How do people get so fat?

I frankly think that if I had to eat a 1300 calorie diet for a year to lose the weight, and then a 1600 calorie diet for the rest of my life to maintain it, AND had an overwhelming compulsion to eat all day and night, I’d give in to it, too.

The fact is, some people have this compulsion from the day they’re born, and for them to understand “why” they overeat is like understanding “why” their hair is brown. Sure, they succumb when they let down their guard. Some people are able to overcome it. Some aren’t.

I never see formerly-obese people griping about fatties, because they know how much is involved in what they’ve accomplished. It’s only the people who are able to maintain their weight with some relatively small amount of deprivation and exercise who think everybody should be able to do what they’ve done. Believe me, it doesn’t come as easily to everyone. If everyone were able to overcome a compulsion the way you have, well, they probably would have by now.

All evidence points to carbs driving insulin and insulin-related growth hormone production which causes a craving for more carbs, but also causes the body to store fat and burn carbs, instead of burning the fat. It’s behind type 2 diabetes, heart disease, estrogen-dependent cancers such as breast and colon cancers, and It’s also now thought to be behind the huge increase in Alzheimer’s, which researchers have started calling type 3 diabetes. Until the 1970s and 1980s, everybody knew that to lose weight, you cut back on starches. Then came the low-fat, high carb craze, and America got obese. People are now convinced that meat needs to play a tiny role in the diet, whereas before, it was a main part of it. How many people eat eggs anymore? For awhile, we were told to limit it to 2 a week. Now they’re thinking they have no harmful effects whatsoever. How much pasta did people use to eat? Spaghetti once every few weeks. Now it’s pasta, pasta, pasta. The amount of sugars Americans eat has reached over 100 of pounds per person per year. Until we all get it back in our heads that it’s sugars and carbs, not protein and fat, that pack the weight on and keep the cravings high, things will stay on the same course.

Glory, you have a very interesting point. FWIW, my daughter has poor impulse control in virtually all areas, money being right up there with food. I guess for ZShopia’s co-worker, it’s similar to the way that alcoholics are always thinking about the next drink, even if they’ve quit drinking. I don’t constantly think about my budget, but I suppose someone who is a compulsive spender does if they want to overcome it. Or how an abstaining alcoholic attends AA meetings several times a week for the rest of their lives.

Oh. Rationalization. That’s not been a topic in this thread yet. Good thing you brought it up because we haven’t been talking about that at all.

NyQuil contains plenty of alcohol, rationalization or not and regardless of what he says, we know why the alcoholic will drink it. The ‘food addict’ title is just more rationalization. You and I both know that if locked in a room with nothing else, the alcoholic will drink a crate of mouthwash and pass out before the ‘food addict’ will touch raw and uncooked vegetables.

Here’s my post with the links.

Bottom line: all you people who are so sure that the solution to being obese is “just that simple” and fat people could, and should, “just” eat less and exercise more or shut up… are simply wrong.

Losing all excess weight and never regaining back is not impossible.

But it is a million miles away from being “just that simple”.

And the hostility, judgment, dismissiveness and disgust directed at fat people is completely out of line.

If I believed that doom and gloom, that permanent weight loss was overwhelmingly difficult, I’d still be fat.

Instead of focusing on all the diets I tried, I started looking at why I gained weight back. Two things always happened:

  1. I would restrict calories, eventually binge, feel like a loser, then quit and go back to eating normally.
  2. I would restrict calories, reach a goal weight, then quit and go back to eating normally.

That - right there - was my lightbulb moment. After that - it was simple, for me. Along the way, I discovered that I was a boredom eater that ate too much in the afternoons. So, I made plans to mitigate that. I also discovered that I have a hard time stopping once I start eating certain foods. So, I quit eating those foods (or cut back). I realized, I hated to be hungry - so started eating large quantities of low calorie foods, and up to 6 meals/snacks a day.

I was overweight and I used to think it was impossible for me to lose weight long term. I told myself a lot of lies. That it was genetic, that I had big bones, that I had a slow metabolism. None of that was true. It turned out to be pretty easy, once I committed to doing actually eating better foods and counting those calories.

It’s not really will power, once I stopped eating my trigger foods, the weird cravings and compulsions stopped too. I rarely feel like I’m deprived or I’m missing out - like I miss being fat? Not a bit.

GOOD GRIEF!
THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT!

Evidently for YOU “just stopping eating your trigger foods” was a pretty simple thing. How incredibly fortunate! You are blessed!

But… (really, I think my head is going to pop off my neck soon…) “just” stopping eating trigger foods, carbs, burgers, whatever it may be, is sometimes a little bit more of a challenge, HELLO!!

Holy crap. I can’t keep doing this…

Oh Stoid, you know as well as the rest of us that you can and will keep doing this.

Nobody’s ‘trigger food’ is cauliflower. If you have a ‘trigger food’ and know it so well that you’ve identified it as such, stop pulling the trigger. One of my previous roommates has an embarrassing story about me and the saltiness of Wheat Thins. I don’t eat them anymore, ever.

Nope. At this point, there’s only two possibilities: people don’t want to understand (because if they did they would have to stop feeling so judgmental, and that’s no fun), or some people really are not capable of comprehending what’s being said. The deliberates don’t deserve more attention, and in the case of the people who are completely missing it on a purely language basis, I’m all out of ways of getting through.

Either way, my time and energy can be much more productively and interestingly applied elsewhere.

Nobody can live long term on 500 calories a day and stay alive. That’s quite a bit lower than a diet needs to be.

This thread has become the usual train wreck of “Fat people are stupid” versus “Fat people can’t help it, it’s impossible to lose weight and keep it off.” Neither is true. Losing weight is extremely hard because it requires a tremendous effort to change one’s behaviour. In principle, however, it is true for 99.9% of all overweight people that simply making their eating habits more healthy and exercising more will correct the problem. The solution t is simple, straightforward, and to the nearest approximation it always works. Being able to implement that solution, however, is really damned hard. It’s no different from kicking cigarettes. The solution to improving your lungs is simple; don’t smoke any more cigarettes. But not smoking cigarettes is a tough thing to achieve. My wife started smoking 3-4 smokes a day earlier this year, and never got higher than 5 or 6 a day, but had a tough time kicking it - a habit she’d picked up in just a few months and had been at for less than half a year.

The barrier is not in simply deciding to eat less the way you’d decide to wear a different style of shirt. But it also is NOT the medically impossible barrier that lard-butt-apologists like to pretend is always their specific case. The barrier is in making the behavioural change, and I know damned well it’s a hard change to make. But once you can make that hange - and I really mean changing your behaviour, not embarking on some silly fad Oprah diet - it works.

I didn’t get the impression that Glory was saying that what she did was particularly easy. Simple isn’t the same thing as easy. Clearly she spent quite a bit of time working on this, planning it out, thinking about strategies that would aid her in long-term success, and then implementing those strategies.

I do not understand why some people – and Stoid seems to be one of them – have this deep-seated desire to tell people that have lost weight that what they have done is nearly superhuman and cannot be accomplished by 99% of people, and also to tell people that want to lose weight that they are simply not going to be successful, because everybody fails.

Yes, people who go around saying, “It’s easy, just stop cramming food in your face, you big fattie,” are dicks. So what? There are a lot of dicks in the world. Why does that make it OK to also be a dick to people who have lost weight and are trying to tell other people about how they did it in a reasonable and non-accusatory way?

Yeah, it’s challenging to lose weight but it’s not the superhuman, impossible task that several people in this thread are making it out to be. I could tell you all about how I’ve been doing it myself. I made very small changes and stuck with them until they became habitual. Then made a few more small changes and stuck with them until they became habitual. At some point I started adding exercise in. Once I was into a routine with that, I added a bit more exercise in. My weight loss has been incredibly slow, but continual, for the past seven months. No, it hasn’t been super-easy, but it hasn’t been some kind of ridiculously impossible superhuman challenge, either. I don’t spend all day feeling deprived. I don’t spend all day thinking about food. Spending all day thinking about food is what I used to do.

Anyway. Along the lines of my telling you not to care so much about people who are dicks and say “fat people should just EAT LESS, durrrrrrh haw haw haw,” I guess I should develop a thicker skin and not care so much about people who say that weight loss is doomed to failure and that nobody can do it. I am personally friends with at least 6 people who have lost more than 40 pounds and sustained the loss for 5 years or more. (And I don’t personally know anyone who has won a gold medal at the Olympics, for what that’s worth. :wink: )

ETA: RickJay simulposted with me and said it better than I did.

Probably because she has failed to lose weight, and hence she believes losing weight is next to impossible to achieve. If she decided to (permanently) eat less and (permanently) lose weight, I am confident her message would be different.

Fact is, it doesn’t matter why you’re fat. It simply doesn’t matter. Because regardless of the reason, there is one solution: eat less. I have never understood why people fret over the reasons when the solution remains the same. It borders on insanity.

It matters to me. I would not be successfully losing weight if I had not bothered to examine the reasons that I put it on in the first place.

Telling people “you don’t need to bother thinking about this in any depth, JUST EAT LESS” is no less destructive and unhelpful than someone saying, “don’t bother even trying, because you are going to fail.”

I guess I don’t share that same mindset. I only care about *fixing *the problem, not the root cause of it. Trying to find a root cause is often a lengthy, frustrating, complicated endeavor. I see absolutely no value in it. Because regardless of what you find, we already know what the solution is. So it’s a complete waste of time.

I’ll second this. I’ve successfully lost some 40 odd pounds, and kept it off for three years (I’m a 6’ guy, 42 years old, who was up to 240, dieted down to 190, and now fluctuates between 195-200); but it’s not easy.

What it involves I found is the following:

  1. Eat dinner at home mostly. Watch portions; eat large amounts of vegitables, and only lean meats.

  2. When at work, bring a lunch. My lunch is usually:

  • I large salad;
  • 2 slices of turkey breast;
  • 1 slice low-fat cheese
  • 2 melba toasts.
  1. Breakfasts are either a bowl of bran flakes with milk or an apple, a bowl of low fat yogurt and two melba toasts.

  2. For snacks, I have a bowl of mixed fruit in low fat yogurt.

Plus, I exercise for an hour twice a week.

Certainly I sometimes dine out at a restaurant or have pizza at home - the trick is to make this an occasional indulgence rather than a habit.

I still have a bit of excess I could lose, but overall I’m not concerned. It isn’t easy but it certainly is not impossible. Just a matter of setting up the routines and sticking to them.

One of the other things that inspired my change was the fact all 4 of my grandparents died too early (cancer, cancer, complications of alzheimers, complications of diabetes, respectively).

Part of my change isn’t just losing weight (although it’s a lovely lovely benefit), it’s being a healthier person. I can actually tell you my “click” moment (although a lot of factors led up to this, obviously). I was flipping through “diet cookbooks” at B&N (which I used to loooove to do) and picked up Super Foods Rx: 14 Foods That Will Change Your Life and all of a sudden I knew how to do it and I knew that I could do it (a lot of details got fleshed out over time, but the basic plan was born right then).

Instead of focusing on what not to eat, I focused on what to eat. The author says that there are a lot of foods that are good for you, but some foods are super good. So, I decided to eat as many “super foods” as possible per day. I really didn’t even start counting calories until many months later (my plan evolved and changed to fit me).

I wasn’t really thinking “don’t eat a muffin” I was thinking “eat more super foods!” and trying to work them all in every day didn’t leave room for a lot of junk. As the weight started dropping and I felt better - I managed to connect the dots - I wasn’t eating junk, I felt amazing, I was losing weight and my energy levels were great.

It was only looking back that I determined I have a weird weakness for sugary, white carby foods (oh and as someone mentioned earlier - Wheat Thins!). I kept thinking - why is this time so different! It’s so easy (in comparison to previous diets). No cravings, no hunger, no binging. I didn’t try to give up sugar/white carbs, it was a by product of what I was doing, but it is honestly like I opened my jail cell.

So, to be fair, I didn’t start by setting out to eliminate my trigger foods, I didn’t even know I had trigger foods. I started by saying I was going to make some permanent changes to be a healthy person and made some happy discoveries on the way.

Just in case anyone is interested, the super foods are:
Tomatoes (including watermelon), pumpkin (including carrots, orange peppers), turkey, salmon, yogurt, walnuts (including all nuts), broccoli (and other cruciferous vegetables), oranges (all citrus), tofu, beans, oats (including all whole grains), blueberries (including all berries) and spinach (including all dark leafy greens), tea.

I started in July 2004, I still eat 8+ super foods a day - always at least berries and dark leafy vegetables. I started when I was 35, I don’t know if I would have been ready to try this any earlier. Knowing to eat healthy is simple, planning to have healthy foods around is difficult. It is very difficult to eat healthy by accident in the US. I had to give up a lot of convenience, I have to sometimes be difficult in social situations, restaurants can be problemmatic with their ridiculous portions and astronomical calorie bomb foods. I do have to say no sometimes to foods I would like to eat. So, yeah it’s hard and sometimes tedious. But not impossible - it’s mostly just habit. I grocery shop, I pack lunches, it’s just how I live. And of course, there are some incredible rewards.

Jesus, Stoid, calm down.

As far as I know of, the only condition where it IS impossible to lose weight is Praeder Willi Syndrome. And that is EXTREMELY rare.)

We understand exactly what you are trying to say. Nobody’s buying it. :rolleyes:

You’re making the classic excuse that fatties make when they realize that losing weight is difficult. They whine “its too haaaarrd”, then start with the excuses, the thyroid thing, the “fat gene”, the “starvation mode myth”, etc etc etc. As has been explained to you numerous times in this thread, losing weight is not easy but is IS simple: east fewer calories than you burn.

What? :confused:

But people don’t work that way: it’s like if an alcoholic tries to just “quit drinking” but still goes to the bar everyday to hang out, and everyday ends up drinking. Faced with the exact same temptation, he’s going to break the exact same way. He needs to do at least enough self-reflection to realize “I need to quit going to the bar”.

If you are eating 10% more than you need to, cutting back 10% of your food is not a big deal and is fairly simple. If you are cutting out half your calories, though, it involves seriously changing your life–all your routines are changing, from where and how and what you shop for to how and when and where you cook to how you relate to your friends and family. That takes thinking, and reflection, and planning, and it’s not simple.

So, what, hugely obese people are incapable of thinking, and reflecting, and planning? How do they hold jobs? :confused: