BMI is a mediocre way of measuring percentage of body fat. If you are athletic with lots of muscle, or a soldier, the number might be too big for its purported use. If you have lots of fat and some muscle but an ectomorphic body, the number might be too small. It does not correspond to anything in real life. Waist circumference alone is likely more useful. BMI is easy to calculate, its main advantage.
A study in the NYT suggesting a few snippets of found exercise a day (running for the bus, climbing stairs) provide real benefits.
I read about this. I can’t help but feel it’s kind of a desperate plea. “If you won’t make time for exercise, at least do some gardening or something.”
How active I am on any given day varies dramatically. Usually I go for a run or lift kettlebells. But if I’m sedentary the rest of the day, I’m not sure that’s great.
I’ve reached the age where losing weight may be unrealistic, and not getting fatter may be the more appropriate goal.
As I understand it, dieting makes people fatter in the long run. However I think there is something to be said for improving nutrition through fresh whole foods. It is both expensive and time consuming but over the last year I’ve shifted toward plant based eating. We do eat meat, but the staples are rice and beans, vegetables, fruit, and nuts. The problem is that when you make these changes in order to lose weight, it will not be sustainable. So I have had to find other reasons to do it. I feel more energy when I eat this way, for example. My mood is improved.
I do strength training to avoid back pain. Because I can carry heavy grocery bags. Etc etc.
I think maybe once you’ve laid this foundation, established that you’re doing this for reasons completely unrelated to weight, and intend to sustain it forever regardless of weight loss results, then you maybe, possibly have a shot at weight loss. But I truly believe this is a gambit that takes years to pay off. It’s diametrically opposed to how diet culture discusses and promotes weight loss products.
Personally, I’ve been able to stay on track thanks to Elastic Habits by Stephen Guise. I bought his little habit tracker thing and every day I decide which level of exercise or nutrition I’m going to tackle. So I’m not going hard every day. I’m going hard many days, but sometimes I’m doing the bare minimum, and I think that’s the only way to sustain such a massive lifestyle change.
You can certainly lose weight when you are older. I was 63 and 280+ in 2000. This morning I weighed 201, more or less unchanged for the last 10 years.
You are the 3%! Congratulations.
I think his point is that it’s not necessarily a person’s age that makes it difficult to lose weight.
That’s part of it. The bigger point, however, is that it’s difficult to lose weight at any age. It’s a tautology, but if it was easy to lose weight, we wouldn’t be going through an obesity epidemic. Which isn’t to say the solution isn’t simple. It’s just that the solution is simple but difficult.
But the thing is, AFAICT, that as far as substantial health benefits are concerned, sedentary people doing a few daily snippets of exertion is almost as good as committing a significant block of time to deliberate exercise.
So it’s not a matter of desperately pleading with people to do themselves a tiny little favor. It’s pointing out that a very unsystematic and minimal, but regular, engagement with physical exertion is doing yourself almost as big a favor as an actual “exercise program”.
And don’t give up the ship on weight loss possibilities if that’s what you want! At the start of this year I was 58 and 195lb (female, 5’4"), and am now 59 and 160lb. (Losing the final twenty pounds might indeed take years, but so what?)
The so-called “four A’s” (acceptance, awareness, adjustment, achievement) are key to constructive mindset changes about fitness and food habits, IME.
A. How many times have you gone on a diet? What worked for longest, or for good?
2010, age 48, after my 2nd heart arrythmia attack (both times due to overindulgence in caffiene/chocolate and heavily salted nuts respectively), I knew I had to significantly drop my weight, which had topped off at 243 on a 6’00" frame (33.0 BMI). [I was not a chronic dieter per se, did maybe 1-2 short term diets in my adult life up to that point, when typically I usually was between 180 and 190. Let myself go in the 00’s…]
So cut out the junk food, focused on smaller portions, and got my ass onto my exercise bike 3 hours a week. I did and do not consider this to have been a diet per se, but a lifestyle change.
Lost 20, 40, and 10 in 3 stages over a period of ~6 years, and have remained there since. Was 175 the other day (23.7), and have had little problem maintaining it, varying no more than 10 pounds in 8 years now.
B. Have you felt your weight led to lower quality medical care?
Not sure what this means-do you mean medical professionals look down on their patients leading to poorer care, or that obesity is inherently unhealthy leading to various ailments?
In any event I’ve been healthy as a horse, age 60 and not a single ache pain or issue. Still do my 3 hours of exercise a week.
C. For you, what pound or percent weight loss would be a success, if any?
28% overall seems pretty good to me.
D. How often do you think about weight or dieting?
Not obsessively. I do think about balancing things, following a large meal with a small one and/or more exercise. I still indulge here and there, ice cream 2 times a month.
E. Do you believe obesity is unhealthy if diet, exercise and medical care are decent
I recall my morbidly obese father, deceased as of 2000, huffing and puffing going up a small set of stairs. Didn’t live to see his granddaughter spike volleyballs as a teen. I am also inspired by my birth mother, who has a number of track and field age records. So yeah.
I’ve been around a couple fat/obese people recently. They won’t eat much when you go out to eat with them. They get their fill afterwards via DoorDash or Grubhub.
Their obesity is a mental problem, not a physical problem.
Or diabetes.
Gift article:
Yeah, and the way I meant it is that I’ve been trying to lose weight for years and I’m tired of it. The first half of my life I was conditioned to always want to lose weight because in many cultural respects womanhood is defined by how attractive you are to men and by extension how much thinner you need to be, right now. I wasn’t happy with my body at fourteen, when I was much thinner, or in college, or at any period of time other than when I was able to do incredible things with it (at my peak around age 30, I could do 100 pushups and drag cars a quarter mile. That felt amazing.)
So I have said, to myself, staring down my 40th birthday, “This whole thing is a racket, isn’t it? Yes, yes it is. Let’s find out how far I can run and how much I can deadlift.”
Not saying I won’t ever try to lose weight, and in the last year I have dropped a size, so there are some secondary weight benefits to lifestyle changes, however if I do it I’m not going to do it to please anyone but myself. And my primary motivation will be to run faster and improve my currently pathetic VO2Max.
I go out in the cold every morning and run my fat little ass off. And when you do something like that for yourself it’s harder for people to take away your dignity. I’m not doing it to lose weight, I’m doing it because I love doing it, I feel better and it’s fucking hardcore to run outside in the freezing cold when everyone else is still asleep warm in their beds.
I have been following some fat people who do real intense athletic stuff, triathlons and marathons and heavy lifting, and I think one piece of this is we need to redefine what an athlete can look like. If a fat person never sees anyone who looks like them working out, they are going to think you have to be thin to participate in athletic activities, and that is not the case. So we pioneers, we’ve gotta represent.
As far as the diet goes, I enjoy cooking fresh food, but meal planning and shopping and cooking takes about fifteen hours a week, something that is exhausting for me and prohibitive to most people. However if you can get in the groove of sleep/exercise/nutrition, you can create your own little perpetual energy machine. Sometimes I chop my vegetables in advance just so I don’t have to do so much work while I’m trying to also feed my kid and get him to bed.
Good for you! I’m a big fan of the idea of exercising to become more fit, and not to lose weight as such.
I want to highlight the importance of this statement.
My WAG is that pushing fat loss down to a secondary benefit level, to something that may or may not happen as you achieve the primary goals of being healthier, fitter, and able to function more at your best, is a huge mindset shift that many of us would benefit from.
If you’re setting a goal of how many pounds you want to lose on a diet, you’ve already failed. A goal like that is based on the premise that a diet is something you go on to lose weight, and once you’ve lost it, you go back off the diet. But for a diet to actually be successful, you have to stay on it, indefinitely. Which means that one feature necessary for a successful diet is that it has to be something that you can stay on indefinitely. And what that is will vary from person to person.
Another thing is that a diet should be about what you are eating, not what you aren’t. If you just cut out some specific unhealthy foods, you’ll find other unhealthy foods to replace them. Instead, start with the healthy foods.
The diet my mom has been on for the past couple of decades, and which works very well for her, is that she eats ten servings a day of fruits and vegetables, and whatever else she wants. Now, part of the reason that this works for her is that she really likes vegetables. I’m sure it wouldn’t work for everyone. But that gets back to what I said about different diets working for different people.
And may not be a “problem” at all in any significant sense. Some people just like eating large enough amounts of food that their body needs to be larger to get those calories burned and maintain their weight, so they end up 50 or 70 or whatever pounds heavier than “normal” weight.
As long as they’re looking after their overall health and nutrition and getting exercise, even though their physical condition and health status might not be optimal, there are way worse problems they could have.
If they want to lose weight, of course they should go for it. But if they’re just beating themselves up with the obsession that they ought to lose weight, then as Spice_Weasel says, they’ll just get tired of it and it’s not likely to work. You can’t successfully put in that kind of effort for somebody you resent and despise, and if what you see when you look in the mirror is “a person who OUGHT to be losing weight but just ISN’T”, you are likely to resent and despise that person.
This is why the first “A” of the “four A’s” is Acceptance. Start out with the determined (and oft-repeated) declaration that it’s okay to be whatever weight you are, and you do not have to regard yourself as an unsuccessful or ugly or lower-worth human being because of it. You’re entitled to the enjoyment of exercise and physical achievement no matter what size you are, and the whole ubiquitous social phenomenon of fat-shaming is just cultural-conformity bullshit. (Especially for women.)
(At the same time, of course, accept the factual reality of potential health problems and basic mechanical problems—where you can fit, what can support you, etc.—associated with obesity, especially extreme obesity, and don’t try to magical-think your way out of it. The fundamental point is not that obesity is a problem-free state but that obesity is not something for which people should be despised or resented, nor does it shut them out from physical achievement.)
The two aren’t mutually exclusive. You can do the “rest of my life” mindset readjustment about food and exercise, and also have a specific (though adaptable) goal for losing a particular amount of weight. That’s not necessarily setting yourself up for failure.
But if what you mean is that it’s not a good strategy to concentrate only on the goal of losing a specific amount of weight, and regard the other side of that achievement as a sort of Promised Land where you are now Officially Thin Enough and can forevermore stop thinking about weight and food, then you’re right.
The podcast Maintenance Phase is devoted to issues of being fat, obesity, and dieting, and I’ve found it fascinating and fun. YMMV, of course
A handful of times, and the only one that worked even halfway well was the time I didn’t really go on a “diet” per-se, rather I decided to count calories, track progress in a spreadsheet, and exercise more. I lost about 60 lbs in about 7 months, gained about 10 back, and stayed more or less stable for a couple years, then gained another 15, stayed stable for a year, then gained most of the rest of it back and then some over the following 3-4 years during graduate school and afterward.
The main issue was that the level of mental effort involved in calorie counting was just too much to keep up constantly. It required constant awareness and diligence- “how much did I eat?” “how many calories are in that?” and so forth.
I wasn’t able to keep it up as a default habit, and I do stress eat, so I ended up gaining it all back.
No, I don’t think it has.
I don’t feel like for me, it’s about pounds or percentages. I would rather be thin, or at least not so fat. Putting a number on it makes it measurable, but say… losing X amount of weight, but not really seeing that in terms of smaller clothes sizes would be very discouraging.
Not terribly often, which was not the case when I was younger, and especially unmarried.
Yes. Stuff like Metabolic Syndrome and other musculoskeletal issues are directly linked to obesity, and while stuff like exercise and diet can have an effect, there are definitely obesity-caused and obesity-exacerbated diseases.