I’m thinking you’re serious, forgive me if you’re not. These three statements are completely nuts.
First, the only worthwhile definition of overeating is to consume more than you burn off or, um, excrete. Your teenage brother’s friend was not overeating, unless he didn’t pay for it, not if he was stick thin. You are aware that even if you only overeat by a mere 2oz a day you will gain 45 lbs? You get to breath wheezing fat in much less than a decade. And once overweight, it becomes much harder to lose weight than to never have gained it: your metabolism shifts, and it is harder to exercise. I’m sure eating less than fit people around you and gaining weight is very frustrating and depressing.
5’ 1" and 165 lbs is not “technically fat”. My wife is 5’ 1", weighs 50 lbs less and would lose weight if she exercised. I am 6’ 2", and I don’t weigh that much. And no, I don’t have an eating problem, nor do I look emaciated. (If I have an eating problem it is the same as your teenage friend - I just ate a large bacon and pepperoni pizza on Thursday. When I eat out, I always eat the entire thing, unless there is something there I don’t like, and some of my wife’s. BUT: I hardly ever eat out: road trips, once a week at lunch, and maybe once a month for dinner. My typical lunch is a very large salad without dressing, some fruit, and a nut and rolled oats trail mix. And my hobbies are running, triathlons, etc.)
I think a lot of people also gain weight the same way I did - when I was young, I had a crazy high metabolism. People warned me that would slack off in my mid 20’s, but I didn’t believe them, and I kept eating and living the same way I always had. Which meant I crept up a few pounds a year and now I need to lose some of them. (I’m 5’7" and when I started Weight Watchers a few weeks ago I weighed 168, now I’ve crept down to 162, woot.) Just eating a little too much every day and taking a job that’s sitting more than standing I went from size 2 pants to size 14 in five years (granted, I pretty much only gain weight between my knees and my waist.)
The thing is, I haven’t gone hungry (gasp) or anything - mostly Weight Watchers has gotten me to quit snacking on candy from dishes all day and to cut beer down to mostly a weekend thing. No feeling of deprivation whatsoever. It ain’t no thing.
When I left my field job for a sedentary desk job, my weight started to creep up. It wasn’t just that I was sedentary, but I was also eating out for lunch. After just a few months, I was close to being on the border of normal and overweight.
I didn’t notice that I was getting a little soft until someone took my picture. That’s when I realized that my bedroom mirror had been lyin’ to me.
So that’s when I started to walk. The zen of walking extended to the zen of lunch-making. After three months, I started noticing changes in how my clothes fit. Three years later, I’m still keeping up my habits, and now I’m bordering on underweight and normal.
But it’s weird. I still don’t see a major difference in myself in the mirror. But when I look at pictures of myself, I’m freaked out at how thin I’ve become. So you cannot trust mirrors. The mirror you use every day will reflect what you’re accustomed to seeing. And you can always rationalize away what other mirrors show. I remember thinking “This mirror always makes me look fat! I need the good mirror!” And because I don’t really ever wear tight-tight clothes, it took a while for me to notice when things were getting snug.
Sometimes I see people on the street wearing ill-fitting pants. Like, guys with panty-lines. They usually are not fat people, but people who are approaching fat. I’m betting their mirrors are playing tricks on them.
I’m glad someone else mentioned this, as I was going to as well. voguevixen I know BMI isn’t a sure-fire method of assessment, but your height/weight ratio gives a BMI of 31.8 which is defined as “very overweight”. My g/f is the same height as you but 55 lbs lighter and is in the “healthy weight” zone - and not even at the bottom of it. I’m 5’6" guy and I weigh 15 lbs less than you, and am at the upper level of my ‘healthy’ BMI which means I could stand to lose a few pounds or at least tone up. None of which is meant to make you feel bad - though I realise it may, and I apologise for being blunt - but this may represent a good illustration of the state of denial that others are pointing at in this thread.
If US size 12 is UK size 14, then this statement is incorrect. ‘Designer’ stores may have only skinny sizing but I think regular stores carry dresses that go up to 18 (US 16), and Primark, the most prominent budget clothing retailer in the UK, goes up to 18/20 which I guess is up to US 18. We have plenty fat people in the UK.
I have lived poor, and when you live poor, true poverty and no time to cook because you are working two jobs; you eat three $1.00 items off of the McDonald’s value menu each day, and you are skinny and unhealthy.
Most people who are poor and fat are not actually poor- they just don’t have enough money to have the large-screen tv, xbox 360, AND still afford to go to expensive restaurants that use good ingredients and portion control as well as exercise…
The worst part of being working poor (which isn’t the same as actual poverty) is that the education and understanding of how to be healthy just isn’t there.
Most people don’t understand HOW to be healthy- it isn’t that being poor is a bar to being healthy. My parents were poor my entire life, and either cooked cheap food and ate only a little of it as they couldn’t afford more, or were working so hard in physical jobs that being skinny was the issue.
I have never understood why people buy the ‘being fat and poor is easy!’
It isn’t any easier than being not-poor and fat.
The issue is education and habit, not poor or not poor, unless you are literally living subsistance. True poor would love to be fat- they might not need to eat for a few weeks and wouldn’t get sick!
I don’t mean you can only afford one car for your 5 person family- I mean you are living on $500 a month for five people, no food stamps, either because you aren’t a citizen or you are too proud- and paying rent out of that! No car, and trying to make it work with food and childcare. Try to be fat in that situation. Good luck.
If you are having to work two jobs to keep a crappy apartment over you and your five kids’ heads, it’s kind of hard not to see that as poor.
When most people talk about poor in America, we’re talking about working poor. “Working poor” is an entirely different level of poverty than living-on-a-dollar-a-day poverty. The two aren’t comparable, but that doesn’t mean “working poor” people don’t have challenges that wealthier people don’t have.
I start work at 8:30 and get off at 5:15. No one forces me to work overtime or to do a double-shift. That alone makes me pretty well-to-do.
People with money have more leisure time. Time to spend on cooking, exercise, chores, and all the fun/relaxing activities that we need to make it through life sanely. The working poor have less time for cooking, exercise, chores, and fun because they tend to work more hours and have more hectic schedules.
Human beings are strange. If they have limited time, they will tend to fill it with easier activities. It is a luxury to purposelessly fill it with harder activities.
The chores have to be done.
Relaxation and fun must be had for life to be meaningful.
But there’s a McDonald’s to take care of the cooking.
And exercise is optional, plus hard.
It is not difficult to understand why people who are poor–the working poor–tend to be fat. If you’ve got just a couple of hours to yourself, why wouldn’t you want to spend it watching TV instead of jogging? It makes perfect sense to me.
Yeah, I have to say, I’m 5’7" and 160something and I’m definitely overweight - nearing chubby, at least to me. And those extra height inches are a LOT of weight, I’ve noticed among friends.
I agree with everything you said, except this part. I know plenty of runners who meet your definition of poor. One of the fastest guys I know has had two jobs since I met him. One trick is to be a form of exercise that is at least as pleasurable as watching TV. (For me, that would be almost all sports.)
I think you become who your friends are. If your friends meet at bars or restaurants, and eat or drink as part of being together, you will all tend to gain weight. If you watch TV with friends (and family) you will be sedentary, and gain weight. If your friends meet at 6 am to run together, then you tend to become a runner, and very few gain weight.
I think the working poor are more likely to live in a neighborhood for which a cheap form of exercise, like running, is less pleasurable, if not outright dangerous. So, their friends are more likely to be sedentary. I think those that work two jobs are more likely to be too tired to pick sport over sedentary activities, and that their friends are likewise. It is not that that they are more likely to want to watch TV as opposed to running.
One of the (many) reasons I haven’t traveled in Europe is because of what I keep hearing about the portion sizes. I fear I will have to order multiple entrees in order to not be hungry.
2-3 meals from one American restaurant meal? Seriously? I clean my plate, then have a snack a couple hours later. Can you give me an idea of where you’re going, because I will have to go check it out to see if I can get more food for my buck - I can’t afford to eat out often as it is.
No, it is not your only option. I have lost 50 pounds since March and I am not hungry at all, because I manage my body’s fat regulation system by avoiding carbohydrates, especially from grains and sugar. Within that restriction, I eat whenever I like, as much as I like, and I specifically and deliberately eat plenty of fat. I feel good, I look good, and my relationship and attitude towards food is completely different than it is if I eat a “balanced diet”.
And if I eat a “balanced diet” the only way I lose weight is via very painful starvation, which makes me completely obsessed with food, miserable, tired, and it’s not very effective. That becomes intolerable very quickly, and my body is screaming at me to eat. So when I can’t take it anymore I find my appetite is unquenchable and whatever I lost I regain plus more - like every fat person who ever went on a calorie-restriction diet.
Here’s what starvation dieting does to you - 36 healthy young men were put on 1600 calories per day for a goal of 2.5 lbs of weight loss per week. Not fat men, normal, healthy young men.
I think you and I have very different views of what constitutes “reasonable”.
Calorie restriction dieting is intolerable; it creates compulsive eaters and bingers, and guarantees that you will end up fatter and fatter and fatter the more you subject yourself to it.
When you see the superobese, you are almost certainly seeing someone who has done a LOT of dieting, because that’s what starvation dieting does to you. The fatter they are, the more likely it is that they have dieted many times, and done so with great temporary success.
Evidently you didn’t follow the links. There were nine in what you quoted, ranging from the NY Times to Yale, all saying the same: exercise just isn’t very effective for losing weight. It’s not my opinion, it’s what the research shows.
I think the point is that exercise alone will not produce a very large reduction in weight over the long term. Without diet control, the exercise will perhaps stop the person gaining more weight or maybe they will lose a few pounds. But if the person does not also make a real effort to modify their eating habits, the exercise won’t produce long term weight loss. The person will keep eating with their old habits, which is probably to eat whatever they want until they feel like stopping. It’s practically impossible to out exercise uncontrolled eating. Most people won’t commit to multi-hour a day workouts for the rest of their life which is what it would take to lose weight by exercise alone.
If you are committed to changing your eating habits, exercise is a great way to help help melt the weight off. But the key part to long term weight loss is to modify what you eat in the long term.
In Ireland and Britain at least, it’s not all that different maybe 3/4 or 2/3 of a typical American restaurant plate, as I mentioned above I think sides have a bigger impact.
Evidently you didn’t read them either past the brief oversimplification that exercise “doesn’t work”. From link 1:
From link 2:
From link 3:
(my emphasis)
From link 4:
From link 5:
From link 6:
From link 7:
From link 8 (“A 7-Step Plan for Weight Loss”). Note step 3:
From link 9:
Every single one of your links suggest that diet and exercise together achieves the greatest weight-loss, moreso than diet alone. You are reading what you want to read.
I know this study has been brought up here before, and it’s been pointed out that it’s interesting but flawed in several ways. These were men who had been eating a normal, healthy diet and then had their calorie intake cut down by half. They lost 25% of their original weight and were seriously underweight by the end. They were literally, actually starving (and that was the point - to study starvation and refeeding).
What those guys experienced has very little in common with the average American dieter. Losing weight when you have a fair bit to spare is nothing like being starved from a normal, healthy weight to a point where your health and life may be in danger. It’s also worth noting that the subjects ‘volunteered’ for this study in order to avoid being drafted during WWII, so their motivation was entirely different than the average dieter (when an overweight person sees the number on the scale go down, they’re usually happy, as opposed to these guys were just watching themselves get sicker and weaker day by day. I imagine that would change the psychological reaction considerably).
I guess you can refer to a calorie restricted diet as ‘starvation’ if you’re using a really liberal definition of the word. But normal, moderate, calorie restriction is not ‘starvation’ in the way that most people would understand it. Ancel Keys was trying to figure out how to help extremely malnourished concentration camp victims, not the survivors of a Weight Watchers meeting.
It’s not necessarily. You don’t have to cut back so far that you consistently lose 2.5 pounds a week, as the Keys study participants did. I’m not saying it’s easy, or that everyone can or should do it, but it’s not accurate to describe it as ‘intolerable’.
I read them all and many others, completely, which is usually the best way to take in the information, not just search for a few things to pick out and extrapolate from.
Here’s what all of them said: exercise doesn’t make much difference. Certainly not enough to warrant all the people in this thread talking about it like it’s an actual *effective solution to being obese. *It is not. It does not work. It is not a solution. It will not improve diet results in a significant way and there’s a strong liklihood that it will undermine your (otherwise effective) dietary efforts.
I am a big fan of exercise. I think if anything can be a panacea and an elixir of youth, it’s exercise. I think exercise can do really miraculous things.
But the focus on it as a major tool for effective weight loss is, as I said when I brought it up, misplaced.