Anyone else ever take secret pleasure in someone else's weight loss struggles?

I was pretty much a chubby/fat child and became for the most part a fat/obese adult. There were occasions when I lost substantial amounts of weight but it always crept back when I "finished" dieting.

Throughout the years, although my father was never openly ugly toward me about my weight, I had no problem, by the time I was an adult, picking up on what his opinion was of people who were fat. He was one of those people who never dieted in his youth or adult life. He had no reason to, he worked fairly physical jobs and apparently had a metabolism that I did not inherit from him. He was lean at around 5'10" and maybe 150 -160 pound and never appeared to work at it.

It was not hard to discern that he believed that people who were overweight lacked certain traits, like discipline, will power or self-control. He also thought that all a fat person needed to do to not be fat was to buckle down and lose the extra pounds. This is not an uncommon belief among people who have never had to work to maintain a "normal" weight, IMO. They may not be blatant about it, although some certainly are but you pick up the subtle signals.

Unfortunately (for them) time catches up with some of them. After retiring by dad's penchant for living on bologna sandwiches, potato chips and beer combined with less activity and age resulted in him packing on pounds that he had never had before. He had a heart attack and bypass surgery but even though he ate a bit better after that he still gained some, reaching maybe 220 pounds although his doctor was telling him to lose.

While it bothered me that he had gained weight and that his health was at risk because of it, I found myself rather amused and actually getting a bit of twisted enjoyment out of the situation. He would complain about his inability to lose weight while making no real effort to deprive himself of anything. He would look incessantly for a "magic pill" that would make weight just go away.

I attempted to advise him of ways to go about dropping pounds but to no avail. Of course the beer was a significant factor but he insisted in equating the "glass or two of wine" that the doctor said was not bad for his health, to an unknown number of beers a day. His years of not struggling to maintain a good weight really set him up to fail. He could not understand why just saying he was going to lose did not fix the problem.

Eventually, it all caught up with him, the extra weight on top of close to 50 years of smoking (he did quit at around 66) CHF, emphysema, chronic Afib and alcoholism took him down at 81 years old. Could look at it as a pretty long life for someone who didn't put a lot of effort into healthy living. For a time, after he died, I felt rather guilty that I had taken some pleasure in his struggles with weight but I don't any longer. It was what it was, a little karma.