I was reading about the study, known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.
Apparently the men were expected to walk 22 miles a week.
Also, their rations were adjusted every week, up or down, with the goal of making them lose 25% of their body weight over a few months.
For a young man who is not overweight, losing 25% of one’s body weight is nothing at all like losing 25% of one’s body weight for someone who is obese.
Lots of results there. An answer to my request wasn’t among the first few, but I did learn a lot about you!
That’s what you’re doing, not why you’re doing it. I’m not sure the term “educate” is appropriate given that you attempt to support your position with an irrelevant study.
In counterpoint I’ll cite as evidence the millions of people like me who have chosen to reach and maintain a healthy weight. We even get to eat protein!
Disagree.
1500 calories is about right for an small-to-average adult with a “normal modern” lifestyle, maybe a bit much.
I did 1,000 cal/day for 11 weeks in Basic Training. Slimmed down rapidly, felt hungry all the time.
At no point was I in physical or emotional danger from ‘starvation’. At the end of 11 weeks, I was ready to eat, but not ravenous.
The motive is not so ulterior. Stoid has had a lot of failure in the weight loss game which creates cognitive dissonance. She handles the cognitive dissonance in various ways, one of which is to attempt to convince other people that long term successful weight loss is well nigh impossible.
Which is understandable…after all, while not impossible it’s obviously pretty frickin’ difficult. I think what Stoid doesn’t realize is that people around here are generally smart enough to know when a lot of smoke is being blown, so it hurts her cause more than it helps it.
Well, let’s start with one obvious fact about starvation: if you have access to food, you aren’t starving. This is starvation: The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people, or o[ne in eight people in the world, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012.](http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm) According to the World Health Organization, 870 million people do not have enough to eat while you demand pity for chronic over eaters who lay claim to starvation. 3.5 million children each year die from starvation:
Skipping a Big Gulp and a doughnut isn’t starvation. The way you use the word with regards to morbid obesity is wrong. And in my opinion it’s inappropriate and shamelessly self-serving.
This experiment proves nothing other than living off a diet devoid of protein and loaded with empty carbs is likely to make a subject sick and crazy. Please direct me to a physician approved diet with these specs. This “experiment” isn’t a reasonable or medically approved method of losing weight. A child would know better than to attempt calorie restriction like this. Your example bears zero relation to a real life scenario. No one’s asking morbidly obese people to restrict their intake to two dozen doughnuts per day in order to lose weight.
No one said that. We all said we have experience with denying ourselves the crappy food we’d like to indulge in and making some better choices instead, or stopping before we’ve eating ourselves into a stupor. Or getting up and forcing ourselves to be active when we’d rather lay around. We’re no different in that respect.
Many of us recognize that chronic overeating is an addiction and needs to be treated as such. Is anyone really so hopeless that they can’t stop themselves from refilling their soda cup over and over and can’t replace the occasional sugary drink with water? Or add an extra beef patty and skip the fries? I doubt anyone expects a person with a BMI above 40 to subsist on salads, and I doubt anyone exists who believes that attempts at cutting back a bit are hopeless. Except you. And since you are relatively well-spoken and have at the ready a few hundred or so cherry-picked claims that obesity is a terminal disease with no cure, I think it’s incredibly irresponsible to others to keep posting these unrealistic and outdated studies as proof that morbidly obese people can’t do anything to improve their lives.
I agree, and I also agree it’s annoying – for anyone, fat or thin – in a weight loss discussion when people inevitably wander in and say something like “Comon fatties, if you want to be thin just eat less!! Duh!!!”
Probably it’s especially annoying for fat people who have tried many times unsuccessfully to lose weight.
But no one ever says “You have to cut your intake to ten percent of what you’re currently eating.” Less means, well, less. There is no reason why someone who has eaten themselves into illness can’t cut 250-500 calories out by replacing soda with water. Or replacing a huge bag of Doritos with a small cheeseburger or other still satisfying but higher protein treat. Everyone defending their morbid obesity keeps claiming they never feel full, but no one is explaining how a liter of Mountain Dew helps them feel “full”.
This gives me an idea for a thought experiment.
Stoid, please imagine that someone – for whatever reason – stops consuming sweets such as soda, ice cream, etc., and instead eats fresh fruit. As much fruit as he wants until he feels full.
And suppose that the same person substitutes lean whole foods for junk food, for example eating a dry baked potato instead of french fries. But without any specific portion size, i.e. he can eat baked potato until he feels full.
And suppose that the same person starts going for a walk twice a day. With no predetermined length, he just walks until he feels tired of walking.
First, do you agree that such a person is likely to end up being thinner than before?
Second, would you say that such a person is “starving”? By your definition, he would seem to be starving. Even though he is free to eat until he feels full.
Well any way you slice it, it’s difficult for fat people to avoid those Doritos and Mountain Dew day after day, month after month, year after year.
Probably it is an addiction.
Well the claim is that skipping the fries and Mountain Dew is like “starvation.”
I suppose it’s like starvation in the same sense that if a smoker stops smoking his brain is starved for nicotine.
But not if the smoker employs a nicotine patch, right? So the chronic over eater is certainly capable of making smarter, more filling, high energy substitutions, just as a diabetic can. As can a sufferer of food allergies.
That’s an interesting question. It’s clear that nicotine patches are not super-effective. If they were, then there would be hardly any smokers above the age of 30.
I think part of the problem is that much of the craving for nicotine is withdrawal symptoms from previous nicotine use.
Probably it’s a similar problem. It’s difficult to fight an addiction using the substance you are addicted to.
That is pretty lousy advice. Consider:
Chronic overeaters do not typically find any food to be particularly filling. That is kind of the whole problem.
Do you know what “high energy” means, Troppus? (Hint: energy values of food are measured in kilocalories.)
To the first bolded part, YES.
There’s a lot of HFCS in our food that we may not even know about (read labels). It acts on the dopamine centers in our brains. For some people, it’s an addiction. This study is another rat study, but if you google Dr. Robert Lustig he has some interesting things to say on fructose and its deleterious effects on the body. MSG, which is found in most processed and fast foods, also has addictive properties.
As for the second bolded part, don’t fall out of your chair troppus, but I agree with you. I’m inclined to be quite a bit kinder to stoid because I’ve been overweight and have an idea where she’s coming from. It’s not a simple matter of calories in, energy out. There are chemicals like HFCS and MSG, and hormones like grehlin and leptin working against us. Some people are more susceptible to them than others. I gained weight because of antihistamines. Freaking antihistamines! It took me fifty pounds to figure out why the eff my appetite was insatiable. In me, antihistamines suppress leptin, which is a hormone that tell us we’re not hungry. That insatiable feeling completely over-rides any intellectual thought process. Biology wins every single time.
But there is absolutely no good reason to accept being overweight or obese. Once I figured out what was going on and stopped the antihistamines, I took a number of nutrition classes (still am), learned about nutrition, immersed myself in it, (re)learned how to eat healthily (whole foods, not processed or fast foods), lost weight and kept it off. Learning about nutrition is one key. It was a shock to learn how much I was eating, how little I needed to eat, and how truly horrible processed foods are. The other key is fitness. There are studies that show a *fit *obese person has no more health risks than a normal-weight fit person.
I have so much empathy for overweight/obese people because I’ve been there. I know first-hand it’s not nearly as simple as so many fat-shamers think. But even just moving more will help. Bringing it back to the topic, again, the BSA has the opportunity to help/educate obese kids with these things during Jamboree, and it’s such a shame they don’t choose to embrace it.
We do have to get rid of the prejudice and be supportive. That doesn’t help at all. It’s beyond me why people think others *choose *this.
I see what you did there. 
Energy-dense vs. nutrient-dense.
People quit addictions all the time, and a gradual tapering down,making smarter substitutions, or seeking help from a physician or therapist are viable, sensible alternatives to cold turkey.
Funny how no one ever claims an addiction to water, huh?
Even if you charitably assume she meant to say “nutrient dense”, foods with high nutrient density aren’t any tougher to overeat than any other foods. Protein bars will get you just as fat as the same number of Snicker’s bars will, and brown rice instead of white won’t do you any favors.
High protein, high fiber foods are more filling due to sheer bulk than a liter of sugar water. There are few limits to how much easily digestible liquified sugar an overeater can take, but even the biggest, most stretched out stomach can only hold so much bulk which takes time to digest.
Yes, and people successfully diet all the time. So what? I’m not the person arguing that effective weight loss is impossible.
I’m not sure what your point is here. Can you elaborate?
That is a huge part of the problem. The temptation is literally always there. It takes very little effort to find and consume these items, and the effect is immediately pleasurable. It’s just too easy to give in to the temptation.
I can remember when cigarettes were cheap and sold in vending machines, and when cigarette ads ran on TV and could be found in newspapers and magazines. We had a lot more smokers back then. Kids would get hooked in high school, and by the time they were old enough to understand the long-term health implications, they couldn’t quit.
Removing the constant temptation of cigarettes everywhere and making a smoking habit too expensive for the average kid to afford has done a lot to reduce the smoking rate in this country.
I don’t have the cites in front of me at the moment, but some studies have shown that food engineered to be hyper-palatable activates the same centers of the brain as addictive substances like nicotine and cocaine. So yes, in at least some people it probably IS literally an addiction. And unfortunately addiction is tough to treat (most smokers never succeed in quitting long-term, nor do most alcoholics). So these foods present a problem. Some people can consume them safely, but others cannot. So how to we deal with that problem? With alcohol and tobacco, we’ve had to resort to a combined approach of public education plus erecting barriers to easy sales. I don’t think, though, that we’re willing yet to erect the same sales restrictions on hyper-palatable foods.
Not quite. Studies have shown that the metabolism of someone who have been significantly obese for a number of years is permanently altered - they require about 15-20% fewer calories to maintain their non-obese weight than they would have if they had never become obese in the first place. And their metabolic parameters while they are holding that weight ARE identical to those of someone who literally IS starving to death. It makes no intuitive sense (after all, they aren’t starving at all, they are a normal weight), but that’s how their body reacts to the weight loss nonetheless. Add to that any cravings for the “addictive” foods, and it’s not so surprising that most people can’t sustain significant weight loss (defined as greater than 5-10% of their starting weight) indefinitely. Their own body is fighting against them, and it generally wins. Those who do succeed generally do so by developing the same sort of extreme eating discipline that anorexics use (which hardly qualifies as a healthy pattern of eating, regardless of the number of calories consumed).
That’s why keeping kids from becoming obese in the first place is so very important. And to do that, we need to alter the general food environment in this country, so that it’s harder for kids to make bad food choices that offer short-term pleasure at the expense of long-term health. While public education can get us part of the way there, I don’t think it will get us all the way there. People generally choose short term-pleasure even at the cost of long-term pain, and children and teens especially can’t fully reason out the lifetime consequences of (for example) developing a soda habit.