Fat America

[Stoid]

@Meyer6

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).

Anyone who is not taking in enough energy to function and has to turn to the body’s stores for energy is starving. The fact that some people have greater stores to draw from doesn’t change what’s happening in the body.

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.

I’ve never read any science supporting this assertion, quite the opposite: the starvation response is what makes dieters act exactly the way the men in that study acted.

But normal, moderate, calorie restriction is not ‘starvation’ in the way that most people would understand it.

It doesn’t matter how “people” understand it, it’s how the body understands it. When you stop eating enough to support your needs, your body will perceive it as starvation and among other things you will find yourself obsessed with food, and when you stop white-knuckling through the ridiculous food obsession you’ve created in yourself you will almost certainly eat more than you did before and end up fatter than you were before.

And we have the proof that this is exactly the way it works from sea to shining sea, in the millions of us who went on a diet to lose a few pounds and found ourselves 100+ pounds fatter 20 years of such diets later. It’s really kind of funny that you would argue that the Keys study doesn’t mean anything when the experience of millions of people confirms it.

Honestly, on what basis is the suffering described by these men in this study so special and different than the suffering described by people on diets? It’s shocking and disturbing in the context of the study, but in the context of the fat person next to you they should just suck it up? Please.

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’.

Well, if it were actually tolerable I daresay a helluva lot more people would tolerate it, seeing as how the alternative is pretty damned miserable as well. But the overwhelming avalanche of evidence crushing us under its collective weight is that people absolutely do not tolerate it, making it perfectly accurate to describe it as intolerable.

[Meyer6]

@Stoid

I’ve never read any science supporting this assertion, quite the opposite: the starvation response is what makes dieters act exactly the way the men in that study acted.

The men in the study suffered from serious malnutrition - they were fed specific things (what would be available in famine areas in Europe - almost all carbs as I understand it) and they didn’t get the vitamins/minerals/proteins/etc that they needed. They were weak and ill all the time. Their bodies were shutting down. That’s way beyond the rumbly tummy and cravings that modern dieters deal with. If a modern dieter is experiencing anemia, hair loss, dizziness, edema, and such symptoms (as the subjects did), they’re doing it way wrong.

Honestly, on what basis is the suffering described by these men in this study so special and different than the suffering described by people on diets? It’s shocking and disturbing in the context of the study, but in the context of the fat person next to you they should just suck it up? Please.

So you seriously think that all food restriction is the same? People at Auschwitz felt exactly the same way that you do when you have salad for lunch instead of a burger? Please yourself.

[Stoid]

@jjimm

Tone aside, I think benganmo is questioning that a maintenance diet is starvation. While as Stoid says a fat-burning diet is starvation by definition, one that keeps you the same weight is not, by definition.

Except that it doesn’t work out like that: you don’t starve until you get to the right weight, then add back the right amount of calories to stay at the new weight and feel normal at the same time, because you starved yourself. The starving you did messed up your body: when you get down to a size 6 and start adding back calories, your body will take them and start turning them to fat AND tell you to eat MORE MORE MORE!!!

So the only way to get down to that size 6 via starvation diet and stay there is to continue to ignore your body sending you signals that it’s starving and wants you to eat more, because if you eat in accordance with the signals your body is sending you will quickly get fat again. And those signals are not polite notes discreetly slipped under the door, they are hunger pains and a constant appetite that never stops chattering at you about all the things you want to eat all day long.

So yes, in practice a calorie restriction method of weight loss can only be effective if you are able to stand living like that for the rest of your life. It’s reported by some of the rare folks who’ve pulled it off that after many years it gets easier… but most people can’t tolerate it for the years it takes to make it easier.

[rat_avatar]

@Stoid

It doesn’t.

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.

The exercise is to improve your cardio health, something that most Americans need drastically.

It does help to improve your energy level and reduce some effects and types of depression which also helps.

The biggest issue with “dieting” is that people want to shed years of weight gain in the shortest amount of time possible.

I lost weight and have maintained it off by simply making small sustainable changes in my diet.

E.G. dropping that extra slice of cheese every day at work adds up over time.

If you work a normal 5 day week 50 weeks a year, dropping the equivalent of 1 slice of cheese, and 30 to 60 min of cardio (which you should be doing anyway) will change your body weight, and at a minimum reduce your fat ratio.

Sure it is hard, sure everyone is busy but no one is as busy as they think.

You just need to make a choice, which is worse, getting the energy up to go do the workout or to donate a decade of your potential life span to the Advertisers on American Idol.

Sure it sucks…but it makes the rest of your life nicer to live when you are semi fit.

FYI, at 185 I burn 432 calories five days a week just by walking 4 15 min miles.

(5 days a week *432 cal * 50 weeks )/3500 cal per pound == ~31 lbs not gained

Not adding a slice of cheese at lunch at work:

(5 days a week * 97 cal * 50 weeks) / 3500 cals per pound = ~7 lbs not gained

Skipping to packets of sugar in my morning coffee

(2*22 cal *365 days a year)/3500 = ~5 lbs not gained

There that is getting close to about a pound a week, and I am far from starving and I feel better than ever.

It is now at Midnight I have to do my walk, because I have about as busy a life as anyone but You have to set your goals, I always pay myself first and this is health in the bank.

[Stoid]

@Meyer6

If a modern dieter is experiencing anemia, hair loss, dizziness, edema, and such symptoms (as the subjects did), they’re doing it way wrong.

Care to address the issues I’m actually talking about?

So you seriously think that all food restriction is the same? People at Auschwitz felt exactly the same way that you do when you have salad for lunch instead of a burger? Please yourself.

I think that qualifies as a violation of Godwin’s law… let’s call it a misdemeanor violation.

Is your argument supposed to be that because the Nazis managed to impose starvation on people in ways that almost defy the imagination that all other starvation doesn’t count, isn’t real, doesn’t matter? Because if we’re going to use the Nazi crimes against humanity as the measuring stick, I think pretty much everybody will need to shut the fuck up and about pretty much everything, up to and including cancer, AIDS & rape.

Starvation is starvation. Concentration camp inmates given a couple ounces of moldy bread and salty water, then forced to work in the snow for 10 hours while fighting off disease in what was easily one of the most unimaginably stressful situations human beings have ever endured suffered the worst starvation ever.

So? Is it a contest?

Starving the body in any situation to any degree for any reason leads to all kinds of unpleasant-to-miserable consequences as a result, and as with anything, the fact that Person A has suffered more than Person B doesn’t make Person B’s suffering easier.

[jjimm]

Double post.

[jjimm]

@Stoid

when you get down to a size 6 and start adding back calories, your body will take them and start turning them to fat

Which “by definition”, to quote you, is the exact opposite of starvation. Everything else you’ve written after this is irrelevant to the point. You’re using the word “starvation” in more than one way I think.

By your argument the pre-mentioned concentration camp survivors would be obese. I’ve seen many interviewed and filmed, and not one of them is obese, which seems to contradict your assertion.

Finally, do you have data disproving that exercise raises the metabolic rate? Or disproving that muscle consumes more maintenance energy than fat?

[Stoid]

@jjimm

Which “by definition”, to quote you, is the exact opposite of starvation. Everything else you’ve written after this is irrelevant to the point. You’re using the word “starvation” in more than one way I think.

???

If you eat normally after dieting, your body will make you fat faster and easier than it did before you starved it (see the Keys study, which has been backed up in the decades since by other studies and the experience of millions) SO… in order to NOT have that happen, you can’t eat normally. You have to eat less than your body wants, which makes your body scream at you that you are not eating enough and it screams at you with hunger pains and obsession with food that you have to control all the time.

Which is what you have to do on a starvation diet.

So yeah, same thing: remember this conversation started when someone said it was reasonable to have to deal with the pain of a starvation diet, I said permanently? and someone else said it wouldn’t be permanent. This is how it’s permanent. Or might as well be, in practice.

[Mangetout]

@Stoid

Except that it doesn’t work out like that: you don’t starve until you get to the right weight, then add back the right amount of calories to stay at the new weight and feel normal at the same time, because you starved yourself. The starving you did messed up your body: when you get down to a size 6 and start adding back calories, your body will take them and start turning them to fat AND tell you to eat MORE MORE MORE!!!

So the only way to get down to that size 6 via starvation diet and stay there is to continue to ignore your body sending you signals that it’s starving and wants you to eat more, because if you eat in accordance with the signals your body is sending you will quickly get fat again. And those signals are not polite notes discreetly slipped under the door, they are hunger pains and a constant appetite that never stops chattering at you about all the things you want to eat all day long.

So yes, in practice a calorie restriction method of weight loss can only be effective if you are able to stand living like that for the rest of your life. It’s reported by some of the rare folks who’ve pulled it off that after many years it gets easier… but most people can’t tolerate it for the years it takes to make it easier.

We’re the same species we were 50 years ago, when most people - even sedentary individuals, were slim. How did they achieve this? It sounds like you’re saying it’s nearly impossible not to be overweight, which can’t be true.

[rat_avatar]

@Mangetout

We’re the same species we were 50 years ago, when most people - even sedentary individuals, were slim. How did they achieve this? It sounds like you’re saying it’s nearly impossible not to be overweight, which can’t be true.

Agreed, increased portions and less activity have nothing to do with it

Granted it is harder to loose than gain, but it is not starve or gorge.

FWIW I did my walk but people still had their Xmass lights on so I took a longer route.

6.03 miles at 4.2mph for ~615 cal, 100 more than a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

And no, it doesn’t hurt and I’m not eating a reward, nor to I desire one.

It does get easier, the first bit is just hard…like most things in life.

[Stoid]

@Mangetout

We’re the same species we were 50 years ago, when most people - even sedentary individuals, were slim.

YES! EXACTLY!!!

How did they achieve this? It sounds like you’re saying it’s nearly impossible not to be overweight, which can’t be true.

Not saying that even a little. I’m saying that dealing with obesity as an issue of “calories in, calories out” is doomed to failure. Spectacular failure: read the OP. But people continue to talk about it as though the issue is really just that simple.

But if obesity is nothing but too many calories in, too few out, the only way to explain the fact that we are “Fat America” would be to say that somehow, for some unknown reason (virus? wholesale genetic mutation? Aliens?) vast numbers of American human beings have become slothful, lazy gluttons that, unlike human baings everywhere else and throughout time in the past, desire and choose to eat huge quantities of food and make themselves fat as a result of that and just dont’ give a shit about the consequences. Out of nowhere. Suddenly, just in the past 30-40 years.

*Which makes absolutely no sense at all.
*
I brought up the real question underlying this several times so far and no one paid it the slightest attention. One person described how two grown men of normal weight could barely finish one giant America-size appetizer while another grown man who was obese wanted and ate that same appetizer by himself plus a burger and dessert besides. I asked the poster how that might be explained. Why would FatMan want and be able to consume so much more than SlimMan?

If you say “Practice”, you have to go back…why did Fatman ***ever begin ***practicing eating unnaturally large quantities in the first place? More importantly, why would so many people take to eating unnaturally large quantities all at roughly the same time, leading to so many people paying such terrible social and health consequences? Why would there be a wholesale shift in American behavior, consciousness and attitude around food spontaneously?

Well, there wouldn’t be, not spontaneously and not out of the blue. Something changed first, before the restaurant portion sizes, to make people want and ask for and expect those restaurant portion sizes.

And I’m not here to stump for the answer (even though I believe I know what it is), because that’s too easy. I’m here in hopes that people will realize that ***this is the question that needs to be asked.

***The approach is backwards, because it starts by simply accepting a premise as true without ever stopping to notice that that it’s logically unacceptable: that huge numbers of people just started eating huge amounts of food and accepted becoming huge as a consequence for no apparent reason at all, so now they just need to stop doing that. It makes about as much sense as accepting that huge numbers of people would suddenly start poking themselves in the face with needles for no apparent reason and just need to be told how to stop doing that.

When you really stop to think about it, it’s ridiculous on its face, yet almost everyone just acts like it makes perfect sense. Until we have wide recognition of the fact that we’re asking the wrong questions, we will be watching lives diminished and cut short in the millions because of obesity.

[jjimm]

Stoid your statement was:" some degree of starvation will be necessary forever to maintain the reduced weight, such a person will have to cope with hunger pretty much constantly."

I am saying you are not starving when you are maintaining the reduced weight. You are indeed when you’re losing it.

I’m on your side by the way. I’ve done carb-restriction and am well aware of the amazing appetite suppression that it causes.

However I disagree that exercise isn’t part of the big picture. I’ve gone through yo-yo dieting and have successfully lowered my weight and have maintained it for a long time. The two things I did were move more and eat less. When I stopped moving more, I ate the same amount and started to creep back up again. Running for 30 minutes burns about 350 calories for me. It’s probably subjective, but it doesn’t increase my appetite at all. And it increases muscle mass, which requires more calories to maintain, even if it doesn’t directly contribute to weight loss.

[Stoid]

@jjimm

However I disagree that exercise isn’t part of the big picture.

I don’t want to discourage exercise, as I said I think it’s the closest thing to a cure-all in existence - seriously. Whenever I feel poorly, whether mental or physical, I know I should move.

But if the goal is about weight, focus on what you’re eating. The exercise will come, often very naturally as the weight comes off. It is our nature to want to move and being fat makes it hard to do that.

[jjimm]

By the way, what induced my huge coworker to eat WAY more than was good for him? I have no idea. I think it’s a complex interplay between the market driving prices down, but driving taste (and therefore the nature of the food and its calorific value) and portion size up. The portion sizes increase and so do people’s expectations, and eventually the physical size of their stomachs increase to accommodate the volume of food.

As I’ve said before, the UK is hot on the US’s heels in obesity rates. What has changed in the UK in my lifetime is the amount people walk, and the nature of the food they eat. We’re addicted both to fast food and to processed pre-packaged ready-meals from supermarkets, but the effect is very similar.

[Mangetout]

@Stoid

YES! EXACTLY!!!

Not saying that even a little. I’m saying that dealing with obesity as an issue of “calories in, calories out” is doomed to failure. Spectacular failure: read the OP. But people continue to talk about it as though the issue is really just that simple.

But if obesity is nothing but too many calories in, too few out, the only way to explain the fact that we are “Fat America” would be to say that somehow, for some unknown reason (virus? wholesale genetic mutation? Aliens?) vast numbers of American human beings have become slothful, lazy gluttons that, unlike human baings everywhere else and throughout time in the past, desire and choose to eat huge quantities of food and make themselves fat as a result of that and just dont’ give a shit about the consequences. Out of nowhere. Suddenly, just in the past 30-40 years.

*Which makes absolutely no sense at all.
*

Well, actually, something has changed - the general availability of calories, and the cultural acceptance of consuming them at any and every opportunity. We’re fat largely(ha!) because we eat too much, too often. Not doing this didn’t seem to kill or traumatise our parents and grandparents with insatiable hunger pangs, so I think it’s possible that yes, we have in fact become gluttonous, lazy and feeble at resisting hunger..

[Chicagojeff]

@MeanOldLady

Why do people always say that? Junk food may be cheap for a quick snack, but buying real food at the grocery store for dinner isn’t cost prohibitive as opposed to fake food. You don’t have to go to your local organic market where you pay the 200% fancy food mark-up. Rice, vegetables, chicken leg quarters, pasta, all very cheap at your local chain grocer.

True Dat.. Example.. looking for lunch.. you can go to Fast food place.. get combo meal for 6-7 dollars.. or you can walk into Publix.. but sushi and drink you own water you brought with you for a dollar less..

Not as complicated as people make it out to be..

[Chicagojeff]

@Crafter_Man

If the salad was free, they would still choose the fried chicken and fries.

Thanks Crafter man.. you can order naked chicken at Popeyes.. and get green beans as a side and drink water.. still have your biscuit and come out WAYYY ahead of the game..

Gesus!! I sound almost Rand Rover like…

[raskolnik]

I lost weight drinking beer. Cause I drink less beer than I’d drink coke.

[Chicagojeff]

@LurkerInNJ

I don’t bash fatties, nor would I ever. When I was very young, a woman in my building was super-sized at a time when it was unheard of. She was very sweet to me. I learned to have a lot of compassion for her and her situation, and that carried over into my adult life. I don’t dislike fat people just because they are fat or think they are fair game for insult.

The thing that astonishes me is how size perception is changing. As people get bigger and bigger, their idea of what is overweight keeps going up and up. Women who are 5’ 4" and 170 lbs think they are either a normal weight or “curvy” rather than obese. People who could stand to lose 50 lbs truly believe that they are 10 lbs overweight. The denial is unbelievable. And everyone just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Americans have gone into the zone where being fat is so ok, it’s perfectly normal.

Yes!! Well this has taken on a new more intimate role in my life. Before i was an outside observer.. now since I took my 12 yr old daughter to get her physical and she’s 507 160lbs I’ve made a decision to get a little more hands on. Before i get hit up.. i know i know.. sensitivity.. but what i can and will do i bring her to the gym with me and her brother. Getting her an ipod for xmas and she’s started playing basketball this year. I’m particularly sensitive because I’m black.. and the number or obese young black women being told this “curvy” bullshit is astronomical.. It’s gotten to the point where a regular sized girl (also black)at her school was doing backflips doing halftime.. and I made a point to compliment her on her athleticism after the game was over..

[Crafter_Man]

@Stoid

dealing with obesity as an issue of “calories in, calories out” is doomed to failure.

But it is a calories in/out issue. From a physical perspective, at least.

If you can’t control what you eat, you have a mental problem, not a physical problem.