The article says that you should accept your 'natural weight'. Unless you have a medical problem, obesity is not a 'natural weight', its a result of an unhealthy lifestyle.

I'd say the natural "set point" is where someone feels comfortable, both physically and emotionally. This point will differ from person to person, depending on genetic make up etc, but the principle of finding physical and emotional comfort and contentment, is the same.

I have just lost 2kg through healthy diet and exercise. I feel great when I can fit in the clothes I wore a few years ago. I feel confident when I can see the right curve at the right place!

As somebody that has recently embarked on a lifestyle change I am aiming to lose weight but know that I will probably never be lighter than seventy - seventy five kilos. For me being happy at 75 kilos is far more important than stressing out about being a perfectly fit 60 kg's living on rabbit food and running for three hours every day.

Interstingly enough when you line up all the girls in my extended family we are all roughly the same height (155-165 cm)and weight (75-90 kg's) and we are never going to be size six stick figures! I've also seen photos of our great-grandmother taken in the early 1900's and the woman is six foot tall, probably 100 kilos and has breastfed fourteen children so it's no wonder we're built the way we are.

There's really no point in aiming for the unobtainable! Life is about being happy with what you are and not constantly worrying about something you might never be!

This article basically encourages people of an unhealthy weight to accept that they are at their 'set point'. Irresponsible.

Stupid diets don't work, correct. Improving your general diet to be healthier can definitely work. The article talks about dieting to get thin, what about simply changing your diet to get to a healthy weight.

Okay so most the people who read and commented on this didn't read it properly. She never suggested that you base you're judgement on overweight family members. The inference is base your judgement on those who have a 'normalish healthy lifestyle'. I will never look like a supermodel - no matter how little I eat or how much i exercise. I will never have 'slender' upper arms, my body design means the best i can do is work them out a little so at least they are firm chunky rather than flabby chunky (ewww) and neither will i ever get lovely thin legs *sigh* but again I can keep them firm and they get me along my 6-10km run each day no problems.

The point of the article is to stop us from having impossible ideas and thus setting ourselves up for failure. If your figure is an hourglass (eg Kate Winslet/Scarlett Johnanson) then its not going to matter how much you diet you're not going to look like someone with a plank figure (think Cameron Diaz/Keira Knightly) cause your entire genetic make-up is different.

Good on you all for losing weight and whatnot, but amongst boasting about your new skinny-ness, you've failed to see the point of the article. Did you even READ it? It's talking about people who put more emphasis on being skinny than being healthy. Believe or not, there is a point where being skinny isn't healthy.

And another point, you've all said you can attribute your recent abundance of success to being thinner... have you ever thought it could be just merely acting happier? Or maybe you've been alienating yourself and making excuses all these years? I know plenty of bigger people who have extremely successful careers and social lives. Being bigger is certainly not healthier, but believe it or not, some people need positive encouragement from people as food is a lot friendlier than someone calling you a fat slob.

I've always been of average weight and I don't know a lot of skinny people who've been totally secure in themselves because they're too busy talking about how much more skinny they could become through their new fad diet.

The best advice i can give is get rid of Sky TV.

You'll gain lots more pleasure from spending time outdoors than channel surfing on the couch. Your kids will love you for it too.

@Capt Picard #17 - Or it could be because the society in general are negatively biased against fat people. It's hard to be happy when people put you down based on your looks, jobs turn you down because you are deemed as health risk so on and so forth. For examplem "I wouldn't be surprised if it was written by a self-justifying fatty boom sticks".

I was born as a fat baby (as in not losing the baby weight as I grew up) and was around 60 by the time I was 12. However, I never had any health problems arising from that, perhaps because I was always active with no particular eating issues. I've since moved onto gym due to busy schedule but I've been maintaining my weight. However, I've seen all kinds of discrimination from people who apparently don't judge people by their looks.

If you do a moderate amount of exercise and eat a moderate amount of food then that's probably the most realistic place for your weight to be, some people will still be fat and some people will still be thin and that's ok.

There is no point beating yourself up when there is no scientifically proven method to keep a fat person slim for more than 5 years. The success rate for losing and maintaining significant amounts of weight loss for greater than 5 years is pretty much zero, only statistical outliers achieve it. Pretty much all the scientific evidence so far points to us only having a very modest amount of concious control over our longterm body weights.

Studies have shown that how fat you feel is a greater predictor of morbidity and mortality than the actual numbers on the scale. Beating yourself up and constantly stressing about your failed weight loss attempts is very bad for your heart. Chronic stress makes you produce cortisol and cortisol is like poison in constant doses.

So I say stop stressing, live moderately and enjoy life.