We've all heard it--the stereotyped observation that obese people are lazy and stupid. People carrying more weight than the health charts have decided they should, are often discriminated against with regard to social popularity, salary, simple courtesy in retail stores. Weight and body image activists have tried to fight back with a"Health At Any Size" paradigm. Sometimes it seems as though it is taking hold. Most of the time it doesn't. If I didn't have a lot of compassion for people struggling with weight issues, I would not have devoted my career to nutrition, a specialty where these problems inevitably find themselves. That being said, there are characteristics of this population that can test my patience. When I find myself frustrated, I think about the"fat, lazy, and stupid" label that has stuck like glue and seems so impossible to change. Some of the situations I deal with consistently: 1. Lack of follow through on commitment to exercise. 2. Lack of follow through on keeping a diet diary. 3. Lack of follow through on scheduled appointments."Lazy" can be easy to replace those with, to the untrained eye. But I also see other things equally as frequently. 1. Extreme forgetfulness. One client was so forgetful he would forget he ate lunch and go fix himself a second, stopping only when he saw dishes in the sink to remind him he'd already eaten. 2. Pretty poor grammar and spelling. 3. Difficulty grasping concepts that are fairly easy for other audiences I teach to grasp. I have come to a place that lies halfway between Health at Any Size and Fat, Lazy, and Stupid. The behaviors are there, but I don't label them judgmentally. I view them as clinical symptoms. If you're having trouble remembering, spelling, adding, following instructions…you need to speak up. You need to let your caregivers know so they can start to associate neurocognitive issues with weight. You can't keep them to yourself because they are embarrassing. You're not stupid. Your nervous system is struggling. If you're too exhausted to exercise because you didn't sleep the night before, welcome to the club. A pretty high percentage of Americans are in the same boat. If your physician or personal trainer is so into their own physique that they can't hear that this is a problem for you…find another. A very high percentage of our clients discover that once they get the sleep corrected, they have all kinds of energy for exercise. Calling someone lazy and hoping to shame them into punishing themselves so you feel good about your reputation as a coach is not the answer. Fixing the sleep problem just might be. This was kind of a hard blog post to write. I am guessing some people got angry and quit reading before they got to this point because they are so adamant about their own viewpoint, or were so offended because they jumped to a conclusion that I was going to be condescending, they just checked out. If you didn't, and you're still with me, thank you. It is really hard to try and talk about these neurocognitive issues with a target audience who really just wants to lose weight or have a baby and doesn't want it to be any more complicated than that. Last Tuesday, the day I posted about brain oxidation, we lost a lot of Facebook fans. I may lose more with this post. That's ok. I want to find the real answer to the real problem with PCOS, not just tell you what you want to hear in the short term, leaving you set up for bigger problems awhile down the road. I can't wave a magic wand and make it all go away, but I can tell you I really want to know what is going on with you. We are putting a project together where members of our Institute will have an opportunity to share their symptoms in a collective database, so that we can look for relationships and correlations that may not be currently on research radars. If you're not part of the Institute, we do encourage you to share, honestly, with your caregivers, what is really going on. I believe we'll have a whole lot more success transitioning the"fat, lazy, stupid" stereoptype into a"hormone-imbalanced, exhausted, brain-fogged" clinical presentation, than we will in just making those horribly judgmental words go away. Besides, one way feels to me like it's just giving in and trying to believe you're healthy as you are. If that is truly how you felt, I'm guessing you wouldn't be sitting here on this blog. We look forward to working with you on unraveling this mystery and getting your life back on course.