Better said, ''It’s hard and there’s a 97% chance I can’t do it." I don’t understand why people are ignoring the scientific consensus here.
The ridiculous thing is, I keep trying. I keep trying because I don’t want to die young. But at this point it’s not rational to believe that I will actually succeed. Those of you saying that permanent weight loss is a reasonable expectation for most people are not thinking rationally. Furthermore - again, science - it’s not even permanent weight loss that should be the goal - it should be the permanent adaptation of healthy behaviors. The focus on weight indicates to me that it really is just about vanity for most people.
This is why I think people don’t understand. Some people do not just like to eat, they have an emotional dependence on food. Some people use food to keep themselves functioning. For some people, nothing works better than food. For some people, to turn a phrase, everything tastes better than being thin feels. We’d like to believe we can do the noble thing, the socially acceptable thing, and be thin, but deep down we know that being thin isn’t as important in our lives as self-medicating with food. Until we find something that makes us happier than food makes us feel, we are not likely to succeed.
It’s like being addicted to cigarettes. Quitting cigarettes is as easy as not lighting one up. Just do that one thing, and you’ve quit.
I could put a gun to your head and say “Light up and I’m blowing your brains out”, and achieve a 99.9% success rate. I could shackle you in a basement with no cigarettes and hit 100% success.
People don’t want to live that way, they live free lives where they have to make the right decision over and over and over again. The guy quitting cold turkey has to make the “Don’t buy a pack, don’t bum a smoke, don’t light up” decision 100 times a day, and is thinking about the 1,000s of times he’s going to have to make that same decision over the coming weeks.
For all the skinnyness that was, they didn’t have to go to the gym 5 times a week, and sit on a stupid bicycle for an hour at a time. They didn’t count calories. They didn’t buy skim milk, lite dressing, and bean sprouts. They didn’t go through the grocery store passing up tasty food products that they love and can afford, in favor of foods they really don’t like so much, and cost more.
What they did was live at a time when the normal lifestyle was active enough to support typical eating habits. We don’t. As a society, if we want to be as thin as they were, we have to put in 10x as much effort into it, because our lifestyle has changed.
The article makes sense. My anecdote -not data- Like many people who have lost significant amounts of weight, I can gain some of it back trivially easily. After eleven years, most of the original weight loss still stands. ( I overdid it and was underweight for a year.)
The primary cause of the weight gain. (living my parents’ lifestyle and eating my mother’s cooking) are in the past now. So my success was partially a total lifestyle change from moving out on my own, partially being seventeen at the time. Still, the amount of activity and food that melted off the fifty pounds then doesn’t even affect my body now. I still work out and eat mostly veggies and lean protein, and barely maintain. So it can be done, but your body may fight you.
I’ve lost a little over 20 pounds so far this year. It’s amazingly simple and I should have lost quite a bit more. I kept gaining back a few pounds here and there when I got stressed and made bad decisions, blah, blah, blah.
It’s crazy stupid hard to maintain the focus and discipline to lose weight. I’ve dealt with it my whole life. But there’s nothing impossible about it.
When I’m doing things right, it’s hilarious just how easy it is. All you need is a couple of remarkably simple rules.
No fried food.
No red meat.
No sugar (as in candy, ice cream, soda, etc.).
Only low-fat dairy.
Walk on the treadmill for 1 hour / day. Two hours on the weekend.
That’s it. All you have to do is try to break the rules as infrequently as possible.
I hate to pile on, but how can you work out 5 days a week for 18 months, and then say you had to stop because you couldn’t afford your trainer? I would think you could remember the routine by then.
And yet, when these same people get a gastric bypass or whatever, they do lose weight. So it’s obvious that if you restrict your caloric intake enough, even without exercise, you will lose weight.
Don’t get me wrong, I realize from my own experience (stuffing myself as a teenager trying to gain weight, and eliminating practically all my favorite foods since I turned 40 in a vain attempt to keep my weight down) that metabolisms vary, and that a reasonable person may decide that the sacrifice is not worth it.
But it’s just wrong to say that “there are people who literally can’t lose weight no matter what.”
:rolleyes:yourself. Are these docs working 14 hour days * 5, leaving them 10 hours to get about 8 hours of sleep and 2 wekend days to take care of the business of running a household? Do they have families? Do they even know if they have families? Or are they working a 24 hour shift every other day leaving them 4 * 24 hour blocks of time to sleep, be with the family and take care of business. And while they are at work, are they chained to a desk or do they get to move around an office or an entire hospital, at more than a liesurely pace? Don’t compare me to a doctor, that’s just dumb. Simply by choosing their profession they imply a certain priority favoring physical health (which actually runs counter to the few doctors I know personally, but still).
I was unclear, I suppose. I’ve placed parenting above workouts. I’d rather be there for them at the random times they need me than worry continuously about fitness. My family history tells me that no matter what kind of shape I’m in I have another good 5 years, 10 years of fiddling about with heart disease and blood clots, and then I’m done. Has been thus for at least the last 100 years with dudes in my dad’s line whether they’ve been hard-working muscle & bone-types or layabouts. So between difficulty making the time to work out and the futility of it, yeah–impractical waste of time.
But I don’t disagree with OP, Army got me in awesome shape in 2 months by moving me around more and stuffing me with food that had no caffeine or sugar. It works. But I don’t care to live that way.
No, what they’re doing isn’t impossible. They’re running their own practices and seeing patients for 10 hours a day. They have families, children, a household. I was showing you that people who have busy schedules, very busy schedules, can still dedicate themselves to their physical fitness and it doesn’t kill them, nor is it impossible. The bottom line is you can spend as much time whining about how everybody has it so much easier, or you can get off your ass and do something about it. Plenty of people have hard lives, busy schedules, but they make their own health a priority. They don’t run around saying “I have a 97% chance of failure anyway so why even start”. They don’t pretend like they’ve undone 6 weeks of progress in a weekend, when really they did it over the course of 2 weeks so they could throw their hands up and say “see! One weekend and it’s all ruined! why even bother!!”
This is retarded. I have a friend who was so obese she went in for the lap band, and after that she relinquished any responsibility for her health at all. She did what is commonly known as “eating around the band”, taking in small volumes of food throughout the day with very dense caloric values. I never saw her not eating. She’d order 4 appetizers at Cheesecake Factory at ~500-700 calories each. She’d drink high-sugar specialty drinks. And she’d get so exasperated, telling everyone “I heard that the lap band would get me to lose weight and so far I’ve only lost 10 lbs!” Well, no fucking shit. You’re not changing your lifestyle at all, you are eating around what is supposed to act as a physical barrier to you stuffing your face with food all day. So don’t pretend like what needs to be done is impossible to do.
If you want a moral judgment along with it, because that’s what everyone here seems to be begging for, fine. I think people who are overweight and say that dieting and exercise unequivocally does not work either have unrealistic expectations about the results they will get, the amount of work that will go into it, or the amount of time (forever) they will have to dedicate to a lifestyle change. I think they will take the first opportunity to say Fat Isn’t My Fault, quote the “97%” statistic, and go back to eating with their emotions.
And for those of you who keep saying, “It’s pragmatically unfeasible!”, shut the fuck up. You don’t want to get caught in the trap of saying that it is literally impossible because you know it’s not, so you want to pretend that it is “literally impossible…for me only”. Start taking responsibility and stop preemptively failing yourself before you even get started. Even the people who lost weight dieting and exercising are claiming it doesn’t work. Which goes to show you that they are dedicated to statistics that show that it isn’t your fault you failed, but willing to overlook their own successes that say that it is.
on parenting over workout. I don’t know your situation. So I’ll only c omment on mine. I am trying to lose a few pounds now. I go jogging with my nephew. Pushing my. 2 year old in a jogging stroller, my 8 year old follows on her bike. Works for me.
I’d argue with you, lady, but I don’t have time. Got stuff to do: This ass isn’t going to sit on itself and someone’s got to get rid of all these goddamned doughnuts.
What’s funny about this thread is that someone in another thread outright said that my diet was not working because I’d “only” lost 55 pounds in 18 months.
Portion control in the US is as big an issue as anything else, IMHO.
[Anecdote alert]
When I was last kicking it stateside, after the first night of mistakenly ordering enough food for about eight people, me and the missus would generally order one starter between us and that would do us both, as the portions were just silly sized. We rarely ordered a main, and certainly not one each, on any occasion. Every meal we got seemed like one of the challenges on Man Vs Food!
*
[Further random anecdote]*
For the last 2-3 weeks I’ve been calorie tracking everything I eat (on ‘My Fitness Pal’ ap) - not because I’m on any sort of diet, but just out of general interest. It’s well worth a go if you’re in any way interested in understanding more about what you’re eating, and it threw up a lot of startling data about my preconceptions of what I was consuming. Some dinners that I thought huge and filling when consumed would be reasonably calorie light and other times I’d not be bothered to cook but would snack on something simple, thinking this would be a lot less calories, but it in fact turned out to be nearly double what a full dinner would have been. The trick is to be entirely honest with yourself – if you start to fudge the data and lie to yourself (or the ap) then the whole point is already lost. I found that a very simple change can make my day’s calorie count drop to a level where I can choose to lose weight or not by one simple change - in my case substituting in cereal in lieu of buttered toast & jam at breakfast. A small thing, but it makes all the difference over a week. [/anecdote]
A choice that 97% of dieters ultimately don’t make. How can I make this more clear?
I love how anecdotal evidence is totally cool when it comes to talking about fat slobs. Forget science, I know a fat person and you’re just too lazy! Fuck that noise.
ladyfoxfyre, if that’s what you got out of what I’ve posted in this thread, then you need to reread it. And what you said hurts, because I’ve been doing really well so many times, and I inevitably get sick, or injure myself. I don’t know why this happens, perhaps because I push myself too hard (And I do push myself way too hard, that’s just how I am - either all in or all out.) But shit always happens to fuck it all up.
Then there’s the depression. There are days when my number one priority is just not killing myself. It’s really hard to continue sticking to a diet plan when you really don’t even give a fuck about being alive, you hate yourself and pretty much the only thing that will allow you to experience any pleasure whatsoever, albeit for the briefest moment, is sugar. I regained a lot of weight last year simply because I was so fucking depressed I could barely get off the couch.
And the pain of failure is not really something I want to go through again. I have failed at this so many times. I’ve got like ten healthy eating cookbooks, I tried the Beck Diet Solution (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy approach), I’ve tried being vegan, I’ve tried the No S diet, I tried eating 1200 calories, I’ve tried eating 1500 calories, I’ve done strength training, running, kickboxing, P90X. I’ve tried so many times. And every time I fail, it hurts a little bit more. And your judgmental attitude just twists the knife in a little deeper.
This thread has made me decide to try a different approach, though. A very super slow approach in which the changes are minor and I barely notice them. I really don’t give a shit whether you think I’m trying hard enough or not.
If you change your lifestyle you can become healthy.
If you are unwilling to change how you live your life permenantly own up to it. You made the choice. It’s not impossible. It’s not even improbable. You just don’t want to do it. Understandable. I love unhealthy foods. I enjoy sedentary pursuits. I would rather not hit the gym 5 times a week. I would love to go back to drinking 3-4 cokes a day. I hate drinking water with every meal. But I also hate being tired when walking up the stairs. I made a choice.
