Obese Boy Scouts not allowed to attend Jamboree. Fat discrimination or common sense?

In My Humble Opinion
321

As someone who has (1) quit smoking, and was definitely an addict to it; and (2) dropped 40 pounds and kept it off for some years (from 230-and-growing to 190 - I’m a 6’ guy in his 40s), I’ll relate my, entirely subjective, view of the matter.

To me, the two are different, but they are more alike than they are different. I will explain how.

In the case of both smoking and over-eating, what really matters isn’t the mechanism of “quitting” - in my case, with smokes, it was cold turkey - as the making of significant lifestyle changes. It isn’t enough to say “well, I’m not smoking, that is that”. You gotta change your pattern of behaviour and activity, because, for me at least, my former patterns included having a smoke.

This is pretty burdensome, because having a smoke was tied into a lot of things I found enjoyable - from going out for a drink with friends, to taking a break from work, even sitting on the dock at the cottage and watching the sun set. True, I could (and now do) enjoy all of those things without a smoke, but my pattern of behaviour was to smoke doing them.

Eating was much the same deal. Part of the pattern of activity I enjoyed involved eating, or at least consuming calories - going to family events and birthday parties, going out for a drink, even going to a movie involved (traditionally) getting buttered popcorn and a pop.

It took a great deal of effort and inconvenience to arrange my activities so that I could avoid patterns in which smoking and eating were part of the pattern.

Eating is different in that of course aside from the purely negative activity of arranging one’s habits and routines to avoid eating “recreationally”, you have to go that extra mile to positively arrange one’s activities to eat sensibly.

However, the big difficulty in both cases is really the same - that it can be really, really tough to arrange your existing life to accomodate your new reality. Your smoking and drinking buddies you may not have as much in common with, if you don’t smoke and only drink moderately. You don’t take smoke breaks at work. Your in-laws have arranged a traditional holiday feast, and you don’t partake above a salad and some chicken breast - they are pissed. You go to a movie and don’t have popcorn. These are little things, but their cumulative effect can be harsh, because along with giving up the addictions and bad habits which are doing you harm, it can seem like you are giving up on the enjoyable small change of life.

The key, of course, is to replace the former habits with new ones which are also enjoyable but are not centred on the self-harming behaviours. So in reality, both quitting smoking - which appears a totally passive decision (that is, you just stop) and quitting over-eating - which does not, both really require some positive action to succeed - the positive action of replacing old habits and patterns with new.

At least, that’s been my experience. Others may find it different.

322

And what happens to those addicts who never curb their own appetites for harmful substances? They require more and more until they die from overdose or complications due to the addiction, right? So show me all the chronic overeaters who eat and eat and eat with no limitation. Where are they? Right, the handful of people who approach 1,000 pounds all die young. What of the remaining morbidly obese people? Why haven’t they eaten themselves to death yet? Because they do have limits, that’s why.

…or you can continue to insist that a food addiction is uncut able and irreversible, completely deny the existence of formerly obese persons who are successfully maintaining a lower weight and either continue puking up smart-ass retorts and hold your breath until medical science produces a magic pill which cures morbid obesity so chronic over eaters can eat themselves into a permanent state of ever-expanding stasis.

Pick a battle, colander. Either chronic overeaters have some options and hope for a moderate lifestyle, or they are doomed. Which is it?

323

I agree with that too. Part of the problem is that food manufacturers have gotten very devious about selling addictive foods while holding them out as being healthy.

Just the other day, I was at the gym and I saw a vending machine which supposedly sold healthy snacks. It had things like reduced-fat cookies; “Pirate Booty” cheese popcorn and so on.

324

Usually an addict’s use of the addicting substance reaches a stable level at some point, and that level of use may be maintained for years. However, they are unable to taper down from that level of use to a lower one successfully and it’s the complications caused by the addicting substance which eventually kills them.

325

Alright, so since you, a doctor, Stoid, the tireless advocate for fat acceptance, and colander, the persistent voice of negativity have determined that chronic obesity is a hopeless, incurable, and terminal condition despite the existence of many who have conquered it, what do you propose we do? Wait for a magic pill? Allow parents to enable their morbidly obese kids to eat themselves into an early death? Redesign all public spaces to fit ever expanding girths and the scooters required to move them about? Or dig in and find possible solutions that already exist to help people not eat themselves into isolation?

326

Thanks for adding your experience to this thread, Malthus. I agree that setting up alternative activity patterns to replace the old, bad ones is often the key to maintaining weight loss long-term, and also to successfully quitting smoking, hard drugs, or alcohol. I doubt, though, that you would have succeeded in quitting smoking had you chosen to gradually taper back rather than stopping cold turkey, because most smokers who do quit for good do it precisely the way you did. Those who try to taper, or who just try to reduce their use significantly (say from one pack per day to one cigarette per day) generally find they slide right back into the old consumption pattern over time. And I can believe that some obese people need to use that same approach (quitting a food cold turkey) for certain items they find particularly triggery (ice cream, potato chips, soda, whatever) if they are going to successfully maintain that weight loss in the long run.

Out of curiosity, did you have any foods you found you needed to give up completely (or at least never keep in your house, but only consume elsewhere)?

327

Well, that is not exactly what I mean. Most overeaters find that they have the greatest success on a diet that includes as few starch-based foodstuffs as possible, as these foods are among the most difficult to moderate one’s consumption of. Unfortunately, this excludes, among others, breads, grains, pasta, and potatoes-foods that most people find it rather difficult to do without, considering their low price points and generally high shelf-stability.

328

Obesity is currently incurable, yes. But it’s hardly terminal or hopeless. A weight loss of 5-10% is enough to avoid metabolic syndrome in almost all cases, and that level of weight loss IS sustainable long-term (even though it’s often not enough to return the person to a normal weight). And if we wish to, we can make changes that will alter the environment in the US in ways which make it harder for people to become morbidly obese.

We could teach people to avoid eating heavily processed foods in favor of unprocessed foods, and to regard items high in sugar and fat as potentially additive (not merely fattening). We could teach kids that daily exercise is critical to health, and must not be skipped, and use PE classes to introduce them to a wide variety of physical activities (not merely competitive team sports) which they might be able to keep up as adults.

We can end agricultural subsidies which keep the price of corn and soybeans (and their derivatives, HFCS and soy oils) artificially low. We can tax the hell out of foods with added sugars and fats as well. If junk food becomes more expensive, people will eat less of it. We could even treat the most problematic items (like sodas) the way we now treat alcohol and tobacco, and put tight limitations on sales and advertisements of these items (including age restrictions).

We can take vending machines and fast food out of schools, and re-institute the idea that food is to be consumed primarily at mealtimes.

We could build our towns and cities to be more walkable and bikable, and build more public exercise facilities. We could also encourage shorter working hours, to allow people more free time for exercise.

There are lots of things we could do. But right now there are powerful lobbies which are working hard ensure that no effective action is going to be taken. And I’m afraid those lobbies are going to succeed.

329

Do you happen to have a cite for this? My understanding, from the NWCR, is that successful dieters generally eat a diet which is low in fat but otherwise balanced.

330

Tapering off certainly did not work for me and smokes. I tried that a couple of times, only to smoke as much as ever.

I think the main reason, in my case at least, is that tapering off wasn’t a real, solid committment to quitting. I did not change any of my activites, I only said “I’ll smoke less”. That means I did my same old activities, only less of them … which, naturally enough, I could not keep up indefinitely.

In my mind, I think, I really didn’t (yet) want to quit. I wanted to say I was quitting, and yet not really change anything, except smoke less. Of course in a couple of weeks I was back to smoking as much as ever.

Now, that being said, I’m not the guy to say there is only one true way to quit. Some people use the patch or Chantix or whatever, and some people swear by them. I suspect that the people who succeed are the ones who have made a firm committment in their mind to quit hell or high water. I know I didn’t really do that before; sure, part of my mind wanted to quit, but part also wanted to keep smoking, so “tapering down” was just a half-assed halfway house - for me.

So, in my opinion, the real issue isn’t the method, it’s the fact of having made a really firm decision to do it. Go into it with mixed motives, and no matter what the method, it likely won’t work. The method can help or hinder, but it can’t make you want to quit - that you have to do.

Of course, some “methods” are more likely undertaken by the half-assed in mind, as I was - like “cutting down”. I have also heard the explaination that cutting down prolongs the withdrawal symptoms, which may have some merit to it, but I think by far the bigger factor (at least to me) was that I was going into it half-assed.

Now as to food (and drink), for me it wasn’t any particular food, it was more the fact of eating (and drinking)-as-fun: sitting to watch a movie, I’d chew on some chips; or go out and have some drinks. Consuming calories, in whatever form, was just tied up with my activities.

My wife and my kid don’t have any issues with weight, and there are all sorts of snacky foods around the house, for them. Sometimes I even have some, but rarely and in small amounts. What counts is not sitting watching Terminator 2 with a large bag of Doritos in hand, like I used to.

331

Troppus, nobody but you thinks that our only two choices are to either dray fattos with repeated exhortations to just stop eating all those nachos or to just throw up our hands and give up. There really is a rather large body of research regarding which behavior modification approaches meet with the greatest rates of success, and there are likewise many public-policy papers that discuss the best way to increase availability of these types of programs to the general populace.

If you are actually interested in being a part of the solution to this problem, I’d advise you to devote less time to vomiting inaccuracies all over this thread and more time to looking up some of these public health initiatives local to you and getting some fund-raising done.

I’m such a wet blanket, aren’t I? :frowning:

332

When you take a good look at American society, it’s amazing how ubiquitous that “fun must involve food” pattern is. And we’ve let food (especially junk food) creep into places where it never was allowed to be before. When I was a kid in elementary school, vending machines in the schools simply did not exist. Mom packed us kids a sack lunch, and that was all the food we had at school. So for the entire 8 hours or so that I spent there, there was simply no food temptation to avoid. Likewise, workplaces and offices had fewer vending machines; people were expected to bring their lunch in or to go out on their lunch break to eat elsewhere, and folks just didn’t snack at their desks. We as a society could go back to those older eating patterns, if we were sufficiently determined to do so. And that would certainly help!

333

A question for anyone here with food issues:

Have you often felt the urge to pig out on plain, dry baked potatoes, i.e. with no added oil, salt, etc.?

Same question for plain white rice.

334

Prove it. Mind you, several posters here have related their personal experience with correcting their own obesity, and each of us can post online testimonials all day to demonstrate that chronic over eaters can and do maintain a healthier diet and lifestyle.

We do this in every possible venue. The backlash against the First Lady’s goals towards this end was swift and shameless, much like the backlash against discussing reasonable substitutions for crappy food have been in this thread.

You’re speaking to a cure for obesity here, and these steps are evidence that there are solutions and alternatives which do not involve magic pills. Funny how it’s cool when you say it, but not when others recommend healthier fare and more exercise.

Yep. Because of attitudes like Stoid’s who shameless co-opts words like starvation to describe the state of being uncomfortably hungry, and because of your own insistence upon using the word obesity where chronic overeating is a more accurate and honest fit for people who are sick by their own hands and not by an environmental toxin or a communicable epidemic. Spin has a lot of influence in this country, and buzzwords trotted out by experts and pundits are quick to become law. This is how learned helplessness is born: when those who present themselves as experts teach an ignorant public they are powerless to change their circumstances.

335

I don’t have to. it’s already been posted a number of times: 95% of people who attempt to lose a significant amount of weight regain it all within 5 years (and often add several more pounds, to boot). Right now we have no way of changing that statistic: every approach that has been attempted (apart from gastric bypass surgery, which succeeds in promoting long-term weight loss only about 50% of the time) has failed to alter those statistics.

We actually don’t do it, and that backlash (which is deliberately aided and abetted by the food industry) is one of the major reasons why.

What I have proposed is in no way a cure for obesity. It’s merely an attempt to control it by reducing its frequency and severity. Reducing the frequency and severity of a chronic disease process is NOT the same as curing it.

In an environment where calories are cheap and readily available at all times in essentially unlimited quantities, there is no difference. In such an environment, chronic overeating quickly and inexorably leads to obesity. The only countries where the rate of obesity is not rising are those where calories remain expensive and food is hard to come by.

Just because you have an issue with the fact doesn’t make them any less facts.

336

I can’t eat a large amount of plain potatoes, but I can easily overeat white rice and breads, yes. (Especially breads!)

337

artemis, I’m referring to your insistence upon referring to “a genetic propensity towards obesity” rather than a genetic propensity towards over eating like we discussed earlier. Medical science does not blame the melanoma earned by a sun worshipped a “genetic propensity towards skin cancer”, the emphysema earned by a lifetime of smoking on a “genetic propensity towards lung disease” or the cirrhosis earned by years or alcohol abuse on a “genetic propensity towards liver disease”. Blaming obesity on genetics alone as you’ve done frequently with that pet phrase is handing chronic overeaters a doctor-approved excuse to defend their bad habits until an early death.

Your stats which you say prove that long term weight loss is not sustainable includes those people who employ fad diets, crash diets, fasts, cleanses, over the counter pills, and other unsound and unreasonable measures that are hopelessly flawed. Please show me the stats on reasonable, doctor approved diets and exercise regimens.

338

I disagree since the groups are representative of different types of people.

If you pick a thousand random thin people who were always thin; and a thousand random thin people who used to be fat, it’s reasonable to hypothesize that, on average, the groups were always different even before the former fatties got fat. Individual differences will not necessarily cancel out.

I mean, why did the former fatties get fat in the first place? On average, they were almost certainly different in some important way from the group which never got fat.

339

Yes, please try to look those up for me. TIA.

340

What do you make of the many people who claim to have lost substantial weight and kept it off for years and years?