Can you really be happy if you are fat??
 

This is a question i would love to know peoples thoughts on. I watch reality TV shows, i see people in public settings and social gatherings and i notice the obese and overweight people in the room and i "see" them smiling or laughing like every other person but inside i truly wonder if they are happy or okay with themselves?

I guess my curiosity stems from the fact that when i was 19, i too was/am very overweight and i dated a wonderful 20 year old guy..fell in love really. He was very obese. Morbidly obese i think. He weighed close to 400 pounds. I loved him, was attracted to who he was, he even had beautiful eyes and beautiful smile. However, when i was with him i often felt guilty for him. I felt ashamed of my body and the size i was, but i felt even more ashamed of his size. I couldnt stand watching him eat and eat and eat. It made me want to puke(past hx of eating disorder issues) out of guilt. Like how could he not feel bad or ashamed of how much he ate. Anyway..long story short.. we broke up and years have gone by and now he has married to a pretty girl but now his weight is closer to 500 pounds and his wife is probably around the 300 mark. However i see in all of there facebook photos(un-edited) that they both seem very happy.

I guess the thing is- I have met lots of very obese people who claim to be happy and im happy if they truly are happy but i personally dont know how you can be truly happy with being obese or morbidly obese. I confess this is not my biggest weight. My highest weight was 320 lbs and i was beyond happy..i was opposite. I was suicidal for a long time. I just wanted to die. I hated being in a body that did not match my inside. I hated the fact that i could barely walk around a block. I hated that i couldnt fit into nice clothes and i hated how people stared and called me frumpy behind my back when they thought i would never know. I had no hope and i begged God to let me die because i couldnt keep living like this. I couldnt be happy no matter what i did.

Now i am significantly smaller thanks to help from WLS and counselling but i guess my question is: Can you be obese and genuinely happy?

Are you asking if he could really be happy without you? Yes.

You haven't lost as much weight as you think.

Let him/it go.

I think it's somewhat of a paradox: you can't be happy if you're suffering, and many overweight people suffer terribly, especially if they're so obese that it intrudes on every aspect of their life and degrades their health and well-being.

But at the same time, I think you can be happy even if you're "fat" in the eyes of others if you're not suffering and just a larger being than average. Because I know as a longtime overweight person that there's a toxic stereotype that you must be miserable (and somehow inferior) just because you're fatter than most.

You can be profoundly happy when you have a terminal disease.
You can be profoundly happy when you are overweight
You can suffer profoundly when you have everything you could ever wish for.

I believe Happiness is independent of your material circumstances, true happiness that is.

No actually, I am asking if an obese person can be genuinely happy.. I am married. Have been since 2009 and love my spouse. I think you greatly misunderstood the question.

This is sort of a weird question. It depends what you mean by happy. There is the kind of happiness that means feeling mostly OK and satisfied with your lot and not feeling miserable and there are those moments when you just lose yourself and feel at one with the universe. I think everyone feels that latter type but alas very rarely. I don't think it's got much to do with your physical self or your appearance or even your circumstances. It's a sort of gift. Of course it all depends on your psychological makeup and many things besides.
I don't believe it's impossible to be happy if your fat but the overall feeling of wellbeing is unlikely to be that great for most people. Also, it's very hard to dissociate your own feelings of self-worth from the images that society values or does not value.
Personally, for what it's worth, I feel that being overweight most of my adult life did have an adverse impact on my feeling of wellbeing, physical and mental. However, if I'd been slim I might not have been any happier. Actually I manged to be reasonably happy, all told. I went out in the world and did stuff and met people and pursued my career and had a host of experiences, some good some bad.
I don't know whether I've answered your question but I've tried. :-)

I think your post says more about your attitude towards obesity more than anything else and what you think of people who are obese - therefore assuming that everyone thinks the same about you.

There are lots of physical aspects of themselves people would rather change, but either can't or find it difficult to. If you think about disability as an example, would you ask the same question about a disabled person? Or do you only ask the question about an obese person because of how society perceives them, and how abhorrent being perceived in such a way feels to you?

I have been very happy at this weight and also very miserable. I don't think that weight alone is the determiner of whether a person can or can't be happy.

Yes, I believe obese people can be happy. I am.

I also believe it depends on your metabolic trend.
Mood tracks with the metabolic trend being good or not so good, because it's both physical and mental.
And not everyone experiences the same mood consequences, so maybe those smiling fat people are not sad underneath.

I think that super dark depression where you want to die, is a mental consequence from the physical situation.
Poisoned by excess starch and sugar, being a metabolically unwell sugar burner with excess insulin and hormones out of whack.
The depression is just another symptom along with excess fat accumulation.

Then, just by switching to LCHF, mood can go up.
Even before I lose all the fat because it takes a long time to burn all the excess fat.
So as soon as my metabolism is happy again, my mood can be too.
Yes, still have life challenges like being fat in a society that beats up on fat people - but everyone has challenges, so what. Can be happy around it anyway.

Also, people can be thin and sad.
And to lose significantly and still be sad. Like by starvation, or low fat AND low carb.
It's hard to restore well-being under deprivation conditions.

Very well said.

Jean

You are right, it does..as an obese person i can never be happy knowing i am this size. I am not happy with my size which is why im trying to change and you are right..i am changing my mood with the diet.

You might want to see someone just to work through that now before you go down a painful road. Many people who tie their feelings of happiness and self-worth to their size find that they feel hollow and disappointed once they've lost a lot of weight. Even if you don't particularly tie the things together more than most people, it can still be hard to live with the new you in the old life because it's disconcerting, KWIM?

What about being that size makes you unhappy? If you lack mobility, you should work on that. When I was 290 and pregnant, I could still do a cartwheel. Not coincidentally, I never felt as bad at that weight as many people do because I had health and mobility. You can work on improving how you feel physically at any weight and you shouldn't wait on the scale to begin that process of taking care of yourself.

[QUOTE=porthardy]

I guess my curiosity stems from the fact that when i was 19, i too was/am very overweight and i dated a wonderful 20 year old guy..fell in love really. He was very obese. Morbidly obese i think. He weighed close to 400 pounds. I loved him, was attracted to who he was, he even had beautiful eyes and beautiful smile. However, when i was with him i often felt guilty for him. I felt ashamed of my body and the size i was, but i felt even more ashamed of his size. I couldnt stand watching him eat and eat and eat. It made me want to puke(past hx of eating disorder issues) out of guilt. Like how could he not feel bad or ashamed of how much he ate. Anyway..long story short.. we broke up and years have gone by and now he has married to a pretty girl but now his weight is closer to 500 pounds and his wife is probably around the 300 mark. However i see in all of there facebook photos(un-edited) that they both seem very happy.

OK, but people can be happy in any state.

Everybody is different. And it depends on what you mean by being happy.

Some people just can't lose weight no matter what, so they accept themselves as they are. Does that mean they are happy? Who knows. All I know for sure is that *I* am not happy when I am the fattest woman in the room and have to shop in the XX department, or wear shapeless golf clothes that I had to buy in the men's department (that *really* sucks). I still need to lose a lot of weight, I'm far from lean, but I'm in the "not awful" range, and for that reason I am happy.

But I wasn't not-happy before.

Yes, you can be happy if you're fat, and you can be unhappy if you are not fat. Weight has nothing to do with it.

I've known happy and unhappy people from all sizes and genders. I feel that like children, your natural state should be happy, unless there is something that causes the unhappiness.

So I suspect if someone was really bothered by their weight, that might be a cause for unhappiness, but if they don't care, I don't see that it would affect their happiness.

In other words, happiness and weight are neither mutually inclusive nor mutually exclusive.

I haven't watched TV since the mid 1980s but I doubt if any TV is "reality" - even the news is skewed with a showing by Polifacts that Fox and MSNBC both have a falsehood rate of over 90%. In other words, they lie more than they tell the truth.

Bob

Define happy. If it's the dictionary definition:

Based on the 1st definition, you could ask the same question like this:

Are you happy to be obese?

Clears things up, doesn't it? Synonyms give us a better picture:

Note the last one. Now ask that question instead:

Are you satisfied to be obese?

The implication here is that obesity was a goal, it was achieved, and satisfaction is the result. Does that sound like something to be happy about? Not to me. Indeed, the opposite is true. To get leaner is a goal, it is achieved, satisfaction is the result. That sounds more like it, we don't try to rationalize it, it just makes sense that this would make us happy. On the other hand, even with obesity, there's everything else to be happy about, or at least it's a possibility. So here, it's a different question:

Can you be genuinely happy in spite of obesity? Yes, you can.