woooosh
The point is that two 5’10" people who weigh 200 lbs can be very different:
One can be 80 lbs of fat and one can be 40 lbs of fat. On a BMI, they are equal, while in reality, one is near obese and the other an elite athlete.
I used to play football as a kid from 7 years of age to 12 years of age until I had knee surgery at 13…I used to eat my meals so quickly that I didn’t feel full until I was on my third helping of whatever dinner my mom was making…that included steaks, chicken, spaghetti, potatoes (when my mom made it, it tasted great except the one time she tried to make boulibaisse[sp?])…After I stopped playing football, I ballooned from 150 to 190 inside of a year (I think I was about 5’10" at the time), weight started to become a problem since my eating habits stayed the same…eat fast and snack often.
Solution: My football helmet!..It started as a joke, but actually worked! I wore it to the dinner table for a couple of weeks and I wasn’t able to scoop my food fast enough and my pieces of meat had to be smaller to fit through my cage…I got full on less food because it took longer to eat it. My brother totally enjoyed watching me do this, but I learned to slow down until I didn’t need to use the helmet. When I told this story to my wife a few years ago, she labeled that as “child abuse”, but I labeled it “creative weight control” and I think the real abuse would have been to let my eating habits go unchecked.
As for big bones, it might be possible, but I think some of the weight has a lot more to do with bone density, not size. As a kid, I never shyed away from milk. My brother and I were putting away a gallon and a half away each day (whole milk, mostly), but as long as we were active (football, swimming, skiing, bikes, etc.) we got stronger, taller and heavier (although in the right proportion) and with all of our activities, we never broke any bones…including jumping off the roof of our house…although my brother did chip his front tooth riding his bike into a parked car…that was a little funny. 
Now, since my knee is more arthritic, exercise is usually painful and over the years (I’m 40), I am at 6’3", 300lb. and I don’t like being in the 300+ range, so I do make an effort to exercise, but sometimes I jack up my knee in the process…If I got back down to 240, with the bone mass that I have, it would be ideal for me…I try to use the elliptical stair-stepper since it burns calories the fastest (at times, I burn 400-500 calories in a 20 minute workout) and the shock on my knees are minimized compared to regular treadmills. I just need to be more consistent on my workout days…1 or 2x per week doesn’t cut it, but getting 4 or 5x per week would. I would be happy with 3x a week.
Oh, whoosh yerself, Philster. 
I’m still not sure what the difference is. Both the people in your example weigh 200 lbs. Yes one may be in healthier/better shape and fat may take up less space than muscle (or whatever) but 200 pounds is 200 pounds. A pound is a pound is a pound. That’s all I’m saying.
So there. Ttthhhbbbbt.
But I’m sure you’ll agree that a pound of feathers looks quite different than a pound of bricks.
So too for a pound of fat vs. a pound of muscle.
I was wonderin’ if you were whooooshin’ us…
But, the discussion previously referenced was about how BMI (Body Mass Index) is a poor indicator of whether or not a person is dangerously fat. Because it only considers height and weight, the 200 pound guy with 80 pounds of fat will have the same BMI as the 200 lb guy with 40 pounds of fat (actually, 40 lbs would make the guy have a bodyfat percentage of 20% which isn’t all that great for a male. Let’s say he has 20 lbs of fat for 10% bodyfat). Both guys would have a BMI of 28.7 (here’s a excellent BMI calculator) and be considered overweight just going by the charts (healthy is between 18 and 23 or 25 depending on who you talk to). But the second guy does notneed to lose any weight because he doesn’t have excess bodyfat.
I guess the point is that we use weight as a rough indicator of body fat. It’s the bodyfat that is dangerous and unhealthy, not solely the number on the scale.
Anecdote: My coworker’s boyfriend is a Secret Service agent and in superb condition. He’s also a huge guy, 6’1" and 230 pounds. Low bodyfat. He just recieved a letter form the government telling him that he’s technically obese and needs to lose weight. This is what using BMI as a sole predictor of fitness leads to…
Another big-boned (and fat) person checking in.
There is no doubt that I am fat because I don’t exercise enough, but even when I’ve lost most of my weight, I will never weigh as much as the charts claim I should weigh. It’s the same for everyone in my family.
My sister was a nurse. She is about 5’6" and wore a size 10 nurse’s uniform. At the hospital where she worked, she was weighed (for what reason, I can’t remember). The person weighing her could not believe her weight. It was something like 150 pounds. I can’t remember what my sister told me exactly, but it seemed to me that the person who was weighing her wanted to make some disparaging comment about her weight, but damn—here she is, in a size 10 uniform, not looking at all fat. (And, like me, my sister does not have a small, delicate frame.)
In some high school gym program we all had to measure the circumference our wrists, to get an idea of whether we were small, medium or large boned. My wrist was bigger than the wide-boned measurement. Yeah, I’d say I’m big-boned. When I was a size 12-14 (looking, I was told, maybe 20 pounds overweight), I actually weighed something like 185 pounds.
I could see myself getting down to a size 10-12, maybe, and I’d probably weigh 160-165 lbs at that point. I can’t see myself getting much smaller (or lighter) than that, no matter what the charts say.
Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as being big-boned. People who define “fat” as being over a certain size will probably always consider me fat because of my frame. I held a pair of size six jeans up in front of me one time, and they barely spanned the distance between my hipbones. My shoulders are a couple of inches wider than my brother’s. Even at my thinnest, I was always what my father would call a big ole girl. I look quite nice at a size 12 (nice enough that my former roomate thought I was much smaller), and would look positively anorexic if I ever got down to an 8.
Am I fat right now? Why, yes, I certainly am. Am I morbidly obese, as my bmi indicates? Objective observers tell me I am not. According to the bmi charts, I was borderline fat back when I was wearing an 11/12.
So I guess you have to decide what definition of “fat” you’re using. Are we talking about people over a certain clothing size? Are we talking about people over a certain bmi? Are we talking about people over a certain body fat percentage? Until we actually define which group we’re talking about, there’s no way to figure out how much of a role different factors play.
Some people are just naturally bigger than others, no matter how little they eat. When I was younger and much thinner, I wore 7/8 pants, and weighed about 140 pounds. Why did I weigh so much? not because of massive bone structure, but from haveinga very large chest and a lot of muscle. Not from working out, it’s just always there.
Now I am fat. I got that way because I ate a lot. I started eating because I got pregnant, stopped working 80 hours a week, and had the money to buy all I wanted to eat. I had moved to a very small town with my husband, and the combination of losing all my friends and being in the middle of nowhere brought on depression. When I’m depressed I eat. When you’re pregnant you get large anyway, so I was in denial what I was getting so much bigger. Trying to get into my old clothes made me realize how big I had gotten and just mad me more depressed.
So, years later and I’m tired of being fat. I’m working to take it off, and it’s going well.
I’m female, and currently weigh in at 190, at 5’8". I never get pegged at 190 - usually 170. When I weighed 170, everyone thought I weighed 140. When I was 140, I was very very skinny.
I think a lot of my weight comes from the muscle in my legs. It’s strange - I never work my legs out, but they’re mostly muscle. If you checked my fat with a clipped on my thighs/ass, you’d get almost nothing. The last time I did a leg-press, without having trained for it beforehand, I pressed around 650lbs. Even when I was 140, my legs stayed the same size. Sometimes I wish I had “slimmer, sexier thighs and buns,” but I realize that they only way for that to happen would be if I let the muscles atrophy.
I also use the Big Bone story. I can barely wrap my fingers around my wrist bones. I’ve never been below a size 10, even at 140. I’m not a petite lady, but I take comfort in the idea that I could crush a petite girl with my legs.
[hijack]
And I agree with whoever said that bone-thin girls are unattractive. Being one who enjoys the ladies, I get distracted when I have a sternum bone staring at me. I know that some people just can’t put weight on, but I’m tired of people finding ribs and tendons sexy.
Women are supposed to be curvy, by god. And maybe if models were a little curvier, I wouldn’t feel so shitty about the fact that I’ll never, ever, ever be that thin. Ever.
Grace from Will and Grace is gross. Karen is HOT.
[/hijack]
Wow. It’s nice that the larger people in this thread can say mean, hurtful things about the smaller ones in order to make themselves feel better about their obesity.
I said that I, personally, find stick-thin woman to be unattractive. Specifically, one woman. I’m not saying that ALL thin woman are gross, disgusting to look at.
Ever read that thread abour Kirsti Alley (sp?) ? Every 3rd post was, “My god, she put on so much weight, and now she’s hideous.”
I’ve read plenty of posts talking about how people find overweight people to be unattractive/lazy/etc. I get it constantly in the media. I’ve gotten it from other people, as have my friends.
I didn’t know there was a lot of skiny-girl bashing going around.
I’m sorry if my PERSONAL opinion that stick-thin women are UNATTRACTIVE (not saying any character flaws, which overweight people get a lot of) was mean and hurtful. I didn’t say that all skinny woman are vain and conceited, or anything like that.
So, sorry if you took it that way. I didn’t mean it to be mean and hurtful.
Go ahead and say that you, personally, don’t find heavier women to be attractive. That’s fine by me - I know everyone has dfferent tastes. I don’t like blonds. Don’t know why, I just prefer brunettes. As long as people aren’t slinging around the terms “lazy” as a general reference to EVERY overweight person, I don’t care.
Grace, as one person, I find to be one of the least attractive people I can think of. I’m not saying that ALL skinny girls are gross. Just HER.
Be careful, you may end up in the pit with me :rolleyes:
For what it’s worth though, I’m impressed by the level of honesty in this thread. No one seems to be attempting to deny the first law of thermodynamics.
Oh, and Silver Serpentine,
Did I read that right? Skinny girls are unattractive, but you want to be one anyway?
There’s a difference between being smaller and being anorexic. I said bony girls were gross. Not just skinny, but Calista Flockhart or Kate Moss. Some people just can’t gain weight, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I think purposely starving yourself or working out obsessively to look like a supermodel is a bad idea. Some people are attracted to very thin people. I am not one of them. It was a personal opinion, not a direct attack on anyone.
Healthy, thin people can be very attractive in that graceful, slender ballerina kind of way. I just personally prefer someone with a little more meat on them. I will never be tiny no matter how much I diet and exercise, so I want a guy who is bigger than me. I just can’t be attracted to someone if I knew I could kick his ass.
If you’re talking about the amount of calories needed to maintain the weight of a sedentary person, you’re probably right. However, I don’t think it’s accurate for athletic or even moderately active people. You can’t calculate the number of calories a body burns during exercise by a simple calculation based on weight. For instance, I’m a middle-aged woman who is 5’10.5" tall and weighs 148 lbs. I do 45 to 60 minutes a day of strenuous exercise and lift weights twice a week. My bodyfat percentage is around 21%. Maintenance level for me is just about 2300 calories a day, which is actually more than it was when I was sedentary and weighed 200 lbs.
All I can say is that I’m 6’1", 215 lbs, and my wife thinks I’m the ungliest thing on god’s green earth when I put on that thong bikini.
(but at least I don’t have to get my back waxed!)
I’m not particularly worried - this is one issue in which I can hold my own just fine.
And just to clear something up:
Because people say mean, hurtful things about large people, it’s acceptable to say them about thin people? Yes - that makes sense - if you’re 8.
I think beauty comes in all sizes, and I don’t give a pahootie what people personally find attractive in a “Boy, I want to get in THEIR pants” sort of way - it doesn’t excuse rudness and meanness, no matter how good it feels to make biting comments.
I don’t care what size you are - attacking people for how they look is ignorant and rude. Period.
Wow, is this ever a volatile topic. Bakhesh, you might have been better off to put this in Great Debates, as there is more theorizing than there are hard facts.
The simple answer is that people become fat because they (a) consume too many calories and (b) expend to few.
However, in real life, it’s hellishly more complicated. After all, eating is not just about taking in calories. Exercise is not just about expending calories. Just off the top of my head (and FTR, I am a fat woman who has been overweight all my adult life), here are some different facets to look at:
Emotion - food isn’t just about calories, it’s about emotion. It’s about the cookies you baked with your mom when you were a little kid. It’s about drinking a beer or three with your buddies. It’s about making sure you have real mashed potatoes and gravy for Thanksgiving. Each of us learns how to deal with food as we grow up. It’s not planned; it just happens. Some of us are lucky, and food doesn’t become invested with emotions. Others of us aren’t so lucky, and along with the difficulties of understand the straightforward facts of nutrition, we have to deal with feelings of guilt, remorse, comfort, and love when we deal with food.
It’s difficult enough to cut out foods that one enjoys, but add on “makes me feel better after a long day” or “doesn’t yell at me like my boyfriend”, and things get a whole lot harder.
Society - we (the US) are a society that has come to incorporate traits that have obesity as a number one consequence. We live in isolated houses that we drive to and from. We work in jobs that demand nothing more strenuous than sitting in a chair. We have to work to make sure we get enough physical activity.
Add to that the difficulties of eating in a healthy manner on a limited budget. Fresh, wholesome food is more expensive than pre-packaged fatty, sugary food. A Big Mac is cheaper than a salad. Restaurant portions are half again to twice as large as they should be.
It takes a great deal of effort for the average person not to get sucked into a spiral of weight gain.
Poorly understood biology - we really don’t understand why some people seem predestined to be fat. We’re a lot more knowledgeable than we used to be, but it isn’t enough. Remember hearing about leptin? It was supposed to be the cure-all. Mice with enough leptin never got fat. Mice without leptin piled on the fat. Humans have leptin, sure enough, but we don’t understand enough about how the human body responds to it.
Heard much about the ongoing wars over nutrition? For thirty years, the medical community called Dr. Atkins a quack. The only way to lose weight, they said, was to eat a low-fat, high carb diet. In the time that the government declared that standard and people started following it religiously, obesity in Americans has skyrocketed. Now, truthfully, the government didn’t tell people to drink all the soda and eat all the Twinkies they wanted, since it’s low fat. However, they did stress potatoes, white rice, and pasta, which are simple carbs.
We are only now starting to understand just how large a role insulin plays in weight maintenance and health. Eat a diet high in simple carbs - even if they’re not sodas and Twinkies - and you’ll eventually trash your body’s ability to respond to insulin. The end result is that you’re hungry all the time, your body can’t route sugar to the cells that need it properly, so all that extra blood sugar goes to the fat cells. More fat cells means a worse response to insulin, which in turn means the body pumps out more insulin, which means the person is hungry all the time. I know whereof I speak.
We’ve also come to realize - finally - that limiting caloric intake without increasing activity is a surefire way to wreck a person’s metabolism. The human body is very good at surviving what it perceives to be starvation. Limit your food intake, and your body will slow down its metabolism so it can survive on what it’s getting. Increase your food intake, and your metabolism doesn’t pick back up for a while. Maybe ever.
And the worst part of it is that once you’re fat, you have to work about three times harder to lose weight than a slender person has to work to maintain their weight. It’s an uphill battle, and it gets steeper all the time.
Culture - we are a culture with very little tolerance for any body type that is not idealized. I don’t believe the skinnies get as much abuse as the fatties do, but they certainly get far more than their fair share.
Once you’re fat, and especially if you’ve always been fat, it’s extremely difficult to take up the activities necessary to lose the weight, because you don’t fit in, and it’s . . . well, it’s more than uncomfortable. Go for a walk? You might have a car of boys yell “MOO!” at you. Happened to me, and I still tear up when I think about it. Go on a hike or to a gym? There are always those people who give you that “what’s that fat woman doing here?” look.
Personal Relationships - the plural of anecdote may not be data, but here’s a story to think about:
My mom is an RN. For a while, she worked on a floor that handled super morbidly obese patients in a weight-loss study. These were the Orca fat people, the ones who needed nurse help to lift folds of fat and scrub under them, then dry properly so they wouldn’t get yeast infections in their skin. While they were in this study, the doctors fed them an extremely low calorie diet, basically starving them. They lost weight. They lost a LOT of weight. The majority of them lost more than half their body weight. Some of them got down into the almost normal range.
That was during the six months they were in the hospital, monitored 24 hours a day with no choice in what they ate. After the six months, they were released back to their homes.
Within five days, every single participant had called the doctors, begging to be readmitted to the hospital.
Why? Well, one lady’s husband brought home ice cream, chocolate, fried chicken - everything she liked - in an effort to make her fat again. Another lady had two daughters who refused to speak to her because she spent some money buying new clothes for herself. Apparently, they thought that money should have been spent on them. Every single patient had a similar story. They could maintain the weight loss in the hospital, but they couldn’t do it in the real world.
Oh, and my mom? Guess how old I was when she took me to my first Weight Watcher’s meeting. I was 12. Now, guess how fat I was.
I wasn’t.
At all. I looked back at pictures to double check.
Guess who started putting on weight at the age of 12 and has fought it every day of her life since then?
Three guesses and the first two don’t count.
To add another anecdote about the complicatedness of weight…
I’ve always been overweight, and for a long time I didn’t really worry about it. I figured I eat healthfully. My dad’s diabetic and my mom’s always trying to lose weight so my house has always been full of sugar free or fat free food. I also don’t have a large appetite and don’t eat abnormally large portions of food and I rarely eat fast food because I’m a vegetarian.
A few years ago I decided that I really wanted to lose weight and I started swimming laps 3 to 4 times a week. At first I was really bad and slow, but I got better at it, and stuck to a pretty regular schedule.
About six months after I started I went to the doctor and I hadn’t lose any weight. I may have even gained a few pounds. So they ran all these tests and found out I had an imbalance called polycystic ovarian syndrome. Despite the name, there were no cysts involved for me but somehow (I still fail to understand why) i’m also glucose resistent, so eating simple carbohydrates and sugars is really bad for me, even more so for normal people.
So, with this in mind, I didn’t go on a strict diet, but I stopped drinking juice and soda and tried to eat more protein and less simple carbs, and kept excercising. In the last year I’ve lost 20 pounds, but I’m nowhere near “normal.” I’m really glad that I’m more in shape, but it’s frustrating to think that many people would see me and think that I’m automatically lazy or a slob just because of my weight.
This is my major problem with how society views fat people. Fat and lazy slob who never exercises are not the same thing, and I hate that misconception. I’m fat because I like to eat. But I work out, hard every day, for 90+ minutes. I lift weights, I do tae kwon doe, and I do triathalons. My knees are formed incorrectly, and I can’t run often, but this fall I did a 5k with several people I work with, and I finished much faster than every single thin person who went. And yet, just last week when I was trying to talk a few more people into doing a 10k on my birthday with me next month, I had people looking at me with raised eyebrows. You? You run?
Ok, I’ll stop ranting. I can take people thinking I’m fat, but I’m sick of people thinking I do nothing but sit around and eat. I’m in better athletic shape than most people I know.
collinsc- Sometimes I do, yeah. I may not find skinny girls attractive, but I still want to feel sexy, y’know? And it’s an issue I’ve been struggling with for YEARS now. I want to be comfortable the way I am and accept my body, but I can’t seem to. It feels good to be hit on/checked out. I’ve only been hit on, oh, 2 or 3 times in the past two years. If I didn’t already have a SO, I’d feel really, really shitty. I still do, at times. I’m 20, damnit. I should be enjoying it. Not constantly thinking, “Is this shirt too tight? Are people staring at my fat?” Or “Wow, I find that person really attractive - but I know they wouldn’t be interested in me because I weigh almost 200 lbs.” I have to either wear Tshirts or make my own clothes because none of the clothes I like in stores are big enough for me. Hell, I just bought a new coat recently, and I had to buy a 2X because anything smaller wouldn’t fir my shoulders/ribcage. I want to dress nicely, I really do. But I must be looking at clothes in the wrong places.
seaworthy- I tried to make that point, but I may have failed. I’ve been up for a very, very long time.
alice_in_wonderland- Have you never, EVER judged someone on appearance? If not, congrats. But not all of us are saintly. Yeah, I have a flaw. I think these thoughts in my head. But I don’t say anything to thin people I meet, and I don’t treat them differently. I momentarily think, “My GOD, she’s way too skinny,” and move on.
But hey, congrats on not judging people by appearances at all. Good for you.