The worst is when skinny people give advice. You can't be too fat, but maybe there should be a skinny cut-off.

I'm sure that has happened, Mike. That's even more reason to go by Val's guidelines. You can get a real feel for a person's integrity and motivation from the general tone of their post, including how well they actually listen to what the poster is asking.

I'm especially suprised when I hear the numbers thing from people who've had to live as a big person. Don't they remember what it's LIKE to have your opinions discounted because of your weight? You'd think sensitivity is sometimes stored in fat cells the way some people forget where they came from.

Not ALL "big losers" are that way, for sure. I've been lucky enough to have gotten a lot of encouragement from some real success stories...body AND soul. There are plenty of friends who've never weighed a lot, but have a gift for being able to see things I might be too close to the situation to actually SEE. They just handle it with tact and sensitivity and don't presume to have all the answers.

I'm glad I'm not the only one frustrated with the situation. We ALL have knowledge to share.

Good post Tater

I'm a slow loser... infact there was a very long stretch of more than 9 months where my weightloss was ZERO...thanks to undiagnosed hypothyroid So if someone looked at my nearly 2 years worth of low carbing and dismissed my advice because I'm not yet at goal...oh well... their loss . I'm much more inclined to both ask for and give advice to others who've shared a similar struggle as I have.

I know I haven't lost enough to be concidered "successful" but I feel like I have great experience with what doesn't work in low carbing. With my variety of health issues, I open door to conversation that might help another person with common issues. To be honest, I don't feel like I've been slighted in any way if anything, I do feel supported. I only hope others have felt supported by me, for I do love to be helpful.

My favorite is when someone said they weren’t going to take my advice because “I hadn’t lost enough weight to have an opinion”. If losing weight in your lifetime made you qualified to give opinions, as much as I’ve gone up and down, I’d be an expert on Oprah

The worst is when skinny people give advice. You can't be too fat, but maybe there should be a skinny cut-off.


I really disagree with this statement. Advice is advice. If it works for you, GREAT! If not, then follow someone's advice you look up to. Whether someone has 15lbs or 215lbs to lose, it shouldn't matter. Weight loss is a struggle for everyone here....that is why they searched for this web-site, right?
But wasn't this already covered in another thread???

Yeah, it was covered in another thread, thoroughly! But, I didn't get involved in that thread, so maybe I'll try to express my ideas on it it here where we haven't gotten into hurt feelings and accusations on the subject yet.

I think it's important (at least for me) to make distinction between offering advice on the mechanics of a diet, how it works, etc, and advice on how to cope with much of the stuff around the diet that directly relates to being fat.

I will take a skinny person's advice on how the diet works, I'll listen to them if they are knowledgable about ketosis or hunger suppression or how many grams of carbs are in a yam, that sort of thing.

But when someone is in the TDC (the forum for those being or having been more than 100 lbs overweight) and are venting about being teased by school children for being fat or being ignored in a store while the thinner woman is waited on, or their husband is telling them he isn't attracted to them anymore, then frankly, I don't want to hear from a skinny person. This is an issue about being fat. I don't want advice on how to handle it from a skinny person. Having a skinny person tell me to buck up, work on my self esteem or whatever will just make me angry as they have not had to feel the same way we have, they've never dealt with that situation. Sure they've dealt with others that might have been just as painful, but they haven't dealt with this one.

Skinny people, you can sympathize with me, empathize with me, give me a hug, but don't tell me how you felt the same way when you were teased for having skinny legs as a kid and you got over it by ignoring the mean bullies. It's not the same.

The thread in question deteriorated when the skinny people started protesting that the others didn't appreciate the real difficulties that they underwent from being skinny. And probably they are right, we don't appreciate it. But that's my point, isn't it? I can't truly appreciate the pain of being super skinny and they can't appreciate the pain of being super-obese. Let's respect that difference. If I promise not to tell the skinny that gaining weight is easy and will they promise not to say they understand the pain of being more than 150 lbs overweight?

Val

Great point Val!
(thanks for the thread, Tater!)

Now what about super skinny people who clearly have an eating disorder and think they're fat--when they're not? I was thinking about this because I wonder if that's why some skinny folk think they understand.

Of course that's a whole other issue and can of worms...

Val,

There are some posters who were very overweight and are now what I would consider skinny. I was skinny as a child but ended up obese at age 50. Being fat or skinny are not conditions that are set in stone.

It IS pretty hard for some people to realize they can't be an expert on everything, and there are things they just don't have any way to understand. I think most of it is truly out of a desire to be helpful, but sometimes I think it's just another way of trying to garner attention and "fit in" as it were.

I couldn't, for example, go into the African-American support thread and expect to be taken seriously if I started trying to tell them I understood the pain of discrimination, could I? How would I possibly understand. I've been left out of things because of my weight, yes... but no matter how MUCH I want to offer a shoulder, I don't know how they feel. There's just no shame in admitting I don't understand.

Lessara 40+ lb definitely makes you successful at this business. And you're always cheerful which is nice.

The skinny people comment was tongue-in-cheek.

I gotta admit, that's a tough one to handle. I can understand being thin, but not as thin as one would like - or having an eating disorder and dealing with body image as a result. But it's hard to empathize with someone who's openly acknowledged an eating disorder, then spends all their time here bleating about how fat they are but life will be an endless Nirvana once they reach goal. I've thought to myself that some of these people probably don't WANT to reach goal, because then what would they have to obsess about? It's the same with us fatties; some may not want to reach goal, because then what would we have to hang so many of life's disappointments upon?

Yeah, I'm hormonal today. Stand back and take cover, y'all.

That's just the thing. Everyone can offer support in some way, shape, or form... Fat, skinny, admitted ED sufferer, binge eater, even someone who's fallen off the wagon and gotten run over by it!

It's the idea of going around the board and telling others "Don't listen to THEM!" that's been bugging me. We all know how to recognize someone who just doesn't "get" our question, and we take it with a grain of salt.

Take the advice offered by someone who really understands what you're trying to say and let the rest go, I guess... even if some people stomp and whine and accuse you of "NOT LISTENING!!!" and go around telling people you don't want it bad enough anyway.

I haven't seen too much of that, thank goodness - although I've noticed a few senior members who are forever pointing out they're not getting enough respect for their advice and accomplishments. Heck, who does? The boards ain't that different from real life, I guess. Nice rant, by the way.

Of course not, I don't think I insinuated that they are. Obviously in the context of my post above, advice and commiseration from formerly obese people that have lost the weight is very welcome.

It's all about using context and common sense in practice, that just doesn't happen sometimes, as Potatofree suggested above, sometimes people want to be involved in every single post whether it's appropriate or applicable to them or not. That's what I find irksome.

I don't know your particular story, but as a man who used to be skinny and gained weight as an adult, I don't expect you to understand what it felt like to be fat all your life as I was. In the same way, as a person who has been fat all her life, I have very little comprehension of how it feels to the former beauty queen who finds herself 100 lbs overweight in her 40s after having lots of children, that's another kind of situation all together.

I think in a support group such as this one, it's important to realize that while we get a lot from being here for ourselves, we have a duty not to inflict more pain on others who are here with us. We need to be aware of what we have to offer and what we don't have to offer and act accordingly.

And I think that's the original crux of Tater's post, let's all use some common sense, let's look at things with some intelligence and common sense to determine if someone's advice to us is useful, if our advice will be useful to someone else, if our experience will be helpful to to someone or if it will seem callous and flippant because it's inappropriate, if the point or clarification we add to a thread is actually helping or if it's just muddying the waters unnecessarily.