So she’s a gardener too?
Well, she read part of a book about gardening once. Which is pretty much the same thing.
Ugh, I tried but I couldn’t get through it. Stoid was given lots of valuable information and advice, but she chose to ignore it (sound familiar?) and found every way possible to deny reality. Bonus points for the sneering at gastric bypass surgery.
Which is ironic if you think about it, since gastric bypass is really extreme caloric restriction by restricting food volume. Of course it is possible to “eat around the band” and consume low-volume, high-calorie foods and not lose much weight at all after surgery.
That thread is a giant magnet for stupidity.
That’s all I have to say.
Here ye go:
I know I would have.
Look, I used to be about 285-290. I’m now 235. So I was REALLY fat, and now I’m just fat.
Losing weight is simple, and it’s really fucking hard. I don’t know why so many people have a problem with that dichotomy; it’s simple, but it’s hard. The simple part is that losing weight is just a matter of consuming fewer calories than you burn over a long period of time. The hard part is finding a way to do that sustainably.
I can tell you there have been times I have been almost hypnotized by the idea of eating food. Losing 50 pounds was dirt simple in theory and amazingly hard in practice, and I started losing it ten times before succeeding. Not stuffing my face with food is astoundingly difficult, and it takes a specific way of eating, in my case, to prevent me from either falling off the wagon or letting my consumption creep up.
So if SToid or anyone else wants a sympathetic ear, holy shit, I am ALL OVER that. I know how hard it is. I will sometimes - this is literally true - find myself standing in the kitchen, knowing I am not actually hungry, yet drawn to food so powerfully I find it hard not to gorge. Coming home from work I find myself mapping out where all the fast food places are. If drug addicts find it this hard, I have a million years of sympathy for their plight, because Jesus, it’s hard.
But I have to do it because there is one way, and one way only, to lose weight; consume fewer calories than you burn. Stoid is in denial on this issue - on other issues I’ll take a pass, just because - but to be honest I can’t really find a lot of ire in me to throw at her on this because I can understand the denial. I would bet good money her estimate of the calories she consumes is a preposterous underestimate by a margin of at least fifty percent, and calories burned an overestimate of equal magnitude, and I’d bet that because I’ve been there, done that. Even in her arrogant denial, to be honest, I feel a lot of sympathy for her. It’s just an absolutely shitty state to be in and it’s so goddamned tough to dig yourself out.
It’s simple, and it’s so hard.
Really, really well said, RickJay.
Yeah, all that formatting actually has the opposite effect than she intends…it actually makes it harder to parse her posts and grasp her point, rather than easier.
That’s actually a really interesting idea.
I jumped into the fray when she said exercise wasn’t a good way to lose weight.
I haven’t read The Book and I think I’d probably agree with a good portion of it since it doesn’t really seem that earth-breaking, but Stoid shouldn’t be passing herself off as an expert on what does and does not work for weight loss. Exercise, when combined with a healthy diet (defined however you want to define it), is a wonderful way to lose weight. When she started going down the “exercise won’t work” path, that’s when she really sounded like she was delusional.
I’m no expert either, but I’m willing to bet that for some people, exercise is better than dieting for losing weight, while the reverse is true for others.
That may be true for some people, but it’s probably a tiny minority. An average person would need to do full-out cardio for an hour to burn around 600 calories. Or they could spend three seconds not ordering the large fries from Mickey D’s.
People tend to vastly overestimate the energy they’re using while exercising, and vastly underestimate the calories they consume. Altering your diet and sticking to it every day will provide you with a much larger and more sustainable calorie deficit than an exercise routine that requires a huge investment of time and energy.
That’s not to say exercise is bad – quite the opposite – just that exercise alone as a weight-loss strategy is not realistic for most people.
I had an interesting revelation today along these lines. I’m not fat and never have been but I do weigh more than I’d ideally like to. Because I’m very tall and broad though, I carry extra weight well and you can’t really tell, and I don’t have a good day to day assessment of my weight. I weighed myself for the first time in about six months today and was suddenly down 12 pounds. This, over a fairly sedentary winter where I was on paternity leave.
Then it hit me - it’s because of that paternity leave. I had a tendency to snack heavily at work, worked long hours, and had a big number of my meals from fast food. At home, I didn’t really have that option and the pounds melted off.
I biked 40 miles a week last summer and lost five pounds. I sat on my ass (and ate better) all winter and lost 12.
And now I know what I’m having for lunch. Mmmmmmmmm.
I think there really is something genetic going on with obesity. Not even close to exclusively, but there has to be a factor, as some people’s situations clearly demonstrate.
However, I also think Stoid has not tried the “eat less and move around more” side of dieting long enough to draw any conclusions that actually apply to her.
You don’t understand! She can’t eat less because she’s overweight! And she can’t move around more because she’s overweight!
Maybe if I used different colors it would be clear to you brutes…
I haven’t read the Taubes book, but I think it relies on the theory that your body can’t form fat if it doesn’t have any insulin, so if you eat all fat and protein, you won’t form any fat and the excess calories will be burned off heating your body or giving you more energy, or whatever, I haven’t read the book.
Obviously the theory has flaws, like the fact that protein will cause your body to release insulin (in a much smaller quantity than carbs, but still) and I’d question whether your body could repair itself very well without insulin, but I wouldn’t call it crazy.
The other half of that story is that muscle is denser (though only a little moreso) than fat. So you likely changed shape in subtle ways- more muscle, less fat.
It’s certainly true that if you’re really fat, it’s hard to exercise.
When I was 20 and weighed about 195, I could go run a quick 5-10K and stop in the middle for a round of pushups and situps without even thinking about it. Then later on in the day I’d go play an hour and a half of tennis and burn off another 700-1000 calories and then go out drinking and it all worked out. Now that I’m 39 and weigh 235, that’s a daunting prospect. Two years ago at 290, no fucking way.
That’s one of the things that makes this such a tough rut to get out of. The fitter you are, the easier it is to burn those calories off. Michael Phelps eats in a day of training what I eat in a WEEK (that’s literally true) but he can also swim like a crazy bastard all day.
So actually, the “I have trouble exercising 'cause I’m fat” bit has a lot of truth to it, and Stoid is in her 50s, making it all the harder.
But “I can’t eat little enough” is just absurd. If you’re actually eating 1300 calories a day with even casual exercise you will lose weight. I don’t care if you’re eating carbs, meats, fats, or lobster Newburg.
This is of course true in the long-term but something a lot of people have found is that if you’re on a severely calorie-restricted diet, you can plateau out for long periods of time during your weight loss period. Counter-intuitively, it actually seems to kick-start some people’s weight loss when they add calories to their diet in these phases. (Although, really, if your daily calorie expenditure is 2000 and you go from eating 1300 per day to eating 1800 per day, you’re still at overall calorie deficit even though now you’re eating what probably feels like a lot more food.)
Somewhat embarrassingly, that thread almost sucked me into trying to prove some kind of point by going on the all-butter ‘n’ bacon diet for 10 days, but luckily my husband talked some sense into me before I embarked. (Well, and also I realized that, you know, it’s Stoid. I could eat 3000 calories per day with photographic evidence of my scale for a month straight and even if I gained 10 pounds – which, by the way, I totally would – she’d still be off in Stoidland where up is down, left is right, calories don’t make you fat, and reading a law book is the equivalent of law school.)