Neuroscience Explains Why Dieters Rarely Lose Weight (nytimes.com) 381
HughPickens.com writes: According to a new study, the chance of an obese person attaining normal body weight is 1 in 210 for men and 1 in 124 for women, increasing to 1 in 1,290 for men and 1 in 677 for women with severe obesity, suggesting that current weight management programs focused on dieting and exercise are not effective in tackling obesity. Now neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt writes in the New York Times that "in the long run dieting is rarely effective, doesn't reliably improve health and does more harm than good". And according to Aamodt, the root of the problem is not willpower but neuroscience.
Metabolic suppression is one of several powerful tools that the brain uses to keep the body within a certain weight range, called the set point. The range, which varies from person to person, is determined by genes and life experience. When dieters' weight drops below it, they not only burn fewer calories but also produce more hunger-inducing hormones and find eating more rewarding. If someone starts at 120 pounds and drops to 80, her brain rightfully declares a starvation state of emergency, using every method available to get that weight back up to normal. This coordinated brain response is a major reason that dieters find weight loss so hard to achieve and maintain. According to Aamodt dieting can actually lead to weight gain because dieting is stressful. Calorie restriction produces stress hormones, which act on fat cells to increase the amount of abdominal fat. Such fat is associated with medical problems like diabetes and heart disease, regardless of overall weight.... Aamodt recommends mindful eating -- paying attention to signals of hunger and fullness, without judgment, to relearn how to eat only as much as the brain's weight-regulation system commands.
Metabolic suppression is one of several powerful tools that the brain uses to keep the body within a certain weight range, called the set point. The range, which varies from person to person, is determined by genes and life experience. When dieters' weight drops below it, they not only burn fewer calories but also produce more hunger-inducing hormones and find eating more rewarding. If someone starts at 120 pounds and drops to 80, her brain rightfully declares a starvation state of emergency, using every method available to get that weight back up to normal. This coordinated brain response is a major reason that dieters find weight loss so hard to achieve and maintain. According to Aamodt dieting can actually lead to weight gain because dieting is stressful. Calorie restriction produces stress hormones, which act on fat cells to increase the amount of abdominal fat. Such fat is associated with medical problems like diabetes and heart disease, regardless of overall weight.... Aamodt recommends mindful eating -- paying attention to signals of hunger and fullness, without judgment, to relearn how to eat only as much as the brain's weight-regulation system commands.
Good luck convincing people (Score:5, Insightful)
There are several whole industries devoted to convincing people that it's as simple as a bit of diet and exercise and if you or someone you know can't lose weight it's because they're fat and lazy. "Health" food, diet plans, pills and potions, exercise machines, surgery. All waiting to grab a dollar. And billions of people too scared or too stupid to know that if they're thin it's their good fortune, not a reason to put others down. Fat shaming is more socially accepted than any other form of discrimination on the planet.
Re:Good luck convincing people (Score:4, Insightful)
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While I mostly agree, I would add that some surgeries do actually work. Gastric bands, for example.
This article smacks of fat acceptance (Score:4, Insightful)
It's trying to justify you're going to be stuck at your unhealthy weight whether you like it or not so you should just accept it fatty mclardbucket.
Re:This article smacks of fat acceptance (Score:5, Insightful)
For one, it does not say that at all and two, this article very much fits what I've experienced.
Since you're not going to believe ANY of my conclusions anyway, I'm not going to waste my time writing them down.
Let's just say I'm losing weight now steadily and all I did was I started to chew my food thoroughly... and I mean thoroughly. I counted 60 to 100 chews per bite.
I immediately started eating way less food because there is now a point, pretty soon, where I find the thought of eating more becomes uncomfortable. I stop eating automatically now.
So on one side, eating less actually is a viable option IF you eat less because you feel sated. If you eat less just because the scale says so, you WILL get cravings and your body WILL go into starvation mode and you definitely WILL NOT permanently lose weight.
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Let's just say I'm losing weight now steadily and all I did was I started to chew my food thoroughly... and I mean thoroughly. I counted 60 to 100 chews per bite.
I immediately started eating way less food because there is now a point, pretty soon, where I find the thought of eating more becomes uncomfortable. I stop eating automatically now.
Would it not just be more efficient to just buy a shock collar that electrocutes you every time you take a bite?
Re:This article smacks of fat acceptance (Score:5, Insightful)
Diets don't work if you don't stick to them
Yet this is what all diets seem to be selling; a temporary pain for a lasting gain.
IMHO the entire concept of "dieting" is flawed; any temporary fix is just that; temporary.
Unless the changed behaviour becomes the normal (unconscious) behaviour, it will inevitably revert to what was previously normal.
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Would be much easier to take you seriously, if you weren't an AC and hadn't just "quoted" reddit.
But anyway, I have a problem with certain statements here: The English language, as opposed to the German, makes no difference between a change in eating habits and a temporary measure, often extreme, with the sole goal to reduce weight.
So me eating less is, in fact a diet change. In that you are right. However, it is not an extreme temporary measure with the sole goal of reducing weight. So we'll need to make s
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I have a problem with certain statements here: The English language, as opposed to the German, makes no difference between a change in eating habits and a temporary measure, often extreme, with the sole goal to reduce weight.
English certainly does distinguish between "diet" as a verb and "diet" as a noun.
People diet (verb) to lose weight.
While diet (noun) is the eating habits.
And you're right, English is not German.
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Well I guess all those people with drug addictions and mental issues are all right than, because they are not fat, and don't abuse their bodies, oh how about this current tattoo fad? Getting needles injecting dye into your skin sells isn't abusing your body?
Our body is far more primitive than the culture we live in getting fat isn't abuse, but a survival mechanism. The problem is our life style never experience what our body is preparing for. Stresses say to your primitive body, I am getting stress hormone
Re:This article smacks of fat acceptance (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who has successfully lost over 50 lbs and had kept it off for years. Who goes to the Gym 5 days a week, and watches my food intake carefully, However I am still over the recommended BMI. Sure I can run faster than most people, and I am stronger, and have much better insurance, I have the pulse and blood pressure of an athlete but medically I am still obease.
I have dedicated a lot of time to this, and I am well aware how hard it is to lose weight, and I am not tolerating trolls to make it harder for others to choose a healthy lifestyle because they are afraid of such judgmental people. Who hide behind their trolling as (Giving them a kick to change) helpful. Overweight people are well aware of their looks, and health concerns far more than you are. And you know what the biggest excuse not to join a gym is? It is I will need to lose some weight first before I can join a Gym otherwise they are afraid of getting mocked by dumb ass comments like that.
Fat Acceptance isn't gluttony acceptance, but treating people of different sizes like normal human beings, and not some underclass that you can insult.
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Your case demonstrates the difficulty of keeping weight off long term. 50lbs, a mere 20kg, and to do it you have to carefully watch what you eat and got to the gym 5 days a week, forever. When you get old or sick you won't be able to maintain that and the weight will come back on.
I'm not criticising you, your results are impressive and you should be congratulated. I'm just pointing out that even with massive amounts of effort you have not returned to any kind of "normal", like a normal person who doesn't ne
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590 calories is a light lunch? How do you work with all that food in your stomach?
Google tells me that an egg and cheese sandwich is 233 calories. An apple and an orange as bring my typical working day total to 332 calories.
I'm not surprised that people put on weight if they regard 590 calories as a light lunch
Re: This article smacks of fat acceptance (Score:2)
Fat acceptance helped me lose weight - 265 to 175 lbs by going keto. It's been a year and a half and I still eat lots of fat. Plenty of protein too and a small amount of unprocesed carbs with veggies.
Just avoid the middle aisles of the grocery store and most people will resume a healthy weight.
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It would instantly become their most popular product. I could see people in the US lining up for their Fatty McLardbucket mean with a jumbo Hi-C and extra sweet and sour dipping sauce.
Warning: Healthy At Every Size supporter (Score:5, Informative)
Worrying. Ms. Aamodt has links to the Healthy at Every Size (HAES) [sandraaamodt.com] obesity apologists. HAES are as insane as anti-vaxxers, only they believe medical science is a worldwide racist conspiracy against fat people. Oh, and if you don't want to buy into their excuses, you're literally oppressing them. [imgur.com]
In short, I'm worried that she appears to be peddling snake oil to people who are very, very desperate to avoid having to take personal responsibility for their unhealthy lifestyles. Diet and Exercise work -- as part of a lifestyle change. We know this, we have known this for years.
The problem is that humans are extremely, extremely poor at making judgements about food, and we have an entire industry ("Big Food") dedicated into manipulating people into overeating and eating cheaply produced unhealthy garbage.
Re:Warning: Healthy At Every Size supporter (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the main issue here is that HEAS and fat acceptance people are overdoing it. Some people can be slightly overweight but everything can be fine health wise and try to force them to a normal weight is more likely to make things worse. There are also some complaints against "fat shaming" that are justified. Obesity is a significant lifestyle-based health issue, but there are many others such as smoking, lack of sleep, drug abuse, risky sexual behavior or being underweight. Shaming should to be fair: If people ignore smoking but are shaming slightly overweight people and claim that shaming is based on health concerns instead of aesthetics that is just bigotry or bad information.
A little big of overweight (BMI 25-27), especially with low levels of abdominal fat is not a big health issue, it might even be slightly more healthy than normal weight. Something like BMI 27 to 30 is unhealthy most of the time, but on average still causes smaller health issues than smoking. But many people are significantly fatter than that. They almost always have health issues caused by their weight and should really lose weight and could easily do so by swapping some high calorie count items in their diet with vegetables.
There is no universal human size (Score:4, Informative)
The doctors have adjusted the definition of "obese" (apparently) to include pot-bellies and thunder thighs. They are doing this in the War on Obesity, which like other Wars on Social Problems, is based in forcing people to do what is not natural for them. They think this will work because all humans are the same, identical and grey, without any context or surrounding needs. But as you point out, people vary. For some, a little extra weight is a good thing, especially in middle age.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to find some eclairs...
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Ugh... This is a textbook example of poisoning the well by making some nonsense claims about HAES. The link to someone who is clearly upset and venting a little, spun into "oppression", is particularly awful.
HAES promote two basic ideas:
1. People should live a healthy lifestyle for the sake of well-being, rather than just for weight loss. So they are against binge diets, and for changing lifestyle to be more healthy. Seems sensible.
2. Simply dieting and increasing exercise is not effective for some people.
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Don't drag anti-vaxxers down to this level.
Anti-vaxxers do not believe the current consensus for one medical issue, that the medical establishment is doing a good job making and using vaxxines. Which is not completely impossible because people makes mistakes and vaxxines are not magically infallible. the medical establishment has be horrendously wrong before, it's not particularly great are science, and it is really good at being greedy and caring about money more the patient health.
What Fat-Acceptance moro
Re:Warning: Healthy At Every Size supporter (Score:5, Funny)
Fat people aren't a "race"
Sure they are, they just don't race as fast as thin people unless you drop them from an airplane.
Re:Warning: Healthy At Every Size supporter (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure they are, they just don't race as fast as thin people unless you drop them from an airplane.
Idiocy is more of a problem than obesity will ever be - as evidenced by the fact that you think more weight would make someone fall faster.
Where did he say that? He said "as fast as", not "faster than".
When did they stop talking about how gravity works in public schools?
Ironic.
Re: Warning: Healthy At Every Size supporter (Score:2)
When the Texas school board found out gravity was a "theory".
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Sure, but the same low breeding that leads to racism now leads to fat shaming.
That argument is so thin it's can't even be rebutted.
Are you implying something? Something beyond "fat shaming is bad and people who do bad things are bad"?
What does racism have to do with anything here? Are we abducting fat people now to sell into slavery? We're certainly gonna need a bigger boat for that.
Control (Score:2)
You cannot force yourself to lose weight.
You can will yourself to lose weight.
The two are distinct. The first is a method of control, which means that without changing your will, you put in place external methods of regulating yourself. The second is how most people lose weight, which is by regulating their desire by balancing it against their desire to be thinner. It's not a diet, it's a reduction.
All the people I know who lost weight and kept it off did so by focusing on their appetites and not rules for
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You can force yourself to lose weight. You see, on uncle Adolf's diet in Auschwitz no one was fat. The prisoners' desire to eat was unchanged.
It's possible to invent less drastic external methods of regulating food intake. Existing ones like stomach ligation are pretty crude, but we can invent better.
Of course, you'd also want to provide enough non-calorie nutrition, but that's markedly easier to do than in a concentration camp.
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This is probably a stupid question, but how much exercise did you add to your weekly routine, alongside the diet?
I'm only asking because I had a hell of a time losing weight through a calorie deficit and good macronutrient ratios, but when I started exercising (crossfit and weightlifting), I started losing weight even though my diet suffered a bit. I'm still technically overweight at 5'11" and 210lbs and could stand to lose another 40-50lbs, but my body fat percentage is significantly lower now.
You don't ha
because diets focus on the wrong things (Score:5, Insightful)
i've never bought into any of the dieting fads nor tried them because they blamed random things without the science to back it up. one fateful day last summer i watched a documentary that claimed sugars in our food were to blame but it actually had the science to back it up.
Sugar is a drug, addictive and causes food cravings. [nih.gov] This begs the question of why we aren't going through withdraw and the answer is that sugar has been added to all your foods specifically so you do not go through withdraw. Look at your raw pasta which has zero reason to have sugar added, it has about 3g of sugar added for every 56g (2 oz).
To make matters worse, food makers started using High Fructose Corn Syrup in products because it's inexpensive because corn is subsidized. Fructose is processed by your liver and it gets stored as fat [nih.gov] unless you have low blood sugar. so products with High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) are most likely to make you fat.
After removing sugar from my diet (not easy to find products without sugar!) I went through a few days of withdraw. After that, I actually felt like I more energy to do things, so much so that I wanted to exercise (that was never my goal). I started walking regularly and losing weight without any crazy diet, just not eating things with sugar added. Apples are a great source of sugar that have the fiber to balance it out so that it's absorbed slowly avoiding a traffic jam in your liver.
In the last year I have lost 65 lbs of fat and gained 15 lbs of muscle without ever having to go hungry or restrain myself from eating. I'm still overweight (for now) but I'm no longer obese.
The food supply is being drugged to increase profits.
Re:because diets focus on the wrong things (Score:5, Insightful)
This, I think, is critically important. And it's not just sugar, either.
If I'm a company that makes food, and it was possible to alter my food in some way to make it sell better -- by making it more attractive or addictive or harder to resist, or as the summary suggests, make it interfere with the brain's weight regulation controls -- then wouldn't I do that? If I can encourage or manipulate people (or their brains/bodies) to stuff themselves silly on my food, won't I sell more if I do? I don't even need to know the precise effect of my changes. If I change something, and the product sells better, who knows or even cares whether it's because the change made the food better, or whether it just made it more addictive? The sales numbers will be up either way.
Anybody that thinks that the companies we buy our food from aren't already doing this is being silly. They have entire research departments dedicated to it.
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Look at your raw pasta which has zero reason to have sugar added, it has about 3g of sugar added for every 56g (2 oz).
Citation needed. I cannot find this on the ingredient list, after checking several.
Are you sure you're not just complaining about the ~2g of sugar that comes from wheat germ, and is not added?
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HFCS has pretty much the same glucose/fructose ratio as normal table sugar.
I hate this "neuroscience explains" stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
Obesity is a recent problem (Score:2)
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Proliferation of fast food and over processed calorie dense prepackaged garbage passed off as food.
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Proliferation of fast food and over processed calorie dense prepackaged garbage passed off as food.
There is typically nothing wrong with those foods from a nutritional value. Sure, they may not always taste as good, and often they may be heavy on sugar, fat, and salt, but there is nothing inherently wrong with them if you are eating a relatively balanced diet.
The real problem is they make eating too easy which can affect how some people eat. Eating foods you prepare yourself wastes so much time and effort that it makes it physically harder to eat, which in turn helps remove the choice of eating mor
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Well, for one, when your mom is single or she actually goes to work like everyone else as opposed to staying at home doing nothing else but caring for the house, having 3 home cooked meals a day becomes much more challenging. Not impossible, but you have to do some serious planning and get into pretty specific time habits to make it happen.
So more people will resort to eating out, ordering, etc. And it goes downhill from there.
If I'm in a rush in the morning and don't have time to patch up breakfast, my onl
Wrong aproach ... (Score:2)
I call BS on the NYT article ...
I reckon the basic problem with diets is the kind of diets ... the typical "reduce by half" diet, or counting calories etc. will not work over the long run, because they are either tedious to follow, or deprive the body of necessary nutrients along with calories.
The way out of the whole dilemma is by not reducing what you eat, but by changing your food to healthy food. And not even looking at how much of that healthy (mostly vegetables) food you eat, but rely on the relativel
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The meat most certainly was not what made you fat. It is the fat, if you eat fatty meat, the ketchup and the french fries or other potatoes like wedges. Or the sauce.
From the web site of Fuhrman's I can not judge how his approach works, but I guess it is similar to Montignac's method. However since he died his name is used for a "diet company's" food products, no idea what to think about that.
The only thing relevant to not gain weight and finally lose weight is the level of insulin and sugar/fat in your blo
Article Contradicts Study (Score:5, Insightful)
This article is a load of crap that contradicts the study's conclusion:
"those subjects maintaining greater weight loss at 6 years also experienced greater concurrent metabolic slowing." ...
"Metabolic adaptation persists over time and is likely a proportional, but incomplete, response to contemporaneous efforts to reduce body weight."
What they're saying is that the body will adapt to the change in calorie intake such that the person can maintain the weight loss. The NYT article makes wild and incompatible conclusions based on this very simple and narrow study.
I don't think so (Score:2)
If you e.g. do fasting, after a few days you have no feeling for hunger anymore.
While it is true that the body as soon as you do a diet tries to convince you "hey you are starving, eat more! because you see: I have to burn the fat!" it should not be to hard to trick the body buy eating stuff that is hard to digest and has a relatively low amount of energy.
For every study: why diets don't work, there are plenty of diets and studies that actually do work.
For many people losing weight is actually not that hard
I know a lot of it is in the brain: (Score:4, Interesting)
about twelve years ago I lost 30 lbs just by deciding to. I don't know how I did it, but I decided to lose weight, decided it was going to happen, didn't change my diet or activity and 30lbs was gone in a very short period of time.
I have been unable to do it again since gaining it back.
I've found that when I'm stressed, mentally exhausted regularly and feel like I'm carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders I gain weight easily. When I feel unburdened and things are going great I lose weight easily. Some of it is that I'm more likely to do recreational exercise when I'm less stressed, and indeed the last time I got down to a good weight that was the case, but I can't contribute it to that every yo-yo.
Re:The real reason? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, the picture is more complex than that, but gut flora is a very important factor, it seems. However, we are not talking about figuring out which single strain of bacteria is "beneficial"; it is probably a matter of finding out which combination(s) of strains produce what effect(s), and this will probably depend on the genetic and epi-genetic profile of the individual. And there are other factors as well, like life-style and habits - like, what do you eat, and do you eat until you're not hungry or until you are full? Do you start to eat when you are bored?
Another interesting fact: recent research in Denmark has demonstrated that you can change your set-point: if you lose weight through dieting and, crucially, keep the weight off for about 1 year, then your will accept this as the set-point. And, of course, you push it upwards by over-eating, without doubt, which is why mindfulness is a very good suggestion.
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I heard the Danish study on the radio (BBC R4) and it is similar to work I've heard of before, but I can't find links to the study.
The Danes claimed that you need to lose weight slowly, and then once you have lost the weight stick with the diet for at least a year so that your body learns to live with the new weight. From what I understand that the researcher was saying was that after about a year of being the weight you wanted to be, your body would stop fighting you, but that didn't mean you could go back
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Not sure if it helps you, dude, but those things can change and I'm pretty sure it's not genetics alone.
I used to have no problem with weight and it felt natural, I simply didn't want to eat that much, I wasn't too thin either, just normal.
(oh, and most "grandma"s around me were worried I eat so little, not that it was little)
Then, for about 3 month or so, I ate more than I wanted (for whatever the reason was). Then things went... wrong, I got to 109kg (normall weight for me is about 85, I think).
I went on
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Many of the contestants on The Biggest Loser kept the weight off for a year but then gained it all back at the six year mark. It seems to vary from person to person... One guy's body was burning 800 kcal/day less than when he started that show.
The set point definitely seems to be the key, but there also seems to be more too resetting it than just maintaining a lower weight for a year.
Re:The real reason? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wasn't sure if I saw that story [nytimes.com] posted here or on the other site. Must have been the other site. It was a fascinating read at the very least.
I also found that it seemed to be somewhat fatalistic and depressing. Humans want to fight against nature and remake the world as they think it should be. It seems like in the ultimate "joke's on you" moment, the very nature of people's bodies has started turning against them all over the developed world. At least this human still wants to fight against nature, to figure out what the answer must be, confident there must be an answer to be had. I don't have funding, and I doubt I'd have the first clue of what to do to figure it out. Debuggers are my thing, not microscopes.
I'm one of the lucky ones--that person everybody seems to know who can eat whatever they want and never gain a pound. Well, not so much as when I was younger and every weekend meant a trip to the arcade to play DDR. I wish I knew why or even how. There are better people in the world who deserve whatever it is about my body that would make gaining a hundred lbs or so if I need to for some reason seem as daunting to me as losing a hundred lbs and keeping it off is for many people I know. One person in particular whose struggles with their weight has turned into a full blown mental illness and utter despair, compounding the problem by wrecking the best tool they have to work through the problem: their brain. Damn shame. And here I am helplessly posting to Slashdot and cussing out ACs like that'll make a difference.
It's not to say that exercise isn't a factor, but I begin to wonder if the mentality of "head to the gym, stress the body to its breaking point for an hour or two, then back in the chair" isn't part of the larger problem. Maybe that works for cheetahs, just not so well for humans.
I think the best thing that people could work towards is a slower, more relaxed pace of life. Everybody is so tense and constantly on edge. Every little problem that comes up is the zomg sky is falling end of the damned world. We seem so completely detached from the essence of living, at least in an agricultural sense: preparing for the growing season, working the earth when plants will grow, harvesting in fall (along with the requisite fall feast), and spending the time of year when little if anything grows with loved ones, safe and confident that enough wood has been gathered and chopped and enough food has been stored away to last until the cycle is complete when spring returns.
In a hunter-gatherer sense: the Earth provides. There will always be enough. Don't horde and don't be greedy. Don't take more than you need.
I feel we've created a culture where everybody is driven like they're being chased down by a lion day after day after day after day. It's not really about the act of eating--that's not what I mean by don't take more than you need--, but it's about the endless 24/7 life-and-death brink-of-the-edge reality that is life in the "developed" world.
First world problems. Literally.
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The problem is people need to know they will have enough tomorrow too. Most hunter gathered and early farmers were on the brink of starvation constantly. Only in the last few centuries has that begun to change.
There isn't always enough so humans had to be greedy to be certian that they would make it.
That said people like to stress about things that won't affect them, or make a big deal out of the mundane. I don't know if it is cultural or genetic or both. ( it tends to run in families)
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Most hunter gathered and early farmers were on the brink of starvation constantly.
There is no evidence to support this.
In fact the opposite seems to be true.
Considering the findings of stone age slaughter houses etc. or reports about the richness of fish in rivers in ancient times.
Re:The real reason? (Score:5, Insightful)
Very well said. Be careful though .. I used to be able to eat whatever I wanted. Then I got married and had kids, and it all changed.
I've taken a different approach to losing weight that is slowly working, averaging 2 1/2 pounds a month over the last 2 years. And no set point in sight. Rather than waster hours at the gym or the idiotic exercise of jogging, I do what came naturally a hundreds years ago ... work. It's amazing how much weight I have lost doing simple things like watching what I eat (i.e. stop buying chips, and eating Oreos in moderation), and laying pavers. Or mixing and pouring concrete by hand. Or using an ax and saw to cut down a tree and cut it to length instead of a chain saw. Installing my own flooring and kitchen cabinets instead of paying someone to do it.
And instead of a huge gym bill or bad feet or large payments to contractors, I have a beautiful house and yard. That I can point to with pride and say 'Yes .. I did that. No, I didn't have any training, I just googled it.;
It's been quite interesting to watch as my wife and I continue to eat less and less .. and realize, we are still satisfied. By listening to what our body tells us instead of some fad on the Internet, we have both reduced both our food intake and what we spend on food. We don't shun fast food restaurants, but we eat there less and less. And, to your point, enjoy what we do eat more and more.
I just bought a used sail boat that will need a fair amount of work. That should keep me busy for the rest of my life, it takes a bit of work to sail a boat instead of motoring around.
I may never reach the weight I was in high school, but that's a ridiculous goal. As long as I can get rid of the pills, I'll be fine.
Re:The real reason? (Score:5, Interesting)
Rather than waster hours at the gym or the idiotic exercise of jogging, I do what came naturally a hundreds years ago ... work. It's amazing how much weight I have lost doing simple things like watching what I eat (i.e. stop buying chips, and eating Oreos in moderation), and laying pavers. Or mixing and pouring concrete by hand. Or using an ax and saw to cut down a tree and cut it to length instead of a chain saw. Installing my own flooring and kitchen cabinets instead of paying someone to do it.
THIS!
I really think in all of the discussions of the "obesity epidemic," the role of everyday exercise that happened in the context of chores and normal housework is underestimated. Yes, I think the rising levels of sugar, portion sizes, and the absence of as many "manual labor" jobs all have impacts -- but so does modern "convenience" in avoiding exercise.
I got to watch my father gradually succumb to this problem over the years. When I was young, I can remember him doing mostly manual work outside to keep up things: mowing the lawn with a push-mower, trimming the hedges with manual shears, digging up the garden each spring to turn over the soil with a shovel, raking leaves in the fall, shoveling snow off the driveway in the winter, cutting wood with manual saws and axes, etc.
And he was relatively trim. I recall helping him with many of these tasks. But over the years, riding mowers became more popular and affordable, the rototiller replaced the shovel to turn over soil, the leaf blower replaced the rake, the snowblower replaced the shovel, the wood was cut with a chain saw. And with each "convenience" it seems he put on a little weight.
I noticed this myself a few years back after I had put on a little more weight than I would like. But I bought a lot of manual tools for doing work around the house, rather than "convenient" ways to get stuff done faster. I never really liked "exercising" at the gym much -- an hour on a treadmill or exercise bike or whatever just seemed boring... and a complete waste of time.
But if you actually have to push a mower around the yard for an hour, that's good aerobic exercise. And turning over soil in the spring before planting the garden is a REAL workout with a shovel (if you have a garden of any size). And you feel like you've accomplished something.
And this is only just normal "maintenance" on your property. Add in more do-it-yourself projects, as most homeowners would do themselves decades ago, and you have a full "training program" covering all sorts of muscle groups, often combinations of aerobic exercise with weight training, etc... all just keeping up your house.
I understand some people may not enjoy this sort of thing as much as others -- some may just like spending hours at the gym or whatever. To each his own. My larger point, however, is that our "obesity epidemic" may also just be related to convenience -- both in terms of food and in avoiding the "normal" exercise that people a generation or two ago just had to do.
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First world problems. Literally.
Most definitely a life style problem.
In Asia only people are "fat" that want to be fat. Because it is a sign of success and luck. Or they don't care for their body.
Unlike in the US e.g. in Thailand the "poor" don't go to Mac Donalds. And eating healthy and good is so cheap there you would be an idiot if you went to Mac Dumb or Burger King (in german we call it Wuerger King, where 'wuergen' means to choke, and the pronunciation is similar to Burger).
It is astonishing how the t
Re:The real reason? (Score:4, Informative)
In Asia only people are "fat" that want to be fat. Because it is a sign of success and luck. Or they don't care for their body.
That's not going to be true for much longer [wsj.com].
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Yhea, it's a funny thing, the body...so complex. My own experience confirms those recent findings. After a change of diet I found out that I simply need less food overall [the decreased burn rate] but it did not feel like being underpowered; quite the contrary, I could do way more than before [walking, running, stairs, cycling, etc.]
But now, if I indulge even a little bit the weight gain is very fast indeed....recently put 8 kilos just from 2 weeks poor diet...mindfulness is crucial, indeed.
Also, the gut fl
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Keep in mind that at the point he was burning 800 calories a day less, he also weighed more than he did when the show ended. He was continuing to maintain his diet, so his body was in extreme starvation mode where it burned the absolute minimum calories possible, and on top of that he was feeling tired and lethargic all the time due to the low calorie diet.
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Nothing in that article explains why rats -- even wild ones -- are ALSO getting more obese. Gotta be something in the food supply, or triggered by something in the food supply. Rats don't diet.
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Maybe we should ask Monsanto. They're smart guys over there and they might have some idea.
Re:The real reason? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe. Maybe not:
http://science.sciencemag.org/... [sciencemag.org]
There have been several studies to date transplanting gut flora from "skinny" rats and mice into "obese" rats and mice resulting in weight loss with the same diet composition. They have also showed the reverse to be true.
Furthermore there seems to be some evidence that sugar-alcohols and artificial sweeteners may be better food for the growth of bacteria that favors an obese phenotype.
http://www.omicsonline.org/bac... [omicsonline.org] http://www.scientificamerican.... [scientificamerican.com] http://www.nature.com/nature/j... [nature.com] http://www.nature.com/news/sug... [nature.com]
(FWIW - I am a doctor (MD) but I am not an endocrinologist/obesity researcher)
Re: The real reason? (Score:2)
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Maybe "mindful eating" is a viable solution. But why would anyone claim that without science to back it up? If dietary modification succeeds less than 1% of the time, why just pull some new thing out of your ass and claim that, oh hey, THIS must be the thing that works? Is there some study where 80% of people lost ALL their obese-weight, got down to normal weight, and stayed there for life? "Monks teach you this one weird trick" seems like the sort of thing that would get pretty fast purchase on the int
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and Genetic predisposition, environmental stresses, social stresses, physical activity, food availability, income, self worth...
Many Many Factors. Like what is popular today if something is too complex we ignores the complexities and focus on one area and yell at scream at each other over why our simple solution which addresses one area is so much better than your simple solution which addresses and other area.
The tried and true "Diet and Exercise" does work, however it rarely ever get people down to a heal
Re:The real reason? (Score:4, Informative)
The issue is that it can be perfectly healthy to eat around 900,000 calories a year, but if you eat just around 15,000 calorie per year too much, people gain 5 pound a year. That is less than 2% over target, but a weight gain of 5 pound per year, will easily cause significant issues in the long term. 15,000 calories a year is just 41 calories a day or about an half an apple every day.
People do not have to eat significant amounts of food to become fat, even tiny amounts of extra food can easily add up to significant gains. Without a closed regulation loop it is basically impossible to eat just the right amount of food. If people have broken internal regulation loop, they build their own regulation loop and permanently count calories and watch their weight to adjust the amount of calories consumed. Unfortunately there is a lot of noise in weight measurements and a broken internal regulation loop often tries to counteract external regulation. It seems that an unhealthy diet can damage the internal regulation. Gastric bands seem to help because they help to readjust the internal regulation loop and not just make it harder to consume a lot of calories.
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Thanks, that's one of the best explanations I've heard.
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The types of foods you eat make a difference as well. Calories aren't just calories. Insulin tells your body to store extra calories as fat, so foods that spike insulin levels help make you fat. Well, guess what foods overweight people love to eat? Carbs, and piles of them. Guess what carbs do. They spike your insulin levels. Get a copy of a book called Why We Get Fat. Excellent book.
This is being written by someone that just dropped between 85 and 100 pounds and I've kept it off for going on a couple of ye
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As a 40 year Type 1 diabetic, I am sick to *death* of fat people making excuses about how "I ate the wrong type of food, so I gained weight". instead of admitting "I ate too much". And I'm sick to death of the endless rationalizations and excuses.
You know why these surveys conclude rationalized absurdities? Because humans making poor choices *lie* on surveys, even if they don't admit it to themselves.
I agree that people rationalize absurdities. Some people blame genetics even though the gene pool in America today is the same gene pool of the 60's when obesity was not an epidemic. Some people blame "slow metabolism", neuropath, Obama, aliens, or whatever other bullshit people tell themselves to cop out of exercising.
That said, what you eat does make a huge difference. The body has a natural way of regulating how much food you eat: if you are hungry, you should eat, and if you are not, you shoul
Re:The real reason? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Let me point at all your mistakes. Because I know how to, and because it's fun.
Since when is eating 300-600 calories per day too fucking much?
It isn't. But saying one can be fat eating "300-600" kcal per day, is false. And trivial to prove so.
I want to know why there are people who can't lose weight without literally fucking starving themselves to death.
There aren't. Nobody dies of starvation on a 1500kcal diet and overweight. Insisting in that fantasy as fact won't make it true. Insisting that there are documented cases, won't make them real. It is a lie.
When you're providing somebody all their food, it's sort of fucking difficult for them to cheat.
Nobody ever told it's easy. There are lots of "Fucking difficult" things people achieve every day.
measurable reality doesn't fucking agree with you.
That's a lie. Often repeated
Re:The real reason? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it just too fucking hard for you to use your imagination a little bit and imagine what it must be like to be somebody who can't stop gaining weight even while eating 300-600 calories per day?
Ok. Once more.
That is not possible. You may not understand why, but it's as if you told me that some people can move objects with their mind alone, or levitate, or cast spells. Not possible. As in "never going to happen". As in "magic". Just impossible. Really. I'm not trying to lie to you. It is truly completely and absolutely impossible. Everything we know about basic chemistry would have to be false for that to happen.
Calories are not an invented unit for you to play with. Calories have a meaning. A human brain alone consumes that many calories per day even in a comma.
For someone to gain weight on such a diet, he would have to be paralyzed, inside an artificial lung, kept at 37C, and have no brain.
I must admit that, after reading your posts, that last condition seems to be possible.
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That escalated quickly.
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That escalated quickly
No shit. This song started running around my head
Now things got worse, yes a serious bind
At times like this it takes a man with such style I cannot often find
A doctor of the heart and a doctor of mind
"Rock 'n Roll Doctor" [youtube.com] by the great Lowell George who, sadly, knew a thing or two about too much and found it just as difficult to do anything about it.
Re:Death of peronal responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Death of peronal responsibility (Score:5, Funny)
It wasn't that she was lazy, it's that you were. Students that stay in high school for eight years will do that to a teacher. :)
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Yeah, like my high school science teacher. Gained 100 lbs in 3 years, got diagnosed with a thyroid problem. Went on medication, lost 100 lbs in 5 years. No changes to diet or habit in those 6 years. All her fault for being lazy.
And your estimation of the % of fat people who have thyroid problems is...?
(You can do the effort to multiply your proportion to the number of obese Americans before answering with your estimations on the largest epidemic of "Thyroid problems" in the history of mankind.)
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Stuffing yourself and not exercising does.
AFAIK the jury is till out on gut bacteria.
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Whole fucking thread full of fat shaming.
I am currently up early and not sure if I can go into work today because you fat shamers have pushed somebody I care about to near suicide. I have literally no fucking clue if I can leave them alone in the house right now.
When somebody eats 300-600 calories per day and still gains weight, there is something else going on.
On the other hand, look at me! I'm only a few lbs overweight, and I eat like shit and drink all the time! I must be morally superior! I have no
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When somebody eats 300-600 calories per day and still gains weight, there is something else going on.
...
My fucking body burns somewhere around 1500 calories at fucking rest last time I checked!
Do you know what happens when you eat 300 to 600 calories per day? Hint, you don't gain weight. Show me a person who consistently gains weight at that level of calorie intake, under controlled conditions. The study of that one guy could possibly revolutionize physics and biology. At that calorie intake level, the body will start reclaiming unused material (muscle and fat) for energy. Heck, one reasonable sandwich (ham, an egg, salad, tomato, pickles, no cheese or sauce) is already >80% of that daily calo
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The body does not burn muscle or other importance organs when their is still 400 pounds of fat surrounding these organs, period. Are you actually saying that you have reason to believe that your friend's metabolise is so fucked up that it skips over her fat reserves?
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When somebody eats 300-600 calories per day and still gains weight, there is something else going on.
It doesn't work that way - any adult who is on 600 calories/day will definitely lose weight eventually, even if they do have medical problems.
OTOH, the number of people with physiological issues that make them fat is so small it's not even a rounding error - seriously, too small to measure - so of course I'm skeptical when 90% of obese people claim it's due to medical reasons. The odds of them being correct is the same as me winning a lottery multiple consecutive times.
IOW, the person you claimed is on 600
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Being a lazy fat ass causes you to have medical issues, being fat will affect your thyroid/gut/everything is negative ways. So I absolutely believe it that 100% of seriously obese people have medical issues, and that some of these hurt them in any attempt to lose weight.
Do you actually think that being obese does not cause any negative effects on anything other than chairs?
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Do you actually think that being obese does not cause any negative effects on anything other than chairs?
I never even came close to saying that. I said that 600 calories a day will make your weight go down eventually. I did not claim that obesity does not cause medical problems.
I said that the amount of people who's obesity is caused by a medical problem is microscopically small, not that the amount of people who have a medical problem caused by obesity is small.
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There was a program on Channel 4 here in the UK a while back called "Secret Eaters"
http://www.channel4.com/progra... [channel4.com]
Explodes the myth of fat people claiming they don't each too much. Basically the premise of the program is people kept a complete food diary. This was then compared to what they actually ate determined by close surveillance. The result was that in all cases the fat people lied through their fat asses about what they ate to the tune of thousands of calories a day on average.
A bit of Googling te
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If swear, if I fucking knew how to raise or lower somebody's metabolism, I'd set yours to fucking ZERO just to laugh at you while you ballooned up. Don't expect me to watch over you when you become suicidal. You deserve to feel anguish and total fucking despair.
1. Discover technique to set metabolism to zero.
2. breed horses with metabolism set to zero.
3. Buy treadmill generators.
4. Infinite free energy.
5. Profit.
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You should not go to work, you should retire. If what you say is true, you can easily claim the million dollar price for proving paranormal existence, as well the noble price in physics for disproving the pillar of scientific understanding that is the theory of the Conservation of Energy.
Hell, even that is thinking to low. You just solved word hunger and the energy crisis. Your friend should not be sad or suicidal, her genes can be used to make cows that produce more food calories then they consume and hors
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It's based on this scientific study: http://ajph.aphapublications.o... [aphapublications.org]
Press release from the college here, a bit easier to read: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/newsevent... [kcl.ac.uk]
A hungry person can procrastinate eating a long time, especially if he or she doesn't keep anything ready to eat in the house.
There is more to it than just that. Even if you switch to a carefully managed, calorie counted diet you can still gain weight or at least fail to keep it off. After the initial weight loss period your body goes into starvation mode, reducing the idle calorie burn significantly (500 kcal/day is not uncommon). So if you were on 2,200 kcal/day and dr
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15 minutes of dance class or on the rowing machine is about 100 calories. You would have to do a lot of exercise every day of your life until death to make up for your body going into starvation mode. Even if you can manage it now, good luck when you are 60.
I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that it's exceptionally difficult which is why the odds against it working are so bad.
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It's not the outright calorie burn that matters, it's the increase in muscle mass and metabolic rate that results from proper exercise.
Hence the saying I've heard among weightlifters: "You have to get bigger before you get smaller".
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Wow the man with a plan again.
Perhaps you can tell us:
a) what exercises you would propose
b) how often per week
c) and how long per unit
So we can nitpick again a bit on your lack of knowledge :D ??
Re: Like an opinion article (Score:2)
When I diet weight comes off. In the first week I lose 5-7 pounds and then settle into a steady 1-3 pounds a week. Why doesn't my body go into starvation mode?
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You say "when I diet", like you have done it more than once. That seems to answer your question.
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It doesn't even take much "will power".
Then you're probably not one of the people with the problem. Huge numbers of people are though.
Re:Like an opinion article (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I'll certainly trust an anecdote of 1 versus this:
"Methods. We drew a sample of individuals aged 20 years and older from the United Kingdom's Clinical Practice Research Datalink from 2004 to 2014. We analyzed data for 76,704 obese men and 99,791 obese women. We excluded participants who received bariatric surgery. We estimated the probability of attaining normal weight or 5% reduction in body weight."
You didn't even read the article, did you? [aphapublications.org] Nevermind the fact that the summary's first link is to the scientific study in question.
The first link is a scientific study that looks at long term weight trends after an initial weight loss. Not "hunger" or "appetite." Food consumption over as much as 10 year is "actual eating." It doesn't even take much "will power" to locate the study and read it, versus cherry-picking a mass media commentary that itself cites seven studies and a metaanalysis.
Apply a version of your own philosophy. It doesn't even take much "will power." Just don't spew an "opinion" without reading each of the hyperlinked articles to check that little things like "it cites self-help books, not scientific studies" are not so egregiously incorrect that you appear to be a complete moron.
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Seriously: You fat? Eat less. It's that simple.
Science says you;re wrong.
Your experience of being a few pounds overweight is not the same experience as someone who is seriously obese.
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Seriously: You fat? Eat less. It's that simple.
Science says you;re wrong.
When observation contradicts your hypothesis, then your hypothesis is wrong. The observation that there were/are no fat prisoners concentration camps contradicts your so-called "science" (I use that term loosely here) that eating less does not lead to weight loss. It does, for a proper value of "less".
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No. It's decreasing because it's becoming a smaller fraction. Editor is dufus.