Being fat is all about discipline. You don’t get fat by binge eating for one or two days. In order for you to add excess fat to your body, you have to make a herculean effort to ignore everything it tells you, for a long time. The only way to achieve steady weight gain is to make it a habitual behavior. Weight loss or gain is always about cultivating habits, which is why it’s equally as difficult for thin people to gain weight as it is for fat people to lose extra weight. Here’s how being fat is hard work:
To gain excess weight, you have to eat far more food (calories) than you actually need, every single day, even if you aren’t hungry, it makes you sick and you feel sluggish.
In Renee Zellweger’s interview for The Daily Mail online, she talks about gaining over thirty pounds, twice, for “Bridget Jones Diary” and “Bridget Jones Diary 2.” She says, “For two days [overeating is] bliss and then you’re full, OK?…Then after a week your glucose levels are going crazy. You’re up and down and all over the place. It doesn’t feel good, and no one wants to hear that, but it’s the truth.”
If you are living a sedentary life, your body will let you know how unhappy it is with you. You’ll feel depressed, tired, unmotivated, have low self-esteem, anxiety and the list goes on and on. The trick is to misread those signals and just assume you need more rest.
In George Clooney’s interview for the Business Insider, Clooney talks about putting on over thirty pounds for his role in “Syriana.” When asked if he enjoyed all of the overeating and inactivity Clooney answers, “There was nothing fun about it.” The article then goes on to say, “Co-star Matt Damon even said Clooney was so distraught with his inability to exercise he became depressed.”
Gaining too much weight comes with a goodie bag of health issues, ranging from back, hip and feet problems, to life threatening ailments like heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.
Fat people have to be willing to live with these uncomfortable, painful, and even deadly health problems in order to stay fat.
In Christian Bale’s interview for OntheRedCarpet.com, Bale talks about his forty pound weight gain for “American Hustle.” “It’s easy to start with … you’re just sitting on your butt and you’re eating lots of doughnuts and eating bread and everything like that. But you do it for two months and your body starts to rebel against you, it’s just saying, ‘No, please,’ and your back is aching and there’s also some problems with that….”
The misconception is that being overweight shows a lack of discipline, because most overweight people try fad dieting for a little while and then go back to the above behaviors that make them re-gain weight. But thin people can’t always hack it either. All of aforementioned actors quickly went back to their previous weight after filming.
Fat people aren’t lazy; they just make it look easy. At one time, often from childhood, they were trained to be fat, repeating unhealthy behavior until it became habitual and therefore effortless. In every single case of a fat person becoming thin, they commendably changed their entire lifestyle and created new, healthy habits. Becoming thin if you are fat isn’t just about losing weight; it’s about losing your entire way of life.
Charles Weller
Author