For godsakes, begbert, you can buy yoga videos. Dude, you won’t be the only fat guy in any of these classes, you know.
I mean, if you don’t want to exercise, fine. That’s your business. But then you’re complaining about losing weight and diabetes. One of these is not like the other…
I don’t want to be seen acting like an inflexible guy (fat or not) making a fool of myself doing ridiculously bad at yoga. Fat people have eyes too. They can see things. This is not hard to comprehend.
And yes, I could buy yoga vidoes. Not gonna - I don’t see the point. My lack of a well-defined six-pack is not a pressing concern to me - and certainly not enough of one to spend time and money attempting - and failing at - and quitting - yoga.
Nonsense - as I’ve repeatedly said, I think that exercise is almost completely ineffective as a weight loss strategy. If you want to lose weight, you eat less. Period. Exercise has nothing to do with it.
This is not to say exercise is useless - exercise serves other purposes, such as making you all toned and giving you better wind and enabling you to impress people by lifting large heavy objects. And undoubtedly a well-executed exercise program can make the difference between being healthy and being even more healthy. But trying to tell me that wanting to lose weight means I should want to exercise is like telling that drowning man that his condition means he should really want that parachute of yours.
No, it’s nothing like that. That’s probably the worst analogy in the history of English.
It’s exactly like that. Exercise is useful for various things but is a crappy method to induce weight loss, precisely how a parachute is very useful in its place but a lousy floatation device. Unless this was a sideways way to dispute my belief that exercise is the wrong hammer for this particular screw?
I’m only responding to your objections here, I am not saying you simply must go out and start yoga right away.
It doesn’t matter one whit how flexible you are or to what degree you can approximate the versions of the poses of the models in the pictures. All the poses are abstractions- attempting them is the only relevant issue. You try it, you did it. This-and some other things, see below- is why I say the ‘live’ classes are better than the videos. Over time the instructors can tell you a lot more in person than you can get from a video. Still, I’d recommend starting with a video.
Anyway, how do you think these people got so flexible? The ability of flexibility is, well, flexible. It will most certainly improve if you try. Stop and rest as much as you like- they really stress this in the live classes.
And it is something of a misconception that yoga is all about flexibility. It does depend on what style you’re doing, but in the last post I mentioned that it will make you ‘sweat as if you’re melting’. I’ve also compared the sweating to ‘being wrung out like a wet towel’. And… melting. Part of the advantage of the classes is that they’re done in heated rooms- you’re more flexible when you’re hot, and you sweat more. Probably why the doctors suggest stretching next to a hot shower in a bathroom with a door closed- an overly steamy approximation. Yoga isn’t specifically geared as a weight loss method but rather something else, but it is assuredly a weight loss method.
re: mellow. Sorry, bad choice of words there. A better phrase would be ‘clear the mind’. It’ll definitely calm you down, but I feel ‘calm you down’ is too soft as terminology. It is one of the oddly clever things about it really, that these guys have figured out exactly what you need to physically do to clear your mind. This effect is triggered by the whole process I guess, but only comes on at the end. You’d have to experience it yourself, I’m sure you’d be impressed. It isn’t some stoner thing.
re: seen in public wearing shorts. All right. You’ve got an aversion here. Think about it. Attraction/aversion… they’re two sides of the same coin. Something I don’t see in the videos (though I have only watched maybe two) but that you’d get from the classes is some guidance in sidestepping these kind of issues. In my last post I mentioned that you’re supposed to be concentrating, and that’s why you’re not going to be looking around and checking out everyone else. Additionally, it is why you aren’t going to be thinking about wearing shorts in public. It is not as if there is something wrong with you. You’d be another guy doing yoga. Hypothetically. But yeah, you’re right, at some point somebody would look at you, and at some point you’d look at somebody else. And there are mirrors.
I mentioned it is comparable to a philosophy of exercise. The difference is that it is mostly unspoken- all of it is demonstrated, they seem to have figured out how to evoke certain insights on your own just by following some simple physical instructions. It is so very clever I tell you. But now that I’m repeating myself, let me say not to get stuck on what I say- you doing it would trump everything.
Again, it doesn’t matter how ‘good’ you are at it. The progress-meter is built-in. Over time you could better approximate the poses, and you’d notice. And you’d be losing weight. 2-3 times a week; enjoy the ‘transgression’ of not going 2-3 times a week. Hmmm, what is it about enjoying transgression, like the Wal-Mart bag of potato chips? I’m not going to say it is all in your head, but it is all in your head.
Yah sure, diet matters too. Again with the ex-girlfriend, but she’s a vegetarian, eats only certain things. It isn’t like she won’t hang out and have a beer or anything. I think her diet habits started when she couldn’t believe the stuff her dad ate (doubly couldn’t believe it because he’s a doctor). Still. I didn’t eat less after I started running (and doing a little yoga), and I lost 50lbs.
Don’t want to? Ok.
Wait a minute… Yoga Pants!
That’s blatantly false.
Look, nobody here cares if you choose to be a complete slug, but don’t make up BS justifications for your decision that have no factual basis. It’s clear that you don’t like exercise, and it’s not because exercise won’t actually help you lose weight.
This is one of the stupidest, most ignorant statements I’ve read on this board in a long, long time.
As for shorts, wear sweat pants. Either way, your funeral, dude.
never mind
I’m very late to this thread, but feel compelled to weigh in anyway… 
fluiddruid and Stoid have the right of this, and I urge everyone here to check out the available scientific research on the mechanisms of obesity. There is a reason that most obesity researchers don’t consider overweight to be a character failing. Everyday, they encounter new evidence that weight regulation is a complex biological process more akin to breathing or bladder control than to purely volitional acts.
Yes, it is clear that most fat people are fat because they eat too much. This has never been in dispute. What is not clear is WHY they eat too much. Fortunately, there are scientists attempting to piece this together with careful research rather than idle, “common sense” speculation.
As a quick example… we know that fat cells produce a hormone (leptin) that suppresses appetite. When a normal-weight person overeats enough, he accumulates fat which then pumps out more leptin, which suppresses his appetite, causing him to return to a set weight point. This is an unconscious process, requiring little or no active volition for many people. On any given day, this person may overindulge in a delicious chocolate cake, which he then avoids the next day because the thought of eating more of it makes him feel ill. He may assume that he is exercising self-control here by avoiding the delicious cake, but the truth is that he has a lot of help from his body and doesn’t need nearly the same level of self-control that would be required from a leptin-deficient or leptin-resistant individual.
A small percentage of the obese population has been found to be leptin-deficient. They just aren’t producing enough of this hormone and never feel sated. Given free access to food, they will eat their way to morbid obesity and/or death. Inject them regularly with leptin and they will slim down almost overnight.
A much larger percentage of the obese population has been found to be leptin-resistant. Unlike the deficient folks, they actually have very high levels of leptin (as to be expected with high levels of fat), but they lack sensitivity to it. The effect is very similar to deficiency, but the cure is not as simple. Injecting more leptin may help a little bit, but is kind of like giving salt water to a thirsty man adrift in the ocean. The real problem in this case is faulty or missing receptors – which are much harder to fix. Perhaps gene therapies may one day be available to correct the problem.
Leptin is just one small part of obesity research. There are numerous other promising angles being explored. Thankfully, there are good scientists approaching this as a biological puzzle to be solved, not as a character flaw to be overcome.
Millions of people experience some level of urinary incontinence and find it difficult to hold their bladders for extended periods of time. In cases where no bathrooms are available, some can exercise extreme willpower to overcome this weakness, while others need to wear adult diapers or embarrass themselves by leaving in search of relief. Most of us consider this to be a private medical issue, not a character flaw.
A drowning person often hastens the process by inhaling water. He knows that it will kill him, but at some point, his instincts overcome his willpower and he tries to draw a breath anyway. Most of us do not consider this to be voluntary suicide.
The mechanisms involved in weight regulation play out over much longer time periods (months and years), but seem to be just as regulated by biology as breathing and voiding. Willpower can help you overcome instinct for a while, but unless something substantial changes in your environment, your biology is likely to eventually overcome your volition.
Instead of blaming fat people for their condition, instead of assuming that everyone’s body reacts to food in the same way, and instead of insisting that they fight their biology with every ounce of available willpower, let’s just give credit where credit is due. Give kudos to the person who loses and keeps off 200 pounds just as you’d congratulate the ultra-runner who just finished another 100-mile race. Lay off the 300lb guy who does other things with his time, the same way you’d respect the privacy of the incontinent fellow who needs to wear Depends. And above all, support the scientists who are working to level the playing field so that we can all enjoy the benefits of healthy weight regulation without conscious obsession.
Meara, no matter how screwed someone’s leptin-feedback system is, they still possess other sources of feedback and the capacity to reason. Even if the cruise control isn’t working, they can still look out the window and recognise that something is wrong, and do something about it.
And comparisons to incontenence or the involuntary inhalation of water don’t make any sense either. Quite simply, it is physically impossible for most people to buy, prepare and eat food without giving themselves ample opportunity to second-guess their actions and change their behavior.
Hurn. Well, I lost a stack of weight in well under a year through a combination of fierce portion control and walking five miles a day every day as near as I could manage, but apart from taking 12" off my waist size and giving me a taut ass and (for a lifelong fattie) ripped thighs and calves, what did it ever do for me? I mean, what good’s an exercise regimen that burns a lousy 3500 calories a week?
Does insufficient leptin sensitivity cause you to eat fast food and other garbage?
Would a person so afflicted gorge themselves on cauliflower, or would they choose cheeseburgers?
meara, I am fully on board with the idea that for some people it is much easier to gain weight and much harder to lose it than for other people. However, the idea that gaining weight is fully involuntary for these people, I am not on board with. There are ways of teaching yourself better habits and learning to live your life so that you don’t have to exercise iron willpower every moment of the day in order not to overeat.
I keep seeing silly and terrible comparisons, in this thread and in other places on the Internet. Losing weight and keeping it off has been compared to being a 200-mile distance runner, to winning a Nobel Prize, to winning an Olympic medal. It’s seriously not that hard, people. It’s not EASY by any means, but it’s not some impossible herculean task. And it doesn’t mean spending every second of your life obsessing over food or spending 10 hours a day in the gym, either. You just have to burn a little more than you eat, for some (possibly lengthy) period of time. And then you have to burn about as much as you eat, forever. This is very possible.
That being said, I also won’t vilify people who don’t make that leap. I said it wasn’t impossible, but I also said it wasn’t easy, and shedding all of the nay-sayers (both outside and inside your own head) is tough. There’s no moral failure in being overweight. But I don’t buy that for some people losing weight is essentially impossible, or akin to running 200 miles.
And I’m not addressing begbert on the topic of exercise anymore, as it is clear that he refuses to admit that his only real reason for not exercising is that he just plain doesn’t want to. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, so I have no idea why he is so resistant to it, but I am tired of trying to debunk all of his BS excuses.
The feedback loop may be longer, but it is not clear that a person has that much more control over the process. In fact, all scientific evidence seems to point to the contrary. Leptin and other weight regulation mechanisms act over days and weeks instead of seconds, but they are very good at eventually overcoming a person’s volition – just as our breathing and voiding instincts are very good at eventually overcoming volition.
If you have opportunity, watch or listen to the lectures series called “Deconstructing Obesity” produced by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. It provides a very good introduction to some of the science involved and how such a lengthy feedback loop can be just as powerful as our more immediate instincts.
This is actually a prime example of how instinctual a lot of our consumption is. We all KNOW that fast food and other processed foods cause health problems. And yet, humans have powerful instincts evolved over millions of years that attract us to calorie-dense foods – especially sweet and fatty foods. You seem to be implying that this consumption pattern in a fat person is a character flaw because it proves that he is in it for taste, not calories. And yet taste preferences are just as subject to biology as everything else here. Humans crave these foods because they ARE calorie dense (and because naturally sweet and fatty foods such as fruit and organ meats are nutritionally dense as well).
Please, please read some of the scientific research on all of this. I could dig out a hundred more examples of shameworthy behaviors that were eventually found to have biological roots, and yet I don’t think this is nearly as convincing as looking at the cold, hard data on the subject (twin studies, adoption studies, genetic analysis, hormone replacement trials, etc.).
If nothing else, please accept that what is a simple matter of willpower for you (reading a calorie label and deciding on a purely logical level that it is garbage) may not be nearly as simple for those who are fatter than you. Not because they are stupid or weak, but because you are swimming downstream in a helpful hormone bath and they are swimming upstream against their hormone currents. There is simply no way to take one person’s experience in weight regulation and generalize it to an entire population (especially to unrelated folks who start out significantly lighter or heavier). Why demand scientific evidence over anecdote for things like climate change trends, and not for biological processes like this?
MsWhatsit, I know from personal experience that it is much easier to train for and run a 100-mile ultra than it is to lose 100 pounds. I also know far more people personally (dozens) who have done the former than who have done the latter. It seems Herculean until you meet them and realize that they are otherwise ordinary people with very strong discipline and mind over body connections. They run six days a week rain or shine, up and down mountain trails. They run through pain and blisters when their bodies are telling them to stop.
The comparison between ultra running and extreme weight loss is actually quite apt. We are asking fat people to exercise constant vigilance and to ignore biological hunger cues for a very long time (possibly the rest of their lives). It is doable for some, but it requires so much willpower and discipline that we should not expect it of more than a small minority of the population. These few are rightly lauded for their accomplishments (in the same way that we respect and admire the ultrarunner), but just as we don’t ridicule the person who chooses to spend effort on something other than running, we should not ridicule the folks who choose to spend effort on something other than weight loss.
The problem I have with many overweight people is the denial and delusions they have about weight management. They say that exercise doesn’t work, dieting doesn’t work, they are big boned, they have genetic issues, etc etc. That’s all a bunch of crap. I would respect someone who said “I don’t have the self control to stop eating and I’m too lazy to work out”. That’s the real reason they are overweight.
Even if someone cannot control their eating, there are other ways they can control their weight. Instead of spending 6pm-11pm watching TV, spend that time walking around the neighborhood, dancing, cleaning, exercising or whatever. Anything to stay active. So uncontrollable eating does not mean you have to be fat.
If someone says:
I’ll call them out on it. I’ll argue with them because they are 100% wrong.
I’ve seen people join running groups who end their first session in tears because they were last and they had to walk most of the course. They feel like they’ll never be able to do it. But the ones who stick with it turn the walking into shuffling, the shuffling into jogging, and the jogging into running. It always works for the people who stick it out. And I’ve never seen anyone maintain their weight. They always lose weight. To be honest, they don’t all end up in the perfect BMI range, but they all lose weight.
So any overweight person who says exercise won’t work for them, especially if they are not even trying to exercise, is wrong. It’s just the delusion in their mind holding them back. I’ll do all I can to break through that delusion.
IMHO they are trying to compensate for something else that is missing from their lives. For instance lack of love, or lack of friends can create a ‘hunger’ that is compensated by eating, unless the underlying problem is healed, the hunger will persist. This is why ‘diets don’t work’, it is not a hunger for food, just food is a temporary fix for another deficiency.
People who try to focus on food to heal the above will either find themselves craving food for a ‘fix’ to help them ignore the other lack, or move that compensation to something else, such as drinking, drugs, smoking, or even things like excessive excercize or becoming a workaholic.
This is simply not true. I’m in the process of losing a significant amount of weight, am down 23 pounds so far, and I never ignore my biological hunger cues. In fact, I am careful not to ignore my hunger cues, as I have learned that letting my body get into a state of extreme hunger is a good way for me to binge overeat. I eat when I get a little bit hungry, and I stop eating when I feel a little bit full. Yes, during the first few weeks of eating normally, I had a lot of food cravings and rarely felt full after a normal-sized meal. This is because through years and years of stuffing myself, I had effectively taught my body to ignore normal hunger/full cues.
One of the huge myths of weight loss is that to lose weight, you must go around constantly starving and depriving yourself, and that you must exercise iron willpower every second of the day. This is simply not true. Eating a normal caloric intake is mostly a matter of setting up good and healthy eating habits and then sticking with them. If you find that you are constantly hungry, something is wrong. (I know this is the cue for people to come in and say that there is something biologically wrong with them that makes them feel like a starving person 24 hours per day no matter what they eat, but I think those people are a rare minority, and I also suspect that if they worked on changing their eating habits somewhat, many of those food cravings would diminish significantly. Of course, I could be wrong about this.)
I mean, seriously, I’ve lost 23 pounds and I feel great. I don’t go through my day constantly gritting my teeth and screaming, “AAAAAAHHH!! WILL! NOT! EAT! DONUT!!!”
Oh, I seriously doubt that. You enjoy that smug feeling of looking down on fat, lazy slobs with no self control too much to ever really do anything to break their delusion.
filmore, I happen to agree with you that developing an exercise hobby is probably one of the only effective ways for some folks to keep weight off long-term. Instead of directly opposing your body’s insatiable hunger, you put the extra consumption to good use (in effect creating a mini-famine where you can’t possibly eat enough to maintain a high weight at your level of activity).
That said, such a hobby is going to take up a lot of time in someone’s life that they may prefer to spend on other pursuits. It’s entirely reasonable for a person to decide to spend their limited energy/discipline elsewhere. Why use loaded terms like “lazy” and “in denial” and “lacking self-control” to describe them? It really IS harder for these people to exercise (at least at first), and to control their eating. Why do you require them to expend more effort than a naturally thin person just to avoid pejoratives? What if their priorities are different than yours and they’d rather spend that time on kids? on arts? on professional goals? Is it possible that you are hearing “I’m fat and I can’t do anything about it”, when what they are really saying is, “I’m fat and it is not worth the effort required to do something about it?”
You seem incensed that some people argue that exercise doesn’t work for weight loss. There actually has been a fair amount of research showing this to be true at the casual public health level. People who undertake exercise solely for weight loss tend to be less successful at losing weight than those who diet. Light to moderate exercise increases appetite, and people compensate by eating more – often more than they’ve burned with the extra exercise. Furthermore, many keep eating at this increased level even after they’ve fallen off the exercise wagon.
I think exercise as a hobby is much different than exercise as a chore. The person who runs 30min a day without any special training or goals is not likely to experience the same transformation as the person who takes up running, joins a running club, participates in social group runs, registers and runs for races, tackles a marathon or even an ultra, etc. We’d do well as a society to promote wellness hobbies like running instead of focusing so much on group/spectator sports.