[QUOTE=hajario]
Bull fucking shit. I seriously work out two or three times a week and do something like take a fast walk with my dog for a mile or two another two or three times a week. I am not one of those people who loves to exercise but I do it so that I have a better chance of living a long and healthy life. I like soda and deserts and cream sauces but I limit my intake of them for the same reason. I would way rather sit on the couch and watch movies or surf the net after work and eat all of the shitty food that I want but I don’t.
[/QUOTE]
I am not really sure what you are even saying here. “Is it easier to lose weight or to never have been overweight?” What the hell does that even mean?
You do realize that once that weight is lost, you still have to maintain that weight constantly… right? And further, that there is a substantial body of scientific literature showing that formerly-obese individuals actually have to work substantially harder and/or eat considerably less to maintain a healthy weight than do people who have never been overweight, right?
That’s what I have to do just to keep the weight I lost off.
To actually lose that weight in the first place, I had to do a lot more. A lot more than that. Now, 15 years later, I can even afford to slack off occasionally (tonight, maybe). But it was years before I could relax to just swimming a few miles three or so times a week.
You sound like you’re saying it’s everyone’s fault except for the overweight person.
How about the complete opposite - I’m 115lbs @ 5’7’'. I’ve been this thin since middle school (now in my 30s). I’ve wanted to gain weight for years and have never been able to gain weight. The work I would have to put in to bring my body up to a normal weight range for my height and build would probably trump the effort needed for an overweight person to lose their weight. Throughout HS I would eat my normal caloric intake (which was ridiculous - probably close to 4000 calories/day) AND on top of that drink a slim fast or two daily for even more calories. Never got about 120lbs. Ever.
Yeah really. I’m 5’ 4", 107 lbs, and apparently I’m underweight. I could just imagine the comments if everyone around me suddenly decided to go on diets to lose weight. :rolleyes:
The thing is: I’m more than happy with my weight. I have no desire to gain weight to be in the “normal” range - screw that. In fact I wouldn’t mind losing a couple pounds, but I would never say that out loud in mixed company because then the comments would start.
I can’t tell you how many times I hear “Oh you’re so lucky that you’re so skinny”.
No, no I’m really not. I would like to gain some weight because honestly, I’m pretty much skin and bones. Like ribs showing skin and bones. But people just think skinny=good. Fuck that noise.
Do… do you need help with this? Because it should be reasonably simple to establish a resistance exercise schedule and gradually enrich your diet in nutrient- and energy-dense foods that you find palatable.
I mean, I guess it is okay if you just want to complain, but if you really do want to change this about yourself it is not exactly an “I want to become the first Astronaut President” level task.
Oh I wasn’t aware that you knew my medical history. Glad to know how easy it is.
Except it’s not since I have digestive issues that limits the amount of fats/calories that are actually converted in my body. And if you bothered to read my initial post you would see that I did try that back in high school (although I left out the part about exercising/working out to build muscle mass).
So the combination of my digestive issues and my seemingly fast metabolism rates, prevents me from gaining weight with great effort, let alone the “easy way” you know of.
You an overweight person? Cause it’s usually those that tell me how easy it is to gain weight.
(By the way - my mother has the same digestive issues that I have, along with the low blood pressure. She’s about 5’5’’, 90lbs.)
EDIT: Just so you know, you’re comment is about on par with people telling someone who is overweight that it’s easy to lose weight - just stop eating so many donuts, french fried, cakes etc.
You’re a very silly person. Don’t you understand that skinny is GOOD and that fat is BAD BAD BAD? Even if the fat person has excellent blood sugar, cholesterol, and blood pressure levels, eats a sensible diet, and exercises regularly, and the skinny person eats a horrible diet, gets no exercise, looks like a concentration camp victim, and can barely lift a 5 pound bag of sugar without passing out?
The current American anxiety over weight is mostly a moral panic. It’s not really concerned with improving anyone’s actual health, it’s about shaming those whose bodies don’t fit into the current cultural ideal. if we really cared about improving the nation’s health, we’d see more programs like the one Hajero’s company offers, which directly encourage exercise and other healthy habits, and fewer of these “Biggest Loser” setups which only promote transient weight loss.
I should clarify: there are some disorders that are known to retard weight gain. However, they are rather serious and generally impose obvious somatic and neurological defects.
My educated guess would be that you simply don’t eat as much as you think you’re eating. It is a very easy thing to misjudge.
I agree with this up to a point. I work very hard, I have to consciously choose to eat less every meal, I have to choose to go work out even though I don’t really like it, regularly. It’s a drag. I wish I could eat whatever I wanted and never have to work out and have stellar health regardless.
But I’ve never been “fat”. I’m at the upper end of the “normal” BMI range (and frankly the “overweight” lower-end is fine too health-wise), and I work hard to be there. A few years ago I dropped down into the mid-lower part of that range REALLY working hard, and now I’ve slacked off a bit in the last couple of years and I’m back at the upper part of the range, but I still work hard to stay there. Left to my own devices, and if I didn’t have any fucks to give, I would easily be quite overweight.
However, I still agree with the sentiment that it is much easier to do what I am doing than it is to be very overweight and then lose all that weight and keep it off. Scientific studies I have read seem to show that its true. Your body and mind both change and adapt to being very overweight and will fight very hard to keep you that way.
But it is not fair to completely dismiss every person who is a healthy weight as having it easy and being lucky. Some of us work pretty hard to be this way.
The capper to that is she’s not just an employee, she’s the wife of the big boss of the department. :eek: At least she was honest and upfront about it, though; she was all “rofl, you guys are going down!” and declared her intention to bring in goodies. She’s only in that office a couple times a week so it wasn’t constant at least.
My coworker has gone gluten-free eating due to a pretty distinct cause-and-effect pattern over months of eating gluten-containing foods and getting stomach pain. She brought in some goddamned Girl Scout cookies since she can’t eat them any longer, and left them on my desk for me. I told her that as far as my brain is concerned, their mint cookies are a 2-serving-size box (two tubes of cookies = one serving each), and physically moved the box of cookies into another room in the office suite so that neither of us would have to see them. (She opened up the box to smell the cookies at one point because she was mourning her loss of GS cookies.)
Ok smartass, I guess we’re gonna have to play this game.
The disorder is called IBS (that stands for irritable bowel syndrome, just so you don’t have to pour over your medical journals to find it). IBS-D (the one that I suffer from) causes diarrhea. With frequent diarrhea, foods pass through your system quickly and normal asorption rate of nutrients and the like doesn’t occur.
And since me just saying that I had a digestive disorder wasn’t quite enough for you and your peer-reviewed medical journals, I’ll give you some more details. A lot of the time when I eat, before I have finished I already have to shit out some of what I’ve eating. This is most easily shown when I eat a meal containing corn - if halfway through the meal I go take a shit in the bathroom, you can find whole corn kernals in the toilet despite the fact that I only just ate them 10 minutes prior.
If you want to provide me with your address, I can send you a stool sample so you can assist me and show me how easy it is for me to gain weight. :rolleyes:
Oh and since I graduated a fairly well respected college with a BA in Chemistry, counting calories taken in vs burned is not exactly a tough one for me.
