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Earlier in this section I was informed that "a BMI over 30 is simply not okay."
Crap! I only have a few pounds left before I'm carted away to mandatory fat camp!
Honestly, when will skinny people understand that people's bodies work differently, and that people with BMIs over 20 do not necessarily spend their entire days eating fried chicken by the bucket?
In college, when I was eating hot dogs and ramen noodles every single day, I was very thin. I didn't weigh enough to give blood. I've gradually gained weight throughout my 20s, despite improving my diet significantly. My blood tests are always fine. I'm healthy as a damn horse. I've also been told I'm kind of hot, but I guess that's just some perverse fetish.
My point is twofold: firstly, please, please stop assuming that every person over a size 6 is a gluttonous sloth who's just too lazy to quit eating. Just doing a PubMed search for "obesity" will show you that the picture is infinitely more complicated than that. And secondly, I don't lecture strangers on whether or not they drink alcohol or smoke or ride motorcycles or any number of other things that put them at risk for disease or death. And whether you like it or not, those are things people choose to do. Very, very few people choose to be obese. I'm sure there are people out there who are just lazy slobs, but I will tell you a little secret: most of the lazy, McDonald's eating, videogame playing slobs I know? Are thinner than I am.
We all wish it was as simple as "being fat is unhealthy, so I'll just stop being fat!" But it's not. There are real issues of physiology, genetics, and psychology that we're just barely beginning to understand. Isn't it reasonable that the same factors that make us different in terms of eye color, hair thickness, height, etc. would also maybe have a hand in how easily we gain weight? It's fine to encourage good eating and physical fitness, and of course I think it's important that people know how to take care of themselves. But informing anyone that their size is "simply not okay" is just unbelievably tacky, and, if I might borrow a popular word of the times, un-American.
