I’m not obese, but I had one doctor tell me that most people have a natural weight range as adults that they tend to fall back in barring any unusual changes to diet or exercise patterns. I have found this to be true for me, as I really can lose weight rather quickly by cutting down on the beers, etc., even without increasing exercise.
In other words, I don’t think people will continue to gain weight just from eating that “extra carrot a day.” It’s really not simple math. We don’t process every calorie consumed exactly the same way.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure that if you are overweight you and ingesting too many calories (too much food.)
Losing weight requires discipline and regular exercise.
Get about an hour of aeorobic exercise every day. Walk if nothing else.
Weigh every day and the same time on accurate scales.
Maintain a graph of your weight day by day for a month. If your weight has increased or same since yesterday eat a little less.
If you have lost more than 1/2 lb. eat a little more.
With this regimen you should lose about 3 lb. a week. Do not try to exceed this rate unless you want to look like a prune.
The other thing I think that contributes to obesity is that most people have no idea how many calories they actually need to survive.
For instance, my mom who ate a reasonable 2000 calorie a day diet and did some exercise was a normal, healthy weight. She then developed hypothyroidism (but didn’t know). She continued eating the same diet, but put on 40 lbs in about 3 months (literally - it was freaky).
The reason is that the hypothyroidism slowed her metabolism down so she was only burning about 700 calories a day instead of the old mark of 2000 - blammo, she’s obese. FWIW, she’s subsequently gone on medication (which will only contribute to about 5 lbs of weightloss) as well as a diabetic diet (she developed diabetes as well) and super increased exercise (1 hour of walking a day on the treadmill till she’s sweaty, plus weight training)- she’s now lost a total of about 30 lbs since May (Yeah mom!) and has a few to go however, she’s a lot firmer than she was before she started.
Anyhow - she didn’t eat any more than a thin person, and yet was obese. However, this story also illustrates that a “glandular problem” cannot necessarily be blamed for obesity - obviously, despite a glandular problem, mom has been able to lose 75% of her weight gain with reduced calories and increased exercise. Period.
This doesn’t take into account the extra calories he would presumably need to consume to carry the extra weight around. If he’s carrying an extra 100 pounds, it takes energy to do that.
If it’s 10 calories per pound, then the 100 lbs overweight person is eating 1000 extra calories per day just to maintain the extra 100 lbs.
So ignoring any metabolic changes, the extra number of calories per day he’ll need to eat is around ** 32 + (current_weight - ideal_weight) * 10 **
I see upon further review that you had said Take a person who is 100 lbs overweight who burns on average 2000 calories a day. I didn’t take that into account. I suppose if the person became more seditary as he gained weight, he could offset the additional caloric requirement needed for the extra weight by being less active and he could keep his caloric expenditure constant over that time.
I don’t remember, honestly. But it was habit-forming (and thus I couldn’t have been on it indefinitely – that’s really the reason it was expensive, actually, because the doctor said I had to come in for monthly visits if I still wanted the drug), and the side effects for me were all connected feeling really overly hot all of the time – not sleeping well, sometimes a little dizzy, etc.
There’s no one answer to this question. Some people have severe congenital ailments that make them highly prone to obesity (naturally occuring human leptin mutations (usually frameshift or early stop codon) for instance), even on restricted diets; some people have to eat 3500 calories a day to even put on weight (I know a guy like that; he’s a freak).
I’m not a nutrition expert by far, but with the little I know, this thread is killing me.
First, “a calorie is a calorie” is true. Show otherwise and you’ve probably got a nobel prize waiting. But that’s NOT to say that eating x calories a day will affect two different people the same way - so anyone saying so is probably incorrect.
Second, “how much” in terms of calories or food is typically the wrong question to ask; it makes much more sense to compare rates - specifically, energy intake vs. energy expenditure. Calculating intake really isn’t that difficult - just tally up the calories - but energy expenditure can be ENORMOUSLY difficult to calculate accurately. You’ve got the sheer physics of it - how much energy is required to keep me breathing, heart beating, or otherwise alive? - but there’s also the biological aspects of how a person’s body regulates itself - like how it reacts excess or deficit calories.
With that in mind, the question is pretty much unanswerable.
Well, we have to bear in mind that “obese” is a pretty wide range of weights. The heaviest I’ve ever been is 275, which at 6’2" is technically obese, but I could and can still run, jump, and do any exercise I could do when I weighed 170. Of course, I’m just now turning 33 - someone who weighed 25-275 but who was 56 could not just do an hour on the treadmill because he was motivated to start exercising.
On the other hand, someone who was my height but weighed 400 pounds should probably seek professional assistance with weight loss.
If you’re demanding precision to the calorie it’s unanswerable. But otherwise it’s a perfectly accessible problem. Metabolism is just a variable with something like a bell curve distribution and which can vary by only so much. Its reasonable therefore, to talk about an “average” metabolism, to make estimates and draw bounds on the problem.