Poll: Obesity: fat people or true illness?

[Seldon2639]

There is no mental reason why a fat person can't stop eating other then insecurity. Most of the time a fat person is fat because they comfort eat, and/or don't exercise. Last time I checked being lazy or insecure didn't constitute an illness, just a weak character. If they become fat through weakness of character, then that isn't an illness. They are not forced to become fat, they have complete control over their weight, it is their choice to become fat. Find me someone who chose to become disabled, schizophrenic or autistic. All those people were not given a choice, they were born into a sh*tty situation, hence why fat people disgust me; they have a choice, and choose the easy option of knocking years off their life and giving up what so many disabled people can only wish of doing.

You're falling into the quintessential Cartesian duality. All "decisions" a human being makes are by definition "mental" ones. Yet you create a divide between "brain" and "mind", wherein the "brain" can be diseased (causing schizophrenia, autism, ect) and the person is exculpated, but if the "mind" is "weak" (causing alcoholism, obesity, ect) the person is blamed.

Why is that?

All decisions, all thoughts, all perception, is caused by neurochemical and mechanical reactions in the brain. Why is one set of maladaptive reactions (causing schizophrenia) given different treatment than another set of maladaptive reactions (causing obesity)? If we accept that being overweight is (using normative judgement) "bad", then whatever wiring causes someone to become overweight must be faulty. How is one faulty wiring different from another?

So, take your logic to the final conclusion: if all "bad" wiring is just a maladaptation of the brain, then any unfortunate consequences of the wiring is equally blamable on the person to whom the brain belongs. So, yes, an autistic person chose to be autistic in the same way an obese person chose to be obese: because their brain is messed up.

Now's when you call me an insensitive jerk for equating obesity to a "real" mental illness, without yourself looking up that in the DSM-IV (the diagnostic manual for psychological illnesses), obesity counts. Tell me again why it's not a disability.

ok 1 .. not doing something isn't the same as doing something ... no illness makes you pick up a chesse burger and eat it .. but an ilness CAN prevent you from doing so

and yeah ... i've never been one to beat around the bush for long ... STOP FUCKING COMPARING LACK OF SELF CONTROL TO DISEASES!!

That doesn't make any sense (see above). Either all problems caused by poor brain function (including "lack of self control", as well as "sees things that don't exist" and "can't function in society") are equivalently diseases, or none of them are. Self control is all in the brain, and if a lack of self control is bad, how is whatever bad wiring causes that not "diseased"? I'm curious why you've concluded that people can somehow overcome the functionality of the brain through... Anything. There's no mechanism for deciding something except for the reactions in the brain, so how is a weakness of will different from being epileptic?

i just thought maybe the human race wasn't so weak as to make up over the top medical excuses for all their flaws .. either way anyone with half a brain will notice obesity is NOT good for you regardless of what it is and try to fix that themselves .. not wait for some dude in a white jacket to tell them what to do

Yep, and any one with half a brain will know that flailing around on the ground when you see flashing lights is NOT good for you. If only people could spontaneously change the way their brains function through sheer force of will.

Incidentally, I'm not fat myself, so please don't come back with an ad hominem attack on those grounds. I'm just driven crazy by the dichotomy between "well, this problem in the brain is an illness, but this problem in the brain isn't"

 

[Jingermanoo]

Im about to start a three month diet of fruit, vegetables and water (although we can allow for an occasional night or two getting wasted). I totally reckon I can do it. I'm also gonna try a jog every weekday and cutting down smoking to Friday nights out.

Wish me luck.

 

[Wesker_Chick]

I personally see it as a mix of both. You have the fat lazy chubs and the people with genuine illnesses.

I'm a bit overweight, but I have hypothyroidism...under active thyroid. I take medication for it and have slowly been losing the weight. So the fat lazy people kind of tick me off...

 

[Ignignoct]

i just thought maybe the human race wasn't so weak as to make up over the top medical excuses for all their flaws ..

Obesity is not a flaw. A lack of compassion for your fellow human being is a flaw.

Subjective.

If I were to become obese I would think it a flaw I'd need to hammer out for my own sake. Compassion is given to fellow humans on a case by case basis, many of which don't cut it, and I'm not just saying that to seem like an angsty, misanthropic kool kid.

 

[Ignignoct]

I personally see it as a mix of both. You have the fat lazy chubs and the people with genuine illnesses.

I'm a bit overweight, but I have hypothyroidism...under active thyroid. I take medication for it and have slowly been losing the weight. So the fat lazy people kind of tick me off...

Stop being rational and pick a side.

The world is black and white, you're either for America or against it.

GO BACK TO FRANCE!

/end obvious joke-trolling

 

[Seldon2639]

Simply put, nothing made the fat person eat more than he nreeds to other than his personality. If obesity is a mental illness, then so is being a murderer or thief, or any other action resulting from personality.
Autism and other mental disorders cannot be changed by the sufferer.
Obesity is a result of a persons actions. Nothing made a fat person pick up another slice of cake other than his/her personality in the exact same way nothing made a smoker begin to smoke other than his/her personality.
Unless you want to argue that everyone is born with their personality engrained into them, but then you'll be claiming to have solved nature vs. nurture.

You're a behaviorist. I get that, and for a long while I was as well. No, I'm not arguing that our personalities are wired from the get go, just a lot of it. You're stuck on the question of "making" someone do something, but that doesn't address the question I asked. How is someone's brain "choosing" to "make" their arm lift the fork to their mouth, then chew, then swallow, then digest, any different from someone's brain "choosing" to show images that aren't real, and hear voices that don't exist?

Now, if what you're saying is that anything you're born with, you can't be blamed for, and anything you develop you're responsible for, that's fine, but there are a few questions.

First, obesity (and other addictive traits) have been linked to genetics. They can be overcome, to be sure, in the same way autism can be overcome (by which I mean they can be somewhat overcome), but what's the difference?

And what do you do with the other side, the positive traits? Do I not get to gain any praise for being smart, since intelligence is largely genetic? If I can't be blamed for something I had no "choice" in making, I shouldn't be able to get credit either. Do you blame an unintelligent person for being unintelligent?

 

[Ignignoct]

i just thought maybe the human race wasn't so weak as to make up over the top medical excuses for all their flaws ..

Obesity is not a flaw. A lack of compassion for your fellow human being is a flaw.

Subjective.

If I were to become obese I would think it a flaw I'd need to hammer out for my own sake. Compassion is given to fellow humans on a case by case basis, many of which don't cut it, and I'm not just saying that to seem like an angsty, misanthropic kool kid.

No. It's quite objective.

Please expand.

Someone is obese, yet this is not a flaw.

Does not compute.

 

[Seldon2639]

The difference between your example of obesity and hallucinations is that one is a conscious decision, the other one, the person has no control over.
An obese person could stop eating at any time if he/she wanted to. If their life was in immediate danger due to eating e.g. "Put the fork down or I'll shoot you", they would.
If I put a gun to an autistic kids head and told him to stop being autistic, nothing would change.
If obesity is a result of genetics, fair enough, the person has little control over that. It's the fact though they have to consciously pick up the fork & eat which makes it much more similar to smoking than a mental illness such as autism.
Plus, I thought there is no evidence for intelligence being genetic, I may be wrong though. Obesity shouldn't be a factor so large that it should overlook all of a persons other qualities, but I see it like smoking. If someone who is highly intelligent is smart, I think it is somewhat of a sad waste that the person may die young, in the same manner if they where a smoker, or on cocaine.
As for thick people being thick, I blame their parents as a lot of a child?s intellect is a result of stimulus they received through the ages of 0-3yrs.

I'm pretty sure we've reached the limit of any discussion. The archetypal nature/nurture, and behaviorist/existentialist argument has reached the usual stalemate. You believe there is a conscious "choice" involved, which somehow breaks out of the "it's all the brain" schema I've set up. That's fine, but there's no middle ground here. I don't accept that there's a conscious "choice" in action, but merely neurological reactions. If it's all neurological reactions, there's no difference between one "bad" reaction and another.

The intelligence analogy wasn't meant to say "smart people can be fat", but more "if you don't blame people except for "choices" they make themselves, and never for inborn qualities, you should also say that stupid people get a free pass (because it, like autism, is inborn).

There is evidence that intelligence is inborn. In monozygotic twin studies (using genetically identical twins reared in different environments), there's between a .40 and .80 correlation between the twins' intelligences. That's statistically significant, and means that likely more than half of the differences between people's intelligences are genetic (is is from studies at Yale, as well as a European genetics department in Cern).

 

[Ignignoct]

i just thought maybe the human race wasn't so weak as to make up over the top medical excuses for all their flaws ..

Obesity is not a flaw. A lack of compassion for your fellow human being is a flaw.

Subjective.

If I were to become obese I would think it a flaw I'd need to hammer out for my own sake. Compassion is given to fellow humans on a case by case basis, many of which don't cut it, and I'm not just saying that to seem like an angsty, misanthropic kool kid.

No. It's quite objective.

Please expand.

Someone is obese, yet this is not a flaw.

Does not compute.

Being obese does not make you 'less perfect' of a person. In the context SsilverR and I were talking (at least, I think this is the level we were talking on) 'flaws' are things like missing strength of character--"i just thought maybe the human race wasn't so weak"--as opposed to something that is incompatible with 'perfect health'.

It does not compute because you've got the wrong software loaded to run this application ;-D

Well, I'll still claim that obesity is a flaw in that it's causing my step-father debilitating back problems and sleep apnea, to say nothing of the other strains caused to the human body by excess weight. He's 350+ and readily admits that it's due to diet and is working to change, but I wonder how much his faith in Christianity, and thus his idea of eternal paradise upon death, skews his view of health.

Is it a character flaw? Arguably, and that's the current argument that I won't bother getting mired in.

Is it a health risk/flaw? Undeniably.

I understand that obesity-measuring methods are flawed and there is no golden standard that all humans should be, but common-sense applies.

 

[Ignignoct]

Being obese does not make you 'less perfect' of a person. In the context SsilverR and I were talking (at least, I think this is the level we were talking on) 'flaws' are things like missing strength of character--"i just thought maybe the human race wasn't so weak"--as opposed to something that is incompatible with 'perfect health'.

It does not compute because you've got the wrong software loaded to run this application ;-D

Well, I'll still claim that obesity is a flaw in that it's causing my step-father debilitating back problems and sleep apnea, to say nothing of the other strains caused to the human body by excess weight.

Nothing in what I said can be taken to hold that you can't make that claim.

Indeed, but one cannot claim that obesity is not a flaw in an objective sense.

There are very, very few things in the known universe that are objectively true and constant.

The existence of psychologically-based eating disorders overturns the 'objectively not a flaw' argument, in a character/personality debate.

I fully acknowledge, however, that I cannot know another man's hunger as I am not him as Buddha once said, and they deserve the avenues towards curbing the "flaw" as best the can if they should so choose.

 

[Aries_Split]

Who says they don't have a normal life?

Doctors.

Doctors can only answer that question from a *medical* point of view. I'm interested in a *human* point of view, as I am a human and not a lab rat.

I made a comment a while ago, jokingly referring to someone who sat with bad posture as "that guy with cerebral fucking palzy".

I later received this PM. I will not state the name of the person who sent it to me out of respect, but it is genuine and unaltered.

I find it extreamly offensive that you would sit there behind your fucking keyboard and poke fun at people who literally have to struggle every day of their lives. If i dont stretch every day, EVERY GODDAMN DAY for an hour, i have a REALLY bad limp, i have one hell of a time trying to play my drums, it took me 9 years to learn to type at an efficient speed, as i do now. and thats just me, there are millions all over the world that have it much worse than i do

best i can tell you are a soleless peace of shit that needs to take a good look in the mirror and evaluate himself.

There is your human perspective. It's not a horribly disfigured human life, it's not less than mine, but it is difficult. It is not within the context of societal norms.
There is your human point of view.