lose weight.  You may eat more in the amount of food or in the number of times you eat per day, but you still have to either eat fewer calories or burn more calories.  You can’t cheat science.  Only God gets to do that.

And in reality, if you go from eating 4000 calories a day to eating 2000, you will get hungry.  This seems to escape everyone’s notice.  Do I get hungry?  Of course.  I do my best to avoid getting TOO hungry, since that’s what leads to binges.  But a whole lot of us fat people don’t really know what it means to be hungry.  Even now, at this very moment, I feel a hunger pang as my body is starting to digest my delicious lunch.  There’s no way my body needs food.  But the signals have gotten so crossed over the last 20 years that my body is telling me as I type this that I’m hungry. 

That’s the problem with sugarcoating weight loss for fat people.  One cliché about fat people that is true is that fat people are not lazier than the average person.  It’s true that many fat people don’t like working out and I know I’ve avoided it in the past.  That’s not lazy, that’s human.  Look at it this way: Let’s say you’re a terrible speller.  Not only are you a terrible speller, but you’ve been made fun of and discouraged from trying to improve your entire life.  Now you’re at work and you’re having a planning meeting, and the boss asks if anyone would like to come up to the whiteboard and write down the ideas that people have.  What are the odds that you volunteer for that? 

Now imagine being fat.  Not only are your fat, but when you try to work out, you have to deal with looks and giggles and people whispering to one another.  You’re with a group of friends and you all decide to go to a bar that’s about a mile away.  One of your friends has the idea to walk, since it’s not that far away.  Not only is this farther than you are used to walking, you know that once you get there, you’re going to be sweaty, a situation that will only be exacerbated by going into the hot bar.  So you try to convince your friends to drive, which makes you look lazy.

Fat people can work hard, and can lose weight.  Lots of people have done it.  It’s not laziness that stops us.  It’s being told that it’s easy only to find out that it’s hard.  If everyone around you tells you something is easy and then it’s not easy, you start suspecting that the problem is you.  So we need a complete change in tactics.  Losing weight is not easy.  Eating the fats and sugars our bodies were made to crave is a lot easier than eating right and exercising.  Fat people can accept this; we’re not weak and we’re not stupid.  Give us the tools we need to succeed.  Tell us about tracking our food, about exercising.  Tell us that walking is healthy without telling us that we can get by on 20 minutes, three times a week.  Tell us about protein and fat and fiber and how they make things delicious and filling.

Don’t tell us that it’s going to be easy, or that eating right will suddenly make the good food into our favorite foods.  Don’t treat fat people like children.  They have the ability to surprise you.

However, if you find yourself on a crowded elevator next to a fat person, I can’t argue with farting and allowing people to blame it on the fat guy.  That’s just good common sense.