Yes, she was sick. You have to see that isn’t the same as what you originally stated, though. You said that she didn’t know HOW to eat properly and that she really, really thought that eating one slice of toast a day and nothing else was a healthy way to live.
Do you really believe she thought that? Anorexic and bulimic people know that one piece of toast isn’t a healthy way to live. They know how they are eating is wrong and that’s what makes the disease so insidious. They HIDE what they’re doing because they do know it’s wrong. They lie about what they eat and don’t eat and what and how they purge. It’s an illness.
I believe there are many, many people who have an overeating illness. You bet. That’s why earlier in this thread I stated that these people (IMHO anyone who is morbidly obese) should be receiving psychological counseling for their illnesses along with diet and exercise.
What if someone claimed that 33% of anorexics can’t gain weight by eating more food?
I think what most of the naysayers in this thread are saying is that the difficult part of weight gain/loss is mental. What makes it so difficult is that people with unhealthy weight (either too much or not enough) play all sorts of mental games to convince themselves that it’s not mental but something else that is keeping them from a healthy weight. People who contend that “it’s complicated” or “it’s the medication” or “some people will still gain weight even if they eat nothing” are giving credence to the mental games.
Actually, yeah. She told me (post-recovery) that “medieval saints lived on a handful of beans or nothing a day, so I thought I could do it too, if I had enough willpower.” I think you underestimate how badly people with eating disorders can mess themselves up mentally. This is not the same as somebody telling themselves something like “If I ignore the bee buzzing around this room, it will go away.” It’s as if you could point at the floor and say “the carpet is blue”, and the affected individual would say, “you’re crazy, it’s red”–because that’s what they honestly think it is, and no amount of reason will convince them otherwise.
One of her friends, who had dealt with bulimia, made what I thought was a very cogent comment about eating disorders and eating issues of all stripes in general. If you’ve got a problem with alcohol, you can make a start by stopping drinking, avoiding bars, not hanging out with people who goad you into “just one pint,” etc. If you’ve got a problem with gambling, you stay away from casinos, bookies, etc. If you’ve got a problem with eating–well, you can’t stop eating for long and stay alive. You have to continue doing the thing that’s killing you (whether in the short term or the long term), but in a healthy way. It’s as if you could live by taking poison, just so long as you took the right amount of poison.
When I myself started dieting some time ago, I started eating less, and I was losing weight, but it was a disaster: I was cranky, irritable, and just not a great person to be around. It was only later, when I learned (as it were) that the goal wasn’t merely to eat less but to eat foods that contained the same levels of nutrients I needed but with fewer calories, that I got back to being my old (still cranky but not overmuch) self. I suppose I could have stopped earlier, had tygre not been so patient, but then I don’t think everyone’s got that luxury. The thing is that eating well, as opposed to merely eating less, is a learned behavior. In a much less radical way than my ex, eating less let me get where I wanted to go, but not in a particularly healthy or sustainable way.
And the constant hollow refrain of “eat less” in this thread will encourage the same behavior.
Yet another faulty analogy. And one that is often trotted out as an excuse.
Every fat person I’ve ever known is fat because of the types of foods they gorge on. Chips, cookies, candy, cupcakes. Sugary foods like breakfast cereal, sweet breads. Fattening comfort foods like butter, ice cream, fried chicken, hot dogs, macaroni and cheese. Full-sugar sodas. 2nd and 3d helpings of anything they want.
I have NEVER seen one sit down and gorge on a huge bowl of - salad. Or a giant plate of green beans.
There are plenty of healthy foods that you can eat as much as you want of and not get fat. Obese people don’t want those foods.
I’m done with writing to you. Even Sleeps With Butterflies, who generally agrees with what you say, called you out on using the term “fatties.” You have nothing worthwhile to contribute to a rational conversation.
I have no “angle” I’m trying to “work”, and suggesting that you understand some deeper and, let us not mince words anymore, deceptive reality about me and what I’m saying is without foundation of any kind. Whatever else anyone thinks about me, I’m who I say I am and I am entirely truthful. When I mean to be sarcastic, I am plain about it and if it is misunderstood as sincere I correct the misunderstanding.
This is GQ. To the extent that I or anyone else speaks about ourselves, it is to offer our personal experiences and/or our knowledge, period. Continued attempts to make this about me in some larger sense, especially connected and referenced to my infamous legal threads and legal struggles, will be met with my ignoring you completely.
Because in many cases the struggle with obesity is exactly what drives one to get the information. People who dont’ have weight issues have no motivation to get the information, people with weight issues do. People who don’t have weight issues have absolutely no idea what it takes to lose and maintain weight, because it comes naturally to them.
An analogy would be the way I understand how to speak and write English. I’m very good at it, entirely naturally. Once I learned to read, that and being raised by my parents, who set excellent examples, was all I needed. I naturally understand the correct way to use the parts of speech and punctuation, no struggle, no study, no thought.
But I would be utterly lost if I had to teach it to people who had no idea. Why certain things are done a certain way is completely mysterious to me. Outside of being able to name the simplest of things: noun, verb, adjective, subject, predicate… I’m lost. And, in the same way as slim people who have no need of the information, my natural ability with English leaves me unmotivated to spend much time studying and understanding the more complex reasons and details - why would I? It’s working for me, I think I’ll spend my time learning something I don’t know that I really need to know.
Like why people get fat and how to control it, because that’s a big damn issue in my life.
That’s not what I said, and not what I meant. You thought I would not want to use weights at first. I was pointing out that the extra weight I carry functions as “weights”. If a tall, strong, fit man weighs 225 pounds of solid muscle, his lifting his big heavy leg is not the same as a fat woman who weighs 225 pounds lifting her leg- fat is dead weight and hauling it around actually requires more strength than hauling around a thin body.
You reject any possiblity that I know this, for some strange reason. But I know this. It’s excellent advice. It’s very hard for me to do for reasons that have to do with my relationship with food, and for reasons that have to do with how I operate in the world generally. But yes, I completely agree that grazing all day on healthy protein, fiber and a wide variety of vegetables is an excellent diet for anyone and particularly for anyone fighting obesity. It controls insulin levels, which is crucial.
I’ve absolutely done so… but on the other hand, being both very intelligent and very genuine makes it much more challenging to bullshit oneself.
The people in my life have many times expressed to me in different ways how much they respect the degree to which I am self-aware.
Exactly the purpose you joked about: see what would happen. It would also give me a focus point that might be useful for me. Perhaps if I were to commit to the challenge I’d find it helpful.
“Just do it” is so profoundly unhelpful it stuns me. But it also shows the disconnect.
Going back to me and using English properly…you saying this to me would be like me telling a 50 year old who had been using hideously bad English her whole life but finally learned the correct way to speak:Just talk right! It doesn’t acknowledge a lifetime of talking “wrong” and how that run some grooves into the brain, making it very difficult to change. And that’s just speaking, which is a relatively neutral matter, it’s not like the person who speaks bad English gets some payoff from it, jsut the reverse, so she’s probably 100% motivated to change. That isn’t true of most people when it comes to weight, it’s much more complicated and difficult… sure we want to be healthy…and we also want that ice cream. Of course we are very interested in feeling good and being more attractive, but we’re also very interested in doing something that feels good right this minute, not 6 months from now.
The person who wants and needs to speak English properly has only a lifetime of habit to overcome, not a bunch of competing desires and motivations that directly conflict with her desire to speak better.
And this is is also why reducing the discussion to being about absolutely nothing except “eat less exercise more” is pointless. If you’ve spent most of your life without a weight problem, then, as you age, you pick up ten pounds when you arn’t paying attention, “eat less, exercise more” might be all you really need.
But for people who have battled serious weight problems for any significant period of time, it’s virtually meaningless because it’s far from being that simple.
Which brings me back to how I acquired my command of the language: by the example of the parents who raised me. This is equally true of my lifelong relationship and habits with food. I was raised in a house where there was absolutely nothing unusual about preparing a pound of bacon to be eaten by one person all by themselves. My mother would decide she had to have guacamole, and that meant 8 avocados and two large bags of Doritos. She would consume this over the course of two days. Popcorn was a giant bowl and a whole stick of butter.
My mother was fat, but she never got anywhere near as fat as I did. My dad was a fat kid, but he got it under control. Interestingly, I was a tall skinny little girl from age 1 to 6, which is when I was raised by my father, who was a stay at home dad in 1959-1964, while my mother worked. I dont’ remember my mother much at all during those years.
Then they divorced (separated, really, the divorce was 25 years later…but they stopped living together) and I lived with my mother. This was both emotionally devastating for me (not like most kids, who are usually much tighter with their mothers so divorce sucks but they are still with Mom… for me it was way worse.) as well as putting me in the path of my mother’s eating habits. I was a quick study.
By the time I was became an adult, after years of diets and weight watchers and starving alternating with making food the central focus of all things pleasant in life, my physical and emotional relationship with food was deeply ingrained. Telling me to eat less and exercise more is meaningless.
But what’s interesting is that I don’t eat like I did when I was a kid, or like my mother did. I adore guacamole, for instance. But I don’t even WANT to do what my mother did. I’'ll make a little dish from a half an avocado or a whole if its small, and I’ll eat it with a handful of chips or on a couple of homemade tacos, and I’m completely and entirely satisfied.
And I’m still far fatter than my mother ever was and far fatter than I ever was when I was gorging myself so much and so often that I thought it was normal to feel sick whenever it came time to use the bathroom, and it’s been many years since then.
But if you met me you’d assume I pig out all the time.
It just aint that simple, Sleeps.
I have an excellent support system, top notch, and it’s humming.
I agree with that entirely at all times about pretty much everything, even things that most people would never agree they have power over.
I am not and have never been the sort to argue that fat people are suffering from some mysterious glandular problem. My argument is that fat people are not a bunch of lazy, weak disgusting self indulgent sloths who must enjoy being fat because if they weren’t they wouldn’t be - they are fat for very complex reasons that are not simple or easy to overcome, and judging them as being “less than” in any way at all is arrogant, rude, and profoundly ignorant.
Because, like I said, these are people I personally KNOW. And I see what and how they eat. I’ve gone grocery shopping and to restaurants with them, been a guest at their house, hung out for the weekend with them.
NOT ONE eats like the slim people do. The non-fat people consistently make healthy choices, and only occasionally have a fattening treat. The fat people I know do the exact opposite.
The very fact of being overweight at all, then dieting, CREATES more problems physically, making it increasingly difficult to lose weight, increasingly easy to gain it and hold it, and increasingly painful to fight with.
Please read Dseid’s posts and links.
Fat people get defensive about their eating because people are so fucking shitty to them about it. (And rarely is it about the eating itself, it’s about the eating when you’re fat, because I only have two fat people in my life but I have LOTS of people in my life who can and do stuff their faces with crap.)
Here’s a newsflash: Shame is SHIT means for motivating anything POSITIVE.
Making people feel like shit about themselves encourages them to treat themselves shabbily, lose confidence in themselves, and often makes them want to give up entirely.
So if anyone claims they have the slightest interest of ANY kind in HELPING ANYONE with a weight issue, you have to stop acting, speaking, and if you can, feeling judgmental towards them. Start nurturing your compassionate and supportive side. Try helping the fat people believe in themselves, care about themselves, *whether they are fat or not. *
This is the critical divide between food addiction and all other addictions, and it is absolutely HUGE. [COLOR=“Black”]HUGE[/COLOR]
Ask any sober alcoholic: could you stay sober if you were required, in order to go on living, to have two or three small drinks every day, 8 hours apart? I guarantee that every single alcoholic will tell you that it would be completely impossible. They might last a day, or a week, or maybe even a month or two… but sooner or later, they’d be in the gutter.
Food addiction is more powerful than alcoholism by several orders of magnitude, because it stems from the most powerful drive we ALL have: the drive to eat.
So take the most powerful drive we are born with and then:
1.Fuck it all up with emotions and memories and relationships and self-worth and pleasure.
2.Live in a world that bombards you with food from morning until night.
Make sure that food, particularly very delicious, high fat high calorie food, is the central feature of pretty much every type of fun or gathering that people indulge in.
Deprive yourself of it, or sufficient amounts of it, for long periods of time, fucking up your body’s normal mechanisms for regulating your weight, and stepping up that drive in a very real chemical and biological way, not only sending you signals to eat more, but also altering your chemistry so that you are even better at storing your calories for later use.
Having become fat, find you are ridiculed and rejected by society, resulting in loneliness, stress and depression, which you seek comfort for, and because you’re you, “comfort” feels like some nice ice cream.
Being fat, find that your otherwise natural desire for activity is reduced, along with the fact that being active makes you hot and uncomfortable, and embarrassed if you are engaging in activities with other people, and it messes up your balance and strength, making it really unpleasant and difficult to get a healthy amount of exercise. This contributes to your overall stress and depression, which drives you to seek some pleasure from SOMETHING, and well, when all else fails some nice buttered pancakes sure are pleasurable.
When you feel like hell in every possible way and realize you have to lose some weight or die in the attempt, you decide that starting now, you are going to recover from your addiction, and from now on you are going to eat times a day and your meals will be something like a slice of white turkey, a small apple, and a handful of edemame. Every day. For the rest of your life. (that’s 255 calories per meal x 6 meals = 1530 calories for the day, which is probably more than you’re burning already if you’re really fat and inactive.)
Then, if you happen to be me and lots of other people who are like me, suffer from a very real problem with impulse control that exists completely apart and outside any of your problems with food and weight.
And then expect people to “just” eat less and move more, what’s the big deal?
While brimming with sympathy for people who are alcoholics, junkies, gamblers, or suffer from the less permanently disfiguring eating disorders of bulimia or anorexia. Because all those things are so hard. But fat people are just weak pigs.
As anyone who has fasted will tell you, it’s much easier to stop eating altogether. But of course, people who fast have rebound weight gain that’s so immediate and powerful you’d think their bodyweight was bouncing off some kind of metabolic trampoline.
So, rather than being “ok” because fat people “can do something about it”, I think the attitude and dismissiveness directed at people with weight problems is particularly unjustified.
And I think it stems from three things:
People who have no weight or food issues to speak of who are simply completely lacking in the ability to imagine people having experiences different from their own. It’s a common affliction that cuts across subjects, kinda like the Bobby situation from earlier: I don’t find walking to school difficult or unpleasant, therefore neither should Bobby! But of course, as I suggested, maybe Bobby is a different human being altogether and my experience is not the measure for Bobby’s.
People who DO have weight / food issues, but they do manage to do what’s necessary to keep their weight under control, and it takes effort that is definitely felt who, like Crafter Man, have concluded that since THEY have overcome THEIR issues through the degree of difficulty required for THEM to do so, anyone who has not yet done so is just weak and therefore contemptible. And of course, deep down inside, there’s also a smudge of irrational envy over what they perceive, in what is probably an entirely unconscious way, to be the fat person’s ability to shrug off the world’s expectations and indulge their desire.
and of course,
People who are fundamentally disgusted by fat on a purely visceral level. They recoil from from it and therefore from the people who are fat. They want to reject it openly and express their disgust. These feelings about fat itself extend to the fat person, who simply must be fundamentally disgusting and unworthy in some important way to have allow the situation to develop, therefore it’s entirely ok to slam them.
#3 is really always part of the picture with either #1 or #2, actually.
Sorry if the way I phrased my post implied that you were saying that. I merely was pointing out that the discussion in this thread has featured some took the op as yet another opportunity to jump up and down proclaiming just that - that the obese “won’t” lose weight, not “can’t”, because they choose not to; that “surgery is for the weak”; that the obese just “rationalize”; and soon the fat haters jumped in with the overt insults of “weak assed fatties” etc.
As to the bit about the actual ad, well, we don’t really know what the ad said, we only have the op’s recollection of it, which in the body of the op went like this:
And that statement is at least somewhat true, depending on how you define “help” the morbidly obese. At least a third will never solve their obesity problem by dieting. And surgery OTOH will result in weight loss that is very often long lasting, and is associated with improvements in diabetes control that exceed that obtained by weight loss achieved by dieting alone. Of course healthier eating habits and exercise will really still help the obese in a variety of other ways even if they do not solve their obesity in any significant way.
Now of course as phrased in the title - “can never lose weight by dieting” - that is, taken as a literal statement, false. Agreed.
As we do not have copy of the actual ad, just two slightly different reported memories of what was said on the radio, debating whether its actual claim is truthful or not is a bit silly. We agree on the facts I think.
I’m not sure if this WebMD article is behind a wall or not, but some here may find it edifying.
On the optimistic side is the fact referenced in this article that looked to see if an intervention program in Middle School could decrease obesity and diabetes risk factors. Intervention schools had substantial improvement but only modestly more than schools without intervention. Nationally, overall, the rate of childhood obesity may be turning the corner.
I’m in the business I am in, Pediatrics, because I believe that the time to affect long term health changes is before they are entrenched, or even evident. Some kids are at huge risk of both severe obesity and of its complications. We pediatricians need to do a better job at identifying them and intervening effectively. The problem is that pediatricians are people too, and our numbers include many who hold the same ignorant stereotypes and take the same blaming tone that many others take. The family centered behavioral group interventions that we now know are effective for treatment in Middle School aged kids and above are neither widely available or often covered by insurance. And there are not even studies out yet documenting its efficacy (or lack thereof, we don’t know) in those who are in the early grades, or even preschool, who are showing the early adiposity rebound that marks the “thrifty phenotype” and its long term risks.
Stoid, what the hell is this supposed to mean? That when you exercise, you don’t need “weights”, because the fact that you are heavy counts as “weights?” Or am I totally out of left field?
ETA: cool site, Sleeps. Some of those recipes look delicious. I saw lots of ones with hummus. Mmmm…hummus.
It means what it says. Our legs make up 30-40 percent of our total body weight. If I weighed 150 pounds, lifting one of my legs would mean lifting 24-28 pounds.
But on exactly the same frame I am carrying 250 pounds, which means I’m lifting a leg that has something like 20 extra pounds of flesh on it. (In my own case probably more because I have extremely big legs, most of my fat is below my waist in my ass and legs) It is disproportionately heavy, because I am disproportionately heavy - just because it’s actually part of my body doesn’t mean that my muscles and bones are somehow magically immune to the effect of it, quite the opposite, since high BMI (body mass indix…fat) means low risk of osteoporosis. Why? Because being me is a 24/7 “weight bearing exercise” that increases the density of my bones.
So depending on what kind of exercise I’m doing, no, I don’t need to add weight until I’ve become strong enough to need to increase beyond the weight I’m already dealing with. IN an exercise like the one Sleeps was talking about, this is more true than most, since she picks up a couple of dumbells to do walking lunges. It would be ridiculous for me to pick up 16 pounds of dumbbells to do walking lunges when I’m carrying a hundred excess pounds out the gate. In fact, it would be ridiculous for me to do walking lunges, BECAUSE I’m a hundred pounds overweight AND I’m 52 years old, AND I’m not in the best shape (I’ve been in far better at this weight, I’m just not now) AND I have very loosy-goosy, badly aligned ankle, knee and hip joints by nature, so stressing my knees like that would be insanely stupid and guarantees injury.
I am much better off doing more tightly controlled resistance exercises that isolate muscles and provide good stability. For bigger all-body type moves, brisk walking while consciously maintaining good posture is a better, healthier, safer bet. When I want to really build muscles I’ll get on my weight machine and do it piece by piece.
Actually, my loosy-goosey tendons are a real problem and I need to do regular physical therapy-style isolation training to stabilize and align my legs, which will reduce the danger of injury.
Anyway… I promised my sister I would take a 7 day vacation from the straight dope so I can focus on finishing some stuff that has deadlines on it. So I won’t be back for a week. (Assuming I can control my impulses… )
Nope, both the anorexics and many “fatties” are sure that the way they eat is perfectly healthy. My classmate whose period hadn’t arrived at 17 and whose medical problem got solved by eating more than one piece of toast and two small salads a day (including getting some protein of animal origin) was absolutely convinced that this food was healthy: it was what her mother had always fed them! My mother is convinced that the way she eats is perfectly healthy - why, she gets lots of fruits and vegetables! The notion that the overcooking and white sauce manages to move those vegetables from the “healthy” to the “unhealthy” columns doesn’t get through. Then again, she gets bombarded with a lot more messages to “eat more vegetables” than to “cut down on the white sauce”; it’s logical, because institutional messages need to be adressed to that majority who does not eat enough veggies and not to the minority who puts white sauce on veggies, but still, in her case it’s the wrong message.
ETA: you know, I just realized that the message says to “eat more”. More veggies, yes, but it doesn’t say that you should eat less of other things in exchange. May be leading some people to do like that lady who thought that Slim Fast would slim you down if you had it in addition to your regular meals.
