I was, and have been, pointing out that eating less than you burn doesn’t apply in all cases. Might want to brush up on your reading comprehension.
BTW: I did some checking and found a medical site which says 5 million Americans are hypothyroid. That’s about one in 58 of us and possibly a whole lot of people for whom your mantra does not apply.
Okay. From my side the debate is closed, unless we’re actually gonna take this into GD.
Did someone mention bacon?
I can understand many of the points and views expressed by many of the folks who have been entrenched in this discussion.
I’ve had people tell me that I don’t understand what it’s like to be overweight since I normally live at the other end of the weight spectrum and I’m finally at a weight where I’m not teetering on the edge of being underweight for my height/age. Since I have the metabolism of a shrew I need a great amount of calories to maintain the weight I have so over-eating isn’t normally an issue.
It’s just fine if you want to tell the skinny guy to shut the fuck up.
I live in a society that is very similar to that of the good old U.S. of A. where every fast food restaurant offers gargantuan portions, where restaurants serve what I consider to be too much damn food, and many people generally eat way too much food that’s saturated with fats and sugars. Wait… many people just eat way too much period and this is a problem that every prosperous developed nation seems to have.
For some reason it really pisses me off to hear people bitch and moan about being overweight then regularly run to McD’s for that supersized Big Mac Meal. If your current physical appearance bothers you it’s fine to complain to me about it but my sympathy will dissolve when you follow that up by a constant failure to do something about it.
One woman I work with has health and weight issues and has been on a strict diet for the past five years we’ve worked together. She exercises daily and takes spectacular care of herself. The fact she cannot take the weight off speaks more to her other health issues than it does anything else and many people would probably say “fuck it” and indulge in a few donuts or a Big Mac. Her willpower and devotion to improving her health are admirable and I can see that ever so slowly, she is losing weight and this makes her happy. It may take another five years for her to reach a weight she’s comfortable with.
Other people I work with complain about being overweight and regularly get their supersized burger, fries, and mega pop for lunch. I’ve told people to their face that their weight issues might just be related to the fact they get the average days calories in their fat laden lunch.
The non- native Canadians I work with are generally are a much thinner, fitter bunch and this is related directly to their lifestyles and eating habits. They don’t often run to McD’s for lunch and generally bring very healthy meals to work like lean chicken, rice,
and plenty of vegetables.
Here’s an interesting thing, over the winter I noticed that I was starting to put on some extra weight which is something I’ve always had difficulty doing but that the weight was composed of fat and I was getting flabby… I actually had some love handles forming. The abs I’ve spent a lifetime keeping rock hard were getting a little “soft” by my standards.
I took a look at my lifestyle and realized that I was spending too much time sitting at my desk and not getting enough exercise because my knees and hips hurt like a bitch (arthritis). I was also indulging in too many unhealthy meals.
Despite the pain it caused, I got more active and cut out many of the junk food items in my diet as my thought was that if left unchecked, I would eventually have to deal with a much more difficult to resolve weight issue. If you’re arthritic, carrying around extra weight just makes things worse and I’m generally in enough pain thankyouverymuch.
I still weigh the same amount but the extra activity and thousands of crunches have almost replaced the “love handles” with more muscle and the flab is disappearing.
My grandfather looked like me when he was 40… at 90 he had a 54 inch waistline. Despite this he died of simple old age and not a massive coronary as many expected.
I’m still not going there.
The debate was closed from your side two pages ago. It’s just that nobody told you.
Oh yes, that would be exactly what you’re like, Tarantula, to take this into GD so you can infect another thread with your uninformed nonsense. :rolleyes:
Bottom line: No matter what someone weighs, be it 140 pounds or 440 pounds, no stranger or random acquaintance has ANY right to make any uninvited commentary (be it in the form of supposed advice or information or flat out insults, harassment or haranguing) about their body, their health or the foods that they choose to eat.
If you cannot manage this, you’re simply a boorish cretin who has no place in civil society. You’re probably also someone who has difficulties getting along with people with respect to other issues as well, because you’re not imbued with the decency, manners and common sense of a goat.
You might want to consider becoming a hermit for the good of the world.
And if you think that you know someone well enough to act with some idea of “intervention” then you should a.) know them well enough to have a good idea of what their issues are and b.) know what kind of approach would be useful and care enough about them that your “honesty” doesn’t supercede your knowledge (and you better have some) or your attention to the person in question or your compassion for their situation which had better be what’s compelling you to begin with.
Once again people seem to be saying that medication, glandular problems etc can cause people to put on fat without eating more calories than they burn.
Once again I ask: how? Energy, and therefore matter, cannot be created from nowhere. I am not trying to have a go at overweight people - its their body with which to do as they please - but a lot of people are obviously getting very het up about this. So I would live to hear the mechanism by which somebody who eats 1900 calories a day and burns 2000 calories a day still puts on fat. Anyone?
I dunno, r_k. I do know that not everyone burns calories at the same rate. Tarantula’s patented “eat less, exercise” diet plan more worked for me (although I’ve never been more than 15 pounds overweight), but the same diet (in smaller portions) and equivalent level of exercise didn’t work for my wife. As far as I can tell, the main difference is metabolic - I burn calories easily, while she needs to do twice as much exercise as me to start losing weight. It makes no sense to me, but there it is.
Hypothetical scenario: You’re walking down the street, and see a very inebriated person walking by. They smell of alchohol, they’re walking crookedly, etc. Then you see them take out a bottle of whiskey and take a drink from it. And you say “AHA! That drunk person is actually drinking whiskey! No wonder they’re drunk!”
Isn’t it like seeing a fat person overeating, and saying “AHA! That fat person is actually overeating! No wonder they’re fat!”
the problem is not everyone loses weight or regains it at the same rate. I have a friend who used to weigh 300. He cut his calories to 1000 a day and only lost 30 lbs in 6 months, roughly 1 lb a week and dropping to 270. Who knows how much of that was muscle or water, but if all of it was fat (which is a stretch) that means his metabolism was barely 1500 calories a day (in retrospect, cutting to 1000 a day was a bad idea for him and may have slowed his metabolism but he was 16 at the time & knew little of nutrition).
on the other hand, some people lose 2-3x as much weight as he did on 2500 calories a day.
I agree everyone can lose at least some weight. But not everyone loses it at the same rate & some regain it faster.
When when WHEN will people get stop talking about things they know little about? Of course there are good and bad foods and I’m not just speaking about bad foods as being those with harmful additives. A food that’s more glycemic will cause a spike in blood sugar triggering the release of insulin which will cause a rapid drop in blood sugar and convert the excess blood glucose to fat. Since are bodies didn’t evolve around such available sugars it overproduces insulin relative to the blood sugar level and will cause someone to be hungrier sooner.
To everyone else - please tell me what I am because I don’t know:
I don’t look on overweight people with any disdain
I just as easily assume that they would rather continue eating as they do and be obese than eat less and be thin unless I’m told otherwise.
If your overweight it’s because you eat too much and don’t exercise enough. Glandular problems are an exception but definately not the rule.
While fat people have been treated unfairly and unkindly by modern society, I think most of what are being called “fat-bashers” on this board are speaking about is the trend in not taking personal responsibility. You can consider overeating to be an addiction of sorts but you don’t see heroine addicts going to parades saying that their proud to be addicted because they aren’t responsible for it and have no control over it and that it’s “who they are.”
The original idea for The Matrix was to have the “machines” just enslave 10 fat guys with glandular problems for their energy needs and let the rest of humanity live a normal life but they had trouble creating a conflict from the idea.
I don’t think that anyone has said this. What people are talking about when they say that medication, glandular problems, etc. are affecting their ability to lose weight is that the number of calories that their body takes to maintain or lose weight is much smaller than what they can be satisfied eating.
Everyone keeps saying “eat less, exercise more” without taking into consideration that the definition of “less” for any particular person, the “less” that it’s going to take to effectively lose weight, may be unbearable. It is a biological imperative to eat, your body has untold checks and balances regulating hunger sensation, blood sugar levels, etc. Your metabolism’s job is to maintain, maintain, maintain. When you deprive yourself, your body is literally driving you to eat more.
Body composition has much to do with calorie consumption rates as well…a 6’ 250 lb man with 5% body fat is nearly solid muscle, and might need 5000 or more calories a day to maintain his weight. A 5’6" woman of the same weight with 50% body fat most likely has no muscle tone to speak of…and is also likely to have yo-yo dieted most of her life and has effectively ruined any chance she has of permanently losing weight. Her metabolism probably only requires about 1500 calories per day to maintain…maybe less. In order to lose weight, she may have to cut that to 1200 or 1000 calories. Do you have any idea what it’s like to eat 1000 calories a day for an extended period of time? And to know that you’re going to have to eat that way for the rest of your life to be successful?
As an aside, one of the reasons that low-carb diets are successful for a lot of people is that they allow you to cut calories (because yes…no one is denying that in order to lose weight, you have to EAT LESS than you’re burning) without the corresponding constant feeling of deprivation. Fat is satisfying, satiating. It allows the dieter to actually stay on the diet rather than starving for 6 weeks, losing faith and hope and getting more and more depressed about a future lifetime of deprivation and constantly falling off the wagon and binge eating.
Weight loss is an incredibly complex subject, and passing it off with a dismissive “eat less, exercise more” completely fails to take into account the realities of what people with serious weight problems face on a daily basis.
There might not be a definate answer to this, at least not yet. It seems that until recently, the medical community was denying the connection between hypothyroidism and weight gain. What is known is hypothyroidism causes metabolism to slow down; it’s possible that such people can be eating fewer calories than they burn but they’re burning those calories too slowly to catch with what they eat. There are reports of hypothyriod patients walking three miles a day on a 1000-calorie per day diet but they still can’t lose weight.
which is what i think some people who keep referring to glandular or genetic problems are referring to. the idea of eat less, exercise more will help with weight loss but at different weights. Someone who weighs 350 and by cutting to 1500 calories a day and 1 hr exercise a day who only loses 1/2 lb a week will be less apt to diet than someone who weighs 250 and loses 2 lbs a week on 2500 cals & 45 minutes of exercise a day.
its not a question of ‘can this person lose weight with exercise & diet’, most likely they can lose at least some. Its more a question of how much can they reasonably lose on a reasonable regimin. and for some people its not alot. I’ve seen tv shows about people who used to weigh 400 lbs… She got down to about 160, but even though she ran daily and ate 1000 cals a day she was barely maintaining her weight loss.
i wonder if i’ll get caught up in all this bitching now. damn
Jadis:
The wonderful thing about bodies is that they adjust. If you eat less your body gets used to less, your stomach shrinks, your blood chemistry adjusts and, Voila.
This latter part is just not true. You don’t ruin your chances of successful weight loss by yo-you dieting, and you’re not required to maintain a restrictive diet for life to avoid gaining it back, and getting along on 1,000 calories a day isn’t so terrible, though I can’t imagine why anyone would be stupid enough to do such a thing.
No. It’s not that complicated. In fact it is very simple. The problem is that there is so much pseudoscience and claptrap out there regarding fitness, nutrition, and weight loss that most people are simple grossly misinformed.
Goodness…I believe I detect a “Universal Me” fallacy going on here.
Just because a particular pattern of metabolism and weight loss is true for you does not mean it’s universal. Just because you have no problem maintaining your weight does not mean that I don’t. Just because you can eat one less lettuce leaf a day and lose an extra two pounds a week doesn’t mean that I can.
Until you’ve jumped into my body and tried to lose weight in it, shut the fuck up.
Preach it, brother Scylla! TESTUHFAH!
I’d also like to note that if it were as easy as “eat less, exercise more” there would be no such thing as an obese person anywhere, let alone the image-conscious U.S.A.
I have one question for all of those “It’s easy” people. Do you enjoy food? Or is it just fuel…like gassing up your car? Do you have taste buds? Does the flavor of food mean anything to you?
Because it does to me. And traditional diet food tastes like shit. I refuse to spend the rest of my life loathing the idea of my next meal and shoveling it in only because it’s necessary or else I’ll die. I’m trying to find the happy medium between good food and diet food. Because if my diet consists of nothing but rice and whole-wheat bread and lettuce, and I’m forever refused mayonnaise, butter or chocolate, I’d almost rather explode like Mr. Creosote. What good is living if you’re living miserably?
Where are you seeing that anyone in this thread has said that people are putting on fat without eating more calories than they burn?
I think r_k picked up on my saying weight loss isn’t simple in some cases and read it as they’re gaining weight.