I always thought you were just high on Charlie Sheen I would happily trade one or more years off my life to finally meet my future wife. I'm not willing to settle, but the FWB thing is getting old
^ These. Funnily enough, there doesn't seem to be a history of fat people; indeed, in some developing nations (India, for example) obesity has more or less only just arrived. I concur with Da_Rude_Baboon; it's not your glands, or your genes, or your insulin making you fat, it's your hands stuffing food into your mouth that's making you fat. The percentage of people with thyroid problems as a percentage of the morbidly obese I have always heard quoted as less than 1%. If you've got a genetic hormone problem or something, your doctor will help you treat it and it won't be a problem anymore - in fact, I'm willing to bet that a considerable number of people are self-diagnosing themselves as 'incapable of losing weight' when no doctor would support that. People eat too much, and exercise too little; ergo, their bodies store excess chemical energy as fat. I hear a lot of excuses ('big bones', 'I'll never be as thin as size 0', 'I've got the fat gene' etc etc ad infinitum et nauseam) and a lot of cheat-y solutions (gastric bands, liposuction, dumbass diets) but a second-page story in today's paper detailed a 225kg woman who dropped to 98kg through cutting back on crisps, taking exercise, and limiting her intake. Get that? She went from nearly a quarter of a ton - half the weight of some sports cars - down to 15st, just by recognising that she was doing herself this harm. That's not to say that what we should be telling fat people is the bald truth (it's their fault they're fat, not their parents or anyone else) and I agree with carpetmonster that ridiculing fat people and being generally unsympathetic doesn't help them lose weight. However, I do think that we as a society need a plan to tackle some of these people - possibly through compulsory therapy. It's now accepted that grossly overfeeding your child can result in them being taken from you for their own protection - I think we should seriously think about equating the self-harm of being morbidly obese to the self-harm of smoking, and offer similar levels of support. After all - there are old people, and fat people, but not many old fat people.
I personally prefer the Red Bull and banana method. Sugar, caffeine, potassium, with a diarrhea* fail safe built in. * a serious consideration when you travel and eat like I do
What I find incredibly interesting is that mankind worshipped the female form with exaggerated curves (multiple fertility goddesses from practically the entire Fertile Crescent spring to mind) for something close to 5000 years, and then Twiggy came along, and the past 70 or so give or take years we've been trying to kill ourselves getting thinner-often to the point of unhealthy as well. Women have curves. Men find them attractive. Women, stop beating yourselves up over what someone tells you men want-go ask a man. My wife has curves, I find them quite nice thank you very much. Eh, there's a LOT wrong with the world today. We should quit telling people there is a "perfect body" when there's nowhere near a standard-we're all different and should be treated as individuals when looking at such medical statements. Because a "perfect body" is a clinical issue, and should not be pressed by a media that knows nothing of the health issues associated with either over or underweight. If doctors stood up and said "these models are unhealthy-their weight is too low, I'll bet they couldn't even have kids anymore because they ruined their hormone regulation" what would people say then?
I don't think you understand where I am coming from, and i'm, not offering my opinion, i'm basing it on scientific fact, as an Endocrinologist. People are shovelling stuff into their mouth. They can't help it. The people who aren't shovelling food in can help it, and don't. It is nothing to do with will power, greed, laziness. Many obese people are being urged to eat by strong biochemical urges. If you want a comparison...teenage lads needing to jack off, the need to sleep etc etc. If you want a barrage of actual studies I can provide them. The diet industry, the treatment of 'fatties' is big business. If you are fat and your GP recommends you get help, they refer you to a Dietician. To put it into context, the Dietetics course makes the person (at the end of the course) know about as much about treating obesity and nutritional disorders as Halfords give out training on how to service a Challenger tank. I know because I have taught on the degree. If you wanna know about drips thought, they know quite a it about that. Right...ask your GP about Leptin or any other adipose derived hormones. They won't know, unless for some reason they read up on it, if they did, there won't be many about unless they needed to know it something. Your average GP knows diddly squat about obesity or even the mechanisms that can lead to the onslaught of excess adipose tissue. Unless the specifically read up on it, which is very unlikely.
Roughly what percentage of the obese people in the UK would suffer from these biochemical urges? I am not not doubting the validity of the condition, I am doubting that it is the primary cause for obesity in this country.
A lot more than people would acknowledge. But kind of sad and funny as most of population are carrying excess fat. Saying that obesity 'only just got to India' has more to do with the amount of food going. Doesn't matter how many urges you have, if you can't get your scoff going. Urges to eat are the basic level. If someone was craving food and they ate cucumber and egg plant casserole, they would probably get full before they consumed an excess amount of calories. But if the same person found themselves in Macca D's with a £20 note, it is going to be far easier to consumer a vast amount of calories than if they spent the same time eating lentils and oatmeal bakes. You may have heard the term 'empty calories' that could just be described as food not being nutritionally dense. Nutritionally dense foods don't often have that many calories either. Foods that are highly processed, foods high in refined sugars, processed vegetable oils, saturated fats etc, that contain macro nutrients (protein, fat, carbs) are still 'nutritious' but less so than natural and unprocessed foods. However high fibre foods (which most junk foods aren't) usually lead to the individual feeling full before they gorge themselves. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1880830/ Some more insight into the biochemical aspects. If you took that into your Dr, and said you might be suffering from one, they'd look at you like you had just lit up a crack pipe. The way I see it, Obesity is just one of the diseases of 'modern man', another one i can think of is Kyphosis, but that is another story. Adiponectin, a 244-amino-acid-long polypeptide is a very important factor also to my mind. Also one not to mention to your GP.
I don't think it read very well. To clarify, Now we have highly processed and often not very nutritious foods available it is easier to overconsume on the calories, even if you don't have a crazy urge to eat more than you need. So if you combine consumption of those foods with a person who wants to overeat to satisfy a need, you have a larger problem. Then add automation, jobs that require less calorie expenditure etc etc, the problem spirals. Bottom line though, I think, based on the scientific evidence, many people are eating out of strong urges from biochemical imbalances, which are not easily recognised or treatable. Ironically some stem from malnutrition themselves. We know for instance people who's diet lack in certain minerals and trace elements can suffer from what is called Pica. Pica can mean eating soil and stuff, but also wanting to just gorge on normal food (rather than the stuff you might get out of a grow bag or your neighbours window boxes).
A vast amount of science - especially biology, and very especially human biology - is 'based on scientific fact' but also largely open to interpretation, owing to conflicting opinions on their important, or to a lack of understanding about other factors. Secondly, you are stating your opinion fairly often: And thirdly: These are not absolutes. Plenty of formerly obese people do lose weight through non-surgical means and without taking medication, so it's plain that at least some of the people overeating can help it, which makes it a matter of want, and will. People like the woman in today's papers work hard to diminish their calorie intake and suggesting that 'they can't help it' belittles their achievement, not to mention offending people like me who work hard to maintain a given bodyweight. There is a distinction between 'overweight' and 'obese'. A lot of people are carrying a bit of weight, but comparatively fewer are seriously, dangerously, morbidly obese. Laziness, if by that you mean 'avoidance of exercise', plainly is a factor, as the human body can be exercised to point where it will burn more calories than it can absorb. Michael Phelps has an 12,000 daily calorie intake sometimes; people on polar treks can be on 7,500 for weeks on end. Many obese people is not the same as all obese people. I'd be interested to hear your opinion on whether these biochemical urges are affected by human dietary patterns. I know of a lot of people who don't eat until they're full, and therefore stay at a given weight. It seems symptomatic to me that many obese people ate until they became fat, at which point these urges became stronger and stronger until (like the woman in today's paper) you're eating 15 packets of crisps a day. This correlates with your comparison of teenagers' sexual hormones - excessive masturbation can become a habit and is related to sex addiction, I'm told. I don't doubt that for many people - a disproportionate amount of the really morbidly obese people - eating is an addiction. But no addiction is 'unbeatable'; people beat addictions to alcohol, heroin, nicotine and cocaine every day, and these are equally powerful. I disagree with your assessment that large numbers - even a majority - of fat people are somehow incapable of resisting biochemical urges to eat, though. Urges are resistable and with help and willpower you can defeat them. I don't deny that there are a tiny number of people whose body gains weight despite all reasonable management - these are people with bona fide gland malfunctions - but the rest seems to be a question of scale (e.g. strength of urges) and that's not the same at all. That's exactly what you agreed with here: When you can't have all the food you want, you can't get fat. Therefore, the idea that some people just get fat from the same amount of food as the rest of us - which is a plea I've heard plenty of times from people that are one KFC bucket from upsetting the planet's rotational axis - is plainly bulls***. To people that say "my genes make me obese", or "it doesn't matter what I eat", Indians and famine victims say different, because these huge populations contain the same genes you do, but rigid control of diet - something you can choose, as well as have inflicted upon you - kept them thin. Now that famine and malnutrition have been chased from certain sections of Indian society, people can 'get their scoff on' and therefore they're getting fat. That's a choice they didn't have before, but it's still a choice. I don't doubt it - in fact, that was the point I was making earlier: Again, you 'think' is not the same as 'it is generally accepted', which is why some people - like me - disagree that many people are fat because a force over which they have no control forces them to eat. I agree that for some people nature and nurture has programmed them to eat more, but I deny that that programming is uncontrollable and unrelated to the person's willpower; in fact, I think control of it is directly related to a person's willpower.
I believe, I think, I might, I figure is just an informal way of writing stuff so it doesn't end up sounding like a boring lecture. I should not have worded it that way. As for patterns, we all know about 'trigger foods'. Foods that encourage you to 'keep going'm usually foods high in refined sugars and sweeteners, for example, biccies. Laziness, is a factor but to get back to my original point, some people can't help eating and overa eating. That is the basic level issue. Along with bad food, inactivity, automated society that just compounds the issue. The link I provided shows some examples of conditions where biochemical imbalances can lead to obesity....can provide more info on every factor of that if you want....I don't want my posts to sounds worse than they already are. "Plenty of formerly obese people do lose weight through non-surgical means and without taking medication, so it's plain that at least some of the people overeating can help it, which makes it a matter of want, and will. People like the woman in today's papers work hard to diminish their calorie intake and suggesting that 'they can't help it' belittles their achievement, not to mention offending people like me who work hard to maintain a given bodyweight." They can't help it, it has nothing to do with belittling fitness fans, dieters or otherwise. In the same manner, civil partnerships don't (or shouldn't) belittle good old fashioned Christian family values. Gay people can't help being gay, it was a choice somewhere down the line but not different than shovelling 400 bags of crisps down your pie hole.
I completely agree with everything you're saying but this. What makes the urges to eat irresistible? It's a chemical reaction in your brain that says, Eat. Some people have similar reactions that say, Sleep, or Smoke, or Drink Alcohol. Some people have very rare conditions - narcolepsy, for example - that means they have literally no control over their reaction to that urge. Some people have very rare conditions that mean they have literally no control over their ability to eat - people whose brains can't process the chemical reaction that says you're full, for example. But like I say, they're very rare. Missing your weight watchers evening for a burger night doesn't mean it's impossible to resist your urges any more than turning off your alarm clock and going back to sleep makes you a narcoleptic. Having another cigarette as a smoker doesn't mean it's impossible for you to control your urge to smoke, either; it might be difficult to resist, but it's possible. That's why I'm unable to see why apparently large percentages of the population are apparently all suffering from an inability to control their eating habits. Both are apparently the product of chemical balances in the brain, so I can see where you're coming from even if it wasn't a comparison I would personally have made. However, while being gay is a choice between alternate modes of sexuality, overeating is a choice between 'enough' and 'too much'. A better comparison would be between a person that can't control how much they eat and people that can't control how much sex they have (not whether it's straight or gay), which would make them sex addicts - and that's an addiction and addictions are fundamentally a matter of choice. I say that any person, straight or gay, with sufficient willpower can resist the urge to have sex and I contend that even the fattest person from the most obese family background, with sufficient willpower can resist the urge to overeat. You can't choose your sexual orientation, and arguably you can't choose the other urges your body gives you (although I think you certainly can choose to minimise or exacerbate them). However, you can choose not to submit to your urges. People resist their urges and they beat obesity, cigarettes and cocaine all the time. Other people choose not to, and they get fat, smoke, and erode their septums. People have gone on hunger strike and starved themselves to death in the presence of a ready meal; QED, even the most extreme urge to eat for the vast, vast majority of the population is controllable and resistible.
i'd give up a year of my life for the cure to ovarian cancer so that my sister never had to undergo treatment again (despite not looking like kelly brook). i'm not at all surprised the young women in @cthippo's quoted article said they were willing to give up a year of life in exchange for ideal body weight and shape. also not surprising that those studied were normal or underweight to begin with. body dysmorphia in women is a persistent (some say epidemic) and complex issue and has been studied from a variety of angles, notably, media influence, evolutionary conditioning, peer influence, affluence and societal norms/mating customs. i think all of these factors play a part in girls' and women's body dissatisfaction. a recent, small (475 subjects) austrian study on body dysmorphia in older women found 60% were dissatisfied with their appearance and these women were just over their "ideal" bmi. it asserted they were trying to combat the effects of aging and traumatic life events (divorce, children leaving home, etc.) were causing them to over-focus on things they could control like weight and eating habits. makes sense to me. the tendency for women to focus efforts on their relative attractiveness, over their intellect, for example, has and continues to evolve. because i work for low-income people and women are disproportionately in poverty, i tend to view the affluence (or lack thereof) factor as a strong precipitator for body dysmorphia, as well as over-all mental and emotional health. it certainly still exists in affluent, educated women, however.
I feel that this has been a communal squaking between a group of eternally skinny-****s that don't understand what it is like to grow up morbidly obese, craving food constantly but never being full. Nor do you lot understand just how difficult it is to radically change your diet, alter your taste forcibly, or deny the most basic of your taste cravings. You may not even understand how much of a difference to all of your outward and inward sensations and perceptions of the world are altered by massive weight differences. All of this, I know too well. I'm sure a few of you have read in the past my story here, so I'll keep it as brief and concise as I can. As a child I lived in a rather abusive family, who only showed their affection for me through food, expecting me to eat everything they laid out in front of me - which I did eagerly. At seventeen I looked in the mirror and was absolutely disgusted with what I had become, that I couldn't go a half hour without some source of sugar in my hand, that nothing I ate ever satisfied the hunger I felt. At two hundred, eighty pounds at my (weighed) largest, it was time for a change. Immediately I began to change my daily habits and my patterns of ingestion - fighting off the cravings and the outright pain of hunger I felt. I pushed myself harder than I ever had before both in exercise and diet, but it was well worth it. Quickly I dropped my first hundred pounds, and felt a world of difference. Really I didn't even know myself after that, but I had a much richer understanding of just how powerful my willpower was. Unfortunately over the following six years it has been up and down quite a bit, climbing all the way back up over two thirty at one point (stressful relationship, over-eating, no exercise, ect), which was the tipping point for me two years ago. Once again I was looking into the mirror at somebody I wasn't. So this time I decided to make a change for life and alter what I was eating at it's base, and how I was eating it so as to eliminate even the risk of apathy towards exercise. Every semblance of what my diet used to be is no more; what I eat now is as diametrically opposed to what I did previously as it can be. My carbs alone necessitated to be cut down to just a fifth of what they were previously just to get within the national food guide, much the same can be said of calories and fats and salts - you get the idea. With the types of foodstuffs I was eating before this wasn't an option, as I wouldn't be able to be full at any time and still maintain a tight grasp on my intake, as I know I would just take it overboard once again. Losing one hundred pounds quickly was easy compared to this, and I can quite confidently say that it is the hardest thing I ever have done, or will ever do. Imagine waking up one day and coming to the realisation that all of the foodstuffs you've loved all your life you cannot eat. None of it. Just to stay at a healthy, steady weight, everything you've loved the taste of has to go, with only glimpses of it passing you by. This is what I had to go through, and am still going through. But at one hundred, sixty two pounds with (about) twelve percent body fat, it is well worth it. Every time my stomach growls and I get an impulse to indulge in a big bowl of my favourite food I have to fight it tooth and nail, satiating myself on something else. Every time I pass by my favourite restaurant I have to quicken my pace. This is the sacrifice I have to make. This is what I feel most of you don't understand. I also want to comment briefly on physical differences I notice in a day-to-day situation: comfortable temperatures are different by a couple degrees; running my fingers over my skin feels different (I can feel muscle, bone, tendons that I couldn't before); movement is much easier, and my balance easier to come by; alcohol, sugar, caffeine affect me much quicker, and much harsher; physical exertion is easier (multitude of factors here though); satiation comes far easier from food; bodily functions operate much smoother and easier. This all take time to get used to, and still surprise me on a daily basis when I try to do something, but have to alter the way I do it. The mindset of being obese is difficult to eschew. While I don't shy away from admitting that I got as big as I was through over-eating and under-exercising, I know that there is more to it than just that - I know that not everybody walks around craving gargantuan quantities of food constantly all through their childhood. Call it hereditary, learned behaviour, or glandular, it is still a massive impulse that one cannot simply will away with the flick of a wrist. It is a life-long struggle against one of the most powerful forces and impulses in your own body. It does feel a little like killing yourself to save yourself. This is powerful stuff you're slagging off as though it was nothing those of you in the self-caused camp. Understand that I didn't intend what I went through as applicable to everybody with a weight issue, but the reading on it that I have done, alongside many other stories much like mine, do tend to support the idea that what I experienced isn't uncommon. And just in the interest of full disclosure: I'm of the feeling that we should run all the fatties the world over on a treadmill, and tell them to eat a damn salad! They're smelling up the place with their fat... Oh, and in answer to the original question: without hesitation, I would trade ten years of my own life just to be physically fit. There is a good chance that I've done this already with how hard I have pushed myself, and how hard I continue to do so.
You say it right here. No matter what biochemnical reason makes you eat to much, you CHOOSE what to eat. If you work in obesity research it's not uncommon that you contact more people with disorders of some kind than the rest of us, and that may eschew your vision on percentages a bit.
I suppose also the matter of choice can also mean being clued up on what not to eat. Many foods people consider to be healthy, or rather not likely to contain harmful stuff, aren't. Some of the best weight control diets were very simple. They told the dieter they could eat anything they liked as long as it incorporated 300g of oatmeal or 7 slices of wholemeal bread, per day, not per meal. By the time the dieter had stuffed up on those 'bulky' foods they didnt have much room to eat a family pack of Wotsits.
I was fat as a kid - too many cakes from grandmother, but when I started to get laughed at, I got myself on a bike every day and started training Taekwondo. A year later I was regularly beating crap out of those who laughed at me. Same goes to my girlfriend, I know her since we were kids. She was always fat and miserable. A few years ago I got sick of it, gave her a good bike and told her that she can either lock herself in the basement and be fat and depressive all her life, driven by primitive instincts to stuff her face full of chocolate, or show some mental strength and do something about it. That might seem brutal, but that's just how it works. We live in an era when life is easy - we get relatively cheap food in any quantity we desire and people simply lose incentive to make any effort, they're too used to passive consumption. This study shows it perfectly. Women would give up a decade of their life to just get what they want, rather than get some education on what they should eat and spend a few months on a gym. The same principle goes to education ("I cant write leterz cause I hav dyslexia and not becauz I was to lazy too lern in shcool and reed some bookz") and almost any other area of life. It's not a nuclear war that's the biggest threat to humanity, it's the passive, consumption driven lifestyle ethos of the 21st century. Authority without responsibility, consumption without effort and in general getting something for nothing - that's not the best way of making progress as a society. And by the way - getting thin is cheap, even if you opt for plastic surgery it's cheaper than a decent car. Try getting a doctorate on a university where every professor and doctor sees you as a future competition to the limited funding (that's how it works on every uni where I live). Or standing on a podium in a DH tournament despite having multiple sclerosis. Beating your urges and losing a few kilos is a walk in a park.
I'm certainly not underestimating the powers of addiction, biochemical behaviour or nurture (or lack thereof); I have and do still spend a large proportion of my time in the Priory (though not for addiction) and met a good number of people with similarly self-destructive substance habits. Your drugs were sugar and salt; theirs were heroin, nicotine, alcohol and cocaine. Your habits are mostly down to a very tough childhood - theirs might be down to similar parental influence, or something as comparatively weak as peer pressure. But either way, they're all in the same boat now - the phrase 'once a smoker, always a smoker' refers to the idea that once you have exposed your brain to nicotine for such a long time, even once you no longer crave it you will still be attracted to it and if you give in to that attraction chemical dependency will reassert itself much more quickly. The same is said by Alcoholics Anonymous, who have learned through bitter experience that one drink is always one too many. They have to spend the rest of their lives struggling and reminding themselves what one drink or a few lines will reduce them to, just like you. To be honest, I think you probably have it harder than them. There's less sympathy for people with chronic overeating disorders than anorexia, alcoholism or illegal substance abuse, and whilst people can legitimately avoid illegal drugs and booze the human body has to eat regularly, so the opportunities for lapse are higher. So congratulations on summoning the willpower to beat it, and by extension all the s*** that caused it. If I can summon the willpower to beat the hereditary depression and suicides in my family I know it will have been the hardest thing I've ever done too.
