No surprise, she fidns the experience quite horrible, and ends up leaving in tears.
This is what it’s like, folks.
I know that as a man, I don’t have it nearly as bad as a woman. But it’s still pretty damned bad. People who don’t even know you will laugh at you and think nothing of it. They’re judge you by the worst of stereotypes and dismiss you with the casual callous cruelty of person selecting produce at the supermarket.
This is garbage. Unless a body somehow naturally defies the laws of physics, including and notably the second law of thermodynamics, the excess stored energy has to go. If a person maintains a “reasonable” diet*, one below their basal metabolic rate, and exercises regularly, their bodyfat will not reach a magic hovering point where no more can be lost if there is still more fat (energy) available.
Why there likely aren’t any experiments like you requested is because there simply hasn’t been enough time. Same reason we don’t know what 50 years of Prozac use might lead to.
*diet here referring to the lifestyle eating habits, not the 2 month fad thing
Although I think the OP question has been answered I’ll offer another stab:
Obesity has become a major problem because there is simply too much variety of cheap highly energy-dense foods. This sort of caloric gluttony was previously available only to the very rich and powerful, kings and lords and whatnot, and even then they didn’t have the astounding range of high calorie combinations available to the modern consumer.
Corporations quickly learned that people can be manipulated via their tongues -as long as something tasted good for the short time it was in the mouth, the fact that this something might well become a part of them (in the form of fat cells) until death was no consideration. Instant gratification and all that. And so a food industry based on taste alone took over common sense. Million dollar ad campaigns scream and shout to ensure that people are intrigued enough to try the taste, while the silence of vegetables and basic grains is deafening, and once you’ve tried the taste you’re hooked.
Perhaps that will change when all crops are GM proprietary and corporations can make a profit by shilling fruit and vegetables.
In the meantime, our minds are manipulated and our bodies fooled… we can eat a 100g bar of chocolate and hardly feel satiated, despite the fact that consuming that many calories in the form of fruit or lentils or even plain meat would leave us tired of chewing and bloated. We can eat a quick “snack” containing more calories than a full meal for the average peasant 500 years ago, and it won’t register for much longer than it takes to swallow.
I think curing the obese has no quick or simple solution… but preventing it can be. Let governments tax food according to calorie value. You want to eat a deep-fried candy-bar covered in goose-fat-and-lard gravy, start saving.
When people can walk through a supermarket and pick out an assortment of fruit and veg equal in caloric value but cheaper than a bar of chocolate, obesity will be a problem of the past.
#1) Kids used to be more active. You didn’t have every videogame from A-Z keeping you occupied on the couch. You also didn’t have 100 some-odd cable channels. Recess periods and PE were in relative abundance.
#2) Portion sizes used to make more reasonable. Supersized fries didn’t exist in 1984. Convenience stores didn’t sell fructose corn syrup in almost liter-sized cups.
#3) Baby boomers were relatively young in 1984. Now they’re older, with slower metabolisms. So you’re left with proportionately more fat people now than in years past. (I see you mentioned this, but you seem to laugh it off as meaningless. Why?)
#4) The yo-yo dieting craze in the 80’s and 90’s (remember when Atkin’s was all the rage?) has screwed up a lot of people’s metabolisms. The glurge of fat-free snack foods that are loaded up with sugar doesn’t help people monitor their caloric intact either.
#5) Every decade it seems as if social isolation increases. The less people interact with others, the more likely they’ll seek comfort from food.
If none of this resonants as true for you, we must be living in two separate worlds.
I posted a study showing how overfeeding by 1000 calories a day results in massive variance in weight gain. I have seen studies showing underfeeding have the same results.
Obesity is not a simplistic physics equation where people can voluntarily limit food intake to lose weight. That is like saying ‘If I put 10 gallons of gas into a vehicle, it should go 200 miles’. That is way too simplistic. There are too many variables other than the energy you put into the vehicle that factor into its mileage. Same with obesity. That is why people currently and have always been different weights and sizes.
Virtually nobody can voluntarily change their weight long term, no matter their initial weight. Not unless they use drugs or surgery.
Whats not to get? Where is your evidence that people can do that? Go find me studies where people have lost large amounts of weight and kept it off long term via willpower.
What data do you like. Look out the window. People are not all the same weight and never have been. Yes we are getting fatter as a whole but we don’t know how to fix it and we don’t know why some are affected more than others.
Good job of proving my point. You have no evidence that anything you say is true, and it is all just supercilious moralistic arguments that have been constantly proven to fail back here in reality.
here are a short list of factors that affect body weight that are independent of obese people being lazy gluttons
Bacteria in the digestive system
enzymes in the digestive system
number of fat cells
endocrine system
signaling pathways between the stomach and brain
neurotransmitters in the brain
Weght-Loss Program Results
I can’t copy from this particular link and paste here, but it basically says that a third of their membership has maintained ideal/goal weight after 5 years on the program. And that’s a lot of people.
But…
It appears it can be done. Why are we fat? I gave my personal history as an example of someone whose lifestyle changes inexorably packed the pounds onto a previously healthy and active frame.
We have fewer sidewalks and more “pay-to-play” skate parks. We have fewer free public parks and more expensive gym memberships. We have more sedentary work and less time to dig in a garden or tend to our own lawns (when we have them). We are getting less sleep, which (according to my D.O.) tells our bodies to conserve fuel because hard times are ahead.
Dude, I’m as irritated as anybody by those who seem to think that all it takes to drop a couple hundred pounds is to swing by the gym once or twice a month and turn down a second hamburger now and then, but you are spouting insane hyperbole here. “Virtually nobody”? You are sweeping tens or hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people under that “virtually”. And, worse, you’re not saying "virtually nobody does lose weight, you’re saying virtually nobody can lose weight - which is nuts. You’re trying to elevate weaknesses and lapses of willpower to an Unstoppable Law Of Nature ™. Now, it’s one thing to insist that it’s really hard to lose weight, but impossible? Good lord, man. Get a hold of yourself.
You’re making even me think you’re just whining and trying to blame anything else but yourself for your problem. Jeez.
You posted a study that essentially showed that some people gain less weight than others despite both being on a high caloric diet. Sorry, but this is not all that shocking to me. Metabolism levels vary between individuals (age, sex, and genetics have a lot to do with this), therefore 2000 calories may be too much for one person and not enough for another.
But what does that have to do with ethnic group differences? You can’t use the results of a study composed of 24 male subjects to conclude that obesity disparities between groups of people that differ across almost every strata is all–or even partically–the result of biochemistry.
No one is saying if you put 10 gallons into any given vehicle, it should go 200 miles. We’ve all driven the gas-guzzling jalopy that requires 10 gallons of gas for every 10 miles traveled, so we know this would be silly to say. And it’s no secret that some people run like those jalopies and others run like Honda hyrids. No one is saying that everyone who eats X amount of calories should weigh 150 lbs.
But this doesn’t mean the principles of thermodynamics are non-applicable. At the end of the day it is a simple physics equation. To lose weight, calories in has to be less than calories burned (or excreted). It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about 1000 calories or 10,000. The math is the same.
Here’s Penn and Teller’s take on it. Those of you who think losing weight is just a matter of will power, of eating less and exercising more, will not be pleased at all.
I don’t think kids were that much more active back in 1984. I could be wrong, the news sure seems to think so. Bur my neighborhood rings with the sounds of kids outside, having fun, when the weather allows. Normal kids go out and play. Shy bookish types like myself stay inside and do whatever they can inside. Watch TV, or play video games, or before that, read books.
They had “super size” fries back then, they just called them a “large”. That’s all it is, a large fries, same as McD’s has always had. And I sure as heck remember Big Gulps from 711 back then, though for me, that was always a Slurpee.
Yes, baby boomers are slowing down etc. Why I laughed that off is, if that’s all this “obesity epidemic” is, why are we so surprised? Surely this was predictable for decades. It’s hardly an “epidemic”, any more than winter is a “natural disaster”. And if it’s just baby boomers get old and fat, they why are they blaming video games and text messaging and TV? Are the baby boomers really that incapable of accepting that they’re getting old? They have to blame that on their kids as well? "No, see, it’s our KIDS getting old and fat, that’s the problem. "
I can’t imagine yo-yo dieting has had a lasting effect on the metabolisms of a signifigant portion of the populace.
The increase in social isolation is a tricky one to gauge. Myself, because of my mental health issues, I’ve tended to isolate myself for my entire life. It’s sort of hard to see, from my POV, whether there’s more people isolating themselves because I’m not out there to miss them. But from what I pick up through popular culture, it seems to be that people still go to bars, hang out at coffee shops, and do all the usual social activities. The cell phone would be a useless invention if we all stayed home all the time.
Honestly, it’s seeming like your arguments amount to (please forgive me for this) what I call “old-fartism”. Oh, things were different back in my day, why people did right and lived right and didn’t have any of this high fructose corn syrup and super size this and that and Twitter this, whatever the hell that is, by gum…
I think we’re having a communication failure here, and as usual, it has to do with the language we use.
I think when he said “vritually impossible” and “virtually nobody” he was speaking in terms of statistics, percentiles, not absolute numbers.
Take getting stuck by lightning. It would be valid to say that “almost nobody” gets hit by lightning in their entire lives. The percentage of people in a population who have been or will be hit by lightning is miniscule. Stastically insignifigant.
BUT, if you say it’s “virtually impossible” to get hit by lightning, someone might well say “Impossible? What about the thousands of people hit by lightning every single year? What about them?”
Well, they’re why we say VIRTUALLY impossible. ALMOST nobody gets hit by lightning. You have to be careful of how you interpret the langage used.
Now convince me how “virtually nobody can lose weight” really means “virtually nobody does lose weight”, because frankly that was the more ridiculous part of your statement. It asserts that even if somebody were to lock you up and give you barely enough calories to power the movement of your bowels, you would not lose weight. Which is obviously ridiculous.
It’s one thing to say that there are numerous factors making it very, very difficult for an overweight person to by self-management become one of the stick people, and to say that you think (quite rightly, I think) that many of these factors could be mitigated at the biological level with a magic pill. It’s quite another to say that it’s impossible for the average scrawniness-impaired person to twiggify himself through lifestyle changes and masochistic self-discipline.
The sad truth is, no matter who you are, you can make yourself thinner, if you don’t mind torturing yourself horribly to do it (and possibly having to keep torturing yourself indefinitely to keep it off). Arguing it’s not possible is a great way to not have to feel guilty about it, but the simple fact is it’s bunk.
Most kids are not inclined to read if TV and videogames are around. The kind of kids that used to pass time playing ball in the street are the same kind of kids that “play ball” now, except they do it virtually through the playstation. They were never the ones reading.
I was actually a bookworm as a kid, and during much of the summer I had my face buried in an encyclopedia when I wasn’t watching cartoons and 3-2-1 Contact. But most kids in my neighborhood weren’t like me. They were at the city pool or hanging out at the park. If my parents had kept the house stocked with snacks, I’d probably be fat right now. Fortunately they didn’t.
You really don’t think portion sizes have grown in the last 30 years? You think McDonalds just relabled their large fries as super-sized and hoped no one would notice? Come on now. Today’s supersizedfries are not eqivalent to yesterday’s larges. And those vats passing themselves off as beverage cups weren’t around either.
So what do you think explains what we’re seeing? The OP posits that genes have something to do with it, right? But unless you’re arguing that our genetic makeup has changed significantly in the last 30 years, I can’t figure out what you think is to blame.
Wesley Clark, here is my response to your general philosophy on weight and the losing thereof:
I believe you are fallaciously arguing from the general to the specific. That is, you argue that obese people as a whole cannot eat healthily and exercise, so you therefore conclude that telling a fat person to eat healthily and exercise will not be effective to get them to lose weight.
It absolutely is what you call “a moral issue” when viewed from the perspective of an individual obese person. They can lose the weight (barring unusual circumstances); if they don’t, then it is their fault. It is a “moral failing” if that’s the term you want to use.
Your analogy to abstinence-only sex eduction does not hold. Abstinence-only sex eduction fails because it does not give any facts or knowledge to the student, it just says “don’t do it.” Telling a fat person how to eat healthily and exercise and that they absolutely must lose weight if they do so gives them all the knowledge they need. It’s the equivalent of teaching about pregnancy and contraception and STDs etc. etc.
You seem to like viewing obesity from a public health viewpoint. If the goal of using that viewpoint is to help reduce the incidence of obesity, then why is that your goal? If you believe that obesity imposes costs on society as a whole, then maybe we should look at why those costs are imposed on society and try better to impose them on the obese individual instead.
I realize the above is not well argued, I don’t have a lot of time here. I’m happy to expand on the above if you ask a specific question.
I think the main point being raised might be better stated, “Why, in the present time and place, is it so difficult for so many people to avoid being fat?”
Given: Many people are not fat, and don’t find it difficult to stay fit and healthy. Or they do find it difficult, but do what’s necessary anyway. To which I say, “Bravo! Keep it up!”
Given: A major cause of being overweight, for most people, is simply that they eat too much and do not engage in enough physical activity. They would be better off if they could change one or both of those facts.
That said, the OP was to the effect that tending to eat a lot when food was available, and storing excess as fat, were a good thing, a set of survival traits that would help keep people alive to reproduce through lean times. Here and now, not so much.
We have access here and now to more than is good for us. Furthermore, things that are very good in the quantities available to a hunter-gatherer, are not so good in excess. Sweet things, for example, and fats, are difficult to acquire in nature, but are readily available to us. So when today I perceive a gorgeous glazed doughnut, or a sweet beverage, my mind tells me, “You don’t need that.” But the ghosts of my primordial ancestors so deep within that I don’t even know they are there say, “Oh, yes, you do. If not now, later. Eat the sugar! Eat the fats!” as surely as zombies say “Braaaaiiiins!”
Just as, for example, the ghosts of the primordial ancestors say to the typical pubescent male, “Must make babies! Now! Is good!” We still expect that male to follow certain societal standards, at least in most places and times. Of course, it is possible for an individual to abstain from sex, and most of us keep to the societal standards, most of the time. But you can’t abstain from eating, at least not for long.
It’s also an evolutionary advantage not to waste energy. In a hunter-gatherer time and place, you might need that energy to chase down some food or to run from a predator. The problem is that here and now, we never have to chase down the food, and we rarely need to run from a predator. But we have this tendency to relax when we can.
All of this becomes ever more true as we age. It was an advantage in earlier times to store food as fat more and more readily the older you got, because it would become more and more difficult for you to get any. Now, of course, an old lady like me can get all the doughnuts she wants. The basic body metabolism doesn’t “know” that, of course, and keeps storing up that energy for the famine that never arrives.
The junkie that cries and says “I’m sick of being sick.” and does nothing to kick heroin. The drunk who spends everyday at the bar and complains about all the crap going wrong in his life because of his drinking. The smoker who coughs up half a lung and always has lung problems and never tries to quit. Yes, all those people piss me off.
Just like the obese person who comes up with every excuse why they can’t lose weight.
I’m just built this way. It’s genetics. Exercise is hard. etc.etc.
I’ve just spent over two years in some pretty severe pain, yet I managed to do it.
So the question is: “What ARE you doing about it?”
How many calories did you consume today/this week?
How many calories did you burn today/this week?
Are you matching or burning more calories then you consume?
What are you giving up? What rewards are you giving yourself for reaching milestones?
Fine. In fact I hope I piss you off enough to get in shape and come kick my ass. I will more then willingly take a beating from an averaged sized MichaelJohnBertrand. Hell, I’d even buy you lunch after (sensibly sized portions of course)
Hypothyroidism
Self-induced disabilities are not real disabilities. They are the side effect of self-destructive behaviour.
If a man cuts off his own leg then he shouldn’t get a handicap parking permit.
No, not at all.
Of course not.
Yes, I can slip into depression like anyone else. Most recently after the car crash. It was a life changing event with pain that seemed to have no end. I HAD to snap myself out of it if I wanted to continue my life. I could have chosen to take handfuls of pain pills. I could have chosen to get a doctor to prescribe something for depression. There were lots of roads I could have taken. Instead I “got motivated”. The pain wasn’t going to run my life. I wasn’t going to get overweight. I was going to work to improve how I felt.
My “get motivated” is not some infomercial type of getting motivated. It is deciding to take control of those things you do not like and fixing them no matter how hard. For me, I feel there is nothing I can not change about things I do not like in my life. Some can be very difficult. Some, not so much.
Look. There are a million things people don’t like in their lives. Some choose to change them, some complain about them. There is a third type who make half-assed attempts and shrug it off saying “eeeh… I guess that’s the way it is.”
For me there is either do it or deal with it and STFU.
And, for the record, I have a medical report from a doctor from about 6 months ago. His diagnosis was I would see little if any improvement on the condition of my injuries.
I proved him wrong.
Granted I believe I will forever have chronic back pain but I’m taking the Laurence of Arabia approach.
It’s not that it doesn’t hurt,… “The trick… is not minding that it hurts.”
THAT, my friend, is motivation.
In a way, yes.
I would guess 75% of those on anti-depressants are wrongly medicated. People, mostly in American culture, would rather take a “happy pill” then deal with the ups and downs of life.
I read a thread here written by a member that was about some sort of semi-traumatic event that happened in their life. They went to take one of their anti-depressants but couldn’t find any. Lucky for them their teen child had some and shared. This means both of them have been prescribed anti-depressants. Read the threads here about medications. It seems 50% or more of the members are on some form of mood-changing medication. When I lived in the States tons of seemingly normal people took medications because it “took the edge off”. For most of these people it’s just a crutch.
Yes. Some people really need these things. Most I don’t think do.
But from what I pick up through popular culture, it seems to be that people still go to bars, hang out at coffee shops, and do all the usual social activities. The cell phone would be a useless invention if we all stayed home all the time.