Precisely.
I don’t see why the mantra “eat less and exercise” is that objectionable. For losing weight, you must lower your calory intake and / or increase the rate of burning calories. The former can mean “eat less” or “modify your diet in some way” and the second can mean “do some kind of exercise”. Granted that some people are so overweight that running or even walking are dangerous, but then there are other methods such as for example swimming.
There are those who have an additional mental illness that causes the weight gain: mentioned in this thread I see anorexia, bulimia, compulsive overeating. A psychiatrist or psychologist may be needed to help them overcome this, but the way to lose weight will still be the same - improve the person’s dietary habits and possibly get the person to do more physical activity.
There can be cases like the poster in this thread who still gained weight after being put on diet of no food and no water for a month, but those are surely exceptional.
“Eat less and exercise” is simplistic and inaccurate like any one-sentence slogan, but the fundamental reasoning behind it is sound.
A bad analogy: if someone is addicted to a substance (alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, whatever) the solution is “stop using that substance”. Of course the answer is much more complicated - some will need a support group, or medication to help them stop. But the extra help is geared toward achieving the “simple” solution - stop using it.
Darn, I missed this one. Actually Coldie, I think you have some good points.
Reading this post of yours, I am realizing that my points aren’t really in disagreement with yours, but more a clarification (not quite the right word I want, as you are being clear, but for now, it will have to do 
)
I don’t think that Americans as a whole are trying to blame their weight on things other than diet. The thing that I’ve been trying to get across (maybe I’M the one who has been unclear, lol), is that yes, it’s diet, but it’s diet brought on by many other factors.
It’s not just a case of “gee, it’s so fun to eat like a pig and take no responsibility”. The other factors; lifestyle, lack of education, emotional issues, etc, are valid issues, and do tie into how our bad diets, as Americans affect us.
Were it just the food, IMHO, it wouldn’t be such a huge national problem.
Hope I made better sense that time?
Actually, that’s a lot worse.
You have painted Americans in general as being weak-willed neurotics who are at the mercy of their own “inner demons.” Where those inner demons came from, I have no idea, but I’m sure someone will tell me that any number of things could cause deblilitating emotional disfunction.
I’m starting to come around to Collunsbury’s way of thinking. Maybe I should just embrace the excuse-making culture.
From now on, nothing is my fault.
That isn’t what I said at all. Nor is it what I’ve BEEN saying. In the several posts I have written to this thread I have made it very very clear that my objection to the simple minded diet ninny mantra of “eat less, exercise more” does NOT equal carte blanche for people to make excuses and not do anything about their weight.
To see what I mean, you would need to read my previous posts.
I’ve never said that people should just give up because the simplistic approach doesn’t work. In fact, I’ve said many times in this thread that in order to get past their failures, people need the appropriate education as to what “ELEM” means and how and if it will work for them.
And I certainly didn’t mean to give the impression that I think Americans are a bunch of weak-willed people. Factors OTHER than too much food availability (and too poor quality of food) ARE valid points and causes of overeating.
And to whomever said something to the effect of “oh thank goodness exgineer, I was wondering how people could create mass”…
Again, if you will read my previous posts (and others) you will see that we all agree upon how people GET fat. The point we’ve been trying to make is that to get UNFAT, for many people, isn’t just “that simple” as some of those in this thread keep trying to say it is.
Having issues that can lead to overeating (or undereating for that matter), or drug addiction, or alcoholism is a valid cause. Saying that is NOT the same thing as saying "and because they have issues that caused or contributed to the initial behaviour, well, there’s nothing we can do for them, might as well let them gorge or tok all they want.
Accepting that for many people, personal issues have contributed to their behaviour does not equal “it’s not my fault”.
What it does mean is that, for many people, (and I’ve never said this was for all overweight people), to cure the problem, you have to address those issues in concert with the physical aspects of weight loss for that person in order for them to be successful
And again, I’ve said this, and so have several others in this thread.
No one is saying needing assistance with weight loss = not my fault, might as well just stay fat.
PS, Needing to address certain issues or emotional difficulties doesn’t equal “debiliatating emotional disfunction” Geez, talk about overacting.
Addressing and supporting someone’s emotional needs while they lose weight can mean something like WW, which though I seriously dislike their diet ideas, I think that their personal support through meetings etc, is a PRIMO “training wheels” starter for overweight people.
THAT is the sort of thing (though not limited to just that), that I mean when I say many people need to have emotional support and education.
Again, there are 6 billion people in the world, there’s no “one size fits all” fat loss program. Different things will work for different people.
Supporting the overweight person emotionally while they journey toward wellness and fitness is valid, useful, and in many cases, absolutely necessary for those people to be successful at all.
Whew! Finally made it through all the posts so my fat ass could throw in my two cents. Actually, since I’m bigger, could I have seven cents? 
As a big woman, (and I mean big as in on the plus side of 220 pounds), it’s nobody’s goddamn business what I eat, where I eat it and when. Until. Until my choices infringe on someone else. In response to the OP of the thread that spawned this discussion (MOL, I believe?), the large woman who sat next to her was a rude bitch, fat or not. I don’t know MOL personally, but I’m pretty sure that if RLL (Rude Large Lady) had simply brushed her a few times and apologized for the infringement, she would have been much more understanding about the issue. Hey, I don’t particularly care for squalling brats on a plane or train next to me. As a matter of fact, I really do not care for children. However, if your (collective your) child cries and you’re obviously doing your best to handle the situation, and you throw me an aplogetic glance and a mouthed “I’m sorry”, hey, I’m going to be a hell of a lot nicer about it. I’ll probably even offer to let the twatgoblin use my enormous boobs for a pillow while you have some juice or a quick catnap. I’m nice that way. OTOH, if you let your kid scream nonstop on a seven-hour flight, and give me dirty looks when I sigh in irritation, well, fuck you and your precious darling, get the fuck off the flight.
Same goes with RLL. If she tossed up the armrest casually and decided she would take whatever amount of room that would make her comfortable, she’s a bitch of massive proportions. And no pun intended.
Now, about the diet/exercise thing…I fully admit and acknowledge that there are people with health problems who cannot lose weight except by extreme measures. A small minority, yes, but they are certainly out there. The majority of us? Not so much. I’m overweight because I enjoy good food, don’t care for physical exercise (sex not included), and I find being a large, voluptuous woman fun and attractive. It’s a blatant choice that I make. Now let’s say, hypothetically, I decided I wanted to be slim. :dubious: What would that take? A large cut on my caloric intake, and a big ass effort to increase my physical activity. It would definately be harder, than say, a 120 pound woman who wants to shed five pounds. Absolutely, because it would require a complete change of lifestyle and attitude.
Don’t get me wrong; I am far, far from lazy. My days are so packed with activities that I rarely find time to sit down and take a breath. I don’t see it happening, but on the slim chance ( ) that I decided to lose weight, I can’t not see exercise and healthier eating habits leading me to that goal, at least partially.
There’s my two cents, the other five cents is free. 
Hey, Alice??
Thanks for the welcome, and i’m reading as fast as I can.
Y’all are prolific, and I had chemo Monday, so i’ve been spending some quality time with my bathroom since the aftereffects kicked in.
I quit flying commercial flights when my only need for travel became covered by Angel Flight, but on my last commercial flight, the seatmate from Hell, in first class nonetheless, whacked me on the head with his laptop every time he got it out. (Three times on a Houston/NYC flight.) The attendant finally took it away from him when it drew blood.
Whadda ya expect. He worked for Enron.
:eek:
I would really love to see some accurate figures as to how many of the obese in the USA are that way because of medical problems, versus how many are that way through plain old sloth, gluttony, and apathy.
I would also like to know what the societal costs of obesity are.
To a certain extent, society may be bearing the costs in the form of super-sized growth on medical spending. When (okay if) universal health care is instituted, these issues may push this issue to the fore in ways that medicare/medicaid have not.
Ambrose - let me tell you a little story.
I’m in Canada and just filed my income taxes - I owe $1,700.00 - it’s a drag.
While writing out the cheque I find that I become substantially less altruistic then before pen goes to cheque.
I start grumbling in my head about physically/mentally able people that don’t work, and welfare mothers that abuse the system, and those that generally sponge off of me, the hard working tax-payer.
I can tell you, through-out all the muttering and grumbling and cheque writing, it never once occured to me to be annoyed with people who are large in size. My taxes pay for medicare and the notion that some person has an eating disorder doesn’t cause me angst about my taxes one bit.
What the fuck difference does it make?
fessie - I wouldn’t worry to much about Arcana - I’ve seen him/her floating around in a few other threads, and just about nothing that s/he has posted has been of any particular merit, whatsoever, and most of it has been rude, ignorant and/or stupid.
You should probably just ignore him/her - I know I am. And no that is not a reference to the mythical “Ignore” list - it’s a reference to ignoring something the way you ignore a fly buzzing around.
Thx for the clarification, aiw - I keep bopping in and out of this thread & can’t get a feel for the gist of it (I must be seeing red too easily on this issue). The various tangents have been fascinating, but then I see those asshole statements & just go off.
I think the people who were talking about cutting soda pop are on to something - it’s more than just the calories, it’s the insulin surges, the hormonal imbalances. And those low fat diets, heavy on carbs, can make a person just crave more sugar (or fat, to offset it) & also cause huge mood swings. For my Mom the Atkins diet (modified to include some low glycemic carbs) has been a wonder - and her moodiness/depression has really improved dramatically. Did you know that too much copper makes your manganese go down, causing sugar cravings? I really think people wouldn’t need so much “willpower” if they could address nutritional/hormonal imbalances via food choices. Time will tell - I’ve just started working on these issues myself.
Just FYI - I’ve worked for various purveyors of soda & junk food, and those executives wouldn’t eat it themselves if their lives depended on it. At one place the executive snack room had free junk food but also free fruits - and a doctor’s scale, with a height/weight chart on the wall above it! Interesting what people will sell, compared to what they’ll consume themselves.
ARgggh. (lol).
Okay QGG? I’m not a large woman, I AM one of those who only has a few pounds to lose (about 15) and on top of that, I have a small bone structure, so the fat that is there has no place to hide.
And I AM one of those who has to do a LOT more than just “eat less, exercise more”. For me, it takes a lot of eating small evenly spaced meals throughout the day, and a heavy duty weightlifting regime, as well as high intensity cardio. So, the “oh, I just skip a few meals, and stop drinking so many beers and work out 3x a week at 20 minutes” does NOT work for me.
If it really WERE “that simple” as some have said here, we would NOT have the obesity problems we have. Even QGG herself said if she made a “large cut on her caloric intake and a big ass effort”. That’s not equivelant to “dropping a few meals and doing 20minsx3a week”.
When I have said in this thread that it takes more than just that mindless mantra for a lot of overweight people to be successful, I am NOT saying that the flip side of that is either that they “get” to skate free with that excuse, OR that they have to take “drastic” measures to get slim.
Again, I’ve described what I’ve meant many times already in this thread.
I was thinking about this last night. One of the problems here is that too many people (I don’t know if this is all “Americans” or not, I only teach here, so don’t know what the issues that overweight people from other countries face), place WAY too much emphasis on what the scale says, than on what the measuring tape.
A pound of fat is about the size of a football, a pound of muscle is around the size of a baseball. Muscles are tight, sleek and hard, fat is gooshy and jiggly.
A woman who weighs 120 and is 5’6" tall, can be fat. A woman of the same height who weighs 20 more pounds than that can have a very low bodyfat percentage and be a much smaller jean size than the “lighter” woman.
The problem (again, sigh) is that too many people think that “eating right” is synomous with “oh, I have to starve in order to lose weight”. So without education on how to properly and safely adjust their caloric intake (and YES, of COURSE you have to adjust it downward, I’ve never said otherwise), and therefore those people drastically and ineffectively drop their daily intake to way too far below they’re BMR.
In doing so, their body’s then use muscle and use up very little of the fat. So, for a short time, those people are “successful”. And they do lose weight. Scale weight that is. But what they are really doing is setting up their bodies to be less efficient burners.
Eventually the severe caloric restriction is too much for people and they return to a “normal” way of eating. The problem is that because of loss of muscle (which is where fat is burned), those people quickly regain the weight, and THEN some, on fewer calories than they were able to eat before they dieted.
What I’ve been saying is that IF and UNTIL those people learn the appropriate way to lose FAT, keep the muscle and the most effective intake and exercise techniques, they ARE doomed to be fat, OR to stay on some miserable severe calorie restrictive diet.
Another problem is the American lifestyle, like QGG said, lots of people are “on the go” all the time, and certainly not lazy. They work 8-10 hours per day, ferry kids about to soccer etc, do housework and yardwork and so on.
All that activity leaves little time to exercise (unless people know how to use the most effective and time friendly types of exercise), so a lot of people get stuck in this vicious cycle.
Do all the “anti-fat” people here rrrrrEALLLy think that most fat people in our country are that way because they are willfully and purposefully lazy, no-good gluttons? I don’t. I think there are just a lot of people who haven’t found the way to success yet.
Again, I am NOT saying that the fact that losing weight takes more than just the diet ninny mantra to work is to be taken as carte blanche for fat people to just say “oh, I can’t help it”.
I spoke to a doctor today (trying to handle chemo reactions that I have not had before in 7 months of this chemo) and mentioned the illness/no weight loss thing.
He reminded me that leptin levels MUST be considered in any attempt at weight loss. My leptin levels are evidently of the “You will lose weight if we cut the flesh off with a knife” level.
With leptin research and setpoint research, there are LOTS more problems than input/output engineering-type number crunching can deal with. No magic numbers, no balance of intake and exertion can account for differing body function.
I quoted the thing about a body creating mass…from much earlier in the thread. I was reminded that when a rogue cell (cancer growth cell) goes into overdrive, a human CAN grow big tumors faster than imagineable.
Life…it’s scarier than you thought.
Good on yah! Doesn’t bother me either; hope no one thinks I’m grumbling. I was merely soliciting a cite for what the societal costs of obesity are. If we can put a number on that, then the case can more easily and persuasively be make for funding weight-loss drugs and programs.
Recently, the IRS ruled that “stop smoking” expenses were eligible expenses to be paid for from a healthcare reimbursement account. Seems to me, that a cost benefit analysis of this problem has already been done, but the proper incentives are not in place.
I know some are “Fat and Proud” and that is great; but, I’m willing to venture that the fast majority of the morbidly obese are not happy with their condition. We as a society can do more than just pay for the blood pressure medicine–but that is the argument of many in the public health field–more preventative medicine.
Also, my point is tangently also that, the costs of ill health are borne, partially and often times in a de minimus manner, by all of us.
Hear HEAR Ambrose!
Traveling from Bangkok to San Francisco to Sydney and back to Bangkok, I learned a few lessons about the rights of fat Americans.
When traveling to or from the US, there are virtually no restrictions on baggage. You can have two pieces of the heaviest, biggest, baddest luggage known to man. This worked just fine for two of the three legs of my journey. However, when I had to go from Sydney to Bangkok, I was neither traveling to or from the US.
I made it to the Airport in Sydney with over two hours to spare. I had two huge suitcases from my earlier travels. I was now going back home to Bangkok. When I tried to check in my luggage, I was told that I would have to pay $200 for the excess baggage. I was shocked! That was too much money for me.
I looked around for support from my fellow passengers, but all I saw were disapproving stares from the enormous people in lines behind me and beside me. At that point I pointed out the obvious. I said "If your concern is simply the cost of fuel to move all of this extra weight, then you have nothing to worry about. I weigh 128 pounds, at least 100 pounds less than most of the other people in this line. (Even more disapproving stares.)
The airline rejected these arguments with no reason. I would not give up. They said that I would have to pay the excess (now reduced to $140) or leave one bag behind. Neither option was even possible, so with nothing to lose, I threatened the ultimate:
“If you don’t stop this nonsense, I’m going to open one of my bags and put on every piece of clothes in the bag.”
“Excuse me, sir. You’re blocking the line.”
“You’re damn right I’m blocking the line. This is my right!”
To the cries of “I’ll take you over here in this lane, Ma’am”, I proceeded to make good on my promise. I opened my bag and took out all of the clothes. I started first on pants. I put on jeans over shorts, shorts over jeans, pajama pants over all. I put on shirts over t-shirts, sweaters over sweaters. Finally, like a giant blimp, I started to put underwear on my arms and over my head.
Finally, they were starting to take me seriously: “Sir, excuse me, you can’t do that, Sir.”
“I’ve already done it, haven’t I? You’re a little late.” I then opened the second, bigger bag.
“That won’t be necessary, Sir,” the Ground Hostess said. “This women here has only a backpack, a piece of hand luggage. We can check one of your bags through on her ticket to avoid the excess weight.”
But I objected. “I’m not giving her one of my bags!” I’ll go as I am, though I don’t know how you’re going to fit me into one of those tiny seats…"
“We’ll take care of the bag, Sir. Please take all that silly stuff off!”
“Are you calling my clothes silly?” I asked.
They never spoke to me again. My bags were rushed through. I got a great seat on the plane. When I got back to Bangkok, my clothes were a mess and needed to be ironed again.
If weight costs so much money, why don’t Americans have weight restrictions or penalties?