regarding teenager weight gain… as it is with a lot of other things, it’s about the net, not the gross.
a lot of mean things have been insinuated in this thread. a lot of lashing back ensued. it snowballed to a 7 page thread where neither side has learned nor conceded a single thing.
you can’t be so callous as to break it down to black/white, food intake/output. there are mitigating psychological (and sometimes medical) factors.
however the contrary can’t be in such denial that “i do eat reasonably. i just can’t lose the weight”.
some people are going to be fat. undeniable. it’s part of the spectrum of humanity. but harkening back to the OP, is how do people get to “rascal fat”? Obviously bigger portions, more fast food, more sedentary lifestyle would affect it, but I would expect this to skew the distribution towards the obese. Instead it is shifting the entire distribution. Especially past the point of being able to walk? how is the psychological barrier of being too fat to walk being broken so easily in today’s society? a rash of edema isn’t crippling the american public.
an argument that isn’t personally insulting would be the car culture? or maybe the perceived increased value of time? walking just isn’t tolerated in much of america - even in urban areas? if you don’t walk a lot, being able to seems less important. the decrease of this value hits a tipping point where gratification of eating outweighs being able to walk, because screw it - i telecommute anyway, i have a rascal to get around, and instead of going out i can play WoW, second life, etc?
But, you are ignoring what one of her points was, which is psychological in nature. To them it is a reasonable amount of food. Is it? Quite often, no; it’s too much (which is why they are obese). That doesn’t deny the fact it is often very mentally taxing to constantly fight your mind obsessing over doritos, or the Ben and Jerry’s in the freezer.
Note that I am not saying that’s an excuse for getting/remaining obese. It is, however, one of the reasons that need to be dealt with if you want to maintain weightloss long term.
Here’s an example:
A lot of people get bariatric surgery because they are (duh) morbidly obese and want to lose the weight. This physically restricts them from overeating. Thus they lose weight. Therefore, like you and others have said, it’s clear that eating less == weightloss.
However.
Again, saying someone is psycologically addicted to overeating doesn’t mean that it’s totally fine for them to overeat to obesity, just like having an addiction to cocaine doesn’t mean it’s fine to snort lines and self-destruct. However, it does mean that many obese people would be well served by getting to the root of the psychological eating addiction and by learning techniques to overcome the temptations.
This is similar to how many alcoholics can’t just stop drinking and have lifelong success. Without support groups, therapy and/or ways to overcome the temptation to go back to the bottle, many will fall off the wagon.
Obviously the basic answer to obesity is to eat less. If that is psychologically (not physically, but psychologically) extremely challenging, the key is to work on those psychological factors so they are able to actually follow the advice to eat less and continue it for the rest of their lives.
Okay, Stoid, you maintain a healthy diet, but are still obese. Over the course of ten years, you’ve kept your weight somewhere between 40 and 50 lbs of your highest weight, and that barely believable amount of weight loss (while still being overweight) was due to your newfound healthy habits, which include starving yourself during the day, and only eating at night.
Then she should have said “the obese are eating what they erroneously believe to be a reasonable amount of food”. Meaning, they are in fact overeating and that is why they are fat. Meaning that the laws of thermodynamics DO apply to fat people.
I am not arguing that some fat people have issues that make it hard for them to stop overeating, I am simply refuting Stoid’s claim that fat people are in some magical way exempt from the laws of thermodynamics.
I remember seeing a show about a doctor for overweight people. He had his patients keep a food journal to monitor what they ate. Based on what they had written, he couldn’t figure out why they weren’t losing weight. Then he had them take pictures of the food and it was immediately obvious. Their perceptions of serving sizes were completely off.
One patient said he had a serving of pasta. But it was actually a whole package of pasta with a jar of sauce on top. Another patient said she had a serving of rice. But it was actually a full plate of fried rice. To these people, a “serving” meant enough food to feel satisfied. And they didn’t seem to be aware of how preparation could greatly change the calories in the food.
Without that photographic proof, these overweight people would likely have said “I only eat reasonable portions but I can’t lose any weight!” I suspect this type of misperception about food portion sizes is very common in overweight people.
How is failing/refusing to do simple math a “psychological problem”.
Every fat person I’ve ever known has been told by either a doctor or a dietician what the number of daily calories per day they need to be eating. Say, for instance, that that number for “Kathy” is 1200. That means, for instance, she can have three 400-calorie meals. Or, three 300-calorie meals and one 300-calorie snack (or three 100-calorie snacks). Whatever Kathy wants as long as the total does not exceed 1200 in any 24-hour period.
There are labels on food, giving the exact number of calories per serving size. So, a 300-calorie lunch is a reasonable amount of food for Kathy. However, if she chooses to double the portion size and eat 600 calorie meals, that is simply a failure or refusal to do her math and dish out the prescribed portion. It’s laziness, or maybe even lack of 3rd grade math skills, but its not a “psychological problem”.
I would say this misperception about food portion sizes is very common among most people, not just the overweight. I am not overweight now, but at age 40 I started to put on a few pounds, and I was amazed when I started to really monitor my calories and focused on portion sizes. What I was eating and what the correct portion size was quite out of whack. Bagel sizes, cookies and pizza slices were way out of whack for me, but so was what a protein serving was. I was easily eating 8 to 10 ounces of steak rather then 3 ounces.
Once I adjusted for this though I dropped down to my current weight and BMI and am quite fit for age 50, if I do say so myself! But I do this by tracking what food I eat using sparkpeople.com and watching my portion sizes, along with a regular exercise program.
You’re right it’s not a psychological problem, it’s called being normal. People who find it natural to be anal retentive about policing the details of their food intake are abnormal. And people who are unable to recognize that food policing is unnatural have a psychological problem.
The average overweight person gets that way by eating in a natural manner. That is, you clear your plate. You finish the bag. You don’t leave 2/3 of the meal you bought at the restaurant. You eat things other than white rice and celery. You take seconds of things you like the taste of. You nosh. You don’t refuse the offered cookie.
Oh yeah, and you don’t exercize worth a damn. Which is also pretty natural, now that we’re no longer living in nature and feeding ourselves no longer requires constant heavy manual labor.
I’ve recently(ish - seven months ago) started the dieting thing, and it’s the most unnatural thing in the world. And it’s hard as hell to deprive myself, which is what it takes to eat three hundred calories for a meal. That boils down to being hungry all the time, literally. And it’s rather obtuse of a person to completely ignore this major aspect of calorie control under the label “failing/refusing to do simple math”.
First off begbert if you are dieting, that won’t work. You need to adjust how you eat and that is your new life and change your relationship with food. Knowing the correct portion size is not abnormal. If they put a side of beef on your plate would you finish it? No, so if they put a 12 ounce steak there, you should understand you are eating 4 times the recommendation for a healthy diet. You can choose to eat that (and I have) but you should intentionally know what that is costing you. Take half of it home and have it for lunch the next day–you don’t have to clean your plate. The clean plate club has been disbanded.
Did you look at the portion chart I posted–the average cookie is huge today. I have cookies, but I have one sometimes two normal sized cookies. I deprive myself of nothing. NOTHING, I just adjust and moderate what I eat. I have to find a space for that cookie in my day or it is just added calories.
I am not on a diet. I don’t sit and monitor my food intake all day, nor do I exercise all day. When I first adjusted my diet I had to have an understanding of portion sizes so I did keep track of it–but now I don’t. I eat five to six small meals a day and I can honestly say I am rarely if ever hungry. I eat immediately on waking up – small meal of about 150 calories, then I eat breakfast a couple hours later about 300 calories. Then lunch–roughly 350-450 calories. An afternoon snack of around 200 calories, then dinner a few hours later around 500-600 calories and then if needed an evening snack of 100 calories or so. That is 1600-1800 calories which is plenty of food for my body height and weight.
Weekends sometimes I go up to 3000 calories as I enjoy a nice beer and sweets as much as the next guy. I just don’t go overboard.
I go to the gym three times a week for a little over an hour each time. Not a huge investment of time.
Are you going from eating 1000 calories a meal to 300 calories a meal? Yes you will feel hungry. You need to adjust that 300 to your current weight and height and reduce your calorie intake so that you are losing about 500 calories a day so that you can reduce your weight by a pound or two a week. You didn’t become overweight in two weeks and you won’t become thin in two weeks either.
This isn’t rocket science here and yes everyone is different. My wife has more issues then I do on this and thus she has to keep a tighter rein on it then I do. But you know what she does, in fact she is one of the few people I honestly know that can claim they weigh less now then they did in high school (I know I can’t make that claim). Yes there are other issues involved, but it eventually falls back onto the fundamental base of keeping track of the calories in my opinion.
No kidding. Almost every time I go out to eat and get a typical dinner, I end up taking about half of it home and having it for lunch the next day. I pretty much plan for it to be that way.
Was 347. Am now 281. 81 to go. (Though it’s not looking good; I’ve leveled off.)
Precisely - my relationship with food used to be good - and normal, and natural. Now I’m eating damn little and nothing tasty. Change in action!
This is abnormal.
There is not a chance in hell that the average cookie is 700 calories. Your chart is not about averages, it’s about the biggest cookie they could find for sale.
That said, I’ve trolled the bakery aisle a lot lately. Staring longingly. The average cookie is 180-240 calories. But they don’t sell average cookies. They sell a dozen average cookies. (Or if you’re at a warehouse store, three dozen.) To get one average cookie, you have to either share, which is great if you’ve got a good-sized crowd, or ration. Severely. Stale-cooke level severely.
This is not impossible. It is, however, difficult and contrary to natural inclinations.
The difference between being on a diet and having a diet is merely that in the later case you have become habituated. Hasn’t worked for me, mind you - though of course, I’m trying to lose weight, not just maintain it, so I set a different level than you.
I think your average “next guy” likes that bag of oreos with over three thousand calories on its own. Does that require him to eat them like potato chips? Yes. Is that hard to do? Not really; the things are bite-sized.
This is difficult to respond to - I’m torn between an ironic “congratulations!”, pointing out that for some of us five hours of free time burned is a lot of time to waste like that, and being doubtful that that little exercise makes any difference. (In my own experience using a stationary bike for an hour a night every night has no effect at all on my weight - it’s all diet.)
Stripping this of platitudes, I think you’re agreeing with me that losing weight is hungry work. Whether maintaining it is hungry work too would depend on your acclimatization level, of course, but in any case it is not normal to get yourself down to a lower acclimatization level through privation (remember, you just admitted it’s hungry work).
Let’s all keep in mind that our points are. You argued that it’s simple math, nothing to it, it makes no sense that there are people so foolish that they’re not living carefuly regulated lives with strictly counted calories. My cogetly argued theisis is, "My ass!’ Natural human behavior in today’s society has a tendency to make people fat. That’s why so many people are fat. You don’t have to be a super-lazy math-impaired doody-head to do it; you just have to act normal. Being like you requires an abnormal and unnatural level of attentiveness and discipline. Can you be proud of that? If you like, sure. Can you decide that anyone who doesn’t rise to your standard is a moron? Yeah, I suppose you can decide that…
And in my opinion it all falls back on the fundamental base of not eating the stuff. Of late I’ve developed the deplorable habit of looking at the dozen cookies. Calculating that I’m holding 2,160 calories in my hand. Knowing that if I buy them they will be gone in two, maybe three days tops - when we all know you’ve got only got maybe 3 or 4 hundred calories of ‘slack’ in a day’s diet, tops. And knowing that if I buy the cookies I’ll be doubling that easy.
And when I put them in the cart, having kept track of the calories doesn’t do a lick of good. Trust me.
I’d imagine some power scooter fat people are that way because they feel like they’ve passed the point of no return. Getting from 300 to 250 healthily is somewhere between 6 months to a year of hard work. And after that year of hard work? you are still 250 pounds. Most people will still think you are fat.
There’s a lot of misinformation about how to lose weight. The thermodynamics brigade will be by shortly to tell me it is just ‘eat less,’ but how much less? if you put a 300lb person on a 1,000 calorie diet, they will be 350 before they will be 200. They might make a detour to 250, but they will be heading back to 300 and beyond when they inevitably crack. Those lacking nuance might think “well, don’t crack then.” At that point of starvation, not eating becomes as much a matter of willpower as not peeing for a month is.
Begbert - 3 hours a week is plenty for a good weightlifting routine to have effects, though in my opinion diet accounts for 85% of your weight, exercise only 15%.
Sure - but who said anything about weightlifting? Us fatties gravitate to the easy-looking exercise, where all the other fatties are, not the benches where everybody else is ripped and we’ll look like beached whales by comparison.
begbert2 first off I am not saying “I” am better then you at all. Just want to be clear and I did not call you a moron or anything along those lines. There are those people in this thread acting like that, but I want to be clear I am not one of them. Secondly, congrats on the weight loss, that is fantastic and you are right, you have 81 pounds more to go. Keep it up! You will hit leveling off spots but you just have to stay the course.
I agree it is difficult. But it isn’t as difficult as some in this thread would have you believe, nor is it as easy as some in this thread would have you believe. Cookies are a great example. That is a huge trigger food for my wife. She loves them and before me and my kid came into her life she would eat the whole package as you noted. However when I married her I had a 8 year old daughter who loves cookies. She certainly wasn’t going to deprive the kid of cookies, so she had to find coping mechanisms that allowed the cookies in the house without her eating them all. Initially it was on top of the refrigerator in a tin. You know–out of sight out of mind and that actually worked for her. You do what you have to do.
Another point I agree with is the gym. Going to the gym is helpful in weight loss as long as you don’t increase your calorie intake, but the vast majority of the weight loss will come via what you eat. About 3 months ago I tore my quad and broke my hip–during the ensuing recovery I actually lost 15 pounds without any exercise. But that was because my wife had to supply my food to me and my injury is her worst nightmare, sitting around and eating. So she only fed me healthy food and I lost 15 pounds. You can read all about it in my upcoming book–Break your hip and lose 15 pounds But exercise will keep you in shape and healthy. I am very anxious to get back to the gym and hope I get approval from my doctor on Nov 2.
I think you are flat our wrong on taking half of your lunch home. Portion sizes at restaurants are way out of whack. To take it home is not abnormal at all and you will need to do some serious debating to convince me that you need to eat a 12 ounce steak, a large potato with all the trimmings, a large salad with lots of dressing, etc. That is a normal restaurant serving and it is too much for a healthy diet.
That cookie you get at Starbucks is not a single serving cookie, just like the bottle of soda isn’t. Nor is a bag of potato chips a single serving. That is where it gets hard to tell unless you do indeed read the labels. Salty things are my personal downfall, but I have to be very careful. A single serving of 150 calories of say potato chips is insanely small to my eyes, but it is accurate. If I put a serving in a bowl and go eat it in the other room then I have to make a choice to get up and get another serving. If I take the bag into the room it is a single serving bag! I don’t have the answers for what works for you, only what worked for me. But there are tools out there, just find them and do what you need to do. Some people need support like WW, others don’t. My wife liked the WW thingy, I never even tried it as that would not mesh with my personality.
The tools to lead a healthy lifestyle are there if you choose to utilize them. It won’t be easy, to be healthy is never easy. It will always be easier to not be healthy and our society does indeed allow the easy way out, but that doesn’t mean you have to take it. It is hard, I have never argued it wasn’t hard, but hard isn’t impossible. I am quite sure there are a few unique individuals where the above may indeed not apply, but that is not what I am addressing. The vast majority of people can indeed control their weight in my opinion.
And with that I am out of here to grab a beer with a good friend. But you know that beer is accounted for! And I didn’t track any of my food today, but I skipped my afternoon snack because I got busy and forgot about it and that is about what a beer would be. Good luck begbert2 I do wish you luck on your path!
Fair enough, but Hakuna Matata’s 3 hours of gym time is probably effective if he is putting enough effort in them, either weightlifting or going hardcore on the cardio machines.
Even 3 hours of half assing it a week does something, though that something can be wiped out pretty easily by an extra bagel or something.
I like how Hakuna Matata’s ginormous post fit in while I was creating this 3 line thing.
You guys do know that muscle weighs more than fat, don’t you? If you stick to a solid workout routine and find you aren’t dropping weight, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
And just for the record when I go to the gym I work my ass off! I have much better things to do with that 3 hours, but if I am going to be at the gym I am working hard the entire time I am there. It helps that I go with my wife and she is a maniac so she pushes me. I do a half hour on cardio and 40 minutes on weightlifting when I go.
haha, I didn’t mean to imply anything about your routine, I was just trying to bring my “3 hours a week can be effective” statement back to its original context.
But exercise will keep you in shape and healthy. I am very anxious to get back to the gym and hope I get approval from my doctor on Nov 2.