Reply #165: I never would have guessed it. [View All]

[wickerwoman]

You do realize that losing weight is significantly more difficult than keeping it off in the first place?

I was overweight by the time I was eleven. In my house, we ate vegetables (usually frozen corn) literally once a week. I was a latchkey kid from the age of seven. I got home from school at three and my parents didn't get back from work until almost seven. By five my brother and I were ravenous so we ate whatever was around that seven year olds could cook- usually hot dogs, hamburgers or lunchmeat sandwiches with potato chips on the side. What was I supposed to do- take money out of my parents' purse and skip down to the farmer's market to buy some produce to prepare from scratch?

I was obese by college, where I lived in a dorm with no stove and only a mini-fridge so I ate Chinese take-out because it had vegetables and I thought it was healthy.

Since I got my own apartment, I have been eating real health food non-stop- ten servings of fruits and veggies a day. I have never owned a car and I walk more than an hour every day. I swim and work out. I do my own housework. I lost about 50 pounds on South Beach and have kept it off for 3 years but I've pretty much hit a wall with 40 pounds still to go.

It absolutely is not as simply as "just eat less". When I really started to pack on the pounds (in college) I was eating almost nothing. I didn't eat breakfast. I often skipped lunch because I wasn't really that hungry and I was trying to lose weight. And then I'd hit a wall in the late afternoon and make a run for Chinese take-out- a pint of white rice, a pint of beef with broccoli and a big bottle of Sprite. And that was it. The problem was that everything I was eating was sugar, fat and white rice. But I didn't have a kitchen or any idea how to cook so what else was I supposed to do?

I don't mean to go off on you, but it really pisses me off when smug assholes who have been thin their entire lives act like they're morally superior to people who have been struggling with weight their entire lives. Do you honestly think that fat people know less about dieting than you do and that that's why they're fat?