The 8 People Who Will Ruin Your Attempt to Lose Weight

It's damn hard to lose weight and just generally get in shape. Americans are getting fatter every year, and 80 percent of people who lose weight gain it all back. Why does it seem so impossible? Part of the reason is willpower and genetics, blah, blah, blah, but a big part of it is other people. Here are some of those often well-meaning monsters you must overcome in your battle to get healthy.

8. People Who Think They Are Doctors
Tell other people that you're trying to get in shape, and inevitably, someone will chime in about how calorie counting is a waste of time and it's all about carbs, or superfoods, or "muscle confusion," or some other magic bullet that renders all other aspects of getting in shape moot. These people aren't doctors and don't even play them on TV, but they still authoritatively dispense advice about how our bodies were made to handle all-meat diets or all-grain diets and outline detailed eating schedules they claim will trick your body and increase your metabolism. What happens is they read a blog or watched Dr. Oz or a P90X commercial, and are now regurgitating their confused recollection of it as if it were fact. They don't remember half the details, they just remember how excited they were to find out something boring they previously took for granted (eat less and exercise more and you lose weight) was really untrue, and something unexpected and exciting was true in its place! This is, after all, Cracked's secret to success. If you can't tune these people out, it can really take the wind out of your sails when you're starting out on a simple diet and exercise regimen and don't see much progress at first (which is normal), and start to doubt if you're on the right track. With people spouting specialized theories at you about how weight loss "really" works, and why what you're doing is never going to work, it's pretty easy to just stop going to the gym the first day you feel tired.

7. People Who Are Cartoonishly Supportive About Body Image
Everybody knows that society is oppressing us with ridiculous standards of body image, especially when it comes to women, and that we all need to do our part to reverse it by making normal-sized people feel confident in themselves and stop them from thinking they are fat. That's totally correct, but all good things can be taken too far. Some people think that it is always 100 percent wrong to ever admit anyone is fat and have a confused notion that to ever agree with anyone that they are overweight is to become one of society's oppressors. If someone who is actually overweight says, "Oh man do I need to lose some weight," these people's knee-jerk reaction will be, "Oh no! What are you talking about! You're totally fine the way you are!" without even looking at them.

6. People Who Take Food Too Personally
Food isn't just food in our culture, or in anyone's. Weddings always come with banquets, family get-togethers on Thanksgiving and Christmas are centered around elaborate meals with specific dishes, birthdays require cakes, big political and business deals are made at power lunches, and first dates are almost always about judging the other person's restaurant behavior. Thanksgiving! If Grandma doesn't make her secret cranberry sauce recipe, Christmas is ruined! If someone doesn't eat your birthday cake, they don't really care about your birthday! This can only mean they wish you were never born!

5. People Who Never Think It's Good Enough
Everyone knows about the stereotypical Asian parent that sees their kid's straight-A report card and asks, "Why no A+?" This kind of joke is apparently very funny to people without such parents but just depressing and straightforwardly true to people who have them. Well, you get the exact same kind of people when it comes to getting in shape. Tell them you're going to stop drinking soda and drink only water, and they'll say, "That's not going to do anything, you're still eating burgers for lunch and playing video games all day." Tell them you're going to take a half-hour walk at lunch every day and they'll snort derisively and say, "You know the amount of calories you burn in one walk isn't even enough to make up for one banana, right?" Pretty much nobody outside of movies ever switches lifestyles overnight, suddenly cutting fat from their diet, exercising five times a week, quitting video games and TV, swapping pasta for quinoa and steak for tofu. Almost everyone who's successfully turned their weight around started out with one "useless" change, like exercising once a week or subbing water for soda. (I put "useless" in quotes because dropping one extra large soda can save you 500 calories just like that.)

4. Overly Spontaneous People
Sticking to an exercise/diet routine depends a lot on planning and routine. Some plans have a once-a-week splurge worked in, maybe a Pig-out Friday to let the pressure out, so you can get back to the grind on Saturday. If you're taking exercise classes -- martial arts, boot camp, yoga, pole dancing -- you might only be able to go certain days of the week. Spontaneous people can throw this all out of whack. Friends who call you up and ask if you want to go out to dinner in the city -- and it turns out their reservation is an hour from now. Or friends who just came from out of town and forgot to tell you ahead of time, but they're leaving tomorrow. Someone who just realized it was so-and-so's birthday and "we have to do something." Or maybe parents that drop by unexpectedly with home-cooked dinners because "you're so busy."

3. Family Members Who Are Not On A Diet
The people most in a position to ruin your diet without meaning to are family members that aren't on a diet. They don't have to be sadists who keep going, "Mmmmmmm," while eating burgers in front of you. Even if they're totally supportive of your diet, there are just logistical problems. If you cook at home, it's not really practical to make separate dishes for each person, so in reality, you pretty much get to go vegetarian with your spouse or your spouse doesn't go vegetarian. Even if you're just cutting fat, you can't cut the heavy cream out of just your bowl of clam chowder and not the rest of the pot. (Note: If you can think of a way to do this, please let me know.) It's not completely impossible to switch to a healthy diet without your family taking one for the team and sacrificing some delicious foods from their diet, but being able to do it usually takes some convoluted planning or just black magic.

2. People Who Make Fun Of Your Stupid Exercise Routine
I'm not saying it's wrong to make fun of people for doing Jazzercise, Tae-bo, Zumba, yoga, powerwalking, soccer, pole dancing fitness or martial arts as an adult, and we as Americans have a duty to come up with humorous quips about our friends' manhood or coolness or funny-looking neon-colored exercise gear, in order to save our declining mainstream sports. But if your friend is a perennial couch potato who's finally found the motivation to exercise through country line dancing aerobics, after failing to stick with jogging, walking, MMA and any other cool-people-acceptable exercises, you might want to think twice about whether you might be sabotaging his last chance to not die early of heart disease.

1. Delicious People
Personally, I was making a lot of progress in my weight loss over the past week, ever since that big biohazard emergency. I guess the mandatory quarantine has helped keep out distractions so I could really focus. The weight has literally been falling off of me, like in actual chunks of flesh, which is a little weird, but I guess that makes sense, how else would fat people get thinner? The only problem is that lately I just keep running into really delicious looking people, just really pink and fleshy, with brains that just melt in your mouth. They have to be like, a million calories. I guess I just need to start avoiding bunkers and fortified buildings entirely, since they're always chock full of tempting, tasty-looking people. Damn these people, it's their fault I can't go anywhere these days. Well, that and the fact my feet fell off.

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