“Healthy obesity” doesn’t exist. It is unequivocally bad for you
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
look at the sons and daughters of branded food conglomerate moguls and their top executives. youll likely find them quite trim.
Being obese isn’t a root cause. It is a symptom of something else.
Particularly, when it is a symptom of depression, believing in “healthy obesity” can be enabling even if it’s not the truth. That person (not statistic) needs to see themselves as healthy and loved to have a chance at being healthy.
Telling them to eat better or exercise is thinking about yourself in a generic version of their circumstances rather than them in their actual circumstances.
I don't buy it. Tolerance towards fatness has risen since the 80s, as have weights; both have gone up at the same time. The more tolerance our society has for fatness, the fatter people get. If more tolerance for fat people were the key to getting people to lose weight then there should be an inverse relationship between the two, but that just hasn't happened.
"Health obesity" isn't about staying obese, it is about shifting social stigmas as they seem to contribute (paradoxically) to obesity[1]. Why is this something you feel the need to support publicly and vocally instead of letting people's health be between them and their doctors (who also need to work on stigmas[2])? The more society makes this a social issue, the worse off people will be when external stressors land [3].
[1] https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291... [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/oby.23266 [3] https://academic.oup.com/abm/article/54/10/738/5901900
Feeling better in the moment just enables people to ignore the root cause and thus fail to make progress. They need truth that their current state sucks, hope that it could be better, and to recognize that their own agency has an outsized effect on their future. And maybe they could use some help breaking down their problems into smaller more achievable steps.
Sounds like enabling obesity to me.
Telling them to eat better or exercise doesn't work because it's a pain in the ass to be in a caloric deficit. They have statistically low dopamine levels (among other markers being out of wack) so they just don't have the mental fuel to deal with doing what's hard. That's what lead them to be obese in the first place, seeking comfort in food, sitting on their butt and avoiding the harshness of their reality.
Another key component are high cortisol levels (ie chronic stress due to past traumas causing depression and other mental illnesses), hindering the parasympathetic brain to switch on digestive metabolism.
You don't solve all these underling issues by saying "hey fat isn't that bad, you can still be healthy being heavy".
Like you wouldn't say to a drug addict "hey drugs aren't that bad for you" to make them feel less shitty about their situation.
How do we know it isn't going to help? Because we've been trying it for decades. Thin people yelling at fat people to lose weight in public does nothing. Time to focus on the systemic unhealthy issues our culture has and stop treating someone's fatness as their own, individual failure.
1. Historically being fat was considered a sign of good health. Of course, this was during times of massive food scarcity and the definition of fat was probably very different from what we consider fat today.
2. Massive amounts of money involved in telling people to eat/drink more, and then spend more money in gyms and taking pills to lose that weight. As opposed to just eating less and then living normal healthy active lives. There’s not much money in the latter.
3. People wanting to stop fat-shaming (which is also unequivocally bad…fat shaming only makes it harder for people to lose weight), trying to convince other people that someone being fat does not make them bad, quickly morphing into being fat is good.
I do not encourage fat shaming at all, but I can also imagine that in some cases shame may be a powerful motivator for some people. Is there hard data showing that it actually makes it harder?
Now it’s a different story if you’re willing to work with them daily to help them lose weight or something similar. But just telling your friend “he your fat, it’s bad for you fix it” will only hurt
It is not at all a constructive approach.
The "healthy obesity" thing is the pendulum flying to the opposite end of the spectrum: unconditional support turned into acceptance and promotion of what we know to not be true.
"Shame implies a personal failing, which readily translates into recognizing and correcting those personal failings."
In the 20th century, Americans fat shamed each other and were less fat. Today in Asia, people still fat shame each other and they're a lot less fat than Americans.
Unfortunately getting into that argument is a minefield.
Just let them be adults and manager their life as they please. At one point they might becone fed up with life as a fat person and they'll make the effort.
And it they don't, well, there are people who smoke from teenage years all the way to the grave
But, either eay, people dont humiliate smokers the way they do with fat people
No, we just tax the shit out of tobacco, exclude them from certain insurance plans, blame and shame them about smoking indoors or inside vehicles, and tell smokers to go huddle outside and off to the side, away from doors, windows, and air intakes, while they do the thing we don't like.
Or were you thinking of air travel, where the difference between a smoker and a non-smoker is either negligible (because they aren't currently smoking), or completely excludes the smoker from the activity (because 16 hours in a plane is too long without a cigarette for them).
Humiliate them? Not often. But we sure as hell told them to take it someplace else; anyplace else, just not near the rest of us.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
If you are shamed for your body, you feel even worse; you may then eat even more to feel better.
Well, we’re probably 70+ years into a National experiment with it, and weights are only going up.
The short of it is that it increases stress, increases depression, eating disorders, and risk of suicide.
As for shame and its ironic effects, you can look to Brene Brown's research and that of other shame researchers.
1 year later, and I'm down 35 pounds with another 10-20 to go. I feel great! Walking doesn't hurt anymore, doing physical stuff is fun again, and I have more energy than I used to. All that to say, the guilt and shame definitely helped motivate me, but YMMV :)
On a related note, find yourself in a woman’s house and notice the inspirational text artwork. “Eat, Love, Pray”, “Worrying works because it never happens”, etc. These little signs are powerful.
A bit brief though, probably need to check the cited material. The overall theme of the report as awhile though is that motivation issues are less of a factor than generally believed.
I think it's better to stick to that, and just drop the term 'fat-shaming'.
It is the same as changing "retard" to "mentally challenged" or "handicapped" to "disabled"... the next term just becomes equally toxic because you haven't changed the actual stigma, just the word used to express it.
But recent efforts have been focused on blurring the lines here.
The stigma causes the hate, they're effectively the same thing (I used them interchangeably) and leads directly to adverse actions against those individuals.
And as I said above - the argument generally shifts at that point to "it's good for them to be attacked, maybe it'll motivate them". Because again, it's just a socially-acceptable vector for hate. We've gradually run out of other forms like racism and sexism, for a while it was homophobia (and the argument was that was a choice too, so it was fine to attack), but we'll always have fat people.
Stop attacking, hating, "stigmatizing", whatever you want to call it, based on traits. It's all "isms" and 50 years ago it is the same argument used to defend racism. Just be civil and treat people like human beings, it's not that complicated.
Others, on the other hand, will be pushed further back into the hole by such talk. This is very individual.
I'm surprised you put that in and not:
4. motivated reasoning. People want reasons to justify their current lifestyle and not having to put in hard work to change it.
For point #1, most western cultures already idealize thinness. Therefore that's not really a factor unless you're from a culture that idealizes being fat.
Wasn't it more a sign of being wealthy and successful? Like if you were fat, it meant you could afford to spend a lot of money/effort on getting food and didn't need to do difficult work outside for 8+ hours a day?
Not sure people were calling it healthy, so much as treating it like a status symbol (because it kinda was).
He always responded: "I just wanted to move to a place where the poor people were fat."
You either need to demonstrate some kind of shame for your unhealthiness or some kind rationale that explains how its actually healthy.
The honest facts that “I like to eat tasty good” and “I don’t really enjoy too much physical activity” are only permissible if you also say “and I can’t help myself” or “and it’s actually not unhealthy.”
It’s a social dance that makes people hide the personal truth that health isn’t the only thing that matters in life.
For me being obese is not really a choice. It's just really hard to do anything about it, especially because I tend to overeat when I encounter stress in life. And I'm not wired with the discipline to fix it. I often go on diets but they never last.
Also, living alone cooking is a real chore and there's not enough ready made healthy food.
And in terms of exercise I really hate team sports and mindless weight lifting. I do hike a bit though when the season permits.
Are these excuses? Sure but if I could have changed it I would have.
Like: car dependent suburbia. If you don't grow up walking to the shops with your parents, walking to the park to play, walking to school, cycling to school, walking or cycling to work; if your only exposure to movement is mandatory exercise at school which is unpleasant, what does that do to your lifelong views? If your environment doesn't have anywhere interesting to walk to, or any sidewalk to walk on, what does that do?
Like: If your parents and family never moved except to get to the car, what kind of early mental expectations does that set you up with? Children try to imitate their parents, if the parents alway groan and complain about having to walk anywhere, that's some kind of lesson.
Like: Livestrong.com says "The average restaurant meal is four times larger than it was in the 1950s. Similarly, the size of American-manufactured dinner plates has increased nearly 23 percent, from 9.6 inch". If you habitually eat out at restaurants and they gradually feed you more, more sugary, food, but you still have the "clean your plate to be polite" mentality, what does that do?
Like: where did this idea of "healthy food" come from? "Health" isn't something in food.
Like: where did the idea that cooking is "a real chore" come from? Can't one grow up to find preparing food a relaxing joy, an interest, an everyday part of life? Or learn to spend less time on it, e.g. meal prepping?
Like: "I tend to overeat when I encounter stress in life" - Where does that behaviour come from? That's learned from somewhere, it isn't innate to cavepeople to have food on hand just in case life gets stressful, it's likely some family or community cultural habit where others might not do that.
I think it was Paul Lutus in a Reddit AMA, someone asked him if he baked much when living in a cabin in the woods, and he said he found it difficult to resist eating baked goods so he just didn't make them or buy them. That kind of discipline is much easier than buying them, having them nearby, and trying to resist eating them every moment forever.
> "Sure but if I could have changed it I would have."
Perhaps you can't, there are suggestions that becoming obese screws up your body forever, so it burns less fat (e.g. prefering quicker feeling of tiredness to reduce movement, rather than breaking the laws of thermodynamics), holds onto fat more strongly, distorts feelings of hunger and satiety and food cravings. UK comedian Ed Gamble who lost a lot of weight jokingly commented about thin people "if you don't think about food, what are you thinking about literally all the time?". It's possible that wasn't joking and years of obsessively thinking about food engrained that as a pattern he will be stuck with for the rest of his life, when always-thin people can forget about food when thinking about other things.
>[...]
>Like: car dependent suburbia
It seems weird to blame car dependent suburbia for the rise from 1950. Did "car dependent suburbia" really get worse compared to 1950? Given urbanization trends, you'd think that car dependence actually went down compared 1950.
Pew Research[2] says suburbs have grown 6.4 million people by migration from cities and rural populations between 2000 and 2018. Ten fastest growing communities in America in 2021 are suburbs[5].
Car companies made and sold about 58 million cars in the USA in the 1950s decade[3].
Eisenhower's interstate highway act was 1956, and miles of highway has increased by hundreds of thousands since 1990[4].
[0] https://www.insider.com/vintage-photos-levittown-suburbs-50s... and https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demogra...
[1] https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/02/5-facts-abo...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_automobile_industry_i...
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183397/united-states-hig...
[5] https://legallysociable.com/2021/09/19/the-ten-fastest-growi...
Imagine if you only learned from the experience that you need more revenue sooner instead of using the most fun tech, but you hadn't had it beaten into you that it was YOUR FAULT, that would be ... unfair, right? We'd all be missing an opportunity to put you in your place which you clearly deserve by circular reasoning of being at fault.
Plus it makes us feel better because if it's your fault, that means you weren't crushed by enormous imbalanced forces so that won't happen to us. If nobody can resist the $4Bn/year CocaCola advertising spend on every media platform going, maybe I can't either. But if you're just weak, then I maybe can.
Perhaps your social circle doesn’t accept that attitude, but in some of the most obese parts of the country, the norm is to “eat some steak and potatoes and put some meat on your bones, skinny boy”
There’s a reason doctors are afraid to tell patients they’re overweight. People interpret it as a personal attack on their choices rather than a medical diagnosis.
The thought goes: If I am not doing things the way others do, I must be mentally ill somehow and in need of a cure.
Confident self-awareness goes a long way, although self-destructive behavior in general isn't respected, nor should it be IMO.
How do this claim make you feel? "Alcoholism isn't objectively bad because for some people boozing matters more than health."
Remember that being obese effects the people around you. Particularly, obese adults teach bad lifestyle lessons by example to their children, who in turn are more likely to be obese than other kids because of it. Having obese parents is even worse for a child's life expectancy than second hand smoke from chainsmoking parents.
These constructs are usually the opposite of what they claim, like “healthy” in this example.
Did you read the article?
I can give you two simple examples:
Look at any picture of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson when he has been ripped. Ditto with Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime.
BMI says these folks are either obese or severely obese. Extreme examples, but illustrative of the weakness of bmi.
On a personal level, I have been listed as obese by a doctor when I weighed in 205 as someone who is 5’11” (somewhat carelessly, because bmi was 28.x, and “obese” is 30+, but still…).
Doctor did not care to notice that I was very muscular, exercise regularly (weights and cardio), and was pretty lean.
The doctor wanted to talk to me about my “weight problem”. I pulled out dexa can showing that I had 176 pounds of lean body mass and was 14-15% body fat (“healthy” range, and probably much leaner than her, even though she was slight build and thin), told her about my diet and exercise regimen, and she quickly reversed course.
You can see how muscular people are unhappy about bmi being used for individual evaluation.
BMI is a measure that is meant to be used to measure populations rather than individuals. Being used as a quick a dirty evaluation tool without looking in more detail by the doctor is irresponsible medicine — yet it is common practice.
This is why “anybody could come to believe otherwise”.
Obviously, if the dexa scan comes back saying someone is 30% body fat, no amount of muscle can make that “healthy”, but I think that’s not where most thoughtful people have issues with potentially specious claims of obesity.
Those all fail to reliably predict body fatness in all populations.
All of those measurements should be taken in context with other health signs, like blood pressure, fasting glucose and maybe eating/exercise habits as well.
I’m a 50-something desk jockey, and I’ve never used steroids or any sort of PED. I just eat well, make an effort to exercise, and my genetics steer me towards muscle building. I was also an athlete when I was younger (not sure if this matters).
I mentioned the rock and Arnold were extreme examples, but they were there to make a point… bmi is not meant to be used to measure individuals.
Your skeleton is there to give the muscles something to form around. Your muscles are supporting the body, not the other way around.
It’s not like your body has to drag around muscles like it’s a burden…
The point in using extremes and then a more modest (and probably realistic) example of myself was that BMI is a potential trap for anyone who has muscle (even if they are, in fact, very fat). They will most likely be rated a category or two above where they should be, and a weight loss regimen for someone who is “extremely obese” versus someone who is merely “overweight” will probably look very different. Specifically, one will probably be a major intervention or lifestyle change, while the other is most likely a small/medium lifestyle change.
2. Note the article is about how BMI is a bad measure for many weight types and frequently miscategorizes risk (e.g., by underweighting risk to “normal” bmi folks with a high body fat %).
The argument that I’m trying to make is not to “checkmate bodyshamers”, it’s to show that bmi is overall a pretty bad measure to use to evaluate weight and health in individuals that include a variety of body types.
Fwiw, I’m not a fan of the “healthy at any weight” stance (that’s clearly BS), but I am definitely trying to show that commonly held beliefs about things like BMI even and especially in the medical community can be dangerous and irresponsible (just like the article explains).
Really?
Would you mind telling that to my former doctor who wrote down in my chart that I was “obese” just based on my height, weight, and a quick visual scan? She was starting into “substantial lifestyle change” talks before I showed her my data.
She didn’t reverse course until I showed her my dexa scan and told her my diet and exercise regimen.
My point is that there are plenty of people who are labeled a category or two worse than they actually are. Yes, many people are actually obese — I get that — but people who are naturally muscular quickly grow tired of (and sometimes numb to) being categorized as worse than they actually are.
Folks who talk about obesity, especially medical folks and media folks, would do well to be more nuanced in their analysis and discussion of the data.
This has something to do with political correctness, which is now the status quo, but that's a different matter.
When societies put up facades and allows delusion to persists, the actual issue doesn't go away. People are still fat, unhealthy (and dying from it), and their appearance is still an issue (even if friends lie or avoid it).
Probably because some popular "treatments" for the condition often attempted are far worse than obesity itself. Yo-yo dieting, amphetamine use, serial liposuction, binge eating and throwing up, et cetera.
However there are studies which find lowest mortality for the slightly overweight with BMI < 30. For instance: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1555137 and https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2022.8577...
> Your BMI tells me your overweight. > But rugby players BMIs are high, and they aren't overweight! > You don't play rugby though do you.
I'm glad that "fat acceptance" may be turning a corner and will be banished hopefully and there can be a semblance of rational discourse.
Ideally you should be a BMI 22, non smoking, non drinking, long distance runner living in the countryside eating a perfectly balanced diet.
Mosy of us will achieve all that, just do what you can.
There's loads of nasty ways to mess up your health. Being fat seems to be the most appealing one (I get to eat what I want and sit around all day? Hell yeah!).
It's not the most appealing one, it's the hardest one to manage. You can not smoke, you can not drink alcohol, you can not take drugs, but you cannot not eat.
You end up with the cheapest calories being lightly processed grains like rice and flour, then you end up with more processed grains like white bread and ramen, then move to things like peanut butter, before hitting junk food. The point is that the cheapest calories aren’t exactly healthy.
The produce aisle tends to be pretty expensive per calorie, potatoes excepted, since veggies aren’t calorically dense, and are sold mostly by weight.
See: potatoes. They're basically pure calories and they're several times cheaper than any junk food. Junk food is the most expensive food no matter how you slice it. The only metric by which junk food might win is in the lazy glutton category; if somebody is too lazy to put a potato in their oven 45 minutes before their meal, then a bag of potato chips has an advantage. But in no other sense is junk food more efficient. And even for lazy people, there are plenty of cheap as dirt veggies that require less cooking or no cooking at all. A bag of apples is a very cheap way of getting a sugar rush without any food prep, but fat people would rather spend that money on several gallons of cola a week.
I challenge you to find any junk food that comes even close to that kind of caloric density per dollar. The cheapest junk food has a tenth of the calories per dollar than a bag of rice from Costco (4-5k calories per dollar), at best.
The problem is that the cheap stuff takes a little effort to make tasty compared to the hyper-palatable junk food. The whole "junk food is cheaper than whole foods per calorie" is nonsense.
The point is, if money is tight, which invariably means that time is tight, people don't have time to cook dried pinto beans, or make bread for EVERY meal where the prep time is roughly 12 hours. Add into that, even knowing how to cook is a skill. An all bread and pinto diet is likely to take more time than most people have, and not yield a great health outcome anyway.
If you look at it as categories, the junk food, and processed food aisles are where you are going to on average get your dollar to go furthest.
The whole point of the "myth" is that it is FAR more efficient and cheaper to get everyone enough calories with food from the junk aisle. The origins I believe come from a cooking show where the budget and time were limited. Professional chefs gave up.
Here's the challenge: you need to serve a meal to 4 people (2,500 caloriesp) you have $10 and 1 hour including shopping and cooking. I can think of half a dozen meals that come from processed foods where that is possible, but doing that with fresh foods is HARD.
If you want to go the pure science route, here's a peer review study from the NIH showing that in many places on earth, healthy food is provably more expensive https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6825829/
High-starch vegetables are a major contributor to obesity.
I bet that it is the "frying" part or the sauce or butter that comes with it, that leaves a lasting impression on the hips.
No one ever got fat eating only vegetables. But you can't eat only vegetables and get all the necessary nutrients(at least not easily).
Throw some eggs or lean chicken meat into the mix and you've got a complete diet that would be very difficult to become fat on.
However, you don't have to be that "extreme". Just eating mostly vegetables and cutting out all the obvious crap will do.
The fact that this is somehow unimaginably strict to many people just shows how completely fucked up our relationship with food is. Most of the foods that make us fat didn't even exist a hundred years ago (at least in its modern, highly processed form) and now people somehow can't imagine living without them.
Getting iron from non-heme sources is also kind of hit-or-miss.
Eat healthy food, and eat only when you're hungry, and most likely your body would auto-regulate the calory intake just fine.
But I also managed to lose 30kg eating (lean) meat, full-fat dairy and almost no green vegetables, just a lot of oats for starch/fibre and nuts for extra protein/vitamins/minerals and healthy fats.
But it's also just really hard to tell what food is actually healthy. Some foods are obviously healthy. Some are obviously unhealthy. But a lot is in the middle somewhere, having both healthy and unhealthy aspects.
Some foods are even controversial in the research, like butterfat which many people lump into the group "saturated fats", which is universally thought to be unhealthy by laypeople. But there are multiple types of saturated fat(ty acids), so it's actually really complicated.
My rough intuition based on reading a bunch of research is that dairy fat is actually quite healthy in small amounts(it's very calorically dense). I could go into a lot more detail on why but the gist is butterfat has a lot of short- and medium-chain fatty acids, which are good. It's the long and very-long you want to avoid.
The 3-4 meals + the constant availability of food is definitely new.
The human brain's ability to use ketones(byproducts of fat metabolism) for energy is actually unique to humans, suggesting a selective pressure towards surviving starvation in our evolutionary past.
You aren’t marching in a legion, working in the fields or building a giant monument without proper food.
Since food preparation took much more time and the logistics were complicated the number of meals and choices were limited but pretty much every meal was packed with carbs and often with fat too (lard, oils etc).
Sweeteners whether it’s honey or other sugars were also quite common and very much so not limited to the ruling classes.
our brains use a very large share of our total energy; so that adaptation may just be a requirement of additional brain energy use and not a adaptation particularly for starvation levels higher than other animals.
It's important to point out that for a lot obese people, hunger hormones are going to be out of whack. So while following hunger might certainly be good for avoiding obesity, it's not necessarily as helpful in losing weight.
The idea of Predestination with regards to eating needs to stop. If there is a psychological addiction then that's the part to be addressed, it's a valid concern. I see what people eat - even people that are not obese - and it's disgusting. I can see at work, at restaurants, even walking in the streets what people eat. That this is 'normal' is what we have to actually try to stigmatize. Donuts, muffins, giant appetizes at dinner, all that stuff should be almost never eaten. Birthday cakes? All that stuff will become disgusting and nauseating to you if you step away from it for just a few months, and your body adapts away from sugar and carbs. It might be hard in the beginning as your metabolism struggles to adjust and keep signaling for you to eat more.
And for the record - not drinking alcohol is a lot harder than not eating for many people I know.
On the other hand I have successfully lost 100 lbs in 6 months in the past, while eating fast food daily.
I won't discuss the "healthiness" aspect of it, but losing weight is ONLY a matter of calories.
I've spent a lot of time experimenting on myself, I can eat lower calories but if those lower calories are bread and sugary crap, I don't get leaner, I get fatter and weaker.
Strongly doubt this assertion
I am naturally thin. That statement ("i get to eat what i want and sit around all day") is true of my body. Is it such a strange idea that there are as many people who are naturally thin as there are that are naturally fat? Those people aren't making a choice to be fat any more than i am making a choice to be thin. Why should they feel bad about their body?
Instead of focusing on individual behavior, you should be speaking out against a government that built a car society, made cities hostile to walking and biking, and made cheap unhealthy food the easiest and cheapest option for most.
Walking and exercise in general make less difference to weight loss than diet.
People know what food is healthy. If they choose not to do it, it's on them.
2. I'm the great-grandparent in this thread. My original comment was in essence: I am naturally skinny, nobody questions that. Is it so strange that people might be naturally fat? You've said something that DIRECTLY contradicts that argument, without any evidence or argument to explain why - all you've done is assert the opposite of what I said. You're going to have to do better. Citation needed on your part.
In animal husbandry, people breed livestock for their "feed conversion ratio" - I.e which animals can most efficiently convert the same amount of food into the most additional bodyweight. It's not a stretch to think something similar might happen in people.
However, if you're one of those people that puts on more weight per item of food then it sucks to be you, but you'll need to eat less food.
Re: your point about medicines - I doubt they manage to create additional calories out of thin air.
But... your overall point is that people need to suffer in discomfort for their entire life so their body looks the way you want it to look? Or so that they stay in good health? If someone is faced with the choice of being fat and happy for 75 years, or being skinny and suffering for 80 years (or whatever the lifespan difference is), why do you feel like your opinion about that choice is something anybody needs to hear? Why is someone else’s choice your business? Do you think that someone should be ashamed or embarrassed about choosing one of those?
I didn’t have to make that choice. But if I did i would 100% choose fat and happy, and i would be upset with anyone who tried to make me unhappy for my choice - especially if it’s coming from someone who didn’t have to make that choice themselves
It's nothing to do with how I think people should look aesthetically, and I don't think the difference is about an extra 5 years of life. There is also "health-span" to consider - i.e. are you bed bound or unable to walk to the shops in the last few years of your life?
>>why do you feel like your opinion about that choice is something anybody needs to hear?
You seem confused as to the purpose of the comment section on a website. Discussing differing views is the whole point of it, I thought. I'm not running up to overweight people in the street and shouting abuse at them.
I'm also not mandating six packs. A certain level of fat is healthy. And I also have zero problem with people like this who own it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG8k8ouN8ro The people I have contempt for are the "Healthy at any size" liars.
Walking and exercise make a HUGE difference in average weight. Just look at Canada, a place mostly analogous to the US, but with way more walkable cities and better public transit. They don't have this problem.
Regardless of how people get fat, we know for a fact that it's nearly impossible to get back to a healthy weight. Children of fat parents are more likely to be fat, both because of genetics and because of diet. Is it their fault that they were born that way?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy
https://researchblog.duke.edu/2021/03/24/duke-researcher-bus...
I got back to a healthy weight by losing 15kgs. It can be done.
Interesting. I like to walk generally, but in the last year, with a fresh Garmin watch prodding me into more steps, I increased my walking by at least 50 per cent. I actually made some 5 million steps last year, at least 7 km every day, in every weather.
My weight fluctuated a bit, but basically didn't change. I am not fat, but I have some amount of belly fat I don't like.
What really changed and improved was my immune system. I am not totally immune to everything, but I tolerate a lot more environmental distress (cold, hot, sweating, getting soaked by rain etc.) before encountering first symptoms of having a cold.
What exercise helps with is making sure that the occasional binge, or change in circumstances, doesn't lead to permanent weight gain. If you're temporarily disabled for 2 weeks and can't move and put on some weight, your body then burns more of that fat when you go back to exercising, or regulates your appetite so you eat less.
But if you're not used to exercising and then suddenly increase your caloric intake, your body has less opportunity to burn the extra fat, so it leads to long term weight gain, and eventually your gut biome and body adjust to the new normal.
And no, the jury is not out on what food is healthy. Carbs are public enemy number 1 according to keto people. Carbs are the best according to Italians.
- Microbiome (eg due to bad microbiome passed on at birth): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27255389/
- Sitting the whole day
- Circadian rhythm disturbance, eg through shift work
- Gestational diabetes increases infant‘s T2D risk later in life
- Hypothyroidism
- Hypogonadism / low Testosterone
- Chronic inflammation, eg via inflamed root canals or chronic infections. People can have eg low grade E. coli overgrowth without knowing.
- Low gut barrier function due to drugs or inflammation
- many many more
Yes, there's "less bad" options, like not eating your whole meal, and/or buying "fake health" food.
Healthy convenience food is very hard to come by and the unhealthy stuff is everywhere.
Smokers are chemically and behaviourally addicted to a substance that's killing them. Just like alcoholics and heroin addicts.
It's probably appropriate to view obese people (food addicts) in a similar way. I don't understand the reaction of telling them to feel bad though. People who are addicted to harmful substances deserve sympathy and medical care.
What an interesting take. Are you saying that people do not essentially "choose" what weight to be by their eating habits?
The problem is not that we aren't listening to our doctors - the problem is that people like OP exist who self-appoint themselves as our doctors and start preaching. And that word was chosen carefully, because it's exactly the same bullshit.
Losing weight is actually really easy. Eat less calories than you burn, and be motivated. My first serious attempt I managed to lose almost 30kg. Sticking with it and keeping it low is really hard. Because every kilo you gain back makes you that much less motivated.
But if you're not motivated, no amount of fascile health advice is going to help. Motivation must come from within. And it can be hard to maintain.
The only diet advice I have from my experience: make a diet you like. If you hate the diet, it will never work. Dieting doesn't have to suck.
I've often heard fitness instructors often phrase this as "weight loss is simple, but not easy" precisely because it's hard to sustain CICO discipline over a reasonable period of time.
As I understand, you just need to consume fewer calories, less sugar and do more exercise. But there's cravings. It's harder to get healthy food at restaurants and cafes. It's harder to cook healthy and tasty food - no one wants to eat miserable food for months, many doctor and nutritionists will just tell patients to eat bland food day after day, like people are robots without souls.
I've heard the same thing about the C programming language: it's a small simple language, but programming with it is hard!
But dieting doesn't have to suck at all. You can diet on food you enjoy no problem.
They key for me was to design a diet to my liking as opposed to one that sucked all the enjoyment out of food. Here are some of the ways I accomplished this:
0. My BMR is about 2000 for reference. I used myfitnesspal w a kitchen scale to count calories and a fitbit(charge 4) to estimate my metabolic rate. I weighed in daily, not weekly, and then went by the weekly average to see progress. I found that weight could often fluctuate by as much as a kg daily due to variables like bowel movements, hydration and imprecision of the scale. Weighing in daily helped control for that.
1. Dinner is sacred. It should be filling and tasty. One of the dinners I made the most was chicken breast with brown rice and a variety of delicious sauces. I managed to make a recipe that included 1 chicken breast sliced up, brown rice and creme fraiche and butter added to the sauce, often with lots of mushrooms, at about 1000kcal pr meal. That's pretty much a full-blown dinner with a very high protein content. And absolutely delicious.
2. To make room for dinner, my breakfast and lunch were quite spartan, about 2-300 calories each. And I would eat maybe 200 calories of nuts or something before bed, because it helped me sleep better. In total that leaves a total daily consumption of 1800kcal. This provides a buffer of 200 calories to my base metabolic rate. That's enough that any added physical activity is always a bonus. But I could sit on my ass all day and still break even at worst. Some days you just don't feel like going outside at all.
3. Insisted on at least 6, ideally 8 hrs of sleep every night. Took whatever steps necessary to make that happen without medication that worsen sleep quality. One thing that really helped here was to take a short walk after dinner. This prevented me from my natural dinner nap which made sleeping at night much easier. Adequate sleep is crucial for losing weight.
4. Incorporate a cheat day at most once a week, at least once a month, making sure it coincided with a lot of activity. So if I got a dinner invite, I would find some way to be really active that day. Maybe I'd walk most of the way to/from the restaurant, or get to public transport by taking a a forest trail in rough terrain. And then I would eat whatever the hell I wanted to that day, as long as I'm not straight up gluttonous about it. This meant in practice that it was pretty hard for me to actually eat more than I burned, because I still ate tiny meals before dinner.
5. Walk whenever possible. Find little ways to walk a bit more, walk one bus stop further than you need to. If you're overweight, just walking can burn a surprising amount of calories.
6. I never set foot in a gym, went jogging or any other "tryhard" forms of exercise. I just took enjoyable walks. More than adequate exercise for weight loss for me anyway.
With this set up I lost 0.5-1kg every week all the while enjoying my diet every day, and regularly allowing some guilty pleasures. And I never did or ate something I hated.
The reason I eventually failed was the bane of my existence: my ADHD, and winter depression. I was doing well with all this taking medication, which enabled me to have all these routines at all. But then the usual depressive episode happened and things got so bad I stopped taking medication, all routines ceased to exist and weight came back. I'm ramping up for another go, with a new plan. In the winter I will attempt to maintain weight, not lose it. This should be significantly easier. And I'm taking more steps to avoid another winter depression but that's a whole other rabbit hole.
Otherwise after the "diet", they will go back to their original weight.
Note: I'm using the definition most people think when they hear diet, which is a restriction.
I had to look up that word: A person usually of little talent who tries hard to succeed, especially through imitation, usually to gain fame or popularity.
A big part of habit change is also changing identity, how you see yourself. In that sense it might be worth investigating your aversion to people that exercise. Many forms of exercise can become quite addictive in themselves. Additionally building some basis of muscle if you have never trained before can increase your base metabolism.
When I say tryhard, I just meant anything that to me is not enjoyable and therefore requires mental effort just to motivate me to do it.
I don't have an aversion to people that exercise. I exercise. Exercise doesn't have to include going to a gym or running. I used to think I just hate all exercise, but I learned that really I just hate synthetic exercise, like gyms and jogging on asphalt. I love spending time in nature, forests, river valleys. It's great exercise. Hell you could go do calisthenics in the woods if you really wanted to. You can do pullups from branches etc.
My point both for dieting and exercise is that the key is to find something you don't hate doing. I resent the implication that hating gyms is some kind of character flaw that needs fixing. If you enjoy the gym, great, go there! If you don't, find something else! I definitely got addicted to walking/bursting/parkouring around a river valley with some death metal in my ears. In the summer I would do it almost every day for half an hour just because I wanted to.
As for growing muscle, this is certainly also important, and initially I tried to incorporate it, but I found that building muscle while also eating a caloric deficit greatly reduced my options in terms of food. I came to the conclusion I had to cut out almost all fat to accomodate the protein and carbs necessary for that. I decided to postpone this until a "stage 2" where I would change my diet to instead maintain weight while gaining muscle and losing fat, but I never got there. Feeling good about next time though because I know what failed last time and what I need to watch out for.
While there are many people that have a comparatively harder time to retain a healthy weight, no one has to be obese. A small minority might find it so hard to not become obese that they simply cannot manage it, but that fact should not dominate public discourse and act as an excuse for everyone.
More importantly, obesity is contagious. You give it to your kids and family. If you don't stop it, your loved ones might suffer.
Can they?
We agree that some fat people can change their weight to become thin. But do we agree that not all fat people can? For example what about people who have become fat as a result of side effects from medication that is treating other health conditions. Hopefully you accept that's not something those people can realistically change. Should they also feel bad about their bodies? I would say no. Now how do we tell which fat people we think should feel bad about their bodies and which shouldn't? Do we have a little health background interview with each one first? Or maybe we could just accept people for who they are, and don't make anyone feel bad for what their body looks like.
As for contagiousness, idk. I know thin kids of fat parents, and I know fat kids of thin parents. I suspect there's a lot more at play than a simple "fat adults make kids fat".
I think the opposite is true, though I don't have statistics in front of me. Obesity traditionally had low rates of recovery. A huge percentage can never seem to figure it out.
The situation looks so grim that doctors were pushing to stop treating it as a "choice". I recall it being controversial, but somewhat agreeing with that perspective. Looking at a condition where people "want" to change, but almost always fail, it appears to look more like an incurable disease, than something that can easily be fixed with "discipline".
What's the point of guilt tripping people when the results are so consistently bad? I know there may have been some breakthroughs since then.
edit: parent comment was edited to remove the examples of eating behaviors they believe are the cause of fatness. Their examples were all things that I as a naturally skinny person do or have done regularly.
> In response to 84 days of 1000 kcal/day of overfeeding, 12 pairs of monozygotic twins gained on average 8.1 kg, but the range was from 4.3 to 13.3 kg.
That’s not a vast range? It means some people gain more than they „should“, and some less than half of the caloric intake.
It’s also not „my“ arithmetic btw.
My original response was to a comment suggesting that overweight and obese people get home and eat 15 chocolate bars. My observation, supported by your additional evidence, is that a small imbalance has a substantial cumulative effect.
Some are genetically predisposed to becoming fat. Its still a fact that they are fat. And being fat comes with associated health risks.
As for how it went from 10% to 60% (your numbers, idk if they're right) one piece of the puzzle is that in 1998 the definition of obesity was changed, which made MANY more people fall into the obese category who did not previously: http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9806/17/weight.guidelines/
Yes people have gotten fatter. That’s a thing that’s happening. To me that’s evidence of systemic problems in our food supply, economic factors like poverty. None of which are reason to treat someone poorly for being impacted by that.
Asking people to ear less than they are eating now is thus asking them to be perpetually hungry. It can be done, even for a year or two if they have willpower, but eventually they will get sick of being cold, tired and irritated all the time --because that is what chronic hunger does to you-- and they will go back to the normal behavior of eating until they are no longer hungry.
Unless they are on a particularly aggressive program of calorie reduction, eating less than they are eating now is not asking them to be perpetually hungry.
Alcoholics are "making a choice" to drink alcohol. But we both know that it's more complicated than that. There are both habits and chemical addictions in play which makes it incredibly hard to stop.
Why don't you afford the obesity issue the same level of understanding?
Because naturally thin people, and the opposite case, are outliers.
There are very few people, especially in the 40s, that can eat a lot and still remain thin.
Setting aside the fact that you've conceded that you don't know if someone is fat "by choice" or because they are an outlier, so you're ok with making people who are fat because of natural reasons feel bad as casualties in your noble quest to make people who are fat "by choice" feel bad.
Do we shame people for the health risk of going skiing? It's a well know health risk, yet i don't see a lot of people telling skiiers their lifestyle disgusts them.
> in your noble quest to make people who are fat "by choice" feel bad.
If you're taking this personally, I don't shame anybody, and I don't spend time on "quests" centered on other people.
I agree actually with you that people are responsible for their choice, and shaming them (as in "you're fat, ha-ha") is not a proper attitude.
Regarding fat excess in itself (that is, disassociated from a given person), on modern times _and_ in western society, while in principle it may be risky as other activities, it's on a very large scale, so it's important to consider it as a serious problem.
The criticism of "lose weight at any cost necessary" is that people who have been fat their entire lives will get yelled at to lose a significant percentage of their body weight, with very little care given to their actual health.
It's incredibly naive and destructive to assume all extremely fat people got that way because "they eat pizza all the time" and they should simply stop eating so much pizza to fix all of life's problems. If they can't lose the weight it's clearly because they're not trying hard enough.
That's why the discussion around this isn't changing the needle on America's weight gain (or most populations across the Earth). We focus on the thinness of the person before we focus on the health.
IOW, 'naturally thin' is a bogus idea.
BMI is a useful heuristic (BMI over 30 and not a powerlifter? Probably unhealthy, let's look at other characteristics and see how unhealthy and how to address it) but a terrible target until you know your own body.
that part is tricky, takes a lot of time, experiments
But also I think the body shape makes a big diff, I have very thin limbs, long legs, my best BMI is between 17 and 18, without limiting myself in food quantity (I alwways eat as much as I can, tho I naturally like to eat 1 or 2 meals a day max)
You say 30 BMI, but in my experience unless you are lifting a lot of weights 25 is the upper limit. Ten years ago I hit 25 BMI, and despite feeling "normal" there were already the first signs of being fat: thights always red, sweaty all day and way less resistance than today.
I lost 15 kg (33 lbs) not by doing crazy exercise, but by cutting 100% of shitty food and eating beyond necesity.
Which is why I also said BMI is a poor target. 22 BMI, for me, would be an awful target. I'd be gaunt and have to lose a lot of muscle mass, not just fat (which I don't have a lot of to lose). Even bringing body fat percentage from 15% to 10%, which is still healthy, would only get me down to about 180lbs. That would leave me 25lbs over the target for a 22 BMI. That's my body, not yours, not anyone else's. I've learned what is healthy for me and have set goals and expectations around that. I wouldn't expect yours, or anyone else's, to be the same. You've realized that 25 BMI is too high for you, great. Now you know, but that doesn't apply to everyone. And the original poster in this thread claiming everyone should be at 22 BMI is clearly also speaking about a particular experience which is not applicable to everyone, but writing as if it is.
I get you...
I'm 6'0" (183cm) and 212 lbs (96kg) (BMI=29). I'm at 17% body fat and am working toward 10%, but also have been lifting weights heavily. I just got down to size 32 jeans (82cm waist) but have a 48.5" chest (123cm) and 15.5" (40cm) biceps. I still wish to lose 15-20lb more, but then I'd be at 195lb and about 8% body fat -- with a BMI of ~27. (Assuming I don't add more muscle at the same time.)
It is a lot better than a 15 months ago when I made my life change - I was 240lb (109kg) and 38% body fat, and pushing a 38" (96cm) waist, truly obese. And I felt like shite.
I am surprised how much I have come to love weightlifting, rowing, and eating a diet better balanced towards low-caloric density foods (lots of veggies) and lean protein. And I am more surprised at how quickly my body changed, considering I'm now just over 50.
Overall, I think BMI looks like a pretty useful metric considering how easy it is to measure. That would explain why it sticks around despite being frequently criticized.
See charts 2.A and 2.B in: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2877506/
I've always thought that while BMI is crude, it still is reasonable for measuring metabolic syndrome, considering that many of the things associated with heart problems involve the needing a powerful heart, when adding any mass whatsoever will necessarily increase the work the heart must do.
It seems to me that in the usual case where a person develops muscle mass by working out, this isn't a problem because whatever "blood necessary to maintain excessive muscle" is negligible in the face of the body adapting to improve the cardiovascular system in order to serve muscular oxygen needs during workout. Of course, heart problems due to an unhealthy person ramping up exercise too quickly is a concern, but this is separate from your concern.
One also observes that athletes in general have lower heart rates than the average person; whatever additional burden their muscles impose, their cardiovascular system is way more adapted to handle that due to exercise.
Here are some things I found in a brief glance at google scholar. There appears to be a condition called Athlete's heart, but I dunno:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26187713/
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jom-2020-0046...
The second describes the same thing:
> Several middle-aged and older men trying to improve their physical fitness by weightlifting have presented for repair of severe mitral regurgitation, some of whom stated that they remembered feeling a pop in the chest while weightlifting, which was the start of their dyspnea.
> Arterial BP increases most during weightlifting that is accompanied by mechanical compression of blood vessels (such as when bent forward at the waist or squatting) and when accompanied by a Valsalva maneuver.
Neither of these papers link them to muscle mass but to the stress of high-intensity exercise itself, which I have already addressed.
I agree that we should not assume things, but in the lack of cursory evidence, I would still stand by my argument that in the normal case where muscle mass is formed from working out, such workout stresses and modifies the cardiovascular system to such an extent the result is a body that is more than capable of handling whatever stress that muscle at rest imposes on the heart.
Once again I reiterate my cursory evidence to my argument, that athletes' cardiovascular system are generally so much more efficient and less taxed than the general population that their hearts beat at 3/4 the average heart rate.
It seems like athlete's heart syndrome is a benign condition.
>The interest in an index that measures body fat came with observed increasing obesity in prosperous Western societies. Keys explicitly judged BMI as appropriate for population studies and inappropriate for individual evaluation.
>When a team of researchers adjusted BMI to take muscle mass into account back in 2018, then associated this corrected measure with mortality risk, they found that the “U” mostly transformed into a straight line.
All good except the long distance runner part. Don't think it is equivocally good as the others and may be potentially harmful (key is the long part, short/medium is good).
Jogging on asphalt just makes my joints hurt and it makes me feel like I'm administering some pathetic modern substitute to the primal need to be active and to be in nature, which just depresses me. Same with everything gym based.
The only time I have some space is during winter, when few people use the outdoor pool and that is still a 20x10m rectangle, where I have to swim in circles like some captive orca.
TFA doesn't even use the phrase "fat acceptance", which is a completely different thing than claiming "obesity is healthy". The former is simply an effort to destigmatize it, like we destigmatize other forms of addiction.
Also, "obesity is healthy" is a strawman — no credible person or group has ever asserted this. If you search for "obesity is healthy", you'll see that every result makes it clear that obesity is not healthy.
That simply isn't true. Just look into the "Health at Every Size" movement. There are some reasonable ideas there, like destigmatizing it as you mentioned. But there are also some harmful and ridiculous ideas prevalent in that movement - namely that "weight loss should not be a health goal".
This lines up with my experience. One can do things like the Potato Diet to lose 100 pounds fairly quickly, but it's definitely not a healthy way to lose weight, and it doesn't equip you to remain at a healthy weight for the rest of your life.
There are certainly bad diets out there, but they aren't just opposed to bad diets. It's simply not possible to be healthy at any size
Fat people should not be bullied, but normalizing obesity is actively harmful to the public health. It's like normalizing smoking.
I wonder what the attributes of the commenter are
Should be
> Most of us will never achieve all that, just do what you can.
The mistake dramatically changed the tone of my comment but it lead to much more interesting discourse... Happy little accident?
On one hand you have to represent your current population, and with the majority of Americans overweight or obese, that's who your customers are. On the other, can this be seen as normalizing a disease?
Like, an ad is never going to be like, "hey you stupid fattie, here's where you can buy clothes." You do still have to sell the clothes.
The question is about whether this is normalizing an unhealthy disease, which your comment does not respond to.
The average American is "normal." that's where we are now.
> normal adjective : conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern : characterized by that which is considered usual, typical, or routine
There is still plenty of work for conventionally attractive people in advertising.
In the 80's, cookies were small, bags of potato chips were tiny and you couldn't "supersize" your fries and Coke at McD's.
But then in the 90's cookies and chips and fries and soda sizes just exploded in size. Now they're the new normal.
I'd be amazed if someone truly obese actually feels like they're healthy.
But for some reason, acknowledging that someone is fat/unhealthy became an offense. People "know" that they are unhealthy but decide to live that way and feel offended. I blame the current health system. Because even if sick people wanted to get treatment, the may not be able to afford it.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
(And no, low-fat ripped bodybuilders aren't relevant to this discussion. They and their doctors both know that BMI doesn't work well for these rare individuals.)
Passive exercise, that you do throughout the day, though, is a great way to expend calories. Walk more, bike for transport, use a standing desk, etc. That's the difference between 1500 calories and 2200.
Exercise is not a bad way to lose weight.
For a simple empirical study, ask every person you meet/know that is fit, and nearly everyone will say they exercise.
Specifically, cardio. If you're goal is to lose weight, you shouldn't touch weights until your BMI < 22. Just run or swim a few times a week.
Diet + cardio with no strength work can put people into 'gotta make it through this famine' mode, where their metabolism slows right down to eke out the stores as long as possible.
As a counterpoint, I also live in the US and have never found making time to exercise to be some kind of insurmountable task -- even when I was commuting almost 3h/day. Exercising requires just a few hours out of your whole week
there's no way a drug that effective has no side effects
I know people who have lost weight using Ozempic...you only lose weight...you do not become healthy...you do not gain muscle...you just are a flabby person who is less fat
in cases of Ozempic use I have observed - less food is consumed but it is still tending to be garbage
weight is lost but I doubt there is a substantial health gain
I have read that the intent was to bootstrap better habits and then stop taking Ozempic once the better habits took hold...instead people will just take it forever and keeping eating (fewer) burgers
How much time for that do you have? Pushing around a walker when you're 65? Spending hours on the phone with Customer Support for some insurance issue?
Exercise is important for many reasons, but not for preventing obesity. Unless you're running marathons, or exercising like somebody who is, the amount of calories you will burn from exercising will in no way whatsoever compare to what you eat. If you start eating more because you go to the gym, you'll almost certainly end up gaining weight.
The answer today is the same as it's been for thousands of years.
At 190lb, my BMI is 26.5, but I'm relatively muscular with a body fat % of around 15%. I have more than 5lbs more muscle than an average person, but my required daily caloric needs are only a few hundred cals more a day at most.
That volume is good for keeping your body limber, but it’s not really exercise in terms of weight loss or cardio conditioning.
You may want to double check that math.
https://www.bikeradar.com/advice/fitness-and-training/how-ma...
Perhaps 500 calories/hour is a rough estimate. 100 miles @ 15 mph = 6.66 hours = 3333 cals or roughly what it takes to burn 1lb of fat.
I would think the 20-40 hours/week of exercise I do has more of an impact on how my calories are burned than the raising of my basal metabolism of the extra 20lbs of muscle I have over a very passive version of myself.
Like if I took a week off and ate the same, I as well would put on fat. Just 50-200 x 7 calories (.10 to .4 lbs) less of it. And that is if my eating habits were the same, which they would not - exercise is an incredibly good appetite stimulant, which people who attempt to exercise to lose weight find out quickly.
What I'm getting at - and maybe what you're getting at to is: long term - decades let's say of lifestyle choices leads to things like diabetes. It's not change that happens in a year. Hard for humans to grok.
I obviously can't tell from your hn post (and IANA doctor), but sometimes I get headaches because I haven't drank enough water, or I've just gone out too hard.
Making sure you're adequately hydrated is important, as is supporting the cellular activity with nutrition.
Where things go off the rails is when the body spends excess energy and inflammatory responses on things not connected to repair and replenish operations. You get acid reflux, allergies, tumors, even dementia-related diseases.
Of course it's not that simple, but for nearly every single one of those pathologies, exercise improves the chances to avoid them, or helps reduce their negative outcomes. (IANA doctor either.)
I'll never get that, we only get one shot at life, even a few hours of exercise per _week_ will greatly increase your quality of life and healthy life span, there are no better medicine, nothing will give you your body back once it's too late. Some people on this forum will grind 60+ (even much more) hours per week at work, absolutely wrecking their body for "success" just to be shadow of themselves at 40. I see it everywhere online "after 40 everything hurt" "I can't sneak on my kids because my knees pop at every steps". What a sad state of affair...
Get out there, get in shape, it's life's best cheat code, everything gets better, your body evolved for that very thing for hundred millions of years, you don't even need that much dedication or time. Learn to master your body, learn about nutrition, learn self control. Run, swim, climb, lift weight, yoga, dance, try everything and keep what you enjoy
I'll always remember the day a 60+ years old climber absolutely humiliated me on the wall by effortlessly completing a climb on the first try while I couldn't even get to the half point, I was 25 and in what I though was a good shape
Not exercising is like buying a high performance car and waiting for the engine check light to do an oil change. Take care of your body, once it's gone it's gone
But I'm with you - I find that exercise works well for me as the one of the best things that makes life better. But I also avoid things like video games, drugs, too much sex with too many different partners (I keep it to one at a time) - that sort of thing, as I know it'll just throw me off.
That's why I said it train self control, you focus on "future you", not "immediate you"
If I have to go way out of the way to binge on junk I'm probably not going to do it.
I owe it to you to be capable of (among other things): a few minutes of chest compressions, running a mile or so for help, and dragging an adult body a few hundred feet to safety.
I owe that to you and we owe it to each other.
There will be no hack to "get around it".
Conversely: If you can do these things, I don't care what you look like or what your actuarial table shows or what you ate for lunch.
Dog will get you out and moving in any weather. They really don't understand why you're too tired for a walk this evening.
YT cooking shows will show the fun side of cooking and get you to make food at home more. Then you're less likely to put so much oil/butter/sugar/etc into dishes vs. eating out. And you also get a taste for vegetables. You kinda tend to eat healthier in general-ish.
Combine all that with a good sleep routine and you're pointed in the right direction. Takes about 3 months though.
That said, body positivity shouldn't be thought of as having anything to say about objective physical health: there is zero reason a person who is obese should necessarily feel bad about themselves. Shame is a useless or detrimental approach to changing behavior; shame is oftentimes the reason people engage in unhealthy behaviors like overeating in the first place. Being overweight is an obvious health danger, but it does not make you a bad person.
Somewhere in the idiot echo chamber of social media the idea of a healthy sense of self worth got conflated with a healthy body.
No obese people are not bad people but I would like to be able to say that I don't approve of their lifestyle and don't want my kids to believe that it is normal and fine to be obese.
We all do unhealthful things, of course, but our society makes it very hard to admit that we do so in sound mind. The role we’re asked to play is to say we’re addicted, indulgent, or ashamed.
The dissonance isn’t good for people and is not unlike the toxic dissonance we associate with religious communities that are too stringent and deny everyday realities of human behavior.
Being a bigger person doesn't make you less of a person, it doesn't mean that you are weak, or even mean that you are unhealthy on its own. As a random person, a friend, whatever we should not pass judgment on other people in that regard.
But on the flip side context is incredibly important. For example in a doctor setting. It is deeply concerning that I see a ton of people that immediately think that if their doctor mentions needing to loose weight that they are immediately fat phobic.
I see people saying they want a "body positive" doctor. Sure Doctor's need to be better and understand that everyone's body, diet, etc is different. But I am concerned about this desire to have a doctor never talk about your weight.
I am overweight and my doctor mentions it... I mean we are tracking it and they weight me. Him not saying anything would be wrong and him not doing his job.
But you are very right that you can't shame someone even at the Doctor. But you also can't ignore it.
The main issue is the cognitive dissonance between being fat and bring told that being fat is unhealthy so you're unhealthy. The easiest way for one's mind to resolve this is to retreat into the imaginary realm where being fat can be healthy. The retreat into the imaginary is easier than not being fat and the cognitive dissonance is avoided.
I have had my share of bad doctors but my current doctor is great and it never feels like a lecture. It feels more like a conversation. He makes a couple of small recommendations and we revisit it in a couple months.
Now I will acknowledge maybe this is because of where I am as far as being obese (as in it isn't a huge concern for my doctor) and I also mention that I am working on it.
But I view this the same way I view sexual health. I engage in some risky behavior, I go in for testing every 3 months. My doctor always asks me about what happened and mentions certain things that they encourage that I don't do. I don't take this as being lectured, I don't take this as them being judgmental or not sex positive, but instead just doing their job.
At the end of the day I am doing something that is not in the best interest of my long term health, and it is their job to tell talk about that.
This attitude bugs me. If a programmer "solved" a memory leak by simply adding RAM, without trying to understand why it happens, the HN commentariat would pounce on him and call him various uncharitable names.
But few people here seem to be disturbed by the fact that we don't yet know what drives obese people to eat more food than people with normal weight.
This is not a trivial question, it is actually a deep question, much like "why do some people slide into alcoholism while others can have their single glass of wine every evening for 50 years and never feel cravings to drink more".
But for some weird reason, few people even ask this question aloud, even though without discovering the root cause for overeating, any society-wide fix is unlikely to happen.
So where's the BMI table that asks height and "how wide are your shoulders?"
For some of us, "big boned" isn't a euphemism.
Even the body builder with a high bmi thing isn't that healthy. It's tough to be large.
You don't need to look at BMI, or any number besides fat % for that matter, to see we have a massive fucking issue. If your belly protrudes far enough that you can't see your own feet, big boned or not, you're obese
Obesity is BMI 30+, unless you're a semi-pro/pro athlete or have genetic defects at 30+ BMI you're definitely fat af, here are examples of 30 BMI: https://www.lipedema.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Obesity-...
There is absolutely no chance you have a 30+ BMI because of "big bones"
It sounds like you want the Body Shape Index = waist circumference / BMI^2/3 x height^1/2
visceral fat is significantly more dangerous than subcutaneous fat, and people who have a high ratio of visceral fat to subcutaneous fat can appear skinny but are as or potentially less well off that someone who has a more balanced ratio of visceral to subq fat.
Sumo wrestlers have extremely low visceral fat and extremely high muscle mass. But a good margin of subcutaneous fat. They have a markedly lower life expectancy than other elite athletes and than other Japanese men.
the main issue for your average person is there isn’t really a good way to measure the percentage or ratio outside of a Dexa scan which are pretty expensive
«Nor does BMI measure where fat is located, which can make a big difference. Visceral fat jammed among internal organs is much worse than subcutaneous fat stored just beneath the skin.»
Thin on the Outside, Fat on the Inside
(Dr. Robert Lustig)
I fucking hate it. I have at least managed to get under a 40 BMI its a huge slog to even get try to get down to only overweight. And even then in realistic terms even if I do, its 100% impossible to stay there over your lifetime after being obese. Age will just catch up with you.
I wouldn't wish this on anyone.
You will have to keep reducing your diet forever as your metabolism slows. It's not 100% impossible, just a very difficult lifelong struggle, like having type-1 diabetes.
I do think that body composition (size/fat/muscle mass) has an effect on your health, but the variance within groups is still huge! There are so many other things in your life that can affect your health, that also have a huge effect size.
So even if you are overweight or obese, and you can't lose weight, it doesn't mean that you can't improve your health. Eating healthy, making sure to get enough fresh air, limiting alcohol and nicotine use, taking care of your mental health and stress level are all going to benefit your health, even if they don't make you lose weight.
The same thing goes if you have a healthy weight and lots of muscle mass: Your body composition is not a free pass to smoke, get drunk every weekend, and eat burgers every day.
I believe it's a good measure for statistics over population, since it's easy to measure and tend to work for a large number of people.
On the individual level tough, you really don't need to be a world-class athlete for BMI to become less relevant for you, contrary to what some commenters seems to imply.
For the last 10 years I've been to the gym around 2/3 times a week, walked a lot more, cut down the junk food, and yet I'm 10/15 kilos heavier than at my 'fattest'. I'm far from being a powerlifter or a professional rugbyman, yet when I see people around me, I'm usually the beefiest guy in the room.
I do believe that some people went overboard with "body positivity". In the same time, as a french guy living in Paris where the expected look varies from 'slim' to 'extra-slim', I'm glad to see more things for people with an even moderately wide frame.
This makes collecting and interpreting the statistics more difficult because you need to distinguish “good” weight loss from “bad” weight loss. BMI isn’t enough to figure it out.
It's not really that you want to be fat, it's that weight is only one of many lifestyle choices and we'd give people better medical treatment if we were less obsessed with it. Also: People should try to move towards a healthier body weight! But it's a question of balancing effort and focus and not some moral imperative.
I would not classify alcoholism as a sustainable approach to life. Obesity, like alcoholism, isn’t sustainable because it accelerates death and disease. I equate “sustainable” with “not unhealthy”, which does not cover obesity.
What I have witnessed isn’t that those folks call it “healthy” but that they describe it as “not unhealthy”. This is incorrect and dangerous, as it deludes others into believing the same.
Edit: as to why, I know a lot of obese folks that avoid their doctors because they feel harangued about being over weight. They know they’re fat and they’ve likely been working on it for some time, and the “you’re fat” + axiomatic health advice isn’t helping them vs simply axiomatic health advice. Psychologically it’s shaming, and shame is a powerful force in human psychology. Whether “you’re fat” is reducing their long term health or not is irrelevant since the advice is the same regardless, and it drives them away from their doctors from their shame. That’s not useful, and I’d hope utility is more important than reinforcing axiomatic medical advice with shaming. I know everyone will say “who cares if they’re ashamed it’s a fact,” but who cares in this is their doctor and the patient. That should have primacy over all.
I've been working out for many years and I think I have a healthy body fat percentage but since I'm not very thin its hard to tell without taking specific measurements, but I would say that most men who go to the gym frequently are in the category of "healthy obese", or overweight, if you just take into account their BMI.
The vast majority of people are not gym rats, thus their BMI roughly corresponds to their fat levels, correctly approximating overweightness and obesity.
> BMI characterized 26% of the subjects as obese, while DXA indicated that 64% of them were obese. 39% of the subjects were classified as non-obese by BMI, but were found to be obese by DXA.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Discussed earlier this month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34854496
And that's not even mentioning the hormones..
Very few in the other direction; this study doesn't mention them
>Mean BMI was 27.3 (SD = 5.9) and mean percent body fat was 31.3% (SD = 9.3). BMI characterized 26% of the subjects as obese, while DXA indicated that 64% of them were obese. 39% of the subjects were classified as non-obese by BMI, but were found to be obese by DXA. BMI misclassified 25% men and 48% women. Meanwhile, a strong relationship was demonstrated between increased leptin and increased body fat.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
There are _very few_ people who have a BMI over 30 purely by having an extreme amount of muscle mass and most of them are on steroids. Also, there are weight related issues for which it is irrelevant whether the extra weight is fat or muscle mass.
The sheer amount of muscle you would need to exceed BMI 30 (obesity threshold) is pretty rare to see "in the wild" and you have to ask how many such people abused steroids etc. to grow so muscular. Natural Homo sapiens build is fairly lean, we are no Neanderthals.
A very fit guy from a normal city gym may have BMI in the overweight territory (so, say, 26-27), but > 30 is too much.
Healthy obese because of muscle mass is the size of an NFL linebacker, not “most men who go to the gym”
ETA: yea, just checked. TJ Watt has a BMI of 30.7 (barely obese BMI). BMI only matters here if you’re TJ Watt lmao
and also have significant body fat. Having a BMI over 25 and being lean is not something you can achieve by just going to the gym a few months. It takes time to build muscle.
For example, when I went to get life insurance, the rate was affected by BMI, regardless of body composition.
Maybe it’s regional, but that’s not what I see in the places I’ve lived.
Almost all except some of the young just-post-college athletes are clearly bulked out with fairly high body fat and plainly inverted waist to hip ratios. They can perform a handful of lifts at high weight, but have negligible cardio conditioning, poor engagement of support muscles and stabilizers, and many are sporting progressively worsening back issues.
The trend in gym practice for men, around me, seems to be really poorly matched to healthfulness in general and shows very little evidence of producing lean high-BMI results. But again, maybe its regional.
This argument you're presenting is used by the "fat positivity" movement to discourage the use of population measures that ARE effective in creating useful statistical analysis of health risks. Like all animals humans are subject to the laws of physics. When you have more mass per unit height your body has to work harder. If you then go on and continue to add or maintain this mass you develop health problems. You don't need an MD to see the intention of the metric nor the absurdity of promoting fatness as a "positive" trait. The only thing this reveals is that the progressives have gaslighted society into believing a lie by using "science" as a kudgel to beat you into compliance with.
I guess this argues otherwise, which is worth considering.
(Though, this seems to be just one study right now? I don't think it's rational to draw the strong conclusions the article does from one study. The absolute claims don't seem supported by the evidence, so I guess they are pushing an angle, though it's not clear to me why.)
The human body needs fat and muscle to be in tandem. Deviation to the extreme of either end is very unhealthy and is quickly corrected by the body, given bare minimum stimulus. Absent this, you'll get the beetus and other things. High body fat can also protect you, for example, obese smokers are healthier on average than skinny smokers. All that poison goes to their fat, because fat pretty much acts as a sponge in the body. That's why "pink cheeks", "baby cheeks" are a sign of long-term health. It takes a very long time (years, if not over a decade) of a proper, modern-toxin-free diet to remove toxins from the body. In the absence of proper amounts of protein and fat your body usually likes to isolate harmful things, which can lead to myriad conditions down the line, even if you've been exercising for years and have been "healthy".
Also, related to the title of the main post, sugar and whole grains (processed flour is basically sugar) and horribly addictive. Obese people that have difficulty quitting / have side-effects from quitting might as well have entire regions of their brain dedicated to timing the intake of sugar precisely, at the expense of their mental functioning. So they would inevitably feel out of energy / motivation after a while, and would need food.
Also, the easiest way to lose fat and gain muscle is to subject your body to external weights. It doesn't even have to be very heavy. If you're obese, you could OHP 10kg every other day and lose a significant amount of fat, even without changing your diet (assuming it's not really horrible)
We have an entire body positivity movement that makes people feel good about obesity. Culturally we’ve come to celebrate it. How do we expect people to keep fit under this culture? The main interests that benefit are junkfood on one facet and pharmaceuticals manufacturers on the other.
It’s becoming the modern alcohol but an addiction we could have avoided instead of celebrating.
As to alcohol while I don’t favor prohibition, I’d like ti return to an environment where no advertising/ promotion of said products is allowed.
And I sure hope you're carving out an exception for the many many people in the world who are fat because it's a side effect of a medication they are forced to take for an unrelated health condition. Or should they feel bad about their bodies too?
But either way - I don't actually think that alcoholics are bad people. I think that they have an addiction and would benefit from access to resources that help with that. If they want to drink til they die, I'm not going to shame them for that.
But I don’t understand how some people come to understand that it’s healthy.
Step 2: Declare that things like race and skin color are strictly a cultural phenomenon that have no grounding in reality or biology.
Step 3: Assert a power dynamic imbalance. Since there is no reason for people to say one skin color is better, then white people are merely "race shaming" people to oppress them.
Step 4: Relentlessly point out all the ways "non-white people people" are "oppressed". If anyone disagrees with you, accuse them of "race shaming", label them an oppressor, etc."
I did the thing you said, replaced weight with skin color, but it came out pretty damn racist.
If you're reading this and it sounds racist, might be time to switch it back to being about weight and realize that yes it is also shitty to treat people poorly because of their weight - just like it's shitty to treat someone poorly because of their race.
Did they control for efforts to change you body? Most fat people are trying to be thinner. Plenty of ways that people are told to change their body involve extreme stress to your body (caloric restriction, extreme diets, stimulant pills).
Did you know that being underweight is ALSO associated with health problems, sometimes as extreme as the ones associated with being very fat.
Anybody reading this and wanting a more nuanced understanding of this stuff should listen to the first few episodes of the podcast Maintenance Phase https://www.maintenancephase.com/
edit: I'm getting downvoted for pointing out two well documented factors that the linked article doesn't seem to account for - I thought we believed in facts and rationality here?
My two other points, anti-fat bias, and the harm of trying to change your body, are things that could explain the health impact of being fat while not actually being a direct result of the fat. So, not whataboutism at all - they are well documented factors that the linked article doesn't seem to account for or consider.
Ok so now this research is out - there is a link between obesity and poor health, but how strong is that link? As someone else pointed out in another thread, look at the error bars... ALL of that difference could easily be explained by the the well-documented factor of anti-fat bias in healthcare.
But the more important thing here is: if being fat is unhealthy - why would we compound that with stigma, shame, and anti-fat bias? Can you prove those things make people skinny? Because I can prove that those things make people MORE UNHEALTHY. Why would we do something that makes unhealthy people more unhealthy?
It's likely that prevention of obesity is achievable by changes is easily available food, walkable communities, regulation of problematic chemicals, childhood health education. And also that overtime medical treatments and food modifications will get better at counteracting preexisting obesity.
But in the meantime, "go lose weight" may not be practical medical advice to an average individual. Eating healthier food and having a regular exercise regimen may well be, but losing lots of weight is not an expected outcome. People will still end up eating more of healthier food, or eating unhealthy food due to life circumstances, or getting too fatigued to exercise enough. At this point, "what else can we do to improve your health" because a relevant question.
Fat acceptance? Bah. Just because I am overweight doesn't mean I like looking at fat models. We can admire the best of us while being realistic of what we are going to achieve ourselves. In some marginal way, watching models and athletes does motivate me to watch my food and workout. Just not enough to end up looking like them.
Apply liberally. Start implementing Pigovian taxes on sugary foods. Monitor and punish companies that use added sugar in foods that don't need it. Shut down the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo.