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New Liposuction Lets Your Surgeon Sculpt Your Body
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Dunno about everyone else, but part of the benefit of getting in shape is feeling stronger and healthier. Being able to pick something up with no effort at all that you had to use 2 hands to pick up before. Artificially stuffing fat to look like muscle isn't going to give you that strength boost. Infact, I'd go as far as saying once you really start working out, the visual bonuses come second to how good you feel. Oh... and there ARE muscles in the ass region also. So having a flabby ass isn't some sort of impossible problem.
ValkyrieofHouston
Golden Member
ROTFLMAO....!
Amused
Elite Member
Some people can work their glutes all day long and still have a flat ass. Genetics are NOT the same for everyone. Also, women look better with a little fat on their ass. Hell, women look gross with less than 20-25% body fat (they also begin to lose their boobs and their periods stop if they drop much lower) . Genetics will dictate where and how that fat is deposited. Some have it in simply awful and unattractive places.
So the ass sculpting I can understand.
The ab thing was just stupid and gross, though. Why not just remove the fat altogether over the abs and allow the natural muscle to show?
ValkyrieofHouston
Golden Member
Agreed...
By the way you are so right about women having not enough fat on their body. I was a runner at one time and went excessive with my running. My weight got down to 92 lbs. I lost my boobs, they looked like flabby bags of skin, and had no butt... uck! Now that I have stopped marathoning and eat healthy, I'm back to a normal 106lbs have a healthy B cup breast size and a bootae! I look back at my pics back then and say gawd... just yuck. I think women look so much better with curves on them and some healthy fat.
Sometimes I think society has gone too far in making our kids think skinny is better.
JulesMaximus
No Lifer
Are you kidding? Our kids are fatter than ever.
ValkyrieofHouston
Golden Member
Mine aren't....
you must be listening to all that media hype... LOL
Didn't they tell you not to believe everything you read or hear in the media?
"Fat people might be less healthy if they're fat because of a sedentary lifestyle. But, if they're fat and active, they have nothing to worry about. "
*Edit* Crimeny it won't let me link the article, so here is what it says:
WHAT THE DIET INDUSTRY WON'T TELL YOU.
Weighting Game
by Paul Campos
Perhaps America's most common New Year's resolution is to lose weight. This week, as we push ourselves away from the increasingly guilty pleasures of the holiday table, we will be bombarded with ads imploring us to slim down with the help of health club memberships, exercise equipment, or the latest miracle diet. Yet, however common it may be, the resolution to lose weight appears to be a particularly ineffective one: The latest figures indicate that 65 percent of the adult population--more than 135 million Americans--is either "overweight" or "obese." And government officials are increasingly eager to declare America's burgeoning waistline the nation's number-one public health problem. The Surgeon General's recent Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity labels being fat an "epidemic" that kills upward of 300,000 Americans per year.
Such declarations lend our obsession with being thin a respectable medical justification. But are they accurate? A careful survey of medical literature reveals that the conventional wisdom about the health risks of fat is a grotesque distortion of a far more complicated story. Indeed, subject to exceptions for the most extreme cases, it's not at all clear that being overweight is an independent health risk of any kind, let alone something that kills hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. While having a sedentary lifestyle or a lousy diet--both factors, of course, that can contribute to being overweight--do pose health risks, there's virtually no evidence that being fat, in and of itself, is at all bad for you. In other words, while lifestyle is a good predictor of health, weight isn't: A moderately active fat person is likely to be far healthier than someone who is svelte but sedentary. What's worse, Americans' (largely unsuccessful) efforts to make themselves thin through dieting and supplements are themselves a major cause of the ill health associated with being overweight--meaning that America's war on fat is actually helping cause the very disease it is supposed to cure.
The most common way researchers determine whether someone is overweight is by using the "body mass index" (BMI), a simple and rather arbitrary mathematical formula that puts people of varying heights and weights on a single integrated scale. According to the government, you're "overweight" (that is, your weight becomes a significant health risk) if you have a BMI figure of 25 and "obese" (your weight becomes a major health risk) if your BMI is 30 or higher. A five-foot-four-inch woman is thus labeled "overweight" and "obese" at weights of 146 pounds and 175 pounds, respectively; a five-foot-ten-inch man crosses those thresholds at weights of 174 pounds and 210 pounds. Such claims have been given enormous publicity by, among other government officials, former Surgeons General C. Everett Koop--whose Shape Up America foundation has been a leading source for the claim that fat kills 300,000 Americans per year--and David Satcher, who in 1998 declared that America's young people are "seriously at risk of starting out obese and dooming themselves to the difficult task of overcoming a tough illness." And the federal government is beginning to put its money where its mouth is: Last April, the Internal Revenue Service announced that diet-related costs could henceforth be deducted as medical expenses, as long as such expenses were incurred in the course of treating the "disease" of being fat--a ruling that will create a multibillion dollar per year public subsidy for the weight-loss industry.
Yet, despite the intense campaign to place fat in the same category of public health hazards as smoking and drug abuse, there is in fact no medical basis for the government's BMI recommendations or the public health policies based on them. The most obvious flaw lies with the BMI itself, which is simply based on height and weight. The arbitrariness of these charts becomes clear as soon as one starts applying them to actual human beings. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out last July, taking the BMI charts seriously requires concluding that Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Michael Jordan are all "overweight," and that Sylvester Stallone and baseball star Sammy Sosa are "obese." According to my calculations, fully three-quarters of National Football League running backs--speedy, chiseled athletes, all of whom, it's safe to say, could beat the world's fastest obesity researcher by a wide margin in a 100-yard dash--are "obese."
To be sure, even if the BMI categories can be spectacularly wrong in cases such as those involving professional athletes, they're often a pretty good indicator of how "fat" most people are in everyday life. The real question is whether being fat--as determined by the BMI or by any other measure--is actually a health risk. To answer this question, it's necessary to examine the epidemiological evidence. Since the measurable factors that affect whether someone contracts any particular disease or condition can easily number in the hundreds or thousands, it's often difficult to distinguish meaningful data from random statistical noise. And, even where there are clear correlations, establishing cause and effect can be a complicated matter. If researchers observe that fat people are more prone to contract, say, heart disease than thin people, this fact by itself doesn't tell them whether being fat contributes to acquiring heart disease. It could easily be the case that some other factor or set of factors--i.e., being sedentary or eating junk food or dieting aggressively--contributes both to being fat and to contracting heart disease.
Unfortunately, in the world of obesity research these sorts of theoretical and practical complications are often dealt with by simply ignoring them. The most cited studies purporting to demonstrate that fat is a major health risk almost invariably make little or no attempt to control for what medical researchers refer to as "confounding variables." For example, the research providing the basis for the claim that fat contributes to the deaths of 300,000 Americans per year--a 1999 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)--did not attempt to control for any confounding variables other than age, gender, and smoking.
And, even among studies--such as the JAMA one--that ignore variables such as diet or activity levels, there is tremendous disagreement: For every study that indicates some sort of increased health risk for people with BMI figures between 25 and 30 (a category that currently includes more than one out of every three adult Americans), another study indicates such people enjoy lower overall health risks than those whom the government and the medical establishment have labeled "ideal-weight" individuals (i.e., people with BMI figures between 18.5 and 24.9). Perhaps the most comprehensive survey of the literature regarding the health risks of different weight levels is a 1996 study by scientists at the National Center for Health Statistics and Cornell University. This survey analyzed data from dozens of previous studies involving more than 600,000 subjects. It concluded that, for nonsmoking men, the lowest mortality rate was found among those with BMI figures between 23 and 29, meaning that a large majority of the healthiest men in the survey would be considered "overweight" by current government standards. For nonsmoking women, the results were even more striking: The authors concluded that, for such women, the BMI range correlating with the lowest mortality rate is extremely broad, from about 18 to 32, meaning that a woman of average height can weigh anywhere within an 80-pound range without seeing any statistically meaningful change in her risk of premature death.
What accounts for the conflict between studies that claim being "overweight" is a significant health risk and those that suggest such weight levels might actually be optimal? The biggest factor is that researchers fail to point out that, in practical terms, the differences in risk they are measuring are usually so small as to be trivial. For example, suppose that Group A consists of 2,500 subjects and that over the course of a decade five of these people die from heart attacks. Now suppose that Group B consists of 4,000 subjects and that five members of this group also die from heart attacks over the same ten-year span. One way of characterizing these figures is to say that people in Group A are subject to a (implicitly terrifying) 60 percent greater risk of a fatal heart attack than those in Group B. But the practical reality is that the relevant risk for members of both groups is miniscule. Indeed, upon closer examination, almost all studies that claim "overweight" people run significantly increased health risks involve this sort of interpretation (or, less generously, distortion) of their data.
This phenomenon is in part a product of the fact that studies that purport to find significant elevations of mortality risk associated with different weight levels usually focus on mortality rates among relatively young adults. Since these studies typically involve very small numbers of deaths among very large numbers of subjects, it isn't surprising to see what appear to be large oscillations in relative risk across different studies. Indeed, one often observes large, apparently random oscillations in risk even within studies. Lost in the uproar over the JAMA study's 300,000 deaths figure is the peculiar fact that the report actually found that supposedly "ideal-weight" individuals with a BMI of 20 had essentially the same mortality risk as "obese" persons with BMI figures of 30 and that both groups had a slightly higher mortality risk than "overweight" people with BMI figures of 25.
In short, the Cornell survey of the existing literature merely confirmed what anyone who actually examines the data will discover: In a decided majority of studies, groups of people labeled "overweight" by current standards are found to have equal or lower mortality rates than groups of supposedly ideal-weight individuals. University of Virginia professor Glenn Gaesser has estimated that three-quarters of all medical studies on the effects of weight on health between 1945 and 1995 concluded either that "excess" weight had no effect on health or that it was actually beneficial. And again, this remains the case even before one begins to take into account complicating factors such as sedentary lifestyle, poor nutrition, dieting and diet drugs, etc. "As of 2002," Gaesser points out in his book Big Fat Lies, "there has not been a single study that has truly evaluated the effects of weight alone on health, which means that 'thinner is healthier' is not a fact but an unsubstantiated hypothesis for which there is a wealth of evidence that suggests the reverse."
As we have seen, most of the people the government and the health establishment claim are too fat--those categorized as "overweight" or "mildly obese"--do not in fact suffer from worse health than supposedly "ideal-weight" individuals. It is true that some groups of fat people--generally those with BMI figures well above 30--are less healthy than average, although not nearly to the extent the anti-fat warriors would have you believe. (Large-scale mortality studies indicate that women who are 50 or even 75 pounds "overweight" will on average still have longer life expectancies than those who are 10 to 15 pounds "underweight," a.k.a. fashionably thin.) Yet there is considerable evidence that even substantially obese people are not less healthy because they're fat. Rather, other factors are causing them to be both fat and unhealthy. Chief among these factors are sedentary lifestyle and diet-driven weight fluctuation.
The most comprehensive work regarding the dangers of sedentary lifestyle has been done at the Cooper Institute in Dallas. The institute's director of research, Steven Blair, is probably the world's leading expert on the relationship between activity levels and overall health. For the past 20 years, the Cooper Institute has maintained a database that has tracked the health, weight, and basic fitness levels of tens of thousands of individuals. What Blair and his colleagues have discovered turns the conventional wisdom about the relationship between fat and fitness on its head. Quite simply, when researchers factor in the activity levels of the people being studied, body mass appears to have no relevance to health whatsoever--even among people who are substantially "obese." It turns out that "obese" people who engage in moderate levels of physical activity have radically lower rates of premature death than sedentary people who maintain supposedly "ideal-weight" levels.
For example, a 1999 Cooper Institute study found the highest death rate to be among sedentary men with waist measurements under 34 inches and the lowest death rate to be among physically fit men with waist measurements of 40 inches or more. And these results do not change when the researchers control for body-fat percentage, thus dispensing with the claim that such percentages, rather than body mass itself, are the crucial variables when measuring the health effects of weight. Fat people might be less healthy if they're fat because of a sedentary lifestyle. But, if they're fat and active, they have nothing to worry about.
Still, even if it's clear that it's better to be fat and active than fat and sedentary--or even thin and sedentary--isn't it the case that being thin and active is the best combination of all? Not according to Blair's research: His numerous studies of the question have found no difference in mortality rates between fit people who are fat
JulesMaximus
No Lifer
Mine isn't either. Trying to buy clothes that fit a normal child can be kind of frustrating though. My son is almost 4 and he can still wear some shirts that say 2T and 3T. A 4T shirt would look like a tent on him. He is above average in height but below average in weight. He pretty much eats anything he wants (cheeseburgers, fried chicken, pasta, mac & cheese) but we don't keep candy or soda around.
So, are they too thin or too fat? Or are they all just right? Which is it? Which hype do you believe?
ValkyrieofHouston
Golden Member
My son is a football player, but for about 6 to 7 hours roughly 6 days a week he sits on a computer playing WOW and Oblivion and eats like a horse. He is not fat or overweight, he is tall and an average sized kid. My daughter is a beautiful healthy good looking teenager with all the right curves in all the right places. Both of them grew up eating Hamburgers, Hotdogs, Macaroni and cheese, sodas, French Fries ... candy for Halloween... geesh they just have lived normal kids lives, and still living normal kids lives. Neither one have been obese or considered stout. But I have always encouraged them to be active... and they are. My daughter loves to go bike riding with her friends, both my kids have walked to and from school since they were about 9, the school was about 1/2 mile down the road from our house. Most of my neighbors and the children they have grown up with are not obese either. At least where I live I have not seen too many obese or overweight, chunky kids... so I just don't put too much thought into all the media hype about America's kids being overweight.
purbeast0
No Lifer
you just said you were at one point 96lbs and are now like 105lbs. obviously your kids have your genes. you are tiny so i would expect them to have that type of gene as well.
and just because they can eat burgers, sodas, french fries, etc, and not gain weight, does not mean they are healthy by any means.
JulesMaximus
No Lifer
There you go. Exercise is key.
I don't believe everything I read or see in the media. I do want my son to grow up healthy and active though.
ValkyrieofHouston
Golden Member
Quoted by Purebeast0:
I certainly understand what you are saying. I think some people have a genetic disposition toward obesity, and or being chunky. But I don't think that necessarily means that a person who is 40 pounds or so overweight is unhealthy either. I think the publics perception is that being fat is unhealthy and that just simply is not the case, that is why I cut and pasted the article above in my earlier post.
I certainly understand what you are saying. I think some people have a genetic disposition toward obesity, and or being chunky. But I don't think that necessarily means that a person who is 40 pounds or so overweight is unhealthy either. I think the publics perception is that being fat is unhealthy and that just simply is not the case, that is why I cut and pasted the article above in my earlier post.
phantom309
Platinum Member
I know women like that who can run marathons.
The whole phony 6-pack thing creeps me out, but if you're healthy and you have the money, I don't see anything wrong with liposuction at all. I'm glad to see they've made it less invasive now.
ValkyrieofHouston
Golden Member
I saw a different procedure on the TV about a week or so ago where there is no cutting involved at all. It is some type of device, looked like an ultrasound hand held device, but in theory acts like a microwave some how. Literally melts the fat deposits underneath the skin from inside out... but no pain... no blood. The body just absords the broken down melted fat. They showed before and after pics... it was kinda cool. Apparently they are trying to get FDA approval here in the states to use it. It has been used in European countries with success. I wish I could find the link to that one!
herkulease
Diamond Member
that guy with the abs looks wierd. I think its because the abs look perfect but he still has some flab in other places. Guys with abs like that are ripped completely.
If I every go in I just want to get rid of fat. I'd like to do the abs and rest myself.
If I every go in I just want to get rid of fat. I'd like to do the abs and rest myself.
Koing
Elite Member <br> Super Moderator<br> Health and F
They aren't the ones looking for athletical performance, it also becomes a bit of a m00t point when you can pick up stuff easily and not all that practical in real situations.
I personally believe you can achieve whatever shape figure you want "minus the womans boobs" and real medical problems. If you have a flat ass squat properly and do real work. Those 1/3 squats aren't going to do anything. Go all the way down properly. No one said it would be easy but you can achieve anything you work hard enough and SMART enough.
A friend muscled and strong at 90Kg dropped down to 63Kg and is one of the most ripped guys I have ever seen. He was never a lean guy and always big and bulky. He kick boxes 6-7x a week and does some weights. He did it over 7 months and is ridiculously lean. He carried quite a bit of fat at 90Kg. He turns 30 this year. If a guy does what he does 5x a week and after 7months your not lean with a 6/8 pack then you are f0cked.
Some people have to push a lot harder then others but you can do it.
Koing
mitaiwan82
Platinum Member
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