Also, if someone loses weight on a low-carb diet, they should FULLY expect that weight loss to return once they re-introduce carbs (and therefore extra calories). Even more weight can be put on if one is not careful to monitor and pace that re-introduction of carbohydrates.
This is why low-carb diets are generally considered great for short-term weight loss but not a great strategy for permanent weight reduction.
You ask:
The OP already clarifies:
Meanwhile:
The OP was not talking about the people Health Professionals have decided to call obese, i.e. almost anybody with a slight jiggle in their walk. They keep shifting the scale, and if anything that’s just discouraging people.
I used to be underweight, up until my mid 30s. Without any major changes* in lifestyle or diet, but by just getting older, now my body has decided to start reacting to the way I have always eaten. I am now over my upper BMI level. It sucks.
I will not be going on any fad or crash diets, and instead hope to just increase my level of exercising, mostly long vigorous walks, and decreasing my junky sugary intake, a losing battle that I probably will never be able to overcome. Despite that, my middle-age-spread waistline is not a serious health problem for me, it’s just inconvenient, so all I need is to keep my weight at a controllable level. I think everybody ought to be able to achieve that. It takes less than an hour a day, a bit of menu juggling, and a reduction in food intake.
*several minor changes, though, which quickly add up
It seems that what you describe as “fat acceptance” is what has become expert medical opinion: fitness matters much more than fatness. If a person is eating healthy and is exercising to the point of achieving good cardiorespiratory fitness then they are likely healthy whatever the BMI and if they are not eating healthy and have low fitness then they are highly likely not, again, whatever the BMI. Obesity is a predictor of bad outcomes in the main because it to some degree correlates with those choices. For someone who is obese and unfit pretty much all the health benefits are achieved with achieving fitness, developing better food choice habits, and a very modest weight loss of 5 to 10% of body weight (which will leave most of them still in the obese category).
People who need scooters to get around are very highly likely not fit. If they somehow exercised enough to become fit (a good V O2 max on a treadmill test, for example) and were making healthy choices, they were likely no longer people who needed scooters to get around and likely had lost some weight, even if they were still objectively measured as obese.
The problem for the people you describe is not mainly that they are fat but that they are unfit. Of course the fatness contributes to the lack of fitness (as well as is a consequence of) but the key item is the fitness itself. Work on that and the fatness will, to an adequate degree, solve itself. Focus on the fatness, on the scale, and the fitness does not as necessarily follow, and more often, neither does even the fatness.
How about you do that? I cited my position, now cite yours.
And even if you’re right, which you haven’t done anything to prove, lifetime costs are what matter. Insurance does not focus on the short-term. 20-year-old employees pay the same healthcare premiums as their 60-year-old coworkers, and weight is not even a factor (at least, everywhere I’ve ever worked). Unless obese people suddenly start living to their 80s and 90s, they’re less of a burden on the healthcare system than non-obese people.
I’m not saying you (the general you, not you Jamie) don’t have a right to feel physically disgusted when you see an enormously obese person out in public. I sometimes feel that way, too, and I *am *obese! But when it turns to prejudice and marginalization and name-calling, that makes you a bully. Bullies try to disguise their disgust with concern by imagining how inconvenient it is to be fat, or how much healthcare money fat people are soaking up.
But when you acknowledge that you don’t have a vested interest (besides morbid curiosity) in how inconvenient it is for someone else to be fat, and you end up being wrong about their burden on the healthcare system, how can you justify marginalizing fat people any other way but your desire not to look at them? And that takes us back to the first point I made: nobody owes attractiveness to you when they walk out their front door.
A good solution IMO is losing weight by eating low-carb, to get to the point where you can introduce high intensity interval training, plus strength training, then continuing low carb while building muscle and improving your metabolism, until you are at the weight you want to be. Then continue with the interval training, and strength training, and gradually add back in healthy carbs, going back a step if the carbs are increasing your weight.
What percent of American children are already obese?
Look, I’m not an anti-fattie. I’m just saying your argument here is patently absurd. Answer me this; what factors are responsible/in play for the significant disparity in life expectancy between obese/non-obese people? And do any of these factors contribute to the strain on/cost of our healthcare system?
Most people make lifestyle choices that lead to suboptimal health outcomes in some way or another. It’s just that obesity happens to be very visible, and therefore easy to shame people for. (Smoking too, for that matter.)
Anyway, I am fully in agreement with DSeid on this. Achieving fitness is a far better goal for positive health outcomes than being thin is.
What didmy question have to do with shame? I simply asked which group, on a yearly basis, averaged higher medical costs over the span of their lives-the obese or non-obese.
Why don’t you look at fit people vs. non-fit people instead? Why the focus on fat people? Is there something special about the medical costs associated with being obese that makes them more important to target than the medical costs associated with being out of shape, or a smoker, or eating a poor diet, or any of the other zillions of shitty health choices that people make every day?
I did not mean to imply that you were personally shaming fat people, by the way. I realize my post came across that way but it wasn’t my intent.
I I was simply responding to the notion that being obese was less of a strain on the healthcare system than not being obese.
It seems plausible to me that if you look at lifetime costs to the healthcare system, the obese population might indeed cost less, due to dying off earlier. I’m not sure this is a net societal benefit. Also, I have no idea if that’s actually the case or not, I’m just saying that it’s plausible.
Actually insurance does not care about lifetime costs. The fact that that cited model has fat people dying earlier so costing less throughout their lives is immaterial to insurance company profits, especially if the thinner person does not get sick until years later, when they are likely no longer on the same insurance plan. Note the article also “found that the group of healthy, never-smoking individuals had the highest lifetime healthcare costs, because they lived the longest and developed diseases associated with aging; healthcare costs were lowest for the smokers.” While dead people do not cost much to take of, I would not however think that promoting smoking as a means to reduce healthcare costs is such a good idea.
As to Ambivalid’s claim - he’s right.
The point again however is that obesity may be mainly a crude proxy for the larger issue, the behaviors. Inactivity costs.
Again, better fat and fit than thin and inactive.
To the op: any weight that a person maintains with regular moderately intense exercise to a degree adequate to maintain good cardiorespiratory fitness while eating moderate portions of food of high nutritional value is not too fat. It is hard to imagine anyone staying morbidly obese doing that but there are quite a few people who are obese who do. And many more who can achieve that even though losing enough weight to be not obese is less achievable, especially long term.
I have battled weight my entire life and have gained and lost in cycles over time. I have spent far more time being too heavy vs being a healthy weight. My only saving grace is that I am tall and relatively strong so even though substantially overweight (and feeling every pound of it) I didn’t look too awful, but I felt awful.
The real bottom line IMO is this. Fat people have a substantially different relationship to food and eating than thinner people. Part of this is (again IMO) physical and part is mental. Congenitally overweight people are not that different from drug addicts in that access to food-drugs, planning access to food-drugs, preparing food-drugs and eating food-drugs, while not quite an obsession is always top of mind. With thinner people I find there is rarely the continuous focus, even at low levels that fatter people have on where the next meal is coming from. Fat people’s brains are wired somewhat differently than thinner people with respect to food.
In addition there is often a substantial delay in overweight people in the satiation feedback mechanism, that allows you to push away from the table when your body tells you you’ve had enough to eat. With thinner people this feedback loop is almost immediate, with fat people it will be 5, 10 or even 15 minutes before your body says “enough I’m full” and by that time you’ve eaten far more calories than you physically needed because you thought you were still hungry. The satiation signal finally kicks in and you’re stuffed to the gills and you feel like you’ve eaten a horse.
So, with respect to food it’s not just that overweight people eat too much, we are *focused *on food. We love to eat and that love is deeper, harder and more profound than you find in thinner people in their relationship to food, even so called normal weight “foodies”. There is an emotional resonance in eating that few other activities short of sex can compare to, and physical exercise is generally not a competitive alternative. In fatter people your lizard brain is always pushing you to consume, even though you know rationally you need to lose weight, and that push usually wins over time. Maybe one day medical science will discover how to turn that compulsion off, but we are not there yet.
Re getting fit the only solution that worked for me as a 54 year old male adult was getting my own personal trainer and working out 3 times a week. The enforced appointment is huge in terms of getting me going. If left to my own devices I would always find a way to self distract instead of exercising. I resisted a PT at first thinking I could do it myself , but the reality is that unsupervised people are not inclined to to do things they dislike like strenuous exercise.
WRT “fat acceptance” this is an absurd joke by people who have given up. Most rational fat people do not “accept” being obese. It’s a horrible state of existence. This is hardly a brain teaser. Sometimes people get tired and adopt a model where they just stop fighting it, but most fat people don’t want to be fat any more than addicted adult smokers want to smoke regardless of what fat acceptance people want you to think.
Another recent data point:
That’s a good question. I suppose that this is the point in the debate where I start talking about increased health care costs for society. But frankly that would be a rationalization.
It’s not the money at all. In fact, if there were some government program which would bring pretty much everyone to a very minimal level of physical fitness, I would support it even if it meant my taxes would go up.
In the same way, I feel that everyone should have a minimal level of literacy and I support government programs to give people a minimal level of education even though a lot of those people are total morons.
Then you’re really underweight and should definitely cut down on those helium dietary supplements…and avoid high winds.
My, what a lot of heat and little light. I accept Rachellogram’s cite, but when I say those two people are too fat, well they were too fat to be carried down the steps. Look, I’ve been overweight (or obese) all my life and I do sympathize. And I am not arguing about costs. But if you weigh 600 lbs someone is enabling you, because you cannot get out to get your own food, let alone earn money for it (well, I guess if you are employed online, you might be).
I have a friend who injured a leg (with a chainsaw!) and for six weeks, it was too painful to get up and go to the fridge. He wasn’t even overweight. But over that six weeks he lost 10 lbs.
Boy, you sure know how to ruffle some feathers with wacky, far-out suggestions!
If your fat is an obstacle to something you want to do, then you have too much fat. If your fat doesn’t prevent you from doing something you want to do then you don’t have too much fat.