Subscribe1. When I say I don’t believe in “dieting” I mean I don’t believe in Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Nutrisystem, etc. Because most people gain the weight back once they stop “dieting.” God knows I did! Just because I don’t believe in the diet industry doesn’t mean I don’t believe in eating healthy and exercising. Just because I don’t believe in the diet industry now doesn’t mean I haven’t tried every single diet in existence before making the decision to have surgery.
2. When I said that it’s possible for someone to weigh 530 pounds and be happy and healthy? I said that because it’s not my place to judge the health or happiness of others. I’m not going to make a blanket statement saying “X>certain weight, therefore X = unhealthy and miserable.” If someone weighs 530 pounds and says they’re happy and healthy, who the fuck am I to disagree? I’m not them and I’m not their doctor so it’s not my place to scream about how impossible that must be.
3. Perhaps the Fat Acceptance movement wouldn’t have to exist if people weren’t so quick to tell folks that they should die/kill themselves/are worthless/useless/etc. simply because they’re fat. You’re pretty much proving its necessity by harassing and threatening the people who belong to it.
The results did not mean that people are completely helpless to control their weight, Dr. Stunkard said. But, he said, it did mean that those who tend to be fat will have to constantly battle their genetic inheritance if they want to reach and maintain a significantly lower weight.
The findings also provided evidence for a phenomenon that scientists like Dr. Hirsch and Dr. Leibel were certain was true — each person has a comfortable weight range to which the body gravitates. The range might span 10 or 20 pounds: someone might be able to weigh 120 to 140 pounds without too much effort. Going much above or much below the natural weight range is difficult, however; the body resists by increasing or decreasing the appetite and changing the metabolism to push the weight back to the range it seeks.
The message is so at odds with the popular conception of weight loss — the mantra that all a person has to do is eat less and exercise more — that Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at the Rockefeller University, tried to come up with an analogy that would convey what science has found about the powerful biological controls over body weight.
He published it in the journal Science in 2003 and still cites it:
“Those who doubt the power of basic drives, however, might note that although one can hold one’s breath, this conscious act is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe,” Dr. Friedman wrote. “The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty. This is the feeling the obese must resist after they have lost a significant amount of weight.”
I don't see how shame would work.I don't see how pride would work.
I find that they often eat reasonably and exercise, but remain overweight.Are you a doctor? A nutritionist? Or a researcher?
You are telling me that if I consume more calories than I burn, my body stores the extra energy as fat. I'm asking you to show me replicated, reliable medical studies that support your assertion.Pretty much sums up the internet, right there.
In the late 1970s, children in the USA ate 17% of their meals away from home, and fast foods accounted for 2% of total energy intake. By the mid-1990s to late-1990s, the proportion of meals eaten away from home nearly doubled to 30%, and fast food consumption increased five-fold, to 10% of total energy intake. From 1965 to 1996, per capita daily soft drink consumption among 11–18-year old children rose from 179 g to 520 g for boys and from 148 g to 337 g for girls. There are 170 000 fast food restaurants in the USA alone. These trends have been driven, in part, by enormous advertising and marketing expenditures by the food industry, including an estimated US$12.7 billion directed at children and their parents. ... By contrast, the advertising budget for the US National Cancer Institute’s “5-A-Day” programme to promote consumption of fruits and vegetables was $1.1 million in 1999. Large meals, often containing a child’s total daily energy requirements, can be purchased for little additional cost over smaller portions, whereas fresh fruits and vegetables tend to be less readily available and comparatively more expensive. Furthermore, fast-food and soft-drink vending machines pervade schools. That US children overconsume added sugar and saturated fat, and underconsume fruits, non-starchy vegetables, fibre, and some micronutrients, is therefore not surprising.
Availability of sedentary pursuits, including television, video games, computers, and the internet, has risen greatly. Children in the USA spend 75% of their waking hours being inactive, compared with remarkably little time in vigorous physical activity; estimated at only 12 min per day. Opportunities for physical activity have decreased for various reasons. Physical education, typically considered less important than academic disciplines, has been eliminated in some school districts. In schools that do offer physical education, large class size and lack of equipment present barriers to successful programme implementation. After-school participation in unstructured activities can be limited, because of absence of pavements (sidewalks), bike paths, safe playgrounds, and parks in many neighbourhoods. Moreover, our culture places a premium on convenience: the car is preferred to walking, the lift to stairs, and the remote control to manual adjustment.
An adult human ingests about 214,000 kilojoules per year. The caloric content of adipose tissue is about 1.7 kJ per gram. Thus, a cumulative "error" in the balance of energy intake and output of as little as 5% could result in accumulations (or losses) of 6kg of adipose tissue per year. Body weight or composition in "free-feeding" humans generally does not show yearly fluctuations of this magnitude. In fact, body weight remains remarkably stable over long periods of time, even the the absence of conscious efforts to control it, and experimental perturbations of body weight are met by resistive metabolic forces tending to return body composition to its starting state.
[leaving for the hospital:] I say, bye as I walk out the door and my dad says it back. Thanks so for your words of kindness and concern! I almost murdered my mom on the drive there.... Because all I needed at that moment was my mom yelling every five minutes.She's in hospital for five days and they never visited her once. I just don't understand.
[emerging from anaesthesia:] My mom squeezes my hand and tells me she has to leave. I still can’t speak or open my eyes and am barely conscious but she has to leave. Because she doesn’t want to hit traffic.
I’m told I’m being discharged! Wooo! I call my mom and tell her. My dad refuses to go to work early so I have to wait four hours to be picked up.
Like [Eric] Schlosser, Shell ends with the now-familiar call for a ban on marketing junk food to children. It's absolutely the right prescription, but one that invokes a "Yeah, right" response. This country will never ban Happy Meal ads on TV.Maybe, but parents can control how much TV their kids watch, especially when they're very young.
I made the mistake of browsing through some of the comments on the digg link, and much of the metafilter thread. The ignorance and hatred on display astounds me. Even the relatively civil and accepting metafites community can barely hide their raging fat-hate. I could fill a dozen fat-hate-bingo cards.
Overweight children find food more reinforcing and consume more energy than do nonoverweight children.There are many many more studies available at PubMed that confirm this finding, with all types of different species. It's a bit incredible that you think that it's science-based to suggest that it is specious.
"RESULTS: In both experiments, overweight children found food more reinforcing and consumed more energy than did their leaner peers."
Sugar intake, soft drink consumption and body weight among British children: further analysis of National Diet and Nutrition Survey data with adjustment for under-reporting and physical activity.
"In logistic regression (adjusted for age and gender, under-reporting, and dieting), overweight was positively associated with energy intake (MJ) (odds ratio [OR]=1.58, confidence interval [CI]=1.42-1.77) and sedentary activity (h) (OR=1.11, CI=1.01-1.23), and inversely associated with moderate/vigorous activity (h) (OR=0.71, CI=0.58-0.86)."
Compensation for energy intake from fast food among overweight and lean adolescents.
"Overweight participants ate more than lean participants whether energy was expressed in absolute terms (1860 [129] vs 1458 [107] kcal, P =.02) or relative to estimated daily energy requirements (66.5% [3.1%] vs 57.0% [2.9%], P =.03)."
Effects of dietary energy on growth performance and carcass quality of white growing peking ducks from two to six weeks of age."As dietary energy increased from 2,600 to 3,100 kcal of AME/kg, the weight gain of ducks increased significantly"
Even the relatively civil and accepting metafites communityThis community does not exist.
[Albert Stunkard and his colleagues] concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples’ weights may be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease. ...The NYT has a Q&A page. Someone asked about the recent increase in obesity. Kolata's response:
The findings also provided evidence for a phenomenon that scientists like Dr. [Jules] Hirsch and Dr. [Rudolph] Leibel were certain was true — each person has a comfortable weight range to which the body gravitates. The range might span 10 or 20 pounds: someone might be able to weigh 120 to 140 pounds without too much effort. Going much above or much below the natural weight range is difficult, however; the body resists by increasing or decreasing the appetite and changing the metabolism to push the weight back to the range it seeks.
... even though Americans are heavier now than they were in the past, they have not, on average, gained enormous amounts of weight. At the lower end of the weight distribution, nothing has changed, not even by a few pounds. As you move up the scale, a few additional pounds start to show up, but even at midrange, people today are just six or seven pounds heavier than they were in 1991. Only with the massively obese, the very top of the distribution, is there a substantial increase in weight of about 25 to 30 pounds. As a result, the curve of body weight has been pulled slightly to the right, with more people shifting up a few pounds to cross the line that experts use to divide normal from obese. In 1991, 23 percent of Americans fell into the obese category; now 31 percent do, a more than 30 percent increase. But the average weight of the population has increased by just 7 to 10 pounds since 1991.I'm wondering why she's using 1991 as the baseline.
I found this part really interesting: the idea of seeing your own body as an "Other," of a conceptual divide between you-you and body-you.You are describing a version of what the writer described. You do not feel that you are the parts of your body that suck.
That's really hard to get my mind around. I do it sometimes, kind of, with parts of my body ("my flat feet/bow legs/aching ankles really don't like jogging..."), but to think of the whole bag of bones and fluid beneath my brain as something somehow distinct from Me, that I'm just kind...attached to (and in her case, imprisoned by and answerable to)? Wow.
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posted by Astro Zombie at 1:27 PM on July 14, 2008