As someone who has battled weight her whole life I’m telling you the best thing that ever happened to me is when someone I cared about took me aside and told me I needed to lose weight. The first one was my Father when I was 15 years old. I was crushed, but I wanted him to be proud of me and I lost weight and it was the best thing I did for myself as a 15 year old girl. The next time would be over 20 years later. My best friend had the guts to tell me what nobody else would, that I was as big as she’d ever seen me. I couldn’t lie to myself anymore and I lost 40 pounds in the next three months and have worked my ass off (so to speak) to never put it back on again. four years later I am 120 pounds, a size 4 and I have earned the right to say the things I do.
I’ll say it again, any woman who tells you she is happy being fat is LYING and would give years of her life to be thin. That’s just a fact.
I don’t define compassion as making people feel ok about the things they have the power to change. There are very few things we really have control over in life. Our weight is one of them. Sue me.
Good for you! What I have seen is that when people keep harassing overweight people, shaming them all with the excuse of “good intention”, they are NOT helping, they are harming the overweight person. I’ve known more than one person who has been humiliated and that did not result in their losing weight. But when people finally gave up on them and stopped, then they went on diets they found for themselves and lost a great deal of weight. What works for one person, doesn’t necessarily work for another.
This woman in the article went to the doctor for help, and all he had to do is talk about lifestyle change to lose weight in addition to the gastric bypass surgery.
Instead, he cursed her out. That is not help, the woman may never again try to lose weight after that, fearing that the next doctor will be just as nasty.
The doctors swear that at least they should do no harm. What the doctor did was NOT helpful, it was harmful.
It wasn’t the question about the woman’s need to lose weight, or her wanting to do so, she needed the extra help, that’s why they invented gastric bypass.