One way you could lose weight quickly is to remove the chip from your shoulder. I asked someone else one question about fighting his biological impulses and you’re assuming a lot of things about me. My plan? My bad habits? The hell? Seriously, dial it down a few notches and climb down off your high horse.
I haven’t read any posts past this one, so I may be covering old ground, and I know we’ve been over this issue in other threads.
The problem I have with your posts is you are conflating the concepts of “going on a diet” with “having a healthy diet.” Sure most diets fail. But if people learn to have a healthy diet and to exercise, they will lose weight.
I don’t presume to know, just that I think there’s gotta be something seriously wrong if exercising = excruciating pain. I’ve been running a while now, and it wasn’t always pleasant, but it was never horrifyingly painful. I mean, you start small. And you don’t even have to run–you can just walk. That’s boring but not excruciating.
Wah-wah.
Perhaps you should look into one of those motorized chairs so you don’t risk burning one calorie in the line at McFatBurger waiting for your 12 McHeartAttacks.
Seriously, if you think that leg cramp hurts, wait until it happens in your heart.
But please, to all the lazy fat people who prefer to eat and become one with your couch, when you are having a heart attack, please step out of line at the ER and let the other people go first.
And I was just reading a study the other day about how a major cause of infertility amongst women is obesity (sorry I didn’t keep a copy of the link so can’t provide the cite)
Right, and so should all the people who drank too much, who did something foolish and got into an accident, everyone who smokes, everyone who drives a car (very risky, that) and really, anyone at all who didn’t get hit by a meteor or struck my lightning on a sunny day.
So what painful things have you done today?
Excruciatingly painful?!? Dude, I’m talking about going outside now and then. Stuff like having our kids walk to school again, building stores within walking distance, etc. This sort of thing won’t turn you into a lean machine, but walking a few couple of miles a day doing your daily tasks is enough to prevent most people from ever getting to the point of obesity in the first place. If we can re-integrate activity into our daily lives, we won’t really need to go hit the gym to maintain a healthy weight.
If anything above a completely sedentary life is “excruciatingly painful” you’ve got some serious major issues. I’ve been doing the Couch-2-5k thing. I just did my first 20 minute run last night, and I didn’t even get winded (yay me!). When I started a month and a half ago I was huffing and puffing after the little one minute runs. It’s only takes 20 minutes a day three times a week and the change is huge and noticeable. Even completely sedentary hugely obese people have been able to follow this program. The only hard part is getting off the couch, which yeah, is your choice and responsibility.
Yeah. I mean, I first started a few years ago, just because I felt it would be a good idea, in the long-term. And it was unpleasant to run at first, so I’d stop and start, taking walking breaks when I got tired, and I slowly built up. So, to answer the OP’s question, yes, at one point in my life, I did something unpleasant (but on a scale of pain, I honestly can’t call it excruciating–it was nowhere near that level of pain), but now it doesn’t even register as unpleasant, more like hard work.
And earlier today, I walked about a mile and a half to pick up dinner…again, not excruciating, except for the fact that I hate the cold. I don’t know, it doesn’t seem like that much effort to me.
Yes you do die. Our ancestors who enjoyed eating foods that had almost no caloric value and that engaged in tons of exercise are not our ancestors. They all died during the first food shortage they ran across.
I think in 30 years the concept of diet and exercise as a cure for obesity will be viewed the same way (as silly and unscientific) as abstinence only education is currently viewed a cure for HIV and pregnancy, as something on the fringe that has no real evidence to support it. If you ignore the fact that evolution has created us to do the exact opposite and ignore the 99% failure rate, it is a great cure. If.
Not necessarily. Reasonable changes in diet and exercise will probably affect BMI by 1-2 points, not the 5-10 a person needs to truly address obesity. Considering that obesity implies having a BMI at least 5 points above 25 and/or being 20% above your body weight, its really not going to work.
There is no evidence anywhere that (aside from a tiny minority, maybe 5%) of person can lose 20% of their bodyweight and keep it off indefinately with lifestyle changes alone. It will require lifestyle changes plus medications or surgery.
Go find a peer reviewed, double blind, replicatable study that finds reasonable lifestyle changes lead to permanent weight loss of more than 5%-ish of bodyweight. There likely aren’t any.
Today, nothing. I spent the day home from work sick.
BUT…
2 years ago someone ran into me with their car and screwed my back up. For two years I was in a far amount of pain. This caused reduced mobility and within a month or so of the crash I noticed weight gain. For the last two years I’ve had to really keep an eye on my food intake - not to take in more then I needed,. more than I burned in a day. It wasn’t that hard. I didn’t lose the extra 15-20 pounds I gained at the start right away but I wasn’t adding more fat to the pile.
As my mobility improved I could walk more. This allowed me to eat a little better and still keep my weight in check.
Recently I bought a house and I’m building a recording studio. I’m doing all the construction myself. This is very difficult work due to the back pain AND the overall loss of muscle from the last two years. It is sometimes slow moving and frustrating because I do have to pace myself because of the pain. If I go to far I might be out for the rest of the day.
I spend 8-10 hours a day on the weekends working on the studio and then spend the week “recovering”.
Does it hurt? Yes.
Is the amount of hurt reducing each weekend? Yes.
Do I feel better overall? YES.
I can afford to hire people to do the work but I choose to do it myself partly because it is a challenge and partly because the physical work will be good for my body. I personally will not be happy if I’m a weak fat slob with McD’s special sauce on the front of my t-shirt. I don’t desire washboard ab’s either. But I’ll never be one of those people who can’t walk up three flights of stairs.
I don’t run. I hate jogging. I don’t ride bikes. I can’t stand working out in a gym. My daily job is me in front of a computer 8 hours a day. But, even with the extra reduced mobility from the crash I managed my diet and didn’t turn into a big fat tub of goo.
That said, it might have been easier for me because I don’t stuff my face with crap 24 hours a day. I rarely have soda. Ever rarer do I eat processed or fast food.
If you’re happy being a lazy fat sod and not doing something because it’s hard or it hurts,. fine. More power to you. What do I care at the end of the day if you are a fat fucking pig? If your fat legs can’t get you out of the basement level before the fire gets you, fine by me.
But don’t expect me to offer you my seat on the train because standing makes you winded. Go wheeze and sweat someplace else.
So how are the fat people going to go find food if they’re so overweight they can’t walk more than 1/2 mile a day? MichaelJohnBertrand comments make me think he’d just sit in a cave somewhere and grunt for food (because exercise hurts) while the ones with the lower BMI (and are more fit) can make the 100 mile hike over the mountain range to the plains where the food IS growing.
Do you really think the more fit are going to be willing to hike back over the mountain to bring Chubby Lump-Lump food?
Hell, the thinner might just eat Chubby Lump-Lump because he has more meat on his bones then Barbi Skinnylegs.
In a pre-agricultural setting, they probably can’t find enough food with little enough effort to do that. In a modern setting, they can.
Pre-modern humans might well have been willing to bring food to people who were too fat to get their own, too. We’ve found skeletons of early humans who, from the condition of the skeleton, had handicaps that would have prevented their getting their own food, but clearly lived long enough to imply that someone else was getting food for them.
People today do things to get more money for rich people- if you don’t have our current rich=good fat=bad moral attitude (which people in other cultures wouldn’t necessarily have), is that really different from bringing more food to a fat person?
I’ve read that, too. Both obesity and very low body fat can cause infertility in women.
I think this point doesn’t get the emphasis it deserves. “Exercise more” doesn’t have to mean “do an intense workout for several hours every day”. Nothing wrong with that, but an all-or-nothing approach does tend to devalue smaller (and therefore easier to make) but still helpful changes, like walking more. There’s a middle ground here that doesn’t require spending all your free time at the gym, for those of us who dislike exercise.
Eating is one of a very few activities that humans might do too much of- it’s one where “just say no” isn’t an option.
If you find that, whenever you drink alcohol, you drink too much, you have the option of not drinking any alcohol at all. You don’t have that option with food.
So much hate.
I gained 50 pounds over 2 years when I left the service and entered the private sector. I wasn’t aware that because I was sitting at desks for 9+ hours a day and driving an hour each way to and from work, my activity level had changed so drastically that I had to cut my portions way back. I wasn’t aware because my days were tiring me out just as quickly (cerebral work can be hard too).
My body still thought it needed that food. Seriously. If I skipped a meal at night because I was too tired, I’d wake up around 3 AM with hunger pangs. I’d eat a slice of toast with cheese or peanut butter and try to go back to sleep. That was the other thing. I was sleeping less, and not sleeping well. Also, I didn’t have quick access to a water foutain during the day anymore. I had to carry my water with me and refill my bottles on my half hour lunch break.
By the time I went to a doctor, I was depressed, discouraged, and disheartened. We looked at how my habits had changed. I no longer walked to the store because my new house was a mile from the store on roads without sidewalks. I got home late, went to bed late, tossed and turned, and spent most of my waking life sitting in a car or at a desk. I didn’t walk to the water fountain, I didn’t walk to the mess hall anymore (I ate in a small “cafeteria” with the rest of my coworkers), I got home after dark and was scared to walk on the road for exercise after I was almost hit twice (yes, with reflective gear on).
I ate right, and I ate well, and I didn’t stuff myself to the point of fullness. I just didn’t cut back on calories I wasn’t using, because my constant thirst and fatigue were being misread as hunger.
I have a plan so I don’t intend to be here forever. But my doctor has warned me that it will take a lot longer to get it off than it did to put it on particularly in an environment that is hostile to physical activity. I’m not whining and I’m not making excuses. I’m simply offering an example to those of you who are arguing that fat people are stupid, lazy, weak-willed whiners.
I am none of those things. I don’t think I’m unique.
How are you defining reasonable? That’s a highly individualistic thing.
The key is to not let yourself get to point were a drastic change in either exercise or diet is even needed. Preventing obesity is a lot easier than treating it. All too often that message gets lost in threads like this because the focus is always on what it takes to lose weight. Of course it’s going to be hard at that point because a heavy body doesn’t take to exercise as well as a light one, and major dietary changes will have to made as well.
Funny you should mention that. I had never heard of this wacky P90X until this past weekend. I saw an infomercial of it while running in the gym, of all places. I don’t even have a TV, but the program looked really intriguing. This is saying a lot, considering I also loathe infomercials.
I don’t need to lose weight, but I have pretty much hit plateaux in all of my usual physical actitivites. I did a bit of googling, end everything I read seems to indicate that if you stick with it, it really works.
Well, OK, perhaps calling it excrutiating was more than a bit hyperbolic. 
But my point remains that I don’t think fit people understand just how much it hurts to exercise when you’re very overweight.
Seven, seriously, why the hate? Nobody’s asking you to carry us.
Obesity is a disability. The fact that we got this way on our own steam doesn’t change that. It’s a disability because it makes many everyday things a lot harder. Simple things like walking a few blocks hurt a lot, because of the stress on our joints. We get winded just walking from one end of our apartments to the other. Sometimes we get aches and pains for no apparent reason. We die too young and live in pain.
If this was from absolutely any other cause, even something else lifestyle related like alcoholism, smoking, or a skiing accident, we would get sympathy and support, and nobody would think of throwing our disease in our face and saying “Just get over it!”.
But no, to add to our pain, you have compassionate souls like Seven, who feel perfectly fine heaping scorn and abuse on us fatties simply because we’re not pleasing to the eye. Society says it’s fine to pick on fatties, and that’s good enough for the Sevens of the world. Wee, let’s go kick the fatty.
And this doesn’t exactly make a person feel like going out there and conquering their illness. Do you wonder why so many of us suffer from depression, another disability?
I’ve been overweight my entire life. And my entire life, people like Seven have tormented me for it. And abuse does not lead to change.
So please, pause before you think of how nice my life must be, how easy I must have it, simply because you do not understand what or who I am.
Being fat ain’t for wimps.
Most of the people who are saying “just suck it up fatties and eat less and get to the gym it’s easy you whining pansies”:
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Don’t have a frigging clue what they’re talking about.
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Are reprehensible jerks.
I was saying it’s harder. Read for comprehension.
The math here isn’t hard. There are many nonbiological imperatives to work for money, and no biological imperatives driving you not to work for money. Many > 0; making money tends to win. There is one (or more) biological imperative to care for your kids, and only one imperative to stay in bed and let them rot. 1 = 1, leaving the door open for other imperatives, like say if you like them a little. But for starving yourself and exercizing past exhaustion, there are no biological imperatives encouraging you, and several arguing against it. 0 < Several, so it’s damned hard to do the ‘get fit’ thing, if you’re far enough down the celulose-lined path that you actually need to.
The people who are like, “oh it’s so easy” - you’re clueless. Some of us have no stamina; I get exhausted after less than ten minutes of even moderately strenuous exercise. (I did even when I was a skinny kid, as it happens; funny that.) Some of use aren’t packing around pansy baby lightweight loads of a hundred twenty pounds; I’m carrying around three fifty, and you can’t understand why I’m ill-inclined to frolic and skip and jump around like a little fairy, just because you are a lightweight. Sorry; if you want to impress me with your impressive multimile runs and your painless gym regimens, try doing them with a hundred and fifty pound bag of sand slung over your shoulders for a few weeks, and then maybe I’ll be impressed.
And some of us have better things to do with our life than waste it suffering in a gym.
Whoa, okay. I didn’t mean to piss you off. But maybe the problem here is that you’re equating “What’s so hard about a little exercise?” with “Starving yourself and exercising past exhaustion.” I mean, I’ve never done either of those things, and I don’t think anyone should. I just mean what’s so hard about walking a mile? or for twenty minutes? I’m not talking about running or jogging, I just mean regular walking.