LOL! 
Sounds like good advice.
I think it is extremely helpful, as it’s the solution to the problem.
I apparently know the solution to obesity; you don’t. :dubious:
I am going to give this one last shot.
The large majority of people are overwieght because they DO eat too much. Yeah, yeah, yeah, its not that simple. They eat because they are depressed, or they go to buffets for every meal, or if junk food is around the house they will consume it all in one sitting.
I think most folks get that.
If you don’t do SOMETHING to fix the problem, nutins going get fixed. Talking about the reasons for the problem isnt fixing anything.
At some point you have to take action. Take care of the depression. Don’t go to buffets. Don’t keep junk food in the house. Whatever…
If you just find more reasons why you cant fix the original reasons that cause the overeating…well, good luck, because then its just chocolate covered turtles all the way down.
If this woman gained fat while eating fewer calories than she burned, then she has discovered the secret of the perpetual motion machine. She should be talking to a patent attorney, not a doctor.
The laws of physics, however, don’t.
This is always true, without any exceptions. If you eat fewer calories than you burn off, you will lose weight. Always, for everyone, every time.
Not quite. Every single, solitary person who is obese got that way because he or she took in more calories than he or she burned off. Every single, solitary one. Every single, solitary person who is obese would lose weight if he or she took in fewer calories than he or she burned off. Every single, solitary one.
Brilliant.
Regards,
Shodan
I think you’ve parsed your words carefully here, and thus made a true statement that is nonetheless incomplete in a very meaningful way.
You’re completely missing the cases of edema.
A friend of mine, a petite woman before she got sick, ended up weighing over 200 pounds. Her problems started with melanoma, and the melanoma metastasized to her lungs. Three tumors there were surgically removed, but the steroids they gave her to control inflammation caused a terrible edema problem. Edema is not fat: it’s retention of water and other fluids in cells, causing the body to swell up dramatically. Perhaps a trained physician’s eye could discern the difference between fat and edema, but to most people, she simply looked obese. She was, if “obese” simply refers to how much you weigh. But she was not fat, and didn’t reach that state by overeating, or eating more calories than she was burning.
In the context of this thread, no, it isn’t meaningful. In fact, it’s pretty close to a hijack.
Nobody refers to people with edema as “obese”. That’s ridiculous, and frankly, it’s beneath you.
Regards,
Shodan
I thought you were leaving, like, 6 pages ago. Glad to see you stuck around. Okay, lady, let me see if I’m following. Earlier you said this:
Sounds like some pretty fucked up binging to me. Then you claimed that you don’t overeat, but are obese, and in post 247, there was a lot of rambling about how you don’t eat a lot, except for all that overeating you do. So you do have poor eating habits and are obese, except you don’t and you are. I think I’m on board now.
I don’t know how often it happens or how many people do it, but I assure it the answer is not “nobody,” because I was with the aforementioned friend when we parked in a handicapped spot (she had difficulty walking as her illness progressed) and as we exited the car, a woman walking by said to her, “You know you’re not handicapped - you’re just fat.”
It’s unclear to me why someone seeing her in other circumstances woul not have drawn similar conclusions about her.
Wht’s the reason in your mind that someone suffering from edema would be obviously distinguished from someone who is obese?
A huge part of someone’s weight is how many calories their body uses at rest. Those people who say they can eat anything and remain slim have bodies which burn a lot of calories at rest. Those people who say they only eat a piece of toast and still gain weight burn fewer calories at rest.
Think of your resting rate like a blowtorch. Your body can have it going full blast (using a lot of calories) or just at a trickle (using a few calories). That can make a huge difference in your weight. A difference of 100 calories a day (a small apple) is 10 pounds per year. So if your body has the torch on high, you lose that 10 pounds per year. But if it’s on low, then you gain 10 pounds per year.
However, your resting rate is not constant. Your body can change it. If you starve yourself, you body wll lower it. If you become more active, your body will raise it.
In any case, if you’re gaining weight it’s an indication that you need to modify something about your lifestyle. You need to eat less food and become more active. If you’re still gaining weight then you need to eat even less food and become even more active.
I can understand how people can be obsessive about eating and it gets out of control. However, I would think at some level they have some control about what they eat. If they can’t control themselves, then they should not put themselves in situations where they overeat bad foods. Don’t have sweet/fatty foods in the house. Don’t go to restaurants where it’s easy to make bad choices.
There’s not a 100% direct eating to getting morbidly obese causation. In general weight is correlated with diet and exercise but the input to output ratio varies greatly for different people and there are a lot of other contributing factors including age, genetics, upbringing, psychology, and disease.
Then there’s the instant gratification factor. This food is going to make me very happy, right now. Diet and exercise might lead to a less intense increase of happiness far in the future…
No, I didn’t talk about all the overeating I do. I talked about all the overeating I don’t, by talking about the times when I DO eat crappy things - 3 wings? 420 calories. One burger? Most of the ones I prefer run about 500-600 calories, especially since I scrape off most of the dressing and usually half the bun. And that’s when I’m being “bad” by eating crap. And on days like that my other meals are what they usually are: a bowl of soup, some rice and vegetables, some cereal. Whereas when most people hit the fast food joints they get the burger, and the fries, and the drink.
I know exactly what overeating, binging look and feel like, and at no time in my entire life have I denied it. I can over indulge now, but not eating all day and eating at night doesn’t mean I’m “binging” - it means I’m doing a bad job of spacing out my meals. Preparing something I like that’s rich and then eating that instead of anything else for a couple of days is not “binging” (nor is it, as someone else said: eating it without stopping until it’s all gone).
If I were overeating, I’d probably be gaining weight. Since I’m about 50 pounds lighter than I was for about ten years, and I’ve stayed within ten pounds of that lesser weight for several years now, I’m not overeating. Neither am I “under”-eating, which would result in losing weight. I’m eating what it takes to keep me going, and as the SCIENCE will tell you, you don’t have to be a binging overeater to maintain a weight that is considerably higher than the norm or average - I know because when I was an out of control binger, I weighed much less than I do now - but I was younger, (but far less active, interestingly!) and hadn’t completely screwed up my body through going up and down enough.
I know what I’m doing, and I know what I’m saying - and every person that’s tried to tell me what I’m doing or who I am or what it means has had to twist and distort my words. We’re on a message board, if I wanted to tell you I live on tofu and lettuce I could and you’d never know the difference. But I don’t because that’s not who I am. Instead, I tell you the truth: I absolutely do not live on tofu and lettuce, and I’m sure if I did I would probably weight a lot less. But, having been gripped by severe compulsive overeating from age 6 to about age 40, I also know how disconnected the amount you actually eat and the degree of overweight you are become, and that’s my fundamental point: no one can possibly know how much anyone eats, how their body processes calories, how hard they work at it, what factors play into it. You see someone you don’t know, you see they are overweight or even hugely obese. All you know for certain is that they are fat, and beyond that you have no clue.
My 2 cents…When I was in elementary school I was a somewhat chubby boy. Nothing grossly obese, but definitely a little porker (this isn’t to say that I wasn’t an active child; I was involved in lots of sports and spent plenty of time outside). A routine physical and blood test revealed that my blood sugar levels were a bit high. Since diabetes is prevalent in my family it was a concern. My stepmother, being a strict woman, decided to put me on a crash diet of virtually no sugar. This diet wasn’t executed perfectly, as there were a couple of instances where I woke up with low blood sugar and felt very weak and naseous, but as I came to my teens I ended up “growing into” my body and any weight issues I had disappeared. Since then I’ve been very healthy and active and I’m definitely the most physically fit person in my family.
My point is that without having that dietary discipline established by my stepmother, my youth eating habits probably wouldn’t have changed. I would have probably continued to snack on sugary junk food outside of meals and kept getting heavier. Given my age, I doubt it was a change I could have made on my own; I needed a parent to step up and be the bad guy (if it had been up to my dad, he would have just let me eat whatever I wanted to; he was easy going like that). So if you develop bad habits when you’re young, and those habits are reinforced by those around you during your formative years, they can become very much ingrained and difficult to change.
You’re right, Stoid, you don’t binge. You just starve all day, then eat a lot at night, finding it difficult to stop.
That was my point about 3 pages ago, but according to our resident fat apologist, a bunch of “science” has to be studied in order prevent the poor helpless fatties from buying and eating whole boxes of Little Debbies. 
Little Debbies? Ugh. Everyone KNOWS that Dolly Madison is where it’s at!
Here is the fundamental flaw in the thinking that is being put forth, both by persons who are sympathetically trying to be helpful and the persons who are enjoying being judgmental and superior: the issue is wider and deeper than simply “don’t buy cheesecake” “don’t be in situations where you will lose control” “don’t keep crap in the house” - these suggestions all assume that if you just avoid being near something tempting, you won’t eat it, and won’t that fix it?
First of all, I want to define the terms and differences - this is about a category of people who are actually being compulsive about food. That does not mean that all compulsives are fat, or that all fat people are compulsive.
If you have a problem with compulsive overeating, it’s not a problem of being near the food, it’s a problem with your head and food. The compulsive starts before then, it starts when you get in the car to go get it, so saying “don’t get in the car” is completely unhelpful - the getting in the car is the same fundamental psychological process as putting the food in your mouth. It’s like telling an alcoholic not to buy the alcohol, or the smoker not to buy cigarettes, or a junkie the junk. It’s not as though proximity is the cause of the compulsion and curing proximity cures the problem.
Because that is true, anything that somehow features some OTHER way of imposing control on oneself is useless. If a person can control the getting in the car to go buy they cheesecake…they can control eating the cheesecake.
Secondly, if such suggestions were in fact viable solutions in theory, they would still be of extremely limited use in practice, since the majority of people who have faced significant weight issues as a result of significant eating issues in their lives will never be “cured”, so to speak, they can only 'manage" their weight, and if managing their weight means constant vigilance to avoid being near the “wrong” food, that’s simply not practical in the real world. The change has to be in the mechanism that sends you to the car.
Even if the relationship with food is improved, anyone who has had a significant and lengthy weight problem will almost invariably have issues staying slim throughout their lives, because being fat, in and of itself, changes the way your body works, and staying slim for some people may take truly Herculean feats of constant, aggressive self-denial that would be hard for anyone to maintain. Not denial of excessive overeating…denial of what is for most people a perfectly reasonable ration of food. READ THE DAMN LINKS.
Obesity is hideously complex psychologically, emotionally, chemically, biologically and socially and that’s why it’s so incredibly difficult to change. Not impossible. Incredibly difficult. Considering the numbers of fat to obese people in this country, and the scorn heaped upon them, anyone who thinks that fixing it is “simple” is full of shit. “Eating less” especially eating sufficiently less to both lose all excess weight and to keep all excess weight off forever. It might be a simple goal, but the road to achieving it is anything but.
And lastly, “self-control” is not a simple thing. Perhaps it is for you. Perhaps you are a person who is very good at controlling your actions, at simply deciding, then doing. If you are, consider yourself blessed. Because self-control, for many people, is not so easy. In fact, it can border on impossible. Self-control is not, at least not exclusively, a matter of pure rational decision-making - it is something which is to some degree a matter of individual brain chemistry.
The most extreme example is Tourette’s. If you know anything about it, you know that it’s not really a matter of sufferers twitching and saying things in the same way one sneezes. People with Tourette’s can actually control their twitching and outbursts… a little. But what it really is is an overwhelming compulsion that they have to give in to. The pressure to scream or tweet or spasm or say “fuckyoucocksuker” builds and builds to an intolerant level and then they just have to let go. And often if they are in a situation where they have to control themselves a lot, when they are free of the situation they will basically “binge” on their spasms, just to feel better from all that control.
What Tourette’s tells us is that self-control is something which is different in all of us. Each person’s ability to control themselves is different, and the super-self-controlled are not “better” than the super-uncontrolled, anymore than the super-brilliant are “better” than the not-that-bright: they were each born with a different capacity.
I’m not suggesting that everyone should just give up and give in, any more than I’m suggesting that people who don’t have a lot of brainpower should give up on learning. I’m saying it is a mistake to believe that behavior is entirely a product of thought and decision, and that people who behave in undesirable ways are doing so because they simply made a choice and they could just as easily choose differently, or at least “try harder”: unless you have really had the experience of feeling like you are outside your body screaming at yourself to stop doing what you’re doing, and had that experience day after day, year after year, you cannot possibly know or judge the degree of “try” in anyone else’s actions.
Add to that fundamental difference in each person’s capacity for self-control the many other factors in play when it comes to eating and weight, not least being the fact that food is absolutely required for life and is also, for almost everyone, a primary pleasure in life, and then add the problems and pain that come with obesity, and it’s absolutely astonishing to me that anyone can possibly feel disgust or hostility towards people struggling with obesity. It’s astonishing to me that the disgust and hostility seems to expand with the size of the person in question, when it seems patently obvious that the bigger someone is, the more likely it is that they have severe issues on all fronts and the more likely it is they suffer terribly, not least with self-loathing that expands with their waistline …to heap scorn and judgment on top of it strikes me as nothing less than sick, cruel and vicious. Because even if you just can’t help the fact that you feel that way (and I don’t buy that; you can’t really help it if you have a negative reaction to a person’s appearance, but everything beyond that you can change: it’s simple) you can certainly refrain from expressing it publicly.
Here you go again, claiming that somehow the laws of thermodynamics don’t apply to fat people.
If a person is “denying” themselves “perfectly reasonable rations of food” then they will LOSE WEIGHT. If fat people ate the same amount of food as slim people, they WOULDN’T BE FAT.
To say that the thinner the person, the less the total number of calories they consume, and vice versa, is obviously untrue. Look at any skinny teenage boy for proof. Or me, underweight and unable to gain significantly on double my usual daily calories.
Each one of us has a different metabolism. Therefore, plenty of skinny people can eat many thousands of calories, and remain skinny. Some fat people can eat a low-calorie diet, and remain fat, or even gain weight.
Like I said, everyone who wants to score points off me has to change what I actually said.
In this particular case, in order to sell your point, you had to add in “eat a lot at night”, which I didn’t say, and imply, by trying to prove that this is an admission of binging, that “incredibly difficult to stop” = “don’t stop”. And this was in a post in which I described a lot of other ways that I am changing how and what I eat, for the better. So I have to call your arguing style fundamentally dishonest.
Which wouldn’t be so unusual or bothersome except that it’s about me personally. It’s so fundamentally icky to take my willingness to be frank, especially about such sensitive issues, and try to use it to shame me so you can score a point, seriously. (then again, perhaps that explains the handle. )
There you go again, refusing to educate yourself.
Let me know when you decide to take in some information, it’s readily available via the links in this thread and more.
Uh, duh, teenagers are still growing.