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.

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.

I think he was offended by the question.

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.

Mother Teresa ministered to people who had less reason to be happy and more reason to be miserable than almost any other people on Earth and yet she often wrote about the joy among her community.

And yet, I understand your question. When I am reminded of my size, it makes me unhappy for a moment. However, I go through large spans of time when I don't think about it at all. My husband is very non-judgmental about my weight and loves me unconditionally. I have three children who also love me as well as my mother and siblings. I'm sure that's largely the key to it.

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.

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.

But the other quotes are there too - many terminally ill or very handicapped people are happy. It depends on your attitude.

Extremes:

I am definitely happy when I see having lost 2 lb. My husband, a thin Buddhist, smiles as he has seen my happiness or unhappiness change with a few lbs - when overall, there is fluctuation within 10 lbs for years. I know it is not healthy to make my happiness or unhappiness depend on the scale. Stupid really

My daughter recently gained a lot of weight and seems fine with it and happy. She criticizes my attitude, saying: how much energy and time have you wasted on diets and on fretting over your weight? She also criticizes my not taking dessert because of my diet. She is right and wrong - right in that my mood shouldn't depend on a few pounds lost or gained, and spending too much time on diet and weight thoughts is unhealthy. Wrong in that I overall am happier with my size and my mood does improve when I eat healthily, which for me is low carb. I think overall, I am happier now than when I was overweight - I never was obese.

It is healthy to be happy with every progress one has made. There are many obese people on this forum who have lost a lot - lets say from 400 to 300 lbs, and they are very happy with where there are. I think it is healthy to be happy on the way, with the progress, even if one is still obese.

I think it is also healthy for a person, maybe that was your boy friend, to decide: this is not my time to deal with my obesity. I had a relative like that - everyone was criticizing her for being super obese, but she seemed happy and was participating in things and active. This was during adolescence, and although it is a tough time to be obese, it may be good to say: I am in this phase of life, I want to finish school or college or... THEN deal with my obesity. It may not be physically good, but psychologically, it may be a healthy attitude to wait until one is ready.

But long term, I doubt a morbidly obese person is happy with his/her life. To hear from everyone, doctors, relatives, TV, newspaper, friends, every day how bad it is to be overweight, and I can't imagine its easily happily accepted.

One reason to be overweight is drugs given to people with Bipolar disorder that often lead to 50-100 lb weight gain. These drugs help with excessively elevated mood (mania) and (less) low mood/depression. I wonder how this balance is really evaluated? I would love to find out if the bottom line is really of benefit - but the psychiatrists claims that the net balance is positive...

Take it from someone who lost a huge amount of weight as a teenager and then gained it back in my mid-20s (after a suicide attempt)...losing weight will not solve all your problems.

Yes, you weight may be a huge source of your unhappiness, but, in all likelihood, those feelings will still be there when you're thin. I know that when I was I still felt like a fat person inside. I still felt guilty about eating. I was that girl who could not eat around other people unless they were as well...even if I was hungry because I figured everyone would judge me for being hungry when they weren't, couldn't order fries or dessert on a date because I thought the guy would think I was a pig, couldn't order dessert in any sort of group unless everyone else did.

Changing an unhealthy relationship with food and with your own body takes more than just losing weight, and failing to address the deeper issues can actually put you at risk of gaining the weight back...it's what happened to me.

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.