TruCelt, those “murderers of African babies” were from France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the UK, Argentina, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, if I’m not forgetting anybody.
“Clean your plate, there’s children starving in Africa!” may even have a “there’s children starving in Congo!” version in Morocco.
Another thing…
Eating is a reaction we have to a whole lot of stimulus.
From being rewarded for something as a child with a cookie or candy, to being comforted with a cookie or candy. Eating when bored. Nothing to do with your hands in front of the TV, might as well use them to eat potato chips. We often don’t bother to THINK when we eat - have a candy dish out with m&m’s in it…watch someone stand there and put m&ms into their mouth without thinking about it.
This kind of wild over-reaction demonstrates what many Dopers have long observed – obesity is a touchy subject. VERY touchy.
The point is that we DO have a cure for obesity. We can cure obesity with exercise and dietary control. Nobody said that it would be easy, and nobody denies that it will be more difficult for some than for others. Nevertheless, whenever people point this out, one can expect others to respond with wild outrage.
surrounded by literalists, I don’t know why you’re having such difficulty. I don’t know if you’re doing everything reasonably well, or if you have a glandular disorder, or if you’re underestimating your caloric intake. Nor would I care to hazard a guess at this point. That doesn’t change the fact that we DO have a cure for obesity, even though this cure is decidedly more difficult or unpleasant for some people than for others.
If you want a straight answer though, then YES… unless you have some unusual medical condition, curing your obesity will require patience, endurance, and effort. It will probably require a LOT of those things. As I said, I never claimed that this fix would be easy for you. It certainly wasn’t for me, and I struggled with obesity for years.
Along the way, I learned many of the things that I was doing wrong, and I learned that I hadn’t educated myself as well as I should have. The journey wasn’t easy, and to this day, I have physical damage as a result. Your journey might be decidedly more arduous, whether due to life circumstances, your biology, or simply the strategies that you’ve adopted. None of that means that obesity cannot be cured, nor does it justify lambasting people who point out that this cure (however unpleasant it may be) does exist.
And a very few are getting eight meals a day.
The problem comes when you go to a restaurant for dinner, they don’t reduce your portion size because you’ve been snacking all day.
Going back to what I said about eating too much without realizing it, I know someone who thinks she is average weight and is constantly talking about how fat other people are. Well, IMHO, she’s a little chubby–perhaps ten pounds overweight. She does exercise so that helps burn some extra calories, but I still think she consumes more than she needs.
Her breakfasts consist of three of four things. A cup of yogurt. A piece of fruit. A granola bar and a glass of juice. Now, that’s easily four hundred calories right there. If your morning consists of riding to the commuter lot and then sitting at your desk, I don’t think you need four hundred calories.
For lunch, she’ll have a meaty sandwich, a bag of chips or pretzels, a plastic container of fruits and veggies, and a dessert. Plus, she snacks throughout the day (granola and nuts). She’ll take a 30 minute walk in the middle of the day. But I’m thinking that’s a lot of food for a pretty sedentary day. I’d probably just eat the sandwich and the fruit and call it a day until dinner.
Like I said, she’s not obese (though she has had her “fat” years). But I find it hard to take her seriously when she’s talking about how much so-and-so is eating. It’s all relative, I suppose. I suppose someone could say that I’m the abnormal one. But it’s further proof in my mind that the average American of “comfortable” means just does not know how much food they really need. They look on the back of the food package and it tells them they’re entitled to 2000 calories, but I think that thing is inaccurate for the vast majority of Americans.
I think Monstro has a good point.
I remember in a thread earlier on, someone was talking about how “unrealistic” a 1,400 calorie diet is, and listed out a day’s worth of food to show how entirely un-doable it was. The complaint was along the lines of “Look, my lunch is a measly sandwich!” Well, yeah.
The raw truth is that we need surprisingly little food. Even if you eat the best of foods, you have to be strategic because you can get just as fat on whole grains and lean meats if you eat too much. As for stuff like ice cream, sodas, chips, etc…we get this idea that you can have one or maybe two treats in a day. Really, it’s more like one or maybe two treats in a week. There is not a ton of wiggle room.
For myself, the key to not gaining weight is to eat food prepared at home, except for special occasions.
If you eat out, it is very difficult to control your intake unless you are careful and know exactly what is in the food being served. Plus, I at least find portion control difficult with bought food - if I bought say a sandwich, I’d be tempted to eat it all, even if it was too large.
I’m Canadian, and I must say that each time I visit the US I am astonished at the sheer size of the portions commonly served in restaurants - sometimes, what is intended for one (appetizer, main and dessert) does for my whole family (two adults and a five year old). It isn’t a huge mystery to me why there is an obesity problem, if people are eating like this regularly. Though gigantic portions are also showing up in Canada as well …
So you just don’t eat it all, right? Self-control is called for in this case, and if you can’t handle that part (portion control is hard for me, too) then you don’t go to restaurants.
Servers are expected to monitor alcohol consumption. “I’m sorry sir, I believe you’ve had enough!”
But aren’t permitted to tell the 300lb woman she can’t have cheesecake with that.
We don’t allow cigarettes to be marketed to children, but it’s okay for MacDonald’s.
It is so sad to see people taking their kids to Macdonald’s. Yikes, do they not bother to read that every single meal they serve has an entire daily allowance of fat, for an adult, in it?
I know people who took their toddlers there and fed them home fries and crap. I had to bite my tongue from saying, “What the fuck are you thinking?” She’s not yet 2 yrs old and you’re feeding her this crap?
It scares me the way it scares me to see someone take a baby’s bottle and fill it with soda pop. Seriously?
That is not at all correct that every meal at McDonald’s has entire daily allowance of fat. In fact, with a few modifications, it’s pretty easy to make their food low-fat. Even the medium size fries which is quite huge has less than 1/3 of the daily serving of fat for an adult. For a number of reasons, I avoid fast food but just because it’s trendy to hate on McDonald’s doesn’t mean it’s contributing at all to the conversation on obesity to mistate what their menu actually has.
Yes, feeding soda to a baby is a horrible idea. Fortunately, this is something I’ve rarely seen and I even worked at McDonald’s for one miserable summer.
I also don’t think it’s sad to see people taking their kids to McDonald’s. It’s often just as healthy/unhealthy as taking your kid to Panera, Olive Garden, Macaroni Grill, CPK or any other slightly more upscale place to eat.
It is sad to see people teaching their kids horrible eating habits- I get way more worried about people I see in the grocery store with a cart full of frozen pizzas, blue juice and candy than a family I see going into McDonald’s.
I used to be one of those, “I’m never taking my kid there!” til my son was about 4. His sitter took him.
It was all over. No more secretly grabbing a chicken sandwich when he wasn’t around. We could enjoy the salty fries together now.
We love McDonald’s. We just don’t eat it every day.
I imagine that in some families, family style dining can increase chance of obesity. Some parents encourage their kids to eat more, to stuff themselves.
Many Americans are oblivious about themselves. Often I want to say, “no, you’re not curvy, you’re borderline obese.” Or “you’re not creative just because you want to be a poet (who writes bad poetry).” Inflated self-esteem matched with low self-confidence
The war on fat. Non-fat this and that. Japanese eat well marbled steak (kobe beef!), drink whole milk, prefer dark meat (I wonder if Americans are the only people who prefer white meat); French their foie gras, pates, confits, cheese, and whole milk. I bet that when Americans order breast meat and non-fat milk, they compensate for the lack of fulfillment by eating more and drenching their chicken in some sugary teriyaki sauce and having 10 bites of pecan pie.
At the butcher, I see people ordering a LEAN steaks, but 16 oz of it per person. They’ll probably drench it in A1 sauce because lean steak isn’t flavorful. A healthier portion would be a well marbled steak that’s lightly seasoned and satisfying after 4-8oz.
An American with a brownie is like a 13 year old kid with a porn mag.
Americans lack shame. They can feel guilty about eating a whole pizza and eating tuna that comes from fishery that kills dolphins and whales, but very little shame about being overweight (denial, denial!). Japanese, on the other hand, could care less about dolphins, whales, but the shame of being even slightly overweight (at least for women) pushes them to try every weightloss gimmick they hear about.
The French, they lack guilt and shame.
Most Americans have poorly developed palates. Good palate makes it a lot easier to eat everything in moderation. A good palate wouldn’t be able to take more than 3 nibbles of cheesecake. Or eat more than 8 oz of well marbled steak. Or more than half a cup of whole milk. A sophisticated palate is in tune with the body and seeks balance and moderation.
Reductionist science in field of nutrition. We’re only just beginning to acknowledge that there’s a lot about food and nutrition that we don’t know.
No, a brontosaurus is big boned, you however…
This. I used to make fun of the Disneyfied suburban downtown cores that surround DC - think Bethesda, Rockville, and Silver Spring on the Maryland side, with the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, Shirlington and Reston on the Virginia side for good examples. We could quibble as to how Disneyfied they all are, but they’re all essentially pre-planned downtown developments anchored around large chains. (Rosslyn-Ballston somehwat less so, granted). This makes them more than a little bland, and ripe targets for mockery. “Oh, look at the suburbanites, thinking they’re in the big city because they can walk from the metro station to the Cheesecake Factory” - that sort of thing.
But you know what? I was genuinely wrong to mock these pre-fabbed downtowns. Yes, they’re bland, and the blatantly manufactured “quaintness” of some of them can be grating. And Shirlington is sort of creepy - a few square blocks of downtown plunked down in the middle of nowhere in Arlington. But these mass-manufactured downtowns are carefully designed by marketing drones and soulless developers to embrace genuinely praiseworthy values. At the end of the day, they really *do *produce walkable communities, meaningful and well-used public spaces, and so on. These “urban villages” get people out of their cars, when twenty years ago they’d have damn near lived in the things. And I think people are both physically and mentally healthier for it.
A man who’s so drunk that he’s being cut off is an immediate danger to himself and others. He may try to drive, or start a fight, or pass out and puke on his own vomit. Whatever the health impact of an extra slice of cheesecake, it won’t make your 300-pound woman slam her SUV into a family of four, or take a swing at the fellow on the bar stool next to her.
I think we need to get it in our heads that the work we do and where we live is a choice, and it’s a choice that has consequences. If you want the benefits of the suburbs or a desk job, that’s fine. But don’t come whining to me about how you can’t be active because of these choices.
It’s not as neat 'n easy as that. Many people live as close to their jobs and/or city as their financial limitations will allow. Some people take jobs that involve a three hour daily commute so that they can keep food on the table. Yeah, they took the job by choice, but what choice did they really have? Foreclosure?
My mother did (does?) all of this. I grew up being told to clean my plate no matter what, if something was making me sick it was all in my head, I should be gratefull for this food, etc. And she’d constantly be dieting, which would result in me being given larger portions, or get upset when I didn’t want seconds. Also she’s not a good cook, over the years she’s adopted her cooking style to suit my father who’s very much a meat & potatoes man. Everything was bland, overcooked, and any complaints would send her on a rant about how “we’re not rich” and it was on sale.
Her attempts to “cook healthy” were worse. She’d make healthy or “low-fat” versions, refuse to admit that anyone could tell the diffence between them and the real versions, and double the portion sizes because “it’s healthy”. :rolleyes: She still gets upset if I’m eating at her house and won’t eat dessert (which I seldom eat anyway). Another side effect of her unappetizing meals was that I was constantly snacking growing up. Once I got a partime job I’d work evening so I wouldn’t have to eat dinner at home, eat at or after work (fast food, Chinese, or something from the deli), then secretly throw out any plates of leftovers she’d made.