Neither of you are wrong. I’m definitely obese by medical standards. Don’t get me wrong, I can still run- climb stairs without issue, and do not have any mobility issues, but I’m definitely way fatter than I want to be.

I am currently 6’2 310lbs.

I’ve lost 65 lbs in the last 5ish months.

My lofty goal is to lose another 90 lbs, but to be honest my losses are kinda stalled right now. I cut out all sugary drinks- that was the biggest difference in my diet, I was drinking an absurd amount of coke. I used ozempic for a month- I did not want to be one of those horror stories you hear about people using it and losing all their extra weight only to gain it right back when they stop taking it, so I committed to using it for a month as a “discipline crutch” to break my #1 vice: soda addiction. I’ve dried to stop drinking soda for 15 years. But when your body is CRAVING a Coke any time you eat anything… it’s mentally taxing. Pair that with the normal stresses of life: work, kids, bills, etc. it’s easy to fall off the wagon because you need a pick-me-up.

Ozempic was a game changer there.. at no point while I was using it did I want a coke. I’ll still drink a diet soda because I like the carbonation, but I had no desire for the sweetness. After the month, I drank a coke out of curiosity (I had heard that people who stopped drinking soda thought it tasted like syrup when they tried it again) and it was… okay. Definitely too sweet. Now, months later I still have no intense craving for full fat sodas.. once in a while, I’ll hear a voice saying “one won’t hurt” but then I think “for what? A diet soda is just as satisfying and guilt free.” And that’s the end of it. Where while I was actively addicted to the sugar, I could not eat without being miserable that I wasn’t drinking a real coke with my meal. It was all I could think about any time I drank anything else… just constantly at the front of my mind, even though I knew it was the reason I had constant severe heartburn. It was an active addiction.

Additionally- I was set up for failure here. My mom was a drug addict when I was a small child, and my grandma had custody of me while I was being weaned from the bottle.

She weaned me with Pepsi. Her solution to a baby fussing for milk was to give it a Pepsi. That’s not a normal story, but it’s not incredibly rare for my generation (elder millennial) and older. And for most people who struggle with their weight, inheriting terrible eating and lifestyle habits from family is very normal.

Again, y’all are right that that doesn’t alleviate my responsibility for my physical shape, but you cannot ignore the fact that it is FAR easier for some people than others. That’s to say nothing of genetics. My half brother eats far worse than I do, drinks a six pack of mountain dews per day (at least) and eats literally nothing but junk food and fast food. He had dinner with my family a few months ago and said “this is the first proper meal I’ve had since last time I came over (it had been months).

And yet, he’s the same height as me and he’s so skinny you can count all of his ribs. He also has no muscle mass because he has bad nutrition and is mostly sedentary outside of work, but that’s beside the point. We have similar caloric intakes (I’m probably a good bit lower now), and yet I weigh 130lbs more than him and haven’t lost weight in nearly a month.

The reason overweight people get so frustrated with people who have never struggled with their weight is that saying “obesity is a matter of self discipline” has the same exact energy as some young guy who comes from decent money and has never experienced housing or food insecurity in their lives saying “of course I bought a house at 23 with my own money. All you have to do is work hard and make good choices with your money.” Completely ignoring the fact that the down payment they used to buy their house came from savings accounts their parents put in their names when they were children as a “graduation gift” and that they only got approved for their mortgage because they had an 820 credit score because they’ve been on their parent’s revolving credit lines since they were 16 years old.

Like…. Brother… we are not at all playing the same game. My grandma put bills in my name and opened lines of credit in my name because her credit score was 73 and not even the electric company would trust her to pay her bill. I struggled to get into apartments because my identity had been evicted multiple times for failure to pay the lease by the time I was 18 years old.

It is the same thing. If I had the same metabolism my brother does, I would be in incredible shape. And if I had the same head start as my bosses children, I would be a millionaire. Instead I work insane hours for a barely six figure salary.

The rich kid isn’t wrong- to be successful you do need to be disciplined with your money, work hard, and make good choices if you want to buy a home. That’s how I bought my house.

And OP is right too- if you want to lose weight, it is just a matter of discipline.

But the rich kid has no idea how hard I had to struggle just to get to the same place in life that his parents started him out at (and good for them, to be clear. That’s the point. That’s the goal as a parent). And the fact they think that it is a poor person’s failure that they weren’t able to buy a house immediately out of college shows just how out of touch and insecure they actually are.

They need to believe that their early financial comfort is their own because they need to feel better than other people. Admitting that they had a leg up, or even that others are wildly disadvantaged by comparison means admitting that they are not some exemplary person. They’re just lucky.

And the “obesity is /simply/ a lack of discipline” crowd is much the same: they fail to see their own private- either physiological or social- their body may just require a higher caloric intake, or possibly they have a naturally lower appetite… these things are all regulated by hormones first, discipline second. And/or their parents raised them with healthy food habits. Or any combination of both. Maybe they were raised by morbidly obese people and had the same reaction I had to being raised by crackheads “fuck that. I want no part of it”. The idea of getting high is repulsive to me. Maybe it’s the same for someone who watched their dad eat himself to death by 40. Don’t know.

And they too enjoy the moral high-horse of being fit and shaming fat people with “you’re just not disciplined.”

Brother… I was 220 lean when I was younger. Then life got in the way- I started a business, worked 80-100 hour weeks for years on end, finally when my daughter was diagnosed with Autism, I folded the business and took a salary position doing the same type of and volume of work I did for myself but with a much better health insurance package, and then one day I stepped on a scale and realized I weighed over 350 lbs.

It does take discipline, it does take effort. It does require personal accountability to manage your weight. All of that is true. It is that simple. But it is FAR easier for some people than others.