So, I feel compelled to tell my story here, after seeing the usual "fat people are just lazy" postings.

For reference, here is a chart of my weight loss over the past 2 years:

Clicky


I am what is commonly known as a "land whale", or "fatty boombalatty", "porker", "fatass", etc. You get the picture. 2 years ago I weighed 470 pounds. Today I weigh 374. I work a desk job with very demanding hours, the only job I am able to find. When I left college I bought a car and most of my physical exercise (on a bicycle) disappeared from my life. I gained a LOT of weight. I do not eat an exorbitant amount of food however. I went to "fat counseling" groups. There are some people there who go eat fast food 4 times a day, and whenever they go they eat 2-3 burgers in one sitting. I am not and have never been one of those people. I order small portions whenever I go out to eat, I only eat 3 meals a day, and yet I still nearly hit 500 pounds.

I've been called many many things over the years. It began with my parents. My brother is as skinny as a toothpick; so whenever food went missing from the house naturally I got blamed since I was heavier. This pissed me off because it was my brother eating the food all along, and yet everyone always felt it was ok to pile on me because I was the fat one. I was highly amused when I moved out at 18 and the food kept disappearing. Still never got an apology though.

The constant insults through life did a huge number on my self esteem. I locked myself up in seclusion for most of my 20's and ignored the outside world. I gained a ridiculous amount of weight because I ceased caring about myself since the rest of the world seemed to have written me off long ago anyway. Then one day I had to be hospitalized for high blood pressure. That was a real wakeup call. I started exercising 30 minutes a day 5 times a week, and eating healthy (1800 calories a day). Nothing changed. My weight flatlined for a month. Dropped the food down another notch (1500 a day, basically starvation level sustenance) and increased the exercise to 150 minutes a day 6 times a week (15 hours a week), and finally I started losing weight at a rate of 3 pounds a week (phase 1).

I was exercising indoors, but unfortunately there's only so much I can take before I went mad. After losing about 70 pounds I felt a lot better about myself; a lot more self confident. I slowed down on the exercise so I could begin having a social life of some sort; I stuck to 2 hours a day 5 times a week (10 hours a week), and my weight loss took a big hit (phase 2). I was still losing, but less than a pound a week now, and the rate was beginning to slow significantly as I lost weight, because the less I weighed, the less I burned exercising.

Well, then something bad happened in my family. I had to take care of some people and the exercise slowed down to a crawl. The one and only reason I was able to maintain 10-15 hours of exercise a week previously was because I had no family responsibilities and I was lucky not to get sick or seriously ill. But now that I had to take care of other people I could only do about 5 hours of exercise a week. 5 hours + 1500 calories a day = weight gain of nearly 2 pounds a week for me. This depressed me beyond all hope and I even stopped weighing myself regularly. This was phase 3.

Finally, after I started feeling like crap again and my family responsibilities were no longer needed, I was able to begin focusing on myself again. Pissed off that I lost 8 months worth of progress, I stopped all socializing and went die hard back to 15 hours (and sometimes up to 20!) of biking a week. Unfortunately after a month I began to lose my sanity again. Sure I reversed the weight gain (phase 4), but with 15-20 hours a week of biking there was literally no time to socialize again and found myself ostracized once more. Finally, I decided I would look for a bike club, which would turn out to be my savior. I joined the club and now socialize and exercise at the same time. I'm losing a steady 1.3 pounds a week again, but as my weight recedes I expect this rate will once again lower as well. Keep in mind this is on a barely sustenance 1500 calorie diet too.

This is literally the only thing that is ever going to work for me. There is no way in hell I am ever going to be able to handle my weight and a family at the same time. As soon as I have children and all sorts of other responsibilities, the exercise is going to fly right out the window because there simply will not be enough time. I never spend time with my old friends anymore because they don't exercise.

So when people go around saying that I'm fat just because I'm lazy, I love to point to the graph where I was exercising 5 hours a week and eating far less than the average person and STILL gained 2 pounds a week. Most people think weight loss is as simple as calories in, calories out, but that's just not true. Some of our bodies love converting calories into fat. It's something I have to live with, and I really wish people would have been more accepting of this fact when I was younger, and encouraged me to actually care about myself. But it was far easier to destroy my self confidence and make me feel worthless. Even today I'll have people in cars scream at me "get off the road fatass, you're not fooling anyone!" when I'm biking (it's almost always pickup truck drivers for some reason). I'm glad that I have enough confidence to flip them off and keep on cycling; but I can see weaker-willed people giving up and falling back to a sedentary lifestyle after so many insults.

Anyway, that's my story. Some of us need to exercise 15-20 hours a week to lose weight, and if you can't understand what kind of a personal sacrifice to life that will make, then there's simply no point in arguing. I'd love to see if there's any activity besides sleeping and working that any of the namecallers here are able to maintain in their life for 15-20 hours without going insane. We're not all lazy, and I would appreciate it if you would stop judging all of us without getting to know a damn thing about us.