Well, now…Scylla has spoken The Truth, so this thread is clearly finished and we can all pack up and go home now. [/sarcasm off]
I think that jayjay has hit the nail on the head (thank you, jayjay) with the “Universal Me” phenomenon. Just because you, or your sister, or your cousin, who whoever else has succeeded in weight loss doesn’t mean that what they did will work for me, or my sister, or my cousin.
Since this topic makes me insane with anger, I shouldn’t have posted at all and I shall not post again. Sorry if that disappoints anyone who would like to get into a cite war, but I just can’t do it and maintain any semblance of mental health. All I can hope for is that at least one person out of the thousands reading this thread might understand the issue even the tiniest bit better. That’s what the board is about, after all.
No problem, Jadis. Universal Me seems very common to some posters.
And I still never got an answer to my earlier question…where does the moral component here come from? Why are obese people so disgusting to some of you? Why does someone else’s weight mean so much to you? Especially when that someone else is a stranger. I’ve seen people’s faces break into an actual grimace of disgust when they see an obese person walking down the street. Where does this come from??
How does it affect you? Why does it affect you? Why is it any of your business? I’ve asked this question earlier in this thread. I’ve asked this question in previous “Fat is disgusting” threads. I’ve NEVER gotten an answer…
I’m gonna drag up a post I made a couple of years ago. This is what I wrote back in 2001 in a very similar thread.
Well, perhaps the time has come to tell my own story:
When I was a kid, I grew FAST. You know those amusement park rides for kids, the ones that say “you must be BELOW this line to enter”? Never been in one; I was over the line by age 7. In elementary school, I was growing so fast that some of my bones (the smaller ones, mostly) couldn’t keep up, and it was painful to walk for a while. I reached a height of 6’2" in around the 6th or 7th grade, and I’ve stayed there ever since.
The lowest weight I can remember in my semi-adult life was 235, in high school. I reached that weight by spending 6 months eating no breakfast, going to the school’s weight room and lifting instead of eating lunch, eating half a normal portion at dinner, then usually going to a martial arts class for an hour or so. And I still didn’t look “thin”, because my frame won’t permit it.
In college, after a girl I really liked dumped all over me, I decided that “looking good was the best revenge”. So, for a semester, I was lifting weights daily, running stairs, and hitting the heavy bag. I ate nothing in the dining halls but vegetables, rice, and noodles, forcing myself into the mindset that “food is not meant to be pleasure, it is fuel”. And I began to take the caffeine/ephedrine/aspirin “stack” four times a day, plus additional supplements when I lifted. I didn’t go so far as to take actual steroids, but I was so full of pills I practically rattled when I walked. Results: a rock-hard frame and a few notches tigher on my belt. And I still didn’t look “thin”, because my frame won’t permit it.
When I noticed my sleep cycle getting fucked up by the mega-doses of caffeine I was taking, and that I was starting to think and act with a short and violent temper, I stopped taking the pills. Because I had graduated and was on my own, I could no longer rely on the dining hall for a variety of veggies, and it’s a royal pain in the ass to cook for one. So, the weight came back.
Today, I still lift, but no longer to the point where I want to vomit after my workouts. I’m a big dude, and I’m certainly overweight, but the effort required to be “thin” is simply not worth it. Thing is, because I have such a large frame, I don’t think I look excessively overweight. I am mighty tired, though, of jackasses trying to insult me into weight loss programs that make me miserable with minimal results. I’m more healthy now than I was in college, certainly, and I sleep better at night. So go piss up a rope, you ignorant stick insect.
I’d like to close with something I said later in the very same thread:
You’re absolutely right. I can control my eating. Experience has taught me that, in order to reach a weight that would generally be considered “thin”, I’d have to eat nothing but carrots for around 2 years. Wanna go on this diet with me?
I never said it was easy. It is however, that simple. I’m a fitness nut, and I used to be overweight. I’ve helpled a bunch of people lose weight and feel better about themselves.
Oh God! I love food. I love eating.
I agree. You are only talking about half of the equation though. The equation is “eat less, exercise more.” You are reading it as “starve on rabbit food.”
If you have a weight problem and have tried dieting, and failed, let me ask you what your exercise program was?
In my experience most people focus on diet. Exercise is by far the more important factor.
Exercise uses energy. It increases your metabolism. It builds muscle. It prevents your body from going into starvation mode. It causes your body to convert fat to muscle. Muscle takes energy to maintain.
Exercise is the most important thing. Your body is like a car. The gas tank will stay full if you don’t drive it, no matter how little gas you add.
I eat very well, probably more than most obese people. However, my body was a stupendous calorie need because I made it that way.
If you make your body have a stupendous calorie need, than you can enjoy your food and maintain a strong, fit weight at the same time.
Wow, Max. Thank you for posting that. I’m always boggled by the lengths that some people will go to fit into some defined expectation. Sometimes that price can be the very health that people think they are improving.
Pretty much. I know what I’m talking about when it comes to weight loss and fitness. I’ll be glad to discuss it with you on whatever level you like.
Yes it does. You may be different, but you are still governed by the same rules of physics and strategies of evolution as all human beings are.
If you understand those rules and you work within them, you will lose weight if you want to.
There is so much bad information, pseudoscience and claptrap out there concerning weight loss that I am unsurprised that most people are frustrated and confused.
I never come to this part of the foum, but someone posted a link to this thread in GQ. I’ve spent the last hour reading it.
To be honest I haven’t read every post in detail (rants bore me sometimes)
Just wanted to say that I have lost 60 lbs in the last 6 months. According to my Dr., i’m 40 less than I was 5 years ago (when I was 19). But I’m still 90 lbs overweight. I hope to meet my goal by next year.
It makes me really sad to know that even though I lift weights 4 days a week for 30 mins and swim 40 mins 4-5 days a week, and walk every day I don’t go to the gym…and I drink a gallon of water a day and have 2-4 servings of veggies…I don’t eat sugar, flour or starch…I’ve never drank large quanties of pop, eaten lots of ice cream or even binged in my life…donuts make me sick…I eat between 1800-2000 calories a day and burn about 3500…Even tho I do all that, I’m still fat and people on this board would still hate me if they saw me on the street.
They would even hate me more if they saw me at Wendy’s getting my double classic with cheese and a caesar salad. Even tho they wouldn’t see me go home and take the bun off. Even tho they didn’t know I drank water with it. Even tho they didn’t know my menu for that day only added up to 2000 calories.
It makes me sad that you guys think like this about me, and every other overweight person you see. Sure it is ok to make you “sick” to see a fat person, but don’t say you’re sick because you hate the way they’re living their lives. You have no idea how they’re living their lives. Every single fat person I know eats differently than me (before dieting). Everyone’s got their own story.
I can’t just stay inside until I’m at my goal weight. I would never make it to the gym. You don’t see me at the gym, either. Cuz you’re not there. You only see me at fast food places. You must be there too…
Yes it is. That’s why I take issue with your post. “It just won’t work for some people.” is both false and dangerous.
I run on these backroads that are used by the local roadrunning club.
Every spring, there’s a bunch of overweight runners on the road, puffing away red-faced, sweating, walking, struggling, doing whatever they can to get through that run, because they’ve decided to improve their health.
It’s hard, and it takes guts and it’s got to be embarassing. Sometimes they get made fun of, and even if they don’t I know they feel the stares.
Those people deserve all the respect and admiration that I can give them. It is tough.
Your “It won’t work for some people because we’re different,” is a crap excuse. The basic rules apply to everybody. While the falsehood may help you to cope, it’s a stab in the back of discouragement to those out there trying or thinking of trying.
If you do it, and do it right, it will work. I swear to God. I promise.
Thank you, ZipperJJ for saying something I’ve beent thinking about since yesterday! I was at the market yesterday, and I bought some chocolate chip cookies. They weren’t for me, they were for my 12 year old and 3 year old, both of whom have fairly healthy eating habits, are not overweight at all, and like a couple of cookies occasionally. But, since I’m still 55 or 60 pounds overweight, there are apparently many ignorant fucks in the world who would look at the package of cookies, ignore the whole wheat bread, veggies, and no-sugar-added ice cream, and think “no wonder she’s so fat. She’s probably gonna go home and pig out on those cookies!” I’ve also gone to the store to buy pastries for a neighbor of mine who is dying of cancer, and barely eats anything; sometimes she gets a taste for pastries, and I get them for her. I bet there are a lot of people who look at me, realize I’m fat, realize I have pastries, and assume they are for me. In a court of law, this kind of shit is called “assuming facts not in evidence”.
These people need to get a fucking clue!
I think this is why most people fail, and why responsible dieticians encourage lifestyle changes rather than crash diets.
Five years ago I went on a diet that lasted a little over a year. Combined with exercise, I lost about 45 pounds. But I got tired of eating dry hummus on cardboard. It was a colossal pain in the ass.
This time around I’m trying something different. Small changes. I used to get a sandwich and chips for lunch. Now I get a sandwich and a pear or apple. I used to get a danish for breakfast. Now it’s a bagel with cream cheese on the side. My once weekly soda is gone and I don’t miss it. And I try to cook for myself more, as I cook far healthier than any restaurant.
While I generally agree with you on this issue, and my own experience is similar to yours, I must disagree on the specific idea that exercise is more important than diet.
A person looking to lose 2 pounds of fat in a week needs to burn roughly 7300 calories more than they’ve consumed.
Using the rather helpful calendar at www.fitday.com, that approximates to:
Swimming laps, freestyle, slow, moderate or light effort (3 hrs) 1875
Jogging, general (3 hrs) 1607
Weight lifting (free, nautilus or universal-type) light or moderate effort, light workout, general (6hrs) 1071
Bicycling, 14-15.9 mph, racing or leisure, fast vigorous effort (3hrs) 2411
For a total of 6965 calories. That’s 15 hours of moderate exercise. For a lot of people, it would be very difficult to fit that sort of time in to a working life.
On average though, a 224 pound male with a deskjob is going to burn (metabolism allowing) around 2500 calories a day just to maintain weight.If they aim for a calorie level of say 1800 per day, they’ve already lost 4900 calories in a week. That gives an exercise target of 2600, a very realistic figure achieved through say 4 to 5 hours of swimming or jogging a week.
As such, I’d have to argue strongly that for the very important initial stages of weightloss, it has to be a balance of diet and exercise to see the sort of results that will encourage someone to keep with it.
And can I just add that the above numbers are purely average figures, and are not intended to be hard and fast rules that will apply to all.
Those are good figures, but they don’t tell the whole story. If your 240 pound guy goes on a crash diet, he’ll probably lose those two pounds in a week, no probelm.
The next week, though his body recognizes the calorie debit and goes into starvation mode. It starts hoarding fat, and burning muscle to reduce calorie consumption. All of a sudden he goes from burning 2500 calories a day all the way down to 1800 or so, and he feels weak and hungry all the time.
If he exercises for an hour a day (mixed cardio/weights) then what happens is he burns about 3,500 calories a week in exercise and only loses 1 pound.
However that exercise has other effects. The body repairs and strengthens muscle (which takes energy,) adds new muscle (which takes energy,) and his metabolism gets knocked up a notch. Remember, a half hour of cardio will jump your metabolism into a fast burn rate for the next 3-5 hours.
You get multiple benefits from the exercise you do, not just the actual calories consumed while doing it.
By exercising, he loses weight more slowly, but he keeps his muscle and his body’s predisposition to burning calories is increased, not decreased due to the metabolism boost, and the new muscle he’s building.
So, it takes him two weeks to lose what he could lose in a week with just dieting. He’s in a much better position than the guy that did it in a week, and lost muscle tone and who’s body is now desperately trying to conserve energy. That guy is likely to gain the weight back if he eats normally again. That guy is trapped eating hummus and cardboard.
I’m a big advocate of a no hardship sort of weight loss program. Try to eat lots of basic unprocessed foods, eat a good breakfast, and a smaller dinner, reasonable portions and eat when you’re hungry just try not to eat crap.
Once you get the metabolism up and the muscle building (instead of being consumed) the body is willing to burn fat, and it tends to do so.
Man, whenever someone uses THAT f-word around here things do get interesting.
The OP, of course, is by some horrible person who is just plain evil for being judgemental.
Of course, those not looking at the OP through fanatic-colored glasses would see the obvious: He saw someone with an obvious health problem (obesity) doing something that would make it a whole lot worse (buying food that is nothing but yummy-yummy sugar and fat).
And, boy oh boy is everyone here preaching (screeching) loudly about how wrong it is to judge people.
So, you walk into the local Kwicky-Mart. In line in front of you is a person plugged into an oxygen cart and buying a back of Marlboros (unfiltered, of course).
Being the virtuous paragons of non-judgement, you’d never think or say something negative about this guy, right?
Scylla? Rember those three miles a day, 1000-calories (or less) a day hypothyroid cases I mentioned earlier? You sound like the doctors that keep tellling them they must still be eating too much.
I wonder how many of those red-faced runners you admire so much are hyopthyroid.
If that man with the oxygen was going to smoke the cigarettes, he wasn’t going to provide a single benefit to himself. He was going to feed his nicotine addiction. He was going to strangle his already battered alveoli. He was going to paralyze and irritate sensitive bronchial cilia and there would be immediate consequences to pay with every single cigarette – most likely a choking, racking cough that would only eventually subside because his respiratory system was just too worn to fight the invasion any more.
That extremely obese woman was going to eat that donut, and those calories were going to fuel her obese existence for at least a couple of hours. As unhealthy as the container for those calories may be, they were going to provide some demonstrable benefit to her physically.
It’s also fair to say that someone who is already in need of oxygen probably hates smoking and is only still doing it because he felt compelled by the nicotine demon within. At least the obese woman might realize some (unfortunate but very real) emotional benefit by eating that donut that morning. For all we know it was the fortification she needed to go into work and lay 75 people off. If I had to do that, I’d probably eat 2 donuts.
Is there a limit to the calories burned via muscle? I know a few friends who are weightlifters, one for example has a lean body mass of about 205 (total bodyweight of 230ish). Which is about 60 pounds more muscle than a normal person. However, he doesn’t eat 6000 calories a day. Nor do the other people i know who have lean body masses in the low 200’s. Does the calorie expendature level off after a certain amount of muscle gain?
When you say diet screws with metabolism, how do you mean? Does the body get tired of going into starvation mode 10 times a year and permanently change its metabolism? And what constitutes yo-yo dieting? Right now i am eating about 2500-3000 calories a day (i think my maintenance is 3500 or so) on a low fat diet and cycling 45 minutes a day while exercising with free weights every other day. I try to eat when i’m hungry but try not to go over 3000 calories a day (i usually never do). Does this put me at risk of screwing up my metabolism in any way? I find that htis dieting lifesyle isn’t really hard for me, but i’ve lost about 13 lbs in a month on it. Who knows how much of that 13 lbs was muscle & water though.
Calculus, the problem with yo-yo dieting is that when you lose weight on a calorie-deprived diet, you lose water weight and muscle mass. When you then get fed up with starving and begin eating like a normal person, you regain the weight as fat, rather than muscle. Someone who weighed 180 lbs and lost 60 of it will weight the same as the person who’s been 180 the whole time, but 60 lbs of that weight will now be fat rather than muscle.
Fat is metabolically inert. Fat does no work and takes no calories to maintain. Muscle is metabolically active. Muscle will use up calories even at rest, just to survive. So two 180 lb humans, one of whom is mostly muscle weight and one of whom is mostly fat weight, will have very different metabolic rates.
I could have said quite a bit of this about myself as well. At 5'3" and a medium frame, I'm "supposed" to weigh no more than 135, I think. Okay, so I'm ten pounds or so over that, and I wear L or 14p(petite). You wouldn't think so to look at me. I work out by turns on an exercise bike, balance ball, and do yoga or Pilates.
There’s gotta be some muscle weight in there somewhere, right?
Oh, and I don’t go hungry. But I have made my portion sizes smaller.
This whole post reeks of simplistic thoughts on a difficult subject.
I’ve had half my stomach removed. (Rare cancer.) I can’t eat even half a normal meal without getting very full. I eat less than any adult I know.
I have not lost a damned pound since the surgery over two years ago, until the idiot at the emergency room gave me a Tylenol based painkiller and started me down the road to dead by fucking up my liver and kidneys. After 3 weeks of extreme jaundice and no ability to keep food down at all, I lost 2 pounds. From dialysis. The leading endocrinologist in the Houston Medical Center just shook her head. THEY don’t know what to do, or why i’m not losing weight by the minute.
But, obviously, all they need is the accumulated wisdom of you guys. You have all the answers. And monkeys WILL fly outta GWB’s butt tomorrow at ten.
