How do people get so fat?

Great Debates
721

I don’t think that further discussion about horses is really germaine to the discussion. It was kind of a tangent of a tangent anyway.

Well, it’s all about priorities, limited available time, and alternate options for both ways to spend that time (that are more enjoyable) and ways to lose the weight (that take less time). My life is choked with purely recreational things that are battling over my time, and I want to do them all. I sometimes feel guilty when I think about the recreational hobbies that I’m letting lie fallow to pursue other hobbies!

Clearly this line of discussion is going to generate more rolleyes than sympathy (‘oh poor baby you, having too many fun ways to spend your time’), but the long and short of it is that my time has an extremely high value to me, and any activity that wishes to compete for my time needs to promise a significant benefit or host of benefits, sufficient to compete.

So. The thing about the “hard” exercise you describe is that it tends to take time. Usually lots of it. You mention burning 500 calories a day; on my reclination bike it says I burn about 280 calories an hour. So even if you’re working nearly twice as hard, you’re still talking about an hour of precious, precious time being expended on the activity. For a benefit that can be literally equalled (on the weight loss front) by not eating two and a half cookies. And it takes no time to not eat two and a half cookies. :slight_smile:

And then there’s the level of unpleasant physical exertion that exercise promises. This is important because if exercise was fun enough, it would become competetive as a recreational activity independent of its neglible caloric burn. And for me, exercise just isn’t fun. “But it is!” you might exclaim. But I’ve been forced to do exercise before, and it has never been fun. Sports have never been fun. Running downright hurts, but even other less painful forms of exercise simply don’t do anything for me, and at best are mildly unpleasant. “But that’s just because you haven’t done them enough!” Yeah, and that’s what they say about eating caviar. Blech, no thanks. I’m not interested in acquiring tastes - I’m not so hard up for entertainment that doing unpleasant things for prolonged periods in the hopes that I might one day become acclimatized to it is appealing to me.

So that’s where I’m coming from - serious exercise is a pain in the ass that wastes precious, precious time for negligible benefits that I can largely achieve through other means more efficiently. With that in mind it should be easy to understand why I personally don’t want to get within ten feet of the stuff.

Probably the thing that’s throwing you off is the opportunity cost of serious exercise - the funner things that I can’t do while sweating in yoga class. If my life was an endless dull drudge of boredom and inactive listlessness, it would be a lot easier to get me to fill some of the gaps in my empty schedule with bouts of beneficial suffering.

I get dubious about the idea that this is so linear that you can meaningfully sum up the calories into the thousands; the metabolism is not a computer. But regardless, the issue is that the exercise-end has such negligible effect that it’s not worth pursuing.

It’s like this: suppose that you want to have a car race with somebody, who graciously offers you not one but two ways to pursue your goal: You can drive the car faster in the usual way, but in addition you can also push the car ahead at the starting line before the race, as far as you like, to give you a head start. It will be in park at the time, so you’re literally pushing it, not rolling it, but by working your ass off, you can gain a few extra feet of distance for efforts for every hour of work.

If a person really, really thinks that this will come down to the wire, and that a few extra yards will be the difference between the win and losing their foot, they would be prudent to push as hard and as long as they can. But me, I’ll skip that just press the gas petal a little harder.

If you saw the rather eclectic mix of possessions in my apartment, you might think differently. :stuck_out_tongue:

That’s not a match. Generally speaking I’m not a frenzied binger; I merely haven’t completely convinced myself that I dislike cookies.

Except I already know the cookies are contrary to the diet.

I will say, that if this clarity stuff came in a pill form, and wasn’t too expensive, I might give it a shot just to see how well it works. But it doesn’t come in a cheap pill - the process to get it would be time consuming and unpleasant and would actually cost more cash than I’m willing to toss at a test too. So, because of that, it’s not for me.

Let me know when the pill form comes out.

Aww, don’t you want to have a nifty semantic hijack? :stuck_out_tongue:

Perhaps people around you eat healthy snacks, but nobody I’ve met does. Of course, I don’t run in gym-club circles.

And ranch dressing? That’s empty calories; no way, not on cauliflower, not on salad, not on anything. (It’s tasty, though.) And since this is for snacking on while watching TV in my la-z-boy, no messy tuna either. Just raw cauliflour (and broccoli (they come packaged together, the way I buy them), noshed on like oversized popcorn kernels. The taste is lame, but the texture is interesting, and it supplants other tastier, more caloric snacks.

I think you overstate the effictiveness of exercise - if only in that you fail to subract out the ‘at rest’ calorie burn from your numbers for the caloric burn of exercise. (Remember, every activity supplants another, which has its own levels of benefits.)

And I’m not in so big a hurry to get there that I need to work both sides of the equation. Particularly when the various costs per calorie on the one side are so much higher than the costs on the other.

I have been carefully refraining from mocking yoga out of a desire to avoid torpedoeing the discussion. But if you want to go there, I can accomodate… :smiley:

Good thing I’m not saying such a silly thing, then; I’m saying that exercise has no effect either way on weight loss/gain, or at least close enough to no effect that it is eclipsed and made negligent by other factors (specifically, diet).

And exercise does trim people up, depending on how you define “trim up” - it bulks muscles, rearranges the body mass, and perhaps trims a little fat here and there. (I get the vague impression that it can taughten skin too, but I could be completely wrong about that.) The thing it *doesn’t *do is compete with diet control as a method of losing large amounts of weight when you take into account the time and effort required.

I’m actually much more averse to getting professional help than I am to exercise in general. Exercise alone is time consuming and unpleasant. Exercise with a trainer is time consuming, unpleasant, has an audience for my failings, and beyond all that has an ongoing financial cost too.

If I can stick to the diet, I won’t.

722

Big if. If you are interested in anecdotal information about how I’ve managed to stick with my diet for the past several months, I can give that, but maybe that’s not really germane to this thread. (Incidentally, there is a Weight Loss thread somewhere in MPSIMS that gets regular traffic, although I think at the moment it has fallen off the front page.)

723

Sticking to exercise is an equally big if.
(And I only spout on about myself when asked or it seems directly germaine to what I’m responding to. Sorry if that bugs people…)

724

Sorry; I didn’t mean to be dismissive. One of my personal peeves is the people who say that it’s impossible to lose weight because nobody has that much willpower, or whatever. My 25-pounds-lighter butt begs to differ. I just didn’t want to go into advice mode if that was not wanted. :slight_smile:

725

Wait, I said or implied that it’s impossible to lose weight because nobody has that much willpower? Wha?

726

No! I meant, I was sorry for coming off as dismissive of your weight-loss efforts because I hate it when people do it to me in a slightly different context.

This thread is making me stupid, apparently. (Har har, save the jokes.)

727

Ah, okay, I get it.

(This thread is making me paranoid about saying or implying something I don’t mean.)

728

For once I feel neither paranoid nor stupid. How ironic is that :stuck_out_tongue:

729

For what it’s worth: NY Times, “Why Exercise Makes You Less Anxious”

730

It’s a good thing Dr. Greenwood doesn’t have a clear bias or anything, or it would make it difficult to unskeptically accept his findings about the rats and his extrapolations about humans.

731

Moderate activity is good for you. ‘Exercise’ is good too, but not proven so far to be any better for general health.

Exercise makes me feel better overall, but I stick to non-punishing activities such as gardening, walking, a bit of jogging and some sprinting exercises, lifting a couple weights, swimming, and yoga, and I never exhaust myself or ‘drip with sweat’ (gross). Yoga is the only thing that has ever lessened my severe menstrual pain - if that isn’t a benefit I don’t know what is. But nothing I do is difficult. If something hurts or makes your heart pound like crazy, that means you are overtaxing your body and should let up. Pain=no gain for me.

I think it’s pretty stupid to assume that everyone will get the same psychological benefits from exercise. The people I know that exercise, usually do it because they love it and have since their Little League coach made them run laps (or alternatively, because they are afraid of getting fat and they think getting on the treadmill is what keeps them thin). The people I know that don’t, don’t because they really don’t like exertion and usually haven’t since their early years in gym class.

732

No offense Begbert, but all of this is completely unsatisfactory!

  1. The body may not be a computer, but it is not a figment of your imagination either. Do you have an alternative (and math-based) hypothesis on what would happen if you ate 252,000 less calories than you burned? Let’s hear it!

  2. Your race car analogy is terrible. It is as if you are looking at this situation through the viewfinder of a camera whose lenses have been set askance each other.
    Check out this article about weight loss and diabetes. You’ll notice that extreme dieting isn’t advised due to its effects on your condition. Your best bet is to incorporate some exercise. Consider one quote:

Yes yes yes, I understand your feelings about the subject. Don’t misplace my skepticism here. I have no doubt that each and every one of your diversions is fully engrossing and amusing. And I’m sure you have built up exercise in your mind to be the worst possible fate. And I completely understand that your time is valuable.

But your conclusions are thoroughly wrong! The opportunity costs of not exercising are potentially a significantly shortened life-span, an acceleration of your condition and a likely increase in the amount of time you will feel unwell. (plus you’ll fail to hold up your end of the social contract if you neglect your health and require all kinds of unnecessary care later, which the rest of us will pay for one way or another) All of which will make any of the full assortment of amusements seem like a self-destructive waste of time- in hindsight- if they crowd out taking care of yourself.

I’m not going after your sovereignty. It is your choice. You could look at the facts in as blurry a way as you like, to the point that the relative values of things are completely indiscernible, then base your conclusion on ‘I don’t wanna’. Fine. At least acknowledge that retreating to a conclusion based on nothing more than the fact of your personal sovereignty is to deny all the relevant data. It is something other than a fact-based decision. In important matters, non-fact based decisions are… ignorant!

I used the calculation that deducted the ‘at rest’ calorie burn.

That isn’t very comprehensive of you. And the cost of delaying is so much higher than what small pains it would require to take action.

As long as it doesn’t involve showing me a drawing of a blind amputee fish devouring a smaller fish with the word ‘yoga’ in it, I can probably take it :smiley:

So. Your (mostly) uninformed concepts of the time and effort involved are the obstacle. This is the touchy part of the discussion, but the thing I stated at the very beginning- it is all in your head. A fact-based decision on this question will lead to the conclusion that it behooves you to start taking some exercise. Your feelings can’t be trusted in this instance. Your (mostly false) concepts about exercise are not helping you. Consider finding a way to let go of them.

Right, an aversion is getting in your way, another thing I stated at the beginning of this. This one isn’t helping you either and ought to be discarded. Consider another quote from the article I linked above:

It all boils down to one thing, one that I think you will find more difficult than actually exercising. You will need to change your mind.

733

To you, but you’re hardly unbiased in this matter.

You’d poop less. 252,000 calories less, given enough time.

Okay, the actual answer is that in addition to the pooping you’d eat a little more and that your body would likely adjust your energy management a little, and together that would be enough to compensate for the neglible added caloric drain of exercise. But you don’t like the true answers, so I thought I’d mix it up.

And I do poop a lot less now that I eat less. It’s a little disconcerting, at times.

I notice that you don’t have a sensible** reason why the race car analogy is terrible. Since I’m left to speculate, I’m going to assume it’s terrible because it’s terribly accurate Exercise is indeed a lot of work for little gain, whereas dieting is a great deal less work*, for a substantially greater, more consitent, and more reliable gain. Certainly, this true fact is a terrible thing for your position in this thread relating exercise and weight loss.

  • Easy from the standpoint of time and effort. It is difficult from the standpoint of self-control, sometimes very difficult. But, maintining an exercise regimen is too, and as best I can tell most of the same techniques that make it easier to keep up the exercise can also be applied effectively to maintaining the diet.

** See the next bit

You are now arguing that losing weight loss through diet is a bad idea.

Think about that for a moment.

I read it as a sign of desperation. You know that a regulated and conservative diet is a much better approach for losing weight than exercise, and that this kills the exercise argument for losing weight, and so you are forced to attempt to devalue and discourage the diet approach in order to make the much worse alternative seem a little less bad in comparison.
Oh, and I don’t have ketosis. I’m not on atkins or anything screwy; I’m just engaging in portion control. Heck, I probably don’t eat that much less than you do - just enough to be losing a tiny bit of weight.

Blurry my ass. Indescernible my ass. Relevent data my ass. You are shoveling horseshit here, my friend.

The hard cruel fact is that it’s really easy for a cost/benefit of options to chuck exercise right in the trash bin, particularly the severe exercise regimens you are using to build up your laughable 252,000 calorie figure. Sure, sure, you find it fun, I get that. And you think that because you love it, everyone would love it. I understand that too, even though it’s silly. But your personal entertainment preferences aside, a person doesn’t have to be deluded or mistaken or wrong to decide that exercise is just not worth the bloody time and effort.

You just have to have better things to do with your time.

I seem to recall somebody else doing the same and getting much more conservative numbers - two and a half cookies a day, for a reasonable amount of exercise.

But, but, but, over ten years that’s 9131.25 cookies! Yeah, yeah. Big timespans make numbers big, wooo. Big frikking deal. If you have to resort to silly tactics like that, you know your position is on shaky ground.

It’s comprehensive of me not to make bullshit distortions about the costs and benefits.

Quite seriously, I don’t really laugh at yogaers or exercise fiends. I shake my head in pity. Poor folks, wasting their lives like that…

But they live longer! Yeah, a longer waste. And given that the actual lifespan differences we’re talking here aren’t that big, I’d much prefer to be happier for a little less time than to have spent more time sweating than I gained as a result.

I have taken some exercise. I just haven’t taken ludicrously large amounts of foolishly wasteful exercise.

But ludicrously large amounts of foolishly wasteful exercise is fun! Er, right. Maybe if you have been so terribly unfortunate as to never experienced anything that is actually fun. Maybe. (Note: I have heard that sex counts as good exercise. Which tells us there are exceptions to every rule.)

What you’re not comprehending (despite me giving, and you quoting, an extremely long and detailed explation) is that my aversions are rational. It’s not a sign of weak will to be averse to wasting money. It’s a rational decision of the kind we expect a rational person to make. And being aware that I don’t want to look like a moron is also a rational decision. (Sure, you don’t realize that people doing yoga look like morons. That’s a problem I can’t help you with - and wouldn’t want to; you like your bizzare hobby, so why should I dissuade you from it? Knock yourself out. But leave me out of it.)

My aversions are getting in my way the same way my brakes “get in the way” of me crashing my car. My aversions are parts of my rational mind that keep me from doing things that are a bad idea. You don’t think it’s a bad idea, you say? Well, you’re wrong. Or you have priorities that are different than mine - which is to say they’re skewed. Oh, you say my priorities are the ones that are skewed? That’s just a matter of perspective, with your vote against mine, and mine wins.

And my doctor is ecstatic about my weight loss. She (probably not too seriously) said she wanted to have me stand in the lobby and tell all her other diabetic patients to do what I was doing.

(Putting aside the usual crapfest about how supposedly easy exercise is…)

You’re right it would be difficult. After all, I would both have to convince myself of the lie that maintaining a proper diet isn’t the clearly better approach to losing weight, but I would also have to convince myself that all my hobbies aren’t really that fun after all.

If I had been caught at a low point in my life and then stumbled on and believed the lie of the supremacy of exercise, then it would be a great deal easier I’m sure.

734

But begbert, I don’t care that you have taken control of your health, followed doctors orders, changed your diet, get moderate cardiac exertion on your exercise bike, and have lost extra body fat with plans to continue with your lifestyle changes in order to lose more.

Ur doin it rong.

735

That’s not very nice.

One thing begbert and I have in common is that we both want to see his success.

I would like to sharpen that in the interest of: more! faster!

736

God, this is rude. That is really uncalled for. What the hell do you care if someone else wants to run or do yoga or anything else? And what gives you the authority to tell someone else that what they consider is fun is not actually fun? Speak for yourself.

Congratulations on the weight loss, though.

737

[QUOTE=begbert]
To you, but you’re hardly unbiased in this matter.

[QUOTE]

I’m biased toward the facts. I thought that was the kind of bias that is ok.

  1. No you’re not going to poop 252k calories less.
  2. The energy management your body would perform is to increase your muscle mass, which would in fact increase the speed of your metabolism. Forget about getting ‘ripped’. It would only take a little bit of effort to achieve this effect.
  3. You’re on a diet. If you eat more, don’t blame the failure on the exercise when the blame falls on the diet. Sheesh!

The race car analogy is poor because it is exactly backward. You compare dieting to hitting the accelerator and exercise to pushing a car that is in park. Fact is, there is only a limited amount of caloric lee-way available through dieting. Maybe someone else knows the specific numbers, but if you’re living off 2000 calories a day, there is your starvation ‘hard limit’. Assuming you’re not that motivated, at what point does your body go into starvation mode? 20% below daily need? 50%? This would be a good one to answer, but in any case once you go into that state your body will seek to preserve its fat stores and slow down its operation, basically making dieting that much harder. I’m guessing you’re trying to consume about 300 calories or so per day less than you burn? Sure it’ll work, but it will take a lot of time.
Exercise on the other hand isn’t limited in the way dieting is. Sure, if you suffer from a lack of volition it can seem rilly hard to get started. If we can set that consideration aside for just a moment, observe that top athletes like that swimmer Phelps guy eat something like 12,000 calories a day. He isn’t the least bit fat.

Dieting is much more like the brake on a car, contrary to your metaphor. It causes the body to slow down. Exercise is more like the accelerator- how many calories you burn is limited pretty much only by your gumption.

It isn’t a bad idea. More later.

No sir. My point lies elsewhere. See below. Good to see you got some fight in ya though!

We’re getting somewhere. Now take the other glove off.

The only hard cruel fact in this whole discussion is the fact that you have diabetes. I don’t mean any insult to you with any of this.
And we aren’t talking about a severe exercise regimen. I proposed something that might burn around 500 cal/day. It really is not the outrageous proposition you make it out to be.

Keep in mind that you have the mindset of a person who weighs 300+ lbs. You’re well below that now, and as you continue to lose more weight, more physicality will become available to you since you won’t have the burden of carrying all that weight. You are attempting to lose what amounts to a transformative amount of weight. You really ought to be prepared to adjust some of your ideas at some point.

Meh. You mentioned something about a mouse vs. an elephant earlier. I doubt I get more than 4 hours of exercise a week (these days). That seems to be plenty to keep me in good shape without any care to diet.
Let’s see, 4 hours/week amounts to… 2.3% of your time. Not exactly something you need to join a cult to do.

How long is it going to take to burn off 252,000 calories at 300/day? 2.3 years. Except that by your own account the dieting stalls here and there. Again, you can save yourself quite a lot of time with the simple application of some focused effort.

Where’s the distortion? Outside of your metaphors I mean.

Well, you’re right that people do kind of look like morons doing yoga. This is never an issue though, since there are no spectators, only participants. This ‘head full of morons’ phenomenon is IMHO a possible side-effect of watching a lot of TV. Can’t go 3 minutes of that without being presented with a different species of moron.
I hope you’ll reveal the rest of your mockeries about exercise and exercisers. Really, I think it might do you some good to bring it all out into the light. Let’s hear it!
-Lifespan differences: The point is the difference in life span and quality for managed diabetes vs. not-managed diabetes.
-Fun: For one, joy>fun. For two, you’re not in shape, so how can you be confident you know what you’re talking about? For three, I pretty much wore out fun. Maybe we should start another thread where you try to tell me what I’m missing in the fun department. I’d be a good sport, promise!
Ludicrously: I’m trying to stick to solid numbers, and you want to cling to the notion that the only levels of exercise possible are ‘none’ and ‘ludicrous’. Get real, exercise brings results.

I hope you can give a direct answer to my point here. Yes, your aversion is mostly irrational.
I don’t feel that you are being real about your circumstances. You are facing a clear and present danger to everything you care about. Diabetes can cheat you, begbert, cheat you personally, worse than AIG, GM, and George W combined. It can destroy your health before you come to an untimely end.
Under the circumstances, your priorities are… irrational. You talk about all this fun you’re having and how much you don’t want to waste your time, meanwhile taking half measures to manage your diabetes. How much time would losing 1/4 of your years waste? How much fun would you have facing the worst consequences of your disease?
You aren’t in a situation where being obese is tolerable any longer. To prioritize your personal convenience, or some small percentage of your leisure and amusement so that you can go on with a half-measure approach to such a threat seems crazy. You really don’t want to waste time pussy-footing around with this one. The longer you wait, the bigger your risk. I strongly recommend you take action.

Hey, don’t do yoga if it bothers you so much. I’m pushing regular exercise. If your issue is looking like a moron, let me ask: who’s watching? And who the fuck are they anyway?

Yes of course your vote wins. I don’t see how you can defend your priorities in this way when your actions put all your priorities, including your life, at risk.

I’m happy for your success so far too, though I think it should be clear by this point that my role is not to blow sunshine up your ass. Have you ever watched anyone get their life fucked up by diabetes?

My point isn’t either/or, it is both. And, how much fun is anything if you go into a phase of seemingly endless illness?

That’s it. Got any more fight in ya? When you’re done letting me have it, turn on whatever it is that is coming between you and your health. Fight!

738

Little by little. One after dinner mint at a time.

739

Read the conversation real close. He is caring about wether I want to run or do yoga or (my preference) anything else. He is telling me what is fun.

Personally, I don’t care what he does with his time. Yoga makes him happy? He should do it all he wants. Running makes him feel manly and virile? More power to him. But he’s not talking about him. He’s talking about me.

(90 down - 60 to go)
Try2b Comprehensive, your position seems to be based upon the misconception that exercise is some kind of solution to my diabetes problem. It’s not. It’s got minor maintenence benefits. It is certainly not a cure. As far as I know, there is no cure. Though I have heard that significant weight loss followed by a persistent maintenence of a lower weight can ‘put the brakes on’ the progression of the disease, perhaps sufficiently so that a bus’ll take me out before the body parts start falling off.

Let’s repeat. Exercise has minor maintenence benefits on the body, of the type diabetics (or anyone, really) might find beneficial to some degree, particularly if they should happen to make it to old-fart age. But the thing a diabetic in my boat really needs to worry about, first and foremost (aside from transient considerations like momentary blood sugar issues, which I personally don’t have) is weight loss.

Which conveniently enough is the subject of this thread.

So. Suppose I wanna lose weight. Suppose I wanted to take less than 2.3 years to do it. (I forget how much weight that is actually supposed to add up to, which probably doesn’t matter because it’s absurd to think that the biology works that linearly.) The solution to losing this weight is to manage the diet.

Especially since, if you happen to have the sort of diet where you get to 350lbs, you would have to manage the diet anyway to avoid completely steamrolling the dribbling of calories you’re burning per day - a fact you reference yourself.

So. I say that dieting works.

And you say that exercise works if you also diet too.

Sounds to me like we have a concensus: for losing weight, diet works. Exercise, not so much.
Other details:

  • You suggest burning 500 calories a day is no big deal. However, according to my exercise bike, that would take at least an hour and a half. A day. Or, alternatively, I’d have to work considerably harder in a shorter amount of time. I call that excessive exercise. I don’t much care what you call it.

  • also, minor point: if I did 4 hours of exercise a week (which I occasionally do, though not this past week), that would not be 2.3% of my time. I dunno about you, but I sleep occasionally, and that time is not mine to use for other things. Also I work, and that time is not mine either. So, by my calculations I have about 67 hours of free time a week. If I did 4 hours of exersize, that would be 6% of my usable time. Or if I did 500 calories of exercise a day (conservatively estimated at 11 hours), that would be 16% of my time. So, congratulations on only understating the time costs by a factor of seven. (Here’s one of those you distortions you were asking about, by the way.)

  • You argue that my opinions about exercise are obsolete because they’re the opinions of a 300+ pound person, and that unbeknownst to me my body would now love excessive exercise. Problem is, I’ve been thin before. I was a stick all through high school, because my diet was rather tightly controlled. (Seriously, I never snacked.) And exercise sucked beyond all reason. PE was hell. Running killed me. (Badmitten was okay, as it involved a lot of standing still.) So, whoops. Guess your experience doesn’t translate well to me, huh?

  • “there are no spectators, only participants”. I wasn’t aware that having your eyes gouged out was a necessary prerequisite for doing (or teaching) yoga. Strangely enough learning it does doesn’t make the sport any more appealing to me.

  • your speil on aversions being irrational ending with the statement that I should take action. Dude, I am taking action. I am losing weight like a mofo. I am just not doing it your way. Because frankly, I prefer a way that works. This year. That dieting is also less of a pain in the ass for me than exercise is just icing on the cake.

740

begbert2, if you’re not pooping, perhaps you need more fiber? Try FiberOne bars. Not power, or energy bars – they’re fiber bars. They’re really good. And yogurt. Yogurt is yummy.

Gotta keep the mail movin’!