And do you you see me claiming that most men over 50 with potbellies can completely exercise and/or diet them completely away?
My claim, again, is that anyone can exercise at least moderately. Not doing so is a choice. Those who choose to exercise at least moderately have the best chance at minimally blunting the severity of a potbelly or preventing one best yet. A not insignificant number can reverse it. But with or without some residual potbelly the choice to exercise is a very common one to make and one that comes with major health returns and is what makes the biggest impact on the potbelly.
Exercising moderately is not winning the Powerball; it is very common.
[QUOTE=DSeid;19494929Exercising moderately is not winning the Powerball; it is very common.[/QUOTE]
Is it? The President’s Council on fitness says 80% of the population doesn’t exercise enough, though over 50% claim to work out 3 days a week . And if I remember right, the numbers really drop off if you look at people that work out consistently years, rather than the typical peaks and valleys around New Years and summer swimsuit season.
Lots more common than Powerball winners, sure, but I’ve noticed that being fit has gotten more and more noteworthy as I aged, starting in my 30s.
The word “IF” is powerful, and indicative of the problem. Use “If” wisely.
If they would eat right and exercise moderately, then <whatever>.
Vs.
If people could be enabled to eat right and enabled to exercise, then <whatever>.
I am in the camp of the latter of the above statements.
People are incapable of eating to a point where the can sustain a healthy body shape and BMI once they’ve drifted from a healthy body shape and BMI… because the fact that they drifted from it in the first place proves they are ‘wired’ to do so, and can only shed that body shape temporarily.
While anecdotal, I’ve seen thousands try. I can name none that have done so successfully (obese to healthy BMI and stay there). Been in gyms since I was 16; been training people in multiple gyms; seen people get physical and mental guidance. No luck. Not one case can I cite.
The stats around stomach bypass/lap banding/stapling and all the procedures that alter the digestive system through surgery show that with the help of therapists, family, surgeons, doctors and nutritionists, and pending death… the failure rate is at 97-98%.
Eating is, conservatively, 80% of the problem. And exercise? No one is going from sloth to active and staying there permanently either.
So, getting rid of a middle-age or AARP gut? If they just eat right and exercise… if they could just find the will, or not be so lazy. No… they just can’t. A rare exception is out there, but we can’t judge all by the capabilities of a rare few enabled mentally and physically.
Are you offering this as a possible explanation should it turn out that the correlation (that fat kids don’t eventually develop potbellies) is false, or are you saying that correlation definitively known to be false?
Not quite what they say. What they say is that “80% of adults do not meet the guidelines for both aerobic and muscle-strengthening activities” which is “at least two and a half hours (150 minutes) each week of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity” and “strengthening activities, like push-ups, sit-ups and lifting weights, at least two days a week.”
That’s a nice ambitious goal but honestly I am pleasantly surprised that 20% of American adults hit both the aerobic and strength training goals. Check out the data and it is about half that hit the aerobic one: 49.2% of adults are doing at least two and half hours of moderate intensity aerobic physical activity each week. There are of course also some number of gym rats who do no where near that amount of aerobic activity focusing instead on strength training.
Hitting that aerobic guideline has been fairly consistently increasing since 2005, having been 41% (again to 49%). Also hitting both has increased significantly from roughly 16% in 2006 to over 20.8% in 2014. Yes indeedy, many more are finding that they are not incapable of exercising and are choosing to do so, even to the ambitious levels set as the goals by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness.
Moreover the number somehow suddenly no longer incapable of choosing to exercise increased more in 2015 “with 55.5% indicating frequent exercise in June 2015, more than in any month since Gallup and Healthways began tracking this metric in January 2008.”
Hitting that President’s Council bar for aerobic exercise stays in the mid 40 percents even for those 65 to 74 years old. For both aerobic and strength targets it stays over 14%.
And let’s be very clear here: no one, including the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, claims that less than hitting both or even either of their goals is of no benefit. The biggest benefit, including on the op specific of avoiding and reducing the potbelly, is from avoiding inactivity. The dose response curve of physical activity to health benefits (inclusive of potbelly reduction) is steepest going from none to modest and then progressively flattens out. Going from none to just 90 minutes a week of moderate aerobic (just brisk walk level) alone (far below the Council’s goals) is dramatic. Our gym rats who do only strength training and no aerobic are not gaining no health benefits either.
Does it drop off with age? Not as much as you seem to think.
Well first but not foremost … you make a very good case that you suck as a trainer!
More foremost though is yes, IF you set as the goal something that is absurd and define failure as not meeting that absurd goal then most will fail and be discouraged.
OTOH if success is defined as eating a moderately healthy diet (with many nutrition patterns fitting that, no need to debate which is best) and exercising moderately, such as 90 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise each week, then most Americans can hit the goal. IF the goal for those who already are obese is to lose 5 to 10% of their weight by way of improved nutrition and exercise, and maintain that loss by maintaining those habits, then most obese American have an achievable goal that accomplishes the lion’s share of the health benefits (including significant reduction of a potbelly) and relatively fewer will fail and be discouraged.
The data above demonstrates that you are simply wrong. Consistently more and more have become more active and are maintaining that increase.
If it is a subjective “I know it when I see it” then as a possible explanation.
If the definition is having some arbitrary absolute amount of visceral abdominal fat or ratio of visceral abdominal fat to fat-free mass, then I can say that it is clear that those who are obese as kids are more likely to have more visceral abdominal fat stores as an absolute and in relation to fat-free mass as middle aged adults than those who were not obese as children.
If the definition is fraction of visceral abdominal fat to subcutaneous fat then I do not know.
At the risk of being an obnoxious multi-poster … Cite for the increase in visceral abdominal fat (visceral adipose tissue; VAT) stores correlating with total overall fat stores (obesity) in kids. Of note is that greater childhood physical activity was strongly associated with less VAT but not with less subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) stores.
An interesting paragraph from the conclusion:
This article is also highly pertinent to this discussion. 144 men with documented abdominal obesity aged 30 to 64 recruited into a 3 year program. Nothing too intense. Every other week counselling for the first 4 months then just monthly (pretty modest level of support), advising them on keeping a modest diet (500 Cal/d deficit … on average going from about 3000 Cal/d to about 2500) and advised to aim for160 min/week of only moderate intensity aerobic physical activity, basically just enough to move them solidly into that upper half of the population on aerobic and not hitting the full President’s Council recommendations.
At one year 81% were still with it. Actual exercise reported on average just below the 150 minutes per week advised by the President’s Council. The improvements on cardiometabolic risk factors gained by such an intervention has been well established in the past and thus it is no surprise to see that such happened here as well, dramatically, again with fairly modest exercise and diet that 81% were able to stick with. The notable part was how much more VAT was loss than SAT and that
More stunning was that
Bottom line?
A very moderate intervention with very modest support, 4 out 5 could stick with it, did not result in “normal BMI” and left them often with significant amounts of subcutaneous fat, but hit on the potbelly hard and improved health markers dramatically, correlated specifically with having hit on the potbelly.
You’d call them failures? Incapable of exercising? If so you are simply very wrong.
Let me approach this from a different angle. My presumption, and I believe it is a very reasonable one, is that I am nothing special. I was no teen athlete. I have no special athletic gifts. I do not believe that I am of intrinsically sterner stuff than anyone else. My gene pool is clearly predisposed to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. If I can manage to eat a nutritious diet and exercise regularly then pretty much the vast majority of humanity can as well, and they do not have to go as far as I take it to be gaining most of the health benefits even if neither they nor I become shredded or ripped as a result.
Yeah 100 million Americans that are constantly bombarded with ads for junk food, Who have HFCS added to everything, who have typical portion sizes at restaurants double that of the rest of the world, who can upsize everything for 50c extra.
The US has DOUBLE the rate of obesity as France, which is also a developed country, with mostly european ancestry. How is that so many more people in France can manage to avoid being obese? Are French people just genetically superior, lucky they are born with “good genes”? NOPE, its just culture and environment (eg easier access to healthier foods in more places) and different societal expectations.
So yes it’s perfectly possible for almost everyone in the US to stay below the medically obese body weight, but yeah its a hard thing to do alone when your entire culture makes it so easy to have 4000 calorie meals for under $10. The “fat acceptance” people are another part of the problem. No it’s not healthy to be in the medically obese body weight category and society / culture should be encouraging those people to do something about it. Which is what happens in many other countries, there are various government programs to educate people, try to make it easier for people to get healthy food (eg eliminating food deserts) and setting up free community exercise programs.
[snip study details, they’re still up there if you want to read them]
I’ve done it too-once weighed 245, and down to 180, have kept it off for 5 years now. Did pretty much what they did, lowered daily intake 500 calories or so, 90-150 minutes of (vigorous) cardio exercise per week. I avoid these high-calorie meals like the plague, most of my dinners are Lean Cuisine type TV dinners with 300-500 cals, and also have managed to avoid the junk food binges I used to go on.
Edit: I do have to admit that the genes are on my side-found my birth mother 20 years ago, she is fantastic shape for a 77 year old woman, both her mom and grandmother lived to be 99, active and healthy until the last year or so too.
Let us imagine that someone 5 ft 7 inches who does not do quite as much weight loss as **John DiFool **did, but with improved diet and regular exercise, inclusive of adequate aerobic exercise, lost (and maintained the loss) of about 10% of body weight call it from 245 to 220. BMI goes down from 38.4 to 34.5. Still solidly in the medically obese range. (Cut-off is 30.0.)
They will have lost large amounts of the potbelly, in particular large amounts of visceral abdominal fat tissue, and will be pretty damn healthy. The additional health benefits gained by losing a bit more than twice as much (still not as much as John has impressively lost and maintained the loss of, but enough loss to get out of “obese” and into “overweight” range) are real but nowhere near as huge and they are likely healthier with those habits having lost weight to 220 than a “normal” BMI sedentary junk food eating individual is … who likely has a visible paunch and a significant amount of visceral abdominal fat despite the normal BMI.
Healthy is relative, and I’d wager that 95%+ of people above the medically obese mark do not do regular aerobic exercise or eat a healthy diet. You can also find some body builders or professional athletes who are technically in the obese category due to muscle mass, I think you can pretty easily tell if someone is one or the other.
Saying that people are incapable of losing weight and keeping it off is like saying people are incapable of quitting smoking. Yeah its actually incredibly hard to do and many people relapse, but it can be done, especially because society has taken a bunch of steps to make it easier, banning tobacco advertising, putting warning stickers on cigarettes, etc etc, funding quit smoking programs. All those things worked, smoking rates have dropped considerably since the 1960s. Same sorts of things would work for obesity rates.
I can say that almost all can eat a healthy diet and exercise regularly and that all who do will reduce the severity of any middle aged pot belly and gain major benefits. If person who is obese does that they gain major major benefits even if they stay in the obese range.
And research suggests that you’d lose your bet. About 46% of the obese are metabolically healthy. Yes that is 56% who are not, so the glass is more than half empty, but 95%? No.
The analogy between keeping weight off (from obese to normal BMI) and quitting smoking is simply wrong. Nicotine cravings peak within a few days and subside after several weeks. For many they go away completely. The brain and body does not work like that with obesity. Once obese the body is devoted to defending the obese weight. Metabolism shifts and the brain drives to eat increase intake and it keeps it up long term. High satiety foods and regular exercise can blunt those long-term physiologic responses but they are long-term and the high degree of discipline required stays required forever. It is a much much bigger lift.
Beating the dead horse here but the point pertinent to this thread is that not all obesity is the same. The obese individual who exercises regularly and eats healthily is not only less obese overall than (s)he otherwise would have been, (s)he is highly likely has much less visceral abdominal obesity, much less of a potbelly, and is both likely to live longer and live better.
And again, a fair number of “normal weight” by BMI individual who eats crap and does not exercise can have relatively large amounts of visceral fat (the paunch) and these individuals with “normal-weight central obesity” have “the worst long-term survival.” The worst. To quantify: