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CDC Projects 40% of Americans Will Develop Diabetes; What Do We Do About It?
the evidence is in all the people around that eat right, exercise, and are not overweight. unless you want to say that those three things being together is just happenstance, in which case I'm interested in hearing your reason for it.
Those three things don't go together as reliably as you imply that they do. There are plenty of overweight people who eat well and exercise regularly. There are plenty of normal weight people who do not.
It depends on your definition of overweight, and how long they've been eating well and exercising. People who are obese have not been eating well and exercising regularly, or they would not be obese. It takes a lot of calories to maintain that amount of fat. Once you start hitting decent calorie goals, the fat falls off fairly rapidly.
Nope. In fact, the opposite is more often true. Most studies that track adults on weight loss plans for long periods of time (over a year) show that most peoples' body mass return to a baseline range even when they successfully adhere to the program. They might maintain modest amounts of weight loss - 10% or less in most cases - but the vast majority of people cannot maintain dramatic shifts in weight loss even if they adhere to a diet and exercise plan.
This is the cause of yo-yo dieting. It is not necessarily, as popularly believed, that people fail to adhere to the diet and then gain the weight back. It is the opposite. People gain most or all of the weight back and then get discouraged and drop off the plan.
Can you link one of the studies that show this and doesn't rely on self-reported calorie consumption?
I wonder what impact a better mental health care system would have on obesity numbers--I know there are a few conditions with reciprocal relationships to obesity, i.e. they're predictors of obesity and more likely to develop with obesity, but I'm not sure how significant the figures are.
Anyway, y'all talking about eating food that fills you...Man, I wish I could experience, just once, being satiated without being so stuffed I was sick. But it just doesn't happen, no matter what I eat. Unless my stomach can literally not hold any more food, I'm still hungry. Best I can do is 'not ravenous enough to distract me' by eating well then chugging water. And if I'm not full keto and restricting carbs religiously already, it's a titanic battle each day to not walk to the grocery store, buy a pint of Moose Tracks, and eat it within 5 minutes of getting home...multiple times a week (on keto, it's just a minor temptation, not something producing intrusive thoughts while I'm trying to work or whatever).
That's to say, for some people, if we were capable of portion control...we wouldn't be fat in the first place.
I think childhood's the only place we can seriously target for combating obesity. No soda in school, hell, no milk/juice/any of it. No vending machines at all. No snack cakes and bullshit for sale in the cafeteria, either. Just good food and water. No advertising sweets and terrible food in general to kids. No colorful boxes with smiling healthy children and colorful bouncing sweets. You can keep selling fruit roll ups and shitty candy cereals, but box that shit up like an Australian cigarette package.
And I honestly think that if a child becomes obese for reasons that amount to 'eating too fucking much terrible shit' then that should be reason for government intercession.
But for broader moves? It's hard to say what we should do, because we don't understand shit about nutrition. I've done a ton of reading on nutrition and pretty much the only thing I feel confident saying for the general population is 'sugar sucks'. But people won't give up sweets, and there are too many nebulous fears around artificial sweeteners for them to gain enough traction to do any good.
Seems to me that unless a given person's diet consists of just washing down their soda with sticks of butter, it's way more productive to try to emphasize some portion control rather than declaring that X and Y foods that someone might enjoy are categorically Bad and Must Never Be Eaten.
I kind of disagree. Food quality is more important than food quantity.
Okay, you eat 4000 calories of whatever it is you value. I'll have 2000 calories and include a sandwich in there.
The idea is that it's harder to overeat high-quality foods. They are more filling and cooperative with the hormones that control hunger and satiety.
The reality is telling people that they can never have food they enjoy is not a good tactic to get them to make a long-lasting lifestyle change.
"High-quality" foods are better than junk food. They taste better and are better for you. You can eat less of them and feel satisfied. That's why rich people tend to be slim despite eating out a lot and having sedentary jobs. That's why fancy-schmancy ice cream is sold in little tubs and crappy non-dairy frozen dessert is sold in enormous tubs.
Seems to me that unless a given person's diet consists of just washing down their soda with sticks of butter, it's way more productive to try to emphasize some portion control rather than declaring that X and Y foods that someone might enjoy are categorically Bad and Must Never Be Eaten.
I kind of disagree. Food quality is more important than food quantity.
Okay, you eat 4000 calories of whatever it is you value. I'll have 2000 calories and include a sandwich in there.
The idea is that it's harder to overeat high-quality foods. They are more filling and cooperative with the hormones that control hunger and satiety.
The reality is telling people that they can never have food they enjoy is not a good tactic to get them to make a long-lasting lifestyle change.
"High-quality" foods are better than junk food. They taste better and are better for you. You can eat less of them and feel satisfied. That's why rich people tend to be slim despite eating out a lot and having sedentary jobs. That's why fancy-schmancy ice cream is sold in little tubs and crappy non-dairy frozen dessert is sold in enormous tubs.
"Low-quality" foods taste just as good if not better. Doritos 4 lyfe.
Seems to me that unless a given person's diet consists of just washing down their soda with sticks of butter, it's way more productive to try to emphasize some portion control rather than declaring that X and Y foods that someone might enjoy are categorically Bad and Must Never Be Eaten.
I kind of disagree. Food quality is more important than food quantity.
Okay, you eat 4000 calories of whatever it is you value. I'll have 2000 calories and include a sandwich in there.
The idea is that it's harder to overeat high-quality foods. They are more filling and cooperative with the hormones that control hunger and satiety.
The reality is telling people that they can never have food they enjoy is not a good tactic to get them to make a long-lasting lifestyle change.
"High-quality" foods are better than junk food. They taste better and are better for you. You can eat less of them and feel satisfied. That's why rich people tend to be slim despite eating out a lot and having sedentary jobs. That's why fancy-schmancy ice cream is sold in little tubs and crappy non-dairy frozen dessert is sold in enormous tubs.
is your solution to a more or less global obesity problem dependent on everybody being rich
Seems to me that unless a given person's diet consists of just washing down their soda with sticks of butter, it's way more productive to try to emphasize some portion control rather than declaring that X and Y foods that someone might enjoy are categorically Bad and Must Never Be Eaten.
I kind of disagree. Food quality is more important than food quantity.
Okay, you eat 4000 calories of whatever it is you value. I'll have 2000 calories and include a sandwich in there.
The idea is that it's harder to overeat high-quality foods. They are more filling and cooperative with the hormones that control hunger and satiety.
The reality is telling people that they can never have food they enjoy is not a good tactic to get them to make a long-lasting lifestyle change.
"High-quality" foods are better than junk food. They taste better and are better for you. You can eat less of them and feel satisfied. That's why rich people tend to be slim despite eating out a lot and having sedentary jobs. That's why fancy-schmancy ice cream is sold in little tubs and crappy non-dairy frozen dessert is sold in enormous tubs.
"Low-quality" foods taste just as good if not better. Doritos 4 lyfe.
Sadly, this is often the case.
When I haven't had a Coke or McChicken in a while, the sugar and salt and fat tastes like manna from heaven.
Shadowhope on
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
the evidence is in all the people around that eat right, exercise, and are not overweight. unless you want to say that those three things being together is just happenstance, in which case I'm interested in hearing your reason for it.
Those three things don't go together as reliably as you imply that they do. There are plenty of overweight people who eat well and exercise regularly. There are plenty of normal weight people who do not.
It depends on your definition of overweight, and how long they've been eating well and exercising. People who are obese have not been eating well and exercising regularly, or they would not be obese. It takes a lot of calories to maintain that amount of fat. Once you start hitting decent calorie goals, the fat falls off fairly rapidly.
Nope. In fact, the opposite is more often true. Most studies that track adults on weight loss plans for long periods of time (over a year) show that most peoples' body mass return to a baseline range even when they successfully adhere to the program. They might maintain modest amounts of weight loss - 10% or less in most cases - but the vast majority of people cannot maintain dramatic shifts in weight loss even if they adhere to a diet and exercise plan.
This is the cause of yo-yo dieting. It is not necessarily, as popularly believed, that people fail to adhere to the diet and then gain the weight back. It is the opposite. People gain most or all of the weight back and then get discouraged and drop off the plan.
Can you link one of the studies that show this and doesn't rely on self-reported calorie consumption?
This study was done with patients admitted to a university hospital and fed controlled liquid diets. The link starts with a plain-English explanation but you can find a direct link to the journal article at the bottom of the page: http://centennial.rucares.org/index.php?page=Weight_Loss
It's a matter of metabolism: reduce a person's body fat, and metabolism slows so that the body burns fewer calories to carry out the same tasks, and weight floats back up. The body bucks a change in weight in the other direction as well. Hirsch and colleagues found that when weight is gained, metabolism increases and body weight tends to reduce to its starting point.
That second article I linked provides the most comprehensive explanation currently available that reconciles both the slowly creeping increase in mean BMI among Americans with the relative difficulty people have losing weight.
In short, weight is homeostatic. The body - whether a rat or a human - exhibits endocrine response cycles that push the individual back to their baseline weight range. Over the individual's lifespan, it is possible for that homeostatic range to get pushed upwards, heavier, but once it is pushed upwards it can't be dragged back down. The formerly obese person must eat far fewer calories than the lifelong nonobese person to maintain comparable body mass.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Seems to me that unless a given person's diet consists of just washing down their soda with sticks of butter, it's way more productive to try to emphasize some portion control rather than declaring that X and Y foods that someone might enjoy are categorically Bad and Must Never Be Eaten.
I kind of disagree. Food quality is more important than food quantity.
Okay, you eat 4000 calories of whatever it is you value. I'll have 2000 calories and include a sandwich in there.
The idea is that it's harder to overeat high-quality foods. They are more filling and cooperative with the hormones that control hunger and satiety.
The reality is telling people that they can never have food they enjoy is not a good tactic to get them to make a long-lasting lifestyle change.
"High-quality" foods are better than junk food. They taste better and are better for you. You can eat less of them and feel satisfied. That's why rich people tend to be slim despite eating out a lot and having sedentary jobs. That's why fancy-schmancy ice cream is sold in little tubs and crappy non-dairy frozen dessert is sold in enormous tubs.
is your solution to a more or less global obesity problem dependent on everybody being rich
I don't get why you think that I thought that was a solution.
Seems to me that unless a given person's diet consists of just washing down their soda with sticks of butter, it's way more productive to try to emphasize some portion control rather than declaring that X and Y foods that someone might enjoy are categorically Bad and Must Never Be Eaten.
I kind of disagree. Food quality is more important than food quantity.
Okay, you eat 4000 calories of whatever it is you value. I'll have 2000 calories and include a sandwich in there.
The idea is that it's harder to overeat high-quality foods. They are more filling and cooperative with the hormones that control hunger and satiety.
The reality is telling people that they can never have food they enjoy is not a good tactic to get them to make a long-lasting lifestyle change.
"High-quality" foods are better than junk food. They taste better and are better for you. You can eat less of them and feel satisfied. That's why rich people tend to be slim despite eating out a lot and having sedentary jobs. That's why fancy-schmancy ice cream is sold in little tubs and crappy non-dairy frozen dessert is sold in enormous tubs.
"Low-quality" foods taste just as good if not better. Doritos 4 lyfe.
I've had Doritos, and I've had posh food and honestly Doritos taste "meh." I don't want to sound like a snob. I just don't like Doritos. I do like crisps (potato chips.) But I still prefer posh food to crisps.
Luckily, it is also mostly unnecessary for the overweight person to reachieve normal weight to be healthy.
Obese and overweight people who experience modest weight loss through diet and exercise, and then continue to maintain a healthy lifestyle regardless of weight, are in general healthier than nonoverweight sedentary people.
Habits, far more than body mass, predict health.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the evidence is in all the people around that eat right, exercise, and are not overweight. unless you want to say that those three things being together is just happenstance, in which case I'm interested in hearing your reason for it.
Those three things don't go together as reliably as you imply that they do. There are plenty of overweight people who eat well and exercise regularly. There are plenty of normal weight people who do not.
It depends on your definition of overweight, and how long they've been eating well and exercising. People who are obese have not been eating well and exercising regularly, or they would not be obese. It takes a lot of calories to maintain that amount of fat. Once you start hitting decent calorie goals, the fat falls off fairly rapidly.
Nope. In fact, the opposite is more often true. Most studies that track adults on weight loss plans for long periods of time (over a year) show that most peoples' body mass return to a baseline range even when they successfully adhere to the program. They might maintain modest amounts of weight loss - 10% or less in most cases - but the vast majority of people cannot maintain dramatic shifts in weight loss even if they adhere to a diet and exercise plan.
This is the cause of yo-yo dieting. It is not necessarily, as popularly believed, that people fail to adhere to the diet and then gain the weight back. It is the opposite. People gain most or all of the weight back and then get discouraged and drop off the plan.
Can you link one of the studies that show this and doesn't rely on self-reported calorie consumption?
This study was done with patients admitted to a university hospital and fed controlled liquid diets. The link starts with a plain-English explanation but you can find a direct link to the journal article at the bottom of the page: http://centennial.rucares.org/index.php?page=Weight_Loss
It's a matter of metabolism: reduce a person's body fat, and metabolism slows so that the body burns fewer calories to carry out the same tasks, and weight floats back up. The body bucks a change in weight in the other direction as well. Hirsch and colleagues found that when weight is gained, metabolism increases and body weight tends to reduce to its starting point.
That second article I linked provides the most comprehensive explanation currently available that reconciles both the slowly creeping increase in mean BMI among Americans with the relative difficulty people have losing weight.
In short, weight is homeostatic. The body - whether a rat or a human - exhibits endocrine response cycles that push the individual back to their baseline weight range. Over the individual's lifespan, it is possible for that homeostatic range to get pushed upwards, heavier, but once it is pushed upwards it can't be dragged back down. The formerly obese person must eat far fewer calories than the lifelong nonobese person to maintain comparable body mass.
So what is that article's theory for why obesity is so prevalent now? I read the abstract, but I probably won't have time to actually read the whole study.
Also, if I'm reading you correctly, once you become obese you will be obese forever and there is literally nothing you can do to change this short of practically starving yourself forever and ever, or maybe getting lucky and having the universe decide to arbitrarily make you skinny again?
Like, say I weigh 300 lbs. Is your position that I can make myself "healthier," but I will pretty much always be 300 lbs for the rest of my life, or maybe I will get lucky and drop down to 275 or so?
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
People didn't use to be this fat. Now they are very fat. If this doesn't have to do with diet or exercise trends, then why did it happen?
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
So what is that article's theory for why obesity is so prevalent now? I read the abstract, but I probably won't have time to actually read the whole study.
Also, if I'm reading you correctly, once you become obese you will be obese forever and there is literally nothing you can do to change this short of practically starving yourself forever and ever, or maybe getting lucky and having the universe decide to arbitrarily make you skinny again?
Like, say I weigh 300 lbs. Is your position that I can make myself "healthier," but I will pretty much always be 300 lbs for the rest of my life, or maybe I will get lucky and drop down to 275 or so?
The bolded, more or less.
If you've been 300 pounds for a very short period of time - say, you're an actor who fattened up for role, or you just 'let yourself go' for a year, or your weight gain was the side effect of a medication - then it's much more likely for you to drop back down to normal weight than it would be for somebody who has been 300 pounds for 10 years.
Everybody should watch their diet and exercise, whether you're 300 pounds or 90. But if, in watching your diet and exercising, you fail to reap significant weight loss more than 10%-ish, don't take that as a sign that your lifestyle changes aren't helping. They're almost certainly helping your health even if those benefits are invisible to you when you step on a scale.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
People didn't use to be this fat. Now they are very fat. If this doesn't have to do with diet or exercise trends, then why did it happen?
Mostly, though not entirely, due to diet and exercise trends. Though stress, lack of sleep, some infectious diseases, some noninfectious diseases, and exposure to various drugs and chemicals (some birth control, some antidepressants, hormone disrupting pollutants, etc.) also contribute.
The problem is that weight is homeostatic - an individual's body "wants" to maintain weight in a certain stable range. It is very difficult to push yourself out of that range in either direction. There's no hard and fast rule for how wide that range is, and it's probably wider in some people than in others, but again +/-10% is a relatively not-terrible estimate.
"Obesogenic" environments - environments that promote sedentary behavior, have calorie-dense food in abundance, are stressful and discourage good sleep, push people to the top of that range. That means that some people who were previously on the cusp between 'normal' weight and 'overweight' will show up in studies as 'overweight.' (It takes only very small changes in the average weight of a population to effect dramatic-appearing increases in the obesity rate.)
The marked rise in obesity observed over the last three decades suggests that behavioural and environmental factors underpin the chronic mismatch between energy intake and energy expenditure. However, not all individuals become obese, suggesting that there is considerable variation in responsiveness to 'obesogenic' environments. Some individuals defend easily against a propensity to accumulate fat mass and become overweight whilst others are predisposed to gain weight, possibly as a function of genotype. The genetic contribution to obesity is well established. Common obesity is polygenic, involving complex gene-gene and gene-environment interactions, and it is these interactions that produce the multi-factorial obese phenotypes.
Long-term exposure to obesogenic environments can also cause that homeostatic range itself to shift upwards. Once the body of a rat or a human has become accustomed to being at a higher weight, that's the weight that the endocrine system drags you back towards.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Everybody should watch their diet and exercise, whether you're 300 pounds or 90. But if, in watching your diet and exercising, you fail to reap significant weight loss more than 10%-ish, don't take that as a sign that your lifestyle changes aren't helping. They're almost certainly helping your health even if those benefits are invisible to you when you step on a scale.
This argument makes a lot sense: a person gets fat, adopts healthier habits to lose weight, rebounds due to the effect you're describing, and eventually gives up these habits because they aren't getting the superficial results they want.
However, if this is true, why isn't this being acknowledged by the medical community at large? If it is really so very hard to reverse obesity and there isn't, as you seem to be claiming, even that much of a need to do so when adopting healthier habits is sufficient, why try to fight a public health issue by making the solution even more daunting than it needs to be? Doesn't this just make overweight and obese people think that adopting healthy habits is useless if they aren't losing weight? Is it to prevent younger generations from becoming overweight and obese in the first place?
Basically, are you saying that the obesity of a person who has now adopted healthier habits is like a scar in that it is a sign of previous damage? What about claims that excessive body weight puts extra strain on the heart?
However, if this is true, why isn't this being acknowledged by the medical community at large?
It is. Crash diets, promises of extreme weight loss, and so forth, are hallmarks of the diet industry, not of mainstream medicine. There's a lot of money to be found selling books, branded processed foods, workshops, videos, and so forth for Atkins, South Beach, paleo, etc.
Peer-reviewed studies on behavioral weight loss programs generally hold 10% to be the measure of a successful program. Some go even lower and count anybody who shows any sustained negative change at all, even as little as a tenth of a pound or a tenth of a kilogram, as having lost weight.
A 2001 study from the University of Pennsylvania found that on average, overweight people set a goal of losing 32% of their body mass. That's three times the amount needed to achieve better health. The truth is, it's unlikely that most dieters will be able to lose one-third of their body weight. Setting extreme goals is a setup for disappointment and failure.
A reasonable goal for many people is losing 5 to 10 percent of current weight. It's a good idea to plan to lose 1 to 2 pounds a week (0.5 to 1 kilogram) — even if your initial weight loss is a little faster in the first week or two.
and
Make the most of your process goals, rather than outcome goals. "Exercise three times a week" is an example of a process goal, while "weigh 145 pounds" is an example of an outcome goal. It's changing your processes — your daily behaviors and habits — that's key to weight loss, not necessarily focusing on a specific number on the scale.
The good news is that no matter what your weight loss goal is, even a modest weight loss, such as 5 to 10 percent of your total body weight, is likely to produce health benefits, such as improvements in blood pressure, blood cholesterol, and blood sugars.2
For example, if you weigh 200 pounds, a 5 percent weight loss equals 10 pounds, bringing your weight down to 190 pounds. While this weight may still be in the "overweight" or "obese" range, this modest weight loss can decrease your risk factors for chronic diseases related to obesity.
What about claims that excessive body weight puts extra strain on the heart?
Those claims are true, as is the issue that fat accumulation around other internal organs can cause health problems, and excessive body weight can also put strain on joints.
However, keep in mind two things: most of the studies that show cardiac dysfunction from obesity...
1) ...fail to differentiate between obese and overweight. Everybody with a BMI higher than 25 is put into the 'overweight' category. The dude who is 10 pounds overweight is measured alongside the dude who is 400 pounds.
2) ...fail to differentiate between people who exercise and people who don't.
When you actually make these differentiations, the degree of cardiac dysfunction is significantly less in people who are not morbidly obese, and even moderate amounts of exercise reverse a lot of the cardiac dysfunction. Example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21869756
Also keep in mind that there's growing awareness about " (TOFI) thin outside, fat inside" or "(MONW) metabolically obese, normal weight" people. These are people who have normal weight and appear skinny, but have internal 'invisible' fat accumulation that contribute to health problems.
How do you fight this? Same way you would if you were outwardly fat. Diet and exercise.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Subject; the lady in front of me at the grocery store over lunch.
Age mid 30s
Height 5'-6''
Weight 275-300lb.
occupation office worker(guess by cloths)
Purchases:
1 bowl of pre-sliced melons ~ 2 cups.
1 box of peanut chewy granola bars.
1
That actual size, 1oz serving 160cal, 11g fat, 13g carbs, 2g protein.
the evidence is in all the people around that eat right, exercise, and are not overweight. unless you want to say that those three things being together is just happenstance, in which case I'm interested in hearing your reason for it.
Those three things don't go together as reliably as you imply that they do. There are plenty of overweight people who eat well and exercise regularly. There are plenty of normal weight people who do not.
It depends on your definition of overweight, and how long they've been eating well and exercising. People who are obese have not been eating well and exercising regularly, or they would not be obese. It takes a lot of calories to maintain that amount of fat. Once you start hitting decent calorie goals, the fat falls off fairly rapidly.
Nope. In fact, the opposite is more often true. Most studies that track adults on weight loss plans for long periods of time (over a year) show that most peoples' body mass return to a baseline range even when they successfully adhere to the program. They might maintain modest amounts of weight loss - 10% or less in most cases - but the vast majority of people cannot maintain dramatic shifts in weight loss even if they adhere to a diet and exercise plan.
This is the cause of yo-yo dieting. It is not necessarily, as popularly believed, that people fail to adhere to the diet and then gain the weight back. It is the opposite. People gain most or all of the weight back and then get discouraged and drop off the plan.
Can you link one of the studies that show this and doesn't rely on self-reported calorie consumption?
This study was done with patients admitted to a university hospital and fed controlled liquid diets. The link starts with a plain-English explanation but you can find a direct link to the journal article at the bottom of the page: http://centennial.rucares.org/index.php?page=Weight_Loss
It's a matter of metabolism: reduce a person's body fat, and metabolism slows so that the body burns fewer calories to carry out the same tasks, and weight floats back up. The body bucks a change in weight in the other direction as well. Hirsch and colleagues found that when weight is gained, metabolism increases and body weight tends to reduce to its starting point.
That second article I linked provides the most comprehensive explanation currently available that reconciles both the slowly creeping increase in mean BMI among Americans with the relative difficulty people have losing weight.
In short, weight is homeostatic. The body - whether a rat or a human - exhibits endocrine response cycles that push the individual back to their baseline weight range. Over the individual's lifespan, it is possible for that homeostatic range to get pushed upwards, heavier, but once it is pushed upwards it can't be dragged back down. The formerly obese person must eat far fewer calories than the lifelong nonobese person to maintain comparable body mass.
While those studies and the multitude like them are very important in the discussion of obesity, they don't directly address the claim that you made (bolded above, but re-quoted for readability).
Most studies that track adults on weight loss plans for long periods of time (over a year) show that most peoples' body mass return to a baseline range even when they successfully adhere to the program. They might maintain modest amounts of weight loss - 10% or less in most cases - but the vast majority of people cannot maintain dramatic shifts in weight loss even if they adhere to a diet and exercise plan.
They show the numerous methods the body trends toward homeostasis, but none of them claim that maintenance of a caloric deficit will lead to a person returning to their initial weight.
If you are 300 pounds, it will be more difficult, but neither impossible nor unhealthy for you to get down to 5% body fat. No matter how long you had maintained that weight.
It seems that obesity is hard to solve, but its easier to prevent people from becoming fat, than fixing it after the fact, when your body is used to being fat. That's why focusing on fat people is useless. People who are already fat have to use heroic effort to get slim (it's possible, but hard.)
It's easier to prevent kids from becoming fat, by changing the way we think about kid's food. School meals need to be healthier. Nutrition and cooking lessons need to be better. Sugared drinks of all kinds need to be seen as treats rather than beverages.
Personally I think that kid's media could do a lot better about not showing kids hating healthy food as "cute." They don't need to go full-on "I love my greens!" but there is a lot of "Ewww! Broccoli!" going on in kid's TV which they should just cut out.
Yeah maybe because I'm fatter and hope to be thinner, but I don't want to buy into exercising and eating better won't let me get me under 200 pounds and stay there.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
This article in the New York Times covers a lot of the scientific ground regarding the difficulty of weight loss, as well as a few troubling anecdotes. When you get the point where you're weighing lettuce... yeah.
The TL;DR of the article:
-As we lose weight, the body tries to restore itself to the old equilibrium.
-The body "remembers" the old equilibrium for years, perhaps indefinitely.
-As we lose weight, muscles tend to convert to more efficient slow-twitch muscles, which burn fewer calories than fast twitch muscles.
-As a result, exercise that would burn say, 250 calories in a thin person might burn say, 200 in a formerly overweight person, despite having a frame the same size and while going the same speed on the same course.
-There are genetic components to weight gain.
-Keeping weight off in the long term is possible, but requires enormous discipline (like, plan and record every meal for the rest of your life discipline), and a person who has been overweight will need to eat less and exercise more than a person who has never been overweight in order to maintain the same weight.
-It's a Sisyphean task to lose weight.
Shadowhope on
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
Those claims are true, as is the issue that fat accumulation around other internal organs can cause health problems, and excessive body weight can also put strain on joints.
However, keep in mind two things: most of the studies that show cardiac dysfunction from obesity...
1) ...fail to differentiate between obese and overweight. Everybody with a BMI higher than 25 is put into the 'overweight' category. The dude who is 10 pounds overweight is measured alongside the dude who is 400 pounds.
2) ...fail to differentiate between people who exercise and people who don't.
When you actually make these differentiations, the degree of cardiac dysfunction is significantly less in people who are not morbidly obese, and even moderate amounts of exercise reverse a lot of the cardiac dysfunction. Example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21869756
Also keep in mind that there's growing awareness about " (TOFI) thin outside, fat inside" or "(MONW) metabolically obese, normal weight" people. These are people who have normal weight and appear skinny, but have internal 'invisible' fat accumulation that contribute to health problems.
How do you fight this? Same way you would if you were outwardly fat. Diet and exercise.
But you've been saying that it is extremely difficult for overweight and obese people to lose significant amounts of weight, even with diet and exercise. Is the type of fat that builds-up around internal organs easier to get rid of or something?
0
HakkekageSpace Whore Academysumma cum laudeRegistered Userregular
Those claims are true, as is the issue that fat accumulation around other internal organs can cause health problems, and excessive body weight can also put strain on joints.
However, keep in mind two things: most of the studies that show cardiac dysfunction from obesity...
1) ...fail to differentiate between obese and overweight. Everybody with a BMI higher than 25 is put into the 'overweight' category. The dude who is 10 pounds overweight is measured alongside the dude who is 400 pounds.
2) ...fail to differentiate between people who exercise and people who don't.
When you actually make these differentiations, the degree of cardiac dysfunction is significantly less in people who are not morbidly obese, and even moderate amounts of exercise reverse a lot of the cardiac dysfunction. Example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21869756
Also keep in mind that there's growing awareness about " (TOFI) thin outside, fat inside" or "(MONW) metabolically obese, normal weight" people. These are people who have normal weight and appear skinny, but have internal 'invisible' fat accumulation that contribute to health problems.
How do you fight this? Same way you would if you were outwardly fat. Diet and exercise.
But you've been saying that it is extremely difficult for overweight and obese people to lose significant amounts of weight, even with diet and exercise. Is the type of fat that builds-up around internal organs easier to get rid of or something?
He's saying that health outcomes improve regardless of superficial indicators such as weight loss. Put another way: It is easier to improve health through diet and exercise than it is to lose weight through diet and exercise, but diet and exercise counteract the negative impact of excess fat regardless (internal and external).
Yeah maybe because I'm fatter and hope to be thinner, but I don't want to buy into exercising and eating better won't let me get me under 200 pounds and stay there.
That's not what Feral said. Exercising and eating better will produce results. But it will require a greater, permanent net calorie reduction to maintain a lower weight than someone who hasn't been carrying excess weight around for the majority of their lives, unfortunately. That is not to say it cannot be done. However, if you have developed a comfortable and healthy routine but are not swiftly diving to your goal, or find it out of reach, the actual number shouldn't matter--you are healthier, full stop. It's just that the number is what most people fixate on and a failure to achieve that (frankly arbitrary) goal causes many to give up the healthy habits they developed out of discouragement that dramatic, visible weight loss has not occurred.
So as long as I continue to exercise and keep eating healthy I'll get to a healthy weight and maintain that? Because that makes sense, because its a lifestyle choice to be a thinner person, I can't go back to eating like a fat person at a healthy weight and expect to maintain that lower weight.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
So here is something that's confusing me, based on the literature Feral is referencing. (About which I'm not skeptical so much as just still trying to understand it.)
Say you start out thin. Through ten years of a consistently sedentary lifestyle and massive overconsumption of crappy food, you become obese. At this point, your body says, "Oh, I am overweight now, I will stay overweight forever, even if you start eating well and exercising, mwahaha!" It is then somewhere between super-hard and nigh-impossible to get back down to being thin. That is the gist of what I am getting from the lit.
So can we flip all that? Say you start out overweight. Then, after ten years of consistent healthy eating and copious exercise, you become thin. At this point, your body says, "Oh, I am thin now. I will stay thin forever, even if you start eating shitty and never exercise again. Yay, homeostasis!" It is then very difficult to become overweight.
If the latter case doesn't happen, why not? Does your body have a bias towards being overweight for some reason, such that you can trend fatter but not thinner? If ten years of a crappy lifestyle can make you fat forever, why can't ten years of a good lifestyle make you thin forever? Is there an age past which your body just says, "Fuck it, I'mma be this way forever because inertia," and then your body style is kinda set?
ElJeffe on
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Yeah thats where I'm hung up. If you're saying I can eat less calories and build muscle but my body will revert somehow? That seems counter intuitive to how I thought biology works.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Basically, are you saying that the obesity of a person who has now adopted healthier habits is like a scar in that it is a sign of previous damage?
On this point, an excessive emphasis on outward appearance as a motivator for weight loss often leads to discouragement because rapid fat loss rarely results in the type of toned, taut bodies in popular media or promised by Before and After diet ads. The "scars" of previous "damage"--aka excess weight--persist even if an obese person is able to shed all the extra weight, in the form of loose skin, uneven or strange distribution of body fat, and literally scars (stretch marks). Even if weight loss is achieved "honestly" (diet and exercise alone), surgery to tuck away these signs would still need to carry you over to that finish line of looking like a model (or any individual conception of "normal), or whatever the goal is.
So yes: If there is any place to focus on re: reducing the incidence of obesity and diabetes in this country, it is going to be at the infant/child level. Habits are hard to break and even harder to form as an adult. I would love it if the emphasis on developing these healthy habits was not on how sexy versus how open to disdainful judgement you are by society, but that would never actually happen.
And tinwhiskers--your purely anecdotal "field report" observing that a fat woman bought a bag of unhealthy popcorn means pretty much nothing. But go ahead and feel privately superior if you like.
They show the numerous methods the body trends toward homeostasis, but none of them claim that maintenance of a caloric deficit will lead to a person returning to their initial weight.
They both state exactly that, particularly the second one.
Once weight loss hits a plateau, maintaining the same caloric deficit will not only fail to induce further weight loss, but is extremely likely to result in partially or totally regaining some of the lost weight.
Also, I picked those two specifically because they involved controlled, non-self-reported diets. There is an abundance of studies and metareviews (including both self-reported and non-self-reported diets) that show that most people regain part or all of the weight they lose from behavioral changes. Some of those studies are cited in the University of Colorado paper if you want to drill down.
If you are 300 pounds, it will be more difficult, but neither impossible nor unhealthy for you to get down to 5% body fat. No matter how long you had maintained that weight.
Define "impossible." It is possible for a 60 year old to give birth, for a 50 year old with no prior musical training to pick up a violin and score a seat on the London Philharmonic after a few years, possible for a pro player to beat Barry Bonds's home run record without steroids, possible to win the lottery.
A great many things are "possible" if you pay no attention to what is realistic.
Meanwhile, there is also plenty of evidence that shows that unrealistic weight loss goals are associated with worse outcomes and reduced adherence, and that a process-based focus rather than an outcome-based focus is associated with better adherence and better long-term health.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
+1
HakkekageSpace Whore Academysumma cum laudeRegistered Userregular
So here is something that's confusing me, based on the literature Feral is referencing. (About which I'm not skeptical so much as just still trying to understand it.)
Say you start out thin. Through ten years of a consistently sedentary lifestyle and massive overconsumption of crappy food, you become obese. At this point, your body says, "Oh, I am overweight now, I will stay overweight forever, even if you start eating well and exercising, mwahaha!" It is then somewhere between super-hard and nigh-impossible to get back down to being thin. That is the gist of what I am getting from the lit.
So can we flip all that? Say you start out overweight. Then, after ten years of consistent healthy eating and copious exercise, you become thin. At this point, your body says, "Oh, I am thin now. I will stay thin forever, even if you start eating shitty and never exercise again. Yay, homeostasis!" It is then very difficult to become overweight.
If the latter case doesn't happen, why not? Does your body have a bias towards being overweight for some reason, such that you can trend fatter but not thinner? If ten years of a crappy lifestyle can make you fat forever, why can't ten years of a good lifestyle make you thin forever? Is there an age past which your body just says, "Fuck it, I'mma be this way forever because inertia," and then your body style is kinda set?
Here's how I make sense of it: You lose a lot of weight from being very overweight through a strict diet and exercise plan. You return to a thin level. However, your net calories (Calories consumed minus calories burned) required to maintain that weight level without trending back upwards again must remain at a lower level than if you had never been overweight. So imaginary numbers here -- if a normal adult human male who does not exercise requires 2000 calories a day to maintain a weight of 175 lbs, a formerly-obese adult human male could only take in 1700 calories a day to maintain 175 lbs.
As for the resistance of the baseline weight to being lowered vs going up--just spitballing here--I consider it analogous once again to stretched out skin. Your skin is elastic enough to spread out over additional fat/muscle growth, but the loss of fat/muscle will not allow the skin to easily spring back to its prior tightness.
In addition, I might say that 10-yr long "obesity" trend followed by 10 yr long "thin" trend has to happen pretty early in life (Say, 0-10 years old, then 11-20 years old, respectively) to see that baseline return to where it would have been had you never been obese. In that, age is also a factor. It's no secret that metabolic processes slow down with age. I'm just not going to be able to eat the way I do at 34 as I did now at 24 and maintain my body. So if rapid weight loss occurs in adulthood, i'd imagine the calorie requirements to maintain that thin physique is even lower than it would have been if the weight loss occurred as a youngin'.
But I am not a doctor, so this is all useless speculation! It just makes sense to me this way.
If the latter case doesn't happen, why not? Does your body have a bias towards being overweight for some reason, such that you can trend fatter but not thinner? If ten years of a crappy lifestyle can make you fat forever, why can't ten years of a good lifestyle make you thin forever? Is there an age past which your body just says, "Fuck it, I'mma be this way forever because inertia," and then your body style is kinda set?
I don't know why not.
I don't know if there is a good explanation out there why not and I'm just ignorant of it, or if it's an unanswered question at this time.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Yeah it sounded like when you first were talking about this you were saying "even if you eat 1500 calories and lose weight, you'll regain the weight you had even if you are eating less."
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
This article in the New York Times covers a lot of the scientific ground regarding the difficulty of weight loss, as well as a few troubling anecdotes. When you get the point where you're weighing lettuce... yeah.
Yep, this is a good article. I wanted to link it earlier but I had trouble finding that specific one for some reason.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
They show the numerous methods the body trends toward homeostasis, but none of them claim that maintenance of a caloric deficit will lead to a person returning to their initial weight.
They both state exactly that, particularly the second one.
Once weight loss hits a plateau, maintaining the same caloric deficit will not only fail to induce further weight loss, but is extremely likely to result in partially or totally regaining some of the lost weight.
Also, I picked those two specifically because they involved controlled, non-self-reported diets. There is an abundance of studies and metareviews (including both self-reported and non-self-reported diets) that show that most people regain part or all of the weight they lose from behavioral changes. Some of those studies are cited in the University of Colorado paper if you want to drill down.
Again, that was not your claim. This new claim, that once your caloric deficit is no longer a deficit and is now in fact equivalent to your maintenance calories you will no longer lose weight is one that I think is well supported by literature.
Most studies that track adults on weight loss plans for long periods of time (over a year) show that most peoples' body mass return to a baseline range even when they successfully adhere to the program. They might maintain modest amounts of weight loss - 10% or less in most cases - but the vast majority of people cannot maintain dramatic shifts in weight loss even if they adhere to a diet and exercise plan.
If you are 300 pounds, it will be more difficult, but neither impossible nor unhealthy for you to get down to 5% body fat. No matter how long you had maintained that weight.
Define "impossible." It is possible for a 60 year old to give birth, for a 50 year old with no prior musical training to pick up a violin and score a seat on the London Philharmonic after a few years, possible for a pro player to beat Barry Bonds's home run record without steroids, possible to win the lottery.
A great many things are "possible" if you pay no attention to what is realistic.
Meanwhile, there is also plenty of evidence that shows that unrealistic weight loss goals are associated with worse outcomes and reduced adherence, and that a process-based focus rather than an outcome-based focus is associated with better adherence and better long-term health.
I would define impossible in the normal sense. For any person with a functioning metabolic system, there exists a caloric load that will necessitate their arrival at a target body fat percentage (within reason). The discomfort and discipline required to get to the target varies, and the set-point theory suggests it will be made more difficult if the person has maintained a higher weight for a considerable period.
Once weight loss hits a plateau, maintaining the same caloric deficit will not only fail to induce further weight loss, but is extremely likely to result in partially or totally regaining some of the lost weight.
Also, I picked those two specifically because they involved controlled, non-self-reported diets. There is an abundance of studies and metareviews (including both self-reported and non-self-reported diets) that show that most people regain part or all of the weight they lose from behavioral changes. Some of those studies are cited in the University of Colorado paper if you want to drill down.
Again, that was not your claim. This new claim, that once your caloric deficit is no longer a deficit and is now in fact equivalent to your maintenance calories you will no longer lose weight is one that I think is well supported by literature.
Most studies that track adults on weight loss plans for long periods of time (over a year) show that most peoples' body mass return to a baseline range even when they successfully adhere to the program. They might maintain modest amounts of weight loss - 10% or less in most cases - but the vast majority of people cannot maintain dramatic shifts in weight loss even if they adhere to a diet and exercise plan.
I fail to see how you could have possibly misinterpreted the two quoted passages, particularly the bolded sections of those passages, as being incompatible.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
If the latter case doesn't happen, why not? Does your body have a bias towards being overweight for some reason, such that you can trend fatter but not thinner? If ten years of a crappy lifestyle can make you fat forever, why can't ten years of a good lifestyle make you thin forever? Is there an age past which your body just says, "Fuck it, I'mma be this way forever because inertia," and then your body style is kinda set?
I don't know why not.
I don't know if there is a good explanation out there why not and I'm just ignorant of it, or if it's an unanswered question at this time.
But regardless of the why, it is the (apparent) case that being fat for a long time makes you more likely to remain fat, but being skinny for a long time doesn't make you more likely (or as more likely) to remain skinny? Is that the correct reading?
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
As an anecdote, the 30 lbs I lost (250-220) when I changed to diet soda never even sort of threatened to come back, nor the 10 more I dropped (210) when I changed to no-sugar everything else. I dropped, then stabilized with no backsliding. Then I had a bad bout of depression, started binging on terrible stuff and not exercising, went up to 215 with hypertension, high cholesterol, pre-diabetic, etc. Begged for a month before my doctor put me on blood pressure meds...month of keto dieting w/o calorie restriction put me at 202 with healthy vitals.
Kept losing a few pounds per month past that (178). Gained a bit back (200) when I moved back in with my family and stopped adhering to my diet. Gained more (216) when I started making trips to the gas station for ice cream on a regular basis. Started keto again, this time with calorie restriction, back down to 208 within weeks.
Obviously, it's possible I'm an outlier, but I've never seen anything to indicate my weight wasn't directly and very observably attuned to my eating habits.
edit: for the purpose of this discussion, I think the 30 lbs straight down with no backsliding when I dropped sugared soda's the most notable thing. That's a straight >10% loss with no backsliding from cutting sugar and calories with no other changes.
Once weight loss hits a plateau, maintaining the same caloric deficit will not only fail to induce further weight loss, but is extremely likely to result in partially or totally regaining some of the lost weight.
Also, I picked those two specifically because they involved controlled, non-self-reported diets. There is an abundance of studies and metareviews (including both self-reported and non-self-reported diets) that show that most people regain part or all of the weight they lose from behavioral changes. Some of those studies are cited in the University of Colorado paper if you want to drill down.
Again, that was not your claim. This new claim, that once your caloric deficit is no longer a deficit and is now in fact equivalent to your maintenance calories you will no longer lose weight is one that I think is well supported by literature.
Most studies that track adults on weight loss plans for long periods of time (over a year) show that most peoples' body mass return to a baseline range even when they successfully adhere to the program. They might maintain modest amounts of weight loss - 10% or less in most cases - but the vast majority of people cannot maintain dramatic shifts in weight loss even if they adhere to a diet and exercise plan.
I fail to see how you could have possibly misinterpreted the two quoted passages, particularly the bolded sections of those passages, as being incompatible.
The first (although now second due to the joys of my quote snipping) read to me that a person who maintained a lower caloric load (successful adherence to the program) would then gain weight back to their original weight without any change to their diet.
The second, I read as they will no longer continue to lose weight as they reach a new plateau.
The whole baseline weight problem is one reason why weightlifting trumps cardio for losing weight. Not only does muscle burn more calories than fat while resting, the process of building muscle also burns calories. This goes a long way towards negating the problem of your body becoming more efficient at burning calories. Plus, as you gain muscle, you will look better, even when the results don't show up on a scale.
The whole baseline weight problem is one reason why weightlifting trumps cardio for losing weight. Not only does muscle burn more calories than fat while resting, the process of building muscle also burns calories. This goes a long way towards negating the problem of your body becoming more efficient at burning calories. Plus, as you gain muscle, you will look better, even when the results don't show up on a scale.
Well, it's also worth noting that studies show that for a beginner, weightlifting is a better cardio exercise than 'cardio' exercises.
Posts
Can you link one of the studies that show this and doesn't rely on self-reported calorie consumption?
Anyway, y'all talking about eating food that fills you...Man, I wish I could experience, just once, being satiated without being so stuffed I was sick. But it just doesn't happen, no matter what I eat. Unless my stomach can literally not hold any more food, I'm still hungry. Best I can do is 'not ravenous enough to distract me' by eating well then chugging water. And if I'm not full keto and restricting carbs religiously already, it's a titanic battle each day to not walk to the grocery store, buy a pint of Moose Tracks, and eat it within 5 minutes of getting home...multiple times a week (on keto, it's just a minor temptation, not something producing intrusive thoughts while I'm trying to work or whatever).
That's to say, for some people, if we were capable of portion control...we wouldn't be fat in the first place.
I think childhood's the only place we can seriously target for combating obesity. No soda in school, hell, no milk/juice/any of it. No vending machines at all. No snack cakes and bullshit for sale in the cafeteria, either. Just good food and water. No advertising sweets and terrible food in general to kids. No colorful boxes with smiling healthy children and colorful bouncing sweets. You can keep selling fruit roll ups and shitty candy cereals, but box that shit up like an Australian cigarette package.
And I honestly think that if a child becomes obese for reasons that amount to 'eating too fucking much terrible shit' then that should be reason for government intercession.
But for broader moves? It's hard to say what we should do, because we don't understand shit about nutrition. I've done a ton of reading on nutrition and pretty much the only thing I feel confident saying for the general population is 'sugar sucks'. But people won't give up sweets, and there are too many nebulous fears around artificial sweeteners for them to gain enough traction to do any good.
"High-quality" foods are better than junk food. They taste better and are better for you. You can eat less of them and feel satisfied. That's why rich people tend to be slim despite eating out a lot and having sedentary jobs. That's why fancy-schmancy ice cream is sold in little tubs and crappy non-dairy frozen dessert is sold in enormous tubs.
"Low-quality" foods taste just as good if not better. Doritos 4 lyfe.
is your solution to a more or less global obesity problem dependent on everybody being rich
Sadly, this is often the case.
When I haven't had a Coke or McChicken in a while, the sugar and salt and fat tastes like manna from heaven.
This study was done with patients admitted to a university hospital and fed controlled liquid diets. The link starts with a plain-English explanation but you can find a direct link to the journal article at the bottom of the page: http://centennial.rucares.org/index.php?page=Weight_Loss
It is easier to directly control caloric intake for long periods of time in animal models. I suggest reading this review:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3174765
That second article I linked provides the most comprehensive explanation currently available that reconciles both the slowly creeping increase in mean BMI among Americans with the relative difficulty people have losing weight.
In short, weight is homeostatic. The body - whether a rat or a human - exhibits endocrine response cycles that push the individual back to their baseline weight range. Over the individual's lifespan, it is possible for that homeostatic range to get pushed upwards, heavier, but once it is pushed upwards it can't be dragged back down. The formerly obese person must eat far fewer calories than the lifelong nonobese person to maintain comparable body mass.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I don't get why you think that I thought that was a solution.
I've had Doritos, and I've had posh food and honestly Doritos taste "meh." I don't want to sound like a snob. I just don't like Doritos. I do like crisps (potato chips.) But I still prefer posh food to crisps.
Obese and overweight people who experience modest weight loss through diet and exercise, and then continue to maintain a healthy lifestyle regardless of weight, are in general healthier than nonoverweight sedentary people.
Habits, far more than body mass, predict health.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
So what is that article's theory for why obesity is so prevalent now? I read the abstract, but I probably won't have time to actually read the whole study.
Also, if I'm reading you correctly, once you become obese you will be obese forever and there is literally nothing you can do to change this short of practically starving yourself forever and ever, or maybe getting lucky and having the universe decide to arbitrarily make you skinny again?
Like, say I weigh 300 lbs. Is your position that I can make myself "healthier," but I will pretty much always be 300 lbs for the rest of my life, or maybe I will get lucky and drop down to 275 or so?
People didn't use to be this fat. Now they are very fat. If this doesn't have to do with diet or exercise trends, then why did it happen?
The bolded, more or less.
If you've been 300 pounds for a very short period of time - say, you're an actor who fattened up for role, or you just 'let yourself go' for a year, or your weight gain was the side effect of a medication - then it's much more likely for you to drop back down to normal weight than it would be for somebody who has been 300 pounds for 10 years.
Everybody should watch their diet and exercise, whether you're 300 pounds or 90. But if, in watching your diet and exercising, you fail to reap significant weight loss more than 10%-ish, don't take that as a sign that your lifestyle changes aren't helping. They're almost certainly helping your health even if those benefits are invisible to you when you step on a scale.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Mostly, though not entirely, due to diet and exercise trends. Though stress, lack of sleep, some infectious diseases, some noninfectious diseases, and exposure to various drugs and chemicals (some birth control, some antidepressants, hormone disrupting pollutants, etc.) also contribute.
The problem is that weight is homeostatic - an individual's body "wants" to maintain weight in a certain stable range. It is very difficult to push yourself out of that range in either direction. There's no hard and fast rule for how wide that range is, and it's probably wider in some people than in others, but again +/-10% is a relatively not-terrible estimate.
"Obesogenic" environments - environments that promote sedentary behavior, have calorie-dense food in abundance, are stressful and discourage good sleep, push people to the top of that range. That means that some people who were previously on the cusp between 'normal' weight and 'overweight' will show up in studies as 'overweight.' (It takes only very small changes in the average weight of a population to effect dramatic-appearing increases in the obesity rate.)
As another review noted (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19955787/):
Long-term exposure to obesogenic environments can also cause that homeostatic range itself to shift upwards. Once the body of a rat or a human has become accustomed to being at a higher weight, that's the weight that the endocrine system drags you back towards.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This argument makes a lot sense: a person gets fat, adopts healthier habits to lose weight, rebounds due to the effect you're describing, and eventually gives up these habits because they aren't getting the superficial results they want.
However, if this is true, why isn't this being acknowledged by the medical community at large? If it is really so very hard to reverse obesity and there isn't, as you seem to be claiming, even that much of a need to do so when adopting healthier habits is sufficient, why try to fight a public health issue by making the solution even more daunting than it needs to be? Doesn't this just make overweight and obese people think that adopting healthy habits is useless if they aren't losing weight? Is it to prevent younger generations from becoming overweight and obese in the first place?
Basically, are you saying that the obesity of a person who has now adopted healthier habits is like a scar in that it is a sign of previous damage? What about claims that excessive body weight puts extra strain on the heart?
It is. Crash diets, promises of extreme weight loss, and so forth, are hallmarks of the diet industry, not of mainstream medicine. There's a lot of money to be found selling books, branded processed foods, workshops, videos, and so forth for Atkins, South Beach, paleo, etc.
Peer-reviewed studies on behavioral weight loss programs generally hold 10% to be the measure of a successful program. Some go even lower and count anybody who shows any sustained negative change at all, even as little as a tenth of a pound or a tenth of a kilogram, as having lost weight.
Example: http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/is-your-weight-loss-goal-realistic
Another example: http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/weight-loss/in-depth/weight-loss/art-20048224
and
and
http://www.cdc.gov/HEALTHYWEIGHT/LOSING_WEIGHT/INDEX.HTML
Those claims are true, as is the issue that fat accumulation around other internal organs can cause health problems, and excessive body weight can also put strain on joints.
However, keep in mind two things: most of the studies that show cardiac dysfunction from obesity...
1) ...fail to differentiate between obese and overweight. Everybody with a BMI higher than 25 is put into the 'overweight' category. The dude who is 10 pounds overweight is measured alongside the dude who is 400 pounds.
2) ...fail to differentiate between people who exercise and people who don't.
When you actually make these differentiations, the degree of cardiac dysfunction is significantly less in people who are not morbidly obese, and even moderate amounts of exercise reverse a lot of the cardiac dysfunction. Example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21869756
Also keep in mind that there's growing awareness about " (TOFI) thin outside, fat inside" or "(MONW) metabolically obese, normal weight" people. These are people who have normal weight and appear skinny, but have internal 'invisible' fat accumulation that contribute to health problems.
How do you fight this? Same way you would if you were outwardly fat. Diet and exercise.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Subject; the lady in front of me at the grocery store over lunch.
Age mid 30s
Height 5'-6''
Weight 275-300lb.
occupation office worker(guess by cloths)
Purchases:
1 bowl of pre-sliced melons ~ 2 cups.
1 box of peanut chewy granola bars.
1
That actual size, 1oz serving 160cal, 11g fat, 13g carbs, 2g protein.
Why is america obese?
While those studies and the multitude like them are very important in the discussion of obesity, they don't directly address the claim that you made (bolded above, but re-quoted for readability).
They show the numerous methods the body trends toward homeostasis, but none of them claim that maintenance of a caloric deficit will lead to a person returning to their initial weight.
If you are 300 pounds, it will be more difficult, but neither impossible nor unhealthy for you to get down to 5% body fat. No matter how long you had maintained that weight.
It's easier to prevent kids from becoming fat, by changing the way we think about kid's food. School meals need to be healthier. Nutrition and cooking lessons need to be better. Sugared drinks of all kinds need to be seen as treats rather than beverages.
Personally I think that kid's media could do a lot better about not showing kids hating healthy food as "cute." They don't need to go full-on "I love my greens!" but there is a lot of "Ewww! Broccoli!" going on in kid's TV which they should just cut out.
pleasepaypreacher.net
The TL;DR of the article:
-As we lose weight, the body tries to restore itself to the old equilibrium.
-The body "remembers" the old equilibrium for years, perhaps indefinitely.
-As we lose weight, muscles tend to convert to more efficient slow-twitch muscles, which burn fewer calories than fast twitch muscles.
-As a result, exercise that would burn say, 250 calories in a thin person might burn say, 200 in a formerly overweight person, despite having a frame the same size and while going the same speed on the same course.
-There are genetic components to weight gain.
-Keeping weight off in the long term is possible, but requires enormous discipline (like, plan and record every meal for the rest of your life discipline), and a person who has been overweight will need to eat less and exercise more than a person who has never been overweight in order to maintain the same weight.
-It's a Sisyphean task to lose weight.
But you've been saying that it is extremely difficult for overweight and obese people to lose significant amounts of weight, even with diet and exercise. Is the type of fat that builds-up around internal organs easier to get rid of or something?
He's saying that health outcomes improve regardless of superficial indicators such as weight loss. Put another way: It is easier to improve health through diet and exercise than it is to lose weight through diet and exercise, but diet and exercise counteract the negative impact of excess fat regardless (internal and external).
That's not what Feral said. Exercising and eating better will produce results. But it will require a greater, permanent net calorie reduction to maintain a lower weight than someone who hasn't been carrying excess weight around for the majority of their lives, unfortunately. That is not to say it cannot be done. However, if you have developed a comfortable and healthy routine but are not swiftly diving to your goal, or find it out of reach, the actual number shouldn't matter--you are healthier, full stop. It's just that the number is what most people fixate on and a failure to achieve that (frankly arbitrary) goal causes many to give up the healthy habits they developed out of discouragement that dramatic, visible weight loss has not occurred.
NNID: Hakkekage
pleasepaypreacher.net
Say you start out thin. Through ten years of a consistently sedentary lifestyle and massive overconsumption of crappy food, you become obese. At this point, your body says, "Oh, I am overweight now, I will stay overweight forever, even if you start eating well and exercising, mwahaha!" It is then somewhere between super-hard and nigh-impossible to get back down to being thin. That is the gist of what I am getting from the lit.
So can we flip all that? Say you start out overweight. Then, after ten years of consistent healthy eating and copious exercise, you become thin. At this point, your body says, "Oh, I am thin now. I will stay thin forever, even if you start eating shitty and never exercise again. Yay, homeostasis!" It is then very difficult to become overweight.
If the latter case doesn't happen, why not? Does your body have a bias towards being overweight for some reason, such that you can trend fatter but not thinner? If ten years of a crappy lifestyle can make you fat forever, why can't ten years of a good lifestyle make you thin forever? Is there an age past which your body just says, "Fuck it, I'mma be this way forever because inertia," and then your body style is kinda set?
pleasepaypreacher.net
On this point, an excessive emphasis on outward appearance as a motivator for weight loss often leads to discouragement because rapid fat loss rarely results in the type of toned, taut bodies in popular media or promised by Before and After diet ads. The "scars" of previous "damage"--aka excess weight--persist even if an obese person is able to shed all the extra weight, in the form of loose skin, uneven or strange distribution of body fat, and literally scars (stretch marks). Even if weight loss is achieved "honestly" (diet and exercise alone), surgery to tuck away these signs would still need to carry you over to that finish line of looking like a model (or any individual conception of "normal), or whatever the goal is.
So yes: If there is any place to focus on re: reducing the incidence of obesity and diabetes in this country, it is going to be at the infant/child level. Habits are hard to break and even harder to form as an adult. I would love it if the emphasis on developing these healthy habits was not on how sexy versus how open to disdainful judgement you are by society, but that would never actually happen.
And tinwhiskers--your purely anecdotal "field report" observing that a fat woman bought a bag of unhealthy popcorn means pretty much nothing. But go ahead and feel privately superior if you like.
NNID: Hakkekage
They both state exactly that, particularly the second one.
Once weight loss hits a plateau, maintaining the same caloric deficit will not only fail to induce further weight loss, but is extremely likely to result in partially or totally regaining some of the lost weight.
Also, I picked those two specifically because they involved controlled, non-self-reported diets. There is an abundance of studies and metareviews (including both self-reported and non-self-reported diets) that show that most people regain part or all of the weight they lose from behavioral changes. Some of those studies are cited in the University of Colorado paper if you want to drill down.
Define "impossible." It is possible for a 60 year old to give birth, for a 50 year old with no prior musical training to pick up a violin and score a seat on the London Philharmonic after a few years, possible for a pro player to beat Barry Bonds's home run record without steroids, possible to win the lottery.
A great many things are "possible" if you pay no attention to what is realistic.
Meanwhile, there is also plenty of evidence that shows that unrealistic weight loss goals are associated with worse outcomes and reduced adherence, and that a process-based focus rather than an outcome-based focus is associated with better adherence and better long-term health.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Here's how I make sense of it: You lose a lot of weight from being very overweight through a strict diet and exercise plan. You return to a thin level. However, your net calories (Calories consumed minus calories burned) required to maintain that weight level without trending back upwards again must remain at a lower level than if you had never been overweight. So imaginary numbers here -- if a normal adult human male who does not exercise requires 2000 calories a day to maintain a weight of 175 lbs, a formerly-obese adult human male could only take in 1700 calories a day to maintain 175 lbs.
As for the resistance of the baseline weight to being lowered vs going up--just spitballing here--I consider it analogous once again to stretched out skin. Your skin is elastic enough to spread out over additional fat/muscle growth, but the loss of fat/muscle will not allow the skin to easily spring back to its prior tightness.
In addition, I might say that 10-yr long "obesity" trend followed by 10 yr long "thin" trend has to happen pretty early in life (Say, 0-10 years old, then 11-20 years old, respectively) to see that baseline return to where it would have been had you never been obese. In that, age is also a factor. It's no secret that metabolic processes slow down with age. I'm just not going to be able to eat the way I do at 34 as I did now at 24 and maintain my body. So if rapid weight loss occurs in adulthood, i'd imagine the calorie requirements to maintain that thin physique is even lower than it would have been if the weight loss occurred as a youngin'.
But I am not a doctor, so this is all useless speculation! It just makes sense to me this way.
NNID: Hakkekage
I don't know why not.
I don't know if there is a good explanation out there why not and I'm just ignorant of it, or if it's an unanswered question at this time.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Yep, this is a good article. I wanted to link it earlier but I had trouble finding that specific one for some reason.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Again, that was not your claim. This new claim, that once your caloric deficit is no longer a deficit and is now in fact equivalent to your maintenance calories you will no longer lose weight is one that I think is well supported by literature.
I would define impossible in the normal sense. For any person with a functioning metabolic system, there exists a caloric load that will necessitate their arrival at a target body fat percentage (within reason). The discomfort and discipline required to get to the target varies, and the set-point theory suggests it will be made more difficult if the person has maintained a higher weight for a considerable period.
I fail to see how you could have possibly misinterpreted the two quoted passages, particularly the bolded sections of those passages, as being incompatible.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
But regardless of the why, it is the (apparent) case that being fat for a long time makes you more likely to remain fat, but being skinny for a long time doesn't make you more likely (or as more likely) to remain skinny? Is that the correct reading?
Adherence is a factor, but it is not the only factor.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Kept losing a few pounds per month past that (178). Gained a bit back (200) when I moved back in with my family and stopped adhering to my diet. Gained more (216) when I started making trips to the gas station for ice cream on a regular basis. Started keto again, this time with calorie restriction, back down to 208 within weeks.
Obviously, it's possible I'm an outlier, but I've never seen anything to indicate my weight wasn't directly and very observably attuned to my eating habits.
edit: for the purpose of this discussion, I think the 30 lbs straight down with no backsliding when I dropped sugared soda's the most notable thing. That's a straight >10% loss with no backsliding from cutting sugar and calories with no other changes.
The first (although now second due to the joys of my quote snipping) read to me that a person who maintained a lower caloric load (successful adherence to the program) would then gain weight back to their original weight without any change to their diet.
The second, I read as they will no longer continue to lose weight as they reach a new plateau.
Well, it's also worth noting that studies show that for a beginner, weightlifting is a better cardio exercise than 'cardio' exercises.