General

This is sooooo important! We all know healthy fat people that have a great quality of life, and a long life. So much is genetics! And yes, there are probably people whose being overweight negatively impacts their health due to their individual genetic traits, but the diet and medical industries like to use a blanket statement to tell us that we all have health risks from being overweight. Maybe I do, but maybe you don't - and few of us really know.

Spike's advice on being active is just generally good advice for almost everyone, I think, too!

If you want to stay healthy, just exercise. I know it's not fun, but it works.

What you need to keep in mind, is that exercising =/= weight loss. Weight loss is due to a calorie deficit, so if you don't want to lose weight by exercising, you just have to make sure you cover the calories you burn with extra calories. Fortunately that's not hard to do because even at 300lbs walking for an hour only burns ~500 calories, and 500 calories is literally half a packet of cheap chocolate biscuits.

Use an online tool to figure out a walking route to a nearby supermarket that will take you 30 minutes or so, walk there and buy the aforementioned packet of cheap chocolate biscuits (or whatever tickles your fancy), then walk home and eat them.

Do that 3 times a week and after a while you'll be much healthier and fitter, and you won't have lost any weight because the extra calorie intake will have covered what you burned. If anything you might actually put on weight.

are you 300 pounds with no health problems?

For the most part, yes.

The last time I went to my doctor he made me do the obligatory "you're fat" blood tests 🙄. When the results came back he couldn't find anything wrong. Blood pressure was good, cholesterol was good. To quote him: "keep doing what you're doing".

While the results were expected, it was actually surprising that he took it well. I've had doctors in the past who were visibility frustrated that they weren't going to get the chance to gleefully berate the fatty like they assumed and looked forward to. It always feels good to ruin a judgemental asshole's day.

But that said, 4 years ago I was over 400lb (for the second time, after dropping to 300lb ), ate anything I wanted, and had very limited mobility. Walking from one room to another meant I would be panting and sweating. Once I tried to exercise by going on a 1km walk, and was in such agony afterwards that I didn't try to exercise again for literally years.

Unfortunately you don't reach the lazy summit of fat mountain without doing some permanent damage to yourself.

Combine my past health problems with me being in my mid 30s now (I'm trying real hard to convince myself that 37 is still "mid" 😬), and if I binge/stuff on tons of sugar etc for several days in a row I now get foot and lower leg pain, so I suspect the inevitable diabetes has started to kick in. But as long as I don't overdo it, it's not an issue.

But that's all a consequence of my previous lifestyle, not my current one. Now I actually exercise and have a diet that (usually) doesn't consist entirely of sugar. I'm still the fattest person in the room, but I feel exponentially better.

I think as long as you start your weight gain while still paying attention to your health and fitness, and actually put in the effort and continue to do so, you can avoid a lot of the more common downsides of being morbidly obese.

Yes. Blood numbers good, no pain in joints, heart issues, etc. We are not actively intentionally gaining, but we also don't make concerted dietary efforts to lose weight. We eat as much as we want whenever we want. We both do eat relatively healthily most of the time, although I like to get stuffed to max capacity when I have the opportunity, and my wife is a meat and potatoes girl that I have had to teach to appreciate veggies.