The challenge is what is the closest hack to get around it, as most people, admittedly myself included, are not willing to exercise? Semaglutide seems to be the best bet right now.
There is no hack. Exercise is non-negotiable. Our lifestyles are far too sedantry for our bodies' evolution. If you are not willing to add a small amount of exercise into your life, you are admitting that you are happy to at least have health issues later in life or at most willing to live a shorter life.
"Exercise" is a bad way to lose weight because what is traditionally considered as exercise is 30 minutes to 1 hour of high intensity activities. If you live a sedentary life, exercise isn't going to help.
Passive exercise, that you do throughout the day, though, is a great way to expend calories. Walk more, bike for transport, use a standing desk, etc. That's the difference between 1500 calories and 2200.
I don't think that's as universally agreed upon as you claim. I know of plenty of women who struggled to lose weight via diet and cardio, and then turned things round when they started eating high protein and lifting weights.
Diet + cardio with no strength work can put people into 'gotta make it through this famine' mode, where their metabolism slows right down to eke out the stores as long as possible.
Exercising is easy, most people can find an activity they enjoy doing. Eating right is a far more demanding task, and sadly that's what matters when it comes to losing weight.
Exercising in the US is hard AF, and only getting harder. There’s comparatively little opportunity to make exercise a part of daily routine. I’m either behind the wheel or a car or behind a desk all day.
lol. If your rationales for not exercising have made it all the way to the country itself being the problem, well.. you might want to just acknowledge that you don't want to exercise.
As a counterpoint, I also live in the US and have never found making time to exercise to be some kind of insurmountable task -- even when I was commuting almost 3h/day. Exercising requires just a few hours out of your whole week
My hack is to not own a car and commute by bike. It is exercise, but camouflages as required activity. I also try to deliberately walk instead of taking the subway regularly, even if it takes an hour or so.
The hack is to ingrain the law of physics to ur brain so that you get reminded constantly that you got to eat healthy and exercise to maintain your physical body
Worry about exercise later once you're at a healthy weight. You can lose it solely by watching what you eat. "Snacking" is the single worst dietary habit of the past 100 years. Eating all the time and having your insulin constantly elevated is not good for the body.
something bad is going to happen to people who think they can just take Ozempic for the rest of their lives
there's no way a drug that effective has no side effects
I know people who have lost weight using Ozempic...you only lose weight...you do not become healthy...you do not gain muscle...you just are a flabby person who is less fat
Because you claimed there were “no ifs or buts”. But there are. When you lose weight, you have to be careful to do it in a safe way. Even the safest way of losing weight, diet and exercise, can kill you if done the wrong way.
in cases of Ozempic use I have observed - less food is consumed but it is still tending to be garbage
weight is lost but I doubt there is a substantial health gain
I have read that the intent was to bootstrap better habits and then stop taking Ozempic once the better habits took hold...instead people will just take it forever and keeping eating (fewer) burgers
"if you can’t find time to exercise, you’ll have to find time to be sick."
How much time for that do you have? Pushing around a walker when you're 65? Spending hours on the phone with Customer Support for some insurance issue?
A general rule is that you burn about 100 calories in a mile jog. A 12oz can of Coke has about 140 calories, a quarter of a cup of nuts has about 200 calories, an apple has about 100 calories.
Exercise is important for many reasons, but not for preventing obesity. Unless you're running marathons, or exercising like somebody who is, the amount of calories you will burn from exercising will in no way whatsoever compare to what you eat. If you start eating more because you go to the gym, you'll almost certainly end up gaining weight.
The answer today is the same as it's been for thousands of years.
The critical piece you're missing is that building and maintaining muscle mass increases your metabolism greatly. Michael Phelps eats 10,000 calories a day. This an extreme example, but the principle is true for all of us.
Supposedly the 10,000 calorie diet of Michael Phelps is marketing vs factual. I don’t have a source for this (but happy to search if requested) but humans are not likely to be able to absorb 10,000 calories daily; I believe the maximum is a function of one’s basal metabolism but would lie around 6,500 calories for an elite athlete.
It may actually not. The hypothesis may be that building and maintaining muscle simply increases linearly with the increase of lean muscle mass. If (and these are made up numbers) one lb of lean muscle mass takes 10 cals to maintain, adding 5lbs of muscle would only increase your caloric needs be 50 cals.
At 190lb, my BMI is 26.5, but I'm relatively muscular with a body fat % of around 15%. I have more than 5lbs more muscle than an average person, but my required daily caloric needs are only a few hundred cals more a day at most.
I don't know if there's a way to properly measure the amount of cals it takes to build muscle. "Building Muscle" isn't just one thing. Muscle fiber being different than simply glycogen storing in the muscle, being different than mitochondria proliferation within the muscle cell being different than just water weight from getting on Creatine. All which produce "bigger muscle".
Agreed, it's a thorny issue. My own subjective experience of lifting weights 3x per week vs. biking 5+ miles into work 5x a week is that the lifting was far more successful in helping me lose weight. Ideally, you do both. But I worry that many people, especially those in this industry, underestimate the weight loss gains from building muscle.
FWIW, bikes are built to be efficient means of moving. Biking 50 or 100 miles per week only burns 250-500 calories, so you wouldn’t expect much weight change.
That volume is good for keeping your body limber, but it’s not really exercise in terms of weight loss or cardio conditioning.
Your personal experience sounds exceptional. Do you think that lifestyle changes you made while weightlifting also impacting your waistline? As in: you probably looked a little closer at what you were eating, so as to properly support you weightlifting habit.
I would think the 20-40 hours/week of exercise I do has more of an impact on how my calories are burned than the raising of my basal metabolism of the extra 20lbs of muscle I have over a very passive version of myself.
Like if I took a week off and ate the same, I as well would put on fat. Just 50-200 x 7 calories (.10 to .4 lbs) less of it. And that is if my eating habits were the same, which they would not - exercise is an incredibly good appetite stimulant, which people who attempt to exercise to lose weight find out quickly.
What I'm getting at - and maybe what you're getting at to is: long term - decades let's say of lifestyle choices leads to things like diabetes. It's not change that happens in a year. Hard for humans to grok.
I think it has more to do with the time spent in cold water and calories burnt from his training. Having said that, I’ve read that muscle mass is the main driver of a “high metabolism.”
I'm not sold on ice baths, but maybe I'm wrong. Training certainly inflates that number. My own anecdata indicates that building muscle has been far more time-efficient for me than running or cycling. At least with respect to burning fat.
Is that so? I often get headaches after excercise, that only go away after taking anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen. So I always thought exercise triggers inflammation for me (especially if I go harder than usual).
Exercise does trigger inflammation, and countering that inflammation can in fact degrade the positive effects of exercise. Inflammation is the body's signal to rebuild and strengthen.
I obviously can't tell from your hn post (and IANA doctor), but sometimes I get headaches because I haven't drank enough water, or I've just gone out too hard.
This is right. The body has all kinds of mechanisms that use inflammation to repair and reshape. Exercise channels this into breakdown and strengthening of muscles, blood vessel enlargement, and a host of other beneficial tissue manipulations.
Making sure you're adequately hydrated is important, as is supporting the cellular activity with nutrition.
Where things go off the rails is when the body spends excess energy and inflammatory responses on things not connected to repair and replenish operations. You get acid reflux, allergies, tumors, even dementia-related diseases.
Of course it's not that simple, but for nearly every single one of those pathologies, exercise improves the chances to avoid them, or helps reduce their negative outcomes. (IANA doctor either.)
I don’t know about you but exercise is one of my most enjoyable parts of my day. Yoga, walking, biking, dancing, swimming are all really enjoyable. Don’t push yourself hard, just go through the motions.
> as most people, admittedly myself included, are not willing to exercise?
I'll never get that, we only get one shot at life, even a few hours of exercise per _week_ will greatly increase your quality of life and healthy life span, there are no better medicine, nothing will give you your body back once it's too late. Some people on this forum will grind 60+ (even much more) hours per week at work, absolutely wrecking their body for "success" just to be shadow of themselves at 40. I see it everywhere online "after 40 everything hurt" "I can't sneak on my kids because my knees pop at every steps". What a sad state of affair...
Get out there, get in shape, it's life's best cheat code, everything gets better, your body evolved for that very thing for hundred millions of years, you don't even need that much dedication or time. Learn to master your body, learn about nutrition, learn self control. Run, swim, climb, lift weight, yoga, dance, try everything and keep what you enjoy
I'll always remember the day a 60+ years old climber absolutely humiliated me on the wall by effortlessly completing a climb on the first try while I couldn't even get to the half point, I was 25 and in what I though was a good shape
Not exercising is like buying a high performance car and waiting for the engine check light to do an oil change. Take care of your body, once it's gone it's gone
Dopamine is well: a hell of a drug, and there's far easier ways to get it than excising. For example: video games. Our brains want the most pleasure from the least amount of effort and don't work on long timelines in the future. So, it makes sense.
But I'm with you - I find that exercise works well for me as the one of the best things that makes life better. But I also avoid things like video games, drugs, too much sex with too many different partners (I keep it to one at a time) - that sort of thing, as I know it'll just throw me off.
Exercising is like vacuum cleaning, you never want to do it but once you're done with it you're happy you've done it. Binge eating or playing video games too long has the opposite effect on me, very easy to ease into, absolute regret as soon as I'm done
That's why I said it train self control, you focus on "future you", not "immediate you"
I have to admit it's been a very long time since I've binged on video games - I couldn't even imagine doing it now - akin to going on a drinking bender. Just no allure or attraction to it. Helps though, not to own a TV, or a console, or a controller.
My #1 hack is not having low-quality, high-sugar snacks in my house. Instead of sugared soda I have flavored soda water (Fresca, specifically) and sugar-free cola. When I do indulge in snacks I don't buy bulk, I buy the small packages, even though they're more expensive per ounce. In fact, that they're more expensive is a plus.
If I have to go way out of the way to binge on junk I'm probably not going to do it.
"The challenge is what is the closest hack to get around it ..."
I owe it to you to be capable of (among other things): a few minutes of chest compressions, running a mile or so for help, and dragging an adult body a few hundred feet to safety.
I owe that to you and we owe it to each other.
There will be no hack to "get around it".
Conversely: If you can do these things, I don't care what you look like or what your actuarial table shows or what you ate for lunch.
The closest hack is living in a walkable city, and biking for personal transportation. There's a reason that obesity is not as big a problem in Europe, and even more so in East Asia.
Best hacks I've found: Get a young dog, get really into YT cooking shows.
Dog will get you out and moving in any weather. They really don't understand why you're too tired for a walk this evening.
YT cooking shows will show the fun side of cooking and get you to make food at home more. Then you're less likely to put so much oil/butter/sugar/etc into dishes vs. eating out. And you also get a taste for vegetables. You kinda tend to eat healthier in general-ish.
Combine all that with a good sleep routine and you're pointed in the right direction. Takes about 3 months though.
I think the article is arguing that there is such a thing as being healthy with a high BMI? It's just that those people generally don't have an excessively high body fat %. But if we are going by BMI, there are plenty of people who have "healthy obesity", on account of muscle mass.
I've been working out for many years and I think I have a healthy body fat percentage but since I'm not very thin its hard to tell without taking specific measurements, but I would say that most men who go to the gym frequently are in the category of "healthy obese", or overweight, if you just take into account their BMI.
Nobody who is jacked has ever been considered obese. This weird "gotcha" about bodybuilders and alike having the BMI of an obese person and being healthy is a meaningless edge cases that tries to stray away discussions.
The vast majority of people are not gym rats, thus their BMI roughly corresponds to their fat levels, correctly approximating overweightness and obesity.
In fact BMI actually underestimates obesity for most of the population.
> BMI characterized 26% of the subjects as obese, while DXA indicated that 64% of them were obese. 39% of the subjects were classified as non-obese by BMI, but were found to be obese by DXA.
Are bodybuilders really healthy though? I'm sure it's healthier than being obese but the kind of pressure they put on their body, I wonder if that doesn't cause problems. Like with most things done in extreme amounts of course. Many top athletes also have major issues later in life.
Actually according to studies BMI underestimates body fat. And by a substantial margin too. About 40% of people classes as not obese by BMI are actually obese.
Very few in the other direction; this study doesn't mention them
>Mean BMI was 27.3 (SD = 5.9) and mean percent body fat was 31.3% (SD = 9.3). BMI characterized 26% of the subjects as obese, while DXA indicated that 64% of them were obese. 39% of the subjects were classified as non-obese by BMI, but were found to be obese by DXA. BMI misclassified 25% men and 48% women. Meanwhile, a strong relationship was demonstrated between increased leptin and increased body fat.
In the case of Hogan, I think you can find photos of him in the 1980s where he looks overweight. He was muscular enough that it didn't matter much, but he was far from being "ripped". He downsized in the 1990s and I think he looked better for it.
> there are plenty of people who have "healthy obesity", on account of muscle mass.
There are _very few_ people who have a BMI over 30 purely by having an extreme amount of muscle mass and most of them are on steroids. Also, there are weight related issues for which it is irrelevant whether the extra weight is fat or muscle mass.
Yes, BMI has problems, but "there are so many hypermuscular people that it makes BMI obsolete" is certainly not one. Ironically, people with normal weight but high body fat percentage ("skinny fat") are one of the problems of BMI, which is almost never brought up by BMI critics.
"there are plenty of people who have "healthy obesity", on account of muscle mass."
The sheer amount of muscle you would need to exceed BMI 30 (obesity threshold) is pretty rare to see "in the wild" and you have to ask how many such people abused steroids etc. to grow so muscular. Natural Homo sapiens build is fairly lean, we are no Neanderthals.
A very fit guy from a normal city gym may have BMI in the overweight territory (so, say, 26-27), but > 30 is too much.
I think you're imagining that they have an insane amount of muscle with low body fat, but I'm saying somebody who could be at the higher end of healthy body fat but with plenty of muscle might actually be overweight or even obese by BMI, even if they are perfectly healthy.
> you can reach that pretty easily if you're a man and you weight lift consistently for a couple of months
and also have significant body fat. Having a BMI over 25 and being lean is not something you can achieve by just going to the gym a few months. It takes time to build muscle.
> I would say that most men who go to the gym frequently are in the category of "healthy obese", or overweight, if you just take into account their BMI.
Maybe it’s regional, but that’s not what I see in the places I’ve lived.
Almost all except some of the young just-post-college athletes are clearly bulked out with fairly high body fat and plainly inverted waist to hip ratios. They can perform a handful of lifts at high weight, but have negligible cardio conditioning, poor engagement of support muscles and stabilizers, and many are sporting progressively worsening back issues.
The trend in gym practice for men, around me, seems to be really poorly matched to healthfulness in general and shows very little evidence of producing lean high-BMI results. But again, maybe its regional.
You've missed the point of BMI. It's a population metric. The application of it to the individual really only works in the edges (too skinny, too fat) where it becomes obvious. I've never seen a BMI confidence interval (doctors are bad at statistics) but I would imagine the 95% CI would reveal the exact thing you stated. I am an example of this as well. By DEXA I measure at ~19% bodyfat yet my BMI is 27.6. However, it has never been a problem of misdiagnosis and a doctor has never been compelled to bring up my weight.
This argument you're presenting is used by the "fat positivity" movement to discourage the use of population measures that ARE effective in creating useful statistical analysis of health risks. Like all animals humans are subject to the laws of physics. When you have more mass per unit height your body has to work harder. If you then go on and continue to add or maintain this mass you develop health problems. You don't need an MD to see the intention of the metric nor the absurdity of promoting fatness as a "positive" trait. The only thing this reveals is that the progressives have gaslighted society into believing a lie by using "science" as a kudgel to beat you into compliance with.
What interests me is how anybody could ever come to believe otherwise. The contrary belief flies in the face of all common sense, popular experience and medical science. It seems to come entirely from propaganda on social media telling fat people what they want to believe.
It is a reaction to obese people being butt of jokes and now majority becoming obese. If you can't change lifestyle you can use contra views as coping mechanisms. Also, like anti-science believing in snake oils and flat earth over the internet you can live in an echo chamber custom made for you.
dont forget multinational processed food and snack vendors benefit immensely from the perception that hyperconsumption of sugar salt and fat is normal and good, and that your obesity is a shameless wonder to cherish unto the grave.
look at the sons and daughters of branded food conglomerate moguls and their top executives. youll likely find them quite trim.
Clothing companies have also played a role in normalizing obesity with advertisements featuring obese people, often accompanied by pro-fat propaganda slogans like "healthy at any size". They do this out of pure greed; fat people have money and buy clothes, so it makes business sense to advertise products to them. But these ads are bad for public health because they promote unhealthy standards as normal and okay.
Being obese isn’t a root cause. It is a symptom of something else.
Particularly, when it is a symptom of depression, believing in “healthy obesity” can be enabling even if it’s not the truth. That person (not statistic) needs to see themselves as healthy and loved to have a chance at being healthy.
Telling them to eat better or exercise is thinking about yourself in a generic version of their circumstances rather than them in their actual circumstances.
> That person (not statistic) needs to see themselves as healthy and loved to have a chance at being healthy.
I don't buy it. Tolerance towards fatness has risen since the 80s, as have weights; both have gone up at the same time. The more tolerance our society has for fatness, the fatter people get. If more tolerance for fat people were the key to getting people to lose weight then there should be an inverse relationship between the two, but that just hasn't happened.
I'm just going off the research, you can buy whatever you want.
"Health obesity" isn't about staying obese, it is about shifting social stigmas as they seem to contribute (paradoxically) to obesity[1]. Why is this something you feel the need to support publicly and vocally instead of letting people's health be between them and their doctors (who also need to work on stigmas[2])? The more society makes this a social issue, the worse off people will be when external stressors land [3].
Lying to people about an objective perspective of their current state of being is good for them?
Feeling better in the moment just enables people to ignore the root cause and thus fail to make progress. They need truth that their current state sucks, hope that it could be better, and to recognize that their own agency has an outsized effect on their future. And maybe they could use some help breaking down their problems into smaller more achievable steps.
It they see themselves just as healthy as obese, why would they want not to be obese?
Sounds like enabling obesity to me.
Telling them to eat better or exercise doesn't work because it's a pain in the ass to be in a caloric deficit. They have statistically low dopamine levels (among other markers being out of wack) so they just don't have the mental fuel to deal with doing what's hard. That's what lead them to be obese in the first place, seeking comfort in food, sitting on their butt and avoiding the harshness of their reality.
Another key component are high cortisol levels (ie chronic stress due to past traumas causing depression and other mental illnesses), hindering the parasympathetic brain to switch on digestive metabolism.
You don't solve all these underling issues by saying "hey fat isn't that bad, you can still be healthy being heavy".
Like you wouldn't say to a drug addict "hey drugs aren't that bad for you" to make them feel less shitty about their situation.
The key here is to encourage and promote healthy behaviors no matter what size you are, and to treat human beings like humans. I don't know why it became socially acceptable to treat others like absolute garbage in public, but it sure isn't going to help society become healthier.
How do we know it isn't going to help? Because we've been trying it for decades. Thin people yelling at fat people to lose weight in public does nothing. Time to focus on the systemic unhealthy issues our culture has and stop treating someone's fatness as their own, individual failure.
1. Historically being fat was considered a sign of good health. Of course, this was during times of massive food scarcity and the definition of fat was probably very different from what we consider fat today.
2. Massive amounts of money involved in telling people to eat/drink more, and then spend more money in gyms and taking pills to lose that weight. As opposed to just eating less and then living normal healthy active lives. There’s not much money in the latter.
3. People wanting to stop fat-shaming (which is also unequivocally bad…fat shaming only makes it harder for people to lose weight), trying to convince other people that someone being fat does not make them bad, quickly morphing into being fat is good.
I'm interested in 3. Is there any research or data about that?
I do not encourage fat shaming at all, but I can also imagine that in some cases shame may be a powerful motivator for some people. Is there hard data showing that it actually makes it harder?
What I’ve always heard is that if it’s something someone can’t fix in 5 minutes they probably already know and you telling them isn’t helping
Now it’s a different story if you’re willing to work with them daily to help them lose weight or something similar. But just telling your friend “he your fat, it’s bad for you fix it” will only hurt
Shame implies a personal failing, which readily translates into feelings of guilt and helplessness.
It is not at all a constructive approach.
The "healthy obesity" thing is the pendulum flying to the opposite end of the spectrum: unconditional support turned into acceptance and promotion of what we know to not be true.
"Shame implies a personal failing, which readily translates into recognizing and correcting those personal failings."
In the 20th century, Americans fat shamed each other and were less fat. Today in Asia, people still fat shame each other and they're a lot less fat than Americans.
Anecdotally, I made a comment to a non-obese 20 something year old about how it is unhealthy to be obese. They went absolutely ballistic saying that I was fat-shaming and that you can’t say obesity is unhealthy.
Many fat shamers use t
Health as an excuse to allow themselves to treat fat people like shit.
Unfortunately getting into that argument is a minefield.
Just let them be adults and manager their life as they please. At one point they might becone fed up with life as a fat person and they'll make the effort.
And it they don't, well, there are people who smoke from teenage years all the way to the grave
But, either eay, people dont humiliate smokers the way they do with fat people
> But, either eay, people dont humiliate smokers the way they do with fat people
No, we just tax the shit out of tobacco, exclude them from certain insurance plans, blame and shame them about smoking indoors or inside vehicles, and tell smokers to go huddle outside and off to the side, away from doors, windows, and air intakes, while they do the thing we don't like.
Or were you thinking of air travel, where the difference between a smoker and a non-smoker is either negligible (because they aren't currently smoking), or completely excludes the smoker from the activity (because 16 hours in a plane is too long without a cigarette for them).
Humiliate them? Not often. But we sure as hell told them to take it someplace else; anyplace else, just not near the rest of us.
I think shame can be powerful for many people, but it has negative side-effects that don't seem to be necessary. Obesity also has large genetic and environmental components[1], as well. Shame can make it hard for people to seek help, since the shame can be internalized to the degree that they don't feel like their life is worth fixing.
Not just that - the fear of being told their health issues are due to their weight (regardless of whether that's true) and the consequent feelings of shame can discourage many people from seeking medical help of any sort, often until it's too late. But it would be just as irresponsible for a medical professional to tell a patient their obesity is healthy as it is to immediately attribute whatever medical complaint they might have to excess weight (which, from what I've heard, still happens a lot).
Just some anecdata here, but I was toeing the line between overweight and obese about a year ago. I read David Goggins book Can't Hurt Me, and one of the things he talked about was having a note in the mirror reminding you of your goals (real novel concept ikr?). Anyways, the way he phrased it was something like, "If you're fat and don't want to be, right down the raw truth on that note and read it every morning, then write down how you'll fix it". I wrote something along those lines down, and read it every morning. The guilt and shame I felt from allowing myself to slip up this bad definitely helped motivate me.
1 year later, and I'm down 35 pounds with another 10-20 to go. I feel great! Walking doesn't hurt anymore, doing physical stuff is fun again, and I have more energy than I used to. All that to say, the guilt and shame definitely helped motivate me, but YMMV :)
Constant reminders are great, just make sure to put some positive ones up, too.
On a related note, find yourself in a woman’s house and notice the inspirational text artwork. “Eat, Love, Pray”, “Worrying works because it never happens”, etc. These little signs are powerful.
A bit brief though, probably need to check the cited material. The overall theme of the report as awhile though is that motivation issues are less of a factor than generally believed.
I think changing the name doesn't take away the hate at the core here. People would be as fine with "fat-bullying" as they are with "fat-shaming", they see it as somewhere between "their social right" and "actually helping the person".
It is the same as changing "retard" to "mentally challenged" or "handicapped" to "disabled"... the next term just becomes equally toxic because you haven't changed the actual stigma, just the word used to express it.
This is basically "heritage not hate" but for a socially-acceptable target. You're saying racist opinions and discourse are fine as long as you don't act racist.
The stigma causes the hate, they're effectively the same thing (I used them interchangeably) and leads directly to adverse actions against those individuals.
And as I said above - the argument generally shifts at that point to "it's good for them to be attacked, maybe it'll motivate them". Because again, it's just a socially-acceptable vector for hate. We've gradually run out of other forms like racism and sexism, for a while it was homophobia (and the argument was that was a choice too, so it was fine to attack), but we'll always have fat people.
Stop attacking, hating, "stigmatizing", whatever you want to call it, based on traits. It's all "isms" and 50 years ago it is the same argument used to defend racism. Just be civil and treat people like human beings, it's not that complicated.
I think the 3rd point is different for each person. Some people do like "tough love" - being told that they are in a bad place and need to improve will motivate them.
Others, on the other hand, will be pushed further back into the hole by such talk. This is very individual.
>1. Historically being fat was considered a sign of good health. Of course, this was during times of massive food scarcity and the definition of fat was probably very different from what we consider fat today.
I'm surprised you put that in and not:
4. motivated reasoning. People want reasons to justify their current lifestyle and not having to put in hard work to change it.
For point #1, most western cultures already idealize thinness. Therefore that's not really a factor unless you're from a culture that idealizes being fat.
> 1. Historically being fat was considered a sign of good health. Of course, this was during times of massive food scarcity and the definition of fat was probably very different from what we consider fat today.
Wasn't it more a sign of being wealthy and successful? Like if you were fat, it meant you could afford to spend a lot of money/effort on getting food and didn't need to do difficult work outside for 8+ hours a day?
Not sure people were calling it healthy, so much as treating it like a status symbol (because it kinda was).
Not having trouble getting food is, de facto, healthy if having trouble getting food is most people's baseline. You're drawing the distinction in a way that only makes sense from a modern perspective.
There was a professor at my university who initiated to America from India when he was around 20 years old, and ended up accomplishing some great things in his field. People often asked him why he moved to America, expecting some story about believing in oneself, following your dreams, etc.
He always responded: "I just wanted to move to a place where the poor people were fat."
It’s because American society doesn’t let being unhealthy be an affirmative choice.
You either need to demonstrate some kind of shame for your unhealthiness or some kind rationale that explains how its actually healthy.
The honest facts that “I like to eat tasty good” and “I don’t really enjoy too much physical activity” are only permissible if you also say “and I can’t help myself” or “and it’s actually not unhealthy.”
It’s a social dance that makes people hide the personal truth that health isn’t the only thing that matters in life.
It isn't the only thing in life of course. If you're healthy but living on the street it's not a very nice life.
For me being obese is not really a choice. It's just really hard to do anything about it, especially because I tend to overeat when I encounter stress in life. And I'm not wired with the discipline to fix it. I often go on diets but they never last.
Also, living alone cooking is a real chore and there's not enough ready made healthy food.
And in terms of exercise I really hate team sports and mindless weight lifting. I do hike a bit though when the season permits.
Are these excuses? Sure but if I could have changed it I would have.
This comment unpacks into a whole world of ideas around obesity which get pushed under the rug by just saying it's "your choice" and you need "discipline" and "diets" to fix it. Most thin people don't stay thin by discipline - or not much discipline. Most thin people don't stay thin by team sports and weightlifting. Most thin people aren't going on diets, ever. Most thin people aren't "choosing" to be thin, they have nature and nurture and culture and environment where thin is the result. 1950 had 10% of Americans being obese. Now 35% are. Has there been a decrease in weightlifting since then? A paucity of dieting? No, surely both of those are on record highs with gym memberships and Weightwatchers being so profitable. What about a collapse of discipline - through one of the most productive times in human history, today with lowest unemployment in 20 years?
Like: car dependent suburbia. If you don't grow up walking to the shops with your parents, walking to the park to play, walking to school, cycling to school, walking or cycling to work; if your only exposure to movement is mandatory exercise at school which is unpleasant, what does that do to your lifelong views? If your environment doesn't have anywhere interesting to walk to, or any sidewalk to walk on, what does that do?
Like: If your parents and family never moved except to get to the car, what kind of early mental expectations does that set you up with? Children try to imitate their parents, if the parents alway groan and complain about having to walk anywhere, that's some kind of lesson.
Like: Livestrong.com says "The average restaurant meal is four times larger than it was in the 1950s. Similarly, the size of American-manufactured dinner plates has increased nearly 23 percent, from 9.6 inch". If you habitually eat out at restaurants and they gradually feed you more, more sugary, food, but you still have the "clean your plate to be polite" mentality, what does that do?
Like: where did this idea of "healthy food" come from? "Health" isn't something in food.
Like: where did the idea that cooking is "a real chore" come from? Can't one grow up to find preparing food a relaxing joy, an interest, an everyday part of life? Or learn to spend less time on it, e.g. meal prepping?
Like: "I tend to overeat when I encounter stress in life" - Where does that behaviour come from? That's learned from somewhere, it isn't innate to cavepeople to have food on hand just in case life gets stressful, it's likely some family or community cultural habit where others might not do that.
I think it was Paul Lutus in a Reddit AMA, someone asked him if he baked much when living in a cabin in the woods, and he said he found it difficult to resist eating baked goods so he just didn't make them or buy them. That kind of discipline is much easier than buying them, having them nearby, and trying to resist eating them every moment forever.
> "Sure but if I could have changed it I would have."
Perhaps you can't, there are suggestions that becoming obese screws up your body forever, so it burns less fat (e.g. prefering quicker feeling of tiredness to reduce movement, rather than breaking the laws of thermodynamics), holds onto fat more strongly, distorts feelings of hunger and satiety and food cravings. UK comedian Ed Gamble who lost a lot of weight jokingly commented about thin people "if you don't think about food, what are you thinking about literally all the time?". It's possible that wasn't joking and years of obsessively thinking about food engrained that as a pattern he will be stuck with for the rest of his life, when always-thin people can forget about food when thinking about other things.
>1950 had 10% of Americans being obese. Now 35% are. Has there been a decrease in weightlifting since then? A paucity of dieting? No, surely both of those are on record highs with gym memberships and Weightwatchers being so profitable. What about a collapse of discipline - through one of the most productive times in human history, today with lowest unemployment in 20 years?
>[...]
>Like: car dependent suburbia
It seems weird to blame car dependent suburbia for the rise from 1950. Did "car dependent suburbia" really get worse compared to 1950? Given urbanization trends, you'd think that car dependence actually went down compared 1950.
1950s coincides with the post-war building boom (mostly suburbs), along with projects like the USA's interstate highways and similar highway building projects around the Western world. Car dependent suburbia definitely got worse around that time, from a combination of factors.
In 1950 40% of people were living in the suburbs. Now 55% are[0]. And that's against a population growth from ~148M then to ~330M now, so 59M suburban people then compared to 180M now and corresponding pressure that would make on size of car parks, moving shops out of centers to places they can have larger car parks, combined with more households with car ownership since 1950 and more cars per household. More population needing more housing, houses trending larger suggests they are more likely suburban or rural than city center, meaning larger overall suburbs and therefore further to travel to get anywhere.
Pew Research[2] says suburbs have grown 6.4 million people by migration from cities and rural populations between 2000 and 2018. Ten fastest growing communities in America in 2021 are suburbs[5].
Car companies made and sold about 58 million cars in the USA in the 1950s decade[3].
Eisenhower's interstate highway act was 1956, and miles of highway has increased by hundreds of thousands since 1990[4].
Trying to frame it in terms of "fault" and "excuses" is petty and unproductive. If 9/10 startups fail, is it "your fault" if your startup fails? You could have picked a better idea, executed faster, gained more skill, done more product-market fit testing, pivoted sooner, charged more, marketed more, AHA! Gotcha! Here's where it's YOUR FAULT and now we've correctly allocated FAULT, we can ... what?
Imagine if you only learned from the experience that you need more revenue sooner instead of using the most fun tech, but you hadn't had it beaten into you that it was YOUR FAULT, that would be ... unfair, right? We'd all be missing an opportunity to put you in your place which you clearly deserve by circular reasoning of being at fault.
Plus it makes us feel better because if it's your fault, that means you weren't crushed by enormous imbalanced forces so that won't happen to us. If nobody can resist the $4Bn/year CocaCola advertising spend on every media platform going, maybe I can't either. But if you're just weak, then I maybe can.
My perception is the opposite. The US is a place where you absolutely can slap your beer gut and make a joke about “having a keg instead of a 6 pack”
Perhaps your social circle doesn’t accept that attitude, but in some of the most obese parts of the country, the norm is to “eat some steak and potatoes and put some meat on your bones, skinny boy”
There’s a reason doctors are afraid to tell patients they’re overweight. People interpret it as a personal attack on their choices rather than a medical diagnosis.
Sure it does. I don't know what part of America you live in, but one of my obese coworkers jokes he eats all the processed food "so the preservatives will keep him alive".
Confident self-awareness goes a long way, although self-destructive behavior in general isn't respected, nor should it be IMO.
> It’s a social dance that makes people hide the personal truth that health isn’t the only thing that matters in life.
How do this claim make you feel? "Alcoholism isn't objectively bad because for some people boozing matters more than health."
Remember that being obese effects the people around you. Particularly, obese adults teach bad lifestyle lessons by example to their children, who in turn are more likely to be obese than other kids because of it. Having obese parents is even worse for a child's life expectancy than second hand smoke from chainsmoking parents.
It might not be the only thing that matters, but once you lose your health, it's very hard to get much enjoyment out of anything else in life. Our bodies remind us constantly in no uncertain terms when they're not functioning well. I can't imagine anything I'd willingly sacrifice my health for, except in some extreme case like saving the lives of loved ones.
There is a line between fat acceptance and glorifying being fat that gets often muddled on social media. Social media is, of course, a funhouse mirror and you'll find that most fat acceptance activists do not actually believe being fat is healthy and really just don't want people to discriminate unfairly against fat people.
Simple, because it's easier to convince people that being overweight is perfectly fine and healthy. As opposed to changing diets, exercising, and holding companies accountable for the junk they put in our food to cut costs.
i think the article explains that the BMI is misleading. there are ways one can be healthy and not actually overweight while having a bad BMI. the laymans conclusion: BMI says i am overweight, but actually i am healthy, therefore i must have this healthy obesity.
The article quoted in the link (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2020.00053...) contains a list of plausible hypotheses and mechanisms for why some amount of fat might actually be good for you. I don't have enough background in human physiology to say how seriously those should be taken, but there you go.
There are other inversion vectors in our society people seem to believe. They are numerous but for just one example, calling black people “white supremacists” is but one example.
These constructs are usually the opposite of what they claim, like “healthy” in this example.
> What interests me is how anybody could ever come to believe otherwise. The contrary belief flies in the face of all common sense, popular experience and medical science.
Did you read the article?
I can give you two simple examples:
Look at any picture of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson when he has been ripped. Ditto with Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime.
BMI says these folks are either obese or severely obese. Extreme examples, but illustrative of the weakness of bmi.
On a personal level, I have been listed as obese by a doctor when I weighed in 205 as someone who is 5’11” (somewhat carelessly, because bmi was 28.x, and “obese” is 30+, but still…).
Doctor did not care to notice that I was very muscular, exercise regularly (weights and cardio), and was pretty lean.
The doctor wanted to talk to me about my “weight problem”. I pulled out dexa can showing that I had 176 pounds of lean body mass and was 14-15% body fat (“healthy” range, and probably much leaner than her, even though she was slight build and thin), told her about my diet and exercise regimen, and she quickly reversed course.
You can see how muscular people are unhappy about bmi being used for individual evaluation.
BMI is a measure that is meant to be used to measure populations rather than individuals. Being used as a quick a dirty evaluation tool without looking in more detail by the doctor is irresponsible medicine — yet it is common practice.
This is why “anybody could come to believe otherwise”.
Obviously, if the dexa scan comes back saying someone is 30% body fat, no amount of muscle can make that “healthy”, but I think that’s not where most thoughtful people have issues with potentially specious claims of obesity.
There are multiple such measures. Ones I could think of right off the bat is hip/waist ratio, BAI, or simply waist circumference.
Those all fail to reliably predict body fatness in all populations.
All of those measurements should be taken in context with other health signs, like blood pressure, fasting glucose and maybe eating/exercise habits as well.
So two examples of individuals that are using huge amounts of anabolic steroids is "illustrative of the weakness of bmi?" Give me a break. All measures are going to have edge cases. And by the way, those two guys actually are pretty unhealthy -- your body is not made to carry around that much weight.
I’m a 50-something desk jockey, and I’ve never used steroids or any sort of PED. I just eat well, make an effort to exercise, and my genetics steer me towards muscle building. I was also an athlete when I was younger (not sure if this matters).
I mentioned the rock and Arnold were extreme examples, but they were there to make a point… bmi is not meant to be used to measure individuals.
I’ll criticize the crudeness of BMI as a yardstick for fitness as much as the next guy, but absolutely no one is looking at Arnold’s BMI and thinking “huh, BMI says the terminator is obese therefore it’s okay for me to be obese”. They’re getting this idea from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is a nexus of social media and bizarre fat positivity propaganda that’s leaked out from obscure corners of society and into the mainstream.
The point in using extremes and then a more modest (and probably realistic) example of myself was that BMI is a potential trap for anyone who has muscle (even if they are, in fact, very fat). They will most likely be rated a category or two above where they should be, and a weight loss regimen for someone who is “extremely obese” versus someone who is merely “overweight” will probably look very different. Specifically, one will probably be a major intervention or lifestyle change, while the other is most likely a small/medium lifestyle change.
My point is this somewhat pedantic argument about BMI does not matter. The phenomenon of "healthy at any weight" is not hinging on cases where BMI does not capture athletic fitness, or does so poorly. "This guy has a BMI of 28.6 and does power lifting! Checkmate bodyshamers!" is not the logic being used in attempting to coerce people into thinking that obesity is healthy.
1. The original commenter asked “how could someone come to believe otherwise?” My “pedantic argument” answered his question.
2. Note the article is about how BMI is a bad measure for many weight types and frequently miscategorizes risk (e.g., by underweighting risk to “normal” bmi folks with a high body fat %).
The argument that I’m trying to make is not to “checkmate bodyshamers”, it’s to show that bmi is overall a pretty bad measure to use to evaluate weight and health in individuals that include a variety of body types.
Fwiw, I’m not a fan of the “healthy at any weight” stance (that’s clearly BS), but I am definitely trying to show that commonly held beliefs about things like BMI even and especially in the medical community can be dangerous and irresponsible (just like the article explains).
Would you mind telling that to my former doctor who wrote down in my chart that I was “obese” just based on my height, weight, and a quick visual scan? She was starting into “substantial lifestyle change” talks before I showed her my data.
She didn’t reverse course until I showed her my dexa scan and told her my diet and exercise regimen.
My point is that there are plenty of people who are labeled a category or two worse than they actually are. Yes, many people are actually obese — I get that — but people who are naturally muscular quickly grow tired of (and sometimes numb to) being categorized as worse than they actually are.
Folks who talk about obesity, especially medical folks and media folks, would do well to be more nuanced in their analysis and discussion of the data.
Socially you're right, we wouldn't call someone obese for being incredibly ripped. But in other areas, we classify people as obese or overweight based on BMI, where a ripped person is probably overweight or obese.
This happens because the social norm (in the US) is to avoid any conversation or subject matter that is even remotely negative. You can see it in every day interactions, people just can't handle criticism of any kind. Conversations must only have positive tones and people are socialized to avoid anything that might result in conflict.
This has something to do with political correctness, which is now the status quo, but that's a different matter.
Part of the problem is that those who are overweight don't want to be shamed for it or can wish others would avoid the topic. Consequently, it can become a socially complex issue, where people want to avoid hurting other people's feelings, but there is a clear as day health and physical appearance issue. And for many overweight people, once they are allowed to feel comfortable about it, they don't want to do anything about the problem. Too many rather live in delusion, until the end.
When societies put up facades and allows delusion to persists, the actual issue doesn't go away. People are still fat, unhealthy (and dying from it), and their appearance is still an issue (even if friends lie or avoid it).
> What interests me is how anybody could ever come to believe otherwise.
Probably because some popular "treatments" for the condition often attempted are far worse than obesity itself. Yo-yo dieting, amphetamine use, serial liposuction, binge eating and throwing up, et cetera.
The literature on the relationship between BMI and mortality is not conclusive except for a BMI > 30. Generally it seems that lower mortality is associated with a body mass index of 20-25.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1000367
the only nuance i’ll add is that there’s a huge difference between subcutaneous fat (eg visible belly fat you can pinch) and visceral fat (the fat hugging your vital organs)
visceral fat is significantly more dangerous than subcutaneous fat, and people who have a high ratio of visceral fat to subcutaneous fat can appear skinny but are as or potentially less well off that someone who has a more balanced ratio of visceral to subq fat.
True enough, but even subcutaneous fat is not benign.
Sumo wrestlers have extremely low visceral fat and extremely high muscle mass. But a good margin of subcutaneous fat. They have a markedly lower life expectancy than other elite athletes and than other Japanese men.
sure I’m not suggesting people get complacent if they have excess belly fat. but controlling visceral fat should be most important goal for your average person given how disruptive it is hormonally
the main issue for your average person is there isn’t really a good way to measure the percentage or ratio outside of a Dexa scan which are pretty expensive
Your nuance is one of the main points of the article.
«Nor does BMI measure where fat is located, which can make a big difference. Visceral fat jammed among internal organs is much worse than subcutaneous fat stored just beneath the skin.»
dexa scan is the most accurate way. i’ve seen more pop up nowadays. they are a bit expensive though. have seen $150 or so per scan but can probably find cheaper.
That said, body positivity shouldn't be thought of as having anything to say about objective physical health: there is zero reason a person who is obese should necessarily feel bad about themselves. Shame is a useless or detrimental approach to changing behavior; shame is oftentimes the reason people engage in unhealthy behaviors like overeating in the first place. Being overweight is an obvious health danger, but it does not make you a bad person.
Somewhere in the idiot echo chamber of social media the idea of a healthy sense of self worth got conflated with a healthy body.
Maybe there is some space between being shamed and being treated as a role model?
No obese people are not bad people but I would like to be able to say that I don't approve of their lifestyle and don't want my kids to believe that it is normal and fine to be obese.
For lack of other shared idols, the “common space” American society worships health and longevity. We measure everything against it and don’t make much room for debate.
We all do unhealthful things, of course, but our society makes it very hard to admit that we do so in sound mind. The role we’re asked to play is to say we’re addicted, indulgent, or ashamed.
The dissonance isn’t good for people and is not unlike the toxic dissonance we associate with religious communities that are too stringent and deny everyday realities of human behavior.
I think this is where 100% body positivity falls short, and that is context.
Being a bigger person doesn't make you less of a person, it doesn't mean that you are weak, or even mean that you are unhealthy on its own. As a random person, a friend, whatever we should not pass judgment on other people in that regard.
But on the flip side context is incredibly important. For example in a doctor setting. It is deeply concerning that I see a ton of people that immediately think that if their doctor mentions needing to loose weight that they are immediately fat phobic.
I see people saying they want a "body positive" doctor. Sure Doctor's need to be better and understand that everyone's body, diet, etc is different. But I am concerned about this desire to have a doctor never talk about your weight.
I am overweight and my doctor mentions it... I mean we are tracking it and they weight me. Him not saying anything would be wrong and him not doing his job.
But you are very right that you can't shame someone even at the Doctor. But you also can't ignore it.
The desire to avoid getting lectured at the doctor's office can result in folks avoiding the doctor in general. Avoiding the doctor had strong negative effects.
The main issue is the cognitive dissonance between being fat and bring told that being fat is unhealthy so you're unhealthy. The easiest way for one's mind to resolve this is to retreat into the imaginary realm where being fat can be healthy. The retreat into the imaginary is easier than not being fat and the cognitive dissonance is avoided.
I get not wanting to be lectured, and I guess that is also where tact comes into play.
I have had my share of bad doctors but my current doctor is great and it never feels like a lecture. It feels more like a conversation. He makes a couple of small recommendations and we revisit it in a couple months.
Now I will acknowledge maybe this is because of where I am as far as being obese (as in it isn't a huge concern for my doctor) and I also mention that I am working on it.
But I view this the same way I view sexual health. I engage in some risky behavior, I go in for testing every 3 months. My doctor always asks me about what happened and mentions certain things that they encourage that I don't do. I don't take this as being lectured, I don't take this as them being judgmental or not sex positive, but instead just doing their job.
At the end of the day I am doing something that is not in the best interest of my long term health, and it is their job to tell talk about that.
The article tries to frame it as if the U-shaped mortality curve and “healthy obesity” hypothesizing have been debunked, but there’s no suggestion that the U-shaped curve was not real. What appears to actually be debunked is BMI>30 as a definition of obesity. As far as I can tell, epidemiologists operating within the framework of “obesity is BMI>30”, still the one most commonly used at the individual and epidemiological levels worldwide, were right to question whether obesity was universally unhealthy. They only become “wrong” when you redefine obesity, so this controversy seems to have been constructive in exposing methodological problems.
(And no, low-fat ripped bodybuilders aren't relevant to this discussion. They and their doctors both know that BMI doesn't work well for these rare individuals.)
Only because people stopped shaming the term "overweight", but are still adverse to "obese". The range 25-30 isn't called the "still healthy range", it's "overweight". Being overweight isn't a good thing.
I don’t know if we’re capable of pushing against the tipping point, but if feels like it will be arduous to return to a point where being obese is frowned upon and not hidden under figleaves.
We have an entire body positivity movement that makes people feel good about obesity. Culturally we’ve come to celebrate it. How do we expect people to keep fit under this culture? The main interests that benefit are junkfood on one facet and pharmaceuticals manufacturers on the other.
It’s becoming the modern alcohol but an addiction we could have avoided instead of celebrating.
As to alcohol while I don’t favor prohibition, I’d like ti return to an environment where no advertising/ promotion of said products is allowed.
In what world are you living? Being obese is and always has been frowned upon. There is a small faction of people who believe that nobody should be treated poorly for having a body that doesn't fit an ideal. You specifically say that body positivity "makes people feel good about obesity". Which, said another way, seems like you think "people should feel bad if they are fat". Why would you wish for someone to feel bad? Assuming you believe that fatness is failing caused by something wrong with a person, do you also believe that depressed people should feel bad because there is something wrong with them? Do you believe people with PTSD should feel bad because there is something wrong with them?
Are you saying someone who is an alcoholic should feel happy about being an alcoholic and just live it up because, why would I as an alcoholic try and not be an alcoholic if society is telling me I have no agency over it.
Nobody is born an alcoholic. Shockingly, plenty of people are born with bodies that retain fat, even fed the exact same diet as a skinny person.
And I sure hope you're carving out an exception for the many many people in the world who are fat because it's a side effect of a medication they are forced to take for an unrelated health condition. Or should they feel bad about their bodies too?
There are genetic risk factors for developing alcoholism. That's not the same as being hereditary. You're born at risk for alcoholism, not born an alcoholic.
But either way - I don't actually think that alcoholics are bad people. I think that they have an addiction and would benefit from access to resources that help with that. If they want to drink til they die, I'm not going to shame them for that.
You're already footing the bill if you have insurance; it's the same thing.
And these beliefs are a consequence of for-profit healthcare.
If socialized healthcare was a reality, there would be a big incentive for having a lean population. We don't have that today, because there is profit to be made.
> this is why I will never get behind socialized healthcare...I'm not footing the bill for the increasing number of people who push these beliefs
Sadly, the US is paying as much per capita for healthcare as countries with free healthcare. A private system costs a lot more to run even when they are managed by people with good intentions.
When I hear that in the US health insurance can cost upwards of $1000 a month, I really think something is severely broken in the system there.
In the Netherlands it costs around 150 with good services. In Spain it's free but no way the tax expenditure is that high because most people don't even make much more than 1000 euro.
A grand sounds a bit high. I have a family of 4 and can't remember ever paying more than 400 a month. Granted, my employer picks up part of the tab but that's just how it works in the US (and it's dumb).
Socialized healthcare could possibly help destroy the beliefs you mention. Public policy will certainly change in terms of what "food" is even legal to sell in this country if bad decisions don't mean profit for private health care companies, but instead mean losses for the public.
Thinking obesity is one number is as dumb as thinking intelligence is one number. Card counting used to be one number, till they realized how much better two numbers did. Yet in this day of smart phones, one still sees geriatricians calculating stroke risk using a rule they can do in their heads. I'd rather trust my health care to prediction markets, if we could work through the data privacy issues.
So where's the BMI table that asks height and "how wide are your shoulders?"
Body building at a professional level is extremely unhealthy because everyone is on an elephant dose of steroids and growth hormones. It’s probably the worst life outlook of profesional sports - much worse than just playing video games at home
You don't need to look at BMI, or any number besides fat % for that matter, to see we have a massive fucking issue. If your belly protrudes far enough that you can't see your own feet, big boned or not, you're obese
Yea, being obese isn't health in any way shape or form. Unless you have some sort of exceptional physique that takes you out of the common medical model. You probably don't have that.
I fucking hate it. I have at least managed to get under a 40 BMI its a huge slog to even get try to get down to only overweight. And even then in realistic terms even if I do, its 100% impossible to stay there over your lifetime after being obese. Age will just catch up with you.
>its 100% impossible to stay there over your lifetime after being obese. Age will just catch up with you.
You will have to keep reducing your diet forever as your metabolism slows. It's not 100% impossible, just a very difficult lifelong struggle, like having type-1 diabetes.
Great work and keep going! I recently heard a good motivator is to think about something as just the "next thing to do" rather than a challenge or problem. Anyways, I don't it might feel like getting advice in an elevator, but I wish you well.
Did they control for anti-fat bias? Unlikely. Especially in the medical system, fat people don't get their body issues taken seriously. The stress of being treated poorly by everyone in your life undoubtedly has a huge impact on your lifespan.
Did they control for efforts to change you body? Most fat people are trying to be thinner. Plenty of ways that people are told to change their body involve extreme stress to your body (caloric restriction, extreme diets, stimulant pills).
Did you know that being underweight is ALSO associated with health problems, sometimes as extreme as the ones associated with being very fat.
Anybody reading this and wanting a more nuanced understanding of this stuff should listen to the first few episodes of the podcast Maintenance Phase https://www.maintenancephase.com/
edit: I'm getting downvoted for pointing out two well documented factors that the linked article doesn't seem to account for - I thought we believed in facts and rationality here?
The only thing bordering on whataboutism is my comment about being underweight. Talking about obesity bring up a lot of extreme emotions in people, and people love to say "it's just about it being unhealthy" but then don't have those extreme emotions when thinking about underweight people. So it's not whataboutism, it's relevant context.
My two other points, anti-fat bias, and the harm of trying to change your body, are things that could explain the health impact of being fat while not actually being a direct result of the fat. So, not whataboutism at all - they are well documented factors that the linked article doesn't seem to account for or consider.
When someone is talking about one issue and you bring up another issue... That is whataboutism. Being overweight is unhealthy. Being underweight is unhealthy. This article is about being overweight. Bringing up something else entirely and ignoring what the article is about is whataboutism.
That podcast is good for a cringe chuckle as they openly wonder if being fat is even bad for you ("what's the evidence for that???" -- well, did the hosts even look?). That show is pure cope for fat people. My girlfriend and I listen to it for fun.
This NEW research found a tenuous link that debunked the previous studies that found the healthy obesity DOES exist. So if we're talking about episodes made before this new research came out, this article directly refutes your "did the hosts even look?".
Ok so now this research is out - there is a link between obesity and poor health, but how strong is that link? As someone else pointed out in another thread, look at the error bars... ALL of that difference could easily be explained by the the well-documented factor of anti-fat bias in healthcare.
But the more important thing here is: if being fat is unhealthy - why would we compound that with stigma, shame, and anti-fat bias? Can you prove those things make people skinny? Because I can prove that those things make people MORE UNHEALTHY. Why would we do something that makes unhealthy people more unhealthy?
I wonder what's going to happen long term to the recent trend of celebrating obesity in advertising. E.g. go to any Target and you will see overweight or obese models wearing the clothes they sell.
On one hand you have to represent your current population, and with the majority of Americans overweight or obese, that's who your customers are. On the other, can this be seen as normalizing a disease?
Nothing at all unless it is forbidden by law, which it won't be. Walmart wants to make a profit, so showing how clothes look on your body is better to achieve this goal.
The parent already acknowledges that: "On one hand you have to represent your current population, and with the majority of Americans overweight or obese, that's who your customers are."
The question is about whether this is normalizing an unhealthy disease, which your comment does not respond to.
It seems the parent comments are inquiring into the morality of the ad campaign. An effective ad shows the potential consumer some desired 'other state' which they could also have by purchasing this good or service. The advertiser is therefore giving some weight to the idea that the obese person in a desirable state. Whereas more traditional ads would show the same clothing on a traditionally attractively weighted person which shows that desired future state includes both the clothing and a more healthy body size.
Before you draw conclusions from the headline, please look at the graph from the linked paper [1]. Pay attention to the size of the error bars. It looks like there is an effect, but it's not the huge and obvious realisation that the article claims.
I do think that body composition (size/fat/muscle mass) has an effect on your health, but the variance within groups is still huge! There are so many other things in your life that can affect your health, that also have a huge effect size.
So even if you are overweight or obese, and you can't lose weight, it doesn't mean that you can't improve your health. Eating healthy, making sure to get enough fresh air, limiting alcohol and nicotine use, taking care of your mental health and stress level are all going to benefit your health, even if they don't make you lose weight.
The same thing goes if you have a healthy weight and lots of muscle mass: Your body composition is not a free pass to smoke, get drunk every weekend, and eat burgers every day.
> Your BMI tells me your overweight.
> But rugby players BMIs are high, and they aren't overweight!
> You don't play rugby though do you.
I'm glad that "fat acceptance" may be turning a corner and will be banished hopefully and there can be a semblance of rational discourse.
Ideally you should be a BMI 22, non smoking, non drinking, long distance runner living in the countryside eating a perfectly balanced diet.
Mosy of us will achieve all that, just do what you can.
There's loads of nasty ways to mess up your health. Being fat seems to be the most appealing one (I get to eat what I want and sit around all day? Hell yeah!).
It's not the most appealing one, it's the hardest one to manage. You can not smoke, you can not drink alcohol, you can not take drugs, but you cannot not eat.
There's a popular internet myth that junk food is cheaper than veggies. Of course it isn't true; junk food is more expensive by weight than anything in the produce aisle, with possible exceptions for exotic imported fruits. How this myth survives people wandering around a grocery store looking at price stickers is beyond my comprehension. A 5lb bag of potatoes costs less than a half pound bag of potato chips.
It's probably the difference in looking at weight versus calories. A cauliflower is, on average, 0.7-0.9 kg (1.5-2 pounds) and provides about 25 calories. A McDonalds burger is, on average, 0.2 kg (0.441 pounds) with about 250 calories. The cauliflower currently costs about 3 euros (yes, you read that right) in the Netherlands while a burger costs around 7 euros. So, calories per euro is 8 for the cauliflower and 35 for the burger.
I want to see this mythical almost half pound burger that is only 250 calories. The "hamburger" that is 250 calories has a patty less than 2 ounces, and hardly anything on it. I doubt the bun weights 1/4 pound.
The myth isn’t a myth. It refers to the price of calories, not the price of food by weight.
You end up with the cheapest calories being lightly processed grains like rice and flour, then you end up with more processed grains like white bread and ramen, then move to things like peanut butter, before hitting junk food. The point is that the cheapest calories aren’t exactly healthy.
The produce aisle tends to be pretty expensive per calorie, potatoes excepted, since veggies aren’t calorically dense, and are sold mostly by weight.
See: potatoes. They're basically pure calories and they're several times cheaper than any junk food. Junk food is the most expensive food no matter how you slice it. The only metric by which junk food might win is in the lazy glutton category; if somebody is too lazy to put a potato in their oven 45 minutes before their meal, then a bag of potato chips has an advantage. But in no other sense is junk food more efficient. And even for lazy people, there are plenty of cheap as dirt veggies that require less cooking or no cooking at all. A bag of apples is a very cheap way of getting a sugar rush without any food prep, but fat people would rather spend that money on several gallons of cola a week.
An eight pound bag of pinto beans costs $6.88 at my local Walmart and contains over 12,000 calories - that's six days of the 2k calorie diet! Lots of healthy grains like buckwheat and brown rice are available at similar price per calorie and they all require little effort beyond setting a timer for the unattended boiling. Add a couple cents for spices from the value store and a dollar or two for frozen veggies and you've got a meal going for the family!
I challenge you to find any junk food that comes even close to that kind of caloric density per dollar. The cheapest junk food has a tenth of the calories per dollar than a bag of rice from Costco (4-5k calories per dollar), at best.
The problem is that the cheap stuff takes a little effort to make tasty compared to the hyper-palatable junk food. The whole "junk food is cheaper than whole foods per calorie" is nonsense.
Yes, There are exceptions, although, it's worth pointing out that a pinto bean is processed minimally in terms of drying. Like I said, if all you want is calories you can make bread with a 5lb bag of floor and some salt at less than half the cost per calorie of pinto beans.
The point is, if money is tight, which invariably means that time is tight, people don't have time to cook dried pinto beans, or make bread for EVERY meal where the prep time is roughly 12 hours. Add into that, even knowing how to cook is a skill. An all bread and pinto diet is likely to take more time than most people have, and not yield a great health outcome anyway.
If you look at it as categories, the junk food, and processed food aisles are where you are going to on average get your dollar to go furthest.
The whole point of the "myth" is that it is FAR more efficient and cheaper to get everyone enough calories with food from the junk aisle. The origins I believe come from a cooking show where the budget and time were limited. Professional chefs gave up.
Here's the challenge: you need to serve a meal to 4 people (2,500 caloriesp) you have $10 and 1 hour including shopping and cooking. I can think of half a dozen meals that come from processed foods where that is possible, but doing that with fresh foods is HARD.
If you want to go the pure science route, here's a peer review study from the NIH showing that in many places on earth, healthy food is provably more expensive https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6825829/
I call bullshit. The average cooked potatoe has 25% less calories than rice or pasta. You'd have to eat 3kg of cooked potatoes to get 2100kcal. I am pretty certain it is near impossible to get fat from eating potatoes. Go give it a try.
I bet that it is the "frying" part or the sauce or butter that comes with it, that leaves a lasting impression on the hips.
Healthy food can be fattening and unhealthy food can be not fattening. It has very little to do with the type of food and everything to do with the density of calories in the food, and the amount of that food eaten.
No one ever got fat eating only vegetables. But you can't eat only vegetables and get all the necessary nutrients(at least not easily).
You can, it's called veganism and lots of people do it.
However, you don't have to be that "extreme". Just eating mostly vegetables and cutting out all the obvious crap will do.
The fact that this is somehow unimaginably strict to many people just shows how completely fucked up our relationship with food is. Most of the foods that make us fat didn't even exist a hundred years ago (at least in its modern, highly processed form) and now people somehow can't imagine living without them.
Sure, but to be vegan you have to know wtf you're doing, because it's really easy to get malnourished in various ways. And unless you want to eat nasty fermented beans or something you need b12 supplements at the very least.
Getting iron from non-heme sources is also kind of hit-or-miss.
Our bodies are not adjusted to eating food with high calory density. Junk food messes up the system the way you feel hungry despite eating enough calories, and that leads to eating too much and becoming obese. You're right that eating the right number of calories in junk food won't make you obese, but it is extremely hard to eat the right number of calories when eating mostly junk food.
Eat healthy food, and eat only when you're hungry, and most likely your body would auto-regulate the calory intake just fine.
Oh yeah eating mostly junk food is not gonna cut it.
But I also managed to lose 30kg eating (lean) meat, full-fat dairy and almost no green vegetables, just a lot of oats for starch/fibre and nuts for extra protein/vitamins/minerals and healthy fats.
But it's also just really hard to tell what food is actually healthy. Some foods are obviously healthy. Some are obviously unhealthy. But a lot is in the middle somewhere, having both healthy and unhealthy aspects.
Some foods are even controversial in the research, like butterfat which many people lump into the group "saturated fats", which is universally thought to be unhealthy by laypeople. But there are multiple types of saturated fat(ty acids), so it's actually really complicated.
My rough intuition based on reading a bunch of research is that dairy fat is actually quite healthy in small amounts(it's very calorically dense). I could go into a lot more detail on why but the gist is butterfat has a lot of short- and medium-chain fatty acids, which are good. It's the long and very-long you want to avoid.
Yeah, humans are evolved to go long periods without food and then to have massive feasts and gorge on food when a prey is caught, say.
The human brain's ability to use ketones(byproducts of fat metabolism) for energy is actually unique to humans, suggesting a selective pressure towards surviving starvation in our evolutionary past.
Looking at a more recent history last 3-5000 years it seems that having 1-2 large meals a day even if simple ones and very highly caloric dense food.
You aren’t marching in a legion, working in the fields or building a giant monument without proper food.
Since food preparation took much more time and the logistics were complicated the number of meals and choices were limited but pretty much every meal was packed with carbs and often with fat too (lard, oils etc).
Sweeteners whether it’s honey or other sugars were also quite common and very much so not limited to the ruling classes.
> suggesting a selective pressure towards surviving starvation in our evolutionary past
our brains use a very large share of our total energy; so that adaptation may just be a requirement of additional brain energy use and not a adaptation particularly for starvation levels higher than other animals.
I get your logic, but it isn't quite right in this case. The reason is that the production of these ketone bodies that the brain can use for biochemical energy, only get produced in significant amounts once liver glycogen stores are depleted. So in a sense it's less of a passive ability and more of an active response to starvation.
My reply was already really long so I made another one.
It's important to point out that for a lot obese people, hunger hormones are going to be out of whack. So while following hunger might certainly be good for avoiding obesity, it's not necessarily as helpful in losing weight.
You can cease buying sugary foods and snacks like chips at the supermarket when you shop. You can explore swapping macros a bit so there's a bias in favor of eggs and fish and other protein. You can try to cut down eating between meals.
The idea of Predestination with regards to eating needs to stop. If there is a psychological addiction then that's the part to be addressed, it's a valid concern. I see what people eat - even people that are not obese - and it's disgusting. I can see at work, at restaurants, even walking in the streets what people eat. That this is 'normal' is what we have to actually try to stigmatize. Donuts, muffins, giant appetizes at dinner, all that stuff should be almost never eaten. Birthday cakes? All that stuff will become disgusting and nauseating to you if you step away from it for just a few months, and your body adapts away from sugar and carbs. It might be hard in the beginning as your metabolism struggles to adjust and keep signaling for you to eat more.
And for the record - not drinking alcohol is a lot harder than not eating for many people I know.
Then you're lucky. I a) intermittent fast, so never eat breakfast b) never eat dessert c) don't snack d) lift weights 3x a week and do other sports once a week e) don't eat fast food, and often skip appetizers, and stick to protein and veggies. If I don't do these things I get fat fast. So my sympathy for 'unlucky' is minimal; I'm sure only a small percentage of people suffer from such a poor metabolism that anything they eat causes the to gain weight. The rest choose not to put the effort in.
You're greatly oversimplifying, which might help you but it encourages ignorance of macros and how differently they're metabolized. It's well known among performance athletes that the body adapts to types of macros. Ultra marathon runners have their bodies adapt to consuming dense caloric foods (fats), as one really obvious example. Professional sports teams employ nutritionists and it's not because they need help counting calories in, calories out.
I've spent a lot of time experimenting on myself, I can eat lower calories but if those lower calories are bread and sugary crap, I don't get leaner, I get fatter and weaker.
> I get to eat what I want and sit around all day? Hell yeah!
I am naturally thin. That statement ("i get to eat what i want and sit around all day") is true of my body. Is it such a strange idea that there are as many people who are naturally thin as there are that are naturally fat? Those people aren't making a choice to be fat any more than i am making a choice to be thin. Why should they feel bad about their body?
They choose it a bit. First eating all the day long some crap (sweets, processed food, fiberless industrial food), drinking sweet sodas and not walking/doing real sports is a choice. It's the choice to live unhealthy. They should feel bad the same way smokers should feel bad. It's quite a disrespect for oneself.
There's people that don't do all that and are still fat, and making them "feel bad" about it is counter productive. In fact, the research on losing weight is quite clear: once you've put on weight, losing it and keeping it off is nearly impossible, and requires life long constant effort.
Instead of focusing on individual behavior, you should be speaking out against a government that built a car society, made cities hostile to walking and biking, and made cheap unhealthy food the easiest and cheapest option for most.
2. I'm the great-grandparent in this thread. My original comment was in essence: I am naturally skinny, nobody questions that. Is it so strange that people might be naturally fat? You've said something that DIRECTLY contradicts that argument, without any evidence or argument to explain why - all you've done is assert the opposite of what I said. You're going to have to do better. Citation needed on your part.
In animal husbandry, people breed livestock for their "feed conversion ratio" - I.e which animals can most efficiently convert the same amount of food into the most additional bodyweight. It's not a stretch to think something similar might happen in people.
However, if you're one of those people that puts on more weight per item of food then it sucks to be you, but you'll need to eat less food.
Re: your point about medicines - I doubt they manage to create additional calories out of thin air.
There are medicines that change how your body processes the calories you eat, and the balance may be that in order to get the nutrients you need to stay in good health, you need to eat in a way that causes you to gain weight. There are certainly drugs that increase your appetite, meaning you the effort required to eat less increases dramatically.
But... your overall point is that people need to suffer in discomfort for their entire life so their body looks the way you want it to look? Or so that they stay in good health? If someone is faced with the choice of being fat and happy for 75 years, or being skinny and suffering for 80 years (or whatever the lifespan difference is), why do you feel like your opinion about that choice is something anybody needs to hear? Why is someone else’s choice your business? Do you think that someone should be ashamed or embarrassed about choosing one of those?
I didn’t have to make that choice. But if I did i would 100% choose fat and happy, and i would be upset with anyone who tried to make me unhappy for my choice - especially if it’s coming from someone who didn’t have to make that choice themselves
>>But... your overall point is that people need to suffer in discomfort for their entire life so their body looks the way you want it to look? Or so that they stay in good health? If someone is faced with the choice of being fat and happy for 75 years, or being skinny and suffering for 80 years (or whatever the lifespan difference is), why do you feel like your opinion about that choice is something anybody needs to hear?
It's nothing to do with how I think people should look aesthetically, and I don't think the difference is about an extra 5 years of life. There is also "health-span" to consider - i.e. are you bed bound or unable to walk to the shops in the last few years of your life?
>>why do you feel like your opinion about that choice is something anybody needs to hear?
You seem confused as to the purpose of the comment section on a website. Discussing differing views is the whole point of it, I thought. I'm not running up to overweight people in the street and shouting abuse at them.
I'm also not mandating six packs. A certain level of fat is healthy. And I also have zero problem with people like this who own it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG8k8ouN8ro The people I have contempt for are the "Healthy at any size" liars.
You're not providing citations either. Get off your fat hating high horse.
Walking and exercise make a HUGE difference in average weight. Just look at Canada, a place mostly analogous to the US, but with way more walkable cities and better public transit. They don't have this problem.
Regardless of how people get fat, we know for a fact that it's nearly impossible to get back to a healthy weight. Children of fat parents are more likely to be fat, both because of genetics and because of diet. Is it their fault that they were born that way?
"Walking and exercise make a HUGE difference in average weight. "
Interesting. I like to walk generally, but in the last year, with a fresh Garmin watch prodding me into more steps, I increased my walking by at least 50 per cent. I actually made some 5 million steps last year, at least 7 km every day, in every weather.
My weight fluctuated a bit, but basically didn't change. I am not fat, but I have some amount of belly fat I don't like.
What really changed and improved was my immune system. I am not totally immune to everything, but I tolerate a lot more environmental distress (cold, hot, sweating, getting soaked by rain etc.) before encountering first symptoms of having a cold.
Yeah, that's consistent with the research. It seems like the body really likes to stay at a given weight, so it adjusts so there's not too much fluctuation. That's why it's really hard to lose weight and keep it off if you've been fat for a long time.
What exercise helps with is making sure that the occasional binge, or change in circumstances, doesn't lead to permanent weight gain. If you're temporarily disabled for 2 weeks and can't move and put on some weight, your body then burns more of that fat when you go back to exercising, or regulates your appetite so you eat less.
But if you're not used to exercising and then suddenly increase your caloric intake, your body has less opportunity to burn the extra fat, so it leads to long term weight gain, and eventually your gut biome and body adjust to the new normal.
No, but some people process different food differently, so eating the same amount of food might lead to different weight in different people.
And no, the jury is not out on what food is healthy. Carbs are public enemy number 1 according to keto people. Carbs are the best according to Italians.
I agree with the part that diet is way more important than walking and exercise, in the short term. But not exercising can lead to obesity long term. Here are some other things that can cause obesity / type 2 diabetes aside from dietary choices:
I would be hugely surprised if there are any conditions that can cause obesity without eating excess calories unless the people concerned have learnt to create excess calories by photosynthesis or something.
Define „excess“ though. If metabolism is out of whack, a person might need to overfeed in order to get enough glucose into cells. If they don’t, cells/mitos are stressed and damaged.
> They should feel bad the same way smokers should feel bad.
Smokers are chemically and behaviourally addicted to a substance that's killing them. Just like alcoholics and heroin addicts.
It's probably appropriate to view obese people (food addicts) in a similar way. I don't understand the reaction of telling them to feel bad though. People who are addicted to harmful substances deserve sympathy and medical care.
That's the bit that OP and the writer, if they're different people, miss. Fat acceptance is basically a position that we fatties have been forced into. If every skinny person learned to mind their own business, it wouldn't exist.
The problem is not that we aren't listening to our doctors - the problem is that people like OP exist who self-appoint themselves as our doctors and start preaching. And that word was chosen carefully, because it's exactly the same bullshit.
So much this. I can't tell you how sick I am of getting some dumb, poorly thought out health/diet advice from a skinny person who never had to lose a lot of weight.
Losing weight is actually really easy. Eat less calories than you burn, and be motivated. My first serious attempt I managed to lose almost 30kg. Sticking with it and keeping it low is really hard. Because every kilo you gain back makes you that much less motivated.
But if you're not motivated, no amount of fascile health advice is going to help. Motivation must come from within. And it can be hard to maintain.
The only diet advice I have from my experience: make a diet you like. If you hate the diet, it will never work. Dieting doesn't have to suck.
> Losing weight is actually really easy. Eat less calories than you burn, and be motivated.
I've often heard fitness instructors often phrase this as "weight loss is simple, but not easy" precisely because it's hard to sustain CICO discipline over a reasonable period of time.
I'd put it in another way: losing weight is simple, but it's not easy!
As I understand, you just need to consume fewer calories, less sugar and do more exercise. But there's cravings. It's harder to get healthy food at restaurants and cafes. It's harder to cook healthy and tasty food - no one wants to eat miserable food for months, many doctor and nutritionists will just tell patients to eat bland food day after day, like people are robots without souls.
I've heard the same thing about the C programming language: it's a small simple language, but programming with it is hard!
You're absolutely right, and this is essentially what I meant.
But dieting doesn't have to suck at all. You can diet on food you enjoy no problem.
They key for me was to design a diet to my liking as opposed to one that sucked all the enjoyment out of food. Here are some of the ways I accomplished this:
0. My BMR is about 2000 for reference. I used myfitnesspal w a kitchen scale to count calories and a fitbit(charge 4) to estimate my metabolic rate. I weighed in daily, not weekly, and then went by the weekly average to see progress. I found that weight could often fluctuate by as much as a kg daily due to variables like bowel movements, hydration and imprecision of the scale. Weighing in daily helped control for that.
1. Dinner is sacred. It should be filling and tasty. One of the dinners I made the most was chicken breast with brown rice and a variety of delicious sauces. I managed to make a recipe that included 1 chicken breast sliced up, brown rice and creme fraiche and butter added to the sauce, often with lots of mushrooms, at about 1000kcal pr meal. That's pretty much a full-blown dinner with a very high protein content. And absolutely delicious.
2. To make room for dinner, my breakfast and lunch were quite spartan, about 2-300 calories each. And I would eat maybe 200 calories of nuts or something before bed, because it helped me sleep better. In total that leaves a total daily consumption of 1800kcal. This provides a buffer of 200 calories to my base metabolic rate. That's enough that any added physical activity is always a bonus. But I could sit on my ass all day and still break even at worst. Some days you just don't feel like going outside at all.
3. Insisted on at least 6, ideally 8 hrs of sleep every night. Took whatever steps necessary to make that happen without medication that worsen sleep quality. One thing that really helped here was to take a short walk after dinner. This prevented me from my natural dinner nap which made sleeping at night much easier. Adequate sleep is crucial for losing weight.
4. Incorporate a cheat day at most once a week, at least once a month, making sure it coincided with a lot of activity. So if I got a dinner invite, I would find some way to be really active that day. Maybe I'd walk most of the way to/from the restaurant, or get to public transport by taking a a forest trail in rough terrain. And then I would eat whatever the hell I wanted to that day, as long as I'm not straight up gluttonous about it. This meant in practice that it was pretty hard for me to actually eat more than I burned, because I still ate tiny meals before dinner.
5. Walk whenever possible. Find little ways to walk a bit more, walk one bus stop further than you need to. If you're overweight, just walking can burn a surprising amount of calories.
6. I never set foot in a gym, went jogging or any other "tryhard" forms of exercise. I just took enjoyable walks. More than adequate exercise for weight loss for me anyway.
With this set up I lost 0.5-1kg every week all the while enjoying my diet every day, and regularly allowing some guilty pleasures. And I never did or ate something I hated.
The reason I eventually failed was the bane of my existence: my ADHD, and winter depression. I was doing well with all this taking medication, which enabled me to have all these routines at all. But then the usual depressive episode happened and things got so bad I stopped taking medication, all routines ceased to exist and weight came back. I'm ramping up for another go, with a new plan. In the winter I will attempt to maintain weight, not lose it. This should be significantly easier. And I'm taking more steps to avoid another winter depression but that's a whole other rabbit hole.
The problem with all this is the word 'diet'. For most people they shouldn't be "dieting". They should be changing their perspective on food and exercise completely, forever.
Otherwise after the "diet", they will go back to their original weight.
Note: I'm using the definition most people think when they hear diet, which is a restriction.
That's literally what my long post was about though. Overly restrictive diets never work. Finding a healthier relationship with food is precisely what I was trying to do, and I would say I succeeded. I just failed to solve the problem which is more unique to me, namely that I completely cease to function as an adult human being for several months at a time almost every year. This has mothing to do with dieting per se and isn't the case for most people.
> I never set foot in a gym, went jogging or any other "tryhard" forms of exercise.
I had to look up that word: A person usually of little talent who tries hard to succeed, especially through imitation, usually to gain fame or popularity.
A big part of habit change is also changing identity, how you see yourself. In that sense it might be worth investigating your aversion to people that exercise. Many forms of exercise can become quite addictive in themselves. Additionally building some basis of muscle if you have never trained before can increase your base metabolism.
When I say tryhard, I just meant anything that to me is not enjoyable and therefore requires mental effort just to motivate me to do it.
I don't have an aversion to people that exercise. I exercise. Exercise doesn't have to include going to a gym or running. I used to think I just hate all exercise, but I learned that really I just hate synthetic exercise, like gyms and jogging on asphalt. I love spending time in nature, forests, river valleys. It's great exercise. Hell you could go do calisthenics in the woods if you really wanted to. You can do pullups from branches etc.
My point both for dieting and exercise is that the key is to find something you don't hate doing. I resent the implication that hating gyms is some kind of character flaw that needs fixing. If you enjoy the gym, great, go there! If you don't, find something else! I definitely got addicted to walking/bursting/parkouring around a river valley with some death metal in my ears. In the summer I would do it almost every day for half an hour just because I wanted to.
As for growing muscle, this is certainly also important, and initially I tried to incorporate it, but I found that building muscle while also eating a caloric deficit greatly reduced my options in terms of food. I came to the conclusion I had to cut out almost all fat to accomodate the protein and carbs necessary for that. I decided to postpone this until a "stage 2" where I would change my diet to instead maintain weight while gaining muscle and losing fat, but I never got there. Feeling good about next time though because I know what failed last time and what I need to watch out for.
While there are many people that have a comparatively harder time to retain a healthy weight, no one has to be obese. A small minority might find it so hard to not become obese that they simply cannot manage it, but that fact should not dominate public discourse and act as an excuse for everyone.
More importantly, obesity is contagious. You give it to your kids and family. If you don't stop it, your loved ones might suffer.
We agree that some fat people can change their weight to become thin. But do we agree that not all fat people can? For example what about people who have become fat as a result of side effects from medication that is treating other health conditions. Hopefully you accept that's not something those people can realistically change. Should they also feel bad about their bodies? I would say no. Now how do we tell which fat people we think should feel bad about their bodies and which shouldn't? Do we have a little health background interview with each one first? Or maybe we could just accept people for who they are, and don't make anyone feel bad for what their body looks like.
As for contagiousness, idk. I know thin kids of fat parents, and I know fat kids of thin parents. I suspect there's a lot more at play than a simple "fat adults make kids fat".
> A small minority might find it so hard to not become obese that they simply cannot manage it, but that fact should not dominate public discourse and act as an excuse for everyone
I think the opposite is true, though I don't have statistics in front of me. Obesity traditionally had low rates of recovery. A huge percentage can never seem to figure it out.
The situation looks so grim that doctors were pushing to stop treating it as a "choice". I recall it being controversial, but somewhat agreeing with that perspective. Looking at a condition where people "want" to change, but almost always fail, it appears to look more like an incurable disease, than something that can easily be fixed with "discipline".
What's the point of guilt tripping people when the results are so consistently bad? I know there may have been some breakthroughs since then.
Almost everyone I met (incl me when I was younger) who think that way never realized just how much food obese people eat at home. It's wayyy more than you think.
They never tell the truth about it out of shame because they know how bad it looks to others.
edit: parent comment was edited to remove the examples of eating behaviors they believe are the cause of fatness. Their examples were all things that I as a naturally skinny person do or have done regularly.
Even at my maximum weight I was most definitely not eating like this. The idea that every obese person is just slamming junk food down their gullet is just false and needs to die.
That’s assuming perfect conversion of energy to body fat. That’s never the case due to losses, and everybody is _vastly_ different:
> In response to 84 days of 1000 kcal/day of overfeeding, 12 pairs of monozygotic twins gained on average 8.1 kg, but the range was from 4.3 to 13.3 kg.
Apologies. Though my statement holds with s/Your/That/.
My original response was to a comment suggesting that overweight and obese people get home and eat 15 chocolate bars. My observation, supported by your additional evidence, is that a small imbalance has a substantial cumulative effect.
The study was with 12 pairs of identical twins. Variation of 25% in IDENTICAL TWINS suggests that variation among genetically different individuals is probably going to be much larger.
You can see the videos on tiktok. Each individual meal is actually pretty reasonable, but each one should be the main meal of the day. Having several per day (plus high calorie but healthy snacks such as nuts) is what cause the problem.
Right, sure. But we don't make women who are generically pre-disposed to have breast cancer feel bad for being genetically pre-disposed to breast cancer. We don't call their bodies disgusting because of that risk, do we? Do we say that it's their fault? That they're lazy, have no self-control? That the "breast cancer pre-dispositon acceptance movement" is wokeness out of control?
It's likely the result of genetic, epigenetic, cultural, economic, and food system factors combined.
As for how it went from 10% to 60% (your numbers, idk if they're right) one piece of the puzzle is that in 1998 the definition of obesity was changed, which made MANY more people fall into the obese category who did not previously: http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9806/17/weight.guidelines/
Ahh for sure, that’s a demographically representative sample of the american population. /s
Yes people have gotten fatter. That’s a thing that’s happening. To me that’s evidence of systemic problems in our food supply, economic factors like poverty. None of which are reason to treat someone poorly for being impacted by that.
Adulthood was what did it for me. : - ) I'm theorizing that it's at least 2 factors: lack of PE (2.5h a week of forced exercise - gone), & reaching legal drinking age (I lost the most weight when pausing drinking for a bit). There were also random occasions for physical activity that now require more effort to set up that were handled by adults in my life or otherwise organized by someone else (skiing trips, hiking, kayaking).
They are making a choice to be fat because they eat the quantity of food that creates that condition in their body. Nobody says two people should eat the same level of food. You should eat the appropriate amount for your body.
People, in the long term, eat as much as they need to not feel hungry. Whether they are slim or overweight.
Asking people to ear less than they are eating now is thus asking them to be perpetually hungry. It can be done, even for a year or two if they have willpower, but eventually they will get sick of being cold, tired and irritated all the time --because that is what chronic hunger does to you-- and they will go back to the normal behavior of eating until they are no longer hungry.
When and how often you feel hungry is a well-documented to be a conditioned response based on eating patterns, it isn't intrinsic unless you go quite a long time without eating. Human eating patterns have considerable flexibility. A person with a normal metabolism can habitually eat one meal a day without being any more hungry than someone that eats three meals a day with snacking in between.
Unless they are on a particularly aggressive program of calorie reduction, eating less than they are eating now is not asking them to be perpetually hungry.
I was under the impression that you can cheat yourself a bit by eating unlimited food but low-cal. Vegetables are one way (they're mostly water and fiber), but I'm not a picky eater and mostly eat to feel full, not for the taste so YMMV.
Getting to explore what it means to be 'hungry', i.e. asking yourself "Is this feeling I need to eat habit or actual real need?" is a large part of controlling/regulating food intake. This 'exploration' used to be engendered by religious practices of fasting and also, times of food scarcity. We don't have either as widespread experiences these days, so the only people who explore their hunger and eating habits are mostly people with a drive to develop awareness around their bodies and who work to identify and then pull themselves out of 'bad habits'.
That's an incredibly simplistic way of looking at it.
Alcoholics are "making a choice" to drink alcohol. But we both know that it's more complicated than that. There are both habits and chemical addictions in play which makes it incredibly hard to stop.
Why don't you afford the obesity issue the same level of understanding?
> Is it such a strange idea that there are as many people who are naturally thin as there are that are naturally fat? [...] Why should they feel bad about their body?
Because naturally thin people, and the opposite case, are outliers.
There are very few people, especially in the 40s, that can eat a lot and still remain thin.
...and the reason we should make them feel bad is?
Setting aside the fact that you've conceded that you don't know if someone is fat "by choice" or because they are an outlier, so you're ok with making people who are fat because of natural reasons feel bad as casualties in your noble quest to make people who are fat "by choice" feel bad.
Do we shame people for the health risk of going skiing? It's a well know health risk, yet i don't see a lot of people telling skiiers their lifestyle disgusts them.
I'm naturally thin too, but thin is relative. I noticed on day soon after college that I was starting to acquire (relatively minor) fat deposits, and despite that not making me even close to overweight, I resolved that I wasn't going to put up with that. Since then I've payed more attention to health and fitness. I could eat pizza all the time and not be overweight, but I don't because I know that would be unhealthy.
That's okay - you're not the topic of this article. If you want to trim up and tone because it makes you happy, that's fantastic!
The criticism of "lose weight at any cost necessary" is that people who have been fat their entire lives will get yelled at to lose a significant percentage of their body weight, with very little care given to their actual health.
It's incredibly naive and destructive to assume all extremely fat people got that way because "they eat pizza all the time" and they should simply stop eating so much pizza to fix all of life's problems. If they can't lose the weight it's clearly because they're not trying hard enough.
That's why the discussion around this isn't changing the needle on America's weight gain (or most populations across the Earth). We focus on the thinness of the person before we focus on the health.
Intriguingly, it seems that the vast majority of the population of North Korea are 'naturally thin' and virtually every young person you see in footage of 1960s USA too.
It is bizarre that you would read an article which says, “using body-mass index (BMI) to measure obesity is likely the most problematic factor,” and then immediately prescribe a fixed BMI for everyone without qualification.
Indeed, especially the 22 BMI target. For me (5'10") that would mean 155lbs, I'd have to shed (going by my scale which estimates body fat percentage) around 28 lbs of fat (I'm at 15% fat right now, so 28 lbs would get me to 0% which is unhealthy) and 7lbs of other weight to hit that target. Could I lose some weight? Sure. But I won't. Back on the exercise habit after a few months off and I'm getting slimmer but my weight is staying the same, as I would expect it to based on my previous experience (I pack on muscle easily).
BMI is a useful heuristic (BMI over 30 and not a powerlifter? Probably unhealthy, let's look at other characteristics and see how unhealthy and how to address it) but a terrible target until you know your own body.
that part is tricky, takes a lot of time, experiments
But also I think the body shape makes a big diff, I have very thin limbs, long legs, my best BMI is between 17 and 18, without limiting myself in food quantity (I alwways eat as much as I can, tho I naturally like to eat 1 or 2 meals a day max)
I'm 185 cm (6'1") and 73 kg (161 lbs), for a BMI of 21.3. I still have more than 0% fat, but I'm certainly slim. I don't have to fight at all to keep my weight as it is, and I'm healthy.
You say 30 BMI, but in my experience unless you are lifting a lot of weights 25 is the upper limit. Ten years ago I hit 25 BMI, and despite feeling "normal" there were already the first signs of being fat: thights always red, sweaty all day and way less resistance than today.
I lost 15 kg (33 lbs) not by doing crazy exercise, but by cutting 100% of shitty food and eating beyond necesity.
I think you're agreeing with me but I'm not sure. I said you have to know your body, which you seem to. For your body 25 BMI is an upper limit, for my body 25 BMI is a lower limit unless I'm losing muscle mass or going to unhealthy body fat percentage levels.
Which is why I also said BMI is a poor target. 22 BMI, for me, would be an awful target. I'd be gaunt and have to lose a lot of muscle mass, not just fat (which I don't have a lot of to lose). Even bringing body fat percentage from 15% to 10%, which is still healthy, would only get me down to about 180lbs. That would leave me 25lbs over the target for a 22 BMI. That's my body, not yours, not anyone else's. I've learned what is healthy for me and have set goals and expectations around that. I wouldn't expect yours, or anyone else's, to be the same. You've realized that 25 BMI is too high for you, great. Now you know, but that doesn't apply to everyone. And the original poster in this thread claiming everyone should be at 22 BMI is clearly also speaking about a particular experience which is not applicable to everyone, but writing as if it is.
My BMI is 31 but my body fat % is 18%. I've been lifting weights seriously for 12 years, since I turned 40, but I would never be mistaken for a bodybuilder.
"...in my experience unless you are lifting a lot of weights 25 is the upper limit.."
I get you...
I'm 6'0" (183cm) and 212 lbs (96kg) (BMI=29). I'm at 17% body fat and am working toward 10%, but also have been lifting weights heavily. I just got down to size 32 jeans (82cm waist) but have a 48.5" chest (123cm) and 15.5" (40cm) biceps. I still wish to lose 15-20lb more, but then I'd be at 195lb and about 8% body fat -- with a BMI of ~27. (Assuming I don't add more muscle at the same time.)
It is a lot better than a 15 months ago when I made my life change - I was 240lb (109kg) and 38% body fat, and pushing a 38" (96cm) waist, truly obese. And I felt like shite.
I am surprised how much I have come to love weightlifting, rowing, and eating a diet better balanced towards low-caloric density foods (lots of veggies) and lean protein. And I am more surprised at how quickly my body changed, considering I'm now just over 50.
Yes. BMI is your weight divided by height squared. Which is really weird when you consider that humans are 3D objects! So you should naturally expect that a taller person will have a higher BMI than a shorter person even with the exact same proportions. In practice humans who are taller tend to be skinnier so we'd ideally use something close to the 2.5th power but that math would have been impractical for the 19th century clerks who were the first consumers of BMI information.
Humans are 3D objects, but fat is not distributed equally throughout the body. Most fat is subcutaneous fat, i.e. located right below the skin. Its abundance can therefore be approximated by body surface area, which is proportional to height squared.
This might be a nice explanation of it didn't fail to agree empirically with reality, where in fact there is a significant cubic component which gives rise to the "something close to the 2.5th power" that GP suggests.
A few years ago I read a paper where they checked the correlation between CT measured body fat percentage and a lot of easily measured and calculated figures, in the same style of BMI (w/h²). I haven't been able to find it again, but if I remember correctly BMI was actually pretty good, although worse for women than for men, and the best measurement included waist circumference.
Waist-to-height ratio is surprisingly good: your waist should not be more than half your height. Simple to measure too, since you only need a piece of string.
Actually, it appears BMI is more accurate for women than for men. I'm guessing because men have more variability in their muscle mass.
Overall, I think BMI looks like a pretty useful metric considering how easy it is to measure. That would explain why it sticks around despite being frequently criticized.
Why do we assume that fat is bad for you, but muscle is always good for you. The blood necessary to maintain excessive muscle is still excessive to normal humans, and may put strain on the heart. Only our skin grows with our muscles, other organs do not grow in tandem.
I've always thought that while BMI is crude, it still is reasonable for measuring metabolic syndrome, considering that many of the things associated with heart problems involve the needing a powerful heart, when adding any mass whatsoever will necessarily increase the work the heart must do.
Do you have anecdotes or other evidence of someone experiencing heart issues because they were too muscular?
It seems to me that in the usual case where a person develops muscle mass by working out, this isn't a problem because whatever "blood necessary to maintain excessive muscle" is negligible in the face of the body adapting to improve the cardiovascular system in order to serve muscular oxygen needs during workout. Of course, heart problems due to an unhealthy person ramping up exercise too quickly is a concern, but this is separate from your concern.
One also observes that athletes in general have lower heart rates than the average person; whatever additional burden their muscles impose, their cardiovascular system is way more adapted to handle that due to exercise.
My argument is that we should not assume that extra mass from muscle does not impose similar health problems from fat. If we are going to say that, it should be demonstrated. A fit person doesn't need to weight 30+lbs more than standard overweight section of the BMI. If they do, they will be a very non-standard human.
Here are some things I found in a brief glance at google scholar. There appears to be a condition called Athlete's heart, but I dunno:
The first link describes heart problems perhaps arising from intense exercise, which is a different thing that heart problems arising from muscle mass.
The second describes the same thing:
> Several middle-aged and older men trying to improve their physical fitness by weightlifting have presented for repair of severe mitral regurgitation, some of whom stated that they remembered feeling a pop in the chest while weightlifting, which was the start of their dyspnea.
> Arterial BP increases most during weightlifting that is accompanied by mechanical compression of blood vessels (such as when bent forward at the waist or squatting) and when accompanied by a Valsalva maneuver.
Neither of these papers link them to muscle mass but to the stress of high-intensity exercise itself, which I have already addressed.
I agree that we should not assume things, but in the lack of cursory evidence, I would still stand by my argument that in the normal case where muscle mass is formed from working out, such workout stresses and modifies the cardiovascular system to such an extent the result is a body that is more than capable of handling whatever stress that muscle at rest imposes on the heart.
Once again I reiterate my cursory evidence to my argument, that athletes' cardiovascular system are generally so much more efficient and less taxed than the general population that their hearts beat at 3/4 the average heart rate.
It seems like athlete's heart syndrome is a benign condition.
>The interest in an index that measures body fat came with observed increasing obesity in prosperous Western societies. Keys explicitly judged BMI as appropriate for population studies and inappropriate for individual evaluation.
>When a team of researchers adjusted BMI to take muscle mass into account back in 2018, then associated this corrected measure with mortality risk, they found that the “U” mostly transformed into a straight line.
> Ideally you should be a BMI 22, non smoking, non drinking, long distance runner living in the countryside eating a perfectly balanced diet.
All good except the long distance runner part. Don't think it is equivocally good as the others and may be potentially harmful (key is the long part, short/medium is good).
Walking in inclined, rough terrain is arguably more versatile exercise, and far, far less depressing to me. Hell, it actually lifts my mood.
Jogging on asphalt just makes my joints hurt and it makes me feel like I'm administering some pathetic modern substitute to the primal need to be active and to be in nature, which just depresses me. Same with everything gym based.
I wondered why I couldn't keep my swimming regime, despite generally liking this sort of activity.
The only time I have some space is during winter, when few people use the outdoor pool and that is still a 20x10m rectangle, where I have to swim in circles like some captive orca.
My main issue is finding exercise in the winter time I can motivate myself to do. Despite growing up in Norway I just hate snow. And my favourite forest trail which is literally right outside my door is a death trap in the winter because it's in a river valley. One slip and I end up falling 50m face down into a frozen river.
One issue is that for the betterment of society in regards to climate change, dense urban living is undoubtedly better than spread out living in the countryside. Assuming we want to maintain current population, of course.
> I'm glad that "fat acceptance" may be turning a corner and will be banished hopefully and there can be a semblance of rational discourse.
TFA doesn't even use the phrase "fat acceptance", which is a completely different thing than claiming "obesity is healthy". The former is simply an effort to destigmatize it, like we destigmatize other forms of addiction.
Also, "obesity is healthy" is a strawman — no credible person or group has ever asserted this. If you search for "obesity is healthy", you'll see that every result makes it clear that obesity is not healthy.
That simply isn't true. Just look into the "Health at Every Size" movement. There are some reasonable ideas there, like destigmatizing it as you mentioned. But there are also some harmful and ridiculous ideas prevalent in that movement - namely that "weight loss should not be a health goal".
IMHO you have a low-generosity reading of the article you linked to, which says that this approach "de-emphasises weight loss as a health goal", and that "the basic premise of HAES is that 'well-being and healthy habits are more important than any number on the scale'".
This lines up with my experience. One can do things like the Potato Diet to lose 100 pounds fairly quickly, but it's definitely not a healthy way to lose weight, and it doesn't equip you to remain at a healthy weight for the rest of your life.
on the other end, I'm 1.83m and 58-60kg since many years (I'm now 37) so a BMI 17-18, and it's my best shape, certainly not underweight. I have really thin bones & limbs (for example I can join my thumb and any other finger around my wrist, thin waist, legs a little bit stronger)
What is your age? Let’s see in 30 years. Most young people have these strong opinions, but life happens and they end up differently. Being lean and mean when young is a lot easier then when you are 50 or 60.
The whole culture of people that talk about "fat shaming" and other such nonsense is a wonderful mirror for people to look into with regards to other Marxist lines of thought.
Step 1: Declare that there is no objective standard for health and/or beauty.
Step 2: Declare that things like weight and beauty are strictly a cultural phenomenon that have no grounding in reality or biology.
Step 3: Assert a power dynamic imbalance. Since there is no reason for people to say skinny is better, then skinny people are merely "fat shaming" people to oppress them.
Step 4: Relentlessly point out all the ways "fat people" are "oppressed". If anyone disagrees with you, accuse them of "fat shaming", label them an oppressor, etc.
You can replace weight with anything. Gender, sexuality, skin color. It's a terribly dull and boring argument. Once you see it, you can find it everywhere.
"Step 1: Declare that there is no objective standard for a better skin color.
Step 2: Declare that things like race and skin color are strictly a cultural phenomenon that have no grounding in reality or biology.
Step 3: Assert a power dynamic imbalance. Since there is no reason for people to say one skin color is better, then white people are merely "race shaming" people to oppress them.
Step 4: Relentlessly point out all the ways "non-white people people" are "oppressed". If anyone disagrees with you, accuse them of "race shaming", label them an oppressor, etc."
I did the thing you said, replaced weight with skin color, but it came out pretty damn racist.
If you're reading this and it sounds racist, might be time to switch it back to being about weight and realize that yes it is also shitty to treat people poorly because of their weight - just like it's shitty to treat someone poorly because of their race.
"Healthy Obesity" does exist. But it is vanishingly rare. When one's body has to support a large amount of muscle mass, it also needs a lot of fat to offset it. This sort of body composition is usually the result of "explosive" training taken to failure (or near it), which (probably) excretes more lactic acid all at once. People on steroids are the exception. AFAIK increasing total reps (lower intensity) instead of going to failure (higher intensity) doesn't help exclusively with fat loss after a certain threshold, you can see that in the different compositions of sprinters / marathoners (or for a more honest comparison, triathletes). You can see "healthy obesity" in people like Kyriakos Grizzly and Eddie Hall (pre-cut).
The human body needs fat and muscle to be in tandem. Deviation to the extreme of either end is very unhealthy and is quickly corrected by the body, given bare minimum stimulus. Absent this, you'll get the beetus and other things. High body fat can also protect you, for example, obese smokers are healthier on average than skinny smokers. All that poison goes to their fat, because fat pretty much acts as a sponge in the body. That's why "pink cheeks", "baby cheeks" are a sign of long-term health. It takes a very long time (years, if not over a decade) of a proper, modern-toxin-free diet to remove toxins from the body. In the absence of proper amounts of protein and fat your body usually likes to isolate harmful things, which can lead to myriad conditions down the line, even if you've been exercising for years and have been "healthy".
Also, related to the title of the main post, sugar and whole grains (processed flour is basically sugar) and horribly addictive. Obese people that have difficulty quitting / have side-effects from quitting might as well have entire regions of their brain dedicated to timing the intake of sugar precisely, at the expense of their mental functioning. So they would inevitably feel out of energy / motivation after a while, and would need food.
Also, the easiest way to lose fat and gain muscle is to subject your body to external weights. It doesn't even have to be very heavy. If you're obese, you could OHP 10kg every other day and lose a significant amount of fat, even without changing your diet (assuming it's not really horrible)
It doesn't exist. Sumo wrestlers are as you describe, with a large amount of muscle and a large amount of fat. And they die young. Sadly, Kyriakos Grizzly will almost certainly die young.
Weight loss can be a sign of health problems, particularly if it’s unexpected. Often people lose a lot of weight before they die.
This makes collecting and interpreting the statistics more difficult because you need to distinguish “good” weight loss from “bad” weight loss. BMI isn’t enough to figure it out.
IMO the fat acceptance movement is pushing more for people to think about obesity like alcohol consumption: not "healthy", but potentially part of a sustainable approach to life. Of course, each deviation from "perfect" health has impacts - but learning to order them productively is what you want.
It's not really that you want to be fat, it's that weight is only one of many lifestyle choices and we'd give people better medical treatment if we were less obsessed with it. Also: People should try to move towards a healthier body weight! But it's a question of balancing effort and focus and not some moral imperative.
> about obesity like alcohol consumption: not "healthy", but potentially part of a sustainable approach to life
I would not classify alcoholism as a sustainable approach to life. Obesity, like alcoholism, isn’t sustainable because it accelerates death and disease. I equate “sustainable” with “not unhealthy”, which does not cover obesity.
What I have witnessed isn’t that those folks call it “healthy” but that they describe it as “not unhealthy”. This is incorrect and dangerous, as it deludes others into believing the same.
I don't think any reply could have supported my point better. All alcohol consumption is alcoholism! Good luck on your path - we would live longer if we all followed your advice. And also - like I said - this is exactly what is being critiqued.
So, why is it that as a wealthy person with good health insurance and access to care, when I see my GP for an actual physical, I get weighed, but I don't get a DEXA scan that actually measures muscle and fat? They're not expensive compared to other stuff in health care, but accurate fat measurement seems to be a thing for recreational fitness nerds not people trying to live a long time or without chronic diseases? When I've gotten these before it's always from a scanner in truck in a CrossFit parking lot rather than at a Dr office. If distinguishing between fat and weight is important, why is it so ignored in medical contexts?
Interesting. I would have though BMI was a sufficient proxy for body composition for broad samples... That conclusions about the average person with BMI of X were useful.
I guess this argues otherwise, which is worth considering.
(Though, this seems to be just one study right now? I don't think it's rational to draw the strong conclusions the article does from one study. The absolute claims don't seem supported by the evidence, so I guess they are pushing an angle, though it's not clear to me why.)
Ok, but what now? There is no effective treatment or cure for obesity from public health point of view. That is, sufficiently low calorie intake will make you lose weight. But, if your metabolic balance is out of whack, it will also leave you constantly hungry, lethargic, not able to enjoy one of the major life pleasures. To maintain that long term once has to essentially prioritize staying slim over all other life priorities.
It's likely that prevention of obesity is achievable by changes is easily available food, walkable communities, regulation of problematic chemicals, childhood health education. And also that overtime medical treatments and food modifications will get better at counteracting preexisting obesity.
But in the meantime, "go lose weight" may not be practical medical advice to an average individual. Eating healthier food and having a regular exercise regimen may well be, but losing lots of weight is not an expected outcome. People will still end up eating more of healthier food, or eating unhealthy food due to life circumstances, or getting too fatigued to exercise enough. At this point, "what else can we do to improve your health" because a relevant question.
Fat acceptance? Bah. Just because I am overweight doesn't mean I like looking at fat models. We can admire the best of us while being realistic of what we are going to achieve ourselves. In some marginal way, watching models and athletes does motivate me to watch my food and workout. Just not enough to end up looking like them.
Just like the Hackernews prescription for individual health issues is fasting, the Hackernews prescription for large-scale public health issues is government regulation.
Apply liberally. Start implementing Pigovian taxes on sugary foods. Monitor and punish companies that use added sugar in foods that don't need it. Shut down the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo.
We could also have private school and private communities that advertise ease of healthy living. But so long as a school run by government, they might as well teach useful things like taking good care of one's health, including school lunch that is a realistic, non-bland example of what one can enjoy eating and at the same time don't become a balloon. Or if we can have vouchers and parents can choose schools that do that, that's great.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadPassive exercise, that you do throughout the day, though, is a great way to expend calories. Walk more, bike for transport, use a standing desk, etc. That's the difference between 1500 calories and 2200.
Exercise is not a bad way to lose weight.
For a simple empirical study, ask every person you meet/know that is fit, and nearly everyone will say they exercise.
Specifically, cardio. If you're goal is to lose weight, you shouldn't touch weights until your BMI < 22. Just run or swim a few times a week.
Diet + cardio with no strength work can put people into 'gotta make it through this famine' mode, where their metabolism slows right down to eke out the stores as long as possible.
As a counterpoint, I also live in the US and have never found making time to exercise to be some kind of insurmountable task -- even when I was commuting almost 3h/day. Exercising requires just a few hours out of your whole week
there's no way a drug that effective has no side effects
I know people who have lost weight using Ozempic...you only lose weight...you do not become healthy...you do not gain muscle...you just are a flabby person who is less fat
in cases of Ozempic use I have observed - less food is consumed but it is still tending to be garbage
weight is lost but I doubt there is a substantial health gain
I have read that the intent was to bootstrap better habits and then stop taking Ozempic once the better habits took hold...instead people will just take it forever and keeping eating (fewer) burgers
How much time for that do you have? Pushing around a walker when you're 65? Spending hours on the phone with Customer Support for some insurance issue?
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/50-years-of-running
Exercise is important for many reasons, but not for preventing obesity. Unless you're running marathons, or exercising like somebody who is, the amount of calories you will burn from exercising will in no way whatsoever compare to what you eat. If you start eating more because you go to the gym, you'll almost certainly end up gaining weight.
The answer today is the same as it's been for thousands of years.
At 190lb, my BMI is 26.5, but I'm relatively muscular with a body fat % of around 15%. I have more than 5lbs more muscle than an average person, but my required daily caloric needs are only a few hundred cals more a day at most.
That volume is good for keeping your body limber, but it’s not really exercise in terms of weight loss or cardio conditioning.
You may want to double check that math.
https://www.bikeradar.com/advice/fitness-and-training/how-ma...
Perhaps 500 calories/hour is a rough estimate. 100 miles @ 15 mph = 6.66 hours = 3333 cals or roughly what it takes to burn 1lb of fat.
I would think the 20-40 hours/week of exercise I do has more of an impact on how my calories are burned than the raising of my basal metabolism of the extra 20lbs of muscle I have over a very passive version of myself.
Like if I took a week off and ate the same, I as well would put on fat. Just 50-200 x 7 calories (.10 to .4 lbs) less of it. And that is if my eating habits were the same, which they would not - exercise is an incredibly good appetite stimulant, which people who attempt to exercise to lose weight find out quickly.
What I'm getting at - and maybe what you're getting at to is: long term - decades let's say of lifestyle choices leads to things like diabetes. It's not change that happens in a year. Hard for humans to grok.
I obviously can't tell from your hn post (and IANA doctor), but sometimes I get headaches because I haven't drank enough water, or I've just gone out too hard.
Making sure you're adequately hydrated is important, as is supporting the cellular activity with nutrition.
Where things go off the rails is when the body spends excess energy and inflammatory responses on things not connected to repair and replenish operations. You get acid reflux, allergies, tumors, even dementia-related diseases.
Of course it's not that simple, but for nearly every single one of those pathologies, exercise improves the chances to avoid them, or helps reduce their negative outcomes. (IANA doctor either.)
I'll never get that, we only get one shot at life, even a few hours of exercise per _week_ will greatly increase your quality of life and healthy life span, there are no better medicine, nothing will give you your body back once it's too late. Some people on this forum will grind 60+ (even much more) hours per week at work, absolutely wrecking their body for "success" just to be shadow of themselves at 40. I see it everywhere online "after 40 everything hurt" "I can't sneak on my kids because my knees pop at every steps". What a sad state of affair...
Get out there, get in shape, it's life's best cheat code, everything gets better, your body evolved for that very thing for hundred millions of years, you don't even need that much dedication or time. Learn to master your body, learn about nutrition, learn self control. Run, swim, climb, lift weight, yoga, dance, try everything and keep what you enjoy
I'll always remember the day a 60+ years old climber absolutely humiliated me on the wall by effortlessly completing a climb on the first try while I couldn't even get to the half point, I was 25 and in what I though was a good shape
Not exercising is like buying a high performance car and waiting for the engine check light to do an oil change. Take care of your body, once it's gone it's gone
But I'm with you - I find that exercise works well for me as the one of the best things that makes life better. But I also avoid things like video games, drugs, too much sex with too many different partners (I keep it to one at a time) - that sort of thing, as I know it'll just throw me off.
That's why I said it train self control, you focus on "future you", not "immediate you"
If I have to go way out of the way to binge on junk I'm probably not going to do it.
I owe it to you to be capable of (among other things): a few minutes of chest compressions, running a mile or so for help, and dragging an adult body a few hundred feet to safety.
I owe that to you and we owe it to each other.
There will be no hack to "get around it".
Conversely: If you can do these things, I don't care what you look like or what your actuarial table shows or what you ate for lunch.
Dog will get you out and moving in any weather. They really don't understand why you're too tired for a walk this evening.
YT cooking shows will show the fun side of cooking and get you to make food at home more. Then you're less likely to put so much oil/butter/sugar/etc into dishes vs. eating out. And you also get a taste for vegetables. You kinda tend to eat healthier in general-ish.
Combine all that with a good sleep routine and you're pointed in the right direction. Takes about 3 months though.
I've been working out for many years and I think I have a healthy body fat percentage but since I'm not very thin its hard to tell without taking specific measurements, but I would say that most men who go to the gym frequently are in the category of "healthy obese", or overweight, if you just take into account their BMI.
The vast majority of people are not gym rats, thus their BMI roughly corresponds to their fat levels, correctly approximating overweightness and obesity.
> BMI characterized 26% of the subjects as obese, while DXA indicated that 64% of them were obese. 39% of the subjects were classified as non-obese by BMI, but were found to be obese by DXA.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Discussed earlier this month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34854496
And that's not even mentioning the hormones..
Very few in the other direction; this study doesn't mention them
>Mean BMI was 27.3 (SD = 5.9) and mean percent body fat was 31.3% (SD = 9.3). BMI characterized 26% of the subjects as obese, while DXA indicated that 64% of them were obese. 39% of the subjects were classified as non-obese by BMI, but were found to be obese by DXA. BMI misclassified 25% men and 48% women. Meanwhile, a strong relationship was demonstrated between increased leptin and increased body fat.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
There are _very few_ people who have a BMI over 30 purely by having an extreme amount of muscle mass and most of them are on steroids. Also, there are weight related issues for which it is irrelevant whether the extra weight is fat or muscle mass.
The sheer amount of muscle you would need to exceed BMI 30 (obesity threshold) is pretty rare to see "in the wild" and you have to ask how many such people abused steroids etc. to grow so muscular. Natural Homo sapiens build is fairly lean, we are no Neanderthals.
A very fit guy from a normal city gym may have BMI in the overweight territory (so, say, 26-27), but > 30 is too much.
Healthy obese because of muscle mass is the size of an NFL linebacker, not “most men who go to the gym”
ETA: yea, just checked. TJ Watt has a BMI of 30.7 (barely obese BMI). BMI only matters here if you’re TJ Watt lmao
and also have significant body fat. Having a BMI over 25 and being lean is not something you can achieve by just going to the gym a few months. It takes time to build muscle.
For example, when I went to get life insurance, the rate was affected by BMI, regardless of body composition.
Maybe it’s regional, but that’s not what I see in the places I’ve lived.
Almost all except some of the young just-post-college athletes are clearly bulked out with fairly high body fat and plainly inverted waist to hip ratios. They can perform a handful of lifts at high weight, but have negligible cardio conditioning, poor engagement of support muscles and stabilizers, and many are sporting progressively worsening back issues.
The trend in gym practice for men, around me, seems to be really poorly matched to healthfulness in general and shows very little evidence of producing lean high-BMI results. But again, maybe its regional.
This argument you're presenting is used by the "fat positivity" movement to discourage the use of population measures that ARE effective in creating useful statistical analysis of health risks. Like all animals humans are subject to the laws of physics. When you have more mass per unit height your body has to work harder. If you then go on and continue to add or maintain this mass you develop health problems. You don't need an MD to see the intention of the metric nor the absurdity of promoting fatness as a "positive" trait. The only thing this reveals is that the progressives have gaslighted society into believing a lie by using "science" as a kudgel to beat you into compliance with.
look at the sons and daughters of branded food conglomerate moguls and their top executives. youll likely find them quite trim.
Being obese isn’t a root cause. It is a symptom of something else.
Particularly, when it is a symptom of depression, believing in “healthy obesity” can be enabling even if it’s not the truth. That person (not statistic) needs to see themselves as healthy and loved to have a chance at being healthy.
Telling them to eat better or exercise is thinking about yourself in a generic version of their circumstances rather than them in their actual circumstances.
I don't buy it. Tolerance towards fatness has risen since the 80s, as have weights; both have gone up at the same time. The more tolerance our society has for fatness, the fatter people get. If more tolerance for fat people were the key to getting people to lose weight then there should be an inverse relationship between the two, but that just hasn't happened.
"Health obesity" isn't about staying obese, it is about shifting social stigmas as they seem to contribute (paradoxically) to obesity[1]. Why is this something you feel the need to support publicly and vocally instead of letting people's health be between them and their doctors (who also need to work on stigmas[2])? The more society makes this a social issue, the worse off people will be when external stressors land [3].
[1] https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291... [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/oby.23266 [3] https://academic.oup.com/abm/article/54/10/738/5901900
Feeling better in the moment just enables people to ignore the root cause and thus fail to make progress. They need truth that their current state sucks, hope that it could be better, and to recognize that their own agency has an outsized effect on their future. And maybe they could use some help breaking down their problems into smaller more achievable steps.
Sounds like enabling obesity to me.
Telling them to eat better or exercise doesn't work because it's a pain in the ass to be in a caloric deficit. They have statistically low dopamine levels (among other markers being out of wack) so they just don't have the mental fuel to deal with doing what's hard. That's what lead them to be obese in the first place, seeking comfort in food, sitting on their butt and avoiding the harshness of their reality.
Another key component are high cortisol levels (ie chronic stress due to past traumas causing depression and other mental illnesses), hindering the parasympathetic brain to switch on digestive metabolism.
You don't solve all these underling issues by saying "hey fat isn't that bad, you can still be healthy being heavy".
Like you wouldn't say to a drug addict "hey drugs aren't that bad for you" to make them feel less shitty about their situation.
How do we know it isn't going to help? Because we've been trying it for decades. Thin people yelling at fat people to lose weight in public does nothing. Time to focus on the systemic unhealthy issues our culture has and stop treating someone's fatness as their own, individual failure.
1. Historically being fat was considered a sign of good health. Of course, this was during times of massive food scarcity and the definition of fat was probably very different from what we consider fat today.
2. Massive amounts of money involved in telling people to eat/drink more, and then spend more money in gyms and taking pills to lose that weight. As opposed to just eating less and then living normal healthy active lives. There’s not much money in the latter.
3. People wanting to stop fat-shaming (which is also unequivocally bad…fat shaming only makes it harder for people to lose weight), trying to convince other people that someone being fat does not make them bad, quickly morphing into being fat is good.
I do not encourage fat shaming at all, but I can also imagine that in some cases shame may be a powerful motivator for some people. Is there hard data showing that it actually makes it harder?
Now it’s a different story if you’re willing to work with them daily to help them lose weight or something similar. But just telling your friend “he your fat, it’s bad for you fix it” will only hurt
It is not at all a constructive approach.
The "healthy obesity" thing is the pendulum flying to the opposite end of the spectrum: unconditional support turned into acceptance and promotion of what we know to not be true.
"Shame implies a personal failing, which readily translates into recognizing and correcting those personal failings."
In the 20th century, Americans fat shamed each other and were less fat. Today in Asia, people still fat shame each other and they're a lot less fat than Americans.
Unfortunately getting into that argument is a minefield.
Just let them be adults and manager their life as they please. At one point they might becone fed up with life as a fat person and they'll make the effort.
And it they don't, well, there are people who smoke from teenage years all the way to the grave
But, either eay, people dont humiliate smokers the way they do with fat people
No, we just tax the shit out of tobacco, exclude them from certain insurance plans, blame and shame them about smoking indoors or inside vehicles, and tell smokers to go huddle outside and off to the side, away from doors, windows, and air intakes, while they do the thing we don't like.
Or were you thinking of air travel, where the difference between a smoker and a non-smoker is either negligible (because they aren't currently smoking), or completely excludes the smoker from the activity (because 16 hours in a plane is too long without a cigarette for them).
Humiliate them? Not often. But we sure as hell told them to take it someplace else; anyplace else, just not near the rest of us.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
If you are shamed for your body, you feel even worse; you may then eat even more to feel better.
Well, we’re probably 70+ years into a National experiment with it, and weights are only going up.
The short of it is that it increases stress, increases depression, eating disorders, and risk of suicide.
As for shame and its ironic effects, you can look to Brene Brown's research and that of other shame researchers.
1 year later, and I'm down 35 pounds with another 10-20 to go. I feel great! Walking doesn't hurt anymore, doing physical stuff is fun again, and I have more energy than I used to. All that to say, the guilt and shame definitely helped motivate me, but YMMV :)
On a related note, find yourself in a woman’s house and notice the inspirational text artwork. “Eat, Love, Pray”, “Worrying works because it never happens”, etc. These little signs are powerful.
A bit brief though, probably need to check the cited material. The overall theme of the report as awhile though is that motivation issues are less of a factor than generally believed.
I think it's better to stick to that, and just drop the term 'fat-shaming'.
It is the same as changing "retard" to "mentally challenged" or "handicapped" to "disabled"... the next term just becomes equally toxic because you haven't changed the actual stigma, just the word used to express it.
But recent efforts have been focused on blurring the lines here.
The stigma causes the hate, they're effectively the same thing (I used them interchangeably) and leads directly to adverse actions against those individuals.
And as I said above - the argument generally shifts at that point to "it's good for them to be attacked, maybe it'll motivate them". Because again, it's just a socially-acceptable vector for hate. We've gradually run out of other forms like racism and sexism, for a while it was homophobia (and the argument was that was a choice too, so it was fine to attack), but we'll always have fat people.
Stop attacking, hating, "stigmatizing", whatever you want to call it, based on traits. It's all "isms" and 50 years ago it is the same argument used to defend racism. Just be civil and treat people like human beings, it's not that complicated.
Others, on the other hand, will be pushed further back into the hole by such talk. This is very individual.
I'm surprised you put that in and not:
4. motivated reasoning. People want reasons to justify their current lifestyle and not having to put in hard work to change it.
For point #1, most western cultures already idealize thinness. Therefore that's not really a factor unless you're from a culture that idealizes being fat.
Wasn't it more a sign of being wealthy and successful? Like if you were fat, it meant you could afford to spend a lot of money/effort on getting food and didn't need to do difficult work outside for 8+ hours a day?
Not sure people were calling it healthy, so much as treating it like a status symbol (because it kinda was).
He always responded: "I just wanted to move to a place where the poor people were fat."
You either need to demonstrate some kind of shame for your unhealthiness or some kind rationale that explains how its actually healthy.
The honest facts that “I like to eat tasty good” and “I don’t really enjoy too much physical activity” are only permissible if you also say “and I can’t help myself” or “and it’s actually not unhealthy.”
It’s a social dance that makes people hide the personal truth that health isn’t the only thing that matters in life.
For me being obese is not really a choice. It's just really hard to do anything about it, especially because I tend to overeat when I encounter stress in life. And I'm not wired with the discipline to fix it. I often go on diets but they never last.
Also, living alone cooking is a real chore and there's not enough ready made healthy food.
And in terms of exercise I really hate team sports and mindless weight lifting. I do hike a bit though when the season permits.
Are these excuses? Sure but if I could have changed it I would have.
Like: car dependent suburbia. If you don't grow up walking to the shops with your parents, walking to the park to play, walking to school, cycling to school, walking or cycling to work; if your only exposure to movement is mandatory exercise at school which is unpleasant, what does that do to your lifelong views? If your environment doesn't have anywhere interesting to walk to, or any sidewalk to walk on, what does that do?
Like: If your parents and family never moved except to get to the car, what kind of early mental expectations does that set you up with? Children try to imitate their parents, if the parents alway groan and complain about having to walk anywhere, that's some kind of lesson.
Like: Livestrong.com says "The average restaurant meal is four times larger than it was in the 1950s. Similarly, the size of American-manufactured dinner plates has increased nearly 23 percent, from 9.6 inch". If you habitually eat out at restaurants and they gradually feed you more, more sugary, food, but you still have the "clean your plate to be polite" mentality, what does that do?
Like: where did this idea of "healthy food" come from? "Health" isn't something in food.
Like: where did the idea that cooking is "a real chore" come from? Can't one grow up to find preparing food a relaxing joy, an interest, an everyday part of life? Or learn to spend less time on it, e.g. meal prepping?
Like: "I tend to overeat when I encounter stress in life" - Where does that behaviour come from? That's learned from somewhere, it isn't innate to cavepeople to have food on hand just in case life gets stressful, it's likely some family or community cultural habit where others might not do that.
I think it was Paul Lutus in a Reddit AMA, someone asked him if he baked much when living in a cabin in the woods, and he said he found it difficult to resist eating baked goods so he just didn't make them or buy them. That kind of discipline is much easier than buying them, having them nearby, and trying to resist eating them every moment forever.
> "Sure but if I could have changed it I would have."
Perhaps you can't, there are suggestions that becoming obese screws up your body forever, so it burns less fat (e.g. prefering quicker feeling of tiredness to reduce movement, rather than breaking the laws of thermodynamics), holds onto fat more strongly, distorts feelings of hunger and satiety and food cravings. UK comedian Ed Gamble who lost a lot of weight jokingly commented about thin people "if you don't think about food, what are you thinking about literally all the time?". It's possible that wasn't joking and years of obsessively thinking about food engrained that as a pattern he will be stuck with for the rest of his life, when always-thin people can forget about food when thinking about other things.
>[...]
>Like: car dependent suburbia
It seems weird to blame car dependent suburbia for the rise from 1950. Did "car dependent suburbia" really get worse compared to 1950? Given urbanization trends, you'd think that car dependence actually went down compared 1950.
Pew Research[2] says suburbs have grown 6.4 million people by migration from cities and rural populations between 2000 and 2018. Ten fastest growing communities in America in 2021 are suburbs[5].
Car companies made and sold about 58 million cars in the USA in the 1950s decade[3].
Eisenhower's interstate highway act was 1956, and miles of highway has increased by hundreds of thousands since 1990[4].
[0] https://www.insider.com/vintage-photos-levittown-suburbs-50s... and https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demogra...
[1] https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/02/5-facts-abo...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_automobile_industry_i...
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183397/united-states-hig...
[5] https://legallysociable.com/2021/09/19/the-ten-fastest-growi...
Imagine if you only learned from the experience that you need more revenue sooner instead of using the most fun tech, but you hadn't had it beaten into you that it was YOUR FAULT, that would be ... unfair, right? We'd all be missing an opportunity to put you in your place which you clearly deserve by circular reasoning of being at fault.
Plus it makes us feel better because if it's your fault, that means you weren't crushed by enormous imbalanced forces so that won't happen to us. If nobody can resist the $4Bn/year CocaCola advertising spend on every media platform going, maybe I can't either. But if you're just weak, then I maybe can.
Perhaps your social circle doesn’t accept that attitude, but in some of the most obese parts of the country, the norm is to “eat some steak and potatoes and put some meat on your bones, skinny boy”
There’s a reason doctors are afraid to tell patients they’re overweight. People interpret it as a personal attack on their choices rather than a medical diagnosis.
The thought goes: If I am not doing things the way others do, I must be mentally ill somehow and in need of a cure.
Confident self-awareness goes a long way, although self-destructive behavior in general isn't respected, nor should it be IMO.
How do this claim make you feel? "Alcoholism isn't objectively bad because for some people boozing matters more than health."
Remember that being obese effects the people around you. Particularly, obese adults teach bad lifestyle lessons by example to their children, who in turn are more likely to be obese than other kids because of it. Having obese parents is even worse for a child's life expectancy than second hand smoke from chainsmoking parents.
These constructs are usually the opposite of what they claim, like “healthy” in this example.
Did you read the article?
I can give you two simple examples:
Look at any picture of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson when he has been ripped. Ditto with Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime.
BMI says these folks are either obese or severely obese. Extreme examples, but illustrative of the weakness of bmi.
On a personal level, I have been listed as obese by a doctor when I weighed in 205 as someone who is 5’11” (somewhat carelessly, because bmi was 28.x, and “obese” is 30+, but still…).
Doctor did not care to notice that I was very muscular, exercise regularly (weights and cardio), and was pretty lean.
The doctor wanted to talk to me about my “weight problem”. I pulled out dexa can showing that I had 176 pounds of lean body mass and was 14-15% body fat (“healthy” range, and probably much leaner than her, even though she was slight build and thin), told her about my diet and exercise regimen, and she quickly reversed course.
You can see how muscular people are unhappy about bmi being used for individual evaluation.
BMI is a measure that is meant to be used to measure populations rather than individuals. Being used as a quick a dirty evaluation tool without looking in more detail by the doctor is irresponsible medicine — yet it is common practice.
This is why “anybody could come to believe otherwise”.
Obviously, if the dexa scan comes back saying someone is 30% body fat, no amount of muscle can make that “healthy”, but I think that’s not where most thoughtful people have issues with potentially specious claims of obesity.
Those all fail to reliably predict body fatness in all populations.
All of those measurements should be taken in context with other health signs, like blood pressure, fasting glucose and maybe eating/exercise habits as well.
I’m a 50-something desk jockey, and I’ve never used steroids or any sort of PED. I just eat well, make an effort to exercise, and my genetics steer me towards muscle building. I was also an athlete when I was younger (not sure if this matters).
I mentioned the rock and Arnold were extreme examples, but they were there to make a point… bmi is not meant to be used to measure individuals.
Your skeleton is there to give the muscles something to form around. Your muscles are supporting the body, not the other way around.
It’s not like your body has to drag around muscles like it’s a burden…
The point in using extremes and then a more modest (and probably realistic) example of myself was that BMI is a potential trap for anyone who has muscle (even if they are, in fact, very fat). They will most likely be rated a category or two above where they should be, and a weight loss regimen for someone who is “extremely obese” versus someone who is merely “overweight” will probably look very different. Specifically, one will probably be a major intervention or lifestyle change, while the other is most likely a small/medium lifestyle change.
2. Note the article is about how BMI is a bad measure for many weight types and frequently miscategorizes risk (e.g., by underweighting risk to “normal” bmi folks with a high body fat %).
The argument that I’m trying to make is not to “checkmate bodyshamers”, it’s to show that bmi is overall a pretty bad measure to use to evaluate weight and health in individuals that include a variety of body types.
Fwiw, I’m not a fan of the “healthy at any weight” stance (that’s clearly BS), but I am definitely trying to show that commonly held beliefs about things like BMI even and especially in the medical community can be dangerous and irresponsible (just like the article explains).
Really?
Would you mind telling that to my former doctor who wrote down in my chart that I was “obese” just based on my height, weight, and a quick visual scan? She was starting into “substantial lifestyle change” talks before I showed her my data.
She didn’t reverse course until I showed her my dexa scan and told her my diet and exercise regimen.
My point is that there are plenty of people who are labeled a category or two worse than they actually are. Yes, many people are actually obese — I get that — but people who are naturally muscular quickly grow tired of (and sometimes numb to) being categorized as worse than they actually are.
Folks who talk about obesity, especially medical folks and media folks, would do well to be more nuanced in their analysis and discussion of the data.
This has something to do with political correctness, which is now the status quo, but that's a different matter.
When societies put up facades and allows delusion to persists, the actual issue doesn't go away. People are still fat, unhealthy (and dying from it), and their appearance is still an issue (even if friends lie or avoid it).
Probably because some popular "treatments" for the condition often attempted are far worse than obesity itself. Yo-yo dieting, amphetamine use, serial liposuction, binge eating and throwing up, et cetera.
However there are studies which find lowest mortality for the slightly overweight with BMI < 30. For instance: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1555137 and https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2022.8577...
visceral fat is significantly more dangerous than subcutaneous fat, and people who have a high ratio of visceral fat to subcutaneous fat can appear skinny but are as or potentially less well off that someone who has a more balanced ratio of visceral to subq fat.
Sumo wrestlers have extremely low visceral fat and extremely high muscle mass. But a good margin of subcutaneous fat. They have a markedly lower life expectancy than other elite athletes and than other Japanese men.
the main issue for your average person is there isn’t really a good way to measure the percentage or ratio outside of a Dexa scan which are pretty expensive
«Nor does BMI measure where fat is located, which can make a big difference. Visceral fat jammed among internal organs is much worse than subcutaneous fat stored just beneath the skin.»
Thin on the Outside, Fat on the Inside
(Dr. Robert Lustig)
That said, body positivity shouldn't be thought of as having anything to say about objective physical health: there is zero reason a person who is obese should necessarily feel bad about themselves. Shame is a useless or detrimental approach to changing behavior; shame is oftentimes the reason people engage in unhealthy behaviors like overeating in the first place. Being overweight is an obvious health danger, but it does not make you a bad person.
Somewhere in the idiot echo chamber of social media the idea of a healthy sense of self worth got conflated with a healthy body.
No obese people are not bad people but I would like to be able to say that I don't approve of their lifestyle and don't want my kids to believe that it is normal and fine to be obese.
We all do unhealthful things, of course, but our society makes it very hard to admit that we do so in sound mind. The role we’re asked to play is to say we’re addicted, indulgent, or ashamed.
The dissonance isn’t good for people and is not unlike the toxic dissonance we associate with religious communities that are too stringent and deny everyday realities of human behavior.
Being a bigger person doesn't make you less of a person, it doesn't mean that you are weak, or even mean that you are unhealthy on its own. As a random person, a friend, whatever we should not pass judgment on other people in that regard.
But on the flip side context is incredibly important. For example in a doctor setting. It is deeply concerning that I see a ton of people that immediately think that if their doctor mentions needing to loose weight that they are immediately fat phobic.
I see people saying they want a "body positive" doctor. Sure Doctor's need to be better and understand that everyone's body, diet, etc is different. But I am concerned about this desire to have a doctor never talk about your weight.
I am overweight and my doctor mentions it... I mean we are tracking it and they weight me. Him not saying anything would be wrong and him not doing his job.
But you are very right that you can't shame someone even at the Doctor. But you also can't ignore it.
The main issue is the cognitive dissonance between being fat and bring told that being fat is unhealthy so you're unhealthy. The easiest way for one's mind to resolve this is to retreat into the imaginary realm where being fat can be healthy. The retreat into the imaginary is easier than not being fat and the cognitive dissonance is avoided.
I have had my share of bad doctors but my current doctor is great and it never feels like a lecture. It feels more like a conversation. He makes a couple of small recommendations and we revisit it in a couple months.
Now I will acknowledge maybe this is because of where I am as far as being obese (as in it isn't a huge concern for my doctor) and I also mention that I am working on it.
But I view this the same way I view sexual health. I engage in some risky behavior, I go in for testing every 3 months. My doctor always asks me about what happened and mentions certain things that they encourage that I don't do. I don't take this as being lectured, I don't take this as them being judgmental or not sex positive, but instead just doing their job.
At the end of the day I am doing something that is not in the best interest of my long term health, and it is their job to tell talk about that.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
(And no, low-fat ripped bodybuilders aren't relevant to this discussion. They and their doctors both know that BMI doesn't work well for these rare individuals.)
We have an entire body positivity movement that makes people feel good about obesity. Culturally we’ve come to celebrate it. How do we expect people to keep fit under this culture? The main interests that benefit are junkfood on one facet and pharmaceuticals manufacturers on the other.
It’s becoming the modern alcohol but an addiction we could have avoided instead of celebrating.
As to alcohol while I don’t favor prohibition, I’d like ti return to an environment where no advertising/ promotion of said products is allowed.
And I sure hope you're carving out an exception for the many many people in the world who are fat because it's a side effect of a medication they are forced to take for an unrelated health condition. Or should they feel bad about their bodies too?
But either way - I don't actually think that alcoholics are bad people. I think that they have an addiction and would benefit from access to resources that help with that. If they want to drink til they die, I'm not going to shame them for that.
And these beliefs are a consequence of for-profit healthcare.
If socialized healthcare was a reality, there would be a big incentive for having a lean population. We don't have that today, because there is profit to be made.
Sadly, the US is paying as much per capita for healthcare as countries with free healthcare. A private system costs a lot more to run even when they are managed by people with good intentions.
In the Netherlands it costs around 150 with good services. In Spain it's free but no way the tax expenditure is that high because most people don't even make much more than 1000 euro.
So where's the BMI table that asks height and "how wide are your shoulders?"
For some of us, "big boned" isn't a euphemism.
Even the body builder with a high bmi thing isn't that healthy. It's tough to be large.
You don't need to look at BMI, or any number besides fat % for that matter, to see we have a massive fucking issue. If your belly protrudes far enough that you can't see your own feet, big boned or not, you're obese
Obesity is BMI 30+, unless you're a semi-pro/pro athlete or have genetic defects at 30+ BMI you're definitely fat af, here are examples of 30 BMI: https://www.lipedema.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Obesity-...
There is absolutely no chance you have a 30+ BMI because of "big bones"
It sounds like you want the Body Shape Index = waist circumference / BMI^2/3 x height^1/2
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_shape_index
I fucking hate it. I have at least managed to get under a 40 BMI its a huge slog to even get try to get down to only overweight. And even then in realistic terms even if I do, its 100% impossible to stay there over your lifetime after being obese. Age will just catch up with you.
I wouldn't wish this on anyone.
You will have to keep reducing your diet forever as your metabolism slows. It's not 100% impossible, just a very difficult lifelong struggle, like having type-1 diabetes.
Did they control for efforts to change you body? Most fat people are trying to be thinner. Plenty of ways that people are told to change their body involve extreme stress to your body (caloric restriction, extreme diets, stimulant pills).
Did you know that being underweight is ALSO associated with health problems, sometimes as extreme as the ones associated with being very fat.
Anybody reading this and wanting a more nuanced understanding of this stuff should listen to the first few episodes of the podcast Maintenance Phase https://www.maintenancephase.com/
edit: I'm getting downvoted for pointing out two well documented factors that the linked article doesn't seem to account for - I thought we believed in facts and rationality here?
My two other points, anti-fat bias, and the harm of trying to change your body, are things that could explain the health impact of being fat while not actually being a direct result of the fat. So, not whataboutism at all - they are well documented factors that the linked article doesn't seem to account for or consider.
Ok so now this research is out - there is a link between obesity and poor health, but how strong is that link? As someone else pointed out in another thread, look at the error bars... ALL of that difference could easily be explained by the the well-documented factor of anti-fat bias in healthcare.
But the more important thing here is: if being fat is unhealthy - why would we compound that with stigma, shame, and anti-fat bias? Can you prove those things make people skinny? Because I can prove that those things make people MORE UNHEALTHY. Why would we do something that makes unhealthy people more unhealthy?
On one hand you have to represent your current population, and with the majority of Americans overweight or obese, that's who your customers are. On the other, can this be seen as normalizing a disease?
Like, an ad is never going to be like, "hey you stupid fattie, here's where you can buy clothes." You do still have to sell the clothes.
The question is about whether this is normalizing an unhealthy disease, which your comment does not respond to.
The average American is "normal." that's where we are now.
> normal adjective : conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern : characterized by that which is considered usual, typical, or routine
There is still plenty of work for conventionally attractive people in advertising.
In the 80's, cookies were small, bags of potato chips were tiny and you couldn't "supersize" your fries and Coke at McD's.
But then in the 90's cookies and chips and fries and soda sizes just exploded in size. Now they're the new normal.
I do think that body composition (size/fat/muscle mass) has an effect on your health, but the variance within groups is still huge! There are so many other things in your life that can affect your health, that also have a huge effect size.
So even if you are overweight or obese, and you can't lose weight, it doesn't mean that you can't improve your health. Eating healthy, making sure to get enough fresh air, limiting alcohol and nicotine use, taking care of your mental health and stress level are all going to benefit your health, even if they don't make you lose weight.
The same thing goes if you have a healthy weight and lots of muscle mass: Your body composition is not a free pass to smoke, get drunk every weekend, and eat burgers every day.
[1]: https://assets.realclear.com/images/44/446325_5_.png
> Your BMI tells me your overweight. > But rugby players BMIs are high, and they aren't overweight! > You don't play rugby though do you.
I'm glad that "fat acceptance" may be turning a corner and will be banished hopefully and there can be a semblance of rational discourse.
Ideally you should be a BMI 22, non smoking, non drinking, long distance runner living in the countryside eating a perfectly balanced diet.
Mosy of us will achieve all that, just do what you can.
There's loads of nasty ways to mess up your health. Being fat seems to be the most appealing one (I get to eat what I want and sit around all day? Hell yeah!).
It's not the most appealing one, it's the hardest one to manage. You can not smoke, you can not drink alcohol, you can not take drugs, but you cannot not eat.
You end up with the cheapest calories being lightly processed grains like rice and flour, then you end up with more processed grains like white bread and ramen, then move to things like peanut butter, before hitting junk food. The point is that the cheapest calories aren’t exactly healthy.
The produce aisle tends to be pretty expensive per calorie, potatoes excepted, since veggies aren’t calorically dense, and are sold mostly by weight.
See: potatoes. They're basically pure calories and they're several times cheaper than any junk food. Junk food is the most expensive food no matter how you slice it. The only metric by which junk food might win is in the lazy glutton category; if somebody is too lazy to put a potato in their oven 45 minutes before their meal, then a bag of potato chips has an advantage. But in no other sense is junk food more efficient. And even for lazy people, there are plenty of cheap as dirt veggies that require less cooking or no cooking at all. A bag of apples is a very cheap way of getting a sugar rush without any food prep, but fat people would rather spend that money on several gallons of cola a week.
I challenge you to find any junk food that comes even close to that kind of caloric density per dollar. The cheapest junk food has a tenth of the calories per dollar than a bag of rice from Costco (4-5k calories per dollar), at best.
The problem is that the cheap stuff takes a little effort to make tasty compared to the hyper-palatable junk food. The whole "junk food is cheaper than whole foods per calorie" is nonsense.
The point is, if money is tight, which invariably means that time is tight, people don't have time to cook dried pinto beans, or make bread for EVERY meal where the prep time is roughly 12 hours. Add into that, even knowing how to cook is a skill. An all bread and pinto diet is likely to take more time than most people have, and not yield a great health outcome anyway.
If you look at it as categories, the junk food, and processed food aisles are where you are going to on average get your dollar to go furthest.
The whole point of the "myth" is that it is FAR more efficient and cheaper to get everyone enough calories with food from the junk aisle. The origins I believe come from a cooking show where the budget and time were limited. Professional chefs gave up.
Here's the challenge: you need to serve a meal to 4 people (2,500 caloriesp) you have $10 and 1 hour including shopping and cooking. I can think of half a dozen meals that come from processed foods where that is possible, but doing that with fresh foods is HARD.
If you want to go the pure science route, here's a peer review study from the NIH showing that in many places on earth, healthy food is provably more expensive https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6825829/
High-starch vegetables are a major contributor to obesity.
I bet that it is the "frying" part or the sauce or butter that comes with it, that leaves a lasting impression on the hips.
No one ever got fat eating only vegetables. But you can't eat only vegetables and get all the necessary nutrients(at least not easily).
Throw some eggs or lean chicken meat into the mix and you've got a complete diet that would be very difficult to become fat on.
However, you don't have to be that "extreme". Just eating mostly vegetables and cutting out all the obvious crap will do.
The fact that this is somehow unimaginably strict to many people just shows how completely fucked up our relationship with food is. Most of the foods that make us fat didn't even exist a hundred years ago (at least in its modern, highly processed form) and now people somehow can't imagine living without them.
Getting iron from non-heme sources is also kind of hit-or-miss.
Eat healthy food, and eat only when you're hungry, and most likely your body would auto-regulate the calory intake just fine.
But I also managed to lose 30kg eating (lean) meat, full-fat dairy and almost no green vegetables, just a lot of oats for starch/fibre and nuts for extra protein/vitamins/minerals and healthy fats.
But it's also just really hard to tell what food is actually healthy. Some foods are obviously healthy. Some are obviously unhealthy. But a lot is in the middle somewhere, having both healthy and unhealthy aspects.
Some foods are even controversial in the research, like butterfat which many people lump into the group "saturated fats", which is universally thought to be unhealthy by laypeople. But there are multiple types of saturated fat(ty acids), so it's actually really complicated.
My rough intuition based on reading a bunch of research is that dairy fat is actually quite healthy in small amounts(it's very calorically dense). I could go into a lot more detail on why but the gist is butterfat has a lot of short- and medium-chain fatty acids, which are good. It's the long and very-long you want to avoid.
The 3-4 meals + the constant availability of food is definitely new.
The human brain's ability to use ketones(byproducts of fat metabolism) for energy is actually unique to humans, suggesting a selective pressure towards surviving starvation in our evolutionary past.
You aren’t marching in a legion, working in the fields or building a giant monument without proper food.
Since food preparation took much more time and the logistics were complicated the number of meals and choices were limited but pretty much every meal was packed with carbs and often with fat too (lard, oils etc).
Sweeteners whether it’s honey or other sugars were also quite common and very much so not limited to the ruling classes.
our brains use a very large share of our total energy; so that adaptation may just be a requirement of additional brain energy use and not a adaptation particularly for starvation levels higher than other animals.
It's important to point out that for a lot obese people, hunger hormones are going to be out of whack. So while following hunger might certainly be good for avoiding obesity, it's not necessarily as helpful in losing weight.
The idea of Predestination with regards to eating needs to stop. If there is a psychological addiction then that's the part to be addressed, it's a valid concern. I see what people eat - even people that are not obese - and it's disgusting. I can see at work, at restaurants, even walking in the streets what people eat. That this is 'normal' is what we have to actually try to stigmatize. Donuts, muffins, giant appetizes at dinner, all that stuff should be almost never eaten. Birthday cakes? All that stuff will become disgusting and nauseating to you if you step away from it for just a few months, and your body adapts away from sugar and carbs. It might be hard in the beginning as your metabolism struggles to adjust and keep signaling for you to eat more.
And for the record - not drinking alcohol is a lot harder than not eating for many people I know.
On the other hand I have successfully lost 100 lbs in 6 months in the past, while eating fast food daily.
I won't discuss the "healthiness" aspect of it, but losing weight is ONLY a matter of calories.
I've spent a lot of time experimenting on myself, I can eat lower calories but if those lower calories are bread and sugary crap, I don't get leaner, I get fatter and weaker.
Strongly doubt this assertion
I am naturally thin. That statement ("i get to eat what i want and sit around all day") is true of my body. Is it such a strange idea that there are as many people who are naturally thin as there are that are naturally fat? Those people aren't making a choice to be fat any more than i am making a choice to be thin. Why should they feel bad about their body?
Instead of focusing on individual behavior, you should be speaking out against a government that built a car society, made cities hostile to walking and biking, and made cheap unhealthy food the easiest and cheapest option for most.
Walking and exercise in general make less difference to weight loss than diet.
People know what food is healthy. If they choose not to do it, it's on them.
2. I'm the great-grandparent in this thread. My original comment was in essence: I am naturally skinny, nobody questions that. Is it so strange that people might be naturally fat? You've said something that DIRECTLY contradicts that argument, without any evidence or argument to explain why - all you've done is assert the opposite of what I said. You're going to have to do better. Citation needed on your part.
In animal husbandry, people breed livestock for their "feed conversion ratio" - I.e which animals can most efficiently convert the same amount of food into the most additional bodyweight. It's not a stretch to think something similar might happen in people.
However, if you're one of those people that puts on more weight per item of food then it sucks to be you, but you'll need to eat less food.
Re: your point about medicines - I doubt they manage to create additional calories out of thin air.
But... your overall point is that people need to suffer in discomfort for their entire life so their body looks the way you want it to look? Or so that they stay in good health? If someone is faced with the choice of being fat and happy for 75 years, or being skinny and suffering for 80 years (or whatever the lifespan difference is), why do you feel like your opinion about that choice is something anybody needs to hear? Why is someone else’s choice your business? Do you think that someone should be ashamed or embarrassed about choosing one of those?
I didn’t have to make that choice. But if I did i would 100% choose fat and happy, and i would be upset with anyone who tried to make me unhappy for my choice - especially if it’s coming from someone who didn’t have to make that choice themselves
It's nothing to do with how I think people should look aesthetically, and I don't think the difference is about an extra 5 years of life. There is also "health-span" to consider - i.e. are you bed bound or unable to walk to the shops in the last few years of your life?
>>why do you feel like your opinion about that choice is something anybody needs to hear?
You seem confused as to the purpose of the comment section on a website. Discussing differing views is the whole point of it, I thought. I'm not running up to overweight people in the street and shouting abuse at them.
I'm also not mandating six packs. A certain level of fat is healthy. And I also have zero problem with people like this who own it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG8k8ouN8ro The people I have contempt for are the "Healthy at any size" liars.
Walking and exercise make a HUGE difference in average weight. Just look at Canada, a place mostly analogous to the US, but with way more walkable cities and better public transit. They don't have this problem.
Regardless of how people get fat, we know for a fact that it's nearly impossible to get back to a healthy weight. Children of fat parents are more likely to be fat, both because of genetics and because of diet. Is it their fault that they were born that way?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy
https://researchblog.duke.edu/2021/03/24/duke-researcher-bus...
I got back to a healthy weight by losing 15kgs. It can be done.
Interesting. I like to walk generally, but in the last year, with a fresh Garmin watch prodding me into more steps, I increased my walking by at least 50 per cent. I actually made some 5 million steps last year, at least 7 km every day, in every weather.
My weight fluctuated a bit, but basically didn't change. I am not fat, but I have some amount of belly fat I don't like.
What really changed and improved was my immune system. I am not totally immune to everything, but I tolerate a lot more environmental distress (cold, hot, sweating, getting soaked by rain etc.) before encountering first symptoms of having a cold.
What exercise helps with is making sure that the occasional binge, or change in circumstances, doesn't lead to permanent weight gain. If you're temporarily disabled for 2 weeks and can't move and put on some weight, your body then burns more of that fat when you go back to exercising, or regulates your appetite so you eat less.
But if you're not used to exercising and then suddenly increase your caloric intake, your body has less opportunity to burn the extra fat, so it leads to long term weight gain, and eventually your gut biome and body adjust to the new normal.
And no, the jury is not out on what food is healthy. Carbs are public enemy number 1 according to keto people. Carbs are the best according to Italians.
- Microbiome (eg due to bad microbiome passed on at birth): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27255389/
- Sitting the whole day
- Circadian rhythm disturbance, eg through shift work
- Gestational diabetes increases infant‘s T2D risk later in life
- Hypothyroidism
- Hypogonadism / low Testosterone
- Chronic inflammation, eg via inflamed root canals or chronic infections. People can have eg low grade E. coli overgrowth without knowing.
- Low gut barrier function due to drugs or inflammation
- many many more
Yes, there's "less bad" options, like not eating your whole meal, and/or buying "fake health" food.
Healthy convenience food is very hard to come by and the unhealthy stuff is everywhere.
Smokers are chemically and behaviourally addicted to a substance that's killing them. Just like alcoholics and heroin addicts.
It's probably appropriate to view obese people (food addicts) in a similar way. I don't understand the reaction of telling them to feel bad though. People who are addicted to harmful substances deserve sympathy and medical care.
What an interesting take. Are you saying that people do not essentially "choose" what weight to be by their eating habits?
The problem is not that we aren't listening to our doctors - the problem is that people like OP exist who self-appoint themselves as our doctors and start preaching. And that word was chosen carefully, because it's exactly the same bullshit.
Losing weight is actually really easy. Eat less calories than you burn, and be motivated. My first serious attempt I managed to lose almost 30kg. Sticking with it and keeping it low is really hard. Because every kilo you gain back makes you that much less motivated.
But if you're not motivated, no amount of fascile health advice is going to help. Motivation must come from within. And it can be hard to maintain.
The only diet advice I have from my experience: make a diet you like. If you hate the diet, it will never work. Dieting doesn't have to suck.
I've often heard fitness instructors often phrase this as "weight loss is simple, but not easy" precisely because it's hard to sustain CICO discipline over a reasonable period of time.
As I understand, you just need to consume fewer calories, less sugar and do more exercise. But there's cravings. It's harder to get healthy food at restaurants and cafes. It's harder to cook healthy and tasty food - no one wants to eat miserable food for months, many doctor and nutritionists will just tell patients to eat bland food day after day, like people are robots without souls.
I've heard the same thing about the C programming language: it's a small simple language, but programming with it is hard!
But dieting doesn't have to suck at all. You can diet on food you enjoy no problem.
They key for me was to design a diet to my liking as opposed to one that sucked all the enjoyment out of food. Here are some of the ways I accomplished this:
0. My BMR is about 2000 for reference. I used myfitnesspal w a kitchen scale to count calories and a fitbit(charge 4) to estimate my metabolic rate. I weighed in daily, not weekly, and then went by the weekly average to see progress. I found that weight could often fluctuate by as much as a kg daily due to variables like bowel movements, hydration and imprecision of the scale. Weighing in daily helped control for that.
1. Dinner is sacred. It should be filling and tasty. One of the dinners I made the most was chicken breast with brown rice and a variety of delicious sauces. I managed to make a recipe that included 1 chicken breast sliced up, brown rice and creme fraiche and butter added to the sauce, often with lots of mushrooms, at about 1000kcal pr meal. That's pretty much a full-blown dinner with a very high protein content. And absolutely delicious.
2. To make room for dinner, my breakfast and lunch were quite spartan, about 2-300 calories each. And I would eat maybe 200 calories of nuts or something before bed, because it helped me sleep better. In total that leaves a total daily consumption of 1800kcal. This provides a buffer of 200 calories to my base metabolic rate. That's enough that any added physical activity is always a bonus. But I could sit on my ass all day and still break even at worst. Some days you just don't feel like going outside at all.
3. Insisted on at least 6, ideally 8 hrs of sleep every night. Took whatever steps necessary to make that happen without medication that worsen sleep quality. One thing that really helped here was to take a short walk after dinner. This prevented me from my natural dinner nap which made sleeping at night much easier. Adequate sleep is crucial for losing weight.
4. Incorporate a cheat day at most once a week, at least once a month, making sure it coincided with a lot of activity. So if I got a dinner invite, I would find some way to be really active that day. Maybe I'd walk most of the way to/from the restaurant, or get to public transport by taking a a forest trail in rough terrain. And then I would eat whatever the hell I wanted to that day, as long as I'm not straight up gluttonous about it. This meant in practice that it was pretty hard for me to actually eat more than I burned, because I still ate tiny meals before dinner.
5. Walk whenever possible. Find little ways to walk a bit more, walk one bus stop further than you need to. If you're overweight, just walking can burn a surprising amount of calories.
6. I never set foot in a gym, went jogging or any other "tryhard" forms of exercise. I just took enjoyable walks. More than adequate exercise for weight loss for me anyway.
With this set up I lost 0.5-1kg every week all the while enjoying my diet every day, and regularly allowing some guilty pleasures. And I never did or ate something I hated.
The reason I eventually failed was the bane of my existence: my ADHD, and winter depression. I was doing well with all this taking medication, which enabled me to have all these routines at all. But then the usual depressive episode happened and things got so bad I stopped taking medication, all routines ceased to exist and weight came back. I'm ramping up for another go, with a new plan. In the winter I will attempt to maintain weight, not lose it. This should be significantly easier. And I'm taking more steps to avoid another winter depression but that's a whole other rabbit hole.
Otherwise after the "diet", they will go back to their original weight.
Note: I'm using the definition most people think when they hear diet, which is a restriction.
I had to look up that word: A person usually of little talent who tries hard to succeed, especially through imitation, usually to gain fame or popularity.
A big part of habit change is also changing identity, how you see yourself. In that sense it might be worth investigating your aversion to people that exercise. Many forms of exercise can become quite addictive in themselves. Additionally building some basis of muscle if you have never trained before can increase your base metabolism.
When I say tryhard, I just meant anything that to me is not enjoyable and therefore requires mental effort just to motivate me to do it.
I don't have an aversion to people that exercise. I exercise. Exercise doesn't have to include going to a gym or running. I used to think I just hate all exercise, but I learned that really I just hate synthetic exercise, like gyms and jogging on asphalt. I love spending time in nature, forests, river valleys. It's great exercise. Hell you could go do calisthenics in the woods if you really wanted to. You can do pullups from branches etc.
My point both for dieting and exercise is that the key is to find something you don't hate doing. I resent the implication that hating gyms is some kind of character flaw that needs fixing. If you enjoy the gym, great, go there! If you don't, find something else! I definitely got addicted to walking/bursting/parkouring around a river valley with some death metal in my ears. In the summer I would do it almost every day for half an hour just because I wanted to.
As for growing muscle, this is certainly also important, and initially I tried to incorporate it, but I found that building muscle while also eating a caloric deficit greatly reduced my options in terms of food. I came to the conclusion I had to cut out almost all fat to accomodate the protein and carbs necessary for that. I decided to postpone this until a "stage 2" where I would change my diet to instead maintain weight while gaining muscle and losing fat, but I never got there. Feeling good about next time though because I know what failed last time and what I need to watch out for.
While there are many people that have a comparatively harder time to retain a healthy weight, no one has to be obese. A small minority might find it so hard to not become obese that they simply cannot manage it, but that fact should not dominate public discourse and act as an excuse for everyone.
More importantly, obesity is contagious. You give it to your kids and family. If you don't stop it, your loved ones might suffer.
Can they?
We agree that some fat people can change their weight to become thin. But do we agree that not all fat people can? For example what about people who have become fat as a result of side effects from medication that is treating other health conditions. Hopefully you accept that's not something those people can realistically change. Should they also feel bad about their bodies? I would say no. Now how do we tell which fat people we think should feel bad about their bodies and which shouldn't? Do we have a little health background interview with each one first? Or maybe we could just accept people for who they are, and don't make anyone feel bad for what their body looks like.
As for contagiousness, idk. I know thin kids of fat parents, and I know fat kids of thin parents. I suspect there's a lot more at play than a simple "fat adults make kids fat".
I think the opposite is true, though I don't have statistics in front of me. Obesity traditionally had low rates of recovery. A huge percentage can never seem to figure it out.
The situation looks so grim that doctors were pushing to stop treating it as a "choice". I recall it being controversial, but somewhat agreeing with that perspective. Looking at a condition where people "want" to change, but almost always fail, it appears to look more like an incurable disease, than something that can easily be fixed with "discipline".
What's the point of guilt tripping people when the results are so consistently bad? I know there may have been some breakthroughs since then.
edit: parent comment was edited to remove the examples of eating behaviors they believe are the cause of fatness. Their examples were all things that I as a naturally skinny person do or have done regularly.
> In response to 84 days of 1000 kcal/day of overfeeding, 12 pairs of monozygotic twins gained on average 8.1 kg, but the range was from 4.3 to 13.3 kg.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2897177/
That’s not a vast range? It means some people gain more than they „should“, and some less than half of the caloric intake.
It’s also not „my“ arithmetic btw.
My original response was to a comment suggesting that overweight and obese people get home and eat 15 chocolate bars. My observation, supported by your additional evidence, is that a small imbalance has a substantial cumulative effect.
Some are genetically predisposed to becoming fat. Its still a fact that they are fat. And being fat comes with associated health risks.
As for how it went from 10% to 60% (your numbers, idk if they're right) one piece of the puzzle is that in 1998 the definition of obesity was changed, which made MANY more people fall into the obese category who did not previously: http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9806/17/weight.guidelines/
Yes people have gotten fatter. That’s a thing that’s happening. To me that’s evidence of systemic problems in our food supply, economic factors like poverty. None of which are reason to treat someone poorly for being impacted by that.
Asking people to ear less than they are eating now is thus asking them to be perpetually hungry. It can be done, even for a year or two if they have willpower, but eventually they will get sick of being cold, tired and irritated all the time --because that is what chronic hunger does to you-- and they will go back to the normal behavior of eating until they are no longer hungry.
Unless they are on a particularly aggressive program of calorie reduction, eating less than they are eating now is not asking them to be perpetually hungry.
Alcoholics are "making a choice" to drink alcohol. But we both know that it's more complicated than that. There are both habits and chemical addictions in play which makes it incredibly hard to stop.
Why don't you afford the obesity issue the same level of understanding?
Because naturally thin people, and the opposite case, are outliers.
There are very few people, especially in the 40s, that can eat a lot and still remain thin.
Setting aside the fact that you've conceded that you don't know if someone is fat "by choice" or because they are an outlier, so you're ok with making people who are fat because of natural reasons feel bad as casualties in your noble quest to make people who are fat "by choice" feel bad.
Do we shame people for the health risk of going skiing? It's a well know health risk, yet i don't see a lot of people telling skiiers their lifestyle disgusts them.
The criticism of "lose weight at any cost necessary" is that people who have been fat their entire lives will get yelled at to lose a significant percentage of their body weight, with very little care given to their actual health.
It's incredibly naive and destructive to assume all extremely fat people got that way because "they eat pizza all the time" and they should simply stop eating so much pizza to fix all of life's problems. If they can't lose the weight it's clearly because they're not trying hard enough.
That's why the discussion around this isn't changing the needle on America's weight gain (or most populations across the Earth). We focus on the thinness of the person before we focus on the health.
IOW, 'naturally thin' is a bogus idea.
BMI is a useful heuristic (BMI over 30 and not a powerlifter? Probably unhealthy, let's look at other characteristics and see how unhealthy and how to address it) but a terrible target until you know your own body.
that part is tricky, takes a lot of time, experiments
But also I think the body shape makes a big diff, I have very thin limbs, long legs, my best BMI is between 17 and 18, without limiting myself in food quantity (I alwways eat as much as I can, tho I naturally like to eat 1 or 2 meals a day max)
You say 30 BMI, but in my experience unless you are lifting a lot of weights 25 is the upper limit. Ten years ago I hit 25 BMI, and despite feeling "normal" there were already the first signs of being fat: thights always red, sweaty all day and way less resistance than today.
I lost 15 kg (33 lbs) not by doing crazy exercise, but by cutting 100% of shitty food and eating beyond necesity.
Which is why I also said BMI is a poor target. 22 BMI, for me, would be an awful target. I'd be gaunt and have to lose a lot of muscle mass, not just fat (which I don't have a lot of to lose). Even bringing body fat percentage from 15% to 10%, which is still healthy, would only get me down to about 180lbs. That would leave me 25lbs over the target for a 22 BMI. That's my body, not yours, not anyone else's. I've learned what is healthy for me and have set goals and expectations around that. I wouldn't expect yours, or anyone else's, to be the same. You've realized that 25 BMI is too high for you, great. Now you know, but that doesn't apply to everyone. And the original poster in this thread claiming everyone should be at 22 BMI is clearly also speaking about a particular experience which is not applicable to everyone, but writing as if it is.
I get you...
I'm 6'0" (183cm) and 212 lbs (96kg) (BMI=29). I'm at 17% body fat and am working toward 10%, but also have been lifting weights heavily. I just got down to size 32 jeans (82cm waist) but have a 48.5" chest (123cm) and 15.5" (40cm) biceps. I still wish to lose 15-20lb more, but then I'd be at 195lb and about 8% body fat -- with a BMI of ~27. (Assuming I don't add more muscle at the same time.)
It is a lot better than a 15 months ago when I made my life change - I was 240lb (109kg) and 38% body fat, and pushing a 38" (96cm) waist, truly obese. And I felt like shite.
I am surprised how much I have come to love weightlifting, rowing, and eating a diet better balanced towards low-caloric density foods (lots of veggies) and lean protein. And I am more surprised at how quickly my body changed, considering I'm now just over 50.
Overall, I think BMI looks like a pretty useful metric considering how easy it is to measure. That would explain why it sticks around despite being frequently criticized.
See charts 2.A and 2.B in: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2877506/
I've always thought that while BMI is crude, it still is reasonable for measuring metabolic syndrome, considering that many of the things associated with heart problems involve the needing a powerful heart, when adding any mass whatsoever will necessarily increase the work the heart must do.
It seems to me that in the usual case where a person develops muscle mass by working out, this isn't a problem because whatever "blood necessary to maintain excessive muscle" is negligible in the face of the body adapting to improve the cardiovascular system in order to serve muscular oxygen needs during workout. Of course, heart problems due to an unhealthy person ramping up exercise too quickly is a concern, but this is separate from your concern.
One also observes that athletes in general have lower heart rates than the average person; whatever additional burden their muscles impose, their cardiovascular system is way more adapted to handle that due to exercise.
Here are some things I found in a brief glance at google scholar. There appears to be a condition called Athlete's heart, but I dunno:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26187713/
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jom-2020-0046...
The second describes the same thing:
> Several middle-aged and older men trying to improve their physical fitness by weightlifting have presented for repair of severe mitral regurgitation, some of whom stated that they remembered feeling a pop in the chest while weightlifting, which was the start of their dyspnea.
> Arterial BP increases most during weightlifting that is accompanied by mechanical compression of blood vessels (such as when bent forward at the waist or squatting) and when accompanied by a Valsalva maneuver.
Neither of these papers link them to muscle mass but to the stress of high-intensity exercise itself, which I have already addressed.
I agree that we should not assume things, but in the lack of cursory evidence, I would still stand by my argument that in the normal case where muscle mass is formed from working out, such workout stresses and modifies the cardiovascular system to such an extent the result is a body that is more than capable of handling whatever stress that muscle at rest imposes on the heart.
Once again I reiterate my cursory evidence to my argument, that athletes' cardiovascular system are generally so much more efficient and less taxed than the general population that their hearts beat at 3/4 the average heart rate.
It seems like athlete's heart syndrome is a benign condition.
>The interest in an index that measures body fat came with observed increasing obesity in prosperous Western societies. Keys explicitly judged BMI as appropriate for population studies and inappropriate for individual evaluation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index
>When a team of researchers adjusted BMI to take muscle mass into account back in 2018, then associated this corrected measure with mortality risk, they found that the “U” mostly transformed into a straight line.
All good except the long distance runner part. Don't think it is equivocally good as the others and may be potentially harmful (key is the long part, short/medium is good).
Jogging on asphalt just makes my joints hurt and it makes me feel like I'm administering some pathetic modern substitute to the primal need to be active and to be in nature, which just depresses me. Same with everything gym based.
The only time I have some space is during winter, when few people use the outdoor pool and that is still a 20x10m rectangle, where I have to swim in circles like some captive orca.
TFA doesn't even use the phrase "fat acceptance", which is a completely different thing than claiming "obesity is healthy". The former is simply an effort to destigmatize it, like we destigmatize other forms of addiction.
Also, "obesity is healthy" is a strawman — no credible person or group has ever asserted this. If you search for "obesity is healthy", you'll see that every result makes it clear that obesity is not healthy.
That simply isn't true. Just look into the "Health at Every Size" movement. There are some reasonable ideas there, like destigmatizing it as you mentioned. But there are also some harmful and ridiculous ideas prevalent in that movement - namely that "weight loss should not be a health goal".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_at_Every_Size
This lines up with my experience. One can do things like the Potato Diet to lose 100 pounds fairly quickly, but it's definitely not a healthy way to lose weight, and it doesn't equip you to remain at a healthy weight for the rest of your life.
There are certainly bad diets out there, but they aren't just opposed to bad diets. It's simply not possible to be healthy at any size
Fat people should not be bullied, but normalizing obesity is actively harmful to the public health. It's like normalizing smoking.
I wonder what the attributes of the commenter are
Should be
> Most of us will never achieve all that, just do what you can.
The mistake dramatically changed the tone of my comment but it lead to much more interesting discourse... Happy little accident?
Step 1: Declare that there is no objective standard for health and/or beauty.
Step 2: Declare that things like weight and beauty are strictly a cultural phenomenon that have no grounding in reality or biology.
Step 3: Assert a power dynamic imbalance. Since there is no reason for people to say skinny is better, then skinny people are merely "fat shaming" people to oppress them.
Step 4: Relentlessly point out all the ways "fat people" are "oppressed". If anyone disagrees with you, accuse them of "fat shaming", label them an oppressor, etc.
You can replace weight with anything. Gender, sexuality, skin color. It's a terribly dull and boring argument. Once you see it, you can find it everywhere.
Step 2: Declare that things like race and skin color are strictly a cultural phenomenon that have no grounding in reality or biology.
Step 3: Assert a power dynamic imbalance. Since there is no reason for people to say one skin color is better, then white people are merely "race shaming" people to oppress them.
Step 4: Relentlessly point out all the ways "non-white people people" are "oppressed". If anyone disagrees with you, accuse them of "race shaming", label them an oppressor, etc."
I did the thing you said, replaced weight with skin color, but it came out pretty damn racist.
If you're reading this and it sounds racist, might be time to switch it back to being about weight and realize that yes it is also shitty to treat people poorly because of their weight - just like it's shitty to treat someone poorly because of their race.
The human body needs fat and muscle to be in tandem. Deviation to the extreme of either end is very unhealthy and is quickly corrected by the body, given bare minimum stimulus. Absent this, you'll get the beetus and other things. High body fat can also protect you, for example, obese smokers are healthier on average than skinny smokers. All that poison goes to their fat, because fat pretty much acts as a sponge in the body. That's why "pink cheeks", "baby cheeks" are a sign of long-term health. It takes a very long time (years, if not over a decade) of a proper, modern-toxin-free diet to remove toxins from the body. In the absence of proper amounts of protein and fat your body usually likes to isolate harmful things, which can lead to myriad conditions down the line, even if you've been exercising for years and have been "healthy".
Also, related to the title of the main post, sugar and whole grains (processed flour is basically sugar) and horribly addictive. Obese people that have difficulty quitting / have side-effects from quitting might as well have entire regions of their brain dedicated to timing the intake of sugar precisely, at the expense of their mental functioning. So they would inevitably feel out of energy / motivation after a while, and would need food.
Also, the easiest way to lose fat and gain muscle is to subject your body to external weights. It doesn't even have to be very heavy. If you're obese, you could OHP 10kg every other day and lose a significant amount of fat, even without changing your diet (assuming it's not really horrible)
This makes collecting and interpreting the statistics more difficult because you need to distinguish “good” weight loss from “bad” weight loss. BMI isn’t enough to figure it out.
It's not really that you want to be fat, it's that weight is only one of many lifestyle choices and we'd give people better medical treatment if we were less obsessed with it. Also: People should try to move towards a healthier body weight! But it's a question of balancing effort and focus and not some moral imperative.
I would not classify alcoholism as a sustainable approach to life. Obesity, like alcoholism, isn’t sustainable because it accelerates death and disease. I equate “sustainable” with “not unhealthy”, which does not cover obesity.
What I have witnessed isn’t that those folks call it “healthy” but that they describe it as “not unhealthy”. This is incorrect and dangerous, as it deludes others into believing the same.
I guess this argues otherwise, which is worth considering.
(Though, this seems to be just one study right now? I don't think it's rational to draw the strong conclusions the article does from one study. The absolute claims don't seem supported by the evidence, so I guess they are pushing an angle, though it's not clear to me why.)
It's likely that prevention of obesity is achievable by changes is easily available food, walkable communities, regulation of problematic chemicals, childhood health education. And also that overtime medical treatments and food modifications will get better at counteracting preexisting obesity.
But in the meantime, "go lose weight" may not be practical medical advice to an average individual. Eating healthier food and having a regular exercise regimen may well be, but losing lots of weight is not an expected outcome. People will still end up eating more of healthier food, or eating unhealthy food due to life circumstances, or getting too fatigued to exercise enough. At this point, "what else can we do to improve your health" because a relevant question.
Fat acceptance? Bah. Just because I am overweight doesn't mean I like looking at fat models. We can admire the best of us while being realistic of what we are going to achieve ourselves. In some marginal way, watching models and athletes does motivate me to watch my food and workout. Just not enough to end up looking like them.
Apply liberally. Start implementing Pigovian taxes on sugary foods. Monitor and punish companies that use added sugar in foods that don't need it. Shut down the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo.