Fat people have a hell of a time navigating the world. If they are out in public, they get stared at, they hear things said about them made in stage whispers, and sometimes outright rude comments made directly to them that reflect common public opinions that they are lazy, indisciplined, and gluttonous. They are the victims of body-shaming and find it hard to shop for clothes.
They also receive lots of gratuitous advice, even from strangers, about how to lose weight and the health risks of not doing so, even though they have heard these things many, many times over, know all of them well, and many have made determined efforts to lose weight and either failed or lost it in the short term only to gain it back later. Many do not go to doctors for their annual checkups or even if they are not well because all too often, the doctor will simply assume that the problem is due to their weight and give them the same old lecture.
For much of history, as W.F. Ferris and N.J. Crowther explained in 2011 research, “excess body fat [was] a symbol of wealth and prosperity as the general population struggled with food shortages and famine,” as we can see in Renaissance portraits celebrating full-figured women. Technology and industry in the 19th and 20th centuries made food stabler, cheaper, and more widely available as well as increased the overall standard of living—but that came with more sedentary lifestyles and processed foods, creating new concerns about weight.
By the 1940–50s, thinness had spread as the new ideal for health and beauty. In March 1954, Life magazine featured an article, “The Plague of Overweight,” which characterized obesity as “the most serious health problem today.” “The uncompromising truth,” it went on, “is that obesity is caused by gluttony.” At the time, only around three percent of Americans were considered obese.
Soon, magazines were publishing all manner of absurd diets, like the Domino Sugar Diet, which encouraged people (yes, primarily women) to increase their sugar intake as a means of losing weight.
…Scientific research has shown, however, that diets, no matter the type, do not work on a lasting basis for many people. More important, there are many reasons why a person may be larger, and that does not make them moral failures.
Readers know that I like the radio program This American Life and a few days ago I listened to a particularly good episode titled Tell Me I’m Fat that has fat people talk about their experiences.
I had thought that the word ‘fat’ was pejorative and when discussing this topic had always used the term ‘overweight’ instead, but one of the people profiled in the show said that it is ‘overweight’ that is pejorative because it implies that there is a correct weight, and that ‘fat’ is better because it is merely descriptive. But even after listening to the show, I still hesitated to use the word ‘fat’ in this post because of years of conditioning that to refer to anyone as fat was insensitive if not downright rude. The show’s host Ira Glass is unfailingly respectful to all the people he talks with on the show and when he started off this episode by referring to fat people, I initially found it jarring but it appears that referring to someone as fat is just like referring to them being Black or medium height or blonde or curly-haired, just a description with no value judgment involved.
There have been some positive changes in attitudes. Fat people have been advocates and beneficiaries of the body positivity movement that encourages people to not feel ashamed of how they look but to go out and about just like anyone else.
This is all part of why many fat activists, as they proudly call themselves, are reclaiming the word fat and squashing its stigma. The Fat Acceptance Movement is working to challenge fat bias and end systemic discrimination against fat people. Plus-size models like Tess Holliday and Ashley Graham are working to change what kinds of bodies get represented in the fashion world. And, TV shows like Hulu’s Shrill (based on Lindy West’s 2016 book of the same name) are putting the focus on fat characters who are empowered and accept themselves just as they are.
Perhaps the biggest shift needs to happen with individuals and the language they use. Fat is a noun. Fat is an adjective. Fat is not an insult, and it’s time for society and culture to stop doing harm to fat people by treating their body type like it’s a bad word.
But I am not sure how universal this sentiment has become, making it tricky for those who do not wish to inadvertently give offense.
The stigma surrounding being fat starts early and is almost unavoidable.
In our culture, fatness is a constant source of shame and ridicule. Research has shown children as young as four have said they wouldn’t want to be friends with a fat child, revealing how early weight discrimination can occur. Other research has found that more than half of doctors described their fat patients as “ugly,” “awkward,” and “noncompliant” with their recommendations.
Media promoting weight-loss advice and the “healthiest” ways to live perpetuate the myth that weight is a matter of personal choice and responsibility. Nonetheless, science suggests that body size is the result of a complex web of factors, including social and economic influences, genetics, food production and availability, urban design, land use, advertising, and public safety and transportation.
People are beginning to realize that blaming fat people for being so is unfair and that they do not deserve to be judged for how they look. Fatness and healthiness are being decoupled and there is an increasing awareness that people can be fat and healthy at the same time and that the main purpose of exercise should not be to reduce weight but to improve cardiovascular functioning and muscle development. If it also happens to reduce people’s weight, that is incidental. The problem with advocating exercise to reduce weight is that if it does not lead to fairly quick weight reduction, people can get discouraged and stop exercising, even though exercise provides many health benefits to everyone.
The older I get, the more I become convinced that trying to make other people do things to change their lives is not helpful, even if we persuade ourselves that we are doing so ‘for their own good’, which is often the rationale given for interfering. We have no idea what other people’s lives are like and picking on one aspect of it to focus on is not helpful.
Many years ago I got interested in the science behind BMI. It turns out that Adolphe Quetelet, who made the first “ideal height/weight chart” asked a bunch of his friends whom he considered particularly well-proportioned how tall they were, and what they weighed. That’s all kinds of science, right there, because it has observation. But then Quetelet’s chart was taken over by insurance companies and school nutritionists and a physical therapist had the bright idea of turning the chart into a formula, and BMI was born!
Standard BMI arguments are to point out that for his size/weight Bruce Lee was morbidly obese.
Marcus @1, wow. So science! And yes, BMI simply cannot deal with muscular people.
There was a new antipsychotic introduced once, that worked so well that schizophenic people could lead normal lives at home with jobs. It almost obliviated the need for any hospitalizations, and didn’t have the hideous side effects of the old antipyschotics. A sort of miracle drug.
But, one side effect that almost everyone had was gaining weight. Such are the penalties for being fat in America that people would stop the drug, preferring uncontrolled psychosis to the horror of being fat. (Luckily, some new drugs of the same type soon came out, which didn’t make people fat.) But, that’s how bad it is, and as Mano says, it’s got to stop.
There is also an effect now, modern people who eat the same number of calories as people in the 1940’s gain more weight than they did then. Obesogenic chemicals in the environment?
If you look at American’s weight over time, the percentage of fat and obese people started to sharply increase in the 1970’s. It’s obviously some external cause: millions more people didn’t suddenly become more greedy.
This reminds me of the Heavy album by actor/comedian Victor Buono, who played King Tut on the 60s Batman TV series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLpP-aa-XHw
I think there’s multiple reasons why American weight started skyrocketing in the 1970s. That’s when the ant-fat, all-carbs-all-the-time diet started. The price of gasoline soared and the economy plummeted, forcing many people to subsist on cheaper foods like spaghetti and various cheap junk foods. Pizza delivery started up as a boon for lazy and time-strapped people alike, and that’s when all adults in a household had to work to keep the household afloat. As the decade passed into the 1980s, fewer young people went to discos or rollerskating, and the vcr and cable tv becoming part of everyone’s home meant more people were spending their spare time sitting at home eating takeout.
Then there’s the topic of foods becoming less nutritious. High fructose corn syrup became added to everything because it was ridiculously cheap, and replaced sugar (Coke Classic --> New Coke and when that failed spectacularly, they just lessened the HFCS and called it Coke Classic).
Recently on Youtube, I saw a video of real Australians trying the American chain Outback Steak House, and one comment said over and over again was how sweet American foods are--everything is sweetened.
Also, IMO, the rise of the bloated SUV is adding to the fattening of America. Apparently, butts are like goldfish and will grow to fit whatever container they’re in?
“If you look at American’s weight over time, the percentage of fat and obese people started to sharply increase in the 1970’s. It’s obviously some external cause: millions more people didn’t suddenly become more greedy.”
That directly coincides with the introduction of high fructose corn syrup. I’m not one of those people who think HFCS is the devil, it’s still sugar and gets metabolized as such. But it’s in everything now, even foods you wouldn’t expect to find sweeteners in unless you read labels. So the same foods now have more calories per weight than they once did. Likewise, foods marketed as “diet” because low fat, add HFCS to make up for the lack of flavor from fats. So while there are a lot of factors, I’d think the main cause is the combo of ubiquitous HFCS and deceptive marketing.
Until very recently with the introduction of a couple of promising (and expensive!) drugs like semaglutide and tirzepatide that finally seem to be targeting evidence-based mechanisms, medicine hasn’t had a handle on even the basic mechanisms underlying obesity. Just like other diseases in the past, no one really had any clue what they were talking about and, consequently, everyone thinks they’re an expert on what’s really going on. See more than one comment below for prime examples. And just like so many diseases in the past, the promising cure seems to be as simple as taking a pill as opposed to the changes in “lifestyle” advocated by the aforementioned clueless experts.
Fat women are beneficiaries, you mean. It’s still an exclusive movement, no men allowed.
That’s debatable. There’s plenty of evidence in support of obesity as a disease process that wrecks the body even if we know very little about how it works, but we’re figuring out evidence-based ways to treat it now. The problem, of course, was that historically it was practically untreatable and you had to hope for the favorable outcome of losing enough weight, which nothing seemed to help with. Preaching at fat people to change their wicked lifestyles hasn’t worked, obviously, and I fully endorse the emerging cultural backlash against that.
Well spoken. I’ll try to remember that and apply it to my own prejudices.
Remember when gas stations just sold gasoline? Now they’re snack food stores that happen to also sell gas.
Food -- especially highly processed, low quality, quasi-food -- is everywhere. Plus, it’s designed to be as convenient as possible: remove wrapper, stuff in food hole, and go. Also, economy sizes. Who needs a nearly 2 liter (64 oz) soda? Soda is little more than carbonated hummingbird food.
…Thanks mostly to non-adherence. Weight is -- for the overwhelming majority of fatties* -- a product of calories in not matching calories out. Changes to diet or physical labour or both change the balance. Though I don’t recommend being so fastidious as to tot up the calories of every bit of food.
‘Overweight’ refers not to correctness, but to health and quality of life. The statistical link between high weight and e.g. heart attack is real. Consider also underweight, which is also all about health impact.
Fat advocates that push for ending abuse of fat people are doing good work. Fat advocates that claim all weights and shapes are equally healthy are liars or fools.
*A description that includes me btw
For emphasis:
Weight and health cannot be decoupled, not entirely, as the statistical association between excess weight and [various] is real. Really real. People can be fat and healthy at the same time, sure. There are also heavy smokers who never get lung cancer and heavy drinkers that never get liver cirrhosis. But that just means they have beaten the odds.
It’s not just quasi-foods, it’s quasi-drinks. While your grandparents may have had 6 ounces of home-brewed coffee in the morning with maybe a splash or milk or a teaspoon of sugar, but over the past 30 years coffee shops have poppsed up. It’s simple to order online and swing by on the way to work to pick up a 700-calorie sugar-bomb with whipped cream and sprinkles and multiple pumps of sugary syrup. Stop by at lunch to pick up another one and boost your rewards toward another free one! The Takeout just had a new fall drink they endorsed whole-heartedly: a sugary frozen coffee with three crumbled pumpkin spice donuts mixed in. You’re worth this treat!
For supper, you can swing by a famous all-you-can-eat buffet for their new specialty, a variety of breaded, fried wings, now soaked in a sugary sauce--and you can get all four varieties because it’s all you can eat! Finish up with a slab of cake. Or drop by a fast food place for a burger with breaded french fries or breaded onion rings stuffed under the bun for 3,000 calories. You can wash it down with another 1,000 calories of sugary frozen soda!
@8 Holms
This is what I meant when I was talking about clueless experts preaching at fat people to adhere to something that doesn’t work, in the hopes of a favorable outcome.
As far as evidence-based treatment is concerned, it’s about as helpful as telling a cancer patient, “Have you tried having less cancer? You know the reason that tumor is getting so large is because you’re giving it so many calories in and not enough calories out…”
@4, 10 SailorStar
I’ve heard it a million times before. Your apparent delight in spreading this nonsense (and coming up with weird new culprits: SUV seats, seriously?!?) contributes to the toxic environment fat people have to put up with to interact with society.
There are multiple viewpoints about the movement.
Here is one perspective:
Re:
I believe that this does not give doctors enough credit, and that it is misleading.
—
PS
To attempt to preclude comments regarding my incapacity of understanding language or my contrarian trollishness or so forth (whyever would I imagine that’s a real possibility?) I note that had what I quoted instead been
“Many do not go to doctors for their annual checkups or even if they are not well because all too often,
they believethe doctor will simply assume that the problem is due to their weight and give them the same old lecture.”That I would not have disputed, because it is true either way, whereas the quoted contention is only true if no doctors don’t just assume the problem is the weight.
@Holms #8
“Weight is — for the overwhelming majority of fatties* — a product of calories in not matching calories out.”
From personal, hard-won experience, I know this to be an oversimplification. I am active to a fault -- my activity sees me averaging 2,800 calories out, minimum (the odd, more sedentary day is below 2,400 -- my daily exercise on such a day is under an hour -- while most days are above 2,900, and can involve more than 2 hours of elevated cardiovascular exercise). Even assuming that the fitness-tracking app I use is 10% too optimistic (I have no idea what algorithms they use, but I can’t imagine they’re more than 10% out of whack with reality, given that my heart rate and step count/frequency is constantly monitored), that’s still more than 2,500 calories out per day, on an average basis. And yet even during the holiday season, my calorie consumption doesn’t go above 2,400 per day (and at other times of the year, it’s usually around 2,000). With this math, I should be gradually losing weight…and I’m not.
My theory as to why is that while I do have a fairly balanced diet (low on meat, high on veggies and fruits), a larger-than-ideal portion of my energy intake comes from empty calories…from high-fructose corn syrup -- I am a known Dr. Pepper fiend, and my consumption of this beverage totals something like 300 calories per day (roughly 2 cans’ worth). With my current diet, I am at a stable weight -- it’s like my body just wants to weigh this much. More activity doesn’t help, nor does lowering my overall calorie consumption. The only thing that has EVER caused my weight to drop has been temporarily cutting my Dr. Pepper consumption to about 50% of what it is currently. I went about 6 months on such a regimen, and went from 181 lbs to a stable 176 lbs after about 4 months (most of which has since come back -- before trying this experiment earlier this year, my weight varied from about 181 lbs to 183 lbs…never higher or lower than this range). Maybe eliminating this soft drink from my diet entirely would eventually drop me down more, but the thing is…I don’t want to do that. I like Dr. Pepper.
So, I think that using the calorie as a way to assess diet is flawed, because clearly some calories “count” more than others, and the body can clearly tell the difference between easy calories (those that are highly-processed, providing instant energy) and hard calories (those that require a good deal of digestion and chemical alteration within the body to be useful). And I know I’m overweight by BMI standards (which are quite flawed, overestimating the “fatness” of shorter people like myself), but I don’t look it, and my doctor (who just gave me a physical last week, complete with extensive bloodwork) said that I was very healthy, apart from a slightly-raised diastolic blood pressure (likely from a genetic cause, as he knows my age, and my measurements and does not consider me to be old or overweight enough for those things to be causing it), and for which he gave me the lowest possible dose of Ramipril, which seems to be working. And critically, my hemoglobin A1C was 4.8%, so my sugar consumption is being dealt with successfully by my pancreas (so far -- I always focus on blood sugar because there is a genetic history of type II diabetes in my family). So my BMI of 28.2 is not concerning to me. I’m healthy and will continue to ensure that I remain so. If things start to devolve as I progress in my 40s and early 50s, I will likely reduce or eliminate Dr. Pepper from my life (it will be difficult, but I know it’s possible). Until then, I will just keep as active as I can, while accepting my body shape and size, and not stressing over losing weight.
BMI as a crude measurement is useful for research, it allows to bin patients into a small number of groups, in a manner that can be kept consistent from one research paper to another. If one finds that behavior X or food Y affects people in a manner that is correlated or anti-correlated with BMI that means something. For individuals who want to know how worried they should be about their health status, a better measure would be waist circumference divided by height (should be less than 0.5), or waist circumference divided by hip circumference (should be less than 0.85 for women and less than 0.9 for men). The reason this is a preferable measure is because if you carry fat around your waist, you are also carrying fat in your liver and pancreas, which over time can lead to organ damage. Fat that is spread subcutaneously is less of a problem. But carrying a lot of weight elsewhere in your body, whether in the form of fat or muscle, while not a threat to one’s metabolic health, does strain the heart more, and can also cause joint problems. So there is a point where weight per se becomes a cause of health problems, but this applies to anyone with bulk, regardless of composition.
For what a 21st century assessment of metabolic health might be like, see Multiomic signatures of body mass index identify heterogeneous health phenotypes and responses to a lifestyle intervention.
There is a misconception that Americans starting getting fat in the 70s or 80s. This is the result of setting an arbitrary threshold and counting how many pass it at any given time. But if you stratify the population by year of birth and track the people born in each year over time, looking at a continuous measurement he picture is very different. See The trend of mean BMI values of US adults, birth cohorts 1882–1986 indicates that the obesity epidemic began earlier than hitherto thought.
From the abstract:
But look at the figures for better understanding. For white men, the highest acceleration in BMI from one birth cohort to the next was for those born around 1920, whereas for Black women the highest acceleration was in cohorts born since about 1970.
Losing weight is a long slog. I gradually list 15 kg (33lb) over two years, but after a close relative died I lost motivation and was soon back to the starting point.
There is no simple fix -- I remain skeptic about the miracle medicines that have received a lot of attention last year.
If one side effect is nausea many may decline, diabetes risk be damned.
Maybe in popular culture. Maybe on Youtube and Tiktok. I won’t hold my breath for the actual healthcare system following this decade’s fad. Post again when, e.g. the British Medical Association or the NHS aren’t recommending you lose weight if you’re fat.
Disagree. The problem with advocating exercise to reduce weight is that it doesn’t work -- not in isolation and certainly not as a temporary quick fix. “Exercise to lose weight” is not what the doctor is recommending, and if that’s what you’re hearing you are not listening.
If you have an unhealthy lifestyle, you have to change your entire lifestyle, including doing more exercise, FOREVER -- and people don’t want to. Exercise is also, according to every single medical professional I’ve ever talked to about it AND every single sports and fitness professional I’ve ever talked to about it, only a small factor (about 20% is the figure I’ve heard most often) compared to calorie reduction. That lifestyle change HAS to also include eating more healthily, and that means eating less.
A physiotherapist friend of mine bemoans the people who, as part of their treatment programme, go for a walk, then gleefully tell her how they rewarded themselves for their efforts with a full packet of biscuits. Then they wonder why their joints hurt and they’re not losing weight. She also expressed shouty frustration at the people who, after the first covid lockdown, marvelled at how much better they were feeling because they’d spent their government-mandated hour a day outside walking… and the extra exercise helped them. It took a global pandemic and a lockdown to get them to actually do what she’d be recommending to them, in some cases for years. (She also noted the last time I saw her that all but one of those people she treated had reverted to their sedentary habits since, with predictable results).
The only problem with that “argument” is that it is predicated on the assumption that doctors and other health professionals use BMI exclusively to make clinical decisions and recommendations. If this were true, it would indeed be appalling. It is very very obviously not true, so it’s safe to simply ignore anyone who complains about the use of BMI as a metric, since they’re by definition trying to imply that it’s used as the ONLY metric. They have to, because their position disintegrates into dust the moment they are forced to admit that the moment someone’s BMI goes outside the generally accepted healthy range, every single medical professional they encounter with no exceptions will move on to assess other factors such a body fat percentage, cholesterol level, waist hip ratio, blood pressure and a host of other factors. To pretend otherwise is to imply that the entire healthcare system is staffed entirely by morons who apply one crude filter and stop. Understandable, if you don’t like the medical advice you’re given. Far easier to blame the messenger.
@VolcanoMan, 15:
IF you are truly consuming, say, 2,000 calories per day, every day, and IF you are truly expending 2,500 calories per day, every day, and you are NOT losing weight… where is the extra energy coming from? Are you photosynthesising? Are you tunnelling zero-point energy from the quantum vacuum? You’re not burning fat, obviously, or consuming any other part of your body mass. What’s going on?
I recognise that the body is a complex system with many interactions that it’s difficult to the point of nigh-on impossible to fully enumerate, much less actually understand. Nevertheless, human bodies exist in a universe where there’s a first law of thermodynamics, and that really is pretty simple -- you can’t just create energy out of nothing. But that’s what some fat people seem to want me to believe, and if I ask how it works, a variation on “it’s complicated” is the standard answer.
That’s the same answer Steorn gave. (Google them…)
It’s the same answer any crank selling a perpetual motion machine gives when you question how their gadget works. And there’s the same persecution mindset -- big oil doesn’t want you to know there’s a way to charge your phone/laptop/electric car for free from a gadget that’s basically some magnets spinning round!!! WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!1!!1! Big pharma doesn’t want you to know you can be perfectly healthy even though you weigh as much as three average sized people but only have the knee-joints and arteries of one!
@ 9 Holms
You’re comparing ingestion of poisons to naturally having lean body mass ratio out of what is arbitrarily considered “normal”. The entire OP seems to have sailed over your head. Your attitude is precisely what is being criticised.
@ 14 Morales
For fuck’s sake you’ve been boasting about how much you pine for old school “rough and tumble”, “no holds barred” Pharyngula where the more viscious you were, the more you were held in high esteem…
And now you can’t post a comment without melting into a puddle of self pity about how everyone’s a big meany. Pathetic.
Nobody knows or cares who you are. If people en masse are pissed off at your comments -- that’s a you problem.
<snicker>
If you neither know nor care who I am, whence that comment?
You do get that your years of obsessive sniping kinda vitiate your approach, no?
Clearly, you are identifying as a nobody, since you obviously do care about me; perfectly evidently, you care enough to address a comment to me, wherein you contrast your imagined past boasting with your imagined present moaning by me.
There, there. You are not a nobody.
You are you, my obsessive hatefan. My anti-fan!
(Nothing wrong with being obsessed by me, of course. You are not the first, and you shan’t be the last)
Mmmhmm. I take that’s not meant to be a Mario impersonation, right?
(“viscious”!)
@20 -- or rather, the minority of it that’s relevant to this thread:
You appear to be saying that lean body mass ratio, or percentage body fat, is just a fixed natural feature of a human body, independent of how much that human chooses to ingest and how active they are. Are you really saying that?
@12, beholder: there’s a saying that says, “You can’t outrun your fork”. You seem to think it’s nonsense that people who indulge their every whim to eat a lot of garbage, non-nutritive foods, gain weight. That’s your issue. Also, so sorry you missed the joke in butts growing like goldfish. That sailed right over your head.
What is true is that as a population, people in cities are thinner than people in rural areas. Part of that is all the walking they do as part of their everyday lives. Walk to the subway to get to work, walk to the restaurant 3 blocks over, walk to the park for exercise. Cities with bike lanes find people who use them to get around.
Weight is complicated. Again, “You can’t outrun your fork”. When I was a kid playing sports, the half-time snack was usually slices of orange. Now parents bring boxes of snack-sized chips. What was once a 30-calorie snack rich in vitamin C is now 200 calories of empty carbs. It all adds up.
And, as has been said over and over again, it’s not simply a matter of calories-in and calories-out. For example, an apple provides riboflavin, thiamine, B-6, Vitamins C and K, as well as fiber from the peel, plus some water, for about 90k. A similar amount of calories of Jolly Rancher candies provides nothing but empty carbs, which the liver works to convert to fat.
My father’s knees are in bad shape in part because he’s been overweight for several decades now. The causal link between excess body fat and knee osteoarthritis is, to my knowledge, established approximately as well as the link between smoking and cancer. It is simply not true that there is no connection between health and body weight. There are well-established statistical correlations as well as well-understood causal links between excessive body fat and some negative health outcomes.
However, I do not think that being overweight is the moral failure of an individual and should not be approached as such. Not only because it does not work, but also because people’s individual metabolisms clearly vary. Some people can eat relatively little and still gain weight, some (like me) can devour food like acid and stay slim. There are people who eat food with 2000 calories on the label and their body uses all of it and stores some in fat for afters, and then there are people who use only some of it and the rest is simply unused and unstored. Also for some people food is addictive, especially sweet foods and drinks. And what food is available to one plays a role too -- 2000 calories worth of apples is not the same as 2000 calories worth of HFCS.
As far as the USA goes, I do believe that the prevalence of HFCS and other sugars in food does play a role. When I was in the USA, I did not enjoy any food the whole time, not even when I went into a fancy-ish restaurant. Because everything was sweet. Eating a hamburger in a sweet bun made me nearly puke the first time I tried it. And as for the sweet sandwich bread -- wtf? I do remember that American sandwich bread was so sweet that I would not consider it a staple, I would consider it dessert. Most of us Europeans were hating on American bread the whole time we were there. We were amazed that non-sweetened bread could only be bought at an elevated price in a bakery -- the cheapest, most common bread in CZ, was a luxury item in the USA
When I was in the USA the cheapest food was fast food and AFAIK that did not change since. Thus it does make sense that the most overweight people in the USA tend to be poor because they are forced to eat junk food by their life’s circumstances and they do not have the luxury of having time for preparing fresh food and/or exercise. Or buying non-sweetened bread.
Calories are actually a rather rough estimate of the energy content of foods. They were determined by burning foods completely away, complete oxidation to CO2 and water, and seeing how much energy was relased. That isn’t how digestion works: first of all, not every bit of food is oxidized, and excess is discarded as waste (sonofiblake @22, the body doesn’t follow the 1st law of thermodynamics, digestion is not perfect oxidation and excess calories can be discarded in waste.)
Also, there is no telling what your metabolism is going to do with your calories. It is well-established that your body will hold onto body fat if it isn’t getting enough of this essentail nutrient in the diet, or if the total calories consumed are too low and the body thinks there’s a famine. It is well known that the body develops a set-point weight, to which it stubbornly tries to go back if weight is lost. It is well known that the body consumes muscle as well as fat if there is a calorie deficit, unless there s a deliberate attempt to retain muscle by strength training. It is well known that, if you don’t consume enough of essential nutrients, your brain tells you to keep eating until you get enough of them. That’s what is meant by “it’s complicated.” You have no control over what your metabolism may do or not do with the calories you consume.
Scolding people to eat less is worse than useless.
VolcanoMan @#15,
Your comment about drinking Dr. Pepper so much was interesting.
In Sri Lanka, we drank a lot of tea. In many offices, there was a designated person to make and serve tea at around 10:00 in the morning and again at 3:00 in the afternoon, and we would usually have another cup after lunch. I also used to have one cup of coffee first thing in the morning.
After coming to the US, I reduced it to drinking one cup of coffee every morning and one cup of tea in the late afternoon. This reduction was relatively easy since now no one was making the tea and bringing it to my desk anymore. But at around 4:00 pm each day, I would crave that cup of tea. But I found that my teeth were getting heavily stained and my dentist said that some people were more susceptible to staining by tea than others. So I decided to give it up. At first, I would feel the urge to drink tea coming on in the afternoon and had to fight it. But now, after more than a year, that urge has disappeared.
Interestingly, last week I decided to have a cup of tea in the afternoon and found that I actually disliked the taste and had to struggle to finish it, although I was using the same tea, prepared the same way. I guess I have broken the habit and will not be going back.
@garnetstar, #25: “the body doesn’t follow the 1st law of thermodynamics”
I really don’t know how to respond to this.
A question, perhaps: by what mechanism does the body generate energy out of nothing? How does that work? You must know, to state the above so clearly and confidently. Please share -- I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say there’s at least one Nobel prize in it for you if you’re right.
@Mano, 26: careful with the oppressive implication that willpower works. /s
One of the problems about all of the techniques for deciding if someone is fat is (obviously) different body shapes. Anat @ 16 suggests that waist circumference divided by either height or hip circumference are more useful measure, maybe, but if I do that I get 0.59 and 0.78 respectively both of which make it read like I am not overweight when I certainly am, I just have a relatively small waist and a relatively large bum with a good proportion of the fat I carry spread over my arms and legs. I really do have a large bum, it doesn’t matter what I weigh my hip measurment is out of proportion to my waist measurement, and it is my bum that sticks out not my stomach or hips (makes getting trousers that fit a right pain).
garnetstar @25:
Not accurate. This has been demonstrated for protein and salt, maybe fats, not sure about that one. For some minerals deficiency may induce pica -- eating of non-food items such as dirt or paint, but not extra calories. Anemic people are not hungry.
#15 Volcano
Calories are energy, and ’empty calories’ simply means energy without other nutrients. It’s still energy though. Either you have a slower than average metabolic rate, or you have overlooked or miscalculated something. Otherwise, your body mints mass out of nothing.
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#20 Sbob
No, the comment you quote was a rebuttal to the statement “…people can be fat and healthy at the same time”. I point out the meaninglessness of this statement by comparing the arguments employed by people in various risk groups. Just because a [fat person | heavy smoker | heavy drinker] does not exhibit [artery blockages | lung cancer | liver cirrhosis], does not mean the statistical link has been refuted.
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# 21 John
Criticism of someone else’s comment is not indicative of a desire to know the identity of that person; it is very possible for someone to criticise you without knowing or caring who you are.
Ah, you were doing so well til just then. A streak of two comments -- probably your personal best! -- with no snide shittery aimed at anyone, not any bloody-minded nitpicking.
Welp, that didn’t work. There’s supposed to be an end blockquote after “because clearly some calories “count” more than others”.
[I fixed it. -- Mano]
@garnetstar, 25: I was so boggles by your assertion that the human body is not bound by the laws of thermodynamics that I missed this:
“digestion is not perfect oxidation and excess calories can be discarded in waste”
This makes your position worse, not better -- didn’t you think this through? (rhetorical)
The argument you’re flailing to support is “boohoo i can’t lose weight even though i expend more energy than i consume”. But you’re not helping by pointing out that, although yer one is consuming say 2000 calories a day, they don’t convert all of that… which makes the discrepancy you must account for BIGGER, not smaller.
Do please explain.
Jazzlet @29: Having a large bum is generally healthier than having a large abdomen! From your post, it looks like your reasons for wanting to lose weight are more aesthetic/cultural than health-related?
This video may help clarify why where the fat is matters: Causes of Insulin Resistance: The Personal Fat Threshold
….er, a blogpost with some short videos embedded in it.
@sonofrojblake, I cannot speak for others, but calories in food are estimated, not measured exactly. It is possible that when a label says 2000 calories, that some people’s metabolism can extract 2100 calories from it and other people’s metabolism just 1900 calories. That way it is possible for a person to use “more calories” than were on the packages of the food they ate. Not because they are creating energy out of nothing but because the labeling has a margin of error and their metabolism performs with efficiency in the upper limits of said margin.
Also, AFAIK the estimates on the packaging use averages for various nutrient groups. So for example saccharides are seen as a bulk and assigned a value X per gram. But not all saccharides are equal, if I remember my nutrition chemistry classes correctly, for example, fructose is higher in calories than dextrose. Thus when using averages for estimations, labels on foods high in fructose would be underestimated and foods high in dextrose would be overestimated. Funnily enough, if true, this could lead to American foods being constantly underestimated due to high fructose content.
An expert opinion would be really welcome here but it would not change the overall point -- when two people eat the same food and perform the same exercises, their bodies still can respond differently, whilst both of their metabolisms most certainly do follow the same laws of thermodynamics.
A fair point. And if you can show that the distribution of errors is something other than a normal distribution around the correct value, and furthermore that those errors are biased only and always in the direction of UNDERestimating the real calorie content of food, then your point may begin to look valid. Do you have reason to believe that to be the case?
Up to a point, possibly. All that does is slightly shift the target for those with “efficient” metabolisms -- less food, more exercise. It doesn’t change the fundamental equation that more energy in, less energy out = more weight. As you correctly state -- thermodynamics isn’t just a good idea, it’s the LAW.
And on this topic, another perspective from forty years ago:
https://sonichits.com/video/Not_the_Nine_O%27Clock_News/Stout_Life?track=1
Holms, you’re so tedious.
No, that was your personal best. Entirely expected that I would have to respond to comments such as yours (empty of content in relation to the topic at hand, entirely about me and my proclivities as you see them), as I noted and predicted in that first comment. Presumably, you get your dopamine hit from my expected retort. I will of course continue to retort, as usual, until I feel I’ve pushed Mano’s tolerance enough and desist for that thread. A most familiar pattern by now, quite evident to any regular reader here. You are part of my coterie of fan haters.
Right, right. Obsessive sniping over years, comments about me to me addressed by name, personal observations, contrasts between the imagined me of the past and the imagined me of the present, nothing to do with caring about me. SullenBub neither knows nor cares about me about as much as you do not.
—
Anyway, to continue what some others have written, it’s complicated because human digestion is not a bomb calorimeter. And there are overheads to digestion, since fats are very easily digested, carbs are fairly easily digested, but protein takes quite a lot of energy to digest.
As for the fitbit-based self-diagnosed caloric balance tracking, that’s a bit fraught. Main problem is manually having to enter every bit of caloric intake one has.
Secondary problem is the accuracy of claimed caloric content of food — especially home-cooked food. What’s a home-made burger’s worth?
What proportion of fat to meat is in the meat, and how much meat is there? How much fat is rendered during the cooking process and not ingested? Does it have cheese or bacon or other stuff in there? What sort of bun or bread is it made from? What sort of sauces are in it?
@Mano @26
Ditto , while in India. But that perk stopped and instead we would then walk to the small tea stall(Tapri) -- I would guess that the negative health implications(sugar) was balanced by the walk round office while drinking it, the companions that one would walk with, the outlet for the frustrations at work, and the gossip!
When I came to work in the US , I discovered that my fellow Indians had imported the practice here too -- Except the tea sucked (dipped tea bags which taste as if one had washed a tea vessel and were drinking that water) but still given the similar walk round the place, the companions and the outlet for frustrations and the gossip!
Remote working messed it all though. At home if you make tea , you have to have it with a snack , if the snack is sweet it must be followed by a savory snack and so forth , coupled with a sedentary lifestyle = gain of 5 pounds so far and counting (There atleast i was on topic!)
My condolences.
#24 Charly
In terms of accessible energy content? They are about the same, though there might be some difference in the ease of access; carbs take longer to liberate than short sugars, and HFCS is 100% short. Though I agree fruit are better as they will also provide other useful things.
#38 John
Hah, no. I am drastically less likely to be snide or scornful or disdainful or (etc.) than you, and I will never have nitpicks as trivial as your worst.
Two big mistakes in this passage.
One, you chose to make two comments that were mostly ordinary contribution to the conversation of the thread, plus a whine about being bullied. I and others chose to laugh at this whine. You then chose to criticise Sbob’s laughter in particular, writing a comment devoted to mocking snatches of his comment, and I chose to point out your particular criticism of his comment made no sense. It’s people choosing to comment all the way down.
Two, the comment of mine you are replying to, comment #31, contains discussion that is on topic. Far from a comment “empty” of on-topic content, it was only one third about you.
But hey, since you criticise comments that are off topic, what say you about #21?
Nah, you’re just the most common source of silliness here for me to criticise.
Slight correction: nothing to do with caring about who you are, i.e. no one cares about your identity. And what of your obsessive behaviour over the years? Your petty nitpicks, jibes, mockery, casting of aspersions, your admitted love of pointless argument, and almost always in a snide delivery? Since you care so much about the gentle treatment of
othersyourself, maybe some thought on stones and glass houses would be in order.@ sonofrojblake (via Marcus)
“Standard BMI arguments are to point out that for his size/weight Bruce Lee was morbidly obese”
The only problem with that “argument” is that it is predicated on the assumption that doctors and other health professionals use BMI exclusively to make clinical decisions and recommendations.
That is a problem with the argument, but the bigger problem is that it is blatantly false. Bruce Lee is recorded at 5′ 7.5″ and 140 lbs., which puts his BMI between 21 and 22, or a highly desirable weight by most standards. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime (6′ 3″, 230 lbs.) had a BMI of 29, which is only considered overweight for typical adults, and not obese (let alone morbidly obese). I have gotten tired of arguments claiming that so-and-so (very muscular) athlete is obese by BMI standards, and therefore BMI is a worthless measure. As if the person making the claim (or any typical human) has anywhere near the muscle mass of a seven-time Mr. Olympia…
Even if obesity did not have any adverse health effects in terms of heart disease and the like, the simple mechanics of being overweight are obvious. I have friends, colleagues, and relatives who are severely overweight. Every one of them is a great person who I value, but every one of them also has issues with either their knees, hips, or ankles. Mobility and range of motion are clearly restricted. That should come as no surprise. I don’t think my knees would be doing well if I wore a 150 lb. pack on my back all day long, every day. So yes, I think “overweight” is a fair term because the biomechanics aren’t there. Having said that, I don’t think that means overweight people should be shunned, or that they are lazy or have some other flaw in their personality. Just look at the society we live in. Sometimes I’m surprised that there are as many people within recommended guidelines as there are. It’s like throwing a thousand people into the ocean during a storm and then wondering why so many of them are drowning.
Holms, what you quoted vs what I wrote, with emphasis added.
“Entirely expected that I would have to respond to comments such as yours (empty of content in relation to the topic at hand, entirely about me and my proclivities as you see them), as I noted and predicted in that first comment. Presumably, you get your dopamine hit from my expected retort. I will of course continue to retort, as usual, until I feel I’ve pushed Mano’s tolerance enough and desist for that thread. A most familiar pattern by now, quite evident to any regular reader here. You are part of my coterie of fan haters.”
So, so tedious. So predictable. Predicted, even. Prescient, I.
oh dear
I feel like this is a topic where so many people have personally staked out their positions and are emotionally invested, that they are just absolutely unwilling to even consider what other people are saying.
Calories in/Calories out… greatly oversimplified, but… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And as pointed out above, calorie counts on labels aren’t necessarily accurate, not everyone has the same efficiency in digesting/metabolizing food, and not everyone has the same metabolic resting rate, etc. How about alcohol? do people expend more calories than gained metabolizing it? Do people gain more calories than expended metabolizing it? How about people who have significant differences in the rates of metabolism for alcohol and it’s metabolites? How about people that are drinking so fast they are literally pissing out some of the alcohol before it’s metabolized?
Ideal body weight/BMI… I feel like any metric that tries to reduce all of humanity to a simple 2, maybe 3 axis graft is just doomed to failure. Even if you take as a given, that their is an ideal “composition percentage” (fat, muscle, bone, viscera, whatever) for a given weight, it’s still going to vary wildly within the same height, based on limb length, torso proportions, etc. People are just too variable to nail down to a couple isolated numbers.
And as to BMI, generally, isn’t muscle mass considered beneficial, or at least neutral? And excess fat mass beyond a certain point generally considered harmful? I can see it’s uses as a demographic tool, but it just seems entirely too reductive to be any use on the individual level. It’s entirely plausible to imagine a scenario where someone is at an “acceptable” BMI score, but has a very high body fat%, and then they start exercising, and gaining muscle mass, without loosing much/significant fat mass. So their weight increases, despite then approaching a more beneficial composition, but according to BMI, they are now “less healthy” then they were previously. Is them increasing muscle mass actually making them “less healthy”?
for the entirely irrelevant personal anecdote bit, I’m 50ish, and admittedly a bit overweight. I don’t really pay attention to what I eat, because I’m lazy and don’t much care, but my weight has been pretty stable, especially considering my reduced physical activity over the years. For most of my life, according to BMI, I was obese, borderline morbidly obese. And, for most of my life, I could sink in saltwater, even with my lungs full. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a big enough body of water to try and sink, so I don’t know if I can currently, and, with my reduced activity, wouldn’t be surprised if I can finally float for once in my life. I’m also rather short. and, I believe I have a slow metabolism. Haven’t ever tried getting it measured or anything, but I’ve long been able to skip eating for a day without undue discomfort, and on backpacking trips, while enlisted, etc., generally seemed to need less food than my companions, or to be able to generally go on longer twixt meals without discomfort.
Oh, I noticed but then forgot to comment on that bit of #38:
No you didn’t! You actually predicted that you would have to respond to your taking issue with the wording of Mano’s post:
“To attempt to preclude comments regarding my incapacity of understanding language or my contrarian trollishness or so forth (whyever would I imagine that’s a real possibility?) I note that had what I quoted instead been
“Many do not go to doctors…””
But no one took issue with that portion of what you wrote! That portion was reasonable and inoffensively stated. The pushback was rather against your bleating about being bullied, and things spiraled from there.
Markup is so very hard to spot.
@lochaber, 43:
Not you though, eh? You’ll consider what other people have said. Won’t you?
Oh dear. You’ve just identified yourself as one of those disingenuous liars I alluded to in #19. Just read the fifth paragraph of that post -- that’s you.
Straw man bullshit. Recommended BMI isn’t a number -- IT’S A RANGE. Even the most simplistic, first-pass filter doesn’t pretend you must have a BMI of 22, no more no less. Variation is expected and built into the system. What you’re bleating about is that EVEN WHEN A HEALTHY RANGE IS IDENTIFIED, you fall outside it.
This falls into the category of borderline trolling wilful ignorance. I suspect you know perfectly well that if your BMI is high, your doctor or other health/fitness professional will IMMEDIATELY look at other metrics, body fat percentage being one of the most obvious ones. Or do you consider doctors etc. so blindingly stupid that they’re just going to tell a body builder with a BMI of 27 and a body fat of 8% that they need to lose weight? You must know some pretty appallingly stupid doctors if that’s you’re impression of them.
#45 John
Maybe if I type harder or something you’ll spot the point.
In comment #14, you took issue with the wording of part of Mano’s post, “Many do not go to doctors for their annual checkups…” You then predicted that people would jump on you for that specific criticism. We know this is the case because you explicitly stated so: “I note that had what I quoted instead been “blah” That I would not have disputed”.
But. No one took issue with your on-topic points, as was your prediction.
People -- by which I mean Silentbob -- took issue with the self pity. And then I took issue with you taking issue with Sbob taking issue… as yet, no one has taken issue with the reasonable and topical bits of #13-14, defying your prediction.
Very important to you, no?
Ah well, there you are. Another response for me.
Dopamine hit!
[Bonus]
“the self pity.”
<smirk>
“defying your prediction”
<snicker>
“No one took issue with your on-topic points, as was your prediction.”
And yet… issue was nonetheless taken, and here we are.
I retort to your attempted gibes.
So tedious. So predictable.
^ In which you concede that your prediction was wrong. Good enough for me.
You are as genuine as a three-dollar bill.
As pellucid as cling film.
And you are just indulging your obsession.
So, so predictable.
“tedious and repetitive personal critiques that then lead me to respond and so forth”
This is the very thing, exemplified.
Ah well.
I shall forthwith ignore you henceforth in this thread.
You have had your quota of retorts already, you greedy boy you.
@27, the body expends calories constantly by generating heat to maintain it’s temperature, and, unless the air is 98.6 degrees F, by constantly losing heat to the atmosphere. Most calories are consume by the resting metabolism, what your body must expend just to keep you alive. The calories consumed by your resting metabolism changes a lot, depending on circumstances, like, if you increase your muscle mass, metabolic rate rises, and if you aren’t consuming enough calories, metabolism decreases and you will retain your current weight. The body is not a bom calorimeter, it is an open system. It isn’t as simple as calories in, calories out.
And, I notice that everyone in this thread, including me, has demontrated the problem that Mano highlighted. Comments have turned to the very emotional question of what is too fat, how people become fat, how to lose fat, people ought to lose fat and are obligated to try.
The idea behind body positivity is that it’s OK to be fat, that it’s normal for some people to be fat, and centering discussion and importance of not being fat just perpetuates the stigma that fat people deal with. It is up to each individual to think about their weight and to decide what weight is best for them, not society. It should be an accepted norm that some people are fat, just as it is accepted that some people are thin.
@27, what I mean is that heat exchage in the body ebbs and flows constantly from conception till death. It never stops, even for a moment. It never even reaches equilibrium. There is never a time when the reaction stops and you can say “Aha! There was a certain quantity (and no more) of heat in, and there has been the same quantity (no more of less) of heat out. The body doen’t obey the 1st law because it isn’t a closed system, it is an open system, heat flows in and out at different rates and never ends (until death).
Related to garnetstar’s last 2 posts: There is evidence supporting the idea that at least in industrial countries basal energy expenditure has dropped over the last century or so.
See Decreasing human body temperature in the United States since the Industrial Revolution
And: Total daily energy expenditure has declined over the past three decades due to declining basal expenditure, not reduced activity expenditure
The first paper proposes as a reason for this change the decrease in chronic infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. Reduced prevalence of infectious diseases is making us fat and thus more susceptible to non-infectious diseases.
SailorStar @4: I think it is a mistake to put all carbohydrates in one category. Simple carbohydrates act differently in the body than complex carbohydrates -- the fraction of the stuff that is absorbed is higher in the former and the absorption is faster. There are pretty healthy diets that are very high in complex carbohydrates and they have positive effects on cardiovascular health, at the very least.
Another paper relevant to this thread: Trends in adult body-mass index in 200 countries from 1975 to 2014: a pooled analysis of 1698 population-based measurement studies with 19·2 million participants. The bottom line is that people all over the world have been increasing in BMI, consistently and uniformly throughout the time period covered. The only difference is that in some places they moved from being underweight to normal weight while in others from normal weight to overweight and obese, but there is no reason to think the former will not eventually join the latter.
#52 garnetstar
It really is. Energy and biomass come from food, and what is taken in and not used is stored. There are differences between peoples’ metabolism rates and other details, but they do not break the underlying relationship between intake and output.
I can support the push to stop vilification of fat people, perhaps selfishly as this benefits me; but I will not agree with other messaging coming from the fat acceptance movement -- that fat is just as healthy as medium (not sure if this is what you were getting at). It just isn’t true.
Anat @34
No it is not about aethestics, it is about being comfortable -- eg I used to get back ache -- as well as being able to buy clothes that fit around my wrists, upper arms, and thighs. I have been lucky enough to have lost two stone (28 lbs) without trying over the last couple of years as a side effect of one of the drugs I take, which has made me a lot more comfortable -- no more back ache, not to mention more flexible -- I can reach the middle of my back again. But I am still c.15 st (210 lbs) 95 kg and still 5′ 5.5″ / 166 cm tall, and however you look at it that is a lot overweight, it puts me at a BMI of 35 which is well into the obese range.
Oh and I do know a bit about how fat distribution affects diabetes risk (but thanks anyway), I am not particularly concerned, rather I was using my body measurements as an example about how it is difficult to provide one simple way of telling if someone is overweight. I am pretty sure that I shouldn’t weigh as low as 8st / 210lb / 50kg, which is the lowest ‘normal’ figure on the BMI scale I looked at, but I don’t know the weight at which I would be healthy. 10st 10lbs / 150 lb / 65kg (the top of the ‘normal’ range suggested) seems as if it might be too low, but it’s a long long time since I have weighed anything near that. I’m not fretting about this, even if I continue to lose weight at the same rate it will be around another five years before I need to think about it seriously 😉
Thanks for the other links too.
Holms @57
I may be misreading garnetstar, but I don’t think they are saying that the rules of thermodynamics do not apply, but . . . it is true to say that we are not as simple as a Bom calorimeter. It’s not just that our metabolisms differ either, we know that our digestive microbiomes differ too with those of obese people differing from those who are not obese, we also know they help us to digest food and that they require food. At this point we don’t know (or at least I haven’t seen) what those differences mean in practise, but it is not at all beyond the bounds of possibility that some digestive tract microbiomes absorb more food and therefore calories than others or that some are more efficient at making calories avalable to us than others or both or something that I haven’t thought of that affects the calories available to us. This doesn’t change the laws of therodynamics, but it does mean that there is more to consider that calories in to the human mouth = calories into the human body.
All of which is to say that trying to make anything about biology simple can result in a distorted picture that doesn’t match reality. Which is just one of the reasons why we need to be more thoughtful about our approach to fatness.
There are differences between peoples’ metabolism rates and other details, but they do not break the underlying relationship between intake and output.
They don’t BREAK the relationship, but they do bend it a lot; at least to the extent that you simply can’t always predict any clear link between a given change in intake and an expected resulting change in output. Eating less, for example, does not always lead to noticeably less output or weight loss. There are numerous physiological and psychological factors at play at any given time in a person’s life; and they can sometimes completely cancel out any appearance of a consistent cause-and-effect link between intake and output/weight loss.
Jazzlet @58: Thanks for clarifying your personal situation. To the question of how much weight one needs to lose to improve health and well-being, it turns out that for some co-morbidities not that much -- somewhere around 5-10% of one’s body weight, but some others require more. See Weight Loss and Improvement in Comorbidity: Differences at 5%, 10%, 15%, and Over -- the findings are summarized in Table 1. They don’t say how much one needs to lose to find clothes that fit -- that is a pure matter of weight discrimination -- if manufacturers cared about heavier people they’d make them nice clothes. (Shouldn’t it be in their interest to do so? It’s a growing market.)
@ 51 Morales
Hey, do us all a favour and reduce our quotas to zero. Mano included.
@ 57 Holms
This is nonsense, and anyone who’s been drunk knows it is nonsense (which I may have been *ahem* once or twice).
Being drunk will increase skin temperature, heart rate, etc. as your body tries to burn off the useless calories.
Holms fallacy is to assume all calories are treated the same. It is not so. Your body is complex, does not treat all energy sources the same, and will regulate both digestion and metabolism in response to nutrient content.
So you can’t just say these many calories will store this much energy as fat. That’s a childlike misapprehension of a far more complex system.
+1
Hey, UnsilentFart, do us all a favour and reduce our quotas to zero. Mano included.Hey, do us all a favour and reduce our quotas to zero.
#62 Sbob
Firstly, you misapprehend my point. I’m not arguing metabolism is a constant, only that a person’s weight and energy has a source -- your intake -- and hence has a hard limit as to what it can use or store. You touch on this when you mention ‘burning off’ -- that’s the other side of the equation, the side that is hard limited by the intake. If ‘burning off’ reduces what is available, less is stored. The sides will balance a little differently from person to person, but they will balance -- the usage and storage will not exceed the intake.
Second and tangentially, alcohol does not increase the rate at which you burn calories. The increase in skin temperature is due to alcohol causing dilation of surface and extremity blood vessels, allowing more blood and hence heat into your skin. You will feel warmer to the touch, but that’s just an increase in the dispersal of your core temperature; heart rate increases to compensate for the drop in blood pressure resulting from vasodilation.
@garnetstar, 52:
I asked you by what mechanism the body generated heat out of nothing, violating the 1st law of thermodynamics as you claimed.
You responded with a load of stuff I already know about how resting metabolism changes -- irrelevance, as it goes. You then go on to say the body is a “open system” -- which is to say energy can move across its boundary. To which I respond: duh. That’s the entire point. If you move more energy IN than OUT, weight has to go up. If you move more energy OUT than IN, weight has to go down. You fail to explain this because you evidently fail to understand it. It’s inconvenient to admit that if your resting metabolism doesn’t move enough energy out, you have to eat less or do more exercise. No amount of obfuscating can change this basic fact of physics.
No, as the video posted above makes clear, the idea behind “body positivity” is that it’s OK for certain women to be morbidly obese. Men and the only quite fat should shut up, and so on.
Oh dear. Which university did YOU learn thermodynamics from, so I can avoid sending my kids there? My chemical engineering degree involved quite a lot of thermodynamics, as you’d expect if you had any idea what chemical engineering is. Suffice to say, thermodynamics doesn’t work how you think it does. You’re just wrong, sorry.
@Jazzlet, 59:
Read #25 again: ” the body doesn’t follow the 1st law of thermodynamics”. That’s pretty clear.
Well yes -- but that simple equation has to be where you start. Blowing it off as not valid betrays an agenda to ignore science when it doesn’t suit. Ultimately, IF you do enough exercise to burn off all the calories you put in your mouth, you will lose weight. If you do less, well, you might still lose some weight because hey, metabolic rate, microbiome, whatever. But if you consume 1500 calories and do enough exercise to burn off 2000, bald physics demands that the only place that 500 calories can come from is your body weight. I’m still awaiting garnetstar’s refutation of that fact.
@RagingBee, #60:
Ultimately the factors at work are:
ENERGY IN: How many calories did consume today? (Say 3000 calories).
ENERGY OUT: How many calories does your body use AT REST? (Say 2000 calories).
How many calories did you excrete (i.e. not get from the food you ate due to incomplete digestion)? (Say… 500 calories).
How many calories did you expend by exercise? (Say… 500 calories).
Those numbers would lead to no weight loss or gain. Change ONE of them, and you’re going to have to change at least one of the others to stay the same weight. You have direct, immediate control over two of them. Bleating about the other two is pointless. Increase the energy in without increasing the energy out, and that excess WILL be stored as weight. Increase the energy out and/or decrease the energy in, and the difference WILL be taken from body weight. The details of how may be complex, but the energy balance is inescapable.
@65, please remember that there’s no need to express yourself emotionally or with insults. We’re just discussing thermodynamics.
Perhaps you wanted me to say that heat exchange between the non-equilibrim open system that is the body and the non-equilibrum open system that is its surroundings (aka, the rest of the universe), obeys the 1st law? What I meant was that the body *itself* is not a closed system, and that heat in, heat out, is not obeyed by the body *alone*.
I didn’t actually say that the body generates heat out of nothing, though that’s how you’ve interpreted it. To be more understandable to you, the question being asked was whether, when calories in are less than calories out, the net negative energy is always expressed by weight loss?
It is not always expressed by weight loss. It is well known that metabolic rate can drop significantly, so that the total calories out significantly decreases. The new number of total calories out may now become equal to the calories in, due to the calories burned by the metabolism decreasing so much. The body can stubbornly hold on to its weight (a defense against what it perceives as a possible famine) by lowering the amount of calories the metabolism consumes. Hence no weight loss, the net negative of calories is expressed by lowered metabolic rate. This is quite a common experience for many dieters, they call it a “plateau”.
The way to fix that is to strength train and put on muscle. Muscle is a very metabolically active tissue, so the amount of calories burned by the metabolism must increase when muscle is added. Also, you can raise the amount of calories you eat a little bit, to make up for those lost in the extra exercise and to persuade the body that there isn’t a famine, it is safe to burn tissue. Then, net negative calories to the body usually starts to be expressed as weight loss again.
The metabolism can only be lowered so much, to the rate that is enough to keep you at least barely alive, so excessively low calories in (ca.900/day, as the Nazis experimentally determined in one of their slave camps) is a starvation diet and does result in severe weight loss and death.
So, I hope that what I’m saying is more understandable to you.
An aside: I think a large part of the problem here is not that sustained and sustainable weight loss is complicated. It’s that it’s slow.
People -- let’s be blunt, fat people -- have unrealistic expectations of what is achievable, usually defensibly because they’ve been sold them by the diet industry preying on them because they’re vulnerable. Nobody is going to make a fortune telling the truth, when the truth isn’t palatable. The vile, appalling conservative politician Ann Widdecombe -- truly an evil old hag by any stretch, google her if you don’t know who she is -- said ONE thing I respected. When asked, in an interview after she’d lost a lot of weight, whether she was going to do a diet book, she responded in the negative, and specifically that if she did, nobody would publish it because it would be four words long: eat less, exercise more. Nobody wants to hear that. They want to know about “this one weird trick discovered by a mom that doctors will HATE!!!”. They want to cheat, in other words.
What they don’t want to do is stop buying cakes and biscuits, start eating lettuce, and walk briskly for an hour a day, and see no really drastic visible in return for that effort for months. Lifestyle change -- which is what’s needed -- is a lifelong treatment regime to which you have to commit. Or don’t… but don’t bleat about the consequences of not doing.
Part of the problem I think fat acceptance activists have is this: if someone is prejudiced against you because of something you have no control over -- your sexuality, your race, your gender, your height, whatever -- that’s obviously wrong, and civilised society pretty much agrees with that. But if someone is prejudiced against you because of something you’ve GOT CONTROL OVER -- your clothing, your visibly-expressed religion, your choice of political party or football team -- well, they’re entitled to their opinion, right? Someone stops me coming into their nightclub and says “No trainers”, well, OK then. Someone stops me and says “No Blacks”, then I’m phoning my lawyer (and I’m not even Black, but the point stands).
The fat activist position depends on the idea that being fat is (like race or gender or sexuality) something it’s not possible to control… but I’d wager that every single person reading this (all three of you) can think of a person of your direct acquaintance who is a living disproof of that position. Ann Widdecombe is proof. How many people do YOU know who are?
Like I said: duh.
You said the body didn’t obey the 1st law of thermodynamics. It seemed reasonable to assume you didn’t mean it DESTROYED energy, i.e. removed it from the universe, although now I think about it that’s a perfectly reasonable alternative interpretation of what you said. Indeed, it’s the only other possible interpretation of what you said. Either energy is created out of nothing, or energy is removed from the universe, one or the other. Except you didn’t mean either of those things, you now claim. OK.
If you respond to nothing else in this post, please answer this simple question: if the energy balance is net negative, where else can the energy come from?
They could more usefully refer to it as “not doing enough exercise”, because that’s what it is.
sonofrojblake, it has been shown that exercise induces a reduction in basal energy expenditure. I don’t know by how much, but it is possible to exercise by an amount that should burn 100 more calories than one eats and have the deficit covered by reducing other body functions such as the activity of the immune system or regulation of body temperature.
In Energy compensation and adiposity in humans the authors conclude that of the calories burnt by *increased* activity (beyond one’s typical prior activity level) 28% comes from a reduction in BEE. So if one wants to create an energy deficit of say 300 calories per day by physical activity one would need to perform physical activity worth 417 calories per day beyond whatever one’s previous activity level was.
What I don’t know is what happens to BEE if the increased activity level becomes a long-term habit -- does the body eventually learn to perform all its functions at a ‘normal’ level with the increased activity or do people who become permanently more active have say, lower body temperatures compared to the time before they increased their activity levels? (I found a paper on energy compensation in endurance athletes, but it is paywalled, alas.)
sonofrojblake
I do not think you paid adequate attention to what either garnetstar or I said, so please do both of us the courtesy of actually reading what we write, as simply repeating “energy in = energy out” does not take into account the complexities of the system. To take what garnetstar is saying first the main problem with
is that “ENERGY OUT: How many calories does your body use AT REST? (Say 2000 calories).” changes in ways that are not just due to there being less resting body. Garnetstar is not saying that people hit a plateau because they cheat, but you are making that assumption, when in fact the actual rate of metabolism (e how fast the body uses energy at rest) changes after a period of swift weight loss; one of the reasons medical advice is to lose weight slowly so you don’t stimulate this response. This change in metabolic rate has been studied exensively, and really, really isn’t dieters cheating, it involves actual changes in the metabolic pathways in response to what the body perceives as famine. Which isn’t to say dieters cheating isn’t a thing, (and isn’t it interesting that to you they must have been cheating with ccakes and biscuits rather than say just too much healthy food?) just that that is not what garnetstar is talking about, and they are talking about something with a long recognised mechanism.
Similarly I am saying that “How many calories did you excrete (i.e. not get from the food you ate due to incomplete digestion)? (Say… 500 calories).” can change (although that is not an exact description in the first place, you do not ever absorb the calories used by your intestinal microbiome so you don’t excrete them either, you just shit some of them out) varies in ways we do not at this point fully understand. We know that the kinds of microbes found in obese people vary from those found in people of a healthy weight with there being fewer different species, but we don’t know eg whether the total number of microbes in an obese biome is different. At this point we can not accurately say how many calories either type of biome absorbs, although there is some evidence that the obese biome requires less calories.
Ultimately what we are both saying is that the numbers you have used for ENERGY OUT vary in ways that are not all under the conscious control of the individual, not that the equation is wrong.
sonofrojblake @67: There is more to non-discrimination than ‘it is not the person’s choice’. A behavior can be a choice and yet determined to be worthy of non-discrimination, or even active inclusion, because the behavior is not relevant to the situation (if a person can perform the job, does it matter if their body is different in some way as a result of their choices?) or because discrimination against people engaging in the behavior does no good, and merely harms the person, or because looking for reasons to be mean to people is not good for one’s own well-being, whereas finding ways to be kind, even to people towards whom one feels some negative emotion is good for you in the long run (and if enough people do so, it will likely be better for society).
@sonofrojblake, for some people being fat is undoubtedly a matter of lifestyle choice. For others, it most definitively is not. Being thin is for some people a lifestyle choice too, for others, it is not.
At 47, I have kept my weight within 2 kg of the average for two and a half a decade by now with zero conscious effort on my part. And when I tried to influence it by conscious effort, it had negligible effect.
I consume copious amounts of food and I am unable to gain either fat or muscle. I did not gain significant muscle even when training under professional supervision. I did not gain fat even when I switched from having to go several km a day on foot to a bus stop to driving a car and having essentially a sedentary lifestyle. I have tried deliberately to counter every piece of advice given to fat people about how to stop gaining weight and nothing came of it. Currently, I regularly have two dinners, and I snack frequently. I am often doing hard manual labor and my body still refuses to build up the muscle that I sorely need and it still does not put on adipose tissue that I do not want when I rest either.
I cannot tell how long this state of affairs will last, it will change with age for the worse (I doubt it will get better and I finally get some muscle strength), but if I am one thin person with literally zero influence on my overall weight, it is not hard for me to imagine that there are fat people with the same experience. The variability of human metabolism is too great and each individual is unique.
Thanks, Jazzlet.
sonofrojblake, again, I will repeat myself and please have the courtesy to read carefully, as Jazzlet asked.
You want me to answer “if the energy balance is net negative, where else can the energy come from?”, please read the answer this time.
If the energy balance is net negative, sometimes you lose weight. You’ve expended more energy than you’ve taken in, so tissue is burned to make the energy balance.
Sometimes when you think that there’s a net negative energy in and out--say that you’ve eaten x calories and you think that you’ve expended Y calories--you have not expended Y calories. You must subtract from the Y calories you think you’ve expended the amount of calories that your metabolism *didn’t* burn, the amount that it has turned itself down from what it used to burn. It turned itself down and burnt fewer calories, so many that the actual calories out becomes *equal to* the number of calories in.
So, calories in now are equal to the actual number of calories out (burned), and of course no weight is lost.
How do you measure caloric intake?
How do you measure caloric expenditure?
@68 As to your unnecessarily offensive and quite ignorant remark about plateaus being lack of exercise, I will repeat the ballerina story. I posted this once on another thread, but perhaps this time it will illustrate to you why your remark is wrong.
There was a bunch of professional ballerinas, who, though they were already plenty thin, wanted to lose more fat, due to the truly insane thinness expectations of their profession. They cut down their calories drastically and cut out nearly all fat.
Please do not try to pretend that they didn’t adhere to their diets, that they were just lying about their food intake, out of laziness or lack of self-discipline. Ballerinas are some of the most self-disciplined people on the planet, far more so than most of us will ever be. They follow extreme and exacting exercise and diet every day. Also, ballet dancers take class *every single day*, so don’t try on the “they weren’t exercising” excuse.
So, they weren’t losing weight and consulted a nutritionist. She had a difficult time convincing them, as she would you, to eat more calories and to be sure that a good portion of them were healthy fats. But, nothing else was working, so they finally did.
Voila, they lost fat. One gobsmacked ballerina said “I never imagined I would lose fat by eating fat.”
Please also read the posts above about what is well known about metabolic changes. If you can’t understand this after reading the posts explaining it many, many times, that is on you.
chigau @74
Calorific intake: the simple answer is that you weigh every single things you consume and you consult the standard tables as to what calories are in what you consume. However that does not account for the fact that we do not absorb all of the calories consumed for a variety of reasons as mentioned in various posts above, and that actually measuring what we absorb is hard.
Calorific expenditure: things may have changed, but when I learnt about this the only way was to to measure oxygen used (and maybe carbon dioxide produced) which means breathing in and out of a sealed respirator for the whole of the period you want to measure. A brief check suggests that this is still the usual technique, but my searching ability is not brilliant so . . .
Only got time to respond to one right now, perhaps more later:
@garnetstar, 73:
OK.
OK. So far, so good, apart from the word “sometimes”. Let’s continue.
I see. You didn’t like the question I asked -- which concerned the situation “if the energy balance is net negative” -- and you’ve chosen to answer a different question -- “if YOU THINK the energy balance is net negative, but it’s not”.
Do let me know when you have an answer to the question I asked.
Thanks
Jazzlet @76: I would like to have a better idea regarding how much I consume, but one hindrance is that we cook our food from basic single ingredients, we cook by batches, and the food thus prepared is shared unevenly by 2-4 people (depending if our son or son’s partner join us) over the course of a few days. I suppose ideally I should weigh all the ingredients, then weight the total product (to account for changes in water content), then weigh my portion each time, and finally do the math. And of course I would need to consider that this method will alter how much I use of certain ingredients (especially oil, which I never measure in my normal manner of food preparation). It doesn’t help that spouse’s favorite cooking method is to toss anything that looks like it goes with other ingredients into the pressure cooker. have you done anything like this? Is there a way to simplify it?
OK, the rest now:
@anat, 69:
So… you’d need to do more exercise? Enough to burn off the actual excess? THAT’S WHAT I SAID. I get it -- the amount of exercise you’d have to do is more than you’d expect. Or you could reduce your calorie intake. None of what you’re saying contradicts anything I’ve said.
@Jazzlet, 70
I did no such thing. I’m not saying people cheat. All I’m saying is that if they’re not losing weight, they’re either eating more or exercising less than they need to. Nothing said here contradicts that, you’re just introducing obfuscations to do with the difference between how much people think they have to do, and the reality.
If what you’re doing isn’t working, it would seem uncontroversial to me to suggest that you need to do something else -- something MORE. Yet all I’m seeing in this thread is people trying to make excuses for why doing the same thing isn’t working.
I’m struggling with this next one:
“shitting them out” is different from excreting them… how?
@garnetstar, 75:
Your ballerina story is quite a funny one. I mean, I could simply respond with “citation needed”, but I’m going to accept that it’s true in all its important details.
What we started talking about here was fat people. Specifically, how hard a time they have in the world. And how they don’t like receiving advice about how to lose weight, even if (maybe especially if) they’re morbidly obese, especially if/when that advice comes from doctors.
And your response here is to bring up the example of professional ballet dancers. Which is hilarious. You’re talking about a cohort who have already reduced their body fat percentage well below the average. OF COURSE they’re going to struggle to reduce it further and need odd, maybe even counterintuitive strategies. They’re operating at an extreme -- anyone with any common sense can see that. You’re simply not comparing like with like.
I’m a middle aged man with more titanium in my leg than is normal. I’m in reasonable shape but I am not, and have never been, a sprinter. I’d probably struggle, today, to do 100m in 25 seconds. However, I’m confident that with some coaching and training I could reduce my time over 100m by at least a second, perhaps two. Now tell me: how relevant is it that a 20 year old who is already training every day and clocking a time of 12 seconds can’t do the same? That’s the level of bloody stupid you’re exhibiting here with your ballet dancer example. Probably better not to bring it up again, you just look silly.
what a fucking asshole…
Well, I certainly can’t rebut that well argued point.
Didn’t have anything substantive to say in response to #46? Apparently not.
I’ll ask you this question again: do you consider doctors etc. so blindingly stupid that they’re just going to tell a body builder with a BMI of 27 and a body fat of 8% that they need to lose weight?
If the answer is yes, I think it’s not me that the asshole.
sonofrojblake, the problem with doctors is that many of them see a fat person and won’t actually look at their complaint but tell them to lose weight. These things happen. Diagnoses of conditions that can be treated don’t get made in time because many doctors don’t see anything in a fat person but their weight. And if they see a fat person coming for a checkup, and their blood pressure is normal, they retest several times because they can’t believe a fat person might have healthy blood pressure (though of course it may rise in the future).
Body builders withBMIs in the high 20s are likely OK, but body builders with BMIs in the 30s need to watch out for their heart health (says my cardiologist mother in-law).
@anat, I am not an M.D. but to my knowledge, most bodybuilders cannot get a BMI near 30 without using steroids. Without steroids, it is impossible to succeed in competitions. Bodybuilders are freaks, their lifestyle is NOT healthy and it is entirely their choice.
I believe it.
I also believe that if they see a smoker they’ll tell them to stop smoking, and if they see an excessive drinker they’ll tell them to stop drinking. These are just the sensible first steps to eliminate possible causes of a person’s health, steps a person can take relatively easily that will reliably, repeatably solve many of the problems people present with. A doctor’s time is a finite resource, and the responsible, rational way to manage it most efficiently is to start by giving the most obvious advice. But you know, people really, really don’t like hearing the obvious advice.
@anat, 83:
Surely you’re not saying a doctor uses BMI as a useful first pass diagnostic tool?
sonofrojblake @85 and @86: I think you missed an important part of my post @83:
If someone comes for a checkup, ie without a clear complaint, it makes sense to give them advice about parameters that are outside the recommended range and are likely to cause problems in the future. But if someone comes with a complaint, the doctor needs to look at what is causing this problem now. And while many health problems can be caused by excess weight, this is not necessarily the only cause in the patient that is in front of them at the moment. It might even not be the cause at all. The patient may have an infection or an injury or an immune condition or whatever, and all these can and need to be treated now. Weight loss might help reduce the severity or prevent repetition of the problem, but there is a problem that needs to be dealt with on a time scale that is a lot more immediate than the likely time scale for meaningful weight loss (which is usually 5-10% of body weight).
sonofrojblake, you are contradicting yourself here. For many people, losing weight is not something that can be done with “steps a person can take relatively easily”. You yourself have acknowledged that losing weight is not easy and now you imply it is. Which is it then, in your mind?
The whole problem is that there is no reliable and definitively no easy way to lose weight and what works for one person does not work for another. The problem cannot be oversimplified to “expend more calories than you eat” because how a body uses calories from food is highly variable both within an individual and between individuals. You keep ignoring this crucial point.
You also skip over the fact that measuring precisely caloric intake and expenditure on an individual level is for any ordinary person impossible with any precision, not to mention ease.
“Expend more calories than you eat” is reductio ad absurdum. It is technically true, while also being practically useless advice.
#66 garnetstar
It must be, because the food eaten is the sole source of biomass for the body, thus less in = less available to store or use. You even concede this without seeming to notice:
Right, energy used dropped because the hard limit dropped, and the sides of the equation must balance. But reducing energy expenditure without also reducing physical activity means you are talking about resting metabolism, yet this does not happen unless the person was sedentary and remains so while dieting. Obviously, such a person is only addressing half of the equation; the other half being neglected is increasing physical activity to burn more.
In short, none of what you are saying contradicts the basic equation.
I confused my terms here, I meant to say “absurd reductionism” not “reductio ad absurdum”.
#80 anat
Some doctors refuse to look beyond size and shape, yet even the other variety of doctor is still going to recommend weight loss efforts start with a commitment to food management and increased physical activity. Because that is by far the most likely solution. There’s a phrase in medicine that is relevant here: if you hear hoofbeats, you expect to see horse rather than zebras. That is, expect the most ordinary of causes for a given set of symptoms, and only turn to the exotics when the ordinary has been investigated.
How many doctors refuse to look at anything but calories in / out when diagnosing someone’s weight? I don’t know, but I will grant it is greater than zero. However, I can return that question to you: how many fat people fail to adhere to diet and exercise, but demand answers that don’t require any lifestyle change? Unfortunately, the answer to that is also greater than zero. I’ve even seen some fat acceptance activists admit as much without realising it, by saying they’ve tried diet and exercise changes and lost weight, but the weight came right back when they stopped.
Anyway the point is, first you try the conventional ways of losing weight, and only when they are proven ineffective do you start to investigate the more exotic causes.
Holms @91: While excess weight is a risk factor for many health condition, and an exacerbating factor for others, it is not true that the correct response to a fat person having a medical problem is -- first lose weight, then we can look at you more closely. First see what the problem actually is, make the person better with whatever tools can be applied now, while also advising them that losing weight will make their health in general better and possibly make the problem they had less likely to reoccur (if that is the case) or perhaps make recurrences less severe etc.
How many fat people already tried losing weight multiple times before hearing from their doctor they need to introduce lifestyle changes to reduce weight? They already did that, they couldn’t do enough of it for long enough with the amount of support available.
The maximal BMI I ever got to was 28, and the most my doctor was willing to tell me was ‘how about joining Weight Watchers?’ Doctors don’t have the time nor the training to offer nutritional advice, let alone individualize such advice. But there are specialists who do, and it would be better if doctors gave referrals to the appropriate ones among them. (In my case, the thing that really made a difference was intermittent fasting. I think it’s because I am an emotional eater, and it is easier for me to not eat than to eat less at a given time. By having a strict limit over when I am allowed to eat I reduced the time in the day during which I deal with food.)
sonofrojblake @79
Remember we are essentially a tube, one hole at the mouth the other at the anus, with none of the contents -- * of the intestines- | being inside the body || * || the contents of the intestine are surrounded by the body, but not all of the contents are absorbed by the body. The various types of food protein, carbs etc are absorbed from the intestine, and some things like bile are excreted into the intestine, but there is a whole load of material like fibre that is never absorbed and just passes through. So shit is mostly things that never entered the body by being absorbed in the first place, with a little that the body excreted, the rest of the excretions being in urine, sweat and from mucous membranes. In a biological sense excretion only happens if a substance has been inside the body. which most of the contents of shit have not, I hope that makes sense with out being patronising.
Anat @78
Yes I did calorie count the recipes I used most often, and yes it was tedious although it did help to an extent, but as I have mentioned that isn’t why I am losing weight, that’s due to a prescription drug side effect. For most of the things we cook we do use a recipe and we do weigh the ingredients, so it was a matter of going through the cookbooks we use most often, and as far as possible working out the calories for the recipes we use most often. However that was before the internet -- there are online calculators you can use now where you just have to put in the weight of each ingredient, and they’ll do most of the work for you, covering things like ketchup as well as single ingredients like kohlrabi to make it easy. \of course \i British so weighing ingredients is my natural default.
Would you same the same about smoking? Or drinking? Or other drug use that harms one’s own health (ignoring issues like second-hand smoke for the moment).
#92 anat
If the patient’s health issue is weight or something closely linked to weight, such as high cholesterol, then yes it is. And remember the OP is about weight per se and the effectiveness of diets, we have strayed into other things from there.
But I think we are now repeating ourselves and I will leave it there.
@ 94 GerrardOfTitanServer
@ 95 Holms
Which bit of
did you not understand?
To touch on a subject dear to Holms heart, there is a recognized phenomenon facetiously called “trans broken arm syndrome” whereby anytime a trans person goes to a doctor with any ailment it’s assumed to be caused by their transition.
I’d assume a similar prejudice against people with atypical lean body mass ratios most certainly exists and is orders of magnitude more prevalent.
But the point seems to have sailed considerably above Holm’s cranium.
“Trans broken arm syndrome: A mixed-methods exploration of gender-related medical misattribution and invasive questioning -- PubMed”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36736052/
Silentbob [to others]:
Heh. I refer you to my #14.
Oh, yeah:
The main purpose of exercise depends on the person and their circumstances; it may be to preclude physical deterioration, it may be to remedy physical deterioration, it may be any number of things.
Basically, if one’s cardiovascular functioning and muscle development are adequate, improving them beyond that is unnecessary.
You wrote as if understanding the claims were the same as accepting the claims, incorrect and vague as they may be.
In honour of the blub, I note the OP was about how to best satisfy the requirements of being nice to people who are the subject of body-shaming about their weight, and the specific set at hand is not that of anorexic people.
First two words of the OP: “Fat people”. Not scrawny people.
Neither is good. But at least that framing is about health, not about esthetics.
To be what to others will seem pedantic, it would be very very weird to actually wish to inadvertently give offense.
Wishing to give offence, sure.
Not wishing to give offence, sure.
Wishing to advertently give offense, sure.
But wishing to inadvertently give offense? How can that work?
PS [meta] [OT]
I do like how Holms puts up with your taunting about his Damoclean sword, bub.
(It’s informative, but)
@ 93 Jazzlet
As gross as your description is (and I’m glad I wasn’t eating lunch) -- it’s entirely correct. X-D
I wonder how many people appreciate that “fiber” actually means stuff of no nutritional value whatsoever that you swallow and shit out? I suspect not many. 🙂
Think about this next time you’re selecting your high fiber bread lads.
Oats. One can only process so much, but one can eat more than one processes.
(excellent fiber, right there!)
@ ^
ERROR: Quota exceeded.
😉
You don’t get a quota. 🙂
—
Bub, I know you can’t actually dispute me, and this is all you have.
Because you’re a slinker. A dabbler.
One, maybe two retorts before you slink away.
No need for a quota, for you. Hardly likely Mano will have to shut a thread down because you will persist in trying to (and failing, of course) to get the last word.
Anyway. Sure, one could eat sawdust — heck, fiberglass — and it would be fiber.
But, in terms of foodstuffs, that’s not quite it. It’s bulky food, some of which won’t be fully processed.
—
Anyway. This post is about appeasing the neediness of those who are upset by people’s perception of their corpulence. No?
(Over to you, let’s get this thread started, bub)
Ever notice the difference between vegetarian and carnivorous feedings?
Vegetarian: bulky and not that stinky. The pipes flow. Toilet paper wipes neatly.
Carnivourous: kinda gloppy, black, super stinky. Like tar. Toilet paper smears, one has to keep wiping (but has to stop before weeping). Nasty shit, that.
Like cat poo vs sheep droppings. I know which is worse.
(That was allusive, bub)
@anat, 87: oh sure, fair enough. And if doctors are routinely misdiagnosing or not diagnosing fat people who present with symptoms that cannot be attributed to their weight -- that’s a scandal, no doubt. And I’ve no doubt such a scandal would make the news. I’ll keep a look out for it.
@Charly, 88:
There’s no contradiction. The steps to take are relatively easy -- eat less, exercise more. It’s obvious that they are easy, because lots and lots and lots of people try it. And then they stop, after a day or a week or a month -- before they’ve had time to take effect. It’s not a contradiction to say climbing a flight of stairs is relatively easy, but getting to the top of the Empire State Building without using a lift is something most people can’t (or more accurately won’t) do.
Indeed. Why? Because people don’t like it, and ignore it. You admit it’s “technically” true, i.e. true.
@Jazzlet, 93:
Most of the contents of shit have not been inside the body? Sorry, no, that absolutely does not make any sense at all. Nor does the preceding paragraph -- what’s all that odd punctuation supposed to try to convey?
I don’t know about you, but last time I checked (and I check every day), my shit comes out of the inside of my body. Where the hell does yours come from?
@ 8,9 Holms
I really shouldn’t pick on Holms -- we all know he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed. But this is so braindead one cannot resist.
Holms did you know men are more likely to have beards -- and more likely to have heart attacks!
Yes, there is a clear statistical link between beards and heart attacks. Clearly to reduce risk of heart attack we must advocate shaving!
Did you know there is a clear statistical correlation between wearing a seat belt and dying in a car crash?! No shit! If you tally up all causes of death, from cancer to heart attack to electrocution -- it was overwhelmingly people who died in car crashes who were wearing seat belts! The correlation is real! Really, really real! Really, really, really real!
We must prevent car crashes by banning seat belts. The logic is irrefutable my dear Holms!
@ 13 Morales
Your link goes to a marketer selling weight loss products you nitwit. X-D
(not a credible source)
“How to Change -- Guide and Workbook by Kiana Dochterty — Kiana Docherty Products”
https://www.kianadochertyproducts.com/guides/p/how-to-change-a-guide-to-breaking-bad-habits-and-getting-motivated
@ Morales
There -- I added an extra one to your quota. Don’t say I never did you any favours. X-D
NoisyBubba:
Back in the day, when you started your vendetta, you claimed I was a troll.
Look at where you are now. Indulging me.
No worries. Interlocutor, I — or trollish enabler, you. Or both!
—
<snicker>
So, you imagine it’s an advertisement for “weight loss products”, eh?
Heh.
No.
Here, for you, the content:
0:00 - The Toxic Truth of Body Positivity
2:18 - Doom Reason 1: A Message of "Inclusivity"
6:19 - 🚨NOT FOR MEN🚨
7:16 - Plus-Sized Bodies Only?
9:28 - Doom 2: A Bad Attitude
10:46 - Thin "Violence" Toward Body Positivity
15:57 - Doom 3: Promoting Obesity?
16:58 - Consequences of 'Body Positivity'
18:54 - Doom 4: Fat Bias
19:50 - 😭 Bullying
23:00 - Body Positivity Is Over
So, which bit is supposedly the marketing?
Heh heh heh.
Go on, try to tell me where it’s wrong. I dare you.
Be as specific as you care to be. Amuse me.
I suppose that for the sullenbug I should adduce a program that’s not entirely advertising, but which actually scopes the spectrum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersize_vs_Superskinny
“weight loss products”
Heh heh heh.
Oldie but gooodie: Dr Rudy
@sonofrojblake, now you are really just being an asshole.
For me, losing weight is easy, because I do not need to do a damn thing. I do not need to exercise more, neither do I need to eat less, or do any changes to my life whatsoever, for any amount of time. But “exercise more” advice for someone who spends their whole waking hours either working or going to work -- I know people whose commute takes literal hours on top of their work! -- is not “relatively easy step”, it is in fact a difficult step. “Eat less” is also not easy because for many fat people, when they start eating less it affects their ability to function, i.e. work.
The advice “east less, exercise more” is about as useful to fat people as advice “spend less, save more” is to poor people. Technically true, practically useless, and usually it is given by priviledged assholes.
#96 SB
The second paragraph you quote I have already addressed in #9. You misunderstood the comparison, but I addressed the misunderstanding: I’m comparing the arguments employed by those groups. And the first paragraph has been the subject of the majority of this thread.
And then in #107 you are just being silly. Causal relationships, dummy.
___
#104 John
Your accusation is a confession.
Holms:
What is it you imagine I confess?
Seriously, I am curious; in fact, what is it you imagine about which I accuse the buba?
(… oh yeah, +1. Probably a dozen or so more, for this thread. Got a few to go)
Oh. You were being serious and not exaggerating. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was actually a denial that being grossly overweight has a strong negative impact on your health comparable to smoking. The last few posts have made your seemingly incredible position clear. Well, thanks for humoring me.
It really is [as simple as calories in, calories out]. Energy and biomass come from food, and what is taken in and not used is stored. There are differences between peoples’ metabolism rates and other details, but they do not break the underlying relationship between intake and output.
And this, among other brown gems I’ve seen on this now-worthless thread, is why physicists should NEVER try to be dieticians or nutritionists. These are BIOLOGICAL and MEDICAL issues, and the complexity of biology totally swamps and overrides the relative simplicity of physics.
I didn’t realize it was actually a denial that being grossly overweight has a strong negative impact on your health comparable to smoking.
The comment to which you’re reacting said “fat and healthy,” NOT “grossly overweight and healthy.” Learn the difference before you pretend to know anything about this subject.
God’s death, all this pig-ignorant self-righteous fat-bashing is really reminding me of my junior-high-school days. Can we at least TRY to be more grown-up here…?
Raging Bee.
Sorry. Are these technical medical terms that I’m incorrectly using? According to non technical English I thought that “fat” meant “grossly overweight” and not “just a bit overweight”. I thought that there was vast evidence that being fat, aka more than a little overweight, was very bad for your health, comparable to being a smoker.
Could you point me at the definitions that you are using please?
#117 RB
My training is in human biology, not physics.
I claim ignorance.
This does seem eerily familiar to the problem of how to help someone with a (drug) addiction. For a drug addiction, it is as simple as not doing the drug, but the advice “just don’t do drugs” is rarely useful. Is being grossly overweight accurately describable as a “bad food addiction” for some people? Possible. I don’t know.
I view being grossly overweight as a personal health problem like being a smoker. I think it is a good thing to do, even a morally required thing to do, to give effective and practical social pressure to stop their bad habits to improve their health. I don’t do that for fat people because I don’t know what is effective peer pressure. I also rarely do it for smokers.
…
This is simply untrue. It is a simple matter of energy in vs energy out. However, you are correct in the sense that there’s a lot of complications to that simple description which do matter. For example, how easily absorbed are the calories in some foods vs other foods? How good are different foods with the same ingestible calorie count at satisfying hunger? Do you ingest different amounts of calories when eating the same food at different times of the day? What is the best exercise to directly burn calories vs raising resting metabolism, and which should people aim for? Both?
Oh, but I do think it’s pretty immoral to spread pernicious lies that deny the strong causal link between being fat and being unhealthy. This causal link and the amount of health harm is comparable to smoking. It’s one of the leading causes of deaths today.
sonofrojblake
I was attempting a simple diagram with “*” being the food, intestinal biome, bile etc and “|” being the intestinal membranes and the skin, to demonstrate that some food can be surrounded by your body, but never be absorbed because your abdomen is a tube. You clearly missed the point and still don’t understand that the contents of your intestine are not in your body in the sense of “absorbed by the membranes that encase your muscles and organs”. If you can’t understand that then you need to go back and revise basic anatomy.
I feel like Gerrard has swooped in with their first post at #94 and started again where I was at #19.
I will, however, respond just once more, this time to RagingBee:
If you’ve got evidence that the body can defy the first law of thermodynamics, by whatever means you like, however complex or medical, do please present it. Note that in order to do so you’d have to explain how it EITHER
(a) can create mass/energy from nothing (e.g. you eat 2000 calories and expend 2000 calories but your weight goes up) OR
(b) can destroy energy (don’t know how that would work… you tell me, I guess, it’s your claim).
As I said -- if you can tell us how the body defies this law, there’s at least two Nobels in it for you.
I won’t hold my breath, though.
@Jazzlet, 123:
Do you even realise how desperate you sound?
I mean, I get it -- topologically, there’s a route (two, in fact) from where the contents of my intestines are to the outside world that doesn’t penetrate my skin. But “not in my body”??
And I do understand perfectly the point that I can put e.g. 2000 calories of food into my mouth, but possibly only e.g. 1900 of will ever make it “into my body” by your bizarre definition.
But doesn’t that help? I mean, isn’t it the dieter’s dream to somehow be able to put 2000 calories in their mouth, but have NONE of it make it “into their body”? Isn’t it rather the problem that really most of that 2000 calories really does make it into the body… and isn’t consumed by a suitable amount of exercise? Isn’t that how getting fat happens? I don’t really see the relevance of your bizarre digression.
The Jazzlet defence: “I can’t have raped her your honour. At no stage was my penis in her body.”
I hope that sounds as repugnant and ridiculous as it’s intended to.
Ok, that probably crossed the line of good taste.
>I feel like Gerrard has swooped in with their first post at #94 and started again where I was at #19.
Does seem like it.
#123 Jazzlet
True, and yet everything that comes out of a digestive system is still considered an excretion, even things like fecal pap.
#126 sonof
The distinction made by Jazzlet is a real one in various contexts, just misapplied here.
According to non technical English I thought that “fat” meant “grossly overweight” and not “just a bit overweight”.
In non-technical English, “fat” means a ridiculously wide range of things, from “just a tad overweight”/”too big to be a Victoria’s Secret model” to “morbidly obese.” You should know this. Use more precise words, and don’t be so quick to misread other people’s use of vague words.
If you’ve got evidence that the body can defy the first law of thermodynamics…
I never said that, moron, I said that biology is far too complex and involved to be explained by a simplistic application of this or that basic law of physics. We all understand that physical laws apply to human bodies just as they apply to photons and cannonballs; but you still need a good understanding of biology to explain EXACTLY how they manifest in human bodies. Your failure to understand something so obvious, only shows how unfit you are to be bloviating about diet and nutrition. Just STFU and stop insulting our intelligence.
Oh, but I do think it’s pretty immoral to spread pernicious lies that deny the strong causal link between being fat and being unhealthy.
Who the AF is actually “lying” about any such thing? There are plenty of people who are considered “fat” but who are, at worst, not obviously in bad health. If you want to accuse anyone of “lying,” then start using more precise language, and base your accusations on same.
Raging Bee
I quote someone else:
>awareness that people can be fat and healthy at the same time
I also cite that bit above by someone else claiming that we only had correlation not causation about being fat leading to severe health harm.
I think this framing is pernicious. By way of comparison, it is technically true that someone can be a smoker and be healthy, but it is not a lifestyle that we should be promoting or normalizing. I see some people in this thread trying to normalize or promote the lifestyle of being fat, and I think it’s wrong for exactly the same reasons that normalizing smoking is wrong. I see many of the comments here trying to normalize being fat and many comments here trying to deny that being fat comes with significant health risks. I also see many comments here saying that being fat is not a result of lifestyle choices including diet and (lack of) exercise, and I believe that it is for a vast majority of people who are fat.
If shaming smokers would make them quit smoking, then I think we should shame smokers. I don’t know if it does. If telling smokers “that’s bad for you, you should stop” would make them quit smoking, then we should do that. I also don’t know if that’s effective. I sometimes / rarely offer this kind of peer pressure advice for smokers. I cannot recall ever doing the same for someone who is fat. However, I am annoyed by the framing in this thread which is giving opposite peer pressure, which is giving peer support *and acceptance*; that is lying to people who are significantly overweight about the severe dangers of it and the causes of it.
@GOTS, shaming does not work, that’s one problem right there. It does not work with smoking either, it does not work for alcoholism, it does not work for drug abuse. An addictive personality might not be perfectly understood, but it is clear that some people are predisposed to develop addictions and once an addiction is developed, it is difficult to get rid of. Telling people “just don’t do it” does not work and shaming them only pushes them to the edges of society instead of helping. There is a genetic component probably to this too, at least alcoholism does tend to run in families.
The best course of action is always prevention. With regard to weight, that would mean in the USA strong regulatory input from the state that would actually force corporations to produce healthy food at affordable prices instead of HFCS infused junk food that is everywhere. Also, universal healthcare and a lot of other things that foster a less stressful society would undoubtedly help too.
Also, while there is certainly a clearly established causal link between obesity and adverse health effects, it often also works in the other direction -- some health problems can be the cause of obesity. That in itself is in my opinion one of the strongest arguments against shaming fat people because, unlike with smokers, this would inevitably lead to victim blaming in some cases and that is never cool.
I do not think we should be promoting obesity as the new cool because it really is not something to strive for, but I also think the problem needs nuanced approach and not a sledgehammer.
@RagingBee, 130:
I said this in my very first post in this thread:
And here you are, 120 posts later… giving the standard answer, like the perpetual-motion-machine-selling crank you sound like. I think I’m going to leave it here, with a quotation from UK comedian Joe Lycett:
“Life is like a box of chocolates. It doesn’t last as long if you’re fat.”
Charly
I think I agree on all.
#131 RB
Jesus christ, another lap round the same point? Already addressed as early as #8, but here we go again: stating that there are fat people who are healthy -- e.g. low blood sugar / cholesterol etc. -- is true but misleading. It elides the well known causal relationship between weight and many aspects of health, and so these are the people you ought to be admonishing to use precise language.
Worse are the fat acceptance advocates who go further and claim all weights are equally healthy; these are either shameless liars or dupes. Either way, they are purveyors of medical misinformation.
Wow, three people totally missed my point in a mere two hours.
… stating that there are fat people who are healthy … is true but misleading. It elides the well known causal relationship between weight and many aspects of health…
Read what I already said, dumbass: “fat” includes a very wide range of people and sizes; which means there will be a wide range of “causal relationships between weight and many aspects of health.” Ashley Graham, for example, probably doesn’t have the same health problems as someone who weighs over 400 lbs and needs a scooter-chair and other accommodations to get around.
(Also, the “causal relationships” aren’t a one-way street. Excess weight (however that is defined) can cause other health problems, but other health problems can also cause excess weight.)
If you really want to talk about the “causal relationship between weight and many aspects of health,” you’ll need to start by using more precise terms than just “fat.”
Careful now, Holms -- RagingBee is trying to sucker you into referring to BMI, so they can repeat all the bullshit we already went round with that, too. I think we really have covered everything here.
“Fat people have a hell of a time navigating the world. If they are out in public, they get stared at, they hear things said about them made in stage whispers, and sometimes outright rude comments made directly to them that reflect common public opinions that they are lazy, indisciplined, and gluttonous. They are the victims of body-shaming and find it hard to shop for clothes.”
This is, in my experience, a true claim.
cf. https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2022/08/14/on-free-will-again/
@ 138 sonofrojblake
In other words, you’ve repeated every form of prejudice in the OP without questioning anything and learned nothing.
“Fat is bad. We know fat is bad because everyone says fat is bad. Why does everyone says fat is bad? Because everyone knows fat is bad. It’s well known fat is bad or everyone wouldn’t keep saying it…”
#137 RB
It’s a scaling relationship, you spanner. More of risk factor means more risk of consequence. A little bit of pudge means a little risk of health burden, while a lot means a lot. Have you ever seen a -- and bear in mind, this is going to be some technical language here -- have you ever seen a graph? Often, as one measured thing increases, so does the other.
I’m sorry if I just blew your mind.
Excess Deaths Associated With Underweight, Overweight, and Obesity
On the other hand, everyone says it so it must be true, right Holms? It couldn’t be just some prejudice against those disgusting fatty-fatty-fat-fats.
@ ^
For clarity, BMI of 25 is considered overweight, BMI of 30, obese.
@ ^
For further clarity, 25-20 or just below is “normal”, so what the study is saying is that the “normal” range is no healthier than the “overweight” range, contrary to the assumptions of Holms, sonofroj, and other assorted numpties who think it’s well established being overweight is unhealthy.
@ ^
Because they heard someone say so once. X-D
@Silentbob, the cherrypicked study you point to does NOT support the claim that being obese is healthy. Here is a more representative quote:
tldr version -- increase in fat does increase mortality but its effects might be masked somewhat by the fact that healthcare improved over the same timespan too.
The “overweight” category is a transitional category and statistically, it makes sense that it can come as no different than the category below it in some studies and that the data will be somewhat fuzzy here. Demarking exact boundaries in a continuum is always problematic.
Even if 100% precise, the findings of this cherry-picked study that you are brandishing about could at best be used as an argument for widening what is considered to be normal and healthy body weight and maybe shift the upper boundaries of the terms a bit up. This study cannot be used to say that an increase in body fat does not have adverse health effects, because it explicitly says the exact opposite.
Here is another study -click- It is a long read with a lot of graphs.
And some relevant quotes:
And a cherry on top? This study is a lot newer than the one you cherry picked and it addresses other studies of those authors (sources 6 and 21)
-but not the obese range:
“Results Relative to the normal weight category (BMI 18.5 to <25), obesity (BMI ≥30) was associated with 111 909 excess deaths (95% confidence interval [CI], 53 754-170 064) and underweight with 33 746 excess deaths (95% CI, 15 726-51 766). Overweight was not associated with excess mortality (−86 094 deaths; 95% CI, −161 223 to −10 966).
Conclusions Underweight and obesity, particularly higher levels of obesity, were associated with increased mortality relative to the normal weight category.”
Very much like someone cleverer than you said in #142. Fucking hell, will you ever learn to read the source you quote? Probably not. You are after all the guy that quoted my own source back at me but with sentences removed to reverse the meaning.
-says the guy running with a snippet of a single source that he found to vaguely (i.e. not really) agree with him. Okay, since you like reading (snippets of) sources and running with it, here’s another source. Which random sentence will you notice and take as gospel I wonder. I haven’t finished it yet as I write this, but I have already found a favourite sentence:
“Obesity is underpinned by positive energy balance believed to be driven by hyperphagia arising as a consequence of increased hunger, decreased satiety or both.”
Positive energy balance means food eaten > food burned, hyperphagia means too much eating, and decreased satiety means the ‘full’ feeling that is normal after eating is weak or absent.
BECAUSE THE BASIC EQUATION OF WEIGHT IS A MATTER OF ENERGY INTAKE MINUS ENERGY USAGE.
Done with you.
/high five Charly giving basically the same lecture but less exasperatedly!
@Silentbob, the cherrypicked study you point to does NOT support the claim that being obese is healthy.
He didn’t say it did support such a claim. And who here is making any such claim anyway?
@Raging Bee, Silentbob, stated in other comments that the notion that excess body fat is harmful to health is just prejudice. Then he posted a study with a mocking addendum where he used the term “fatty-fatty-fat-fats”. How else to interpret this term as obese?
But ok, let’s say he did not mean that. The study he cherry-picked does not support the claim that “overweight” is healthy either, the authors write in their conclusion:
And later studies indeed looked into the confounding factors and found that overweight people do, in fact, have higher mortality. There is, as a matter of fact, a continuum of rising risk of health complications with rising body fat above what is generally considered healthy.
And when we are at it, in comment #107 Silentbob wrote:
I cannot interpret this post as anything other than an attempt to discredit the statistical link between incresing body fat and health risk. It fails spectacularly and can be disproven precisely by looking at the confounding factors that health professionals look at.
Correlation does not imply causation, but rarely there is causation without correlation. Thus when there is a correlation, there is a possibility of either causation or a common cause and if there is a reason to suspect either, it is worth looking into. In the case of beards and heart attacks, there is possibly a common cause in that being male causes both beard growth and heart attacks. Both could be for example caused by the way male sex hormones affect the body etc. That is how a healthcare professional would look at this correlation, they would not immediately jump to the nonsensical conclusion that we must advocate for shaving to prevent heart attacks.
The second example is equally silly because nobody who works with statistics thinks that way. The proper comparing factor to mortality of people who die in a car crash whilst wearing a seatbelt is not all people who die in a car crash but people who die in a car crash whilst not wearing a seatbelt. And when one does such an examination it is trivially easy to find that seatbelts increase survivability of a car crash considerably.
It is easy to find silly correlations and then pretend that no correlation matters, ever. But that is not true, correlations do matter and they are an important step on the way to finding causations. A lot of scientific work is to sort out which correlations are causal and how and which are just coincidental. When good scientists find a correlation, they look into it, they do not throw their hands into the air and declare “just a correlation, nothing to see here” nor do they jump to the first conclusion that pops into their head and declare it truth.
The current consensus of health professionals everywhere is that the correlation between excess body fat and adverse health effects is that it is not coincidental but causal, and in some cases (like knee osteoarthritis and diabetes type 2 and probably others) the causal link is well-researched and known. In other words, on the population level, the correlation IS the result of causation.
On an individual level, the situation gets complicated. As already said, that causation is in some cases reversed. For example, sometimes hyperthyroidism can lead to being underweight, and hypothyroidism to being overweight. In those cases, a competent doctor will, based on blood tests, first address the thyroid issue, and the weight will most likely adjust afterward accordingly.
That is why nobody should be getting personal health advice from strangers on the internet but strictly from their physician who knows their health history and tests etc. That is also a reason why nobody should be giving unsolicited comments or advice on weight to strangers, or body-shame people for having the body they have. And btw. thin-shaming is a thing to.
Thank you Charly.
@Raging Bee, Silentbob, stated in other comments that the notion that excess body fat is harmful to health is just prejudice.
Actually, a lot of it IS prejudice. Lay people, and even some doctors, are well-known to jump to such conclusions, not only about truly obese people, but about anyone else who exceeds their (uninformed and unrealistic) notions of what people “should” weigh. I judge strangers by sight like that every day, and such judgments are purely esthetic and, yes, prejudicial. I’m not even A doctor, let along THEIR doctor. And I know I’m not the only person making such judgments of people I don’t know — though I sometimes feel I’m the only person NOT mouthing off such uninformed opinions.
BECAUSE THE BASIC EQUATION OF WEIGHT IS A MATTER OF ENERGY INTAKE MINUS ENERGY USAGE.
Congratulations, you’ve just stated the easy part. You’ve LITERALLY contributed your two cents worth, and nothing more.
But when we’re talking about living organisms, as opposed to cars, computers or nuclear reactors, “energy intake” is extremely complicated, and “energy usage” is even more so. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step — but if this is the only step you’re willing to take, then there’s no point in taking it at all.
Sure, a useless two cents’ worth that multiple people needed to hear. Especially Sbob.
Yeah, right, no one can lose weight or think clearly about it until you show up and explain thermodynamics. Go to bed.
@Raging Bee, the existence of prejudice against fat people does not disprove or preclude the negative health impacts of excess body fat on health. Both can, and AFAIK both do, coexist. I have clearly stated in my posts here that I do not agree with body-shaming and prejudice against fat people. I still think, based on the evidence available to me, that excess body fat is harmful to health.
When a doctor refuses to do a blood test and tells someone they should lose weight, they are being a judgemental jerk.
When a doctor does blood tests, finds out the patient is pre-diabetic, and recommends loss of weight and change of diet, they just follow the current scientific consensus on how to treat the issue.
The judgemental attitude towards overweight is a problem in multiple ways because it ties a person’s worth to their weight. Which is of course nonsense. However, denying the real negative effects of obesity on health is not the correct way to deal with the problem.
@Raging Bee, the existence of prejudice against fat people does not disprove or preclude the negative health impacts of excess body fat on health.
I never said it did. What I said was that a huge amount of the “advice” being given about or to fat people is hopelessly tainted with prejudice and simplemindedness; and is coming from people who really have no clue what they’re talking about — as so many of the comments on this thread prove.
I still think, based on the evidence available to me, that excess body fat is harmful to health.
And I fully agree. The question is, who determines what is “excess” for each person, and on what information are such determinations based? The OP called for “a more thoughtful approach to weight;” and that should include letting the patients and doctors themselves do most of the talking, and not gumming up discussions with useless blithering about thermodynamics and the like.
Yeah, a bit like the approach to trans people.
In that case, all the focus seems to be on trans women, in this case, all the focus seems to be with obese people.
Trans men, anorexics — they’re not what the discussion is generally about, though of course it’s just the converse of the very same issue.
#157 RB
Dumb statement. Nothing I’ve said suggested no one was able to lose weight or think clearly about losing weight; rather, I spent my efforts rebutting the nonsense portions of the fat acceptance movement and bad arguments expressed here in support of them. Some people seem unable to think clearly about weight loss, seemingly buying into the dangerous nonsense of ‘health at every weight’.
Easy questions. 1. Doctors, epidemiologists, and related medical professionals; 2. case studies, death statistics, population research etc. etc.. And the ‘gumming up’ seems to be coming maninly from those that dispute the relationship between food and weight.
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#160 John
Who else but would we talk about when the OP is specifically over -- rather than under -- weight people?
Since you ask a specific question, here’s a specific answer: scrawny people, for whom health issues become far more severe. Double your ideal weight, you will have issues and get noticed. Halve it, and you’ll be on life support if you are lucky.
“We need a more thoughtful approach to weight”, Holms. That’s the title.
Weight. Not corpulence.
Were it “We need a more thoughtful approach to overweight”, my point would have been vitiated. But it wasn’t, so it isn’t.
(This doesn’t count towards your quota)
PS https://www.youtube.com/@SupersizeVSkinny/videos
(Since I didn’t actually link to it last time)
And the ‘gumming up’ seems to be coming maninly from those that dispute the relationship between food and weight.
I’m pretty sure no one actually disputes such a relationship. We’re just pointing out that said relationship is far more complex and idiosyncratic than “simple physics,” and it is useless and irrelevant to constantly repeat laws of thermodynamics in the face of such complex and interrelated circumstances.
Heh.
Just looked, and she has a new video out:
Does the universe have a purpose?Obvious clickbait, of course. Some bloviating, perhaps some pop philosophy.
I can do that, too:
The very concept of purpose only makes sense in relation to something done by some entity for some particular reason. No entity, no purpose — it’s just happening.
Oh, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
Obs, I shan’t be watching that one. 🙂
[apologies; distracted, wrong blog] 😐
#161 Me
“Who else but would we talk about…” should read “What else would we talk about…” -- garbled in an edit I think.
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#162 John
Sure, the title. Is that as far as you read? Because I went further and found additional context: “Fat people have a hell of a time navigating the world.” That’s sentence 1. The entire post continues in that vein. Thinness is mentioned, but only in the sense of ‘not overweight’. Underweight issues are not brought up.
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#164 RB
I’m glad you understand that, but… Really?? I sure got a lot of pushback when I mentioned the simple relationship. Sure, various people said there was more to it than that, but they were weirdly prickly about the advice being ‘eat less, exercise more’.
And then there was Sbob, who doubted the relationship between weight and health entirely.
I refer you to my #13 and my #14.
<snicker>
Cargo cult rhetoric is funny. Still +1 to your quota, but funny it is.
(I quoted that @139)
Yes, that was my very point!
Gah, you sure a slothy.
(Wow)
Here, again:
“Yeah, a bit like the approach to trans people.
In that case, all the focus seems to be on trans women, in this case, all the focus seems to be with obese people.
Trans men, anorexics — they’re not what the discussion is generally about, though of course it’s just the converse of the very same issue.”
Just as most pop discussions about weight end up about overweight, so do most pop discussions about trans people end up about trans women.
Well, vice versa in this case, you surely by now you get to what I refer.
Anyway.
“Jack Sprat could eat no fat,
His wife could eat no lean.
And so between them both, you see,
They licked the platter clean.”
Cool, so your tutting is that Mano talked about A rather than B or A and B. I believe his usual response is to laugh off such silliness.
Holms:
Comment #160, as you yourself noted.
Not like I precluded any conversation, is it?
I note you have yet to dispute my claim (it is meet you celebrate grasping the point of it), so that’s not your problem. It’s just that I noted that notable item.
(Some call it… ‘commenting’)
You believe many things, Holms.
Well, you *claim* to believe many things.
For example, you claimed to believe that I had likely not even read the first line of Mano’s post, though I’d long previous adduced multiple quotations from that very post which I then addressed.
(Wooden guns are wooden)
@ 167 Holms
Assuming I’m “Sbob” ??? show me where I did this and I will gladly apologise.
Alternatively, you could admit you’re lying and apologise.
…but they were weirdly prickly about the advice being ‘eat less, exercise more’.
That’s because losing weight isn’t always that simple or easy, and such advice works differently for different people, depending on their particular medical issues and other circumstances to numerous to list here (which are, I remind you, personal, confidential, and most likely not known to those people robotically offering the same easy advice over and over every effing day).
#170 John
Two things that did not happen.
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#171 sbob
You’ve been sbob for at least a year, and you’ve responded to plenty of my posts and replies calling you that… and you only just became conscious of it?? Anyway, as for rejecting the link between weight and poor health, #107 is perhaps the first clear example. You quote me saying
And respond with
Obviously, you are casting doubt on the claims being made, rejecting the correlation as coincidence, akin to seat belts causing car crash fatalities.
In #143 you selectively quote a paper in a manner that belies its actual conclusions. You choose a paragraph that states the overweight portion of the BMI range shows no statistical difference to that of the normal range (omitting the portion that deals with the obese BMI range), and declared
and then in #145
There is no other interpretation of this but that you doubt the relationship between weight and health.
Time for that apology.
___
#172 RB
Oh the process of losing weight isn’t easy, and I sure as hell would not make that claim given the state of my body. But the principle of energy in versus energy out is very straightforward.
Holms:
Heh heh heh.
Where’s the celebration? And is a query as to how far you read an expression of belief, or perhaps just sarcasm?
Holms, heh.
“Cool, [blah]”
Yeah, yeah: “sarcasm”. The feeblest possible excuse, after “just joking”.
Ah well, I’m confident that by now you get the point I was making.
Silly question. It could be both, it could be either, it could be neither.
(duh)
But sure, you had realised I had already quoted the bits you quoted when asking me whether I had read the bits I quoted and addressed. Attempted sarcasm!
Let’s call it cargo-cult sarcasm. And you’re not very good at all even at that.
(+1)
“Cool” = celebration, hilarious.
Meaning asking a question is not an indication of belief.
Heh heh heh.
You’re just making phatic blustering noises, Holms.
You call it Just Asking Questions, but we both know better.
Since I have already established that you will persevere with such pointless retorts without end due to your neediness, it is up to me again.
So; you’ve used up your quota of retorts for this thread, since otherwise it will just go on ad nauseam.
I see two of the most ignorant commenters on this thread are now bickering among themselves over…nothing substantial or relevant, apparently. Time for this thread to join the choir invisible, I guess…preferably without crossing the 200 mark…
#178 John
Again, your accusations are confessions. “Cool” is a celebration, and asking you something rhetorically is indicative of my belief, and all you have is blustery assertion.
Also, another quota? This quota silliness is just your way of exiting an unsupportable argument, but everything that happened since #51 has been evidence that you are unable to resist argument for arguments’ sake and the quota line is empty.
RB
I bet you 99% of the time it is that easy. The difficulty is that most fat people find it difficult to summon the willpower to make the necessary changes to their lives. Thus, while it is as easy as “eat less calories, exercise more”, it does not follow that it’s helpful to offer that as advice. Also also, I remain entirely open-minded that there are a variety of other very relevant factors that would be useful to consuming less calories, such as: time of day might matter to how well calories are ingested, and different meals with the same amount of calories might satisfy hunger to differing degrees. That matters very much to someone who is trying to find the willpower to do effective things to lose weight.
Similarly, for a smoker or drug addict, the answer is really as easy as “stop doing it”. However, the true difficulty is navigating the unique circumstances of that person so that they can find the courage, willpower, and desire to stop doing it, and simply telling them “drugs are bad, m’kay; don’t do it” is probably not useful.
PS: Re: “eat less calories, exercise more”. Also sugary drinks. Ceasing consumption of drinks with calories, especially soda pop, is probably hugely important as well, and one of the easiest things that someone can do. Just in case someone is going to nitpick over eat vs drink.
@ 179 Raging Bee
It’s literally all they have. What gives their lives meaning. Sad.
Trumpspeak!
<snicker>
Yes, bub.
Literally all they have, indeed.
(They being you and your cohort, of course)
And now another of the most ignorant commenters on this thread has to pipe up again…
I bet you 99% of the time it is that easy…
Whatever you’re betting, pay up now, because that claim has already been refuted by the experience of commenters here, as well as that of MANY other people who have dealt with weight-and-health issues that have turned out to be more complicated than they’d previously expected.
And since you’re just repeating claims that are already known to be false, that’s another reason to pronounce this thread dead.
Raging Bee
What personal experience? The personal experience that it’s very hard to have the desire, courage, and will power to actually follow through and eat less and exercise more? Of course. That’s hard to do. Just like it’s hard to stop using drugs when addicted. Drug addicts are not experts on how to quit addiction and they are not reliable sources regarding their own personal efforts to quit. I would hazard the guess the same is true for most fat people because they can be accurately described as an addict in this sense.
I still don’t get it. What is your goal here? What are you trying to say? I totally recognize that there’s many elements to creating a diet and exercise plan that is effective and palatable, pun intended, and that will depend heavily on the individual person. I don’t get how or why you think that the solution for 99% of fat people to lose weight could be anything other than eating less calories and doing more exercise. Barring people with rare medical conditions that lead to weight gain, what else could you possibly do to lose weight? Liposuction? Surgery to reduce stomach size? Drugs to reduce appetite. What are you trying to say? That the human body will not lose weight with sufficiently more exercise plus sufficiently less calories intake? Or that there is some other way? Because there really isn’t some other way for most fat people that is medically advisable. It really seems like you’re saying that there is, and that is what is really confusing to me.
I still don’t get it.
You say that a lot. It sounds like a problem on your end.
@GOTS, I think (English is not my first language) that the problem is that many people here appear to use and understand the words “easy” and “simple” as interchangeable. They are not. Further, I get the impression from some people in this thread, that they think that just because something can be described in a simple true statement, that the thing itself is simple. That is not so.
“Losing weight means eating fewer calories than you expend” is a true and simple statement.
This simple statement can be arrived at by cutting away all the variables that differ between cases until you get to a formula that describes what all weight loss scenarios must have in common in order to work, similar to simplifying an equation in maths.
However, in real life, all these other confounding (and often, though not always, highly individual) variables cannot be ignored. That makes real-life weight loss neither simple nor easy. Each case requires significant nvestment of time and effort into untangling the individual variables, then some more investment of time and effort into establishing a workable plan, and then even more investment into keeping it up, oftentimes for the rest of one’s life.
Many incredibly complicated and difficult things can be easily described in true and simple terms:
“Solving climate change means to reduce CO2 emissions and suck from the atmosphere what we already put in there.”
“Curing cancer means killing cancerous cells and not healthy cells.”
“Starting a colony on Mars means building a self-sustaining biome there.”
@Charly
Yep
PS:
What an asshole.
First, the most effective way to curb obesity in the general population is to slightly underfeed the infants. This was the suggestion made by the French Ministry of Health back in the 1920’s. And the incidence of obesity in France is currently less than 1/3 that in the US (20 years ago, it was 1/5 of the US’s). The key is to inculcate proper habits before the child reaches the age of 6 when the corpus callosum becomes essentially completely myelinated. Second, it is not the obligation of schools to feed the children. Cafeterias are secondary, not essential to schools. In other countries, obesity is low because they are poor. Only in countries with government welfare where one finds poor people to be generally fat. But then government welfare brings about other pathologies in poor people.
Feeding infants less food than their little bodies need, letting the poor starve to death and/or die of exposure.
You probably don’t see how pathological those advocacies are, friedfishe. I do.
Definitely not. Infants are delicate, and undernourishment only worsens that. A bit of chub is healthier at that stage than an ‘average’ build, and healthier by far than a thin baby.
Oh look, friedfish has found a whole new subject to be dead wrong about…
This was the suggestion made by the French Ministry of Health back in the 1920’s.
And…no one in France has had any new ideas about healthcare or child development since then?
And the incidence of obesity in France is currently less than 1/3 that in the US (20 years ago, it was 1/5 of the US’s).
Got any citation showing cause-and-effect relationship between those (ridiculously vague) numbers and the 1920s “suggestion?”
The key is to inculcate proper habits before the child reaches the age of 6…
Now you’re sounding like another Christian simpleton who thinks abusing their kids at an early age solves everything.
…when the corpus callosum becomes essentially completely myelinated.
WTF does that even mean? Do you even know what the corpus callosum is?
friedfish2718 says @190
Getting an early start on the Christmas Season, channeling Scrooge.
Dude, Oliver Twist wasn’t an instruction manual.