You’re thinking too small.
Three words:
Flinststones Chewable Valium.
Method of administration is unusual: You give it to the kids so their parents can relax.
Exactly. And I can come up with a dozen different alternative/homespun remedies for atopic dermatitis, as well, from acupuncture to essential oils to diet recommendations to Windex.
OP, you seem to think that atopic dermatitis is an easy cure; it’s not always (as evidenced by so many people who try alternative treatments when the three lines of allopathic medicine don’t produce results.) Contrariwise, you seem to think that there are dozens of western allopathic weight loss treatments. There aren’t. There’s “eat less, move more”, there’s surgery, and there’s drugs - most of which harm the patient more than they help, so they’re yanked from the market pretty regularly.
I don’t understand why “burn more calories than you eat” could be vague at all.
This is what I’m expecting to do today:
Activity-Calories burned
Brush teeth-12
Aerobics - low impact 93
Walking 3 mph 134
Driving 146
Reading 325
Writing 455
Weight lifting - general 158
Weight lifting - vigorous 560
Sleeping 682
**Total Calories Burned 2,565 **
As for what I am eating:
Breakfast: 4 slices of toast-180
4 pats of butter-144
4 servings of 10 cal jelly- 40
Mid Morning snack: two clementines-200
Lunch: Jimmy John’s Italian Night Club: 951
Afternoon snack: Package of 100 calorie popcorn-100
Dinner: Tuna salad-475
Dessert: Ice cream- Edy’s low fat-110
Total Calories Consumed: 2300
My net difference is 265 calories that I’m burning more than taking in. At that slow rate I’d be losing a pound about every two weeks. I could tweak my diet (and not splurge with a crappy sandwich) and accelerate my weight loss if I chose to or work out harder. The point is that I am an adult and am able to find out what calories I’m expending and what I’m taking in. I don’t know what is “vague” about that. It’s a specific guideline which garners results.
And not that you’d want to, but there was just a recent study that not only proves the theory, but goes overboard in a gross way:
Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds
Yeah, but if I started a thread on, “how do you deal with your atopic dermatitis,” I would expect much greater uniformity in results, as opposed to, “how did you you deal with your weight problem.”
Is that just because there is so many more people who have a weight problem than atopic dermatitis?
Look, you can talk calorie counting and exercise all you want, the evidence is clear: human beings for the most part do not succeed with those plans over the long term any more than they succeed with any other. You may ascribe that dismal record to any cause you like: human laziness, human evil, human weakness, redundant body systems for retaining fat. EATING LESS AND EXERCISING MORE DO NOT WORK FOR LONG TERM WEIGHT LOSS. If they worked, more people would be skinny. Sure, some people are able to lose massive amounts of weight on them, but they are merely outliers on the graph, which is very clear and consistent about most human beings.
If you have the least little bit of honesty in you, you have to admit that they do not work. Doctors have that honesty, why can’t regular people? Oh, right, it gives them a nice little frisson of superiority to point out that people who cannot lose weight are, unlike them, morally flawed. Such a tiresome thing, but boy, you sure hear it a lot. Also that pathetic blather about “making excuses.” I know a lot of women who have pursued weight loss programs with great energy and determination only to put it back on. They accept it as their moral failure. I am not so sure. I think it is very hard for human beings to lose weight.
As others have suggested, maybe if we look at the NON-COSMETIC effects of exercise and dieting (not necessarily extreme dieting, just trying not to consume massive amounts of anything) we’d all be better off. I personally would emphasize exercise over dieting. Nothing will make you want to lose weight more than having to carry it around on a treadmill for a time. Let the treadmill (or bike, or stairmaster, or whatever) do the talking. It is NOT hard to exercise regularly for prolonged periods of time. Being physically active is the norm for human beings.
I think it’s equally vague as telling people to “moisturize” if they have atopic dermatitis. Yes, there will be people who will go online, research the scientific definition of “moisturize,” look at clinical studies to figure out which agents are considered superior at retaining water in the dermis (if this is actually what moisturizing means, I’m not sure), and then look at all the ingredients of every major available OTC cream, lotion, ointment, etc, and find the one with the greatest proportion of effective ingredients.
But most people won’t do that. They’ll just vaguely flit around and buy whatever they see working for their friends, who may or may not have the same condition, or whatever they see the most ads for, or whatever is the most hyped. Which is basically what people do with weight loss. And I think most doctors would be hard pressed to come up with specific treatment plans for most people.
I don’t get why people don’t seem to understand that the current methodology to treat overweight/obesity just doesn’t work. Yes, on an individual level everyone has the power to do it. But clearly people aren’t doing what’s necessary, and I think scientists/clinicians have an onus upon them to figure out something that does work.
Let’s say there is a medication that works fairly well at treating diabetes, but it makes your hair fall out. So people don’t take it. The medical community could collectively throw up their hands and say, “well, if people are going to be stupid and shallow like that, it’s their funeral, we gave em a way out.” But they don’t, instead, they understand the limitations of their drug and look to develop a better one.
I don’t understand why the general public doesn’t apply the same logic to weight problems.
Thank you. You said it better than I could.
It’s hard to treat cancer if you refuse to get chemotherapy. It’s hard to treat diabetes 1, if you refuse to take insulin. It’s hard to treat alcoholism if you don’t stop drinking.
The problem with the treatment of obesity isn’t that it doesn’t work, or has bad side effects, it’s that the person doesn’t want to put in the effort to treat themselves.
Why doesn’t it “work”?
No method is going to work if people don’t use it.
The treatment clearly does have some undesirable side effect, psychological or otherwise, because people are not following it.
Because we’re all still fat.
It’s toooo haaaaaaard, isn’t a side effect.
It doesn’t work because … it doesn’t work. Great logic there.
Because if you found a method to allow me eat what I want without gaining weight then I would just eat more. The amount I eat isn’t limited by scarcity or money or hardly any other factor. I could eat 20,000 calories today if I want. The one and only limiting factor is my desire to not get any fatter and even that evaporates when confronted by, well, foods too numerous to mention.
Easing the physical burdens of work and providing abundant food to everyone are two major goals of society I think. Job well done. The surprising thing to me is that there are people who aren’t fat.
You don’t take away personal responsibility in any regard.
It’s toooo haaaard absolutely is a valid reason that people don’t comply.
Really, do you think any side effect for any medication/treatment that isn’t life-threatening should be completely disregarded? That if a drug to treat acne causes suicidal ideation in some people, we shouldn’t work to improve the drug, because they could just expend the discipline not to commit suicide?
And the fact that the treatment is not having its intended effect is evidence that it doesn’t work.
I think that would play a part in it, sure. Any time you ask a question about a common experience, you’re likely to get more replies than an uncommon one. But again, I think you underestimate how many recommendations you *could *get for atopic dermatitis, if you talk to a group of people with atopic dermatitis. I used to run an alt med clinic. There are many, many recommendations for atopic dermatitis, some of them more legit than others.
Finally, don’t forget money. Diet plans make people lots and lots of money, in books, in “food”, in webhits, so people make a lot of them up to make money. Most diet plans that look different aren’t different fundamentally from “eat less” (and may or may not include “move more”). South Beach? Eat less. Atkins? Eat less. Cabbage Soup? Eat less. Twinkies and Doritos? Eat less. Low fat? Eat less. Pritikin? Eat less. Eat several small meals? Eat less. Eat only one large meal? Eat less. Oh, they may dress it up in a new wrapper, and focus on carbs or protein or fat, but in the end, all of them work because they include eating fewer *calories *than you did before, as far as we currently understand metabolism. (Which, I grant you, is very poorly indeed, and we may find someday that limiting a specific macronutrient really does make a difference, but so far it doesn’t appear so.) The thing is that different people have different hang ups. Me, I will willingly kill someone for a noodle after three days of no carbs. So I’m not going to tell you Atkins worked for me, because it didn’t. That doesn’t mean it didn’t work for someone else.
So that may look like 8 “treatments” for obesity, and you might get a reply detailing each one, but it’s all one in my book. Similarly, I could list 8 herbs commonly recommended for atopic dermatitis - is that 8 treatments, or one called “herbal”?
And finally, to touch on the post Evil Captor made while I was writing this: he’s right. NO method of weight loss, not even surgery, works really well for the majority of people for long. And that’s because, despite the phrasing in wikipedia, obesity isn’t abnormal. It’s not a disease process (although it certainly leads to many disease processes.) We’re not trying to correct a body’s error as we are in atopic dermatitis, we’re trying to thwart what our bodies naturally do, which is gain weight whenever possible when people eat and move like they want to eat and move. (Again, as far as we know. It may be that obesity is a disease process caused by the triggering of some allele on some gene somewhere, but epigenetics is only hinting at that right now, and we’re a long way from addressing that with current technology.)
And Hamlet’s right, too. That doesn’t mean it’s science’s fault. It means that people have access to food and lifestyle that our body’s didn’t evolve to handle healthily long term and they LOVE it and don’t want to give it up. When we say “eat less”, we really mean it, like it or not. And “less” is really very much less, not just a teeny bit less. A common theme in Weight Watchers meetings is how surprised obese people are at how little food we need to consume each day to survive.
It’s a reason. It’s not valid. As I said, chemo won’t work if you don’t’ take it. Insulin won’t treat diabetes if you don’t use it. If you continue to drink, you’re not going to treat alcoholism. All those treatments require that the person take some responsibility for their treatment.
No, that’s called a “strawman”.
Again, you’re confusing result (not working) with the reason why the result happened.
Substitute ‘treatment’ for ‘exercise and diet’ and you have a winning combination.
Good Luck!
Sure it is. And plenty of diabetics think it’s tooooo haaaaard to manage their blood sugar, and so they start amputating stuff as it dies. That’s not an indication that insulin doesn’t work to lower blood sugar.
Of course we should. And as weight loss drugs turn out to cause heart attacks and strokes, we pull them from the market and look for new ones. Believe me, research in obesity treatment hasn’t stopped, by a long shot. Every drug company knows they’d make a mint off a real effective weight loss drug that allows people to eat what they want and still lose weight without dying of a stroke. They’re trying, they’re really, really trying!
But resistance to lifestyle change is not a side effect of obesity treatment. It’s a *block *to obesity treatment, and that’s not the same thing at all.
Hamlet is absolutely correct.
Moreover, people HAVE been finding ways to make fat loss easier for people to attain. That’s why you have fat substitutes, low-calorie recipes, and non-caloric sweeteners. It’s also why researchers have been plumbing the psychological causes of overeating. You also have the fitness industry, which has spent many years exploring exercise methods and equipment that make it easier for people to shape up – or at the very least, give people more options for doing so.
Do some of these methods have questionable merit? Admittedly so. The point, however, is that people are NOT saying that we should simply give up on people who have a hard time losing weight. They are indeed trying to find ways to make fat loss easier for folks. Ultimately though, if people don’t put in the effort, then none of these methods will work – and that should come as no surprise to any thinking individual.
Before you lambaste me for those words, let me remind everyone that I was overweight for many, many years. I’m in much better shape now, to the point that people are impressed with my stamina, strength, and physique. It was hard work though, and I was only able to shape up through discipline and intense determination. I didn’t just throw in the towel and say, “These methods don’t work!” I knew better than to do that.