the right to be fat?

NAAFA shreds

omg, these fattays have the motivation to congregate and protest sizism but they don't have to motivation to change their sedentary lifestyles

cutty bringin it

Do you think people do not have a right to be fat - that those considered obese should be locked up in containment camps until they lose weight?

Community service would be more productive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzNzDJ_XGOU

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/186/397684800_0b2ef13ce4_o.jpg

shitbeus (16 hours ago)
i find the larger woman to be much more attractive than normal women. i like to feel dominated and i find this video extremely arousing.

^"Good old" youtube comment box :/

youtube comments are certainly something, yes:
well ive just been sick im a sise 8 and after this i feel a sise 58 omg stop and look in too a clean mirror.... fat mallow heads.... all they do is eat then they want help to loose it all cheek

Loose or else!

cheek

I really don't much care about peoples' weight, except my own (though not to a point where I actively try to change it or worry about it (just wouldn't want to be fat or be able to feel my ribs)), and my fiance's, shallow as that may be. Anyone else can get the fat, it's their prerogative & pretty pointless and mean to mock them for it.

but such fun!

um, i'd worry about my own weight more than anyone else's, the only people i'd ever mock about their weight are brothers or close mates.

they don't have to motivation to change their sedentary lifestyles

I literally thought Cutty was quoting the YouTube comments box

abbott otm really, some people obviously have to put a whole lot more work into it than others and im not mad because some folks have different priorities, awesome fat people > boring skinny people

obesity as a national epidemic is another issue but it should be treated in a systematic way, not a lame moralizing one ... folks who do that are worse than hitler fundamentalists who think christianity is the best birth control.

Sometimes people in our nation have dumb ideas about how to solve things. Like I say, "If people can't be righteous, they'll at least be self-righteous."

Like this is only specific to the U.S.A. tho. :P

i recognize my post has no nuance and might not perfectly represent what i think but it seemed like a fun thing to throw out there.

i might start appending this to all my posts

The looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand

lock thread

I don't care how fat people are, I just wish everyone would dress better.

Criticizing fat people as being too lazy to be thin is a lot like criticizing poor people as being too lazy to be rich. Fat is not a moral issue. It doesn't even come close.

Would fat people be better off thin? In some ways, probably so, but only within a very limited scope. Being thin won't make them smarter, happier, more caring or loving, or even necessarily better workers, better neighbors or better parents. It wouldn't even guarantee them good health, only somewhat better odds of good health.

would poor people be better off rich?

(necessarily?)

If everyone else could just get style and walk in a straight line, my life would be so much improved. It's not the fat people I object to having to look at on the subway, it's the ugly & unpleasant ones.

It's not the fat people I object to having to look at on the subway

unless i'm looking at them taking up two seats :)

people being lazy and sedentary and being a drain on a nation's resources and support systems is totally a valid moral and political issue (see good old Protestant work ethic, etc.)

makin fun of fat people, discriminating against them, gettin all self-righteous however = not helpful (or very nice)

I don't care how fat people are, I just wish everyone would dress better.

This is my wife's manifesto.

people being lazy and sedentary and being a drain on a nation's resources and support systems is totally a valid moral and political issue (see good old Protestant work ethic, etc.)

maybe i think too highly of behavioral psychology or something but to me its a non-starter as a moral issue and is much better dealt w/ as a simple exercise in implementing a system that makes healthy living the shortest distance between two points

Being thin won't make them smarter, happier

I dunno. I've been watching a lot of bad "I'm a fatty, help!" reality TV shows lately (don't ask), and no one ever seems really happy with themselves when they're obese. Once they start shedding the pounds, and start looking healthier, they seem much happier.

Body image issues are a harsh mistress.

people being lazy and sedentary and being a drain on a nation's resources and support systems is totally a valid moral and political issue (see good old Protestant work ethic, etc.)

People of any weight can be sedentary and a drain on a nation's resources and support systems, of course.

http://washington.uwc.edu/depts/compsci/cps109f05/eatoe1740/images/hungry%20hippos.jpg

what is this system you speak of deej

People of any weight can be sedentary and a drain on a nation's resources and support systems, of course.

I was thinking of healthcare costs, disability costs, etc.

one time a fat guy in a restaurant ran out of food so he slid up to my table a put on a bib and poured hot sauce up and down my arm. he sharped his knife with his fork and got ready to dig in.

how idd ii escape this almost lethal encounter with a fatso? find out after the jump.

i don't know how anyone can get behind the fattay at work who eats chocolate bars for breakfast--

"i applaud you for being you, fat person, keep it up!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NjTWvl8x-U

i don't know how anyone can get behind the fattay at work who eats chocolate bars for breakfast

oh, go ahead, play coy. You know you and everybody else in the office has already got behind her.

Assuming that a fat person is a drain on a nation's resources and support systems is specious and stupid. I'm fat, but I pay more in taxes than a minimum wage worker in the US makes. I also don't have any health issues, my BP/cholesterol/A1C is enviably low. But I do lack style and should dress better, that's true.

kenan, i was imagining a fat dude, but you can spin this any way you desire, you chubby chaser

I am so over all this classification shit ever since I checked the BMI charts some years ago and learned that I score as "overweight" and nearly "obese". Clearly the people they're interviewing on that segment are the kind we THINK about as "obese" or at the very least "fat", but if the statistic that 2/3 of all Americans are "obese" is based on government BMI charts, it's a total public opinion-fuck.

is this fat dude like the imaginary aspie dude?

xxpost you know it. sheeit... get em fat enough, and it doesn't matter if it's a dude or not.

but what if breakfast chocolate eater happens to be hilarious?

this fat dude is imaginary yes, but the aspie is a female, and we've been getting along better due to my exceptional people skills

there's no need to get personal or point fingers at specific people at your job or whatever - when a country has a population like ours, that is increasingly sedentary and overweight, that results in per capita increases in consumption of all kinds of resources (food, energy, gas, etc.) and results in an unhealthy populace that requires ever-increasing healthcare support and costs. This is simple math. Americans in general - myself included should think about consuming less as simply being civically responsible.

x-posts

breakfast chocolate eater is a simulacrum of all fat people with disgusting eating habits in offices everywhere

anyone who doesn't think America in general is TEH FATTEY should visit other countries

x-post

there is a way out.

http://www.healthofchildren.com/images/gech_0001_0001_0_img0006.jpg

there's a habit issue to diet and activity, but huge class-based issues of availability and cost as well. you ever try to get decent vegetables or go jogging in a shitty part of town?

yeah, I remember reading the BBC harping about the equivalent problem in MERRY OLD. Also, have you seen the European tourists in New York lately? Not a looker among them.

quit spamming your website kenan

choglit ghettos

one thing is for sure, if we are going to solve big and multi-faceted social problems, we need to figure out who to blame, first.

and make sure it is not us, in any way.

We should be looking at better ways for fatteys to contribute to our society. One idea just off the top of my head is that they could make a great self-organizing levee system.

let's blame illegal immigrants

xp Crowd control barriers.

Wait, let's blame feminists -- it will even almost be true, which is an unexpected bonus.

let's certainly blame the fat feminists, who are of no use to anybody

Excuse me, I am very useful. So there.

Fat, ugly, hairy bitches. Never forget.

All I know is I get really annoyed when I receive customer service emails at my job that read like "I NOTICED THAT YOU DON'T HAVE ANY NFL SHIRTS IN SIZE 6XL, WELL WHY NOT??? HAVE YOU EVER WATCHED A FOOTBALL GAME ON TV, THERE ARE A LOT OF REALLY FAT SPORTS FANS AND LOTS OF AMERICANS ARE REALLY REALLY FAT TOO. WE ARE A POWERFUL CONSUMER BASE AND YOU NEED TO MAKE MORE SHIRTS IN 6XL BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT SERVING THE DEMOGRAPGHIC."

let's certainly blame the fat feminists, who are of no use to anybody

-- cutty, Tuesday, October 30, 2007 2:05 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

don't you have a photo of you and...?

this fat dude is imaginary yes, but the aspie is a female, and we've been getting along better due to my exceptional people skills

http://content.answers.com/main/content/img/PosterThumbs/icecube.jpg

Smoove

just going back to a time when there were some sensible points being made ...

no one ever seems really happy with themselves when they're obese. Once they start shedding the pounds, and start looking healthier, they seem much happier.

Body image issues are a harsh mistress

hmm. not sure body-image issues are necessarily the key reason for them feeling better -- i mean, if they've started exercising (which they surely have) then the proven boost/kick/whatever you want to call it which you get from that is probably got a lot to do with it.

anyway, sorry to derail. wonder how many xposts there'll be?

xpost fewer than i thought

Andrew, how big is 6xl? That's like...~!

i can assure you there is no photo of me and a fat feminist

Also, I'm sorry, but I can't accept that anyone who can't properly wash themselves because of their fatness or has to use a motorized wheelchair to lug their fatness around can be even remotely considered "healthy."

jon are you confusing cutty with chaki

Elmo, is anyone arguing that? Maybe I missed it.

All I remember is something about a vagina costume

i mean, there was an incident involving me, a vagina costume, and beth fattay from the gossip, but i do not think someone took a picture

maybe you dreamt it?

a 6XL t-shirt is 65" in circumference. That's almost 5 1/2 feet around. xpost

Laurel, I was commenting on the "fat people can be healthy, too" argument, which is certainly true... but only up to a point.

It's not a very interesting argument when the bar of "fat" has been lowered to encompass "normal" people as well.

5 1/2 feet around

LOL

no, Laurel, the choice is before you: anorexia, or obesity. choose.

It's not a very interesting argument when the bar of "fat" has been lowered to encompass "normal" people as well.

-- Laurel, Tuesday, October 30, 2007 2:19 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

lowered from what? do you propose that there was an actual different quantitative limit at one point

my happiness requires others to be miserable. sorry about that!

It's not a very interesting argument when the bar of "fat" has been lowered to encompass "normal" people as well.

more likely that definition of "normal" distorted by limited sample pool of overweight people. seriously, step outside the US - the difference is kinda shocking (and oft commented on by first-time visitors to the US, in my experience)

no, Laurel, the choice is before you: anorexia, or obesity. choose.

-- gff, Tuesday, October 30, 2007 2:20 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

how can the US be obsessed with dieting/being skinny and also be criticized for being the fattest country in the world?

xxpost my happiness requires others to be squeezable.

I dunno actually, Jon. I have a feeling it has, but I couldn't say when or where or by what. My earnestness specialty is motherhood & the myth of the nuclear family, not so much weight & body image through history.

Also maybe Shakey didn't hear me earlier but if I am nearly "obese" by the scale that's giving us statistics about all Americans, we might want to re-think.

so is my wife, fwiw, I'm aware of the scale you're referring to.

Altho I have been retaining water like kerazy latey. u_u

what's obese

My feet are cold, and this thread is making me want to snuggle.

Calculate your BMI here, RJG

fat girls have nice pillows

i saw a fattey in bordeaux last weekend and it kind of blew my mind

xp Goosedown from overstock.com, tyvm.

it was like when i saw a black dude in wells-next-the-sea

BMI is bunk, guys, but there are much more accurate, albeit more invasive ways of actually determining how much fat you carry on your body

I'm normal

"I NOTICED THAT YOU DON'T HAVE ANY NFL SHIRTS IN SIZE 6XL, WELL WHY NOT??? HAVE YOU EVER WATCHED A FOOTBALL GAME ON TV, THERE ARE A LOT OF REALLY FAT SPORTS FANS AND LOTS OF AMERICANS ARE REALLY REALLY FAT TOO. WE ARE A POWERFUL CONSUMER BASE AND YOU NEED TO MAKE MORE SHIRTS IN 6XL BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT SERVING THE DEMOGRAPGHIC."

the irony is, the effort they'd expend by taking out the stitches and putting in extra fabric to get around their Michelin brand torsos would probably drop them a shirt size, AND introduce them to something more exciting than football: sewing.

Seriously, do all of these 6XL people think they are a huge (ll no pun int'd) buying demographic? Is it like, "shit, we should make 6XL shirts for fatties, or else we'll lose their business to another team, or to hockey"? Gimme a break.

You cannot tell me this is not dead fucking snuggly (nsf the 16th century). Winter is coming, ppl, get yer priorities straight.

this sounds simple-minded but i think the biggest problem americans have with health is that there is no place to go for a walk, actually the entire concept of going for a walk has just ceased to exist for most of the country

dude nfl football is way more exciting than sewing

tracer otm the number one correlator with obesity is the length of a person's driving commute

xxp That seems v reasonable, actually.

xp to Tom: does not compute

nobody walks anywhere anymore
except me

Dammit I was zinging football. OTM about commuting.

i walk places all the time dudes

people who live in big cities walk. (note: This is why los angeles does not count.)

and i don't mean "let's put on athletic shoes and go for a power-walk in the subdivision" i mean a walk that takes you past interesting things, that is pleasurable in and of itself, that encourages lingering and detours

xpost haha one time the lovely emma b wanted to go for a walk in tennessee and i was just like "what." and finally i got my head around it and was like "there are no sidewalks. we'll be killed." she's like "you live in the country! i can see mountains from here! and you're telling me we can't go for a walk???" so we did. after about 10 minutes a car stopped and this guy rolled down his window, with the rest of his family inside, and says, "your car break down?"

xpost yeah i'm not talking about big cities, obv

Elmo, why does it "annoy" you to get an email like that?

it's just funny that even riding the train or taking the bus everywhere is still healthier because you're not doing all the physically passive, stress-inducing shit that driving involves

i hate driving now that i live in a big city it suuuuuuucks

It annoys me when I would love to buy an article of clothing but they don't make it big enough to fit me. That happens a lot.

Plus there are lots of stairs in the subway. And it doesn't go through the drive-through, altho I have often wished it did at around 3.57 in the AM.

Mr. Que where do you live? If it's like New York City or something, then of course you walk a bunch. If it's a place less suited to a good walk (the best way to walk to the store is along an interstate highway or something) then you'd probably walk way less.

I walk a lot more now that I live in Montreal than I did when I lived in Ottawa, because my neighborhood is walking-friendly. Living in Ottawa, the only walking I did was to and form busses. Every friend I have there who gets a car gains twenty pounds. I wonder if there's a correlation between "crappy places to own a car" and "not fatness."

i believe that, as tom said, there literally is

weird, our internet crashed a few times so i did not realized i xposted so far, sorry for repeating points mentioned jsut up from me

the invention known as the bicycle works wonders

my bicycle got stolen and my gf's broke and the one i found under a bridge is awesome, but also in awesomely bad shape and too small for me and i am SCARED of the people who run the bike co-op and i don't know how to fix it and i am too poor to buy a new one... perhaps i should GET MY THIEF ON

I walk as much as possible, driving in SF sucks and is not advisable and the only reason I bought a car at all was so that we would have it for the baby in case of emergencies. Living near where I work has always been a huge priority for me, commuting is fucking stupid on so many levels.

It annoys me because we DO offer some shirts in size 6X, but there are very real business constraints -- printing, warehousing, product sell-through rates -- that prevent us from making every shirt in every size. It annoys me because, as body types they are way way outside of the norm, they require a specialty product that costs significantly more to produce, but they hide behind this statistic of FAT AMERICA and put on a show of indignation because they can't accept that they are in the superfat minority.

xxpost

OWN UP TO YOUR SIZE AND ACCEPT THE FACT THAT BUYING MASS-PRODUCED CLOTHING MAY NOT BE AN OPTION FOR YOU. These are the life costs of your "fat pride."

Kinda like how I sucked it up re: finding cheap, mass-produced 36" pants. I look like I shop for floods AND I DON'T COMPLAIN (except on ILX)

36" inseam, i mean.

I wear 36/36... outlet stores, dude. Also, work clothes (Carhartt, Dickies).

Dude, elmo, take 10 deep breaths. Maybe do some yoga.

BMI maths say I'd still be "normal" at only 144lbs. I'm 6'2".

I think the phrase "life costs of your fat pride" has a nice ring to it

Yeah, Kerm, they're skewed way way low. Like, I'm sure there are a few people in the world who are healthy and happy at 6'+ and less than -150 lbs, but there are also lots of healthy ones at 5'3 and 150+ lbs. Like me!

Just deleet the redundant minus sign in your heads, pls.

"like meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

You have to squeal really loudly for that to work, though.

who are healthy and happy at 6'+ and less than -150 lbs

this is me, roughly (altho I've put on a couple "sympathy" pounds during pregnancy)

so to sum up: cuddlestein r people too

I wear 36/36... outlet stores, dude. Also, work clothes (Carhartt, Dickies).

What kind of outlet stores are you talking about? When I hear that term, I think "places where they sell a bunch of Old Navy out in the sticks where you need a cr to get to except Old Navy is not only awful, but they only go up to a 34" inseam because despite my hating them, I CHECKED."

I never thought of Dickies... I've never even owned a pair, actually. Are the esspensive?

My parents live in a fairly rural area and are very very athletic -- running or swimming 3 times a week. I walked across Williamsburg with them and they were ANNOYED by it. WTF

levis online store

maybe walking thru williamsburg is annoying for non-health reasons

or just walking anywhere with jw

BLAMM

i walk a couple miles a day and im pretty fat

A year and a half ago I was working for a construction company slinging lumber and concrete and shovels and ladders around all day and I got down to 195 (almost out of the "overweight" class) and people started asking if I was eating lunch.

Who the hell would go to an outlet to buy Old Navy? It's outlet prices in the STORE, already.

yes, but without the quality you expect from factory rejects

I just meant like the Levi's Store or that kind of thing, not department stores. Tombot OTM on the online thing. Dickies used to be cheap but they may have been further co-opted by hipsters so who knows now. Carhartts are $$$ but will last a long time.

oh btw, guys, when your girlfriends tell you that they think your beer gut is "cute"--they don't mean it

cutty are those organic miles though?

@Laurel: My moms, for one. There must be one near the Canada border because she keeps buying shit for my siblnigs there.

xo to cutts How would you know, you can't remember the last time you had a beer.

I dunno if carhartts will actually last too much longer, I give them about a year or two before baggy asses are back in and urban outfitters starts carrying them

Haha oh god, xP. Altho, xo... well, maybe if it was for good luck.

i can't remember that last time i had a beer gut either

That is not a choice that I, or anyone I might date, should have to make.

levi's online site, at least the canada one, sems to say that they only go up to 34" inseams. alas.

but this thread isn't about long legs, it's about fatties. clearly i digress. NO FATIES

my butt keeps getting fatter, but the rest of me stays the same.

fat feminist over here.
i actually do think i would be happier with my appearance if i lost 20 or 30 pounds. which i am trying to do. but keep being seduced by sweet potato fries.

also i do think beer bellies are cute.

^^not a problem

xpost

I'm not fat and I don't walk anywhere.

This thread's gaining a lot of weight.

maybe walking thru williamsburg is annoying for non-health reasons

-- gff, Tuesday, October 30, 2007 3:05 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

it was like 10 am (lol my parents are puritans) and they were annoyed by the fact no one was out and nothing was open

they wanted the ultimate urban experience

That BMI thing is some bullshit. I agree that I am overweight now but I apparently need to weigh 155 to not be overweight. When I did weigh 155 (at age 19), you could count all of my ribs.

The only thing open past 8:00 pm in Brooklyn are bars. I should bring my father to Williamsburg, though - in the 70s he had a mustache, wore a headband, and was obsessed with Steely Dan.

my butt keeps getting fatter, but the rest of me stays the same.

This means you are steatopygous. Not everyone can say the same.

old person ass looks weird.

someday I will be old and I will be damn thankful for old person ass.

holy shit i am almost overweight according to bmi, thats insane.

steatopygous female:
http://barclay1720.tripod.com/hist/images/ongewoman.jpg

according to bmi i am "normal" which, as anyone who has met me can attest, seems somewhat insane since i am shaped like a pre-pubescent girl

I am "normal" as well, at 5'11" and around 160. In order to be "underweight" according to this BMI chart, I would need to get down to 132 pounds. I have not weighed 132 pounds since I was 14 years old. That would not just be underweight, it would have to be the result of internment.

i think the important question you're all forgetting is: why do fat people have that weird smell?

because they're hiding pizzas and burritos under their armpits?

yeah, when i put in my lowest weight (around 114lbs, i think, at 5'5") it fell well within the normal range. i think it errs a bit on the side of slenderness, but then again the medical obesity threshold isn't very high.

this is me, roughly (altho I've put on a couple "sympathy" pounds during pregnancy)

-- Shakey Mo Collier, Tuesday, October 30, 2007 2:03 PM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

haha wait shakey mo is a woman or was that just a bad joke?

yeah, i weigh around 165 now, which is way less than i weighed all through high school, and it's just barely in the "normal" BMI range

I'm 5'8" 141 lbs and my BMI is in perfect Normal range. I don't know what you chuckleheads are talking about

sympathy pounds = man gains weight when his wife is pregnant, perhaps due to sharing in the ben & jerry's and/or soil.

im trying to lose weight

also, while "not being fat" might not lead to happiness, pretty much everyone agrees that regular exercise (even walking a mile or two a day) is better at curing depression than any pharmaceutical.

oh do they

say that to my personal trainer cousin who committed suicide last year

j/k

do you guys think that being skinny is like having money in this country? like, 70% of skinniness is concentrated in 30% of the population? so that we're simultaneously the most anorexic and the most obese country in the world?

no i do not think that, once again thanks for playing

i think it helps a little w/low-level depression, not clinical

do you want to redistribute wealth??? WHY NOT REDISTRIBUTE WEIGHT WHILE WERE AT IT??? that would be FAIR after all WOULDNT IT???

xpost but pretty much everyone agrees! what are you, some kinda communist?

GUYS THE BMI IS WHACK WHY ARE ANY OF YOU LISTENING TO IT

ANY REASONABLY ATHLETIC PERSON WITH MUSCLE IS GOING TO BE "OVERWEIGHT" BY THESE STANDARDS

Moralizing obesity across the board is stupid and counterproductive. I have known plenty of women who are "chubby" or whatever but are also hell of strong and run marathons. lol genetics. being a big boy or girl is fine as long as you are actually mindful of your health (<---crucial). when shit gets bananas is when massive 300lb people are wheezing up the stairs or getting diabetes or what have you and still try and claim that how they are CHOOSING to live is not unhealthy. me saying that fast food + sedentary life + not giving a fuck = unhealthy watch out is NOT the same as saying lol fat fuck i hate you.

ps max is right about exercise

drr thank willm xpost a million.

DID YOU GUYS KNOW THAT EVERY SINGLE NFL RUNNING BACK IS OVERWEIGHT?!??!?!??!?!! WHAT HAVE WE BECOME

haha kenan why you being such a dick?

im probably 20 pounds of fat away from being "healthy" and i know from experience that when im even vaguely in shape i'm way happier than when im not.

its possible to be "fat" and "healthy"--im just pointing out that exercise often (tho not always) correlates to both "happiness" and "less fat"

as long as i can buy clothes at the regular store i'm good

omg, these fattays have the motivation to congregate and protest sizism but they don't have to motivation to change their sedentary lifestyles

-- cutty, Monday, October 29, 2007 5:39 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

even tho cutty is harsh, this is at least sorta true.

i guess what's weird about major, morbid, holy shit obesity is that it is a health issue that is (a) genuinely modern and (b) may actually begin to effect the population via pathways traditionally outside the purview of, like, infectious disease. should a mega-fatty be charged for two seats on an airplane? well, yeah, actually! should we start making airplanes bigger in order to accomodate them? no! but once you start having zero tolerance for what is actually an affliction (brought about by life choices, perhaps, but a genuine affliction all the same), then you get into weird leper colony stuff

(xposts Sorry, max... it's fall again, and I am allergic to ragweed, mold, and categorical statements about what everyone knows to be true about other people's health.)

gbx otm x1000

most alarming to me is how some of your more thoughtless morbidly obese people are raising their children. esp since meeting a 200 pound 11 year old puts the lie to the argument that (major, morbid) obesity is "just genetics." really? where were these kids in the 1970s??? are you saying we've had a major overhaul of the collective genetic stock in the last 30 years? wowzer!

individually, a person being heroin skinny, skinny, normal, overweight, obese, morbidly obese, gargantuan etc is not really a problem morally or a reason to not like them or be pals or whatever. what's alarming is when the rate of obesity is one the rise in a given population.

do these genes make me look fat?

another bummer: eating healthy can very frequently cost more than eating poorly. so, in some parts of the country, we have a burgeoning population of obese people (esp children) that really only have access to shitty, sugary foods with basically no nutritional value, and they're getting diabetes (a complex, life-long condition) AND they don't have healthcare! and, if they're kids, it's not really they're fault, right?

WHAT TO DO.

educate

people aren't going to eat right unless they care about eating right. which seems to be a minority position these days.

Well sure but when people start going 'DO YOU KNOW WHAT WEIGHT-RELATED HEALTH PROBLEMS ARE COSTING US? X000 PEOPLE DIED FROM DIABETES LAST YEAR' like the guy in that filmstrip, it's like...people who are "fat" as opposed to actually fat are not the ones raising healthcare costs. Even if I had diabetes, it would not really be obesity-related diabetes and therefore would not count as a cost of obesity being levied on the American public.

PUBLIC HEALTH IS IMPORTANT PPL

c.f. AGING BOOMERS, FAT KIDS, UNINSURED IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR EXOTIC AILMENTS, THE COMPLEX INTERACTION OF SOCIAL ISSUES AND PSYCHOLOGY AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR POPULATIONS, BREAKING: RICH PEOPLE HEALTHIER THAN POOR PEOPLE (IS THEIR RECURSIVE FEEDBACK?), T/S: CUTTING-EDGE CANCER TREATMENTS v. CHEAP DRUGS FOR AFRICA, etc.

xp yeah, but i think a lot of people don't even know what eating right even means. esp since we're crazy for fad diets and quick fixes and don't know how to cook for ourselves and forget that we have vegetables in our fridge until it's too late and fuck why'd even bother buying fennel anyway, who eats fennel

xxp well yeah, Laurel, some people just have diabetes

This thread is depressing the living shit out of me, but I figure instead of pretending it doesn't exist anymore I can offer to answer any questions/field any anger/whatever, from the perspective of the truly morbidly obese... does this hold any appeal, ILXy friends?

If you've seen huge people when you're out and about and wondered anything about how they deal with shit, I can maybe offer my perspective.

we've had no-fat, no-sugar, no-carbs fad diets - I eagerly await the "no protein!" fad diet.

which will hopefully trim down the population considerably.

x-post

why have we allowed fast food into our cafeterias? why can't anyone just make their kids come around to liking adult food earlier? is their something developmentally necessary about only liking PB&J and spageddy until it's too late to know how to feed yourself?

xp ben boyerr i'm sorry if we're being jerks here :-(

fwiw, i look at this as a genuine public health issue; no moralizin' (or at least i try not to)

PB&J and spageddy are not unhealthy foods.

I hate fennel, it tastes like anise.

gbx, yeah, but if I fall into "overweight" category by (stupid) gvmt standards, and I am diabetic, I assume my medical costs are being applied toward the OBESITY EPIDEMIC OMG etc etc which is really inaccurate.

xp NOOOOOOOOOO THEY BE TAKIN MY PROTEEEEN

I drink V8

without liquor in it, even

ben boyerr i'm sorry if we're being jerks here

No, no, don't worry about it! I'm fascinated by the discussion... and I just figured I'm probably the only huge person on here, so I thought I might offer that perspective by answering questions - even if they're brutal!

I mean I would like to see the inventor of that government scale do a 5 minute sword dance with 2-beat pas de basques.

xp Ben, I am totally pro that NAAFA rally on the youtube vid, but duh that's prob a little too EARNEST ACTIVIST for ILX in general and also did not seem like the battle to fight on this thread. I can start, though...?

pb&j and spaghetti are healthy compared to a whole diet of mcdonald's, kfc, chips, school food that is way worse than that, etc.!

xxxpost

TOMBOT = madman

actually nick is right w/r/t pb&j and spageddy, i should have subbed fries and a chicken nuggets

and yeah, laurel, you're probably right, but the fact that childhood obesity is on the rise seems to be pretty well-supported.

I eagerly await the "no protein!" fad diet

you missed the '80s, then? heard of "vegetarianism"?

lol gabbneb

(yes i realize there is protein in some of those non-foods)

btw i was referring to myself: i basically only ate pb&j and spageddy and the odd curry until i got to college. and i guess i turned out ok.

gabbneb going for the low-hanging fruit, kudos

ive been drinking vitamin juice when i can lately too. i dont worry about eating remotely healthy but im also not remotely fat. not that there's anything wrong with that.

i dont understand how a) pb&j + spaggeddy is significantly different from what kids have been eating for the past 200 years (as nickalicious sez) or b) how laurel could be considered fat

xps

why have we allowed fast food into our cafeterias?

CA has taken steps to ban this shit (no soda sold in schools, etc.). Thanks Governator!

JESUS CHRIST FUCKING X-POSTSSSS

i wonder waht tyra.gif has to say about all this

GUYS I WAS WRONG ABOUT PEANUT BUTTER (<--- nuts and oil!) AND JELLY (fruit, sort of) AND SPAGHETTI (carbohydrates and vegetables and maybe some meats!)

find and replace with fast food and tv dinners

fat people do get charged for 2 seats!
ever seen that show AIRPORT
sadly i have. while huffing on the treadmill trying to slim down. (not kidding here)

Hey guys have you ever been watching tv with a 6 yr old and a commercial for LUNCHABLES comes on? It can be 9:30 at night and the moment it's over I WANT LUNCHABLES. That shit is fucked up. Who the fuck are you LUNCHABLES and how did you develop such an incredible stranglehold over children's imaginations?

That woman who said (altho GRANTED we only have her word to trust on this but FUCKING H if you're not going to believe anyone why bother?) that her blood pressure, cholesterol, etc etc were normal but she can't get insurance b/c of her weight...that shit is NUTS. Not like America(tm) gives a shit about the other guy having health insurance ANYWAY but come on dudes.

"btw i was referring to myself: i basically only ate pb&j and spageddy and the odd curry until i got to college. and i guess i turned out ok."

i think typically you cant eat pretty much anything you want until you get THROUGH college, as long as yr not one of those kids who's allowed to drink all the soda & eat all cans of icing (i mean this literally) any time they want.

lunchables sounds like something that wouldnt be too caloric - 5 crackers, 5 little tiny slices of meat, 5 slices of cheese - but yet it has like 800 calories. where did they come from?

fat people do get charged for 2 seats!

I'm pretty sure that's still only on Southwest Airlines.

I tried to eat a can of icing once, only the icing turned out to be Crisco.

And what about those studies that show that when a very overweight person is put on a "regular" diet/calorie allowance, their bodies respond chemically as if they're in an extreme starvation situation? Hi that's not good at all, I need the soft tissue in my eyeballs...FOR SEEING WITH.

ben, in all sincerity and with kid gloves, who/what do you blame for your obesity

er blood pressure, cholesterol, etc etc were normal but she can't get insurance b/c of her weight

I'm in this boat, for the most part (I have other health problems but they are unrelated to my weight).

Anyway, this thread is really depressing and I wish I hadn't read it.

The thing is weight is like the second factor looked at in underwriting health insurance, right after whether or not the person is a non-smoker. I'm sure there are companies or programs out there that will take a bit of a deeper look into someone's health/history, but, especially in the case of individual life/health policies of which thousands/millions are sold a day, that costs too much in clerical manpower to be profitable.

Woah Laurel, what studies are those? They sound like the inverse of the "Supersize Me" experiment (in effect, not in execution/scientific rigor).

lol laurel ive seen pics of u & ur srsly not at all fat

ben, may i ask if yr doctor has recommended any course of treatment (if s/he even feels any is necessary), or is it just "eat right and try to exercise?"

not all kids have hummingbird metabolisms (esp if they're not playing around all the time), so eating poorly will catch up more quickly.

i haven't watched the thing, laurel (coffee shop wif no headphones), but yeah, that is riduculous, and no doubt based on the same BMI that seems so clearly to be ineffective

xpost city

so who's stopping these fattyies from eating?

idiocracy.avi

Laurel, any sane nutritionist wouldn't immediately pull the basement out of someone's caloric intake, much as they wouldn't feed a pigroast to a kid from sudan.

About those studies: if I read it, it was prob in the Times or the Economist or some similar media outlet. It was specifically a voluntary study/experiment, though, not a normal nutrition allowance.

xp I am clearly not fat, that's exactly my point. I am lol sturdy peasant but perfectly normal, and the fact that the BMI chart puts me into nearly "obese" for being short and sturdy is, as already agreed, ridiculous.

Whoa-ho, this thread exploded! I'm startled bcz it was like hell of three lonely posts yesterday. Exponential! Quit making our world's server costs rise w/these fatty fat threads!

Hey computer man...everyone has some kind of health problem, don't care if people are fat, ain't gonna criticize 'em. Keepin' it concise & positive in the oh-seven.

laurels: also, studies like the one you cited are exactly that: studies. you can't know if pulling the caloric plug is a good idea or a bad idea until you just go ahead and do it to a cohort of subjects (sorry, bros!). someone says "huh, totally thought that was gonna work" and some other dude looks smug and draws up a different plan.

biochemistry: serious business

Don't worry about kid gloves, honestly...

ben, in all sincerity and with kid gloves, who/what do you blame for your obesity

Myself, absolutely.

may i ask if yr doctor has recommended any course of treatment

I spent a lot of money enrolling in an outpatient program at UCLA a couple of years ago, which my doctor recommended to me. It was an interesting mix of group meetings, prescribed diets, and therapy. I lost 75 lbs. over about 3 months (but I still had a long way to go). Then I got very ill (totally, 100% unrelated to my obesity) - as in unable to work for 6 weeks and/or leave my house - and I gained all of it back. It was incredibly depressing. After that I have continued to struggle with the "eat right and exercise" orders but with minimal success.

re: lunchables, this is a pretty great article:

http://slate.com/id/2149531

six adults and four kids eat and review nine different pre-fab lunch thingies.

100 calorie packs will cure obesity

They will cure my ability to have a peaceful grocery store trip. I get an impulse to throw boxes of those at the wall in contempt. I can't even really pinpoint why they piss me off.

No no no, I am totally down with the studies, you gotta find things out somehow. I'm just saying that human bodies are WEIRD, MANG and we know so little about some of this stuff...in situations of ACTUAL MEDICAL OBESITY like we all love to complain about takin' up our insurance premiums and being a joke a la What's Eating Gilbert Grape? and so on, I pretty much assume it is 100% not the fault of the individual (all else being equal). Thyroid imbalances, stomach conditions, metabolic settings...too much to second-guess.

Oh yah me too, and even though people should not be condescending and smug about the obese just because it's fucking mean, that's an 'empirical reason' some people get behind about not mocking people.

I just hate MEAN.

I tried to eat a can of icing once, only the icing turned out to be Crisco.

-- HI DERE, Tuesday, October 30, 2007 8:46 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

story of my life :-/

Like, there was a Time Magazine article (back when I got it for free at work) last year about the bacterial colonies that live in all our stomachs that we don't notice/take for granted after the original period of maybe not feeling so good...we adjust and feel better but the bacteria STAY...and that some studies of people's medical histories were showing that they experienced unusual weight gain following exposure/infection to these bacteria, but everyone had always assumed the gain was due to other factors like aging, lifestyle... You could hardly make this shit up, it's so science fiction.

guys there's no silver bullet. obesity as a mass (ha) phenomenon has plenty of antecedents: a) lots more cheap (shitty) food available & b) people moving around less in their daily lives. both those have a ton of underlying causes, some of them maybe classifiable as "lol its yr fault fatey" and some totally not. some of them are even good things! but tip any of those factors a little more toward "eat more/do less" and wahey, more overweight people.

srsly cutty what is your compelling interest in this issue.

i know only a little bit about the byzantine metabolic pathways that dictate where and how your body uses the food it takes in, but it's all regulated by loads of equilibria. where the issue gets fraught is that, without question, SOME part of the population registers these equilibria differently, and shunts food into different uses differently than someone else (aka, their being genuinely obese really IS beyond their control, and drugs are required along with dietary controls). other people have disrupted these equilibria over the years (type II diabetes), whether it's their own fault or not. sometimes you can reset your body (whoops, too much beer in college, better hit the weights!), sometimes you can't (again, type II diabetes).

i think being "big" was latched onto as a health-insurance thing because, when we first started looking at the data, there were some compelling correlations between obesity-as-measured-via-the-body-mass-index and other conditions, like heart disease and what have you. more nuanced statistics no doubt exist or are being created, and the health insurance companies are ignoring them so they don't have cover as many people, period.

xp bigtime yow

http://www.hessdesignworks.com/Illustrations/Corn.jpg

srsly cutty what is your compelling interest in this issue.

gff--i am very health and exercise oriented. also i think it is ridiculous that overweight people would gather and protest for the right to be fat.

subsidize the shit out of a complicated starch that most of the people and livestock can't digest properly and you can ruin any country's diet

also, i think gff is right in the general sense: any number of these underlying complexities tend to get tipped out of whack pretty quickly when our bodies stop doing what they were designed to do as recently as a hundred years ago.

xp TOMBOT otm

i see overweight people on the streets, and the subway, and wish they cared a little bit more about themselves.

i understand it's not easy to be fit. i'm not blessed with perfect metabolism but i compensate for it with my lifestyle. i work 9 hours a day and also manage to get cardio 6 out 7 days a week.

oh shit tom otm. there a days when i think of the corn industry as a world-historical crime. so much arable land put to growing something that is no good for anyone, and we subsidize the whole thing, and it impoverishes the rest of the world, which continues to be poor and starve.

xp ok cutts thx 4 clarifying. do you have any good exersize regimen tips? i have been trying to get into better fighting trim & would like to avoid gyms if poss

there ARE days

eat 6 meals a day. 45 minutes of cardio a day.

Overweight? Blame the bacteria in your gut

Cutty, dood, you are a roadie: yr required to be obsessed w/ your diet & weight. That is not a normal level of deprivation and possib not sustainable long-term.

cutty, in all sincerity & w/ kid gloves, is this a sympathetic concern or more of an aesthetic one?

Okay I think people are forgetting that corn is TASTY.

xp I mean, awesome for you, but you know it's v v non-standard even for fit people.

there's other factors pushing the subsidization of corn (and soybeans) tho - namely that agribusiness was eager to copyright them because they're the easiest and simplest ingredient to bio-engineer, and are also the most widely-used food ingredients (soy and/or corn is in almost everything). Copyright that and presto you have a precedent for corporate monopoly of the food supply, and what a glorious future that will lead us towards amirite lolz *shoots self in despair*

so many x-posts

i dont understand how a) pb&j + spaggeddy is significantly different from what kids have been eating for the past 200 years

there's a little part of the world oh right around here:

http://www.brittany-ferries.co.uk/media/images/5/1/AquitMap_293x280_1.jpg

where they do not eat pb&j or pasghetti very often. of course even there, kids become instantly magnetized to "Flunch" and other fast-food chains like it's crack. maybe as they get older the peer pressure to eat better stuff starts having more sway. food is the #1 topic of conversation in that part of the world, after all. peer pressure -- i.e. eating in groups on a regular basis -- has been shown in a study to be a big reason why the frenchies are healthy in spite of all the duck fat and cognac. if you're with a bunch of other people, you tend to eat slower because you're talking more, and you also don't go back for thirds and fourths because it would be rude and also because there's just not enough on the table.

or you could just try having three glasses of red wine a day.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2201580,00.html

last weekend the lovely emma b's mom said "yesterday we did something strange." i said, "what was that?" "we did not have any wine with our food!" and i said yes, that is pretty strange for you guys. then emma told me that her mom was actually talking about LUNCH.

it's both. i sympathasize with those who don't give a shit what they look or feel like.

laurel, i do way more than 45 mins a day, i'm saying what regular people should do. yes, i'm a roadie, yes i'm obsessed, but that's a separate discussion.

This thread makes me wish I wasn't chained to a desk at work and was instead outside ... doing anything, really. Even just walking.

basically everyone really ought to get some kind of hobby that involves more than just sitting there.

exercising purely for exercise's sake is depressing if you know that you're starting in the hole, and that it's not going to be fun like ever. playing a game or doing a fun sport is worth doing ANYWAY, and has the added benefit of being good for you. once it start paying dividends, it's easier to see how training (as opposed to fucking around) can be even more beneficial

Hahaha I know, I read the daily bike log, remember?

sweet corn is great! this is a tiny fraction of the corn-based garbage we eat. actual ears off an actual cob is not the problem. industrial seed corn, liquefied for its sugar/carb/filler content and put in every food you can think of (hello, soda pop) is just gross. (dan i'm pretty sure you're funnin but just to be humorless completist about the argument and all)

6 tiny meals?

xpost

corn on the cob = A+++++++ would eat anytime

who the fuck is drinking straight corn syrup, fuck that fucker

BASKETBALL: the great equalizer. set picks. lay out scrawny bike riders. drain threes w/impunity. being big /= not having coordination

xp dan anyone that is drinking soda, wtf, dude, science? i mean there's some fizzy water in there i guess.

I can't play any fun sports anymore since the fucking Dept of Parks taped off my local b-ball court and spent the last 2 years doing JACKSHIT with it besides tearing up all the concrete and leaving a bunch of unused equipment lying around. SO ANGRY SHAKEY MO SMASH NOW

the corn people eat as corn on the cob, that has some flavor to it, is as gff points out almost NOTHING like what makes up most of our food bulk in HFCS, beef, chicken, etc.

True about hobbies, gbx! Plus even the proud beautiful fatties at the rally in that video were having workshops to help people get stretched out and be as mobile and flexible as possible -- I think that's totally fair. We're only seeing a tiny portion of the overall conference or the group's aims, based on one newscast.

lol, peer pressure is usually the reason why i overeat/eat foods that are terrible for me. i can maintain on my own, but hanging with dudes and talking about food leads to sweet sweet indulgence

also, is there truth to the thyroid trouble = massive weight gain thing? i had a teacher in HS who weighed 400+ pounds & said she was unrecognizable before she had her thyroid problem. all i ever saw her eat was a pair of beef jerky's for lunch. she couldn't wear anything other than velcro sandals because her feet were so fat.

xps corn syrup is terrible, no doubt, but i fucking love canned corn.

the 6 meals don't have to be tiny, but they have to be substantive healthy and should contain a protein, a starchy carb and a fibrous carb. aim for 300-400 calories a meal. front-load your day with more calories and taper off throughout. don't eat after 8-9pm.

and jaymc is otm. i am feeling restless and should probably ride a bike somewhere, very quickly. can't go running cuz of a stress fracture >:(

lol, peer pressure is usually the reason why i overeat/eat foods that are terrible for me. i can maintain on my own, but hanging with dudes and talking about food leads to sweet sweet indulgence

-- Jordan, Tuesday, October 30, 2007 4:20 PM (17 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

haha, me too. esp in the context of fast food. i'm usually *shrug* it's where everyone else is going

corn syrup drinkers? hm dunno but you could ask:

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AKO

xps lol

Lunchables Mess With Your Mouth Chicken Dunks
Contents: Breaded chicken nuggets, Sour Tongue Tasting Fizz, ketchup, Starburst, Capri Sun 100-percent juice
Look/Convenience GPA: 1.73
Taste GPA: 0.35
Nutrition GPA: -0.80

oh front-loading calories, i'm terrible at that

ALSO STAY AWAY FROM FUCKING HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, JESUS

Lunchables Maxed Out Ultimate Nachos
Contents: Tortilla chips, mild salsa, nacho-cheese dipping sauce, nacho-cheese seasoning packet, bottled water, Kool-Aid tropical-punch flavor powder, Air Heads candy
Look/Convenience GPA: 2.13
Taste GPA: 2.23
Nutrition GPA: -2.00

ps i shit @ work in the am usually too

i had pasta for breakfast today!

playing a game or doing a fun sport is worth doing ANYWAY, and has the added benefit of being good for you.

playing sports/games with people = way less fun for me than exercise, 'cause i suck at most sports. i'd rather do individual shit like, uh, exercise.

xpost, i thought the eating at night = bad thing is a myth?

There is more water in soda than corn syrup, ergo drinking soda is not drinking straight corn syrup.

It is good to know that corn pisses people off! I have hours of entertainment ahead of me now.

(xp: Tracer that article was amazing precisely for that first utter abomination)

haha, me too. esp in the context of fast food. i'm usually *shrug* it's where everyone else is going

-- gbx, Tuesday, October 30, 2007 9:22 PM (33 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

also i think with guys nights outs there is a genuine pressure to outeat everyone else

jesus christ the xps!!

Wow NEGATIVE nutrition, that's some kind of achievement.

a lot of this stuff is common sense. eat some fruit instead of a chocolate bar. don't eat cheese on everything. don't go for a second helping. stop drinking all that beer.

if you are overweight most likely you need a lifestyle overhaul and it's not easy, but the happiness you will feel in the long run is worth it all.

I just wanted to say that I'm making a real effort these days to keep it under four Baby Ruths in any twenty-four hour period.

U fatty.

hd, the last crate of (DIET) coke i bought said something like "DID U KNOW COCA COLA IS HYDRATING?? ALL BEVERAGES ARE HYDRATING, DUMBASS." i honestly didnt know that & still kind of suspect it to be bullshit.

god my required caloric intake is going to spike bigtime once i start work :-/

There are things in this world, Big Terrors, that I just get tired of hearing about and one is High Fructose Corn Syrup. Whineyface out. (=me)

Jordan it is a myth, but it can go hand in hand with, say, eating in front of the tv and zoning out so much that you keep eating until you realize you don't have any hands.

Because you've eaten them. In case that wasn't clear.

lololololololol to deeznuts (xp and tracer)

CUTTY WHAT ABOUT W33D???

speaking of which, ive heard weed actually raises yr metabolism, is this true? xps !!!

weed has no calories, unless i eat a pot brownie

if you are talking about lung health, i vaporize my weed which is certainly the lesser evil of all weed consumption methods

re: diet coke... it is hydrating in that it puts liquid in your body sure, but caffeine is also a diuretic = makes you pee = makes you need more liquid in you, which is probably part of the reason that everyone who drinks diet coke appears to drink a gallon of the shit a day. UGH. And nobody I know who does this is healthy!

don't get me started on diet coke.

i also learned recently that one of the major reasons that gatorade is so "hydrating" is that it specifically PREVENTS you form peeing (salt = less surface area for liquid to osmose into your body = less pee)

vapezilla.jpg

will m. - try using science

lol typos: "form peeing"

"I can pee in a square! OH SHIT I DRANK GATORADE, NO SQUARE PEE FOR ME."

PURE UNCUT GATORADE is SO LOADED in ELECTROLYTES (salts, basically) THAT IT CAN......DEHYDRATE YOU

basically, if it is a hypertonic solution, which osmotically drives water OUT of cells, in order to equilibrate to isotonicity. water it down, however (powder), and you can actually drive water into cells via the same process

(AFAIK, obv there is more to it....but surface area is sort of not relevant, unless you're talking about crenating cells and surface area:volume ratios and shti)

diet coke also has serious diabetes implications

I thought gatorade was isotonic, that was the point of the stuff

People who drink gallons and gallons of diet soda because "Hey... diet!" are dumbasses.

you'd think so, tombot! but i'm fairly certain i recall my biochem prof telling me otherwise??? maybe i'm wrong.

i probably shouldn't have been so strident. sorry.

anyway, a packet of gu or a banana + water is probably better than gatorade anyway

http://wardmulroy.com/gatorade/DOCS/1/content(9).html#ans17

"two chili fries and, uh, two large diet cokes"

http://www.bier-am-hbf.de/images/cine/true_romance_7.jpg

it's how we roll

ok maybe i misremembered the fact as it was told to me by a pretty science girl and the breadth of my "science" knowledge = 0ºC makes water get biger and everything else get smaller. Plus I was busy talknig to a pretty girl and apparently not, you know, learning anything

What did she weigh?

i find it incredibly hard to exercise and still eat dinner before 8-9 pm. i dont get off work until 6. What if i have to buy groceries? stop at the store? run errands? does this mean i have to get up @ 6 in the morning to run? If so now i should be going to bed between 10-12. If that's the case then by the time i get home from work (7-8pm) i have exactly two hours to do non-work related activities ... whatever my interests happen to be. so empty.

when i go running after work i'm eating at more like 9-10 pm

true (when i exercise i usually dinner between 8-9:30!)

i don't think there's anything wrong with that! the only reason i don't eat even later is because the lovely emma b starts turning into the grumpy emma b if we don't eat by 9:30.

as far as people who drink diet coke all the time... fuck, this one fucking guy (diabetic, iirc, type 2 i think as well) drank no water and only diet coke because "what's the point of drinking water? i don't like it as much as diet coke." a bunch of us nerds would play ultimate frisbee once a week (fuck you, at least it was exercise) and he would bring a big bottle of DIET COKE and drink it when he wasn't running. he wasn't in shit shape, but he was definitely in the worst shape of all of us (and this was all computer nerds, just to reiterate, brought together by a love for COMPUTERS). God, drinking diet coke after running around. DISGUSTING.

thing is, him and this other guy (who is just really pedagogic and loves researching this shit) found that there is absolutely no proof that diet coke is not a good substitute for water 100% of the time. I'm no scientist, but every heavy-diet-drink-drinking person I've ever met is not healthy in any way, and I doubt it's only because that the shit isn't part of their "Active lifestyle." There's something in that shit thatm akes people sick, especially in those doses.

i've been having trouble forcing myself to eat at home just because of this tight schedule and my need to do non-work activities at some point in my life. never mind socializing, meeting up for drinks w/ friends, etc.

i end up spending too much money eating out as a result

seriously cutty how do u balance these things?

I think what cutty points out about frontloading calories is important. it used to be breakfast was the largest meal anybody ate during the day, and you had all day to burn off the pancakes and sausage and grits or whatever. Now we skip breakfast, stuff ourselves at 8:30pm because it takes an hour and a half to get home and pick up a bucket of chicken, squat in front of the television or the computer until 11:30 or later and then spend the rest of the night passed out turning our late, oversized dinner into extra gut and ass.

We were all a lot better off when we used to drink at work.

(not nec bcz of the drinking at work. that was just the old endemic disease that we've replaced with the topic of this thread)

God, drinking diet coke after running around. DISGUSTING.

I sympathize 100%, deej.

drinking at work = YES

just liquor, though (duh). I quit drinking beer for about 6 weeks (and admittedly began to ratchet the cardio up a bit) and lost 10 lbs. quick.

Fuck you, good health.

I feel soul-crushing guilt every time I have a hunger pang, even if I haven't eaten for two days.

o_0

you should probably not be skipping food for two days at a time

seriously cutty how do u balance these things?

you pretty much get it--i wake up at 5:30. exercise before work. "non-work activities" need to be prioritized accordingly. i try to get to bed as early as possible. repeat.

thing is, him and this other guy (who is just really pedagogic and loves researching this shit) found that there is absolutely no proof that diet coke is not a good substitute for water 100% of the time
-- Will M., Tuesday, October 30, 2007 9:48 PM (5 minutes ago)

what, kidney damage isn't proof enough?

yeah, dinner was a problem when i was in a relationship and wanted to go to the gym, except that dinner was at like 6:30, so it was either don't exercise or don't eat together. that sucked.

it used to be breakfast was the largest meal anybody ate during the day, and you had all day to burn off the pancakes and sausage and grits or whatever.

"you" = britishes, right? afaik pretty much no other culture fetishizes big breakfasts like we do.

"we" british/american/australians

i mean i dont know a ton about nutrition but it seems to me that calories are calories and it doesnt matter when during the day you consume them

you should probably not be skipping food for two days at a time

It's not a normal state of affairs. I'm just saying. Threads like this and the judgments that people feel they have a right to make about fat people make me feel terrible guilt about ever being hungry at all. It's not a healthy state of mind to be in.

the french certainly do

consistent consumption of aspartame is a one-way ticket to chronic toxicity
again, probably better off with some booze

Whooooah I don't think that's true, max: best way to gain body weight is to eat and then NAP. Which is my favorite weekend calendar entry, pretty much.

I mean at least that's what sumo wrestlers do, along with their quite rigorous workouts and giant caloric feeings, they take naps right after.

SCIENCE seems to agree with me:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/02/060202080832.htm

http://www.livescience.com/health/060201_night_munchies.html

really? what about working out and then eating? i thought that it's good to get your metabolism up before you eat, and that what you do after doesn't matter that much?

calories are calories and diurnal metabolism is diurnal metabolism

so yeah being awake and burning all day really helps tear down a heavy breakfast

WHOA. melissa. NOT EATING is the worst thing you can be doing. your body in starvation mode will store everything as fat when you finally do eat. you are just making it worse. eat more, but eat LESS each meal. you are seriously fucking your metabolism up.

i thought the french were the "continent" in "continental breakfast"

i mean really guys i think the best advice is, uh, "eat less, more veggies, get off your ass every day."

trying to fine-tune WHEN you eat and all that stuff strikes me as just making you unhealthy thru neurosis instead of fatness

wow max that sounds like EXCELLENT SCIENCE
they took a DIFFERENT SPECIES, induced weight gain by REMOVING THEIR REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS, and then pretended this has anything to say about human beings with testicles or some such shit
jesus christ

thnk u Dr. Bot

max I'm just saying this "eat less" crap is a bunch of fuck
we didn't have to eat less two generations ago and nobody called our grandparents a nation of fatties

people smoked and drank and ate meat and woke up every day to start all over again and on top of all that shit the men had higher sperm counts

then they all died of cancer and heart diseas!

Yeah but what a life....

cutty do you eat before you run in the mornings

j/k

haha yeah they never got to find out how awesome it is to turn 85

not running, cycling. i have a cup of coffee then go. after 45 minutes, i eat an energy gel.

i figure you eat a meal afterwards, but if you eat before, what is it that you eat?

I found myself slimming down pretty quickly when running 3 miles a day 4-5 times a week

oops xp

what is this energy gel

err disease

sorry 3/4 of my grandparents were alcoholic fat smokers and died in their 60s or early 70s. the one who wasn't fat = still alive

Our grandparents were eating more "real" food, though, and less HFCS and TVP and processed foods (or at least, processed foods were just starting to take off as pre-prepared foods promised the Housewife of Today a more efficient, healthier dinner as proven by science). They may have been eating steak and eggs and the same canned veg all the time (grey, I mean, green beans, anyone?) but at least it was food.

i found it kind of neccessary to have a little SOMETHING in my stomach ... when i was running after work i would eat a clif bar around 4-5 p.m. and then run around 7-8 p.m.

energy gel = 100 calories to replaces the glycogen burned during 45 mins workout

sometimes i would also eat a baggy of peanuts

i used to ride 40 miles a day and i would eat an entire baguette with my dinner

then i usually eat oatmeal w/banana, 1 egg/1 egg white

I mean the benefit of real butter and real meat and stuff like that is that at least when you eat it YOU FEEL FULL. It's not as good as eating healthy foods LIGHTLY, but it's better than eating lots of highly processed foods that don't fill you up but add lots of calories and bad fats and stuff.

tom u kidding?? ppl DEFINITELY ate less 50 years ago. im pretty sure my grandfather wasnt choking down a double bacon cheeseburger and a 72oz coke with dinner 4 nights a week!

also "eat less" only helpful if you GET OFF YOUR ASS, too.

xp laurel OTM

how long does 40 miles take???

i will eat an entire baguette because it is there

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060901161230.htm

one of my grandfathers ate bacon for breakfast every single day and drank a 12 pack of crappy beer.

how long does 40 miles take???

2.5 hours of riding at moderate pace

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1447051

Results. Marketplace food portions have increased in size and now exceed federal standards. Portion sizes began to grow in the 1970s, rose sharply in the 1980s, and have continued in parallel with increasing body weights.

http://www.hindu.com/ms/2004/12/01/images/2004120100110601.jpg

cent: cutty
clockwise from lower left: ilx

oh ok. i might have done 40 miles a couple weekends ago! but now it is cold and i won't be able to do it again until spring :(

I don't get it gff

hey guyz.

some good points here.

i think what worried me about the doc was that these women were saying they weren't going to conform to some skinny fashion model idea of beauty. which, of course is fair enough.

but...they were also saying that they thought it was a positive thing to be, like, fucking morbidly obese. well, i'm glad you're not letting vogue tell you how you should look, but heart attacks aren't much fun. my dad had one a couple of years back and he's not even that big. they seemed to be trying to tie health issues to body image issues, like they were all part of the same thing. dodgy.

yeah about 2.5 ... at my absolute fastest i did 32 in 1 hr and 45 mins.

at the time though i worked from 2 pm in the afternoon to 8 at night, with no school happening either, so i could get up around 9 am, eat breakfast and then go ride @ 10 am, get back around 12 or 1 and then shower and go to work.

ok ok ok uncle people eat more overall than they used to

I got off my real point though which is that I think our entire lifestyle is fucked up now, watching diet and exercise so much is because we've made poor adjustments in other areas. risk homeostasis/production pressure of the economy/chronic over catastrophic etc

no i totally agree w u 100%

this thread oh jeez

the real problem is the retarded ass 8-9 hour work day, silly holdover from industrial era bullshit

xp which is why i think things like "eat less at night!" are sort of useless when the problem has way more to do with the way our lifestyle is tied up in the auto/agribusiness/white-collar economies which force-feed us shit and dont let us move

working in an office i have 0 incentive to finish my work ahead of schedule because i'm still going to be sitting in the office all day.

I work 4x10 shifts right now, I can't wait to start growing a tub

tell me i can finish my work and leave in 6 hours and i will DO IT

One of my grandfathers ate lentils and freshly slaughtered goats and stuff. And maybe smoked a little. He lived through the entirety of the 20th century.

deej, consider getting up early. it's really not hard once you slide into a routine. you'll find yourself well-rested and rising at the same time every day if you do it right.

my co-workers are always whining about how tired they are. sorry i can't relate.

(Grandfather was also skinnier than you, and had thicker hair.)

cutty, you are the hyperhealthy friend that everyone simultaneously admires and thinks is a total dick for being so healthy.

I seriously doubt that last bit nabisco

it does kind of take a degree of dick-style narcissism to put such a strong emphasis on your own physical well-being

it balances out because cutty will be lonely when all his friends die 15 years before him

Given all the hatred and negative pressures on fat/obese people, some of whom could probably do something about their size but many of whom would -- LET'S FACE IT -- simply have to work a lot harder than the rest of us and still only achieve some percentage of "normal" weight loss for their efforts, I think it's more than fair to promote ACCEPTANCE OF WHERE THEY ARE NOW so someone gives people fucking permission to NOT HATE THEMSELVES. Improvement in fitness & healthy & body chemistry is prob the most desirable outcome but we're talking about a lifetime of struggle.

The resident scrawny computer geek population of ILX does not have this problem by and large, you can talk about fried chixen and cheeseburgers with glee but there are people, some of whom have commented in this thread, who cannot achieve even an average metabolism/weight/size/whatever by anything except drastic means, and they need hope and to be valued and all that softie earnest crap that ILX hates or else where is the motivation to even try?

dan OTM :(

Ha, Tom, I can't tell if you're trying to compete with Ethiopian mountain farmers on the "slender" scale, or if that's a bald joke.

So I back "fat appreciation" or whatever -- you gotta love yourself regardless. And also go to yoga & have some kale.

but you have to understand for the years 2005-2006 i was a drug addict alcoholic.

whoever said hating fat people for being lazy is like hating poor people for being lazy was totally OTM

I've just always been one of those people who basically doesn't have the patience for more than 30 minutes of exercise every couple of days or so because I'll just start thinking "what the fuck is the point of this? I could still get mugged or hit by a truck or wind up with a total asshole for a boss"

yeah my grandfather never lost his hair at all, and he, like, worked on that manhattan project! wtf.

Tom: you are skinny minnie, though. Blah blah that has its own pros and cons I know I know...but your life as a tall and skinny person is very different from life as a fatty.

I was still speaking to the cutty regimen and my strong philosophical differences with it. I believe in taking care of yr bod and all but there are all sorts of ways to betray yourself

you guys might be sick of me going on and on about ver frenchies but here is a typical day's food for somebody in the southwest of france:

breakfast:

- o.j.
- coffee (or not)
- yogurt with jam
- fruit
- croissant

lunch:

- shrimp
- pork loin with potatoes, piece of bread
- endive salad with dressing
- cheese and more bread
- 1 glass red wine
- optional dessert (a piece of chocolate maybe)
- optional coffee

dinner:

- nuts
- some kind of liqueur

- soup
- tuna casserole
- two glasses of red wine
- salad
- cheese and bread
- optional dessert (like a pear tart)
- optional coffee
- optional cognac

snacks are pretty non-existent. i have one friend there who is trying to lose weight so she runs and i think eats a little less than what i outlined above but the basic schematic holds for just about everybody. and they are not "magic" people, they just walk and bike pretty much everywhere.. i dunno.

oh, you dunno, huh?
sounds like MAGIC PEOPLE to me then

VOODOO PEOPLE even

its spelled VOUDOU in the south of france

different strokes for different folks. i'm not preaching here or telling anyone how to live their lives. my regimen works for me and i'm the happiest i've ever been. neurosis doesn't enter into it. i don't dread getting out of bed at 5:30 and getting on the bike. i look forward to it.

"so someone gives people fucking permission to NOT HATE THEMSELVES."

it's good they don't hate themselves. it's not so good for them to die of a heart attack/diabetes.

also i guess when i say things like "cheese" and "bread" i mean actual cheese and actual bread, without hydrogenated invaginators and added glyco-syrupanes

oh dude there's this thing they do and for some reason i love it. when you're done with whatever meaty thing you've been eating and there's still some meaty juice or soup down in the bottom of the plate, instead of soaking the rest of it up with your bread you pour a little bit of red wine in your plate, pick up your plate with your hands and slurp it up - it's called the "chabrot". maybe that's the secret.

Lots of people who aren't obsese die of those things, too, Mr pc user, and they don't even start out with the evolutional handicap of having very protective body chemistry that stores food extremely efficiently against the threat of starvation.

it's good they don't hate themselves. it's not so good for them to die of a heart attack/diabetes.

Can't you see how these things might be related, though? Many of these women hate themselves so much that they can't leave the house (and thus live active lifestyles, etc.). And the media is really not helping at all with that perception. I know that when I walk around I don't want people to look at me and think of how I am emblematic of The Problem With America.

melissa, do you want to be accepted the way you, which in turn will make you feel good about yourself, or do you want to to change what you are and feel good that way?

"the way you are"

i'm guessin a little of both, cutty

they don't even start out with the evolutional handicap of having very protective body chemistry that stores food extremely efficiently against the threat of starvation.

haha yeah as if in a massive drought/food shortage all teh fatteys are gonna be sitting around living off their stores of fat instead of quickly dying of heart attacks and dehydration

I want to be accepted the way I am, absolutely. It would help immensely if I wasn't saddled with all this guilt and self-hatred and feeling like I am an unforgivable monster on top of everything else. Because, you know, I've been trying and failing for years and my whole sense of self-worth is tied up in how I look and every time I fail I sink a little further down. If I could try to lose weight separately from all that psychological bullshit maybe I could actually accomplish something.

Lots of people who aren't obsese die of those things, too, Mr pc user, and they don't even start out with the evolutional handicap of having very protective body chemistry that stores food extremely efficiently against the threat of starvation.

-- Laurel, Tuesday, 30 October 2007 22:43

ok, ok... there are people with slower metabolisms BUT this does not account for the rises in average weight in western countries over the last 50 years or so. have people's metabolisms magically slowed down on average? of course not, it's a lifestyle thing. it would be more productive if these women said "i want to lose weight for my health" rather than "i'm not going to lose weight because i'm not some sucker for diets/fashion" it should be two different issues.

there are people who naturally bigger, but nobody is naturally morbidly obese, that is a lifestyle problem.

^^^ Yes. and this has been pointed out several times so far on this thread

ok, fair enough. since i started it, i felt compelled to contribute just to show i wasn't some troll mocking the overweight.

removing the social stigma of being fat you feel from others is still not going to change how you feel about yourself, though

The social stigma plays a huge part in how I feel about myself.

aw Mel Caramel!! I made a couple of cruel jokes up top that I'm sure you didn't like. But I make cruel jokes at my own expense all the time, too. I think you have to let people see your vulnerability, I think that's very important on the battling the psychological bullshit front. Making jokes at your own expense does that. (Of course some people go WAY overboard with this but that's a separate issue I think, and probably still pretty healthy all things considered)

without the social stigma, what motivation do you have to lose weight?

pack of wild dogs chasing you?

What has also been pointed out several times is that "morbidly obese" is the far end of the spectrum of this problem, the bulk of people in that video and the fatties we are mostly referring to are just FAT. For god's sake. There is a woman in the broadcast who is fat by "normal" standards but states that her cholesterol, blood pressure, and other applicable measurements are PERFECTLY HEALTHY and yet she can't get health insurance. Obviously she also cannot get any appreciable level of public acceptance, since all y'all already wrote her off by proxy.

You have no idea what size a "fat" person that you see in public or on television would be if he or she WEREN'T dieting and working out, and people aren't all going to get the same results from the same lifetyle changes. We need to accept and stop hating because there are people eating steamed whitefish and greens and tofu who are never going to get back into a size 12 or whatever, while I can have cheeseburgers if I want them and the most I do is complain about my thighs sometimes.

Cutty, for shame. Without the social incentive of public awards & approval, what incentive do you have to perform at such a high level?

You think it's a motivating factor? It's not. At all. It's the factor that leaves me with a crippling social phobia that has contributed significantly to weight gain (weight gain, I might add, that originally had nothing to do with unhealthy eating; that has come more recently as I've just plain given up). I'd like to lose weight to feel better physically and have more energy.

xposts

granted I only watched the first 10 seconds or so of the clip that started this thread (no sound at work, what's the point) but I think there's DEFINITELY some morbid obesity goin on there, sorry. If someone's boobs and/or forearms are bigger than my head...

Oh right, god forbid we offend the sensibilities of someone tall and naturally skinny.

sounds like you are in an endless catch-22. the social stigma isn't going anywhere.

fwiw I'm not "offended" wtf

I really feel like there is this assumption for some people on ILX that fatties are the "other" and that there aren't any fatties on ILX. Pssst...Fatties hide on the internet.

I'd like to come out as fat. I'm fucking huge, thats why I don't post photos of myself anymore. That's why I only ever post photos that I've taken of other people.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't agree with this whole fat acceptance thing, but I can't seem to lose weight and I certainly am not one of those people who eats a chocolate bar for breakfast, I just seem to lack any self-control with any kind of food (Be it a carrot or a plate of hot chips) and I hate every day of my life because of it.

Shakey Mo, how about if you send the circumference of your head measurement to my secret lab and I'll get right on developing a SMCI for measuring obesity by your standards.

hahaha its a deal!

boobs bigger than my head are pretty kewl

"You have exceeded the 55 Shakey Mo Head limit, off to fat camp with you!"

No I thought we agreed that fat people are needed in New Orleans to fortify the levees. Weakling toothpicks like myself can be the shims, to create a seal.

sounds like you are in an endless catch-22. the social stigma isn't going anywhere.

But it would be nice and helpful if it did. Seriously, I don't even know what kind of point you are trying to make here.

All I'm saying is that it's a huge struggle with no easy solution. There's so much more to it than "lol lazy fatties", and that includes how the social stigma contributes to cycles of overeating and inactivity fueled by self-hatred, in addition to very real physical inequalities that make it much more of a struggle for certain people.

I mean, seriously, it's not rocket science that I would feel better physically and mentally if I lost weight, and being condescended to as if I haven't figured that out yet is completely maddening and insulting, especially considering that I have been trying for years and years.

when i was in san francisco for four days i ate the following:

- cheese omelette
- 5 coffees w/ milk
- shared fish and chips with friend
- cup of clam chowder with lots of oyster crackers and shared calamari with friend
- shared bread pudding w/ friend
- ramen w/ spicy tofu
- bagel
- approximately half bottle of fernet branca
- 4 whiskey & cokes
- a few crackers at japanese tea garden
- 3 coca cola classics

and i walked i'd guess 6 hours every day, uphill, upstairs. WHEN I GOT HOME I HAD GAINED 10 POUNDS.

cutty, i'm assuming that you don't go out so much anymore to keep up your schedule? i wouldn't know, though, because i don't go out anymore (and go to the gym more often).

my point is i guess is that there is such thing as being genetically doomed to be somewhat of a fatty because the friend i traveled with ate significantly more than me (there were several meals that she ate alone while I sat there) and she LOST weight from all the walking.

you said you were drunk most of the time in the other thread! LIAR

hence half the bottle of fernet branca! okay it was more like a whole bottle.

SEE

this anecdotal case wherein you drank three cans of pop, a cheese omelette, fries and pudding proves that even healthy eating can't help a person lose weight

you can't gain 10 lbs in 4 days. you're just retaining water.

Would you guys agree that most people's weight loss efforts fail because they only try to tweak their status quo lifestyle, rather than pursuing something like a broad lifestyle reboot?

It seems to me like we hear a lot of "all you have to do is exercise and eat right" and when people try to attach "exercise and eat right" to their pre-existing lifestyle they fail, because there are so many other factors that influenced and generated the activity and diet patterns that got them overweight in the first place, and these factors are rarely ever addressed.

I think people want to believe that they can be who they've been, and live the lives they've led, and with some modest changes to their diet and a couple trips to the gym or the park their bodies will transform before them. The reality is if you want your body to change significantly, you've usually got to start living a substantially different kind of life that accounts for or modifies your interests, your hobbies, your habits - everything.

What's odd is that lots of people I talk to think that's impossible or would require some superhuman level of willpower, but I don't think it's much different from changing jobs. Who here couldn't start going to a different place of work with vastly different protocols for basically the same tasks, practically overnight? Nobody ever says "well, I'm so used to taking I-205 to exit 12, and filling out these forms this way, and sitting at a cubicle in this corner of the building, and walking this way to get to the watercooler... I don't think I can work anywhere else."

Am I even close to the money?

you are otm.

i know that fat people lie about working out and eating habits because i do it myself.

Chaki, so do skinny people. I know countless of skinny people who say:"Man, I eat so much!" and then you add up the cals/food and they eat a lot less. Or they (unconsciously) move a lot more than your "average" person.

melissa, do you want to be accepted the way you

So if she dropped 40 kilos (for whatever reason), she's not Melissa anymore? I mean, shit, I know what you mean, but still...

I used to weigh about 125 pounds, something I doubt I will ever reach again, because, if I'm being honest to myself (and my body) isn't really "me." I'll forever try to gain that weight even though my mom's convinced that my diet was crazy. (This week she said, referring to that period:But you only ate like 50 procent of the normal amount!") That said, I'll forever feel a fattie, because deep down that's what I am/feel. And yes yes I know I am not obese but I can't escape that nagging feeling I am.

Let's all go back to Rubens time and gorge ourselves on cakes.

Kerm, that's entirely possible. What I'm saying is that no matter what changes they make, some people will have greater success with weight loss than others. And when you meet or see someone who you consider "fat" you have NO IDEA what they're already doing (or not doing) to be healthy or fit or happy.

So very true.

I grew up in a household where snacking was rare and there was little pop in the house and for that I was very lucky. I think the best thing was that dinner and lunch (in the summer) was always prepared from scratch and that carried over to me. I almost always prepare my own dinner now from "scratch". A piece of protein and some sides. It was a habit I learned early and now I have a hobby- cooking. I drink way too much but a bottle of wine is the price I'll pay.

I fall off the wagon when I'm desperately hungover, then I crave pop and McDonalds (yesterday I ate a Double Quarter Pounder, large fries and a large frutose-ade, it wasn't good at all and I think I'm finally done with that).

The price of gas motivated me to move a transportation hub where I have to walk 15 minutes to get there and another 15 to get to work. I'm hardly burning calories but when I started I was tired just doing that now I'm not so it has done some good. At least I get some fresh air (ha cleveland air so, um).

Then I decided to start doing simple calisthenics. I could not do 10 push-ups or 25 sit-ups (I weigh 165 and am 6-1) and still can't. I stopped trying because it bored me to death. I could be cooking instead.

that's my story and I'm sticking to it etc

i learned this from interviewing a cross-country runner from colombia: "it's not just about a few good workouts" she said, "it's about consistency"

xpost or what Kerm said, writ small

xxpost brownie your story is touching!

without the social stigma, what motivation do you have to lose weight?

-- cutty, Tuesday, October 30, 2007 6:01 PM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

UH

kerm is right, i think. when i moved to montana, there were very drastic changes to my lifestyle, simply from the change of setting. i was doing schoolwork, which had a more flexible schedule, i wasn't surrounded by drinking buddies and casual midweek barhopping, exercise in a beautiful outdoor setting was readily available, etc. etc. i came back to visit chicago after about 2.5 months and i was getting comments on looking healthy and thin, and i LEFT as a relatively healthy and thin person.

i was lucky in that moving did the changing for me; i didn't show up thinking "better drop some weight and start training," i was just happy to be in the mountains, which are like a natural get up early and do shit motivators.

brownie also otm: i was only allowed apples and cheese as a kid, and i'm a little grossed out when my roommate decides to put down an entire bag of chips in a non-stoned, non-hungover context.

he is also the least healthy eater i know, i think, and is wasting away

MILLIONS OF XPOSTS

social stigmas are stupid and counterproductive, which i thought would have been made obvious by now.

however, cutty is right in that, for some, going all out and bonkers and getting up at 5.30am and training like mad WILL be necessary to undo the last XXX years of your life! i think a lot of people (MYSELF) trick themselves into thinking that running once a week for a few miles means that they've "been running lately."

far better to do 15 minutes of light exercise in the morning every fucking day then it is to save it all up for saturday, blow out early because you're not conditioned, but feel tired and satisfied anyway, and then feel like you've earned a chocolate shake. consistency is everything, full stop.

Because the truth is that for most of us, with modest changes to diet and beer consumption and a few workouts a week, we WOULD see some weight loss/fitness gain. I know I would, because I've done it! We'd all plateau eventually and have to make more extreme changes to continue the arc, but that's dependent on your final goal anyway.

And part of the point of fat acceptance is that it has to be okay to choose not to spend your life pursuing something that's unreachable by anything but, say, surgical means, or a lifetime of being married to your workout until your joints wear out from the stress; not everyone is mentally suited to be an extreme athlete (not extreme in risks taken, but extreme in making it their primary pursuit/time-constraint in life). Maybe people would like to concentrate on being better musicians, or better accountants, or having a wider variety of pursuits and hobbies and skills than just putting in a few hours of cardio every day. Those of us with physiques in the "normal" range can afford that and not suffer public derision -- people we think of as "fat" deserve the same consideration.

Oh fuck so many xposts.

I think that as with smokers, people almost feel as if they are performing some sort of moral or altruistic act by stigmatizing fat people ("saving them from themselves", etc.). Except the problem is that a smoker can put away their cigarettes for the moment. They can hide it around people they know are especially judgmental. I have to continue being fat all day. There's nothing I can change or do in that moment when I'm just walking around, *being myself*.

to wit: "i don't really smoke" or "i'm quitting" = yeah well i still bum a smoke at the bar every now and then (guilty)

not smoking means not smoking. quitting drinking means not drinking ever. exercising regularly means that you're actually doing it every fucking day.

i loved my bike commute, and made a point of making it a rain or shine thing. if i hadn't done that, i would've driven a lot more frequently when the weather was bad, and that would have slackened my standards in general. i mean, this is why people get trainers (CUTTY), or opine about how much more fit they were when they played X sport. yes, you were younger, but mostly it's because you HAD to show up to practice, and someone was there to YELL AT YOU. as someone completely lacking in self-discipline, i find the only way i can make myself do stuff is if i like doing it anyway. hobbies are the answer.

xp "people we think of as "fat" deserve the same consideration." = OTM. but my point still stands, i think!

i'm bewildered by the fact that mandee thinks her SF eating log was healthy?

i only have a trainer to tell me HOW to train, not to motivate me to train. i was riding everyday without him.

Laurel you were right about not making assumptions about a person's health and habits by their appearance, but nobody requires several hours of cardio a day to avoid being way overweight.

if you are not an endurance athlete, there is no benefit from more than 45 minutes of cardio a day

No but they might have to do drastic things in order to get down to a size 8-10 or whatever is considered acceptably "normal". Some of the women in that video were probably very healthy size 18s or so, and are you saying that we should be forcing them, through social pressure, to make exercise far more important in their lives than it is in most of ours, just so they can be the same size my friends are without working out at all?

Cutty and gbx excepted, apparently, because they are both already extremely athletic people, basically they are in the very top ranks of anyone I know.

xp cutty i know he's not out there with you, just that some people don't even know how to make a plan for training, is all. if you're showing up w/o anything to work with, it's nice to have someone help and say "do this today."

They can hide it around people they know are especially judgmental. I have to continue being fat all day. There's nothing I can change or do in that moment when I'm just walking around, *being myself*.

precisely why destigmatizing is good. a person shouldn't feel bad for walking around being fat all day because other people are deriding them. nor should they for being short, tall, or whatever. being yourself is AOK because that's the only choice you have.

i think there's some talking at cross-purposes here, tho. for some reason, i guess some non-fat people seem to think that fat people are walking around chomping huge legs of lamb and demanding that obesity be seen as something we all should aspire to. when, obviously, that is not the case, and the truth is somewhere between that and skinny people demanding that the fattys stop being fat all over the place because it's ruining their view of the other skinny people.

i mean, if your obesity is a genuine health issue, work towards fixing it. if you're just bigger than most, but not unhealthy, fuck 'em. and if you ARE unhealthy and are OK with that, then, well, that's cool, too, just don't say you weren't warned.

xxp oh c;mon laurel that probably isn't true

i mean for me, maybe not for cutty, obv.

fat people are not carbon-neutral

cutty, i'm assuming that you don't go out so much anymore to keep up your schedule? i wouldn't know, though, because i don't go out anymore (and go to the gym more often).

-- lauren, Tuesday, October 30, 2007 7:32 PM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

i hardly go out at all. since i gave up drinking, being social in a bar has no appeal to me. i'm happier this way, though.

Uh hi gbx, no one I know personally bike-commutes except you and ddb and my roommate and the bike girls. No one I know rock climbs, there's one marathon runner, everyone else is at a more or less "yeah fine I guess I'll go to the gym/yoga class" level of participation if any.

I mean, I hang out with the noixe bored, c'mon.

i had a point about the food diary
just not sure what it was now! oh i know it wasn't healthy just wouldnt have expected to get so fatty in such little time.

since i gave up drinking, being social in a bar has no appeal to me. i'm happier this way, though.

we lost a good soldier. never forget partying cutty.

i guess my point above laurel was that, for some people, getting down to HEALTHY size/fat levels/cholesterol/etc. may, in fact, require RIGOROUS training, in the same way that it would require a weekend warrior to become a competitive triathlete. not everyone is fucking jerod, you know. if you're 450 and even hoping to get down to a perfectly healthy 230, it is NOT GOING TO BE EASY. IT IS GOING TO BE VERY VERY HARD. YOU WILL HAVE TO TRAIN LIKE AN ANIMAL. no shortcuts, etc.

I found a BIG factor for me was ALCOHOL. It is the worst empty calorie ever. I spent the last 6 months seriously depressed and pretty much not eating (I did eat healthy when I did, mind you) and I didnt lose all that much weight because I kept hammering the wine and cider, despite the fact I walk a lot and dont eat a lot. Booze is fattening as all shit and does something weird to yr metabolism and insulin in large doses.

pourin a forty for cutty

http://www.trailjournals.com/images/gear/6039903.jpg

you have to imagine that tipped over and spilling some gatorade

when i went on an all whiskey diet for 8 days i lost a ton of weight!

gbx OTM all over with a sensitivity that i cannot muster.

Okay fair enough, gbx. I guess everything everyone is saying can only possibly be applied to "some" people so it's all relative. But I think you're overstating the link between weight and health, which is something that is still up for research and in flux in the news...there are lots of reasonably healthy people who are still fat and that should be cool. Could they do MORE? Oh absolutely. So could we all. But the rest of us don't HAVE to do more in order to feel good about our public appearances, that's the burden I would like to see gone.

basically, what gbx is saying, it is all or nothing. make the lifestyle change yourself and stop blaming the social stigma as a roadblock.

i hate to sounds like tony robbins here, but it's fucking true.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/healthy.bodies/interactive/timeline.fad.diets/14.1993.powter.jpg

But I think you're overstating the link between weight and health, which is something that is still up for research and in flux in the news...there are lots of reasonably healthy people who are still fat and that should be cool.

what i said applies to under-nourished skinny-ass dudes who are chronically tired, too, though laurel. if it's clear that your lifestyle is not doing you any favors, you might want to think about changing it. for some people who are already healthy, that means drinking a bit less at the weekends, cutting down on meat, running one or two more days a week. for other people, with more work to do, that means NOT drinking, NEVER going to fast food restaurants, NEVER allowing yourself a treat because you did exercise, becoming a recluse and putting your nose to the grindstone. for some people, this will be depressing and intolerable, and maybe not worth the time. for others, they'll realize that they're feeling better in general, and maybe it's worth digging deeper into it.

but your last sentence is OTM. then again, so is cutty's: the social stigma should neither be a roadblock nor a reason to feel bad about yourself. it's just what some other jerks think.

it's just what some other jerks think.

-- gbx, Tuesday, October 30, 2007 7:33 PM (0 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

^^^ pat and glib and at least 60% insensitive, but also true, in the end

i don't know about cutty, but i feel like i'm trying to be a cheerleader, and be helpful, but mostly i'm just coming across like a dick that doesn't worry about this shit much. so sorry about that.

nb i still haven't actually watched the youtube link!

Not to be stupid (but I am, I know) but if you are overweight (in a healthy way) is that still not bad for certain aspects of your body? Doesn't it for example put a lot of pressure on your bones?

in my case, i wasn't obese, i was an alcoholic with a drug problem. obv these aren't readily apparent physical issues that result in immediate social stigma, but i am became disgusted with myself. and i made the changes in my life that i needed to make.

Laurel, I'm not sure if its what you were talking about upthread or not, but the number of calories required to maintain weight is largely unaffected by bodyfat. So if you add 30lbs of fat to a person's build, the calories required to keep that fat on them are very insignificant. If you added a lot of fat to your sedentary, "normal sized" friends and they made no changes to their lifestyle, they'd stay fat. If you take a large person who is maintaining their weight, and got them to lose a lot of bodyfat over a period of time and then go back to their old "fat" eating habits, it would take them a long time to gain it all back.

in my case, i wasn't obese, i was an alcoholic with a drug problem

aiming close to home, eek :-/

make the lifestyle change yourself and stop blaming the social stigma as a roadblock.

cutty, have you ever been fat? fat enough to be made fun of? fat enough to feel totally emotionally and socially crippled? i know that you've got good intentions here but you're coming off like an asshole. "social stigma" might just be "what jerks think" but it leads to very real, very damaging anxieties which are not altogether unlike the kind of addictions that keep people drinking or smoking. not all of us have the kind of brain chemistry or psychological makeup that allows us to turn around one day and start running, especially not if you're starting several pounds in the hole already and are desperately afraid of being guffawed at while they run.

i was pretty fat for four or five yeas in middle school and high school. ive since lost a fair amount of that weight (not all of it) but its left me with a whole set of problems and anxieties that im still working out. i can only imagine what its like for the truly obese, who've had to deal with this their entire lives.

p.s. evan i appreciate your sensitivity a lot and for what its worth i think youre pretty much on point. this is a psychological thing and as such is all about framing. being a cheerleader is way better than looking down from your high horse (or high bike), which just makes people feel worse and makes the task seem impossible.

i have good intentions, i ask important questions, leave the sugar coating to evan

this thread made me go to the gym even though i'm still getting over being sick and save my chocolate croissant for breakfast. you fuckers.

this thread made me sit late at work instead of finishing my work

YOU HAVE TO WAKE UP ONE DAY AND WANT TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE. ALL OF IT. WHETHER IT'S DRUG ADDICTION OR OBESITY.

(as opposed to the 1000 other ilx threads that have tempted me to go eat ribs, pizza, sandwiches, burgers, nuevo cuisine, etc.)

xpost

i hardly go out at all. since i gave up drinking, being social in a bar has no appeal to me. i'm happier this way, though.

ha. i think i resemble that remark. if you feel like going to the movies or to the greenmarket, you know who to call.

see! people like me in real life.

let's collaborate ASAP

done. i will always be, uh... "voluptuous," though.

i haven't read whole thread but am gonna agree with gbx abt a lot of things! and laurel abt some things! and other people prob. wld not do whiskey diet b/c wld obv die. but anyway, even though i'm well within 'normal' weight zone i totally judge myself way more than any of those people in that video - i'm like, hey, as long as you're actually happy, and everybody's happiness zone is different.

re: kinds of exercise that is enjoyable vs that that is harder to be motivated to do: i've been doing this 40-min each way bike commute for a few weeks every day and damn i LOVE IT SO MUCH (i get to ride some of it through a park and some along the canal!) and also damn if i can't eat anything i want and drink beer and still lose weight! (the way home is mostly uphill, which at first was slow and slightly painful but is now quick and only slightly lung-busting but that is my own fault - the city built an awesome wide bike path!) but anyway, v v soon it is going to be too miserably cold for this long commute and the bike paths will be closed and the streets trecherous :( :(

but yeah so i still have my ymca membership but have realized that i actually hate working out with other people in a gym! i used to like it but i realized i only liked going at times when there were only abt 5 other people there. impossibly now with work schedule :/ now i just want a little exercise bike for my bedroom or something b/c riding a bike and listening to music is something i like even if it's in my house.

real point is: food is good and beer is good and i am slightly vain and manageably competitive and like having visible thigh muscles and being able to pass people on hills on my bike. if people have a right to be fat then we also have a right to be ripped.

and by "gave up drinking," i mean "sometimes get drunk in my house," but hey! basically the same thing.

xpost to cutty

total xposts
shld say something abt stigma, need to think
xpost

Social stigma can be very real and very irrelevant at the same time.

voluptuous is a good thing, tho, see. xposts

rrrobyn on point, kerm otm again. you cannot discount social stigma, and the psychological problems that stem from of it. you can, and must, however, decide that for as long as they persist, it's your responsibility to say fuck you and make the change.

...he says, cracking third beer.

maybe we just have a right to be happy

i just want to make i clear: i dont disagree with the fact that all of us need to stop at some point and change our lifestyles if we want to get healthy. im just saying that you can either be a total condescending or obtuse prick about how difficult that is, or you can be sympathetic to it.

or 'content' or whatever it is i don't know i don't want to be a buddhist monk or anything i just want to be mostly okay with certain things that i can control and chill abt the things i can't and change the things i can possibly rage against them
xpost to self

i know cutty is being abrasive (assuming you are singling him out), but it sounds like he is at the very least passingly familiar with how difficult that can be, if not more so.

highfives for rrrobyn forever

max, yes
stigma is some brutalizing heavy shit that a lot of people are just not equipped to battle w/o some help
stigmas re: fatness and mental health are unfortunately two of the most socially acceptable stigmas around ugh

xpost back atcha

xp: no i think he cleary knows how difficult it is to turn your life around! i just think he could be a little bit more sympathetic to the differences between getting healthy from a position of being fat and getting healthy from a position of being an addict. im not claiming that one is harder than other, just that they require different kinds of encouragement and levels of realization.

whatever tho--im not really mad it can just be aggravating to see a dude whos clearly in better shape than anyone on the board going on about "fatteys" and how "social stigma" shouldnt be an excuse or anything.

There was a point in my life where I was drinking milkshakes after every dinner because I was trying out for sport teams and I weighed 130lbs and I was over 6 feet. I was told time and again that I was too skinny to do the things I loved (football, basketball and baseball) and was singled out in gym class as being an "ectomorph" by the jerk gym teacher. Eventually I said fuck it I'm joing the golf team- I was again lucky that the public school even had one. The overweight kids had it worse of course. Every Middle and High School gym teacher I ever had was a fucking asshole.

I don't know what it's like today but gym class made me hate exercise. And gym teachers.

xpost to the world!

well yeah.

c.f. shut up and paint, man! the song is in your heart, if you just listen to it! skydiving is just stepping out of a plane.

xp to max

altho secretly all of those things are true. i mean, it really is just stepping out of a plane, right?

"fatteys" is a meme from classic noise board

the golden age

DAEREST FATTEY,

so i made a joke from this boards past--don't fucking call me out for using it again. it has nothing to do with how fit i am in my life. it's still funny.

people pay good money for this kind of browbeating, people.

cutty, while I understand your main point and the hard-won personal experience that you are drawing upon and while what you say has a measure of validity, I think you are being much too dogmatic and intolerant by insisting that the path you took would amount to the same thing for others as it was for you.

Lives are complicated things and perfectly valid choices that one makes in one segment of life will inevitably narrow all one's choices. You know what others should do, because you did it and it worked out for the best. But they are not you.

This problem is cognate to what I call the mechanic's fallacy. Every specialist, such as a mechanic, or dental hygienist, or child psychologist, can tell you that there is a particularly good way to approach car maintainance, or flossing, or child rearing, and they will advise you to spend whatever time and effort it takes to change your oil every 3000 miles, brush so many minutes after each meal, or talk about your child's fears of monsters.

The difficulty comes when you try to take every "correct" piece of advice and make every "correct" choice. You discover you can't, without becoming crazy and running as fast as you can from chore to chore. Plus, you must get at least 7.5 hours of sleep every night, eat only organic foods, inform yourself thoroughly on all local political issues and chew each bite a dozen times. And so on.

Your advice may be good, but not everyone is going to take it, and they may well have very good reasons not to - like doing everything else in their lives.

shit was before my time

I HAVED NO IDEA WHAT'S GOING ON RIGHT NOW!
-- underwater ghost ship picture (skowly), Thursday, January 11, 2007 4:50 PM (9 months ago) Bookmark Link

same as it ever was

I think you are being much too dogmatic and intolerant by insisting that the path you took would amount to the same thing for others as it was for you.

cutty did not do this

everybody otm

YOU HAVE TO WAKE UP ONE DAY AND WANT TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE. ALL OF IT. WHETHER IT'S DRUG ADDICTION OR OBESITY.

You simply have to!

Sometimes people give you shit about something because you need to do something about it. That's how stigma works. That doesn't mean they're right, OR WRONG. People being jerks is a lame excuse for you to blow it.

it's funny because i was going to cut and paste that as an example of him NOT saying that everyone has to take the same path. realizing that changes need to be made /= making the same changes as other people.

xp to aimless.

and yes, aimless, you actuall DO HAVE TO DO THAT. are you taking offense at the "ALL OF IT" part, or the changing part? i don't really see your point.

actually you just have to take an interest in yourself, instead of worrying about other people taking an interest in you

the rest is butter

"I'm gonna keep letting my self down because people aren't encouraging me right" is bullshit.

maybe everyone should take a moment and re-read my posts. i'm not as bad as you think i am. this seems to be a reoccurring theme lately.

if you are a drug addict or an alcoholic or can't control eating habits or sleep around when you shouldn't, the simplest solution to the problem is to STOP DOING THAT THING. and if that habit has permeated your life so much as to make itself a chronic, ever present problem, then yes, the only thing you can do is to decide that you need to change. and possibly change like a lot.

also, tombot OTM.

you don't have to want to change your whole life, though, just the parts you would rather do without. like a big ass, or a cocaine habit, or binge drinking, or staying up too late, or cutting your arms up. I'm on a "go me" kick right now but hell if that means I'm going to spend my weekend out being in the sunshine when I have perfectly good videogames at home. I got simple goals, for me.

cutty:

http://www.finishing-school.net/images/menu.jpgp

The sticking point is "wanting", not "all of it". A lack of desire is not always the obstacle. The implication is that, if they really wanted it enough it would happen. This is a false conclusion.

Who's stopping them?

you have to want it for the right reason cf. my post above.
if other people are the reason why then other people will very shortly become the reason why not.

no, actually it isn't. it's the necessary conclusion. unless you see the hand of god pushing morbidly obese people into shape, what else makes it "happen"

xpost to aimless

cutty YOU HAVE A BIG EGO.
these other people DO NOT.

The sticking point is "wanting", not "all of it". A lack of desire is not always the obstacle. The implication is that, if they really wanted it enough it would happen. This is a false conclusion.

-- Aimless, Tuesday, October 30, 2007 8:28 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

you're right, but probably not for the reasons you think you are.

so do you!

I know, takes one to know one! I didn't for a really long time though.

i'd venture to say your ego is bigger than mine actually, but i like you and i value your posts

HUGGLEZ

how long till aimless' three paragraph rebuttal

I'm just saying the transition from self-disgust to self-interest is really the key and it's hardly straightforward. It's easy to gloss over though because the english language seems kind of lacking in words to describe it

and it's especially tough if you were raised to think of all self-interest as selfish and bad

as an ex-obesey and current pudgy (went from ~260 to about 185 presently at 5'11"), it does take something to get out of an emotional rut to actually start the process of getting healthier. I lost the bulk of my weight 5 or 6 years ago and prior to that had this rly shitty cycle of being sad about being fat and then getting fatter cos i was sad about it. i became vegetarian for ethical reasons then, but it sure as fuck helped that i wasn't eating hot pockets anymore. exercised pretty frequently, like 5 or 6 times a week for about 45 minutes each of incline walking. pretty sedentary now, unfortunately and i think i was up to 195 at one point a month or so and i got all oh hellll no not gonna be 200 lbs again but i am back at my equilibrium weight again, roughly.

awesome! good work, keep it up!

OH HELLLL NO

there's also a thing with any kind of stigma where there's a natural and not entirely wrong-per-se impulse to be like "fuck these cockfarmers and their judgments, i am going to do whatever the fuck i want" -- which in the end, of course, gives just as much -- if not more -- control to the judgmental cockfarmers in question

aaaaand Tomboto has said that already in a difft way.. i am going to bed!

thinking back to when i first started exercising regularly (3 or 4 years ago?) it would have discouraged me to focus on losing weight, i don't think i even weighed myself for 6 months at least. i remember saying in my head a lot that it was about making a lifestyle change, not getting ripped/skinny/etc. in a couple of months.

(of course another factor was that my relationship was dissolving, so that kind of freed me to focus on selfish stuff more, which i think was actually healthy)

word to that

I wish the extra-cultural thing tracer brought up had caught on. It's mind-boggling to watch America's struggles with weight from inside of another culture (I'm American but I live in Japan). I teach at elementary schools here, and after doing it about seven months i saw a program on TV about American schools. The size of the Americans, after getting used to my kids, blew my mind. I agree with Laurel et al. that the social stigma is unfair and counterproductive, but is it not OK to try and change our society's values so that all of our kids don't look like little elephant men?

in other words, WILL SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?

you have some good advice, cutty. i need to start going to the gym, i think i'd feel a lot better - i'm low energy a lot of the time. and then wouldn't worry so much about what i eat so i don't gain weight.

re: other countries, hell, here in the US it's weird enough going from a big city to hometown back in a rural county, i'm like omg, everyone is very big here. where was that study that showed the most likely influence on someone gaining weight was their friends' weight?

I thought about going to the gym because of this thread but I had dinner plans.

(I'm American but I live in Japan). I teach at elementary schools here, and after doing it about seven months i saw a program on TV about American schools. The size of the Americans, after getting used to my kids, blew my mind.

Maybe I have a very skewed view but, whenever I'm in the US, it strikes me that most teenagers seem reasonably okay. It's when they graduated from college, get married, have a job, the trouble starts.

That said, in Japan they are just so extremely skinny. Young'n'old.

xpost - i don't really know what to do at the gym, i hate all those machines, but can't go running when it gets cold (eyes start watering + i get these awful stabbing pains in my ears even if i have them covered, it sucks)

i was on campus @ my undergrad recently and it struck me that the students all seemed.. bigger than they did when i went there. used to be everyone stayed on/near campus and was outside all the time. when i dropped by it was a beautiful fall afternoon and almost no one was to be seen, now most everyone drives home for the weekend

i am still in awe of processed food industry and the general blind eye to its connection to health issues on all fronts incl obesity. b/c on one hand it appears that 'going organic' and eating fresh foods is gaining prominence in the certain media spheres, the reality is that corn syrupolase and palmaticsoy oil are in freakin everything that has a primetime tv advertising budget

while exercise is one thing, and i think we are meant to move as much as possible, the rapid switch in the last 50+ yrs (time enough for a few generations to learn how to not eat well) to food that more about being sold (economy) than about being eaten (community) plays a huge role in why people are fat. on one hand, yes, the individual does have to wrest control but obv not everyone is doing that or able to do that or 'wants' to do that. if you are convinced that eating chips and hot dogs and sugar-coated cereal and things is the way it has been and always will be even if at the same time someone's saying that it's 'bad' for you, it's hard to break that so-called habit. it's become a part of one's identity - and food is so huge in identity formation, esp b/c y'know we eat from day one. mostly to say that food is obv as cultural/social an issue as it is an individual one, tied up in multileveled issues of power and control - oppression/repression work in tandem but bucking up won't nec get you where you want to be in all cases.

(still haven't headed over to that feminism thread or anything to drop some foucault crit etc but wld be similar reasoning)

also re: japan - guy, they lost the war

guyS i mean and also what i mean is years of poor nutrition for over a generation will f up a lot of things healthwise

the article linked to in this thread: NUTRITION cover story in Times Magazine (Jan. 24, 07) covers a lot of what we're saying. and is smart and on point.

that said, it's funny/gross how wealth since wwII has generally translated into MORE rather than better
xpost
i will read that and not just b/c that is my birthday

oh yes i have read that i think posted in that thread

So spot on, rrrobyn. Also if you were a pudgy kid and you were made conscious of it all the time, your relationship with even HEALTHY foods is fucked up. You've got to get past that if you're going to see any long-term changes, that's a big part of the seismic shift that gbx and others are referring to even if they don't know it. Easy to say when your rel'ship with food is NOM NOM MAKES BODY WORK HARD BOOYAH, though.

Like, it's really good to substitute carrots for cookies, but it's even BETTER to grow (with therapy or personal realization or whatever) to a place where you can say "I don't need that carrot right now just because it's there." That can mean undoing decades of self-loathing and harmful attitudes/punishments/criticisms, though.

Hahaha which is maybe closer to the drug addiction analogy than anything else on this thread.

yeah being a fat kid fucks you up bad.

The problem with drug addiction analogies is that you can never go cold turkey with food.

key word i think: relationships
this is where the 'science of food' gets to me - you can count all the calories and portion sizes and vitamin content of foods you want but that only changes the language you use - the relationship at core remains the same - it's the difference btwn discussion and discourse, where discourse takes into account the context and reasoning behind the language

xpossts

No, absolutely Melissa.

i wish i could give an actual 'solution' though - i guess the solution is all highly individual? therapy? sports? quiting yr job? finding god? actually loving yrself instead or who you think you should be? etc?

Dean was ahead of his time. RIP HOMIE

robyn, i think the japanese were thin before the war, too. pretty sure <i>everyone</i> was.

the reason i brought up japan was because it is like america, where corporations run the country and as with everything else have commercialized the idea of eating. but the crap doesn't sell as much here, for instance the Coca Cola corporation sells way more bottles of cold, unsweetened tea than cans of soda. cultural ideas about nutrition are still very important. my problem with the 'it's ok to be fat' mantra is that children are learning that, too, thus perpetuating the culture that says it's OK to eat the garbage the American food industry feeds us (well, you. I got the fuck out).

According to my mum the Japanese (or Budhists?) think that you should eat 80 procent. I guess in the US it's more 120 procent. :-)

yeah i was being a bit facetious and generalizing there

here's some advice to you kids in yer 20s, early 30s. if you are skinny/thin/fit, keep it up because you're gonna hit your mid-30s and your metabolism is gonna slooooooow down, and at that point job & family responsibilities are gonna probably be such that getting in exercise routines is gonna be tougher. i gained 20-25 pounds over a 5 year period in my late 30s, but i had such a "margin for error" that it only bumped me up into "normal" range. at that point, i realized i had to change some things and did because the 5 pounds a year track does lead to fatteyland eventually. now i'm fine at 175 and 6'1" but trying to lose large amounts of weight past 40 is hard, so leave youself a resonable "cushion" (ha) and you'll be well positioned when U R OLD.

xpost
i think in the US it's mostly carbs when it comes down to percentages!

wait i need to wear my glasses if i'm going to have the screen this far from my eyes - i thought that said 80 percent protein adn i was confused. i am still confused. i am tired. i am not hungry tho.

what is procent??

%

haha yeah i figured but of what? what is this mythical 100% perfect place?

as if all the rest weren't enough:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7069914.stm

There is no new research involved in this document: the panel examined 7,000 existing studies over five years.

The result, they say, is the most comprehensive investigation ever into the risks of certain lifestyle choices.

They see body fat as a key factor in the development of cancer, estimating its significance to be much higher than previously thought.

"But if people are interested in reducing their cancer risk, then following the recommendations is the way to do it," said Professor Martin Wiseman.

"Cancer is not a fate, it is a matter of risk, and you can adjust those risks by how you behave. It is very important that people feel that they are in control of what they do."

Holy fuck, that article is over the edge. Completely bonkers. And it ends with "cancer specialist Professor Karol Sikora said: "There's absolutely nothing magic about 10 bullet points to prevent cancer. The main message I would have is not to worry about it, to enjoy life..."

Hahahahahahhahaa. Right.

that article is so hacky. bacon causes cancer? pseudo-scientific journalism, pls to fuck off.

oh FCOL
cancer in who
kludging 7,000 separate studies together like that seems like a recipe for a big load of horseshit - different controls, different sample sizes, different populations, possibly different ANIMALS involved, etc.

kludging 7,000 studies together in order to pick a TOP TEN list of "recommendations" sounds like one of the most flawed methodologies I can think of, but then again, I don't know the real guts of how they did it.

Linds, preserved meats do contain sodium nitrate & nitrite, and a lot of people suspect it's a carcinogen of some kind...studies on animals in the '70s suggested that it was.

The FDA's current position is that sod nitrite is safe, but then there's this: "National Academy of Sciences...1981 report stated that nitrate does not cause cancer, although some population studies have found an association between high exposure to nitrate levels and certain cancers." So uhhh it doesn't cause it but there's some correlation between cancer and nitrite levels, thanks a lot guys.

I started out feeling self-righteous reading this thread, because I've lost a good amount of weight by denying myself foods I used to eat regularly and running 3-4 times a week.

At the same time I have a lot of socio-economic, cultural and circumstantial advantages that make this possible. I don't really see a simple "it's the fatty's fault" vs. "it's society's fault" answer.

I have the money to buy whatever food I think will be healthy and tasty, within reason, but at the same time I see people with less money loading their carts with sodas and chips and cookies that are not even that cheap. If a person can afford a McDonald's value meal for lunch, they can also afford a turkey sandwich with some veggies on whole grain bread and just skip the damned fries and soda.

Our advertising promotes the idea that healthy eating is not manly, or that it's not giving you that "break" that you "deserve." (as though the indegestion and sluggishness following fast food consumption is stress-relieving). It also generally discourages self-denial, for obvious reasons.

But yeah, a lot of fat people are still partly to blame for being fat - even with so many cultural factors working against them, there are also plenty of opportunities for change. And taking a line of "it's not their fault," just further encourages the slide into gluttony.

My mom didn't let us have hot dogs or ham or stuff, and bacon rarely, like for holiday brek only.

just further encourages the slide into gluttony.

You clearly weren't feeling any less self-righteous by the end of the thread, either.

Yeah I'm not happy with the "no bacon" part of their recommendations.

Our advertising promotes the idea that healthy eating is not manly, or that it's not giving you that "break" that you "deserve."

I think this is as close to a smoking gun as we will ever have in the "why are so many Americans teh fatteys" question that gets posed again and again in every second-section newspaper lifestyle supplement ever.

True or False: some fat people "love" to eat.

http://m.assetbar.com/uuabwrsWJ.gif

Speaking of lifestyle supplement features, one reason the "Mediterranean diet" works is because the food actually fucking tastes good, unlike some unconscionable concoction by a *nutritionist* (who is basically just the other side of the same cultural coin)

what are the responsibilities that come with the right of being fat?

If a person can afford a McDonald's value meal for lunch, they can also afford a turkey sandwich with some veggies on whole grain bread and just skip the damned fries and soda.

it always surprises me how not-so-cheap mcdonald's is, at least in nyc. dollar menu aside, a quarter pounder value meal costs more than a freshly-made deli sandwich from most of the places around my office.

keeping to the right of the aisle on your 'jazzy' to facilitate traffic flow in the grocery/ wal-mart

x-post

or left if you're in the UK etc.

is most of turkeys' bulk made from corn nowadays too?

If a person can afford a McDonald's value meal for lunch, they can also afford a turkey sandwich with some veggies on whole grain bread and just skip the damned fries and soda.

it always surprises me how not-so-cheap mcdonald's is, at least in nyc. dollar menu aside, a quarter pounder value meal costs more than a freshly-made deli sandwich from most of the places around my office.

yeah @ this. I recently made a trip to the nearby Wendy's because of time/ work constraints and ended up spending right at $6 for a 'value deal' (no biggie anything, either). Man, I can eat way better for perhaps a dollar or so more at semi-close meat & three (w/ grilled catfish), hippie lunch counter, or lunch menu at greek deli.

It is odd how a place like McDonald's, which was invented, Holiday-Inn style, as a sanitized counterweight to all the vaguely suspicious mystery-meat roadside burger joints staffed by some dude wearing a bandana who calls himself "Dip", has come to be the epitome of bad health and mystery meat itself. But still it retains some palimpsest of this "trustworthy" past. It has this weird cultural authority that draws people to it.

well that's industrialism, innit. people wouldn't drive a homemade car, but you think a toyota off the line will function with robotic precision. i don't think of "mystery meat" when i think of mcdonalds, i think of something ruthlessly and relentlessly regularized. an anti-mystery! i mean, i don't know wtf goes in that stuff but i have certainty that it's been mapped down to the molecule by someone.

yeah, it's a mystery but at least it's an anonymous mystery.

and it ain't chinese!!!

McDonalds "meat" = 30% wadded up newspaper, 30% corn starch, 30% lead, 10% "love"

The new Angus Burger is good though!

And I'm serious. I eat red meat like maybe once a month at most, just for a fix, and last time I needed my fix I got an Angus burger at the drive thru on the way home. It was the break I deserved!

(I'm not sure why I'm capitalizing "angus" like it's the burger's given name)

because it's the proper name of a cow

at least "love" is high in protein

xxxxpost

Ah! So it is! (xpost)

ok i know dick all about beef cattle, but isn't this "angus" nonsense of the past couple years the biggest fake-distinction marketing hoo hah since forever? like saying your cold medicine has a "histamine blocker" when antihistamines have been on the shelf since 1931?