Don’t you think that’s exactly what MeanOldLady is mocking? I mean I think it’s pretty obvious that’s how rachelellogram feels and pretty clearly ridiculous.
Forget it MOL, it’s Fattytown.
But what if you started out ridiculously fat? What if all that time you put in on the treadmill got you down to a svelte size 18? She worked damn hard every day and hated every minute of it to still be morbidly obese.
I know a woman who went on Biggest Loser and lost 100 lbs, which is awesome for her health but it is at the expense of the rest of her life. All she does now is go to work and work out. The time that you spend going to movies and drinking beer at the bar? She doesn’t get to have that. The time that I spend bonding with my husband? She doesn’t get to have that. She has to put in at least 3-4 hours of heavy work outs every single day to keep from being overweight and she seems to have accepted that she will probably never have a real relationship with anyone because of the dramatic amount of time and energy it takes to stay thin. I have to wonder if she will look back on her incredible weight loss on her 40th birthday and still think it was worth it.
And she only eats celery and water too, right? Maybe a little air for dessert?
Why doesn’t she just eat a healthy amount of food to maintain her healthy weight and exercise a normal amount? Does she have a thyroid problem that makes that impossible?
Most of us don’t “start out” ridiculously fat but I personally became very overweight before hitting puberty and I do feel sort of “guilt-free” about it. That is, I can’t see wasting my time blaming my pre-teen mind for not appreciating the long-term consequences of overeating. Still, I lost the weight through hard work and now I eat enough calories to maintain my weight with moderate exercise.
It’s clearly not easy for plenty of people. I needed to see a doctor who helped me understand exactly how many calories I needed and taught me what foods to eat to get them. What reason is there that would keep anyone without a severe untreated thyroid problem for doing that? As opposed to heavy workouts 4 hours per day?
I mean if your friend gains weight unless she burns 2000 calories exercising for 4 hours would you agree she must have eaten at least 2000 calories beyond her BMR, or does metabolism not work in her body like everyone else’s?
At 5’ 10 1/2", 182 lbs., I come in at a BMI of 25.7, or just a shade into “overweight”. I suspect I get dinged a bit in the BMI calculation, due to my body build (long torso, short arms and legs), but I also admit that, despite several years of increasingly vigorous exercise, I still have a small spare tire (which I’d desperately love to finally get rid of).
According to the calculator, I’ll need to lose another 5 pounds (177) to be officially under the “overweight” limit. Considering that, 8 years ago, I was around 225 pounds (a BMI of 31.8, or “obese”), I’ve come a long way.
pbbth I don’t know about people for whom physics do not work, but physics is working fine for me at sustaining that level of weight loss. I even had my lapband removed, and have lost a further 15kgs. That was a dumb thing for me to have done to myself in the first place. I never got it to adjust properly anyway, so it never worked and all the weight I’ve lost has pretty much been on my own.
I’m just sad it took me so long to stop lying to myself and working on shortcuts. Just count calories, eat what you want, but eat less than you expend. It’s super easy. If you want to drink beer and eat crap, burn more calories. I’ve lost about 92lbs with a further 40ish lbs to go. It slows down towards the end, but it’s totally doable. I spend (when at uni) about three hours a week in the gym, and about five or six hours a week when I’m between semesters. Pretty sure most people can sustain this and still see their family - less TV maybe? I eat pretty well. I’m eating lollies now, in fact, cause it’s a gym day. It’s easy, totally doable. Dunno why I didn’t work this out years ago, but I suspect total stupidity on my part.
If someone needs to spend that many hours in a gym to keep the weight off, then they clearly are eating too much and not counting calories or WW points or whatever. If they don’t want to put the effort in to do that, then good on them for spending the time in the gym. Counting calories in the day and age of websites and smart phones is easy as breathing. I’ve been doing it for almost a year now, and have not missed a single day. I am Gleena on Livestrong.com as well, aand am happy to have anybody have a look at my profile there. (My food ups and downs and gymbludging is there for all to see, though in fairness the last three weeks I was out with plantar fascitis, a malady leftover from my extreme lardassery.)
All up it will take me about 18 months to two years to get to where I want to be. I might not ever look good naked (like MOL probably does, which makes me butthurt, let me assure you :D) but I can walk up a flight of stairs without needing a good lie down.
But if someone is happy being whatever weight they are then that’s cool. They just shouldn’t pretend they can’t lose weight. They can, they just don’t want to. Doesn’t mean people shouldn’t notice it’s unhealthy. It is.
None of this back and forth is going to change anyone’s mind. Nearly dying from a weight related illness didn’t make me put the fork down, nor did the need for a rest after climbing stairs, or being brutally bullied in HS, or anything else. People will put the fork down when they want to, and not before. That’s pretty much my takeaway from this journey I’ve been on. Until they they will make excuses and lie to themselves and others and whine endlessly about why they can’t. I know, cause I did it.
MOL is spot on.
Last time I checked, there’s no rule that says you can’t attack someone’s comments, you just can’t insult said person. If they get insulted, well, hey. We’re all adults here.
(Remind me to tell you guys sometime about the biggest corpse my dad ever had to deal with)
14.4.
woo.
Well, I guess I just don’t think it’s ridiculous. It’s not ‘looking attractive to other people’ has never been a big issue for our, or any species.
Still, I’m surprised that your friend has to give up her entire life even after losing all that weight.
There can be a lot of sacrifice for those who are starting out on big weight loss, and I don’t think it should be underestimated just how big that sacrifice is (not, you know, on the level of being nailed on a cross or anything, though that would probably lead to some weight loss…) but it shouldn’t be ongoing forever.
What I was trying to say is simply that I dont think your explanation clarified anything that wasnt already understood. To me it’s a patently ridiculous position, but I’m not going to insult you or anyone else for not seeing it as ridiculous. All I’m saying is please don’t think I’ve missed your or rachelellogram’s point. I get the point; I think it’s ludicrous.
Whoa, whoa, it’s only an aspiration. Nobody said I was actually there. In any event, congrats on the progress.
And pbbth, I am also curious about what medical condition your friend has that requires her to work out nonstop, leaving no time for personal relationships, in order to stave off obesity.
She’s got “you people are mean, I know someone who can’t help being fat no matter what”-itis.
Happens to lots of people with friends who post on the SDMB.
As best as I am aware she doesn’t have a medical problem, just a tendency towards obesity. She eats normally, taking in less than 2,000 calories per day. She isn’t the only person I’ve heard of who has had to put in that kind of time to stay thin, just the only one I know personally, and it is sad to me that for her to stay fit she has to put in that kind of time. Perhaps in a few years she will be able to cut back on the physical activity and use mostly diet to maintain her size but as of right now she has found that if she only puts in an hour a day or so she gains weight.
How is your health?
Pbbth, you can’t say “she eats normally” unless you are cutrently swinging from her uvula watching everything that goes down her throat. You can only say “she tells me she eats normally and appears to do so when I’m around her,” which is very different from the statement above.
Just as a thought experiment, what do you suppose would happen if your friend agreed to live in a lab for 6 months where she wasn`t permitted to exercise? But - the researchers determined what they believe to be a daily caloric consumption level that will keep her weight stable, and ensure that without even a single exception she eats it every day? Would she gain weight?
What if the researchers were allowed to tinker with the food? Say they decide she should be eating 1600 calories per day, but she actually does gain weight after a month. If they lower it to 1400 calories per day could the potentially stabilize it, or is there no point where she’s not gaining weight unless she exercises 4 hours a day?
Doesn’t it seem more likely that she’s just eating too much?
She’s almost definitely eating the wrong things. Probably typical low-fat bullshit - a lot of people will see creeping fat gain on a moderate caloric intake as long as they’re getting 200+ grams of carbohydrate daily. This is what the ‘experts’ advise though.
I will say that I know several people who have lost 100 lbs or more, and none of them have to do crazy shit like that to maintain their weight. Some don’t even exercise regularly.
I have a feeling that pbbth’s friend is either eating a lot more than 2000 calories per day or she isn’t actually exercising for 4 hours per day, possibly both.
This doesn’t mean that she isn’t going to the gym for 4 hours, but that’s not the same as working out for 4 hours. Walking slowly burns 200+ calories per hour. Low impact aerobics is around 400 calories per hour. More vigorous exercise will easily push you to 500-1000 calories per hour. Somebody who is actually burning 1000-4000 calories per day exercising while eating 2000 calories per day is going to drop weight like crazy (and my guess is that they’d find that pace unsustainable for very long).
I have done plenty of long workouts where when I look back on the time actually spent exercising it’s only a small fraction (1/3 or so) of the total time involved, the rest was spent taking breaks, switching between equipment and so on. And that was by myself, if I was hanging out, socializing, etc. that would eat up even more time. I recently started a new routine and it’s a very concentrated 40-60 minutes of workout plus a little warmup/cooldown at each end, it’s amazing how much you sweat when you go continuously for a short period of time. As I noted in an earlier post I’m also a long distance runner so I know what it feels like to go at a moderate pace for hours on end.
Anyhow, good on your friend for what she’s accomplished but I would think that spending some time with a trainer and really focusing on an efficient workout routine will get her the same results (or more) in less time each day, leaving her with more time for “life”.
Yeah, if she got her caloric intake low enough probably she wouldn’t have to exercise 3-4 hours a day. Getting her caloric intake low enough might also entail her getting down to 1000 calories per day too, which isn’t healthy either. Perhaps she eats more than she says she does and exercises to compensate for it and I don’t know. I can’t say for sure. I just know the way she lost weight in the first place was being surrounded by trainers and nutritionists for 16 weeks and living within a controlled experiment where she was taught all the diet and exercise stuff to be able to use it in her daily life afterward.
I think it is telling that people here are saying the difficulties some people have in losing weight are ridiculous lies but no one is giving shit to Surrender Dorothy or rhubarbarin about how their dangerously underweight issues could just be solved by adding bacon to everything. So if someone finds it really unreasonably difficult to lose weight they are liars who just can’t be bothered to change their eating habits but if someone finds it difficult to gain weight that isn’t worth a comment. After all, if losing weight is just physics then gaining weight is the same, right? The fact that people kicked in with, “Seriously, a BMI of 50?” but the only person to comment on the BMI of 14.4 was one of the two underweight people in the thread speaks volumes about the predjudice on this board.