Exercise and obesity.

In a recent thread about Arlines charging more for Large people, slackergirl made this comment:

Of course, your idea of a reputable source is not known to me, and can be changed to save your self 100 bucks and your reputation I am sure. However I have such a source.

Here is my source with several studies. They don’t meet your critera to the letter, as they don’t give any percents in the studies. I would bet my own 100$ that 100% of the study group lost weight and kept it off as long as they kept thier diet and exercise routine stable.

I wish I could find more sources for you tonight for this OP, but time is short tonight, I will do more research the rest of this week and drege up what is common sense to everybody else.
Even a fat person that exercises and eats a healthy, moderate diet (as in low sugar, moderate calories) will loose weight, and if the diet and exercise is followed, it will stay off indefinately.
*however a person with a serious medical condition that may be causing the obesity may not have the same results. This is a rather small percent though.

There is no magical cure for being overweight, other than parentage. Eating right and following a vigorus exercise program can and will take off weight and improve the quality of life. Following this and stopping will increase the chances of the effects reversing. That just makes sense, stop doing what makes you fat, and then start back when your no longer fat will make you get fat again.

I think this trend to believe that only skinny people benifit from exercise is caused by feelings of inadequacy, and from a refusal to admit a shortcomming. Everybody benifits from exercise, fat or not. Its the type of exercise you choose.

I’m short on time now and don’t have time to really look at the study in depth. I’ll try to get a solid response to that for you tomorrow.

From skimming it this seems to be another group of short term studies. All of the studies that I have seen, and the mainstream books I’ve read show a failure rate of +90% after 5 years. To make matters worse, the higher the starting BMI, the worse the statistics get over time. So for somebody like me with a BMI of 45 the numbers get up to 96% and up. After 10 years they can go above 99% in the morbidly obese.

The other thing that most places that cite these studies don’t tell you is what an obesity study considers a success. Most of them consider a success to be 50% of excess weight lost, so a 300 pound person like myself could lose 75 and be considered a “success” by the study, but I’d still weigh 225 and be borderline morbidly obese.

The post in the airline thread was really a reaction to the people who consider morbid obesity to be a lifestyle choice. Everything that you said is common sense, but life doesn’t work out that way. People get injured and can’t exercise for stretches of time, especially the obese. People get hungry.

New research into satiety and hunger hormones show that obese people who have lost weight have more of a hunger triggering hormone than thin people.

My point is that saying diet and exercise will make you thin is a pat answer that does not work in the real world. There are too many other variables, most of them still unknown at this point.

I’m absolutely for exercise and eating well. It will make anybody feel better physically, feel better emotionally, and probably improve their overall outlook on life. It can help a morbidly obese person lose a bit of weight and maintain that loss, but no study has shown that this will make them thin for life.

I’ll give you specific nitpicks on your stuff when I have time to really look at it.

As someone who has been fat since the day they were born, I can tell you that Epi is totally right.

I will never be a “normal” size until I quit crash dieting and make a total lifestyle change, where I stop eating junk permanently and haul my ass to the gym 3-5 times a week whether I want to or not.

It’s just that simple.

Fatty checking in:

I’ve been “chronically fat” all my life - eating a normal sized diet for someone of my size/age/etc. will result in me gaining weight where they’ll easily maintain it.

That said, a few years back, I was 375 (6’1), and decided it might improve my life to lose some weight. So, in 9 months, I lost about 200 pounds of fat, gained about 40-50 of muscle, and became practically a paragon of good health. I’m as “naturally prone” to be fat as anyone else - except, perhaps, a very few number of morbidly obese people - and so anyone who “can’t” lose weight either doesn’t have the will or the knowledge to do so.

Hmm, let me first say that I think thin is a bad term. A 5’11 250lb bodybuilder with 8% bodyfat has little fat, but hardly anybody would call him thin. I think Fit would be better. Or Cut. Thin makes me think of anorexic models. So when I say Fit, I don’t mean just healthy, I mean low bodyfat.

No long term study that I could find has been done. All short term.(I will keep looking though) Maintaining it can be done, but it is just as time consuming as losing the weight. That takes a will power that most people do not have. I don’t think this means that it is impossible for obese people to lose weight and keep it off. I think it is very hard, genetically and socially. I think it takes sacrafices most people don’t feel are worth the rewards.
This is hardly conclusive evidence, more like IMO, or based off anectodal evidence and feelings. So I will admit as such.

On your losing 75 lbs and keeping it off; If you lost that weight, and kept if off, that would be a sucess. If I said the only weightloss that matters is one that makes you instantly into Britney spears, forgive me, that is not how I meant it to sound. 75 lbs is alot, and should not be discounted.

If you meant weightloss to the point of being Brad Pitt or Allysa Milano, I think that is all dependent upon genetics, not everybody can have bodies like that, But they can have healthy, fit, and relatively thin bodies. (compared to the obese counterparts)

I don’t think obese people choose it as a lifestyle. I am not one of those types. I do know that it is possible to change it, and I think that it can stay that way. I don’t think everybody that is large is lazy, but I do think that statements like the one I felt you made in that other thread was sort of a fatalistic approach to it. I think a person would see this, say “whats the point of trying, this intelligent lady said its not possible”, and give up all hope. I think it has to do with lack of knowledge of it being possible to change.

225 may still be “morbidly obese” in somebody’s chart, but I would say that dropping from 300 to 225 would be an enormous success. There’s a huge difference between those weights in terms of a person’s health.

It’s really pretty simple. Failing a prohibitive medical condition, an obese person need only follow the physics.

Based on your size, metabolism and lifestyle you should be able to get a pretty good idea how many calories your body needs in a day to maintain it’s weight.

If you can’t figure it out track your weight and calorie consumption for a two week period and do the math.

After that one need only raise the number of calories one burns through exercise, and reduce the number of calories consumed to a few percent (no more than 15%) below what is required. Going more than 15% may put your body into starvation mode causing your body to hoard resources.

While doing this, the person will need to ensure that they are eating a balanced diet.

Do this and one will lose weight slowly and gradually. There’s no buts about it.

The problem is that it’s a lifetime commitment. Managing your diet and exercise forever is not fun, it requires that an obese person make a lifestyle change that is permanent if he/she is to lose and keep off the weight.

What worked and continues to work for me is setting goals unrelated to weight.

I gained 40 pounds when my wife got pregant. She had the baby, lost the weight. I didn’t. So, I decided to run a marathon. The training and the adjustment in diet necessary to fulfill that commitment took care of the weight. To keep it off, I’m training to run another.

I guess the kicker is to lose weight and keep it off, dieting doesn’t work. You find success not by altering your diet for a few weeks, but by permanently changing your identity.

As a marathon man it’s tough for me to be fat. As a new dad with a sedentary job it was easy.

My boyfriend weighs about 105 ls. He chuggs whole milk all day. He’s known to eat an entire bag of chips in one sitting. He doesn’t get an extreme amount of exersize. We eat the same food, in about the same portions (except I skip on the things like whole milk milk shakes and other absurdly high fat/calorie concoctions) and yet I do not, nor will I ever, weight 105 lbs. He cannot gain weight, no matter what he does, short of perhaps eating lard by the handful and never moving, which would not be healthy at all.

If there are some people that are “just skinny”, why do we refuse to belive there are some people that are “just fat”.

Because skinny is seen as good, and fat is seen as bad. Assuming that someone’s “just fat” is a condemnation (in the mind of people who aren’t fat) to a lifetime of disability, loneliness, and other unpleasant things. This is complete bullshit, of course, but it seems to be the popular opinion.

(this is in response to even sven’s last question, btw)

From “Treatment of obesity: mission possible” by Alain Golay, The Lancet, Vo. 356, Supp. 1: “The combination of a nutritional-cognitive-behavioural approach associated with physical activity has achieved a greater than 50% success rate at 5 years in our clinic.” Not quite longer than five years, but getting there. (Lancet won’t allow a link; go to www.thelancet.com, search journals for “obese success diet long-term.”

This study showed that participants in a weight loss study “On average, the participants had lost 30 kg and maintained the weight loss for 5.1 years.”

I’m still looking, but I’m guessing that after 5 years people’s diet and exercise programs have pretty much become a lifestyle and going back to the old, unhealthy way of living would have to be a conscious choice.

Stay tuned . . .

And sven, there *are *people who are “just fat.” But I don’t think there are people who are “just obese.” There are things to be done to reduce the obesity to a healthier “just fat.” Some people will never be thin, no matter what they do, but a morbidly obese person can certianly do some things, even if it’s gastric bypass, to lose some weight.

Who refuses to believe some people are just fat? I just don’t believe the majority of obese Americans are obese because they can’t help it. Granted I don’t have scientific evidence to prove this just some anecdotal observations based on old photos I’ve seen and a general knowledge of how some of my ancestors lived.

So let’s take a look at the 'ole Gibson photo album with pictures dating back to the 1870’s.

  • No obese children, teenagers, young adults, or adults. The only people with extra baggage appear to be men at least in their 50’s and women in their 30’s or 40’s who have had multiple children.

  • In school photos dating back to the 20’s I don’t see any obese kids. Compare that with class photos from today.
    For the most part when I look at old photos from outside my family I’ve observed the same thing. There weren’t that many fat people. So why does there seem to be so many more fat people today then there was 50 years ago? Either diet and physical habits have changed or there’s some fat gene that skipped all those other generations in the age of photography.

Marc

(In the UK) a recent documentary (which I didn’t see, but spoke about at length with a friend who had) compared “naturally” thin and “naturally” fat people – they placed them on 24hr suveillance with fixed amounts of exercise and fixed calorific intake – the “fat” subjects seemed to fufil expectations and gained more weight (or lost it more slowly than) their “thin” counterparts.

The anomaly turned out to be explained by the tendancy of the “thin” people to be more active in there inactivity – fidgeting, tapping their feet etc., etc. So, no magic after all, just the same immutable equation
calories_in - calories_out = weight_change
– if you burn more calories than you eat you WILL lose weight (and vice-versa).

Slackergirl, when you refer to the failure rate over 5 years, are you talking about people who stay on their program of diet and exercise for 5 years, but still gain back the weight they lost initially, or are you talking about people who simply don’t stick to the program

Maybe I am missing something here but I do not think that I am. Let’s look at this as the engineer I am. I will assume nobody will argue with any of the following statements:

  1. The body generates power constantly, although the rate of power consumption varies. If you are not generating power, you are dead.
  2. Power comes from chemical conversion of the food we eat and fat reserves (generally) in the body (unless you happen to be a plant).
  3. Mass can neither be created nor destroyed (We will assume you are not nuclear powered).

Therefore:

  1. If your rate of power consumption exceeds the power provided by the chemical conversion of the food you eat, you will die, or more power will be provided bu chemical conversion of the fat reserves in the body.
  2. Chemical conversion of fat reserves to power will cause weight loss.
  3. There is no such thing as “people who cannot lose weight”, only people who eat more food than their body needs. This includes people with “glandular” and “medical” problems.
  4. The efficiency of power conversion varies. Hence the people who can eat 2 gallons of ice cream per day without gaining weight (poor power conversion). These people should be considered disabled, and should be helped by the government, as they are forced to spend more money on food than robust people.

Prove me wrong.

Prove yourself right.

I must be missing something again. I though that everything in my post was accepted scientific fact. Is it the standard on this message board that everything must be demonstrated from first principles? If so, I will give up now, because discussion is useless.

No, not everything needs to be demonstrated from first principles. However, your point #6 is a contentious statement (to the best of my knowledge), and I’d like a source.

Another thing to be taken into account is the amount of fat people who attempt those fad diets. I’m talking abou the Atkins, The Way, etc… Plenty of “larger than healthy” people are trying these diets and in the end getting downtrodden. I have had friends going like yoyo’s because of these “simple yet effective plans”. Every single one of them has simply quit and forsaken dieting for the good old buffet…

… But those diets no one really expects to work. In my family I have seen the gramps and my mom manage to lose a good amount of weight and keep it off through managing diet, exercise and all that fun stuff…

…but maybe I shouldn’t be saying anything because I am one of those people who can eat the two tubs of ice cream…

I swear I spend half my time trying to figure out acronyms…

-Duncan

Burping buzzard

Welcome to the SDMB.

Actually, you can’t prove a negative. The onus is on you to prove your positive assertion, not us to disprove it.

Be that is it may, your final assertion is false. It doesn’t necessarily follow that the person who can eat 5 gallons of ice cream and not gain weight suffers from poor efficiency. He/she may be every bit as efficient as a heavier person.

His body may simply regulate his weight differently, and not store excess calories in body fat to the same degree as another person.

Other people’s bodies may tend to store excess calories in fat more readily, or have a higher set point.

It is most likely not a simple equation, but a formula that varies from body to body.

I.E. At X activity level and Y consumption level, a person’s body may store Z percentage of calories.

All these variables will differ from person to person, nor will there be a perfect distribution curve as activity and consumption level shifts.

As those variables shift another variable will come into play as well, that of metabolism. Higher activity will shift metabolism upward, but lower consumption below a certain threshhold (which will also differ from person to person) will send the body into starvation mode which will shut down nonessential functions and lower metabolism to conserve calories.

One of the big problems faced by dieters is that they send their body’s into starvation mode very quickly through crash diets, making weight loss very difficult because not only does the body scrimp calories it enhances the hunger signals that it sends. Even if the person does overcome those two drawbacks, and risks the health problems and loses weight, when normal consumption habits are resumed the body stays in starvation mode and puts the weight back on.

Starvation mode also results in the loss of muscle mass (which lowers the body’s calorie consumption rate.) The person may lose weight but still be fat.

Still other dieters will be forced to contend with their bodies miserly metabolism and cravings and be forced to eat very little so that they don’t gain weight.

The trick to successful weight loss without health detriment is to avoid letting your body go into starvation mode.

The problem is that most bodies are smarter than their owners (or their owners haven’t read the manual.)

To lose weight you need to get your body to step up its metabolism, create muscle rather than fat with any excess calories it finds, and feel free to dispose of the rest. It will not do this last if the food it is receiving is not plentiful and frequent.

I see your point, but I think perhaps you did not carefull read my entire post (or possibly I am unclear and explaining poorly). I have presented it (very) loosely as a logical proof. My point 6 follows directly from 1 thought 5. I.e., if 1 throught 5 are true, so must be 6, unless you are aware of some fundamental biological mechanicsm that I am unware of. Or am I missing something?