How Fat is Too Fat?

In My Humble Opinion
81

No, people are saying to abstain from behavior that we have evolved to do, and ignore the impulses to do it. To use willpower to avoid engaging in behavior deemed morally repugnant and unhealthy. And in both situations that strategy fails 90%+ of the time over the long run. Like it or not, it doesn’t work as a public health initiative. People can rail all they want.

I feel like I am the one saying ‘wear a condom’, which is a metaphor for ‘wait until medical science understands how bodyweight regulation works’. People should eat healthy, exercise, lower their stress, have good social connections, etc to improve their health. But as of 2012 we really don’t have the medical technology for long term weight loss for the majority of people. Best to wait until we figure that out and promote body acceptance than have endless numbers of people devote huge chunks of mental and physical effort to what is a sisyphean task. We didn’t even know what hormones like leptin and ghrelin were until 15-20 years ago. The lifestyle changes necessary to promote health and the lifestyle changes necessary for massive weight loss are not the same.

And we do need to have sex to continue life. Not you an me, but the species in general.

82

DSeid, are you a doctor in Chicago? If so, are you affiliated with the pritzker school of medicine?

83

That’s a noble thought, but just like people who smoke, drink, do drugs, etc., eventually that choice that made will wind up adversely affecting other people. For example, obese person has chest pains, takes an ambulance ride and spends five days in a hospital (for example). That’s an ambulance that was tied up for a ride that didn’t need to be taken, a hospital bed occupied that didn’t need to be, etc.

People can change their lifestyles. They can lose weight and keep it off. All it takes is for them to accept the consequences of their actions and to change their actions to have better consequences.

84

This. One thing I have found to be pretty consistent about “solutions” for problems that boil down to “just use willpower to stop”; they don’t work.

85

First off, I want to congratulate brazil84 for a very nice, non-prejudiced non-judgemental op. It’s a pity that the prejudice has to come in.

Look. 95% of people who try to lose weight wind up gaining it all back. Claiming that people “just need willpower” is just woo. It’s no more true than any other thing people claim willpower can fix. The actual studies speak for themselves. Stop with continuing to believe certain theories because they fit your just world hypothesis. Being fat is a bad thing, so you have to believe people deserve it.

This thread isn’t about you and your inability to comprehend science. brazil84 asked a really nice, thoughtful question, and it deserves a real answer. I wish I could provide it. All I can offer is that, perhaps we should be more concerned about activity levels rather than weight.

86

Almost as effective as solutions that boil down to “medical science will develope a pill to cure that”.

87

I’ve had a few patrons sneer at me, which I can handle. I’ve been told that I had no right to move slowly in the pool (which was not the lap pool, but the water aerobic pool). I’ve been told that I should just stay home and stuff cookies into my mouth until I die, because there’s no hope for me. I’ve been mooed at. OK, I can handle that, it happens in general public places, most people are quite nice but there’s always a few assholes who think it’s hilarious to make fun of someone who’s different. I’ve had people make fun of my walk, too. However, when I go and ask a gym employee how to use a piece of equipment, or just what the etiquette is, I don’t expect to be ridiculed and told that if I had been hitting a gym regularly that I’d KNOW how to do this simple thing.

So I got a Cardio Cruiser, which squeaks (apparently this machine is prone to squeaking) but otherwise doesn’t make any wisecracks about my weight or fitness level.

And I doubt that any other user would have seen me being sneered at. It wasn’t done loudly, but it was definitely malicious. Just because you haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Some gyms are worse than others.

88

It’s astonishing how many people don’t comprehend that weight management is a very complex issue for so many of us. You sound plain ignorant when you say it’s “just” a matter of will power. If you haven’t been in this kind of position, you have no understanding and no right to judge or make pronouncements on what we should or shouldn’t be doing. You are NOT helping anyone and in fact you’re probably demoralizing some. Way to go.

DSeid, astro and Kaio, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed your informative posts in this thread.

It’s taken me a long time to change my habits. Like many of you I’ve been overweight for more of my life than I haven’t. But I’m succeeding. It was a process of changing my behavior and I didn’t even lose weight for the first few months. Slowly I got off caffeine and started taking vitamins and supplements geared toward curbing my appetite, balancing my blood sugar and thyroid, etc. Check out Chromium GTF and 5-HTP for curbing the cravings.

As the supplements started kicking in, what I craved was protein and vegetables. I’m not kidding. Never thought I’d see the day, and that I was doomed to feel deprived the rest of my life. It felt like my body was functioning like a “normal” person’s. Protein’s been a key-I did calorie counting which was a PITA and left me hungry all the time, but if I have three servings of lean protein a day I feel really good. I have whatever fruits and vegi’s I want, and only two slices of non-white bread. I found that carbs from starch leave me really shaky so I avoid them mostly, but I do need some. I don’t worry about whether my salad dressing’s low fat or not.

Eating out throws me way off so I try to avoid it, but my Mom likes to do lunch. I try to limit it to once or twice a week.

Buying crap was a habit that was hard to break, but I found if I didn’t bring it in the house, I didn’t eat it. What a concept! My BF still eats crap, but now I’m to the point where I can get him a KitKat, not get one for myself, and not feel deprived. I do occasionally mutter, “fracking skinny dude…” under my breath.

I added exercise, very slowly. At first I did it every other day to let my muscles recover. I’d push myself a tiny bit more every time. Just a tiny bit. Then I shortened the duration and went to every day. The key for me was to not overdo it and get discouraged because I either hurt myself or got really sore. I’d put a red heart sticker on my calendar for every day I exercised. I still do it. It sounds kind of silly, but it’s nice to see that page full of hearts.

Exercise SUCKS. I hate it. But it works consistently for me. I quit even trying to make it “fun” and just do time on my Tony Little Gazelle while watching TV. Sometimes I go walk on the boardwalk at the beach. I just accepted that exercise is something I have to do. I piss and moan, get it over with, put the heart on the calendar and go on with my day.

It has been SO HARD changing things, but it’s an accomplishment. It is still a work in progress-I suspect I’ll always have to stay on top of things and never quit thinking about what I’m eating and doing. I still have things to change. My advice to anyone is to start with one little manageable change. Stick with it for awhile, a month and congratulate yourself at every opportunity for sticking with it. When you’re comfortable with that change and have integrated it into your life, make another tiny change. It’s FINALLY what worked for me.

89

So it is the parents, the schools, and the employers that are to be blamed for all the unfit people in America??? :eek:

Focusing on fitness won’t be any more successful than focusing on diet. But it is good to see that the foundation of excuses is being established before the focus is shifted. :frowning:

90

Tossing around this statistic makes me batty. It is meaningless but us used to lend scientific credence to “losing weight is hard”.

No shit it is hard. Your weight is the product of years of dietary and lifestyle choices. And yet when we want to change it we expect a quick solution, a temporary hardship, and then a return to our old ways. Expecting the outcome to somehow miraculously become different.

As for the statistic, at least 95% of people think “dieting” is a temporary state. No wonder nearly all are unsuccessful.

91

Helena330 congratulations!
You really do get it. It is as simple as calories, the kinds of foods, and exercise. The complexity is in the application and persistence in the face of all the biological and neurological factors that led us to be overweight in the first place.

Willpower alone might cut it for some, but most need more than that alone.

92

I’ve never been overweight (actually I’ve been underweight a lot) but I’ve experienced this psycho-metabolic state of mind with regard to food in my life at times, so I know this is true. If this were a permanent condition with me I know I would most certainly be unable to avoid obesity, and that no degree of self-discipline would matter. Addictions cannot be arrested by sheer will-power. The problem with food addiction is that total abstinance isn’t possible. For this reason I believe it’s much more torturous than chemical addiction, where one can discontinue the neural-chemical connections completely so that the compulsion for their gratification can start to fade in its immediate power, as substitutes set in.

93

Nonsense. An immense number of medical conditions have been cured that way. Judging from history I expect any cure for the “obesity epidemic” to be a medical one, with general starvation due to a collapse of civilization as the second place possibility. “Willpower” as a solution barely rates as a possibility; just above “aliens invade and steal our fat”.

94

It’s not like thin people have cornered the market on not understanding others’ POVs. Someone here in a thread a while back admitted that until they began to lose weight themselves they didn’t realize that thin people got hungry too. :eek: And that’s hardly just one person’s misperception, how often do you hear heavy people dismiss so and so staying fit by claiming he or she can “eat anything they want”? That might seem true for some thin people, at least when they’re young, but the rest put effort into exercise and do a lot of denying themselves what they want to eat. I could stand to lose ten pounds, but if I didn’t say “no” to myself about 75% of the time I crave sweet crap and make an effort to stay active, I’d need to lose 100.

95

DSeid, yeah, that’s along the lines of what I was talking about before. There’s a huge difference between “dieting” and “living a healthy lifestyle.” Prevention will have to come about early by helping kids find that physical activity that they love and want to do all the time – not everyone will love running, or whatever – and eating means food that came out of the ground instead of out of a factory 95% or more of the time. This is something that we as a community have to start doing when they’re still infants, really.

I’m just not buying that “this is what we evolved to do” or that a “majority” of people couldn’t be helped with those big lifestyle changes. We didn’t evolve to be sedentary – survival depended on hard manual labor for several hours a day. The sedentary, high-fructose-corn-syrup lifestyle didn’t come about until really recently in our evolutionary history.

Some people, who have been obese (obese, not overweight) for many years may not be helped as much by a change in lifestyle due to long-term metabolic damage, but I doubt that’s the majority of those who could stand to care for themselves better. I think the majority are simply those who have sedentary jobs and rely too much on take-out, because the prevalence of that lifestyle has skyrocketed in the last few decades.

There’s too much focus on “willpower” here. The idea is to come to LOVE doing what’s necessary to maintain health. Get to the point where you think whole grain bread tastes way better than wonder bread. Where White Castle makes you queasy when you eat it so you’ll pass on that, thanks. Where your run is how you untie that persistent stress knot in your back… what a relief. It’s a matter of forming habits that you can’t imagine your life without.

Change is scary, but that’s different from impossible.

96

As for the actual question of the OP: if it is uncomfortable being in, sitting in, moving in your body, if your body gets in your way, that’s too fat.

97

I agree, but I am not as pessimistic as those who trumpet that 95% statistic.

I don’t have a study to back it up, but I have a strong feeling that of the 95% who try and fail, a large percentage are people who fall into one of the following categories:

(1) people who have an unrealistic fantasy that they will get back into the shape they were when they were 20 years old; have a killer beach body; etc.

(2) people who are mainly focused on getting into shape for a particular event like a reunion or a wedding;

(3) people who unrealistically believe that all their problems in life will go away if they just lose weight;

(4) people who fall for bizarro diets which promise to let you eat just about whatever you want;

(5) people who believe (consciously or subconsciously) that once they hit their goal weight, they will be 100% normal and can go back to eating whatever they feel like; and

(6) people who engage in unsustainable diets, for example eating no solid foods at all or eating only 500 calories a day.

Again, I have no studies to back it up, but I’m pretty confident that if people approached dieting in a realistic, sustainable way, a much higher percentage than 5% would succeed in losing weight and keeping it off. And perhaps more importantly, stop getting fatter and fatter.

(By “sustainable” I mean making small, incremental changes in your lifestyle which you are pretty confident you can keep up forever. For example, substituting an apple for your afternoon bottle of soda.)

This ought to cut down on the (growing?) percentage of people who are unable to wipe their own butts.

98

What behavior is it that we have evolved to do? Eating? Or eating unhealthy food enough of the time to result in obesity? Do you know what else humans have evolved to do? Run long distances.

Here is the problem inherent in what you’re saying. We have people within this very thread who have indicated how much of the barrier they overcame was mental, and how changing their attitude and mentality toward food, improving their diet, and engaging in regular exercise resulted in them losing weight. For every person you are claiming that this will not work for, there is a person on the other side of the aisle for whom it has, and does continue to work. Bodyweight regulation is indeed an issue, one of many factors in the struggles of people who are fighting obesity. But please, do not say that we don’t have any medical technology available for long-term weight loss for many people. The fact that people don’t stick to a healthy diet long term is not the same as diet and exercise having no impact on weight loss long term. If indeed these things were not effective, you would not see any healthy people walking around ever, we would all be slaves to our “evolutionary behavior” to grow obese. But we’re not, I’m not, many of the people in this thread are not. We are exposed to the same environment that you are, the same temptations you are, and somehow we have different outcomes. Why do you think that is?

I think brazil84’s list of reasons why people ultimately fail at weight loss are pretty comprehensive and probably pretty accurate.

99

brazil84, your feeling though is not on the money this time. These are the results in medically supervised programs of various sorts. From that MedScape review:

Kaio, the point is that this is not the environment we spent most of our evolutionary history in. This is an obesogenic one of our own making, full of what are best thought of as “superstimuli,” all the sweet salty fatty calories you evolved to crave you can possibly consume without having to work all day to get them. From an evolutionary POV what is surprising is that there are some who are not fat in this environment that Chief Pendent had referred to as “plenty and lackamotion”.

Hbns’s odd post reflects a real, albeit stupid and harmful to us all, attitude - any attempt to understand what about our societal structure has resulted in epidemic levels of obesity and to modify it is “shifting blame.” Blame is not the subject at hand; prevention and public health are. Responsibility is. As a society we need to take responsibility for making modifications that improve our group well being; as communities we need to take responsibility for the environment that our kids spend their school days in; as parents we need to take responsibility for the environments within our households and the habits we teach our children, especially by modeling; as individuals we need to take responsibility for controlling our local environment and developing healthier lifestyles even in face of a shared environment full of those superstimuli, we need to set our sights on the goals that matter more and are actually achievable by most of us - being healthy by developing long term habits that are associated with good health at all BMIs … do that and the fat will reduce* to as a secondary effect, but that, if it occurs, is bonus points only.

These are not easy changes but there is no excuse for not doing them at every level. “But I did that and I still didn’t lose weight.” Don’t care. You are still healthier. “But I love White Castles. I like soda.” Yeah and a crack addict loves cocaine and an alcoholic his booze. Don’t keep it in the house. Don’t order it. Avoid eating in places that promote it. “I don’t like exercising.” Just move. You don’t love brushing your teeth and you do it anyway. Just park farther away, take the stairs, walk faster, carry your groceries to the car instead of using the cart. Find ways to play that involve moving. There is not a person around who cannot do these things. And yeah as Kaio suggests, you may find yourself enjoying fitness, craving it, liking kale salad with dried cranberries and pine nuts in a light olive oil dressing, after a while. Healthy real foods actually really do taste good. Honestly, better than the food-like products do in my mind.

Judge yourself on what you do, not by what the scale, or the idiots, say.

*Most particularly abdominal fat, a.k.a. central obesity, will reduce most of all. This is the fat most associated with adverse health outcomes.

100

How does this address pre-weight loss goals or the reasons for discontinuing the dietary changes though? This just says that a large majority of people regain the weight. It doesn’t address why, which is what brazil84 was speculating about.