Let me get one thing straight: I've got nothing against fat people. The weightier members of our society include among their number some of its soundest and most grounded individuals. These are people who are comfortable in their weight; they fill out empty space; they have a presence, and they know it and like it. They like food, they like a lot of it, and they make no apologies. Their flab improves them; it betokens a sensual, epicurean approach to life, which is only to be commended. When Shakespeare's Julius Caesar said "Let me have men about me that are fat", these are the kind of people he meant.
He most emphatically did not mean, however, the kind of outsized neurotics who are my subject today: fat people who won't own up to their nightly fridge raids; fat people who whine about being fat, but are too goddamned lazy to do anything about it. These people are constantly in search of the magic formula that lets them lose weight while sitting on their arses. They are always on some fad diet or another; they believe all the most credulous media hype about diet and nutrition, especially if it also happens to tell them that exercise is no use. They especially like the stories that tell them how to shed the pounds by ingesting something: red wine helps you lose weight, white wine helps you lose weight, you lose weight if you eat chocolate at 3am, but only if you lubricate it with lard and have five cups of coffee the next morning.
When challenged about this crap, they will fill you with endless biological babble about ketosis, insulin, metabolic rates, endocrine disorders, hormone levels, genetic factors, appetite suppression, high-fructose corn syrup, and so on ad nauseam. But the truth is, weight loss is not about biology, it's about physics. Mass is energy, and to lose weight, you have to burn more energy than you consume. It's as simple as that, and there's no way of avoiding it. Good luck getting the message through to the deluded fatties, though. Yesterday on a message board I saw one guy claim that he actually gained weight when he exercised more and ate less, thus creating something from nothing, like a human perpetual motion machine. The first law of thermodynamics doesn't make a special exception for you, you fat fuck.
Some people are tricked by the side-effects of scams like the carbohydrate-denying Atkins diet, which makes you piss away the water holding your glycogen reserves as you starve your body of a ready supply of energy. All the Atkins diet does is transform you from a fat bastard into a listless and dehydrated fat bastard; if that's solution for weight loss, then so is cholera. As tempting as they sound, dietary changes are not enough: the only healthy and reliable way to lose weight is to get off your fat arse and do some exercise.
But then you get people claiming to eat nothing and exercise all the time and still be fat. These people are simply lying. It's amazing how obese people delude themselves about how much they eat: I'm tired of all the fatties I hear claiming to subsist on bird food. There was a seriously obese guy at my school who kept pointing to his packed lunch and saying "Look: I only eat the same amount as you", except he always had a fucking chocolate bar hanging out of his mouth when he said it, and two more in his pocket. When reckoning their daily intake, lardarses tend to count only the main meals and forget about the wall-to-wall snacking in between, which often amounts to five times the calories. And then they employ a bizarre system of mental accounting, constantly robbing Peter's orchard to pay peanuts to Paul. "I only drank diet colas today, so that means I can have an extra slice of pizza for dinner, and a whole cheesecake afterwards, oh, and maybe a tub of deep-fried lard."
They are similarly delusional about the amount of exercise they do. There was a three-hundred-pounder on the aforementioned message board who claimed to have done exercise five times a week, except, when you read the small print, it turned out that "exercise" included such strenuous aerobic activities as assembling an Ikea flat-pack. Some fatties consider it a day's workout if they just walk up the stairs, and some if they just tap their feet to the elevator music. It's easy to spot these people at the gym: they spend five minutes ambling on the treadmill, then sit fifty-five minutes wheezing at the weight machines, and pack it in a few weeks later after they notice no improvement. In case it needs to be spelled out: exercise involves moving about quickly for extended periods, taking in huge gulps of air, feeling your heart racing, working up a sweat. It's not meant to be a short stroll through the comfort zone.
I have little sympathy for the plight of these fat whiners: it's quite easy to lose weight if you have a bit of honesty, backbone, discipline, and common sense. Moaning fatties without these qualities end up, as far as I'm concerned, with the bodies they deserve.