It is reasonable if a decent percentage of the public can and will follow the advice.
You are right about preventing obesity. Supposedly if you endorse decent lifestyles in children they will be less likely to grow up to be obese, by adulthood those interventions won’t work as well if at all. But those interventions have to be done in childhood, when the brain is still plastic.
But we still shouldn’t be surprised when lifestyle alone cannot change obesity in any meaningful fashion. Areas of the brain that give us a sense of control over our biological actions evolved far after we evolved the ability to regulate energy intake. Willpower and the neocortex are fairly recent additions to our biology. Energy regulation was likely one of the first traits life developed.
At 350 pounds, that time in the gym could literally save your life. Your heart is a ticking timebomb that’s going to explode in a heart attack. What are you doing that’s more important with your time? Note, I said “more important”, not more enjoyable. If you can’t find an enjoyable way to work out, so what? Do it anyway.
If you are getting exhausted after 10 minutes, you’re working out too hard. Tone it down until you can work out for 45-60 minutes. That may mean you are at a very slow pace, but that’s fine. You’re 350 and it takes a lot of effort to just move your weight around. You should be thinking of ways to burn more calories, not how to reach some maximum calories/minute. If the impact of walking hurts your joints, try the stationary bikes or elliptical machines.
If nothing else, grab a book/iPod and sit on the stationary bike for an hour even if you’re just twirling your legs with no resistance. Eventually you’ll get stronger and will be able to add more resistance.
Yup, you can shorten it by carrying around 150+ pounds of excess weight. I’ve never been that heavy, but I’ve been over 20 stone English style, 288 pounds and almost certainly more because I saw that figure on the scales after the first week of the diet. So don’t tell me I don’t have a clue about how hard exercise is, because I set myself the modest initial goal of walking up three stories for coffee twice a day, instead of taking the lift, and it was fucking hard. I’m talking fighting for breath, hauling myself up by the handrail hard. When I stepped it up to taking outdoor walks, my feet were going numb after the first mile. But I sucked it up and stuck to it rather than whine about how the effortless exercise freaks just didn’t understand me, and I smiled and nodded politely at the office marathon runner, and you know what? Much less than a year later the 44"-waist trousers that needed a heavy leather belt to keep the waistband from bursting were fitting me like clown pants. I even got to see the scales reading one hundred and something for the first time since the 1970s.
I’m still a lifelong collection of bad eating habits waiting to reassert themselves. I daren’t ever assume differently. But I can either do something about what I eat and how much exercise I take before I’m crippled with arthritis and medicating for Type 2 diabetes, or after. My choice. No-one else can do it for me and no amount of kvetching will make it any easier.
Biological imperatives? If the biological imperative to keep yourself physically mobile enough to hunt or gather your own bellyful of food isn’t enough, what is?
People here who’ve lost quite a bit of weight have given very reasonable advice to anyone who chooses to try to do better.
I have no idea what it is to be 350 pounds, but I know people who’ve weighed more who valued their lives more than you apparently do and worked at getting some of the weight off. They didn’t care if they were the perfect size, just a bit healthier.
You get really winded and uncomfortable after ten minutes. Find a gym that has a pool. The water offers better resistance than walking on a treadmill and takes about 70% of your weight off your aching joints and feet. At the fitness level you describe, just walking back and forth in the pool for 20-30 minutes would be an excellent start.
If you’re unwilling to commit any time to your health because you have better things to do with your time, then that’s your choice. The strongest biological impulse we have is to survive. If you have no problem ignoring that one and want to grasp to the idea that your urge to eat is stronger, then hold on to whatever delusion you need to make yourself feel better. Your quote above is all anyone needs to see to understand why you are in the shape you’re in. I don’t need to be morbidly obese to understand that.
Through work I spent a year working with patients who are at least 100 pounds overweight. I have nothing but respect and admiration for those people who chose to sign up for help to get healthier. Not a size zero, not a marathon runner - to get healthier. They had a wide variety of diseases and ranged in weight from 225 pounds to 580 pounds. For some, this was the first time they ever tried to lose weight. It was hard for them and it would be for anyone that size. Maybe you’re not at the point where you value your life more than your excuses, but try to hold your bile towards people who do work hard to be healthier, no matter what their size.
If it don’t hurt, it don’t help. I stationary bike an hour 3-5 nights a week (I prefer to watch tv during this than reading), and walk for about an hour a couple times a week when I go shopping (admittedly, holding onto/pushing a cart, which can be a crutch). Weight lost: zippo.
I’m gonna have to starve myself to lose weight - and/or excercize myself past exhaustion (recall, that’s like ten minutes if I break a sweat).
Dude, I am mobile enough to hunt and gather my own bellyful of food. It’s just that I have a car to drive myself to the chow’s natural habitat, wherein it lies sitting motionless waiting to be picked up. Biological imperative satisfied.
And that was a touching success story. And I agree that no amount of kvetching will make it easier - but you may recall also how helpful annoying bastards kveching about how easy it is [for them] is? Or those that (to bring this back to the OP) think there isn’t a biological imperative being fought against, and that it’s instead as easy as deciding to wear a blue shirt in the morning instead of a red one?
Wait a minute. You start this thread by saying you have better, yet outdated, genes and you are “morbidly (though cheerfully) obese”. When I start shaking your rolls of fat now you’re a victim and have a disability.
You’ve already said you don’t want to exercise and it sounds like you really are content with being fat. So I don’t see the problem.
If you said you don’t like to shower but once a year because you don’t like soap then don’t get upset when people say you stink.
From what I can tell in your posts you don’t have a medical reason for being overweight. You were overweight as a child and in adulthood you still choose to do nothing about it. I have no pity for you, I don’t feel sorry for you and I’ll be damned if I ever call you someone with a proper disability. You are disabled as much as the guy who intentionally cut off his own leg.
My body build is stocky. I’m not a twig. I love food. I love to eat. I enjoy sitting for a few hours just playing video games or farting around on the computer in my spare time. It would be quite easy for me to bloat up a couple hundred extra pounds. My brother has the same build as I but he eats crap and does nothing. Last time I saw him he was quite large. The difference between him and me - I CHOOSE to watch my weight.
I’ve already told you an injury reduced my mobility. At the height of the pain I literally could not walk for more than 10 minutes at a time. For an entire year I was very much like how you sound in mobility. It was hard and painful to move.
But I didn’t sit and say “wah-wah - I’m disabled”. I worked through it. I watched my food intake. I ate what I wanted (for the most part) but just ate smaller portions. I figured out how much I was burning each day and tried to match those calories with my food intake. I wasn’t anal about it. I’d allow myself sweets or an extra helping of something. But not every meal and not every day.
Just by staying on top of it I managed to stop my weight gain and slowly reduce it. I forced myself to move around more - working through the pain. Some of this, like reducing my food, was easy. But don’t be fooled. Forcing my body to move around was quite difficult and painful. The work I’m currently doing now with the studio is very difficult for me. But I’m forcing myself to do it because at the end of the day it is better for my body.
If you choose to do nothing about your weight but sit on your ass and wait for a magic pill, then expect people like me to have no pity for you.
Reduce your intake. Get motivated. Get up. Move around. Get yourself off the Paxil. Do something about it. Yes, it will be hard, at first. But it gets easier. Shit man, join one of those weepy support groups. Anything that helps you figure out what you need to loose the weight.
But sitting with a computer keyboard resting on a huge belly is not going to do anything for you. Only you can do it and the magic pill is not coming to save you.
And, for the record, my wife has a weight issue. She has been fighting with it for years now. But that is the difference… she’s fighting it. She’s not just sitting on the couch stuffing her face with BigMacs and BigGulps. She will never be Kate Moss thin. Her body isn’t built that way. But she works very hard to keep the weight down. And, even with the extra weight, my wife is beautiful to me.
Unless you have a medical reason for being fat, then being fat is your fault and your fault alone and the only one who can fix it is you.
And for the record, my scorn is not because you are fat. It’s because you’re an unmotivated lazy sod.
Actually, you’d be surprised. I’ve just been diagnosed with type two diabetes, and have the whole bit with doctors telling me I’m going to die horribly, with the vague implication that it will happen in a matter of minutes. And you know what? That biological imperative to survive isn’t doing a thing. Personally I suspect it’s wired to fire up when you are actually in peril - which makes it pretty useless as a motivator for such a slow killer as obesity - or even diabetes.
Judge me! Judge me! You are so all-knowing, after all.
Wesley, what do you think you are accomplishing with this view you hold? I understand that you believe that advice to eat better and exercise is a failed remedy to obesity if you think about obesity as a public health problem because many people will simply not follow that advice. However, what I don’t understand is the ultimate conclusion you reach or insight you achieve by holding this view. Please do tell. Thanks.
Ideally obesity should be treated as a medical and scientific issue that we are only beginning to understand (if we understood it, we’d likely have a cure and aside from surgery and we do not), not a moral issue whose cause and cure can be found in negative stereotypes (ie assume fat people are lazy gluttons, then assume if they become less lazy and less gluttonous they will stop being obese). The reality is we don’t know why people are fat or what to do about it. Things like environmental toxins that mimic hormones, sleep deprivation and viruses can all affect obesity levels as much as anything else and much of the research is younger than we are. We really don’t know why 2 people can have the same lifestyle and one will be 10% bodyfat and the other will be 45%. We don’t know why obesity rates may be 70% in one country and 15% in another. What we end up getting is the negative stereotype assumption that ‘people in country A must be more gluttonous and lazy than people in country B’ which is absurd.
Our attitudes towards obesity cause far more harm than obesity itself. Fear of getting fat is one of the biggest reasons people take up smoking and refuse to quit. The psychological consequences, especially on women, of our culture’s attitude on this subject are extremely damaging.
So my conclusion is pretty much this
Obesity should be treated as a scientific and medical issue, not a moral issue due to the moral failings of people who have it. We don’t understand the biochemistry of obesity, and our intolerance of fatness does more harm than fatness itself. Any claim that we can use willpower to overcome biological urges that have evolved over billions of years is going to fail, and the evidence consistently supports that claim that the level of lifestyle changes necessary to affect bodyweight is unsustainable for most people. Diet & exercise as a cure for obesity is arguably the biggest failure of modern medicine since abstinence only education was used as a cure for STDs and pregnancy. We tend to discount people who say ‘don’t have sex until marriage’ as a cure all for HIV and abortion then turn around and promote lifestyle changes as a cure for obesity. Abstinence when combined with condoms, medications and abortions if necessary is effective at fighting unwanted pregnancy and STDs, but abstinence alone isn’t. Lifestyle changes, when combined with surgery or medication is effective at controlling bodyweight. Lifestyle changes alone are not.
It would be better if we treated obesity as a medical issue rather than a moral issue, promoted healthy lifestyle independent of whether it resulted in weight loss (the benefits to physical and mental health from better lifestyle are numerous and it doesn’t require drastic lifestyle changes to get them either), and waited until we understand enough to address the issue. Obesity is strongly associated with expensive chronic diseases like osteoarthritis and type II diabetes, and needs to be addressed.
I guess the issue upsets me because physicians and the medical establishment in general should believe in evolution, believe in clinical science, and listen to their patients. Our attitudes towards obesity show they do not.
Can you show me a cite where two people without rare disorders eat the same amount of calories, do the same amount of physical activity and weigh vastly different amounts?
The American daily energy availability is 3770 calories. This is an obscene amount of food. The rise in American obesity is clearly and directly correlated with the rise in American calorie consumption. So yeah, maybe it’s something else. Maybe all those countries with elevated rates of caloric consumption were also hit by some kind of fat virus. But that seems pretty unlikely, doesn’t it?
The percentage of women with diet related health problems is marginal next to the percentage of women with obesity related health problems. I agree that the “everyone should be model thin” attitude is harmful. But this does not mean that “everyone should live an active and healthy lifestyle” attitude is also harmful.
I agree that health is more important than weight. But you are missing the fact that being obese is a sure sign that you are not living a healthy lifestyle (unless you just started) and have not for some time.
I never said I had superior genes. I said obese people may have genes that were very good up until relatively recently, historically speaking. I brought this up as a way of explaining the enormous rise in obesity. I wasn’t even talking about my own case in particular.
And I never claimed to be a ‘victim’. I know that, like an addict, I brought about my own fate. Smokers get lung disease, alcoholics die of liver failure, fat people die of heart disease or diabetes.
I suppose you heap scorn on those other addicts too.
Actually, I never said I didn’t want to exercise, nor that I was content being fat. I said exercise hurts a hell of a lot more when you’re fat, which is true. Thus, an obese person faces a much larger disincentive to exercise than a thin person.
Nor am I content being fat. I don’t want to be fat. I don’t want to die before I’m 50. I don’t want to be a member of the last group it is still perfectly acceptable to publically abuse and mock and hate and make all kinds of assumptions about.
Doesn’t mean it’ll change any time soon. It’s not that easy.
I would not expect pity from the likes of you. I would doubt you are capable of it.
What, exactly, is a “medical” reason for being overweight? Please explain.
And I’m as disabled as an alchoholic with a failing liver, a smoker with lung disease, or a crack addict with a heart condition.
But i suppose you have no pity for them, either, or really for anyone. Ever.
“How dare he assumes that about me!” you rage.
Well, you’ve assumed an awful lot about my life, my character, and my worth, and that of those like me, so I figured, fair’s fair.
I’ll always expect people like you to have no pity for me. You’re the exact sort of person I’ve always dealt with. Hate, rage, scorn, contempt… those emotions come to you like old friends. Pity? Compassion? Sympathy?
When you see those coming, you cross the room and avoid eye contact. After all, you barely know them.
I’m hardly waiting for a magic pill. I do what I can, given my multiple health issues. It’s slow going but I make a little progress every day. I think that a technological solution is more likely to save lives and fix the problem than any idealistic education-based initiative.
Do you actually read before you respond, or just scan for keywords?
“Get motivated”? Tell me, are all your emotions an act of will? Can you simply decide to be happy and boom, you’re happy? It’s a wonder you get out of bed at all. You can just sit there and be happy forever.
As for “getting myself off the Paxil”, I take that because without it, I am insane. I suffer from chronic deep depression and social anxiety. No Paxil and I would likely kill myself or lose my grip entirely.
But I suppose you’re one of those angel of compassion that doesn’t really beleive in mental illness either, right? After all, it’s all in your head. Crazy people are just lazy. They could get better if they wanted to.
They just need to “get motivated”.
And how, pray tell, do you know this about me?
Same way I know you’re a pitiless, morally retarded jackass, I suppose. A belligerent, bludgeoning, brutal bastard with the heart of a schoolyard bully and the soul of a cranky infant, careening through life drunk on hate, rage, and testosterone, who thinks himself more of a man for preying on the weak and can only feel superior when making another feel inferior. Anything grander and more subtle than that stands no chance of making it through the tiny gate into your microscopic mind, and so your only response to the pricking of compassion is to blame the victim and club him. "Urr, fat man make brain hurt. "
We do know why people are fat. It happens when people eat more calories than they burn. Diets in the 3000 calorie range combined with sedentary lifestyles will lead to overweight. This is not some huge enigmatic mystery that we’re dealing with, and it doesn’t help anyone by making it out to be this way.
It doesn’t help that our cultural attitudes haven’t caught up to this new reality. There are a lot of people around who were taught stuff like “clean your plate”, “don’t waste food”, and “take some food if someone offers it to you”. Those attitudes are bad in an environment where there is too much food, because they mean you end up eating when you’re not hungry. That’s something nobody should be doing or encouraging in an environment where obesity is a much more common problem than not having enough food. It’s a hard habit to break once you’ve learned it, though.
If we’re going to try to change our culture to reduce obesity, not teaching our kids to eat when they’re not hungry might be a good place to start. Don’t make them clean their plates, and teach them how to politely say no thank you when someone offers them food and they’re not hungry.
After a two-week base-line period, 12 pairs of young adult male monozygotic twins were overfed by 4.2 MJ (1000 kcal) per day, 6 days a week, for a total of 84 days during a 100-day period. The total excess amount each man consumed was 353 MJ (84,000 kcal). During overfeeding, individual changes in body composition and topography of fat deposition varied considerably. The mean weight gain was 8.1 kg, but the range was 4.3 to 13.3 kg. The similarity within each pair in the response to overfeeding was significant (P less than 0.05) with respect to body weight, percentage of fat, fat mass, and estimated subcutaneous fat, with about three times more variance among pairs than within pairs (r approximately 0.5). After adjustment for the gains in fat mass, the within-pair similarity was particularly evident with respect to the changes in regional fat distribution and amount of abdominal visceral fat (P less than 0.01), with about six times as much variance among pairs as within pairs (r approximately 0.7). We conclude that the most likely explanation for the intrapair similarity in the adaptation to long-term overfeeding and for the variations in weight gain and fat distribution among the pairs of twins is that genetic factors are involved. These may govern the tendency to store energy as either fat or lean tissue and the various determinants of the resting expenditure of energy.
Force feed some people and they burn it off. Force feed others and they store it as fat. Some might easily lose the weight afterwards, some might not. The difference is genetic, and we really don’t understand why.
The reality is calorie intake and usage is largely a matter of biological signals we can’t control and don’t understand any any attempt to regulate calorie intake via willpower is about as likely to succeed as asking someone who voluntarily regulate blinking or breathing the rest of their lives. Any attempt to use willpower to control them long term is likely to fail, and the evidence consistently supports that claim.
As far as healthy lifestyle and its role in obesity, again, that doesn’t explain why blacks and latinos who live American lifestyles have double the rates of obesity as Asians who live in America. The reasons are biochemical, not moral.
What we don’t know is how to fix it in a way that actually works short of surgery, nor should we. We also don’t know why various people living the same lifestyle will end up at different weights. There were obese people back in 1850, and there are thin people today despite the lifestyle of today being more conductive to obesity. If we could voluntarily eat less and exercise more we’d have died out as a species a long time ago. The fact that food has higher caloric content and we don’t work in manual labor anymore played a giant role in the obesity epidemic. But it doesn’t in and of itself explain why even though lifestyle affects obesity why one person may be 150 pounds and the other 300 pounds in the same culture with the same lifestyle.
Unless you can show that these groups are eating the same foods, in the same amounts, and getting the same exercise, you can’t leap to the conclusion that biochemistry is to blame. Blacks and latinos are more likely to be of low SES than Asians and whites, for one thing. Culture also tracks closely to diet.
Is your position that there are no fundamental differences in caloric input between obese and non-obese people? That we’re all eating the same thing but some people, through no fault of their own, gain weight while others don’t? I’m scratching my head, trying to figure what your larger point is, and I’m not getting it.
You already highlighted the role of genetics. Our energy efficiency has a lot of to do with how we are put together, and that’s determined by DNA. Some people can eat a lot without gaining weight. Others can’t get away with that. So what? This isn’t news! We’ve always known this.
There were obese people in 1850 because 1) food wasn’t hard to come by for everyone 2) not everyone was laboring in the fields and factories, and 3) some people naturally had slower than average metabolisms just as they do now.
There are thin people in 2009 because the 1) exercise is not an impossibility for everyone, 2) not everyone is compelled to eat more than they burn, and 3)some people have naturally faster than average metabolisms just as they did back in 1850.
I don’t get this conclusion. First of all, how can you explain how so many people have managed to do this, if it’s so impossible? Secondly, why do think having this ability would mean we’d die out as a species? The inability to control one’s energy use does not enhance fecundity. It hurts it, actually.
Why not? Do you have data to support this conclusion?
Furthermore, he has failed to explain why this all of a sudden happened in the last 25 years. Sure, there has been obesity forever. But never on the scale that we see today. Did our “get fat” genes suddenly get activated?
Or could there maybe be some correlation with the changes in the American diet and physical activity levels that directly correlate with the changes in our obesity rate?
How is the diet of 1984 substantially different from that of today?
How about the activity levels? Can you cite a study showing that people were more active back in 1984?
Seems to be we had pretty much the exact same diet and exercise levels back then. Just as many potato chips, just as many cars, just as many sendentary office jobs, you name it.
So what changed?
Is it just that the baby boomers are all getting old and fat now? Is that the real cause behind the “epidemic”?
