By what mechanism, then, do they get fat, if not by eating more than they burn?
Additionally, no, a 50-pound overweight man is NOT (necessarily) eating 16 calories more a day than he burns. He has, over the course of his life, averaged 16 calories more per day than he needed. If he is currently eating 16 more calories per day than he burns, he is currently gaining MORE weight. It’s not really a helpful distinction when factored out over the course of 30 years.
I started my diet 3 months ago. I set a target caloric intake for myself, per day, and tried to hit it each day. When I first started it I actually counted up everything I ate and drank to make sure I didn’t go over. Things worked. After a while, I got lax and started estimating. It works most of the time, but if my weight goes up from one day to the next I think “Oops, I misestimated, I need to not eat quite as much today.”
It would be of no help to continually eat like that for months, gain 20 pounds, and then think, “Gee, I averaged 40 more calories per day than I should have! Oopsie!” It’s only useful when USED in day-to-day or week-to-week diet planning.
Garfield, I wasn’t offering diet strategies. I was discussing the absurd proposition that fat people must be lazy, etc. I hope it’s obvious how the fact that you couldn’t possibly measure the excess of a fat person’s eating compared to a normal weight person tends to discredit that.
And you’re right the calorie counting works - for dieting. When you’re dropping your calorie intake 500 to 1000 calories (or 20 to 50% or so) below your daily requirements, then you can estimate well enough how much you’re eating to make a difference.
But the fact is those kinds of gross changes in diet can only work short term. Once you enter the “maintenace phase” calorie counting becomes hopeless because of the impossibility of measuring your diet within the small range you need to to maintain a given weight. So you’re forced to wait until your weight ticks up then drastically drop your caloric intake again as you described.
Because ultimately all a diet is doing is making very short term large changes that add up to a virtually undetectable change in the average energy balance over a lifetime.
Not by any height-weight chart I’ve ever seen. You’re at the upper end of your weight range.
One pound does not equal 3500 calories in practice. When people are overfed they gain a pound of muscle for roughly every 2-3 pounds of fat as they need the muscle to carry themselves around. Plus metabolism can go up to compensate for the extra calories so just eating an extra 100 calories a day doesn’t matter much if your metabolism goes up and you end up building muscle. The idea that the body doesn’t know how to cope with an extra 16 calories a day is totally undrealistic. Do you honestly believe that if I ate an extra 50 calories a day that I’d eventually end up gaining 5 pounds a year until I hit 350 pounds or so? The human body is far too complicated for these calculations to work.
http://www.unu.edu/unupress/food2/UID08E/uid08e05.htm
“Continuous monitoring of food intake and physical activity over a 40-week study-period showed that some men initially ingested approximately 3000 kcal/d, but after overfeeding for months with 6-8000 kcal/d they had gained only 6 kg and now required 5750 kcal to maintain this excess weight.”
Again, none of this changes the fact that trying to violate billions of years of evolution to obtain socially acceptable bodies has failed miserably for the last 100 years that we’ve been trying to do it. The only working solution is manipulating internal biochemistry until people’s bodies feel comfortable at socially acceptable weights and right now we don’t know how to do that. Until then all we will be able to do is promote calorie restriction and healthy eating, which has a higher failure rate than virtually every other medical intervention which is practiced at roughly 95%. The only other medical interventions that fail 95% of the time and that run the risk of making the underlying condition worse (dieting can make you fatter) are last resort experimental interventions for terminal patients.
Wow…
Don’t selectively quote 30-year-old data or anything…that might not give people the whole story, but just the part that props up your argument.
(emphasis mine)
Whoops. My fault. I actually didn’t read the whole thing, just that one part. It did sound a little far fetched as most overfeeding studies I’ve seen don’t show a metabolic boost anywhere near that level and all show some degree of weight gain.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0675/is_n3_v11/ai_13747114
Given the same amount of gluttony, some people gain weight more easily than others. A study was conducted of 12 sets of identical twins who were overfed 1,000 calories per day, six days a week for 14 weeks and allowed to walk only a half hour per day. Weight gain varied from 9.5 to 29 pounds. The group average was 18 pounds. Although this reflects a wide range of weight gain in the group, each pair of twins responded similarly to the overfeeding. Therefore, genetic factors seem to control one’s tendency to get fat.
84,000 extra calories and the weight gain varied from 9.5 to 29 pounds. Plus some of that gain had to be muscle to carry the extra fat around. So 3500 calories does not equal a pound of fat in practice as there are too many variables.
People who are overweight, who decide to eat in a disciplined manner and reduce their caloric intake, lose weight. This takes discipline and willpower. It takes effort and thought. Why does the fact that you “couldn’t possibly measure the excess of a fat person’s eating” (which I do not agree with, by the way) mean that fat people are not lazy? How is it that fat people can actively make a change, and lose weight, if it is impossible to measure? By logic, if it is impossible to measure, there should be no way to voluntarily lose weight by eating less. How could you tell how much less is enough, if it is impossible to measure?
You seem to be confusing the difficulty measuring over one day with the ability to keep in balance generally over weeks, months, and years. Once again, it make actually take some effort to realize that having eaten the Cinnabon two days ago, you should not “treat yourself” again today. The fact that you cannot measure the exact caloric overcount from eating the Cinnabon two days ago does not change the need to maintain rough measurement and balance.
No…the measurement problem doesn’t go away even if you increase the time to a year. Fat people are still eating only a tiny fraction more than they’re burning - 0.6%. That’s not a measurable difference over a day or over a year. It’s utterly trivial. There is in fact no way on earth anyone can tell whether a person is eating more than they should given how much they’re burning except by watching them gain weight over periods of time.
You can’t. You’re talking about a change in lifestyle equivalent to a spoonful of sugar a day. Why do you assume that you could ever tell when the mathematical impossibility of doing so is obvious?
So tell me, what is your theory on how anyone EVER loses weight, if such a change is so difficult to measure?
As I’ve said, I was overweight at the beginning of this summer, and had been, in fact, for several years. Did I worry about how many extra teaspoons of sugar per day I’d had over the course of my life? No. Did I worry about whether I was going to have an extra one that particular day? Damn right I did. Over the course of three and a half months, I have lost 20 pounds through reduction in calories (and increase in excercise throughout the course of my normal day…mostly commuting a 1.5 mile round trip by bicycle). This works out average just over one pound per week, nearly 600 calories per day. Granted, 600 calories is not the miniscule amount we were talking about before, but as I said, I never once thought about how much extra I’d eaten to get that way, beacause it doesn’t matter. Once you’re overweight, it is defeatist and trying to absolve yourself of fault if you say “but I ONLY averaged one teaspoon of sugar more than I needed per day, every day, for the last 30 years!” What good does saying that do? It
The question here is: What did I do that is so magical that poor people can’t do it as well? I’m not poor by the standards we’re talking about in this thread, though I am a college student who definitely cannot afford to spend a lot of money on food. So tell me what I did that you’re saying poor overweight people cannot. I argue that nearly anyone can.
Well…I’ve never done THAT before. Sorry for the incomplete second graf. I’ll try and finish it here.
makes the problem seem at once too miniscule to fix (which is fairly ironic) and at once insurmountable. Yet it is obviously not insurmountable, as thousands or tens of thousands of people have lost and kept down their weight. So, I say though it may be a factually true statement, to average out excess calories over the entire course of one’s life, it is also utterly meaningless in any appreciable way.
Good point.
As I have repeatedly stated in this and other threads, we so desperately want to find a cause to obesity that absolves all personal responsibility. Alas, it does not exist. The truth is that a person is fat because they stuff too much food in their mouth, and/or they don’t get enough exercise.
Virtually anyone can lose weight. Even poor people. And the formula is extremely simple: eat better, eat less, and exercise. This formula has a 100% success rate. Of course, if a person does not have the discipline to follow the formula, they will never lose weight.
Yes, virtually anyone can lose some weight. But how much weight can they lose and how long can they keep it off are what are important. If all people had to do was lose weight there’d be no problem but they usually just gain it back and/or after they lose a certain amount of weight weight loss starts becoming exponentially harder.
I don’t really believe in the self discipline viewpoint on weight loss. I know graduate students and people with doctorates who struggle with their weight, I know single parents who work and raise families by themselves who struggle with weight. If a person has the discipline to get an advanced degree or raise a family by themselves but not to control their eating habits then eating habits are not something that you can just assume everyone can control if they want to. That formula only has a 100% success rate on paper. If people enjoyed/tolerated depriving themselves of food and/or they could starve (that is all dieting is in one form or another) and not regain the weight to avoid the next famine then our ancestors would’ve died out millions of years ago. There probably were human ancestors who enjoyed large amounts of exercise, eating low calorie foods and who didn’t regain weight after a famine. They are all in museums somewhere with captions talking about when they went extinct. Human genes have been refined and developed under eons of famine, which is why people have trouble losing weight and keeping it off in 2005 in the land of plenty.
That the formula you are listing would work if it didn’t violate billions of years of biochemical evolution. No one is trying to ‘absolve people of responsibility’ just trying to hand out the responsiblity fairly. Do you get this way when dealing with cancer patients? 66% of cancer could be avoided with healthier diet, exercise, screeing and not smoking. Combine that with things like nutrional therapy and other esoteric therapies and the number is probably closer to 80%. But nobody has this level of distaste for cancer victims that we do for obese people. The vast majority of life’s problems are the fault of the person with the problem to one degree or another. But asking them to scale mountains just doesn’t make sense. Wait until medicine knows enough about the biochemistry of obesity to make it so losing weight and keeping it off has a 20, 40 or 90% success rate instead of the 5-10% rate it has now. There are tons of people who want to be thin but who just can’t control their biochemistry well enough with today’s technology to get there.
Garfield226 - How do you intend to keep the weight off, and how long do you think you will keep the weight off?
I intend to keep eating fewer calories than I burn until I reach a goal weight, then increase my intake slowly until I find (approximately) the number of calories it takes to maintain that weight and try to average that many calories from then on. Through continual monitoring of my weight I will be able to tell whether I am exceeding (or undercutting) the limits and can adjust my intake (or exercise, but primarily intake) accordingly. I believe I’ll keep it off as long as I want to keep it off.
It’s an interesting conundrum isn’t it? Which is why people’s cavalier certitude about something they haven’t really considered logically at all is such an impediment to solving the problem. (I point to **Crafter_Man ** as a typical example). Most people are unshakably convinced that permanent modest lifestyle changes are the solution. There’s two problems with this total misapprehension. 1) It can’t possibly work. 2) it has political implications when people get round to discussing fat people. I’ve been interested in the political implications, but you’re interested in the practical implications for you which is also perfectly reasonable. But let’s be thoughtful about it.
We really have to sit down and think. Get out a piece of paper. Why don’t permanent modest lifestyle changes work? Well, it’s like asking somebody to regulate the temperature in a room to 10 degrees by setting a thermostat that has a precision of +/- 300 degrees. It’s an exercise in both frustration and stupidtity.
The cycle of crash diet, gain, crash diet, gain, crash diet, is the only solution that makes any mathematical sense. This is in fact the solution you’re describing for yourself. And by a crash diet I mean a diet *vastly * below your daily requirement for a very short period of time with an inevitable return to your usual energy balance for the vast majority of the time. In terms of the thermostat analogy when it gets too hot in the room you very briefly set the temperature on the thermostat down 100s of degrees (to an amount that would certainly freeze you to death if you did it for a long time). When you’re satisfied with the results you turn the heat off altogether until it starts getting uncomfortable again.
The problem is even though the diet you have right now is working for you, ultimately you’re going to have to return to virtually your identical energy balance over the long term. Frankly for the rest of your life the average energy balance for you will have to be an imperceptible change from where you were before you dieted. This is where nearly everyone gets screwed (because they haven’t thought about the problem - or actually my complaint is they haven’t been told about the problem). Because people think that once they’ve lost weight by dropping their energy balance by some huge amount they can maintain that weight by some finer calibration of “lifestyle regulation.” They think they can consciously manage a “healthy” energy balance. (I see in your new post that that’s your plan. All I can say is rethink your plan or you will face certain defeat at the hands of physical laws. You can’t titrate to the millileter with buckets.)
Are you intentionally avoiding my question?
Wesley Clark:
Indeed, there are successful & educated people who are obese. These people either want to be fat, or they lack the discipline to lose the weight – take your pick. It’s that simple.
I was fat for a long time. And then I decided I didn’t want to be fat anymore. So I restricted my caloric intake and began exercising. I went from 200 lbs to 150 lbs. That was 10 years ago, ad I’m still at 150 lbs. How was I able to do it? Simple: by remaining on a calorie-restrictive diet and remaining on an exercise program. Most people don’t do this; they quit. And then the weight returns. (Big surprise.)
Muddying this issue with complicated, specious, & politically-correct theories does no one a favor, especially those who are fat and want to lose the weight. And when you strip away all the BS you learn the painful truth: a person is fat because they stuff too much food in their mouth, and/or they don’t get enough exercise. Period. And the formula for losing weight is extremely simple: eat better, eat less, and exercise. This formula has a 100% success rate. Discipline is (obviously) needed to follow the formula over the long term. If a person does not have the discipline to do it, they will never lose the weight.
Which question?
Try re-reading (or perhaps, reading?) post #130.
[QUOTE=leandroc76]
Crispy Cremes
[QUOTE]
Sorry…but I have to make this nit-pick because it’s near and dear to my heart.
It’s Krispy Kremes