I can see that, since I haven’t ever said that calorie reduction will not work on me, only that a reduction in calories to 1388 didn’t work.
Fourth paragraph of the horribly confusing OP:
I went on to explain in the horribly confusing OP:
in other words, popular tools for weight loss goal setting say that at my age and weight and activity level I should maintain my weight eating 2450 calories a day. But I was maintaining my weight at 1388 calories per day, 56% of the amount I should be able to maintain with.
Therefore, if my reality was 56% of the number the weight tools predicted for maintenance, it’s reasonable to assume the same percentage applies to losing. 56% of the recommended calorie intake to lose 2 pounds a week (always agreed to be the maximum-but-still-reasonable-goal) would be 860 calories, which also happens to be under the minimum number of calories considered safe, but that’s moot, since I would find living on 860 calories per day completely impossible to sustain.
As for why I would find it so, I refer you to the post I made last night about Ancel Keys study of weight loss.
I get that I’m mixing things, that we’re all mixing things. The thing is, none of us could possibly be as invested in your situation as you are, and as you say, you have posted a ton on this. Long posts. I haven’t read every single post you’ve ever made on this subject, and the ones I have I’m quite sure I haven’t retained completely. It’s very very difficult to track it all and get the whole picture. From the perspective of someone who doesn’t know you other than what they’ve been able to get from these threads, you give the impression of someone who is not fully honest with herself or us about what she’s eating and how she feels about food. Not deliberately, not lying, but not honest.
And, yeah, I totally believe that if your average calorie intake is between 2000-2500 calories a day, you won’t lose weight, because if I averaged that much daily I would gain weight, so that makes total sense to me. I also understand ADD-type lack of discipline, cause I haz it. I have basically controlled my weight my entire life through portion control only, because that I can do, but restricting the types of food is very difficult for me (leading me to fighting hunger a lot…it’s not a good system of eating, at all). So, it’s not that I think what you’re saying is impossible. I just think that the way you tell these anecdotes and talk about yourself naturally leads to people being confused because it all seems contradictory and a bit illogical.
This is exactly what I think (and I say this as someone who’s fat). There’s still a stigma against mental health treatment in general, though (though it’s gotten better in recent years) and I only see that stigma being worse if you’re in mental health treatment for “being a fattie”.
I’m annoyed because I so do not have the time to do this point justice, dangit. But in my current graduate studies, we’ve studied the advances in technology, living standards, quality of life, etc. from when colonists arrived till today-ish. There’ve been some interesting publications about the notion of comfort and how “physical comfort” only really becomes a concern once your society has ensured overall high standards for the essentials of life. So, medieval serf? Nope; more concerned about a bad crop turning into starvation or making sure to not freeze in winter. Early 19th century American? Starting to, yeah; if he can’t afford a cushioned arm chair or settee, he can at least get the furniture that either has cane seating (more give than a solid wood seat) or has curved lines that help hug the back or arms instead of straight lines that don’t fit our bodies.
Similarly, people in industrialized nations tend to feel more stress and suffer from depression and/or anxiety disorders. Of course, it’s obvious that part of this is likely that there will be under-reporting of these problems in developing nations, but it really seems like the more your society is more or less “guaranteed” the essentials of life, the more your brain has time to focus on other things. These other things then are perceived as far more important than they are, since you need to have SOMETHING to concern yourself about, and those basic essentials are already taken care of.
[sub]I told you I can’t do this subject justice; hell, it could be developed into a dissertation.[/sub] “Obesity epidemics” are basically confined to well-developed and industrialized nations; the US blazed the trail but other nations (New Zealand, Australia, the UK, etc) and rapidly urbanizing regions of otherwise developing nations are quickly catching up.
To try to bullet-list my thought process:
[ol]
[li]Industrialization / development leads to increased chances of survival and having essential needs met.[/li][li]The more developed a nation gets, the more these essentials are as “guaranteed” as they ever could be.[/li][li]This frees up a person’s time and mental energy for other issues and concerns and ALSO brings new problems into the fold*.[/li][li]A WHOOOOOLE bunch of things (increased isolation/less emphasis on the community, sedentary work, excesses of food, etc. etc.) I can only vaguely alluded to in a parenthetical aside… ;)[/li][li]All of this seems to lead to higher likelihood of having depression or anxiety issues.[/li][li]Food is used as a coping mechanism for these problems. Food has always been love and hospitality, so when you have an abundance of it and “first world problems” —[/li][li]Food is used as a psychological crutch -> bam, obesity epidemic.[/li][/ol]
Like I said, this is just a semi-quick messageboard post trying to at least vaguely point to this general issue. Our human brains are discovering things waaay faster than our bodies are able to adapt to these new advances and changes. Couple that with coping mechanisms for these “first-world problems” and an obese person may well not be able to lose weight long-term unless s/he gets to the root of what the issue is and take care of that. If you’re eating way too much as a physical comfort to distract you from your anxiety about XYZ, all the diet advice in the world won’t truly help until you TAKE CARE OF XYZ.
Ex: If no one in an area has any sort of motorized transport, you have smaller communities that are designed with that in mind (all necessities are within walking distance, etc.). Once “everyone” has cars and trucks, you “need” to have one if the area has then sprawled out so your necessities are a 30 minute drive away. Now you have to worry about car maintenance, repairs, etc. Even if you don’t own a car and can take a bus, you’re still dependent on that transportation.
You don’t think that’s oversimplifying the issue just a bit? Yes, we all know that losing weight is hard. What I’ve been reading in this thread seems to indicate that losing weight (and the corollary - keeping the weight off), especially for the morbidly obese, is more than just ‘hard’. It’s almost impossible. Losing ten pounds is ‘hard’. But if you start off knowing that you have to lose a hundred pounds or more, the challenge is considerably more daunting. You can’t even think of a diet in terms of a few months of ‘cutting back on the calories’. You’ve got years of calorie restriction ahead of you to have any hope of achieving a normal body weight. All on the off chance that maybe it will take, maybe you will actually succeed in changing the eating habits of a lifetime and maybe, just maybe, you will be one of those weight loss success stories and actually keep the weight off. Meanwhile, in your own life, in the media, in the research that is available, you keep hearing, seeing and reading about the incredibly high failure rate for the very thing that you are attempting. I think you need an incredible degree of self confidence, self discipline and persistence to even imagine that you could make it that far. And if you had all that, you probably wouldn’t be morbidly obese in the first place.
You love asking questions. Don’t much care for answering them, though. Why do you think that might be? Have you seen anyone who might help you figure it out?
Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean that the impression you’re giving is the inevitable impression that one would take away. It’s not because you’re more invested, it’s because of your posting style.
That’s quite a bit of it. I did a little research yesterday to check on my impression of that. Since 1984, the minimum wage has more than doubled (from 3.35 to 7.25); however, the sale price for a two liter bottle of Coke is the exact same amount (if not cheaper). This matches my memory of a 12 oz. can of coke being 50 cents in the college vending machines, and I believe it is still 50-75 cents … if you can find a machine that dispensed cans that size. Nowadays, most of the vending machines dispense 16 or 20 ounce bottles.
Other trends -
more variety of “snack” foods
inflation of serving sizes (when I was in college, a 32 oz drink was the super Jumbo, now I think that’s what a medium drink is)
More TV programming and proliferation of video games increased the amount of time people engage in sedentary activities. Add in longer commutes for people in suburbia.
I think people who have a job tend to work longer hours now.
Another thing which is a two-edged sword - social acceptance of smoking and alcoholism has diminished significantly in the past 30-40 years. This makes it harder for people with ADD to self-medicate with nicotine or alcohol, which leaves caffeine and sugar.
The obesity rate has skyrocketed over the past 50 years. Hence obesity is not due to person’s genes, heredity, or physical anomaly.
If you were to make food available to a cat or dog 24 hours a day, you would probably end up with a very fat cat or dog. Same goes for humans. Food is cheaper now than it has ever been, and more readily available than it has ever been. When food is cheap, people will buy (and eat) more of it. This also explains why food stamp recipients tend to be extra large.
And this is where I completely disagree with you. If your therapy had been successful, and you had really severed your emotional connection with food, then you would be like Crafter-Man. You would be able to give up whatever foods were problematic for you. You could eat a healthy diet, low-fat, low-carb, or something else, with the correct number of calories to sustain you at a healthy weight. You wouldn’t need to reward yourself with cornbread or cake, because they simply wouldn’t matter enough to you, certainly not more than maintaining a healthy weight.
I think this kind of therapeutic success is very difficult, and can take many years. But the bottom line is that no one has any reason to eat more than the amount that will sustain her body at a healthy weight, except for an emotional/psychological reason. And once those psychological reasons have been removed, then, and only then, Crafter-Man is right and anyone can lose weight.
I don’t think your conclusion is valid. If obesity is entirely due to the availability of food, then why doesn’t everyone overeat? Why aren’t rich people, with the greatest range of available food, fatter than everybody else? Why isn’t everybody fat, with so many cheap, available food resources? Obviously because there’s more involved than just that. Again, you are oversimplifying a complex issue.
Food is available to me 24 hours a day. I have a stocked pantry and a stocked freezer/fridge. I’m guessing that the same is true for you. But I’m not obese and neither are you. Sure, I could stand to lose 10 or 15 pounds (but it’s hard!), but if all that mattered was the availability of food, why aren’t we both 100 or even 200 pounds overweight?
And there’s a school of thought that believes that the reason why there is so much obesity among the poor is that the ‘cheap, available’ food is mostly bread, potatoes, pasta, and sugary crap. Simple carbohydrates. Meat and fresh veggies start bumping up those food dollars.
Whether it’s the reality for me personally or not, if this was true, we wouldn’t have so many fat people who can’t lose weight. Or, alternatively, if it is true, then it is normal, and Crafter_man is the abnormal.
Read the big post. It makes very clear that dieting itself creates disordered eating.
And the researchers, specialists in eating disorders, make the observation that the extreme reaction is the correct, life sustaining reaction to have from an evolutionary perspective.
Read it, please. It’s very informative, covers a lot of what’s being asserted here, and it’s not my opinion, it’s what they learned at the same time they learned that cutting calories works, so if you’re going to pitch that, you really need to have the full picture.
Actually, that is not correct. My cats, and many other pets I’ve known in the past, free-feed, and they are not fat.
It’s not JUST the availability of food. It’s that we’ve managed to refine food to the point where a large amount of the food available has no non-coloric nutrition at all. One aspect of this is that processed foods last longer than non-processed foods - for instance, most whole-grain starches have oil that can go rancid. Another of the big issues that we face is that now, it is as cheap to eat out as to make our own food, especially when you factor in time spent preparing and cleaning up, and supplies; but in the restaurant kitchen, higher calorie foods such as deep-fried starches are cheaper because they require fewer man-hours to cook.
