You could walk in a circle around the kitchen table or the sofa. Literally. Walk from one end of the house to the other, over and over. Sit on the couch and do arm circles. Unless you are a quad, you can exercise.
The Pentagon Channel has some great workouts. If you don’t have cable, you can get the workouts online: http://www.pentagonchannel.mil/Shows/FitforDuty.aspx# you can do a lot of their exercises at home with hand weights, a band, a chair, and a medicine ball. If you don’t have that, you can make do with homemade sandbags and a plastic milk jug filled with water or sand.
There’s always the revolutionary, money-saving diet of eating the same foods you’ve been eating, but less of them.
It seems like someone always pops in to these threads to say how they can’t afford to eat better and lose weight, or they can’t possibly exercise. It may seem that way when you’re discouraged by the situation you’re in, but instead of looking for reasons why it won’t work, try looking for ways to make it work for you.
P.S. I don’t know anyone who has succeeded in keeping off the weight they lost with Optifast. I think that type of liquid diet is doomed to failure, because there’s no way to incorporate it once you’re done losing weight.
P.P.S. I’d be willing to bet that the sleep apnea will improve if you lose the weight. Knowing you may have a small throat should be giving you more incentive to lose weight, not less.
I’ve been overweight or obese most of my life (lost it, regained it, lost it again - regained it. Now trying to lose it again).
I tried the gym but found it just wasn’t to my liking - I prefer to outdoors and waking around looking at the scenery or riding my bike (wieght training was good).
While I don’t recall being sneered at or abused I certainly expected to be. Because the kind of people who have been giving me shit about being overweight for years also tended to be the ones who were the biggest gym junkies.
I tend to be an introvert anyway and the prospect of subjecting myself to more taunts and abuse (after years of it at school and after) always made the gym a less than appealing prospect.
Weight-loss surgery is a viable, medically sound alternative for many people. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it—or at least researched the hell out of it.
Could not agree more. With issues of public health, prevention should generally have a lower associated cost. I agree obesity is the symptom, and that treating the symptom seldom addresses the root cause.
I agree that targeting fitness is the best fiscally responsible broad based approach both in the short and long term. Save the more expensive medical and psychiatric solutions for those cases at the margins that aren’t reachable with the broad based approach.
Look at that, you do have a sense of humor. How effective can a media campaign be without resorting to marginalizing and ostracizing the unfit ala the the anti tobacco campaign?
As to how effective a positive messaging media campaign can be, the answer is fairly clear. Pretty effective.
This may upset your political sensitivities but it turns out that the ads for Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign are pretty effective and work significantly better than marginalizing and ostracizing (which as per cites already provided are already known to increase obesity rates, not decrease it).
Results of course are what matter, and the result of the “Let’s Move!” efforts, combined with other efforts at multiple levels, have been as cited: halting the rise of pediatric obesity and even beginning to reverse it.
This is simple stuff that every decent parent has learned: kids respond better to be told what to do, not what not to do, coupled with making it easier for them to do it. Adults too.
I’ve been overweight all of my life an the most obvious advice doesn’t work for me, well because my brain says “I’M HUNGRY! FEED ME!” and my enlarged stomach doesn’t feel fullness until its too late. I paid the price:
I’m diabetic now (I was diagnosed last week) and I’m pretty much forced to eat less-than to near-normal amounts of food (no over-eating) with very little to no simple carbs and drink sugar-free flavored waters or water.
I’m slowly getting used to healthy vegetables, but carrots give me that throw up response if I try to eat them. I’m thinking of investing in more whole grains like barely to replace rice.
That really doesnt look like much food to me. If that is all a skinny person gets to eat every day for the rest of their life, then I guess I will stay fat. I would be hungry and miserable from lunch-time onwards.
I decided to check out this claim and I am skeptical. The study you link to sent something like half of the subjects to popular weight loss programs like Weight Watchers. In fact, Weight Watchers was specifically mentioned.
I then went to Youtube and searched for Weight Watchers ads and picked the first one which did not feature celebrities.
As you can see, it features a man who used Weight Watchers to lose 109 pounds. I searched him on Google, apparently his starting weight was 294 pounds.
So you see, Weight Watchers definitely promotes the fantasy of recapturing your lost youth; becoming one of the thin people; etc. And why not? They are a money making operation and that’s what sells.
Nevertheless, I maintain as a non-expert that this is the absolute wrong mentality to have in connection with a weight loss program. It’s just common sense.
Look, I don’t know the right way to lose weight permanently, but I do know what’s wrong. And of the weight loss recidivists, a lot of people are doing stuff that’s clearly wrong.
Agreed, this is a good approach during development. How does lack of fitness in the adult population get addressed? Positive reenforcement is the proven method for long lasting behavior modification, however the anti tobacco campaign seems to have gained momentum when it went to negative imagery and messages. I can’t help but wonder what serious a nationalized fitness campaign would look like?
Wait, what the hell are you eating? I’m talking about how I might get a slice of pizza, how is that too paltry for you? What, do you dip the slice in lard or something? It’s not like I live off crackers and tofu, fer chrissakes.
I think Weedy means that a single slice of pizza isn’t that much, although that also depends on how big a “slice” is; when I have pizza (from the store), I eat two slices, with the pizza cut into eighths (the box says there are 6 servings, so that is 1.5 servings). On the other hand, some people might eat an entire large pizza at one sitting (a day’s worth of calories, more or less) and consider that to be a “slice”.
Id probably eat more than one slice, or eat a sandwich plus something else.
I brought it up because skinny people often say they eat whatever they want or similar things, but if you look at what they eat, it turns out they dont want very much. Compared to what I would be eating if I ate whatever I wanted.
Perhaps he missed that she’s eating a pretty big dinner? Like Mississippienne, lunch is a lighter meal for me because eating a lot mid-day makes me sluggish in the afternoon, and I’m just not that hungry that early in the day. I won’t have more than a sandwich, perhaps with some baby carrots, and the mid-afternoon snack would be a granola bar or some fruit or something. If I ate a slice of pizza (assuming a NY style slice you’d get at your standard take-out place), I’d be quite full and likely would need to skip my mid-afternoon snack. Two slices and dinner would be more like a snack.
Dinner, on the other hand, is my “main” meal and I eat quite a bit more during the evening meal. Not everyone is like this – so if he’s looking at pizza for lunch and thinking that’s nothing, I can see that if he’s used to lunch being his main meal and dinner is the equivalent of a sandwich. Regardless which way you do it the daily intake works out to about the same.
A person does adjust to eating smaller amounts of food over time, as long as you’re still eating enough to support your activity level. I’m not ravenously hungry all the time, and part of my strategy is to stop eating when I’m full (which I’m actually not awesome with, but hey). However my activity level is also enough to support more food than average, I think. I don’t count calories but at a rough estimate I probably eat 2300-2500 calories a day. It’s definitely more than 2000. I couldn’t eat that much if I weren’t running 45+ minutes every day, though, plus have some lean muscle mass that means I burn more sitting on my ass, too.
You need to re-watch that commercial. The couple together lost 109 lbs. and the wife alone lost 53 lbs. 109-53=56 lbs.
Of course Weight Watchers sells the fantasy of being one of the thin people. They’re in the weight-loss business. What the hell else are they supposed to sell?
Weight Watchers tends to show younger people in its advertising because its membership tends to skew older. They’re trying to dispel the notion that it’s just for older people, so they’re playing up their online-only program (which is what this commercial is for) and showing younger people in commercials and advertising for their regular meetings program.
That being said, Weight Watchers’ focus is, and has always been, about adopting a healthier diet and modifying behaviors. If you can do that successfully, and if you stick with it (which isn’t that hard), you will lose weight and you will keep it off without trying all that hard. It’s the people who look for the easy way out and stop when they hit their magic number who gain it back.
told you had no right to move slowly in the aerobic pool, and I’ll assume this wasn’t in the middle of someone’s class that you weren’t a part of
told that you should just stay home and stuff cookies into your mouth until you die, because there’s no hope for you
mooed at, and not by stray cows
had your walk made fun of
ridiculed when you asked an employee for instructions on how to use a machine
ridiculed when you asked an employee about gym etiquette
told flat out by an employee that if you had been hitting a gym regularly that you would KNOW how to do whatever simple thing you were inquiring about
I’m really astonished that your local gyms, businesses that make their money getting people in shape and keeping them in shape, allow this to happen since you and other large people are their target market. It amazes me that myself and other hardcore gym goers have never witnessed such conduct. In 30+ years of working out regularly, I’ve never set foot in a gym that would tolerate such conduct from a patron, never mind an employee.
Frankly, in my gym, the trainers practically fight over who gets first dibs on the fat chicks because they tend to be the best customers. The women start working with a trainer, have positive support and encouragement and see results. They bond with their trainer, keep losing weight and shaping up, and begin to make all kinds of changes. The ones that don’t get scared and quit, it’s really something to see how they change over a year or two. Not just physically but mentally. Once that switch is flipped and they see what their life could be like, they don’t stop. They don’t have any more excuses, just goals. And they blossom. In 30+ years, I’ve never gotten tired of watching it happen.
Apparently, the target markets for these gyms are people who want to hit the gym for an hour each day, and who are already in shape. They don’t want the fatties, and they sure as hell don’t want anyone with any mobility problems. I had to learn that people are expected to wipe down the equipment with sprays and towels on the SDMB, for crying out loud. I mean, I asked if there was something that I was supposed to be doing other than just hopping on random pieces of equipment, and NONE of the gym staff was interested in telling me anything like that. Now, it wasn’t very many people who gave me shit about my weight and fitness level, but I figured that the gym wasn’t interested in my money. I asked about meeting with a personal trainer a couple of times, but nobody was ever available. I was supposed to get a couple of sessions free for signing up, and possibly I would have become a regular, but I guess that being available was too much of a chore.
So, like I said, I got a Cardio Cruiser, which works fairly well. It’s just one machine, and so I have to do some other exercises as well, but it’s good for stamina. I don’t have to fight traffic for 45 minutes to use it. I can use it whenever I want to. Sometimes I might have to remove a cat or two first, but that’s pretty easy. And the thing cost less than half a year’s dues, not even including the sign up fee. And what is up with sign up fees, anyway? In one gym, I was supposed to get three private training sessions for signing up, but in the other two, I was just told that this was the way it was.