Hmm. I drink only diet soda and diet carbonated water with Splenda. Without getting too graphic, the first is not a problem for me.
Back to the pint of ice cream. A regular diet calls for 2000 calories and 66 grams of fat a day (that’s what they base the RDAs on). Does it matter how you get this? If I only eat a pint of ice cream a day, and nothing else, am I sticking to the values or why not?
If so, that just exposes the depths of her ignorance on the subject.
Half a pound a week is considered sustainable, healthy, REAL weight-loss.
The things people say about eating and exercise. . .like it’s just “natural” to finish a pint of ice-cream, or a bag of Doritos out of boredom.
I’m trying to work-up a “brain” analogy to how people treat their bodies. It might be like an athlete saying, “oh, I don’t actually read anything, and I haven’t since grade school. But, I like to huff gasoline, and get DVDs of Jerry Springer and just watch them on an endless loop. And, I’m teaching my kid to behave this way, also. It’s just my genetics that makes reading seem so boring.”
That’s it? That’s all a regular diet calls for?
No protein? No carbohydrates? No vitamins? No minerals? Just 2000 calories and a 66 grams of fat?
Interesting. I guess just eating that pint of ice cream would do it then.
Well, I’m sure it wasn’t “all their lives”, as I’m betting that they didn’t get married as infants.
But I’m just going on what the nurse told me. I didn’t have the time or authority to grill the wife on whether she made midnight Twinkie runs.
Haha! I read his post and thought “hmm, Omnivore’s Dilemma” thought about pimping it in my response. I love his writing and HFCS is pretty scary. As well as the government subsidy of the whole corn economy.
I had health problems as a child that were very much controlled by diet. I did not drink cokes, eat canned foods, eat sugary cereals, no processed meat. Now my mother is a miserable cook on a good day, but she made a concerted effort to increase my quality of life. I have always been thin (well, except when I started eating like my husband, bad idea, I’m back now though).
I have a cow-worker who is always, always sick. Our sick policy has changed because of her. Her stomach always hurts. Did I mention she is always sick? She drinks nothing but Pepsi, eats NO vegetables except potatoes (preferably fried). She takes no vitamins. I tell her to eat a stalk of broccoli for the love of god. She said the other day she was so sick she couldn’t even keep down Tuna Helper. TUNA HELPER? I couldn’t eat that crap and I’m healthy! When I mentioned to her mother that I didn’t have my first pop-tart until I was in my 20’s, she said I was abused, I pointed out, no, I was sick. The mother will proudly exclaim that she never made her children eat anything they don’t want to eat. Kudos, you got a sick kid.
I now have a child. I don’t know what her issues may be. I am following the same diet for her that I had, lots of veggies, no processed meat and no sugary cereals. I did give her some pudding once that I made from scratch.
We now have a babysitter one day a week. When I told her that I had packed some cheerios for her to snack on, she said “oh, if she likes Cheerios, she will LOVE Fruit Loops.” She also fed her some processed meat. Obviously, these are not things that she thinks about. I do and I now have to sit her down and talk about my daughters diet and what is acceptable. Maybe a Fruit Loop once a week won’t hurt her, but I don’t really want to get involved in a food strike where a Freakin’ Fruit Loop is the weapon of choice.
My thoughts about food are far different than most people I am around. I don’t eat much fast food. I consider McDonald’s horrifying food. I know when I am slamming down the Ramen that it is BAD, I don’t kid myself. I also know that my health is directly tied to my diet, no matter how good Nathan’s hot dogs are, I will pay.
People eat crap. They eat lots of crap. They shovel it in, they have no concept of a portion. Heck, they don’t even know what food is. Food is not Tuna Helper and Lunchables.
Until I see strong evidence otherwise, I’m attributing our horrifying obesity rates to crappy eating, lack of exercise and cluelessness.
How the hell am I supposed to raise a kid without using the phrase “don’t come back inside until the street lights are on!”
No kids play outside in my well established, family neighborhood either. Never.
Must be nice to live in a world where all of life’s problems can be boiled down to a simple moral judgement.
I do believe that most of the obesity epidemic can be traced to a lack of education. However, despite what many people claim, said education is not very easy to come by. There is a METRIC FUCKLOAD of misinformation out there. Eat bread. Don’t eat bread. Drink your milk. Don’t drink your milk. Eggs are good. Eggs are evil. And a huge amount of this misinformation is perpetuated by the food industry itself.
We are told that whole grains are good. Next time you’re in the supermarket, take a look at packaged breads. I bet you find a bunch that say “Packed with whole grain goodness!” on the front. Then look at the list of ingredients. “Whole grain” is likely not anywhere in there.
Be cool, Trunk. Surely you realize that someone who snacks on bowls of potato chip crumbs slathered in ketchup is ideally placed to criticize you?
You’ll be getting all your calories from sugar and fat. What about your complex carbs, protein, vitamins, minerals, and fiber? What are you going to do when your sugar high ends and you completely crash because you haven’t given your body anything else to turn into energy?
Since this is the Pit, and all.
Yeah, laziness. If you are getting conflicting information, it is your responsibility to your health to find out the correct answer. Here’s a clue, an egg is an egg. It isn’t evil. Eating 12 dozen eggs a day might be a problem. The thing is, no matter what it is, barring Mercury/Lead/Arsenic, no single food item (non-processed) is going to slay you in your tracks. Moderation. Fucking moderation.
How anyone can reasonably expect to defend laziness by stating that they believe the crap on the package, until they actually, you know, pick up the loaf of bread and read the shit they HAVE to put on there for the precise reason of counterbalancing the crap they slap on the label, is ludicrious at best.
I was forced to put on 2 lbs a week when I was pregnant, my doctor stated he didn’t care how I did it, that the baby needed fat now. He suggested ice cream and milkshakes, but really emphasized the weight vs. the quality. You know what I did? I walked around the grocery store looking at calories per serving. You want to put on weight cheaply? Grab that Little Debbie Fudge Round and go to town. BTW, they were freely available at my high school.
My husband is overweight, pretty much always has been. He eats for crap. He loves McDonalds, 7-11 and cokes. Ice Cream brought into this house will be gone in seconds. His cereal of choice? Fruity Pebbles. He is sedentary and loves processed shit. That is what it is nutritionally, utter and complete shit. It is filler, designed, processed and packaged to convince you that it is “yummy.” He falls for it, he knows he falls for it and he doesn’t try to defend it. His sister thinks that cookie dough is a good breakfast, his whole family is a family of grazers. They eat all damn day long. The also don’t move around much. They all have weight problems. His mother puts a ton of salt on every bite that enters her mouth.
My family does not eat that way, and we don’t have weight issues, blood pressure issues or other lifestyle issues.
Laziness, it isn’t just about being physically lazy. It’s about being mentally lazy. Pick up the fucking loaf of bread and educate yourself. Hell, pick them all up. Find out what you are putting in your pie-hole. Look at what is actually in a Twinkie. Use your brain cells, stop using an information overload as an excuse to do what you really want to do anyway.
I am a female, 5’8", my typical weight is 120lbs. I got up to 185lbs by eating like my husband. I stopped, I dropped the weight. I was fat, it may have been accidental, but it only came off after I made a change. There is a money management guy that says you can get into debt without paying attention, but you can’t get OUT of debt without paying attention.
We spend more time wondering what kind of car says about us, or our house or our clothes than the quality of the shit we put in our mouths. For the vast majority of the population it is no more than a simple equation, put out more than you put in.
Laziness, in mind, in spirit and in body.
Now give me my Twinkie of Doom.
Not fair, ice cream is a good source of calcium, vitamin A, and protein, and it is very low in sodium. 
Bingo.
It is quite simply difficult to avoid getting fat if your job and recreation consists of sitting in front of a computer or TV screen, while at the same time you eat just as you please.
I can’t in my wildest dreams imagine that a whole pint of ice cream is one serving. I’m afraid that I’m of the camp that thinks “OMG, what a pig” in reference to the folks buying the large size at Coldstone. That’s a LOT of food. I don’t see how anybody’s mind could wrap around that being okay. Even as a treat, why would someone want to sit and just eat for an hour solid to demolish it?
I feel guilty going to Taco Bell twice a month and ordering my typical order. My order there consists of probably about 1300 calories in two Chalupa Supremes (less veggies, to make it really sinful) and an Empenada. Their Empenadas are soooo good. Talk about greasy sugary yumminess. But I always think as I’m eating that the stuff is really bad for me and that next time I’m gonna get a simple soft taco. I rarely do.
I’m 5’2" and my weight fluctuates between 127 and 135. I’m fat (in my eyes) at anything over 130. I feel and look heavy at 135. My face rounds out and my boobs overflow my bras. Last December, before I was laid off, I was hovering between 125-127. I was trying to get back to pre-baby weight of 122. Never quite made it. My now sedentary life has contributed at least five pounds in seven full months. YIKES! When you’re short, even a few pounds can have a huge impact.
Lifestyles ARE completely different now. I remember one thing especially, I was only allowed sugary cereals when we went camping. Cocoa Puffs were a treat! I think maybe that some of the over-indulgence of children is due to the stricter parents of the past, and the whole “I’m not gonna be my mom/dad, and they did whatever to me”.
I’m not sure I agree. Maybe for a person who eats a fairly normal amount of calories, exercise can be the difference between being heavier and being lighter, but for someone who has problems with keeping away from high-cal foods, exercise can be a frustrating road to nowhere. I’m a quite active person, but I still have trouble with my weight because I just eat too many calories. 500 exercise-burned calories can be easily replaced in a few minutes of poor food judgement. I thoroughly approve of exercise, because health is more than just weight, and as far as I can tell there is no way to be healthy without being active, but I think the majority of Americans would do well to realize that cutting back in calories will go a lot further for their weight loss than trying to exercise it off-- and most of the material out there doesn’t emphasize this enough, in my opinion. It’s much “easier” (scare quotes because I know it’s not easy) to not eat that donut than to spend 30 minutes negating it by jogging. Exercise is great, but overall I don’t think it’s feasible for most people as a weight loss plan. IANAD, YMMV, LOL, WYSIWYG, BYOB.
Of course it is, but even by putting in a huge amount of effort, you can still get wrong information. Seriously, does anyone believe otherwise? If so, could it just be smugness?
For years I believed that all fat was bad. I asked several dieticians if there weren’t some fats that were better than others. Nope, they said. Fat is fat, and fat is bad. As it turns out, some fats are good, but the US Government figured people were too dumb to figure that out. So they lied to us. And dieticians went right along with that. One gave me misinformation several years after she had done a study on the subject.
Now perhaps you would like to tell me how asking several dieticians was due to my intellectual laziness.
I’m pretty sure you’re trolling, but thyroid disorders are real. They change the rate at which the body burns calories. I’m not saying they’re the sole cause of obesity, or even the cause of 10% of it, but they do exist. I know because I eat shit all day (I could easily pack away that much ice cream, and have, now that the weather is so hot) and my weight is dead-center average. So obviously, some people can burn their food faster than others. It’s not only willpower: some people are lucky and some people aren’t. As one of the lucky ones, I can understand this.
Another reason for the obesity epidemic which is so often ignored on this board (where so many of you are drivers who live in the suburbs) is the grocery gap. Many areas, especially urban areas, lack local grocery stores which means that the residents (many of them carless, or not on a direct bus line) have to rely on convenience stores and fast food dollar menus for their food. The local grocery store moved out of my neighborhood a few months ago and now I have to take the bus to get back from the nearest one since it is over a mile away. What happens if there is no bus service to your part of the city (due to violence, poor city planning, or prejudice) and you need to eat? You go to the 7/11 and get whatever you can.
Also, it is far cheaper to eat shittily than to eat well. To prepare a healthful dinner you usually need a lot of other ingredients–spices, side dishes, as well as a functioning kitchen with stove (and of course, the time to cook, which often isn’t there if a parent is the sole provider or if both parents work). Many people who live in low-income housing don’t have that. For example, at the grocery store two skinless chicken breasts cost roughly $4.99 a package; this feeds two people. But I also have to buy a marinade, another dollar or so. And then I have to think about side dishes, and that also adds up. In all, you’re talking maybe seven bucks for dinner, $3.50 per person. Whereas I could also go to KFC (which is not a bus ride away, it is right down the street) and buy a bucket of chicken that will feed me for a week, at a little over a dollar a meal. That’s not a problem if you have a fast metabolism, but I’m sure there are people whose bodies couldn’t deal with even one piece of fried chicken a day.
I think that maybe I’m a little less eager to judge fat people because I know firsthand that sometimes you hit the genetic lottery. That’s not to say that a lot of it, even a good majority, is due to laziness, but it’s not all laziness. As far as children go–should only well-off suburbanites with cars and grocery stores in their vicinity be allowed to raise children? How about instead of only blaming the people we try to get more grocery stores into the cities and stop the pricing practices that make it better for a mom to feed her kids McDonald’s than to make them a healthy dinner? I guess because then we wouldn’t be able to gloat about our own diets.
And if you don’t have an Internet connection? Don’t have a local library with all the latest health books? Work full time and care for kids at night, so maybe getting information about food isn’t your #1 top priority? Not to mention that you might not even be able to access the healthy foods you need (see last post).
I swear, this board can be so elitist.
I agree with that. It was what I was getting at when I said it is difficult to not gain if you live a sedentary lifestyle and eat “just as you please”. With which part of my quote do you disagree? 
I’m talking about losing weight; the argument is lower your calories so the body burns more than it takes in. On that measure alone, who cares if it’s ice cream or vegetables?
Because it tastes good? Because if one bite is good, two is better? We have to agree to disagree, because I can’t undertand how someone would spend time eating a salad.
Seems a bit of a moot point. I don’t really think that for most people, it is necessary to have the latest in technology to understand that regularly eating whole bags of Doritos while watching TV isn’t very good for you.
When I was fat, I knew damn well why - I liked eating lots of crappy foods, chock full of fatty, greasy, salty and sugary goodness.
My grandmother knew better, and she never read a nutrition book in her life and thought “surfing the net” was something that happened when a beach boy ran into a fisherman.
Bullshit excuses, and nothing more. It’s not elitist to point those out.
Work full time and care for kids at night: Talk to their pediatrician. Don’t have one - get one, by whatever means necessary. It’s vital to your children. And listen to the answers, because most of them will apply to generic you, too.
*And if you don’t have an Internet connection? Don’t have a local library with all the latest health books?*Then turn on CNN; they have frequent programs on personal healthcare. No cable? Check local PBS stations for the same.
It comes down to personal priorities.