Oh Jesus H. Scotch, the fatties are going to keep acting like the rules don’t apply to them. “Oh no no no, you see, if I were to completely change my lifestyle, eat healthy for the rest of my life, jog 3 days a week and drink lots of water, I’d still be obese! Nope, no way I’d ever be thin. I could consume 2,000 or less calories a day, jog a mile every single day and drink 64 oz of water daily, and I’d still be fat. Even if I made this a lifeling routine. I would only lose a small percentage of my body fat. Nope, doesn’t work for me! All this talk of ‘calories’ and ‘exercise’ is nothing buyt gobbledygook.”
It’s option C, “None of the above”. I’m not exactly content to be chronically overweight, but it’s a while since I could be arsed to actually do anything about it. As I say, that is nobody’s fault but mine. I berate myself mildly about it from time to time, of course. At the point at which I pick up the fork, however, what I ought to do ends up taking a back seat.
I don’t cram huge and wasteful quantities of food down my throat at every opportunity. I don’t need to. With a sedentary occupation and not much scope for any other exercise, it’s quite enough that I eat slightly too much food most of the time and ignore the weight creeping on. An ounce or two a week builds up over time, if it’s uncorrected.
“Heavy” is a euphemism, though it’s physically part of the problem, as my cardiovascular system and aching joints remind me from time to time.
Btw, I accept the existence of the odd super-fatty back in the Stone Age. We’re designed to pack on the pounds when food’s abundant, for obvious reasons. Consequently, if you’re high enough on the totem pole that the tribe actually bring you an extra-big hunk of mammoth without requiring you go run it down for yourself, you can get as fat as you like - and it’ll be a badge of status. OTOH, actually being hideously fat back in those days was probably no more desirable then than now. If the tribe decide they aren’t going to feed you for free any more, you’re now ill-equipped to go back to feeding yourself.
And now back to those who want to claim they can gain weight on 500 calories a day and three hours of aerobics. :dubious:
For fuck’s sake, when are you going to realize fat people being responsible for their weight doesn’t excuse the doctor telling an overweight patient to shed some pounds to better her love life?
Nice selective reading comprehension, Boy Wonder. You conveniently skipped the parts about mowing the lawn and hiking, and the fact that I HAVEN’T gained all summer. Not going to the gym != physical inactivity.
My MAIN point, however, was that it would be nice if you could drop the comments about how “fatties” must always go the the extremes. It’s just as possible to overeat on vegetables as it is to overeat on donuts (or undereat, for that matter: you might see a fat person eating a donut, but it may be the one she’s allowed herself for the week, rather than the first of a dozen that day). And it’s possible to be overweight, but have otherwise healthy stats and be able to do physical things.
And yes, I weigh 200 pounds, but for all you know when you see me on the street I might have weighed 300 before and be making excellent progress. Don’t assume I’m on my way up the scale.
:: applause :: Yeah, 'cause you know what? Lots of things compete for my time: work, relationships, household chores, leisure time, and yes, weight loss. This summer work took over for me, and I devoted what little time was left over to relaxing and spending time with my husband. Quite often that meant eating convenience foods that were not the very best food choices. But I focused on maintaining weight rather than losing, because that’s what I had time and energy for. I am NOT going to ignore work and family/friends just to get into a size 12. I’m happy enough having gone from a 22 to a 20. It’s a start. If it’s not fast enough for anyone else, too fucking bad. I’ll run my OWN life, thank you.
Ain’t nobody tellin’ you folks to ignore your families or starve yourselves just so you can be “thin and pretty!” Just stop acting like somehow changing the way you live won’t work for you because you’re special. You ain’t.
It’s not okay for the doctor to tell her, “Yeah, you know, even fat chicks get laid, but you’ve gone too far.”
My over-eating - one of the very few changes the dietician was able to suggest in my already healthy diet was to cut down from a whole glass of skimmed milk for supper to half a glass.
The comments of the haters in this thread are just so out of line with my reality. I would really like them to visit my life and see how normal my eating is, and how above average my exercising is, and how my body still clings to its fat cells with a death-grip.
Actually, I used to have a room mate that was built EXACTLY like the Venus of Willendorf, short stubby arms and great pendulous hanging boobs and all - I know this because she used to insist on walking around the place half dressed, or flashing me when I’d walk out of the kitchen. Frankly, I wish she would have kept herself covered.
That being said, I would say that you’re most certainly correct that most hunter-gatherers looked a heck of a lot more like Kate Moss than they did my roomie - the difference is that they WANTED to look like my roommate. Aint life funny.
Anyhow - Orange Jumpsuit - apparently you’re thin and lovely and perfect, which is great for you. You would probably make better points if you didn’t call people “fatty” tho… Besides, I’ve heard that you have thick ankles.
Ain’t life funny? Yep, when you spend your whole life one meal ahead of acute malnutrition you idealise an extra hundred pounds of excess weight. Like one or two other funny things in life, attaining this end is less of an upside than it looked at the time.
Cite for OJ being, or claiming to be, thin and lovely and perfect, or is her only crime refusing to believe that some poor disadvantaged sector of the population can photosynthesise without chlorophyll? :smack:
And if obesity’s only downside was being called a ‘fatty’ you’d have a case. Very few people ever call me ‘fatty’, and if it weren’t for the knee pains, the gout, the inability to keep up with my six-year-old son, the way I have trouble fitting into seats on public transport, the whole clothes issue, chronic water retention in my ankles and legs, and the trouble I have with stairs, plus a few other issues, I daresay I’d never notice my weight.
But what if the only reason you are going to the doctor is to have your toenail looked at? What if the doctor looks at your chart and sees that you haven’t been to a doctor’s office in the last six years? Wouldn’t he be remiss in his duties and obligations as a health-care provider if he didn’t do all that he deemed necessary knowing that he may not see you for another six years?
Somehow I doubt that. Her arms aren’t short, they are just incredibly thin. Further more, her looks aren’t attributed to body fat, but rather the female porportions over emphasized. Her buttocks take up nearly half of her body, her breasts, belly and vaginal lips are overemphasized. I’ve read numerous studies on the Venus de Willendorf and none of them ever suggested that she was representative of women of that area or of what they were supposed to look like. You should write your own study, because this is the first I ever heard of it.
The overemphasis on feminine figures and the deemphasis on gender neutral figures has been excepted by most scholars as signs of it being a fertility symbol. There are many of these figures, there isn’t just one, and they are found spread out through a wide area, showing that ancient peoples considered them important. The covering of the statue in red ochre pigment, the fact that it wasn’t able to stand and had to be carried from place to place further suggests that the statue was a fertility symbol. Fertility symbols are still common in many cultures today. They are used to encourage not only the production of more children by the women, but also encouragement of fertility of the earth and animal tribes.
There is a small movement which believes the Venus’ are representative of a time when humans used to worship a MotherGoddess, but it is a small movement and most scholars believe that it is a fertility symbol.
I’d love to see a cite for this but I doubt I’m going to get it. I used to be an anthroplogy major, and although it was 5 years ago, I still remember the general gist of most of the books I’ve read and what people looked like in the videos I saw. From what I remember, there was absolutely no evidence that hunter-gathers wanted to be overweight. They spent most of their lives moving from place to place and the extra pounds would have hindered them. Now, you could be correct if we refer to people with more sedetary lifestyles but this didn’t happen when the Venus figures started being produced. Among some famer societies, the individuals in charge would be overweight. But not in all, in fact this seemed to be representative of societies were few held power which wasn’t true of all societies. I don’t know the percetages, but we studied many more where the power was spread out then when it was concentrated. This wasn’t due to people viewing overweight bodies as heathier/sexier/etc but rather that the individuals in charge were overeating in order to show off their personal wealth. This was a personal choice, hardly the result of genetics. Of course, the Venus Figurines are thought be dated before humans started farming, so it is unlikely the statues were representative of a person of importance in a farming society.
I do believe that some people have the natural tendancy to gain more or less weight than others through eating the same amount of food, but I also believe that if all of us were put back into a hunter-gatherer society, we would be thin again.
This is not to suggest that overweight people simply overeat and need to stop eating an exercise. I had the opposite problem for most of my life, I could not gain weight. I’m finally putting on the pounds now, after going on birth control and starting to exercise. But I’ve also seen a lot of overweight people blame everyone other than themselves and yet, when I go out to eat with them, they eat the wrong foods in the wrong proportions. I do not mean to suggest that everyone who is overweight has this problem, but I do believe a large chunk of it is.
Well, count yourself lucky that you were never flashed by my roomie then, because she was the spitin’ image. In fact, referring to my Hart on Art, I can confirm that she does very closely resemble the little Venus. I have no cite for her vaginal lips, because thankfully I was spared that particular part of her anatomy.
I should write a study about how my ex-roommate was built like the Venus of Willendorf? That would be… interesting. ?? ??
Indeed. And in fact, many fertility symbols show exaggerated representations of various body parts (penis, breast, vulva, buttocks, etc). However, because the representation is an exaggeration of the norm, doesn’t mean that those particular proportions are never found in nature (albeit less commonly).
Well, Hart would be my cite (again), and while I was overstating it a bit, he states that when fertility symbols were crafted, exaggerations of body parts suggesting fertility were common, perhaps denoting an admiration for those parts. Frankly, I have no idea how a hunter-gatherer from 10,000 years ago would have reacted to my roommate - Hart seems to think they would enjoy the proportions.
Further, I must admit that the library at my university is rather deficient in 10,000-year-old film depicting the people of that time. Aint funding cuts a bitch.
I have no cite for this. However, I’m of the opinion that if you’re going to go around calling people snotty names such as “fatty” then you better be a total frikin’ goddess yourself. That is all.
Juh? I thought that if you were going to call people “fatty” it should mean that you’re not fat. Anyway, fatty, keep making excuses. It’s not your fault. Even if you changed your lifestyle, you’d still be fat. Don’t bother changing the way you eat and exercise for the rest of your life, you’ll only lose a very small portion of your original weight. Nothing works for you. Right, got it.
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