I do think that too many processed carbs, especially sugars, are bad for you, as well as a diet that is mainly one or two foods (even if they happened to be healthy), but you still won’t gain weight if you don’t eat more than you need (the OP hasn’t said anything about how much his mother eats, perhaps also why she mainly eats that stuff; of course, we also don’t know exactly what is meant by bread and yogurt; there are breads that have far more calories that the example I gave).
This is actually not true. You may not be able to choose where you reduce, but people gain and lose weight in different places depending on their genetic propensity. Example: a runner in my neighborhood, runs every day, weighs about 115, has very prominent saddlebags (hip thing) and is otherwise quite slim. On a good reducing diet the typical person will lose belly fat first, and on a bad fast-food diet the typical person will gain weight around the middle first, but there are lots of variations.
My father-in-law had a huge belly and sticklike arms (probably legs too, I didn’t see his legs). He was in the hospital for some weeks for hip replacement and then in rehab, where he ate a good diet and (possibly key) didn’t get to drink, and he came out of it with a flat belly and everything else the same size. Of course once he got out he headed to the first bar he saw so he put that belly back on but it took a few months.
(Note to OP, I am not saying your mom has a problem with alcohol; this is merely an anecdote about losing a big belly.)
The “apple” body can indicate metobolic syndrom. Sometimes pre diabetic.
What type of yougert? Plain, nonfat, sweetened?
If she mostly eats sweetend yougert with bread I could see a problem.
Agreeing with previous posts, her diet seems definitely lacking. For example, does she not consume any vegetables? I’m not a doctor or dietician, but that’s the first thing I noticed. My guess is that she’s very malnourished and missing things such as vitamin C and probably several others.
Not true. Where do you get your information from?
I don’t believe in the theory that says: the more you eat the fatter you get. It’s true with most people, but not all of them. I am very thin, and I eat very very much. And thin is not necessarily healthy. My bad diet has cause lots of problem to me, but overweight is not among them.
here is my usual daily diet:
7:00 - 10 sweet dates + Arabian coffee
9:00 - 5 dates + Coffee, then a bowl of beans + two loafs of bread + cheese + a lot of sweet tea
12:00 dates and coffee
02:00 bowl of white rice + soup + bowl of tomato and onion salad + a handful-size meat/chicken + two cups of yougurt milk
5:00 tea + crackers
7:30 coffee + dates + lots of chocklate
10:00 dinner: omelette + falafel + cheese + cream + honey + lots of sweet tea
and alway have something before I sleep
The way metabolism works isn’t that the more you eat the fatter you get. It’s that if you eat calories in excess of what your body consumes you gain weight. There’s no room for disagreement at all, it is an absolute fact. The only vagaries are how much energy your body uses and how much food you eat. Most people are bad at estimating what food consume, but even if you know that with precision, you don’t know exactly what energy you are burning. It’s not something that’s knowable with precision.
It’s easy to make empirical observations though. For instance, you aren’t overweight therefore you’re not regularly eating more than your body burns.
There are a lot of articles due to the Olympics about the enormous amounts of food Olympians eat, 6000+ calories per day, because they are so active.
So, It’s eather my body is consuming (changing into energy) all the calories I eat, or I’m not eating much?
I watched a BBC Horizons episode titled: “why are thin people thin?”. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get an answer to that question. I think my intestines are not absorbing all calories, so they don’t have to burn them.
This. THIS. Times a million. I can think of few worse sources of medical advice than this message board.
I don’t have the patience to point out all the dumb things that have already been posted to this thread but there’s a ton of misinformation in here already. Have her see her regular doctor, and if necessary have him refer her to a specialist.
If it does turn out she’s simply overweight, the usual advice re: counting calories, diet, and exercise applies, though the honestly exercise isn’t going to be terribly helpful in her case. Older obese people generally can’t exercise enough to burn any significant calories.
Liposuction isn’t for fat people. It’s a scalpel, not a magic wand.
Definitely not the first unless you are very active, and for the foods you say you eat, it sounds like some of them, like “two loaves of bread” aren’t as big as they are over here (this is a loaf of bread to me; 450 grams and 1,080 calories total for this example).
There are other possibilities but they’re all pretty ‘soft’, not a complicated answer that might be more satisfying. For instance, it’s possible you are very overweight and have a warped opinion of what a healthy weight is. It’s possible your weight has been steadily increasing but slowly enough that you haven’t noticed. It’s not something you can determine on an Internet message board.
I wonder if he may be calling one “round” of Arabic bread a “loaf.”
You mentioned that bread is a major part of her diet.
There is a book called Wheat Belly which claims that mankind has not had enough time to evolve better responses to wheat consumption which only began with the advent of agriculture.
I haven’t read it but my wife does a lot of reading on Primal/Paleo/Atkins/South Beach all of which reject wheat as a very fast source of blood sugar (just like sugar) which causes a spike in the insulin response which tells the liver to convert the blood sugar to fat so it can be stored.
My wife has ben living with a 60 lb loss for several years. After getting serious in January, I have had a consistant 25 lb loss that has been sustained for 5 months. We eat lots of vegetables, eggs, and lots of meat including the “bad” ones. I can now take my shirt off at the beach. I was quite sensitive about my man-boobs.
Amazingly enough the advice in this thread has mostly been spot on:
“Central” or “abdominal” obesity (as described by the op) is one of the central features of metabolic syndrome and travels with a high risk for diabetes, dyslipidemias, and hypertension. Links to more information about central obesity were provided.
Those problems that run with central obesity must be screened for and treated if present but the treatment for central obesity is improved nutrition and exercise.
That nutrition approach means adequate good quality protein sources, adequate amounts of vegetables and fruits, and little refined carbohydrates. Overall calorie intake generally needs to decrease. There are lots of variations of nutrition approaches that have different gurus and acolytes but those principles are pretty basic across all that work. A diet of yogurt and bread mostly can be improved upon greatly and the dietary advice given here so far has been just fine.
In fact the only advice here that is clearly horribly wrong is the advice you just gave, that exercise is not going to be terribly helpful for a 53 year old obese woman. On the contrary IT IS KEY. It is vitally important! Exercise, even the modest exercise that an obese person of years more advanced than a mere 53 can do, has tremendous benefits on inulin sensitivity and on visceral fat in particular, the latter possibly particularly so in the elderly obese. It also has brain effects that can impact the body’s weight set point.
O.P.,
Get her eating vegetables and fruits, try to get her eating Greek style yogurt without added sugars, get her to vary her protein sources some, at least some legumes and nuts if not some fish.
Get her moving. Walking half an hour a day even if it is on the treadmill, whatever she can and will do.
And yes get her to doctor who at least can make sure that the assumption of central obesity is correct and who can screen for diabetes, dyslipidemias, and hypertension.
Quoted for truth.
It’s extremely important to make sure that what we’re assuming is fat is, indeed fat, and not a tumor(s), cyst(s), acites or other issue. The fact that the OP says, “Her body is normal except for her abdomen,” is a red flag. Assuming normal=thin and the OP has a realistic idea of what normal is, most postmenopausal women simply aren’t shaped that way unless there’s something wrong. So called “apple shaped” women - those with the greatest propensity for abdominal fat - tend to gain fat in their face, chest, shoulders and arms before they gather it around their middles.
IANAD but FWIW I don’t think 5’5" and 205 lbs is THAT fat. Yes, it’s certainly overweight but I’ve seen worse.
I’ve BEEN worse.
Anyhow, OP – your mom needs to cut out the bread and yogurt, both have tons of sugar. Get her a copy of the Atkins Diet book … it’s very hard to do by the book and she may need to tweak it but dammit low carbing is the only way to go. She’s gotta be willing to cut the sugar from her diet for life, though.
PandaBear77, she’s a BMI of about 35. Over 30 is defined as “obese” and over 35 is defined as "morbid obesity’. I am sure you’ve seen worse and been worse but that does not make it any less of an issue. True about 15% of American women are at least as fat but the fact that she is primarily fat centrally makes it a bigger deal (BMI is not the whole story); she is in good company in Saudi Arabia (from 12 years ago so likely underestimates now):
The paper continues to bemoan the lack of exercise and the imbalanced nutrition of the population. Pretty much exactly the circumstance of the op’s mother. The result is what is being considered “a diabetes time-bomb” in the Kingdom.
And dammit low carbing is NOT the only way to go. It was a way that worked for you (I presume) but that really does not mean that it is the right choice for everyone
If she has metabolic syndrome, then by definition she has hyperlipidemia, hypertension, and hyperglycemia (and microalbinuria in some definition schemes). This isn’t simply being overweight, this means she has a number of diagnosable medical conditions that actually require medical treatment, to which exercise might be a helpful adjunct. That’s making the rather large assumption her “abdominal fat” represents abdominal obesity and that in turn means she has metabolic syndrome, and not ascities, GI dysfunction, hepatomegaly, a tumor, etc. It’s also worth noting that many, including me (and the ADA) feel that metabolic syndrome is sort of a useless diagnosis. The fact that risk factors for heart disease, obesity, and diabetes are highly correlated isn’t really that surprising or helpful.
If, on the other hand, she’s just overweight without any of these conditions, “exercise” almost always does nothing. If she undergoes significant weight loss through diet and sticks with a program long enough that she develops some endurance then yes, exercise becomes helpful as a weight management tool. It also obviously has benefits for CV health, etc though we are presupposing in this scenario that she doesn’t have any issues with her blood pressure, lipids, sugar, or kidneys. The number of obese 53 year old women who have achieved this in my experience is zero but I don’t doubt these people exist. The hot climate doesn’t help.
Walking 30 minutes on a treadmill a day at a leisurely pace burns about 100-150 calories. The idea that this will do anything of significance in a 53 year old women with a BMI of 35 with what sounds like no prior history of exercise is, to put it mildly, highly optimistic. This is assuming she actually keeps it up for more than 6 months. The retention rates of this type of thing are abysmal.
I stand by my assertion: Exercise isn’t very helpful in causing **weight loss **in older obese people. Some people really do undergo lifestyle changes later in life and embark on serious fitness programs which have lasting effects. That doesn’t fit the OP’s scenario at all.
I also stand by my assertion that this board regularly regurgitates google searches in response to medical questions that should be addressed by an actual medical professional. A ton of woo has been posted already. This lady might be obese. She might have a serious medical condition. 60 lbs overweight but her extremities are totally normal? That does happen sometimes, but ascites and ovarian tumors aren’t that uncommon either. Eating “good protein” whatever the hell that means, or reducing your bread intake isn’t going to help with that.
She should see a doctor.
The only thing that can explain the obesity epidemic that we face today is the huge increase in the simple carbs that we consume today.
Processed foods and fat foods will promote “low fat” like never before. Nowadays most milk comsumed has much reduced milk fat. People are eating way less meat than before.
But processed foods are loaded with sugar. Pop is loaded with sugar. And if that isn’t enough we like to apply adorn our healthy food with batter or wrapped in bread. Pasta has taken over the world and promoted as a low fat alternative. Huge mistake !
And I’m not concerned about the more complex carbs from vegetables which convert to blood sugar more slowly and don’t freak out the pancreas.
There is a reason why obesity and adult onset diabetes are connected. Its the massive insulin response towards the sudden increase in blood sugar. The body has to regulate blood sugar, and the only way it knows how is to convert it to fat and store it. If you abuse the pancreas you stand a good chance that the pancreas will fail.
Ever see a picture of a fat male lion ? The don’t hunt much, they let the females do that, while they lay around all day until the females get them their meat. No carbs for them. No excercise either.
But cows. In order to fatten them up in the stockyards , they feed them grain. Not fat, but grain.
I’m sure the fact that most of us work in cubicals barely larger than veal fattening pens instead of on farms, and that we’ve created suburbs where you can’t walk to anywhere useful/interesting instead of mixed use housing/markets and an environment of fear and entertainment where children are discouraged from playing outside in favor of watching television or playing video games and removing recess from schools and interesting (“unsafe”) equipment from playgrounds have nothing at all to do with it.
Look, I’m certain that the increase in the amount of sugar we eat is a Bad Thing and it contributes a whole hell of a lot to the obesity epidemic. But it’s not the only, nor is it an insurmountable problem.
'Sides…have we established yet what “yogurt” actually means? Do they eat sweetened lowfat yogurt in Saudia Arabia, or are we talking about full fat plain goat’s milk yogurt, or something in between? Is the “bread” Wonderbread or whole grain pita or something else?