Yikes! :eek:
Phil,
Some medical conditions like PCOS/Insulin Resistance CAN, in fact, defy the math.
Yeah but if you use 30 weight instead of 10w40 and leave off the fruit topping it can be a pretty fulfilling snack. The trouble is it always leaves me craving either a bone or some little squeaky toy.
OK, I guess you’re right. I don’t understand why eggs are pareve, but then I’m no rabbinical scholar.
Eggs are pareve because chickens (and other fowl) are really pareve.
It was a later rabbinical enactment that made fowl (because of it’s resemblemce to actual meat) have the status of meat. The encactment did not extend to eggs (probably because they don’t really resemble meat in any way).
Zev Steinhardt
Ignoring the inflammatory tone of some material above, the basic answer is Zev’s: we get far less exercise, and we we consume far more calories, than our ancestors of even two generations ago. I have to laugh every time someone complains about how much they have to spend to get someone to do their yard work, and then complains in the next breath about how much it costs, in time and money, to go to the gym and work out several times a week.
For some, the answer is to severely restrict their caloric intake. For others, it’s to devote enough time to exercise to offset the additonal calories. In default of one or both of those, most people will gain weight (a few abnormally high metabolic specimens at the far end of the bell curve excepted). One the additional weight has been gained, it requires an even greater degree of devotion to one or (preferably) both options to effect loss of that weight. It also requires a long-term commitment that many people on the gain-lose roller coster don’t understand, as it may take years for your body to stabilize at your new weight – when you start to lose weight, your body tries to compensate by slowing down your metabolism, making it harder to lose more or even to keep off the lost weight. Only after a considerable time of being thinner does your body seem to adjust to the lower weight.
The best single article I’ve seen on what’s known about obesity, weight loss, etc. was one of Malcolm Gladwell’s articles in The New Yorker a few years ago: The Pima Paradox .
I’m a software engineer – being over/underweight, having unkept hair, dressing poorly, and muttering odd phrases to myself are all parts of the job. They help my employers feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. If I were to show up looking like a Cosmopolitan male model, everyone would assume I was faking my technical expertise.
(A silly question deserves a silly answer, n’est pas? 
)
Having worked in a grocery store deli for a few years, I have a theory that part of the problem is the fact that it is just plain cheaper to buy junk food and food that is not so good for you than it is to buy the good stuff. Why that is, I don’t know. But I have seen not-well-off families choose the flavored “orange drink” stuff instead of orange juice for their children (or the fatty bologna lunchmeat instead of the turkey, etc.) so many times.
Although, there’s also the issue of how your parents taught you to eat. I really don’t understand the number of people who drink soda like it is water, for example. In my household, soda is a treat that you have Friday night, but other households have soda with dinner, and that can be a large unnecessary calorie intake right there.
Anyway, I think a world where milk is cheaper than soda makes more sense, don’t you?
Milk costs me $3.50 a gallon.
Coca-cola costs one dollar for a two-liter bottle.
Store-brand soda costs fifty cents for two liters.
Store-brand prepackaged bologna costs $2.00, and ham is $3, for a one-pound package.
Cold sliced turkey from the deli is $4.59 a pound.
Healthy bread costs $3 a loaf.
Store-brand bread so laden with preservatives that it literally does not go stale for two months is sixty cents.
I’m a college student. I have NO income except for the money I had in my bank account at the beginning of the semester. Do you really think I’m going to eat healthy?
I’m a college student. I have classes and meetings and tests (not to mention untreated depression). Do you really think I’m going to work out enough to make up for the food?
So I either don’t eat at all, or I get pudgey.
Poor me.
I think it’s a real pain in the ass that $20 will buy you a cart full of snack food (those big huge bags of potato chips and cheezy poofs are a dollar a pop, for example), OR it will buy you approximately two healthy meals. :rolleyes:
The reasons given so far are very good, but what I think it comes down to is that it’s so easy to become overweight, and so hard to get away from it. Think about it–with all the hassles of modern life, isn’t it nice to just eat whatever you want and not have to worry about it?
This is the root of the problem, IMHO.
That’s absurd - how much potato, tomato, carrot, cabbage, onion can you get for $20? Add some herbs or spices and you’ve got a week’s worth of vegetable stew, I bet.
Point. And it’s a lot easier to eat well when you can actually COOK. I’m still pissed about the weight I’ve gained from trying to live on Very Little Money and having nothing to cook in but a Very Little Microwave.
And I still don’t understand the connection between being fat and buying motor oil!!!
I gained some weight due to a life style change from running around like a maniac in college and not eating regular meals to sitting on my ass all day writing software and eating regular meals. That accounted for maybe 15 or 20 lbs.
I gained the bulk of my extra weight (about 45 lbs) when I was on a medication for my migraines that listed “weight gain” as a side effect. I thought it meant water retention. In fact, it meant that it was an appetitite stimulant. This meant that my brain was telling me to eat when my body did not really need food. Big surprise - my brain won. I was on this medication for a couple of years.
I got off the meds (luckily there were alternative meds), lost the weight in 1998, and have been maintaining it since.
I think different people have different brain chemistries that tell them when to eat. My appetite was stimulated by meds - some people’s could be normally be in an elevated state without any meds.
Don’t genetic predispositions often play a strong role? Me, I’m very thin. How much I eat and how much exercise I get seem to have very little effect on my weight. I could stuff myself with food and sit on the couch all day, and would still gain very little weight, if any at all (no, I’m not trying to make anyone jealous! :p). Many members of my family are like this. But I know obese people who can eat right and exercise a lot but still can’t seem to lose that much weight.
In any case, fat or thin, a good diet and plenty of exercise is the best thing for your health. But it seems to me too much of a generalization to say that all overweight people are that way because they eat poorly and are couch potatoes.
I used to be jealous of people like you, but then I realized that had I not started to gain weight, I also would never have started exercising.
I saw a former high school classmate a couple years ago. She was just as thin as she was in HS, while I’d gained quite a few pounds and it was obvious (I was a thin girl in HS). Yet, I noticed her underarms were flabby (but thin), while I have barely a flabby spot on my body due to a very regimented exercise routine.
So, I for one am a non-thin person who actually doesn’t envy people who can eat anything, since being thin tends to fool a lot of people into thinking they’re healthy when they’re not. (Not that I know whether you are or not; you just provided the example).
There was a thread about this in GQ but, alas, it was lost in the Great Crash. Some of the points that I raised:
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Identical twins reared apart have similar body weights.
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If you take pairs of identical twins and feed them identical amounts of excess calories, the weight gain within a twin pair is tightly linked but the weight gain among different pairs varies widely (i.e. for the same number of calories ingested, the amount of weight gained depends on the person’s genetic makeup. And the weight gain can be small, medium, or large depending on the genes)
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For the same number of calories ingested, leptin deficient mice gain more weight than leptin-replete mice.
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Certain diseases/lesions affecting the hypothalamus (the site in the brain controlling things like appetite, thirst, etc.) lead to acquired obesity in previously normal-weight individuals.
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The prevalence of obesity in certain ethnic groups (eg. Pima Indians) approaches 100%.
These type of data are only part of the huge amount of evidence indicating that obesity can have a substantial “non-pyschological” contribution to its genesis.
I don’t think there is anyone dealing with obesity on a professional basis who seriously believes that it is a simple as “People get fat because they do lack self control and a knowledge of portions and nutrition.”
I find that this post was right beneath “favourite cookie”, quite amusing.
What I want to know is, why is it that I’m so skinny when I eat so much crap and don’t exercise?
Genetics, I reckon.
Read the OP - "Why are so many Americans overweight? Travel around the world, and (except in a few places in the Pacific Ocean) you won’t see anything like as many obese people as in the US. It’s lifestyle.
One thing I can’t help noticing, having an obese relative and some fairly hefty friends, is how obese people often have juvenile diets. In their 20s, 30s even 40s, they eat as if they were still 10 year olds. Don’t eat much fresh fruit/veg. Have a hang up about fish. Prefer white bread to wholegrain. Can’t imagine pasta or a salad without a ton of cheese. They’re overgrown physically, but in terms of culinary taste they’re infantile.
The reason that I am overweight is that as I got older my metabolism slowed down. This compounded with the fact that a job change to a much more sedentary type job lead to a waist line that has grown at an alarming rate. (I added about 6 inches in about 5 years)
I want to change my eating habits.
I want to get an exercise habit.
It’s hard to change these long held patterns.
But I’m trying Ringo. I’m trying real hard.