Stop Judging People For Gaining Weight

Stop Judging People For Gaining Weight

It seems that everyone has an opinion on the ideal body weight someone should have. Even when people are at a healthy weight, they will likely find someone criticizing them, or calling them too ‘fat’. Here are a few reasons we should stop judging people on the size of their bodies.

Sometimes It’s Not Their Fault

We often assume that if someone has gained weight, it is because they are a glutton that eats too much and are too lazy to do any exercise. While this is true for many of the cases of obesity, it isn’t true 100% of the time. Many people gain weight for a variety of other reasons:

• Medical conditions like lupus – which was the reason singer songwriter avant gained weight. Many other medical conditions can cause weight gain, and so it isn’t something that they did, but something that happened to them.
• Poverty – believe it or not, poor people gain a lot of weight because they have little choice in the type of food they eat. This may sound counterintuitive, until you look at the cheapest foods available in today’s markets. Highly processed foods that are full of sugar and fats are cheaper to buy, but they also keep you hungry most of the time. This means that people living in poverty often eat unhealthy foods in large quantities simply because that’s all they can afford.
• Psychological issues – Sometimes people have psychological problems that cause them to overeat, or even slows down their metabolism. This is not exactly clear most of the time, but it is certainly the case for many people.

Judging Does Nothing To Help

By passing judgment on others, we aren’t providing constructive feedback. All we are doing is making them feel bad about themselves, possibly making it worse. Many people who are overweight never try to lose their excess weight simply because they feel that they aren’t capable of doing so. When asked where they got that idea from, they mention criticism and judgement from others. After all, if everyone tells them they are a lazy glutton, they will begin to believe that about themselves. Weight loss, especially for the severely obese, is not as easy as we think it is. Someone with a healthy weight that has gained a couple of pounds over the holidays may need very little effort to lose those few pounds. But when someone has been obese for years of their life, shedding those pounds takes a lot more efort and determination. More importantly, it requires a lot of confidence and determination, which isn’t easy to build up when everyone around you is judging you. Moral support is extremely important for people trying to lose weight, and passing judgement makes everything worse.

In the end, judging others isn’t going to help them (or us) in any way. There are better ways to handle the situation. So try to be more sensitive, and remember that not everyone wants to lose weight, their body is theirs to do with as they please, and it isn’t our place to tell anyone how to live their lives.