My worry is this article will be enough to push someone who is conflicted to the other side - acceptance of being overweight and unfit.
Tbh, I'm pretty sure nobody is going to read an article and be like gee, I guess being fat is OK & I don't have to worry about it anymore. Nobody likes being made fun of or feeling self-conscious. Or being tired, running out of breath, having a hard time on stairs, wearing a t-shirt at the pool so you don't have to be embarrassed to be seen, and so on. I think there's a few big barriers in the way:
1. For starters, you have to accept personal responsibility for your weight. No one is holding a gun to your head forcing you to eat or sit around & not exercise. Until you personally decide to take control & take action, nothing much is going to change unless someone magically comes along & starts cooking healthy, tasty food for you all the time.
2. Second, there's a lot of misconceptions about what you actually need to do. If you want to be thin, all you have to do is change what you eat. People think they have to live at the gym...you can be skinny simply by changing your diet. I see people all the time who are really consistent at going to the gym & then don't watch what they eat, and instead reward themselves for working out by eating whatever they want. You can do that to an extent using IIFYM, but then you have to add food tracking into the mix, which is not something that everyone likes to do.
As an addendum here, eating healthy doesn't mean plain chicken & veggies all the time. If you're willing to learn how to cook, you can make great-tasting food that is healthy for you. THAT is where the real barrier lies: you have to expend the mental capacity to find recipes & the physical energy to try recipes, and then make your meals. Or else start doing calorie tracking if you don't want to do mealprep yourself. Either way, it's fatiguing & requires effort, which is hard to stay on top of for more than like...a day, haha.
3. Third, telling overweight people to get lose weight doesn't inspire or motivate them, it crushes their self-esteem & usually results in no action taken.
4. Fourth, I don't believe in motivation as a way of getting consistent results. Like just not at all. Projects like losing weight are about commitment, not whether or not you feel like doing it on a particular day. Nobody has the kind of willpower that will let them do that, especially if you're already overweight, because you already have those eating habits ingrained.
Other than tracking your calories or being extremely physically active on a near-daily basis, the only thing I've seen consistently work is a permanent diet change. For me, that meant doing make-ahead meals so I didn't have to think or work when mealtime came. Being overweight typically means reduced energy & that includes mental energy, so if you're hungry, you're going to eat what you eat habitually unless you have something healthier already prepared. So that's pretty much what it boils down to be successful long-term:
1. You are responsible for your body.
2. Diet controls fat. That means food makes you overweight (or not).
3. Eating healthy does not mean eating bland, nasty healthfood, unless you put zero effort into it. Buy some garlic salt!
3. Commitment trumps motivation for results. If you want to change, stop being a mental pushover to your feelings of not wanting to make an effort & just start cooking. It's not hard. Anyone can mix tuna & mayo together & slap it in a tortilla.
And it's not like it's a permanent thing, either. I know guys who lost 100 pounds, kept it off for years, quit paying attention to it, and gradually drifted back to being fat again. You basically have to put in enough effort to (1) make your food taste good, and (2) create enough variety so you don't get sick of it. And of course (3) actually cook the food (or buy it based on a calorie-count for your goals, if you're into tracking things). I've bounced up & down in weight a few times because it's easy to get lazy, so you do have to make an effort to stay on top of it.
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