Are you fat and don't give a fig?

In My Humble Opinion
121

There is a disconnect here that I’m thinking can never be bridged.

Why do you need to count every calorie? What’s so hard about taking what you were going to eat for the day, and well, eating a little bit less of it?

Every meal is just some combination of fats, carbs and proteins- all of which have a fixed calorie count. It’s not that tough to eyeball a meal and use the ratio of these elements to get a rough idea of what a “reasonable” portion size is. It’s not that hard to keep a running “high-low” count in your head so that if you eat a big lunch you eat a smaller dinner. It’s not like the world ends if you don’t get exactly 200 fewer calories a day- just keep the trend downward and you are golden.

I’m genuinely baffled. I can and do gain weight if I start eating to much, but the techniques above have allowed me to regulate my weight pretty consistently for decades- even across pretty big lifestyle changes.

122

Maybe you’re not eating 200 calories more per day. Maybe you’re eating 400, or 500. So you cut back and eat “a little bit less” so you’ve saved 200 calories per day. Awesome. But you’re still at a 200-calorie surplus. And speaking from personal experience, once you’ve been overeating for any length of time (and honestly, it’s not uncommon for a lot of people to have been overeating consistently for their entire lives and not really been aware of it) you lose your innate sense of how much food is enough. Counting calories can be really helpful to give you an idea of what an appropriate portion is.

That said, I don’t think counting calories as a life-long system is going to work for very many people. If you want my opinion, which isn’t going to be very helpful I’m sure, the two things that will work to “solve” the obesity epidemic is: Set up communities to force people to walk more, and have a food shortage. As long as there’s a surfeit of high-calorie-density food available, in unimaginably great quantities, people are going to be overweight, end of story.

123

Do you have energy-dense snacks at home that you munch on a lot? Stuff like chips, crackers, cookies, or nuts? If so, stop buying this stuff. If it’s not in your face, then you don’t have to worry about monitoring your intake of it or planning your life around it. This is the kind of 200 calorie sacrifice that seems pretty doable and non labor-intensive to me, especially in the absence of extreme food attachment issues.

Personally, I have the willpower of a 5 year-old when tasty food is in my vicinity. I’m probably no different than your average overweight person in this regard. Fortunately, I’m also lazy, so when the food isn’t in my vicinity, I have little desire to get off my butt to get it. Keeping snacks to a minimum in my house probably does more to help me weight-wise than anything else I do.

124

I think we as a society would benefit enormously from teaching hospitals. I don’t mean hospitals where med students and nursing students go to practice hands on learning. I mean hospitals where the public can come to see what it really looks like when people die.

I am moderately overweight: 5 foot 5 and 160 pounds. I am also an alcoholic. I’ve not yet managed to control my drinking, but I have the good sense to be terrified of what will happen if I don’t. I’ve given lactulose to the men and women with fluid swollen guts, stomachs like medicine balls, shaking with pain because their livers have shut down. I’ve wiped their asses after yet another bout of medically induced diarrhea, had them look into my eyes and ask me to let them die. I’m still not sure if it’s better or worse that the death of the diabetic.

Diabetes is like slow poison in your veins, destroying every system it touches. All that sugar, unaccepted by your cells, tears your kidneys to nothing, until you have a mangled looking lump of dialysis graft on your arm, yet another site that could be ravaged by infection that wont heal. And infection wont heal. A diabetic can lose a leg to accidentally stepping on a tack - or, if the circulation gets bad enough, to nothing at all. Veinous stasis ulcers are painful, ugly, oozy things, sometimes crawling with MRSA. Hospital stays become drawn out exercises in boredom and pain. And then the leg goes.

And your family doesn’t take care of you in the end. Get that idea out of your head. They can’t - they have to go to work, and you’re blind in a wheelchair, needing dialysis. The doctor, and the nurse, and the case manager will explain to them that the care you need is too great, and it’s time for the nursing home. Yes, people sometimes go to the nursing home in their fifties. Their kids cry and cry, but in the end, what else can they do?

Eventually, you come to us and die, but sometimes that takes a very, very long time. And you don’t die happy. You die screaming in agony.

My body doesn’t care that I’m drinking my Irish heritage anymore that it cares that you’re eating your childhood. Both will kill us horribly in the end, and anyone who says they don’t care simply doesn’t know.

125

Anecdotal again- for my first marathon, I trained with a running group. A large number of people said that one of their goals for the race was to lose weight. Several months and many miles later, no one had. We went into the marathon healthier, more strength, better endurance, probably better cardiovascular benefits, etc, but no actual weight loss.

126

I should have been more clear: the number of people in that category (people I know who have lost weight and kept it off due to distance running) is 2. :slight_smile: Both started out very significantly overweight, began running with the Couch to 5K program, lost a bunch of weight, and have kept it off to this point, several years later.

I do not think that running is some kind of panacea or a good idea for everyone. I’m just saying that in addition to strict calorie-counters, heavy regular exercise is one route to long-term weight control. And again, as I said up-thread, I don’t worry too much about my weight these days. I’m definitely on the heavy side for a runner, but whatever, I’m in reasonably good shape so I don’t really care.

127

The reason that most people don’t do a small deficit, such as a hundred calories, seems to be, as previously stated, that it doesn’t produce immediately visible results. It isn’t solely a desire for instant gratification in and of itself that makes this inviable; it’s that, in order to know that it’s working, we need to see that it’s working. And with daily variations in weight due to things like water retention, and the fact that a hundred calorie deficit would lead to a pound lost in thirty-five days, it could be two to three months before any definite change is seen.

If you don’t see a change in that long–especially if you’re already quite heavy–you’re probably going to conclude that what you’re doing probably isn’t working, and that you need to cut more. This may often be the case anyway–I have no idea what my basal metabolic rate is. I know what some website says it is, but that’s just an estimate. With the method of small, subtle cuts, it could take a year or more before someone who is severely overweight even finds where they should be, and longer still for it to have a real effect on their health.

So the cuts become more severe, and therefore more noticeable. The effort required to sustain it becomes more severe and more noticeable, too. If one is going to go the calorie counting route, doing so requires that you learn about food, and that you keep fairly close track of what you eat. Doing so is sometimes quite tiring, and sometimes counter-intuitive.

I’m currently calorie counting, and I’ve limited myself to twelve-hundred calories a day (fun note: that number was actually sort of inspired by a post from even sven, where she said she had around IIRC 1300 a day for maintenance. Since it’s worked for me, I totally owe her a thanks!). Twelve-hundred isn’t maintenance for me; it’s really not even close. And, based on how I had been eating, it was a huge (ha!) shift. I had to be conscious of everything I ate–every mindless snack, every bit of butter, every dash of milk or pinch of sugar. After a few years of ridiculous overeating, my sense of proportion was shot; and, really, if this shit were intuitive for me, would I have gotten to where I was in the first place? I had to figure out how calorically dense foods were and what appropriate portion sizes were, and then I had to acclimate to these adjusted values.

It’s work. And it’s work that you do while you’re freaking hungry. I mean, realistically, our bodies aren’t meant to be happy with periods of calorie deprivation;our current environment doesn’t jive with the conditions we evolved in. So, while you’re losing weight, part of your body is telling you that, hey, you’re slowly starving, 'cause you sort of are. So while calorie restriction is super simple–calories in less-than-sign calories out–it’s not really easy. It’s certainly not as easy or as hard to notice as a missing scoop of ice cream.

Now, for me it got a lot easier after a few weeks, and now it’s fairly mindless. Frankly, I much prefer it to things like Atkins or low-carb or South Beach, where I have to track multiple variables and have to absolutely restrict some kinds of food. And it’s absolutely worth it; I’ve still got a long way to go, but the approximately seventy-five pounds that I’ve lost so far have been extremely beneficial to my health and well-being. And that’s what’s important.

But the idea that it’s just not that hard? Yeah, it kind of is that hard, at least to start. Those first few weeks were murder, and it’s still a low-level pain in the ass when, say, I’m hanging out with friends who want to go out and eat dinner at Culver’s.

It feels kind of insulting and frankly kind of dismissive for people who’ve likely never been there to say, “yeah, it’s just creating a calorie deficit; how hard can it be?” Fuck that; it’s hard, and insinuating otherwise totally takes away my hard-earned glory. :wink: A better response is, “yeah, it’s hard, but you should do it anyway, because you’ll live longer and feel better.”

128

Ha! I love you monstro and you are one of my favorite people on this board but I have to say that if my weight problem could be solved with extra pie and ice cream I wouldn’t have a weight problem. I know you’ve mentioned that food just doesn’t have a ton of appeal to you in other threads and that, while you enjoy it and all that jazz, that you really have to force yourself to eat sometimes. I think that your basic nature in this regard makes it really, really difficult for you to understand why weight loss is so hard for so many.

You’ve mentioned that you love to exercise and move your body though, so if you were told by doctors and the people around you that you needed to give up exercise to get healthy how difficult do you think that would be? If your doctor told you to get a segway and stop walking everywhere for the rest of your life as part of an overall lifestyle change how miserable would that make you? I think you would probably find it very difficult and possibly even impossible to fight that part of you that really wants to be moving around to be happy and, while you might do as your doctor suggested, you would probably be pretty uncomfortable and unhappy with your lifestyle. This is much more in line with what the overweight are dealing with when trying to lose weight.

129

I totally agree with this sentiment. It is hard to convey just how important food is to some people-- for me, I fully believe it is an addiction. I wish there were other things that made me as happy as food does, but there truly aren’t.

I don’t smoke, I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink, but I LOVE food. I love looking at recipes, I compulsively watch Food Network or Cooking Channel, I love walking up and down the aisles of a grocery store, I read multiple food and recipe blogs daily, I love looking at candy and baked goods even if I don’t ultimately buy anything. I eat more than I should and I sometimes even eat when I’m not particularly hungry because I genuinely derive joy from the act of eating. I know this is not “normal” for many people, but this is my reality.

I definitely do not eat anything I want any time I want, but I had an enormous donut for breakfast yesterday and I thoroughly enjoyed every single bite. I work out 4x-5x a week to enable my eating habits, not because I get any pleasure from exercise. Although I am still somewhat overweight, this is the only way I’ve been able to strike some kind of balance, because I’ve dieted and/or made “lifestyle changes” in the past and there’s a point where I become completely miserable.

For the record, I just had a physical at the end of August and my cholesterol is great, my blood pressure and blood glucose are both normal.

130

i am about 30lbs overweight…and it bothers me deeply. it wasn’t caused by an unhealthy lifestyle or lack of exercise. it was caused by insulin resistance coupled with pcos.

i had no idea what was wrong with me when no matter how much exercise i did, i kept gaining weight…even with a healthy diet. had to go to an endocrinologist to figure out what the hell was wrong with me. it was depressing to eat healthy and do all the “right things” for my body yet still gain weight. thankfully my insurance is covering the medication i need to be on to fix the issue and i’m slowly getting better.

people who are overweight because they just don’t care frustrate me. ‘skinny’ people look at me like i’m a lazy slug and i’ve always heard, “you should eat right and exercise so you can lose that weight.” —they have this view bc there ARE so many overweight people out there who are seen just shoveling the unhealthy food into their mouths constantly.
the general population doesn’t understand that most overweight people didn’t get that way from eating cinnabun everyday or eating a whole bag of doritos at one sitting…all they see is that one fat person chowing down and that taints their whole view of how people get fat.

131

To be fair, after you’ve grown accostomed to your dinner plate looking a certain way and belly feeling a certain way after you eat, it really does become hard to switch gears to the opposite and resign yourself to doing it forever.

If someone told me I needed to add french fries (or something comparable) to my lunch every day, my throat would close up. The idea just makes me feel very uncomfortable. So I can imagine what someone who’s accostomed to eating fries with their lunch for years would feel if they were told to drop them. It’s a fear of feeling that ache of deprivation.

When you are used to eating little, your stomach shrinks and so do the eyes. When you eat a lot, your stomach gets big and so do the eyes.

I know I sound real awful posting “advice” since I’m on the other side of the coin…and that side isn’t quite as stigmatized or as difficult to fix. And you are right. I don’t get it. Even when I had a strong appetite, I had a inner governor that would keep me from pigging out too much. I don’t know what it feels like to be addicted.

I don’t think this is a fair comparison. Because doctors aren’t telling fat people they can’t eat at all–or even that they can’t eat unhealthy foods. Just that they can’t eat in excess.

FWIW, when I was at my lowest weight, my doctor did tell me I had to stop walking so much. She told me I could only walk to work but that I had to take the bus home. And I did hate it. I need my morning walks to wake me up and get me jeeped up for the day. I need the evening walks to purge my brain of numbers and unwind. But as much as I hated being restricted, I did as I was told. Perhaps because I’m not addicted to walking like some people are addicted to food? I don’t know, but it wasn’t like I couldn’t see my doctor’s point: Until I started bringing in more calories, I simply had to cut back on excess movement. Unless I wanted to turn into a skeleton. And I didn’t.

Once I reached a certain weight, she gave me the go-ahead to go back to my evening jaunts. I expect that unless I start packing on some more poundage, I’ll start to drop once the cold weather sets in and I’ll have my “privileges” revoked again. So that’s another motivator to eat and eat more.

On the radio the other day, there was a guy talking about will power and how he conceptualized it as a muscle. It’s not something you’re born with. You have to train it. I don’t know if I agree with him 100% because I think some people are born with markedly reduced pleasure principals. But he cited some interesting studies showing that people who practice being “mindful” about something mundane, like sitting up straight or not using contractions, tend to be better at resisting other temptations. Like nighttime snacking. And will power is something that can tucker out. If you’re constantly surrounded by temptations all day and you actively resist them, then you’re more likely to give in to them when you get home and your defenses are down. If true, I find it interesting.

I’m babbling now. So I’ll shut up. :slight_smile:

132

Now while most people I know who do endurance training to the level needed for a marathon do lose a fair amount of fat mass, let’s take your post at face value. To me this illustrates the point I was attempting to make. Their goal was a stupid one driven by vanity; what they actually achieved was what mattered.

amarinth, I won’t badger for an answer, but I do humbly request a response to my direct questions to you in my previous post. You did not lose weight training for the marathon … so what?
As to the “your blues aint like my blues” protests of if only “my weight problem could be solved with extra pie and ice cream …”, well it seems to me that the grass is always easier. Neither is easy for the person who is experiencing it. IMHO, both sides deserve huge respect when they are able to exert the will needed to make lasting changes and understanding of how the rudeness of others around them impacts them.

133

I’ve been maintaining a 75lb weight loss for 6 years. I don’t count calories every day. I don’t really need to. During the week, I pretty much eat the same things (I have 3 favorite breakfasts, 3 favorite lunches and about 10 favorite dinners). I know as long as I eat my 3 meals with 2 snacks (generally a piece of fruit and a non fat latte), I can have a nice dinner out on the weekends (glass of wine, tasty entree, split dessert) and stay at my maintenance weight. I don’t eat a lot of convenience foods (fast foods, packaged foods, bakery goods, frozen dinners) because I made a change to not only lose weight and to try to live a healthy lifestyle.

I don’t weigh myself too much, instead I go by my favorite black skirt. If it zips comfortably, I eat to maintain. Which means I can have a few treats here or there, maybe the occasional biscotti with my coffee or cheese and crackers at a friend’s house or 100 calories of exceptional dark chocolate or a glass of wine after work. If my skirt doesn’t zip, well then, I do count calories for as long as it takes to get back where I want to be.

After 20 years of yo-yo weight loss up to 200+ lbs, I’m still pleased and amazed at my wardrobe of cute size 6 clothes and how relatively easy it is. If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have told you I was genetically destined to be fat and it was TOO HARD to lose weight.

What really did the trick for me was giving up what I thought were my favorite foods - chips, crackers, cookies, pretzels. I cut out white/sugary/floury carbs and reduced whole grains and I lost my food cravings/binging. That change made the impossible - possible. And I don’t miss them.

134

Exercise burns fat, and eating less cuts back on replacing fat. For weight loss, neither works alone. Short of fasting on water and vitamin pills, you can’t lose weight if you do nothing but sit in a chair all day. And burning off calories like a Channel swimmer isn’t going to produce weight loss if you replace the calorie loss each day.

135

I understand the feeling, though. I’m sure if I were fat and there was some skinny chick posting about how she ate her pecan pie and ice cream like a good girl, so why can’t the overweight people NOT eat theirs, I’d be rolling my eyes too.

136

I didn’t mean the post to be a “woe is me” kind of thing. I simply meant that the solution to monstro’s problem was still mildly pleasant simply by virtue of her being human and having taste buds. Forcing yourself to do something sucks tyrannosaur testicles but I think most of us would agree that forcing yourself to choose to add a favorite dessert to our daily menu would be significantly easier than choosing to deny ourselves something else that we loved. Most of us spend a lot of time denying ourselves things. Don’t buy that dress, don’t drink that beer, don’t sleep with that woman, don’t smoke that cigarette, etc. Adding something mildly pleasant to your day is significantly easier than telling yourself no for the 7,000th time in an afternoon for the large majority of people.

This wasn’t intended to slight the effort monstro is making because obviously she is doing a kick-ass job of taking care of herself, just to say that her not being able to understand the difficulty some people have with losing weight is understandable given her natural tendencies to skip a meal every here and there.

137

I think you can imagine it being hard to get some men to wear a dress, to get my wife to drink a beer (she enjoys wine but hates beer), for you to have sex with someone who you find repulsive, for me to smoke a cigarette (blech), so on. If the thought of eating more makes you feel sick then forcing yourself to do it is not “mildly pleasant”, it is distinctly unpleasant … someone else might enjoy sex with that person you find repulsive, but that does not make it any easier for you to do it!

138

Well…

My sweet tooth is not depressed. Or as depressed as the other teeth. I didn’t have to struggle to eat the pie and ice cream (confession time!) I did have to struggle to eat dinner earlier, and I can’t have dessert without dinner. But it was a piece of cake to eat the piece of pie. :slight_smile:

I don’t think it’s analogous to what these people are going through. I’m starting to think it’s like I have a loose wire. My body feels hunger but my brain doesn’t register it. The idea of eating french fries is gross. And then someone gives me some french fries and I put one to my lips. My fingers better watch out because my teeth suddenly turn into mechanical chompers! My body is ravenous, but for some reason my brain isn’t. The brain is saying I’m full. Since I’ve become aware of this disconnect, I’m learning to fight the messages my brain tell me. I tell myself, “I don’t care what you feel like. You are hungry, fool!” And once I overcome the barrier my brain is putting up and actually eat, I do get the pleasure out of it, like pbbth said. The key is just remembering the “feeling” is just a crazy body hallucination or something.

For over-eaters, this doesn’t seem to be going on. Their brains are saying they are hungry because they ARE hungry. Maybe they don’t need any more food, but their bodies are communicating “I’m HONGRY! FEED ME!!”. And their brains are in complete agreement. So there is no disconnect. It’s kind of like if I feel tired. That sensation is irresistable. I can’t not sit down or at least stop. Intellectually, I know that I can catch my second wind if I just keep going…I know I haven’t exhausted my resources and I still have 15 miles left in the gas tank. But try telling that to my weak legs! When I’m tired, I’m tired. Period.

I think that’s what over-eaters have to overcome. The feelings of hunger. It’s not imaginary…it’s a real sensation. Hunger hurts. It makes one feel weak and irritable. It’s nothing like what I go through when I’m contemplating what to eat for dinner.

Maybe for some under-eaters, it is. But not me.

139

I spent a few years being fat and loathed it. Told myself daily that I shouldn’t be judged or judge myself by my weight, that I’d rather be fat than deprived, all that propaganda. No matter how hard I tried to sell myself on that nonsense, it didn’t really take. I hated being overweight. Loathed it.

As someone who is at her ideal weight and has been so for about two years, let me say this: it’s NEVER a simple thing. It drives me NUTS to see those articles claiming if you just cut 100 calories a day from your diet, you can lose almost a pound a month. That’s only true if you’re eating no more than the exact number of calories you need to maintain your weight, which few people do. What really ticks me off is when people say, “It’s simple! It’s just a matter of expending more calories than you take in.” Sheesh. It’s like saying, “It’s simple. Just grow more food and you’ll end world hunger”–true, but it’s a little more complex than that. People really do metabolize calories differently. There are a host of factors that determine how someone metabolizes food. Appetite in itself is fairly complex. It’s…just…not…that simple.

I work out daily. I love it, and it feels great. I have–loathe this expression–changed my relationship with food. I feel like I carved away all the stuff that wasn’t me and am now more like myself, the thin kid who liked to dance and run around, the healthy, fit adult I’ve usually been. But anyone who thinks it’s simple has never been fat. Period.

Oh, and FWIW, my doctor once told me that people who are overweight but who exercise at least 30 minutes daily are much healthier than their fat, sedentary counterparts but not nearly as healthy as normal-weight, active folks. He didn’t say whether they beat out sedentary healthy-weight people.

140

I’m not exactly “fat”, but I could probably stand to lose about 10 pounds. More precisely, I could stand to lose about 20 and gain 10 in muscle. But my appearance doesn’t bother me, and I can engage in plenty of physical activity without tiring, so I don’t really consider it a big deal.