Depends on how you define “overeating”. You appear to be defining it on a biochemical basis. But most people would define “overeating” as eating more than enough to satisfy hunger. And there is problem. Some people’s natural hunger levels exceed their bodily needs.
The calories in - calories out = weight formula is totally correct. However, what people in this thread, and in every thread on this subject choose to ignore, is that there are physical diseases which cause the “calorie out” function to become totally screwed up.
Hypothyroidism, for instance. Lets say that a normal person (NP) eats 2,000 calories a day, and burns 2,000 calories a day doing light exercise and eating a balanced healthy diet. Now, NP develops a condition because of cancer, or genes or plain old bad luck that causes their thyroid gland to quit functioning. While everything else remains constant, the number of caloreis they burn per day, doing the EXACT SAME AMOUNT OF ACTIVITY drops like a rock. Now instead of burning 2,000 calories a day, they only burn 1,000. However, this isn’t the sort of thing that happens over night - it sort of sneaks up on you. Suddenly, NP starts gaining weight, and they don’t know why. Maybe they gain 10 lbs in a month so they cut their calories to 1,500. Still not enough - they continue to gain. Keep in mind, that as their gaining weight, their thyroid gland is still not working. They begin to get headaches, all the time, so they really can’t exercise. Their thinking becomes confused. Perhaps they become depressed. They break out, their hair falls out and their fingernails break and they feel like shit. So, finally, after 4 or 5 months and about 50 lbs of extra weight, they get in to see their Dr. and the hypothyroidism is diagnosed. Super, they take synthroid (or something) which corrects the hair loss, the fingernails, the depression, the headaches, everything except…the weight. Synthroid will help you loose about 5 lbs. That leaves 45 lbs to lose - but remember - you didn’t gain those 45 lbs because of over eating - you gained them because of a normal diet and a dodgey gland - losing 45 lbs when you don’t have icecream sundays to cut out of your diet is a lot harder than if you do.
Basically, my point is that not everyone who’s carrying extra weight is so because they “overate” in a normal sense. Yes, they ate more calories than their body expended, but that’s because their body was only burning a freakishly low number of calories.
It is totally unfair the sort of shit that larger people have to take. Are some people big because they eat to frickin’ much? Yes, no doubt about it. Are some people big because they eat a normal amount but their body isn’t working correctly? Yep.
FWIW, between being diagnosed with hypothyroidism and right now, I’ve gained 20 lbs. Now, I started out as really, really skinny. I mean REALLY skinny, so I’ve wound up at sort of a nice, slim weight - lucky me. Pity the poor person that was carrying an extra 10 lbs and then developed the disorder - they’ve gone from being pleasantly plump to being fat.
As to the OP - I would say that all obesity is caused by some sort of condition apart from overeating - depression, poor self image, a physical condition, etc.
If you eat what you believe is a “normal” amount of food, and you’re still gaining weight, then you need to consume even less calories.
No, actually your totally incorrect here. If someone has a condition where they only burn 500 calories a day, they need to have that condition treated, not eat 450 calories. To suggest otherwise is stupid.
No, you can fight depression with positive thoughts. Just don’t think negative thoughts and you probably won’t be depressed. With cancer there are a myriad of treatments you can do to prevent cancer or catch it early. If someone has depression or cancer (or poverty, or an STD, or gets fired or is in an abusive relationship) it is probably their own fault to one degree or another. The question is do you want to live in a society so heartless and darwinistic that people make it a point of always pointing the fact that even a tiny bit of personal control is supposed to translate into some kind of magical willpower force that can conquer genetics, environment and past history?
The ‘calorie in calorie out’ equation is based on the idea that people are totally rational beings who can willfully ignore billions of years of evolutionairy biochemistry that controls how many calories they take in and expend. We can’t. We can exert some control, or temporary, but not total control by any means. If we could control our biochemistry there wouldn’t be addiction or obesity. Another problem is fat cells. The number of fat cells in a person’s body play a role in obesity and they vary from 25-300 billion. A fat person who has 200 billion cells and loses weight may appear thin but their cells are under the impression that they are starving to death. A thin person who overeats and has 25 billion cells may be the same weight as the thin obese man but his internal biochemistry is under the impression that he is stuffed so even though both appear reasonably thin their biochemistries are light years apart. We barely understand the biochemistry of obesity and all the proteins, chemicals and hormones and how they all. That is why there is no cure for obesity, because we don’t understand how it works.
Alright, so I think we’re in agreement that some people just have to eat a greater volume of food than others because of their physiology. But if some people have just had big appetites for as long as humans have been around, then why the recent proliferation of obesity?
It’s because of people eating a lot of fast food and other crap that will cause you to gain weight very quickly. Eating large amounts of other food might well contribute to weight gain, but eating Big Macs on a regular basis will do it a lot faster than, say, eating large servings of potatoes every day.
No, not at all. The reason why people with big appetities didn’t get fat for as long as humans have been around is simply that until a few hundred years ago food was never unlimited and energy came from your own muscles. It didn’t matter whether you were a Doctor, a Baker or a Bricklayer you did physical work constantly and famine was routine. Obesity is very hard to attain under htose circumstances and in most societies obesity was considered a desirable thing and a sign of success.
People have traditionally eaten whatever the highest value food was. There are endless accounts of hunter gatherers relishing pure fat taken from their kills, or commoners eating huge portions of suet pudding for example. Those things are far more energy dense than anything you’d ever get from McDonalds. The difference is that people get much less exercise now and most people will never experience famine.
You need to understand that for 95% of our history we didn’t even have agriculture so annual scarcity was the norm. Weight gained in autumn was lost in winter. For most of our agricultural history even people would regularly suffer the reuslts of famine, poverty and so forth that would cause weight loss.
To suggest that recent obesity s all because of McDonalds is overlooking the reality of the existence of the human species. For 99% of our history people simply didn;t have access to unlimited food of any sort, and until a mere 50 years ago most owrk was done with human muscle power. In terms of the food people would have eaten is they could have human diets have probbaly improved. McDonald’s is probably healthier than the average European’s preferred diet 100 years ago.
The average 19th century European diet was unhealthy in the sense that it lacked nourishment, McDonald’s food is unhealthy because it is loaded with salt and fat. Compare a person who eats root vegetables and gruel for 30 days to someone who eats McDonald’s for the same amount of time, and see who’s worse off.
Humans were also stunted throughout much of human history. So holding up people from 100 years ago who were 3" shorter and had several forms of malnutrition is not a good counterexample.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg1713.cfm
Poor boys today at ages 18 and 19 are actually taller and heavier than boys of similar age in the general U.S. population in the late 1950s. Poor boys living today are one inch taller and some 10 pounds heavier than GIs of similar age during World War II, and nearly two inches taller and 20 pounds heavier than American doughboys back in World War I
Plus obesity really isn’t the problem it is made out to be. In much of western civilization the obesity rates are only around 15-25%, which honestly isn’t that high. Even in the US which is considered the fattest nation obesity rates are only 25%
As far as the idea that people are fatter due to big macs, I agree somewhat. Westernization and the diets it provides combined with the non manual labor it provides contributes to obesity. But the idea that fat people eat big macs all day is a myth. Thin people do that too and you can’t tell what a person’s lifestyle is like solely by how fat they are because how fat they become is somewhat out of their control.
Somewhere in this thread I posted a link showing in the 1960s fat made up 40-42% of the american diet, today it makes up 30-33%. So we aren’t eating more fat than we used to, we are eating less fat.
I think what everybody’s missing is that the difference in lifestyle required to create a large difference in weight is actually miniscule. Most of the energy balance is very tightly controlled by the body even among the fattest people.
One pound is equal to only 3500 calories. On the other hand the average person eats and expends about a million calories a year. So to keep within a 10 pound range over a year you have to match your food consumption to your energy expenditure with only about a 3% error rate.
In other words you can’t be eating much more than an apple or so a day more than you’re spending without gaining 10 lbs a year. Actually since people tend to gain about 10 lbs a decade, that means that people are on the whole matching their food consumption to their energy expenditure with an accuracy of 0.3%. That’s the equivalent of about a cherry a day or less than a minute of walking.
It’s completely impossible for a person to do manage that precision through exercise and calorie counting alone, since food labeling alone can have up to a 20% error (for example). And metabolic rate can vary by far more - among individuals and even for the same individual across time.
Bismillah can we please see this presumed 19th century diet that was comprised of root vegetables and gruel? I think you are labouring under some serious misapprehensions of what diet was like 100 years ago or indeed at any prior time in human history.
The average Victorian working man’s diet was bread, potatoes, beer and suet/dripping. Protein came from eggs, ‘sausages’ and other offal and seafood. "Real’ meat was a rarity as were vegetables. I don’t know where you got the idea that gruel or root vegetables other than potatoes (the same root vegetables that McDonalds’ fries are made of) were in any way common elements of the diet.
If we had a wager on a person who had a breakfast of fried bread, lunch of bread and cheese and dinner of beer, bangers and mash and suet pudding versus a person living on McDonald’s I know where I’d put my money. I also know who would be getting the most fat in their diet.
I think you have some romanticised notions of just how healthy the Victorian workingman’s diet actually was.
That’s not what I said, but yeah, I’ll grant you that.
The recent proliferation of sedentary lifestyles and high-fructose corn syrup.
The Victorians did not factory process their potatoes, deep fry them in oil, then roll them in salt.
What the fuck? My statement that McDonald’s is more unhealthy than the Victorian workingman’s diet does not equate to me arguing that Victorian food was healthy, of which I said nothing of the sort.
This is just what I’ve been trying to say. I did attribute it to fatty foods and not sugary ones, which you may be correct about, but the general idea is the same.
No, they did all that by hand. Perhaps you are unaware that what you buy at McDonald’s under the name ‘fries’ was popularised in Victorian England as part of that great English meal of “Fish and chips”. Deep fried potatoes weren’t made at factories but they were indeed common enough in Victorian England.
Nor have I suggested that you said any such thing.
However I still contend that you have no evidence at all to support your claims that McDonald’s is less healthy than Victorian workingman’s food. Victorian workingman’s food was primarily fatty offal, potatoes, saturated fat and dripping. That is far less healthy than a normal McDonald’s diet.
You appear to have romanticised idea that the Victorian workingman’s diet consisted of gruel and root vegetables which was not the case. Processed flour, pre-made bread, saturated fats, alcohol and potatoes were the staples. Root vegetables aside from potatoes were rare, as was gruel or any similar cereal-based food. As a result the diet contained less fresh vegetable material, less dairy, less fibre, more saturated fat, more alcohol and possibly more salt than anything sold at McDonald’s. Whatever makes you think that is more nutritionally sound?
As I mentioned in another thread, we are always looking for a no fault/politically-correct reason for why a person is fat. These explanations tend to esoteric & complex in nature. Why so many people want to discount the simplest & most likely explanation – a person is fat because they eat too much – I do not know.
I don’t doubt that they had something similar to french fries, and I can imagine that it wasn’t very healthy. But evidently many people survived to at least middle age at that time… on the other hand, how long do you think anyone could survive on only Big Macs and fries?
Then why do you continue to claim that I’m “romanticizing” the Victorian diet? Do potatoes and gruel sound that appealing?
Big Macs and factory-processed fries, I should have said.
I think you’re a bit too influenced by the movie “Supersize Me”. If you did enough working exercise to burn up the MCd’s food calories you ate (which he quite deliberately didn’t do in the move) a lot of the negative effects of the MCs’ diet for sedentary people would be irrelevant. Meal for meal a MCd’s meal would be probably be a considerably superior meal nutritionally vs typical Victorian workingman fare.
I can’t see one reason why they couldn’t survive indefinitely. There doesn’t appear to be anything critical lacking form the diet.
Of course this is entirely a false dilemma. Nobody in the real world actually lives exclusively on just Big Macs and fries just as nobody in Victorian times lived exclusively on fish and chips. The compasrison is between a ‘normal’ modern diet containing large amounts of McDonald’s meals and a ‘normal’ Victorian diet. And you still haven’t explained how the Victorian diet could possibly be more healthy.
You appear not to fully understand what ‘romanticise’ means. It is not a synonym for appealling, it’s a synonym for wishfully fictitious.
The idea of a Victorian workman living on carrots and gruel is is a romantic image, not one based on reality. It is a romantic view of the way people lived. The reality is that the diet was high in refined starches, saturated fats and alcohol and low in fresh vegetables and fibre, moreso even then the McDonald’s menu of 10 years ago. Neither diet may be appealing but one is an accurate portrayal and one is an attempt to render a fairly mundane state of existence into some sort of romantic ideal.
The solution is quite simple, provide a reference which suggests that the average Victorian ever lived on root vegetables and gruel and we’ll have the issue resolved in factual manner.