Why is ok to say, skinny and not fat?

[AnyDream]

Weight is a very emotive issue and I get really peeved when there is any insinuation that overweight people should just exercise more and eat less. I eat less than a 3 yo now to stay this thin (thanks to my lapband). Is that something someone should be able to sustain on their own? C'mon now. And exercising when you're heavy is very hard, sometimes painful and even with a lapband, many PCOS sufferers don't lose weight, because their body doesn't work like everyone else's. I had PCO and gained 25kgs in a year when I was younger. Was that me suddenly eating more and being lazy?

Weight is a personal thing and how you manage it should not be anyone else's business.

I think societally we are happy to make a whole lot of assumptions about why people are skinny or fat - when the reality of people's lives are frequently quite different to those assumptions. There is a lot of research at the moment about how stress vs happiness affects the biochemistry of weight gain, and it's one of the reasons why malnourished or impoverished children grow into wildly overweight adults. It's also true that once you gain or lose a certain amount of fat, your entire biochemistry around nutrition and fat storage changes. What's true for healthy adults in the "normal" weight range does not necessarily apply to people who are (on their own personal scale of health) under or overweight.

Yep, just ask all those breast cancer patients who gain on average 10 -20kg over the space of all of 6 months despite getting their breasts chopped off, even tho they have spewed their guts out for 5 months straight on chemo. It's the combination of the body's shock at being thrown suddenly into an artificial menopause plus the steroid medication that does it...not to mention the stress and grief involved in the process. Many of those women never lose all of that weight either, the changes to their bodies are profound. If was just about diet and exercise, this just would not happen.

ETA - sorry Misty, I read the post after that one and have only caught up with your previous post just now. It's also possible for people who are in the BMI-determined "healthy weight range" who are actually unhealthily overweight, by virtue of the amount of fat they carry relative to their muscle mass and skeleton (like you point out there are ethnic differences). There's a whole field of statistics which is about measuring people's height & weight & health etc (forget the name) but its quite complex. My point was that the BMI is really very crude whereas the reality of the health-body-size relationship is complex.