That’s not the question I asked you, now is it? Again: where do these “lower expectations” come into play?
The thing is, there is almost no chance that this will occur as long as he continues to live in the same environment in which he reached his current weight. Major weight loss requires a complete restructuring of one’s lifestyle from the ground up, and it is laughably absurd to expect a minor child to be able to accomplish this unless you get his family on board with these lifestyle changes as well. A “no Jamboree for Jimmy” threat is not going to be an effective method for effecting this change.
Some posters in this thread have called for allowing limited participation, “just like they do for handicapped kids”. Lowering expectations to accommodate overeaters is the opposite of the Scouts goal of self improvement.
And bullshit. There is no evidence that a kid has to lose a massive amount of weight. it may be five or ten pounds. If he has the resources to find out about the Jamboree, he has access to the common knowledge that eating less and getting more exercise will help him lose weight. He can ask Scout leaders in his troop for help. He can ask the school nurse. He can ask a teacher for guidance or read about diet and exercise online. I agree that the families of such kids are primarily responsible for enabling such unhealthy habits, but for every argument you make about “he’s just a kid, what can he know about diets” I can find a counter argument proving that even very little kids attempt to restrict their food intake in order to avoid getting fat. Kids may not know where babies come from, but they know overeating makes you fat.
The fitness requirements will not be a motivator for a lethargic kid not interested in participating anyway. But they would work to inspire an active morbidly obese kid. Hell, brides lose weight to look good in a wedding dress they’ll wear for an hour in front of friends and family who already know what they look like. If people can be motivated to eat less and exercise for such frivolous reasons, they can certainly do it for awesome reasons.
The thing is, artemis, what you are saying goes against most people’s first hand experience. I am a normal weight, but once a year or so I’ll let loose a bit and quite quickly I’ll put on 10-20 lbs. when that happens, I’ll return to my normally conscientious approach, and lose it.
Most people do this. So we don’t really believe we’ve won the genetic lottery. It’s work.
Except you’e missing some crucial differences here. Smokers can quit cold turkey, and the craving for cigarettes fades over time. No one can quit eating cold turkey, though, and hunger doesn’t fade with time, but gets worse.
Perhaps that is unpleasant for some people, but life is sometimes inconvenient, and feleing more hungry than the next guy is p
Yes, it is due to magic. The magic is called “industrial civilization.” For the first time in the evolutionary history of humans, entire populations have 24-hour access to essentially unlimited amounts of extremely palatable and calorie dense foods. Nothing in our evolutionary background prepared us for this situation, and you can easily see the results for yourself just by going to any public place and looking at the people.
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Until they get sick of trying to maintain such a disordered eating pattern. Then they go back to their original size (and often wind up a bit heavier then before).
And without that attitude I am right. No one has found a reliable and widely effective way to significant long-term weight loss except bariatric surgery (and even that only works 50% of the time).
Fortunately it doesn’t matter, because adopting a sensible diet and exercise program brings about all the beneficial health changes needed. Anything else is about aesthetics, not health.
That could be a really beneficial program, and it’s a shame the Scouts haven’t incorporated such a thing into the Jamboree.
Sven, what you don’t seem to understand is that you’ve described everyone’s experience -including the morbidly obese. We don’t just keep growing and growing like a monstrous tick; we reach a stable weight and stay at that weight pretty much indefinitely as long as we maintain a consistent eating/activity pattern. My current weight has been more-or-less the same for over 2 decades now. (Like you, I do tend to put on a bit extra around the holidays -and like you, I don’t have any trouble taking that off again.)
If you want to know what it’s like for an obese person to lose more than 10% or so of their body weight, try forcing yourself to become anorexic. Do you think you could lose 50% of your normal body weight and then keep it off indefinitely? Because that is what I would have to do in order to return to a “normal” weight - develop a completely disordered eating pattern and then maintain it for life. And like most people, I can’t manage to do that. (Which is probably a good thing, as if I could I would have been just as capable of developing a dangerous disordered eating pattern back when I was younger and thinner and didn’t have any extra weight to lose!)
What you believe or don’t believe is irrelevant to the facts, Sven. Every nation that becomes affluent enough to adopt the standard Western diet sees an increasing rate of obesity in its population. Change the food environment, and the average weight of the population changes (with most of the change happening at the far right hand of the curve, not the mean).
I’m guessing she’s referring to the similar findings re “genetic predisposition to alcoholism” wherein some alcoholic families seem to suffer a common dopamine deficiency. Of course, the studies looking to place blame on obesity outside the individual’s habits don’t account for the persons with the same dopamine issue and healthy weight.
artemis, all these studies about the causes of obesity are routinely trotted out in the press and any consumer of popular news is familiar. We recognize over eating as an addiction, but nearly every recovering raging alcoholic and chronically addicted smoker will tell you that the cravings remain. And your claims are a disservice and insult to every successful reformed addict. It is entirely possible to eat less, just as it’s possible to drink less, do less heroin, meth, etc.
There is a lot you aren’t saying here, like avoiding placing blame on the parents for encouraging the eating habits that allow a kid to get this sick. Like how raising a child in a cult of food, treating childhood angst with food, rewarding good behavior with takeout and other assorted junk, and modeling the worst possible eating habits for a child sets them up for a lifetime of illness without intervention. That’s the root of the problem here, the caregivers who encouraged their kids to eat themselves into illness and exclusion. Yes, the kids are sick. Yeah, we’ll probably keep throwing money into finding a pill to curb the appetite, because it’s easier and more socially acceptable than shaking the parents and saying for crying out loud stop trying to kill your children. And we’ll probably keep attempting to blame the behavior of the morbidly obese on outside factors, but at the end of the day, there is no need for lipo in third world countries. Jesus there are starving peasants on the African continent who would gratefully eat the fat our surgeons suck out. The very idea that “We can’t help being fat! It’s an illness, not our fault! Our country is just too wealthy!” isn’t just false, it’s shameful.
There just isn’t a fat gene. There may be a problem with dopamine and some other hormones that lead people to self-soothe with a addiction, but researchers won’t discover a gene that makes people fat.
They will also tell you they lessen over time, even if they never go away. And alcoholics and smokers who are successful in dealing with their addition generally do so by giving up the problematic substance completely and forever. That is not possible do do with food, for obvious reasons (although giving up certain types of food that are problematic is).
IF that child has a genetic predisposition to obesity, yes, that environment will set him up for a lifetime of trouble. If the child doesn’t, raising him in that environment doesn’t cause weight gain. We know that from studies of adoptees (particularly identical twins raised apart, who end up with very similar weights as adults despite being raised in completely different families with very different family eating and exercise patterns).
Because in third world countries food is limted and expensive relative to the family’s income - and what food is available is minimally processed and not hyperpalatable.
Why do you find the truth shameful? I repeat: weight is as heritable as height. Which doesn’t mean average population weight can’t change over time, just as average population height does.
The Dutch children who grew up during and after WWll (when there was a serious food shortage in Europe) are on average 4" shorter then their descendents. Does the Netherlands today have a height problem because this generation is so much taller than the previous one? Should the Netherlands induce an artificial famine to get their current height problem under control?
True. There are many, many genes involved in appetite control and weight regulation, and they interact in complex ways with the environment, which is why we see a range of body phenotypes in every population on Earth, and changes in a given population’s phenotypes with changes in the environment.
If we want our population to become thinner on average then we are now, we need to change the obesogenic environment we’ve inadvertently created over the past century. That will solve the problem (but make no mistake, there will still be some heavy people in such a society - they’ll just weigh 200 lbs instead of 600 lbs).
They’ve already discovered several which do, actually. Although that’s mostly of academic interest, as those gene mutations are mercifully rare in the general population.
Prove to me that feeding the exact same diet of 2000 calories per day to two different people of similar shape, race, and age will lead the one with a “genetic propensity towards obesity” to become obese while the other maintains a healthy weight.
No, you’ve heard about teetotalers because they often volunteer that information in order to explain why they have declined a drink or because they feel the need to testify. Ordinary people have periods of addiction and dependence, and lessen their intake of the substance that caused them problems without banning the substance from their lives.
Bolding mine. This is the most intellectually dishonest statement in popular medicine today, and it’s pure spin. Why not say “If the child has a genetic predisposition to overeating”? The first statement implies that obesity is akin to suffering from a genetic predisposition to Huntington’s disease, as though obesity is an unavoidable, incurable disease that cannot be avoided. But it is, both avoidable and treatable. Why not honestly describe the tendency to overindulge or self-medicate with food for a more accurate picture?
You mean that both twins may suffer from a similar dopamine/other hormone imbalance that leads them to overindulge or self-medicate with food? Because if they both take in approximately 2,000 calories per day, neither will become obese barring a catastrophic metabolic disorder.
So, pretty much it tastes good and that’s why we can’t help it. Quite possibly a more inadequate excuse than “processed food is cheaper than whole food”.
How do you explain families with a mixture of obese and thin siblings?
We didn’t need to coin a buzzword to describe cheap, easily accessible fatty food. There are many, many temptations in this country which are widely available and easy to obtain that people decline to abuse. Psilocybin mushrooms are widely scattered on cow shit all over America, but the average Joe isn’t tripping balls all day just because they are easy to get. Any number of inexpensive household paints and cleaners can provide a high, but most of us aren’t huffing.
Look, it would be nice if processed food manufacturers and restaurants would stop relying on sugary, fatty fillers to pimp out cheap food. And if we could put enough social pressure on the industry to back off on the sugar, corn syrup, salt, and fat, we would all be healthier. Or, we can spend billions attempting to find a magic pill or surgery to curb the appetite. But why do that, when we can achieve the same goal with moderation and a decent exercise regimen and taking responsibility for our own health and well-being rather than forcing everyone else to accommodate and fix overindulgence?
There is no such proof in humans, as we can’t trap them in laboratories for a lifetime and feed them exactly 2k calories per day. However, it’s quote easy to prove in rats, and it’s been easy to breed strains of rats who will ‘naturally’ become obese eating the exact same diet as an average, normal-weight rat without a genetic predisposition to fatness. Physiological difference between obese (fa/fa) Zucker rats and lean Zucker rats concerning adiponectin - PubMed
There’s a lot of important research being done on the causes of obesity, metabolic syndrome and it’s increasing effect on the world population etc - you should definitely read a bit before you start insisting that being fat or thin is only about how much you choose to eat and exercise. There’s enough science out there at this point that anyone trying to simplify it to that, sounds very silly. The more we learn about the body, the more sure we are that obesity is extremely complicated and multi-factored.
I don’t understand why, on the SDMB of all places, people insist on filtering the extremely interesting and widely researched scientific issue of body weight and fatness, only through their own anecdotal, personal experience, opinions and judgement. Every thread about fat people devolves into this ridiculous ‘why don’t they just eat less!’ circular argument, and none of the people making it seem at all interested in educating themselves further on the subject.
I’m reading the shit out of Zucker rat studies, and what I’m finding is a plethora of research about increased Zucker appetites and lethargy. There is nothing surprising about the studies so far: lethargic Zucker rats allowed free range to gorge get fatter and eat themselves stupid. The studies seem to be mainly about “What and how much do obese rats eat and why do they overeat and lay around?” and “Let’s turn these fat rats loose, observe their excessive eating habits, then check their blood sugar and metabolic panel for a cause of their increased appetite.”
Here’s what I turned up: “…obese rats consistently eat more food than lean rats”
and this: "Food intake was greater in butter-fed rats than in soybean oil–fed rats. However, despite an apparently larger effect in obese Zucker rats, there was no interaction between phenotype and diet, suggesting that the effect did not differ significantly between obese and lean rats." In reading this full study, it’s determined that lean and obese rats appear to burn different fats at different weights, but the conclusion: “exercise of moderate intensity seems to be sufficient to promote fat oxidation”
What I can’t find is evidence that moderate or reduced calorie intake and moderate exercise results in chronically obese Zuckers. “We fed Zuckers and typical rats the exact same diet, exposed them to the same conditions and the same exercise, and the Zuckers became more and more obese while the typical rats remained healthy.” Can you find that study for me?
As far as the criticism against the “Western diet” model, free access to the Western diet makes an already lethargic and overindulgent rat sicker. That isn’t a breakthrough. But how do you explain the millions of people who are thriving on the Western diet with no ill effects?
Your link does not appear to state the point you are using it for. It would indeed be very interesting if one rat could gain weight more than another, eating the same, calorie-controlled diet.
Maybe not a lifetime, but how about six months? Because Columbia University’s Rudolph Leiber and Michael Rosenbaum have done exactly that, housing research subjects in a completely controlled laboratory environment while monitoring every aspect of their caloric intake and output.
Their results showed that subjects who arrived at a certain weight after weight loss need substantially fewer calories to maintain that weight than did subjects who started at that weight.
Basically, former fatties need to work a lot harder to maintain a normal weight than do people who were never fat to begin with. And that doesn’t even get into neurochemical differences between normal-weight and obese people. For anyone curious to learn more, I highly recommend this New York Times article.
I don’t understand it, either. Generally, I think most of it has to do with ignorance and no desire for understanding (a few rat studies don’t count), but some of it’s also because fat people are perceived as a socially acceptable target. Specifically to SDMB, across a number of threads lately I’ve noticed quite a bit of intolerance and lack of compassion.