Official why are people obese thread!

[blackllotus]

Originally posted by: Amused
The fact of the matter is, genetics plays a HUGE role in how someone will react to a given environment. It's VERY hard to keep weight off if your body is constantly telling you it's starving. This is why most dieters fail.

Eating and physical activity also play a "HUGE" role as well. If genetics was the only major reason that the obesity rate in the U.S would not be so much higher than many other places in the world.

 

[Legend]

Originally posted by: tigerslicer
It seems like some people (I'm not saying very many) in this thread don't understand how weight is lost or gain. So for those who don't know it is essentially all about calories. Consume more calories than you burn you gain weight, burn more and you lose weight.

That being said, perhaps some people have a genetic propensity to burn more calories while they sit around and do nothing while others have a natural propensity to conserve energy and calories. I think that is the only role genetics plays in this and for some or many it may be a big factor. I have a theory that at some point down the line we will adapt to the fact that there is always food in abundance and our bodies will stop being inclined to conserve calories, but that is just what I think.

Calories in vs calories out, yes. That's been true for all time and helps no one. It's so much more complex than that.

What you eat has a profound impact on body composition and hunger.

Do a little experiment...

Case 1:
Consume mostly starchy processed carbs and use fitday to monitor your calorie intake. Note every time you have to suppress your hunger to limit your calorie intake to 2500.

Case2:
Then consume fruits, vegetables, meat, nuts, milk, cottage cheese. Use fitday to monitor your calorie intake and note every time you have to suppress hunger.

I guarantee you that you'll be fighting hunger all day with case 1, and you may even have to what feels like overeat with case 2 to meet 2500 calories (or more if you're bigger, whatever a set number).

In the 1980s, all these "experts" were telling us to reduce fat, saturated fat, dietary cholesterol, and eat anything that's low in fat because some sloppy studies in the 1960s showed that those increased LDL (neglecting to mention that it also increases HDL, and that many vegatables decreased LDL...). They essentially recommended that all Americans adopt case1.

 

[uberman]

I ate nothing but hamburgers and steak. I lost 50 pounds in a year and a half.

 

[vi edit]

Originally posted by: Amused

Originally posted by: vi_edit

Originally posted by: Amused

Originally posted by: IcebergSlim
1) no portion control
2) everything is processed
3) chemical/hormone additives
4) hydrogenization
5) high fructose corn syrup

in summary people are fat because they eat alot of food with low nutritional content.

I do not know a single fat person (with a sedentary or active lifestyle) that has a clean natural food diet with reasonable portion control.

On the flip side, the vast majority of skinny people I know don't watch what they eat either.

The idea that skinny people somehow have more discipline than fat people is absurd. The only skinny people with dietary discipline are those who have to diet to remain thin. Most skinny people do not have to diet. In fact, most skinny people couldn't become obese if they tried.

I don't agree. There are two *main* types of skinny people. Those that watch their diets and eat well, and those that are malnourished/under eat. These are actually the *majority* of skinny people. These are people that simply eat to survive and nothing more. They are essentially starving themselves and their energy and health levels show it. (This group is not to be confused with eating disorders).

You do have your genetic freaks with the metabolism of a blast furnace that can get away with anything, but they are the minority.

I count my calories almost down to a science. I know the nutritional/calorie contents of many meals/foods and take notice of what others eat. There are a lot of very poor eating habits out there on both sides of the scale. Diet plays a huge part in being able to gain, shed off and keep off the pounds.

Sorry, but in my 40 years of life on this earth, I can say without a doubt that of all the skinny people I knew that were never fat, NONE watched their diet. Not a single one. The only skinny people I knew that watched their diets were formally fat people who had to diet to get skinny.

I was one of them. I was stick thin all my life until my mid 30s when I gained 30 or so lbs around my waist. I NEVER watched my diet and ate like a horse. All the skinny kids I grew up with were the same. In fact, when I grew up, kids didn't go on diets and the first low fat diet craze was just starting among adults. NO ONE watched what they ate. They all just ate what they wanted.

Funny how the diet craze PRECEDED the obesity epidemic by about a decade.

You can still "eat whatever you want" and not eat enough for your body. Many of the "skinny" people I know are skinny because of this. They don't make a conscious effort to eat less, they just don't want to eat more. They can eat pie, they can eat cheeseburgers, they can drink beer. But over time they are at a calorie deficiency for their body and/or activity levels.

Fat or thin, most people have no concept of what their body needs for their size and activity levels and even worse, they have no concept of the amount of calories that they are putting in.

When you are "calorie aware", you take notice of the eating habits of others. Simply put, some people are eating less than they think they are, and a whole lot more are eating more than they think they are.

When you compound this with the drop of activity/exercise levels like you point out, you have the weight problems. But those weight problems can pretty largely be controlled simply through diet. Which goes back to my original point about calories and consumption.

Exercise is an excellent tool for balancing things out. It's an equalizer. It's not a miracle worker. If I chug along on an exercise bike for 45 minutes I burn about 400 calories. that's only about 1/6th of what I consume in a day. That extra 400 calories is what allows me my beer and piece of cake at night. But I could simply not have either of those and skip the exercise and have a similar net calorie intake.

If I skip the exercise but still have the beer and cake without adjusting the rest of my calories....well that's about 3/4 of a pound a week that I'm adding to myself.

Yes exercise does raise overall metabolism, but really it's not as big of a deal as it's made out to be. I probably burn more calories by having two cups of coffee and running to the can to piss 5 times extra a day.

Also skipping exercise does nothing for cardiovascular fitness and the expansive list of other benefits you gain from it healthwise, but you can still remain thing without doing it by controlling your intake. But that's a different thread/topic.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Lots of people are over complicating things here.
It's VERY VERY simple.

When people take in more calories then they burn they gain weight.
Eventually, the weight gain causes them to be so overweight, that they are classified as obese.

 

[CarlKillerMiller]

JP

 

[pontifex]

why does ATOT have such a huge fascination with fat people? Are you all that bad off that you have to find something to make yourselves look good? I just don't understand it at all.

 

[db]

Quote:
____________________________________
Do a little experiment...

Case 1:
Consume mostly starchy processed carbs and use fitday to monitor your calorie intake. Note every time you have to suppress your hunger to limit your calorie intake to 2500.

Case2:
Then consume fruits, vegetables, meat, nuts, milk, cottage cheese. Use fitday to monitor your calorie intake and note every time you have to suppress hunger.

I guarantee you that you'll be fighting hunger all day with case 1, and you may even have to what feels like overeat with case 2 to meet 2500 calories (or more if you're bigger, whatever a set number).
______________________________________

Neither case 1 nor case 2 is a balanced diet.

 

[TheNinja]

calories in > calories out

 

[Mike Gayner]

Why is everyone so quick to blame genetics? The USA wasn't this obese 200 years ago, and genentics havent changed in this time. Your diets have. You're a bunch of overeating, underexercising fat slobs.

 

[MikeyIs4Dcats]

Originally posted by: Mike Gayner
Why is everyone so quick to blame genetics? The USA wasn't this obese 200 years ago, and genentics havent changed in this time. Your diets have. You're a bunch of overeating, underexercising fat slobs.

welcome to ATOT.

 

[compuwiz1]

Video games, chips & soda for kids.
Football, chips & beer for Dad.

Don't see much excersize there.

 

[ShotgunSteven]

I go to Sam's Club and see a person using a powered cart for no (apparent) other reason than the fact that they are obese... but they're very agile when they have to get out of that thing to get the Twinkies off of the display pile.

 

[Legend]

Originally posted by: db
Quote:
____________________________________
Do a little experiment...

Case 1:
Consume mostly starchy processed carbs and use fitday to monitor your calorie intake. Note every time you have to suppress your hunger to limit your calorie intake to 2500.

Case2:
Then consume fruits, vegetables, meat, nuts, milk, cottage cheese. Use fitday to monitor your calorie intake and note every time you have to suppress hunger.

I guarantee you that you'll be fighting hunger all day with case 1, and you may even have to what feels like overeat with case 2 to meet 2500 calories (or more if you're bigger, whatever a set number).
______________________________________

Neither case 1 nor case 2 is a balanced diet.

Not the point. However, case 2 is pretty damn healthy. Please point out the deficiencies of that diet...

 

[Legend]

Originally posted by: BurnItDwn
Lots of people are over complicating things here.
It's VERY VERY simple.

When people take in more calories then they burn they gain weight.
Eventually, the weight gain causes them to be so overweight, that they are classified as obese.

AGAIN...this has been true for all time, and it helps no one.

Did everyone begin to decide consciously to overeat in the past 30 years or is there something that encourages overeating?

 

[Legend]

This is a good read about the government supporting the unhealthy macronutrient shift to processed carbs and calling it a "balanced" diet. Although I think it promotes Atkins a bit too much.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.h...res=9F04E2D61F3EF934A35754C0A9649C8B63

 

[NaOH]

Originally posted by: Soviet
Cause they eat too much, and theyre lazy, and theyre fat.

/thread

 

[BurnItDwn]

Originally posted by: Legend

Originally posted by: BurnItDwn
Lots of people are over complicating things here.
It's VERY VERY simple.

When people take in more calories then they burn they gain weight.
Eventually, the weight gain causes them to be so overweight, that they are classified as obese.

AGAIN...this has been true for all time, and it helps no one.

Did everyone begin to decide consciously to overeat in the past 30 years or is there something that encourages overeating?

People value their time more than ever before.
Because of this, people don't spend nearly as much time getting exercise as they should.
Also, because of this, they will often eat whatever is tasty, fast, and easy rather then healthy meals.

It seems so simple.
At least this is the reason why I am fat.

 

[Legend]

Originally posted by: BurnItDwn

Originally posted by: Legend

Originally posted by: BurnItDwn
Lots of people are over complicating things here.
It's VERY VERY simple.

When people take in more calories then they burn they gain weight.
Eventually, the weight gain causes them to be so overweight, that they are classified as obese.

AGAIN...this has been true for all time, and it helps no one.

Did everyone begin to decide consciously to overeat in the past 30 years or is there something that encourages overeating?

People value their time more than ever before.
Because of this, people don't spend nearly as much time getting exercise as they should.
Also, because of this, they will often eat whatever is tasty, fast, and easy rather then healthy meals.

It seems so simple.
At least this is the reason why I am fat.

I don't entirely agree with the "not exercising enough" argument. I believe it's a component to the problem. I used to be overweight in my teens when I consumed a bunch of simple carbs. I lost the weight with exercise, and then it came right back. It wasn't until my late teens that my dietary changes removed the necessity to do rigorous cardio to keep weight off. Rather working out simply became a way to build muscle and keep healthy.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.h...649C8B63&sec=health&spon=&pagewanted=3

With these caveats, one of the few reasonably reliable facts about the obesity epidemic is that it started around the early 1980's. According to Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics, the percentage of obese Americans stayed relatively constant through the 1960's and 1970's at 13 percent to 14 percent and then shot up by 8 percentage points in the 1980's. By the end of that decade, nearly one in four Americans was obese. That steep rise, which is consistent through all segments of American society and which continued unabated through the 1990's, is the singular feature of the epidemic. Any theory that tries to explain obesity in America has to account for that. Meanwhile, overweight children nearly tripled in number. And for the first time, physicians began diagnosing Type 2 diabetes in adolescents. Type 2 diabetes often accompanies obesity. It used to be called adult-onset diabetes and now, for the obvious reason, is not.

So how did this happen? The orthodox and ubiquitous explanation is that we live in what Kelly Brownell, a Yale psychologist, has called a ''toxic food environment'' of cheap fatty food, large portions, pervasive food advertising and sedentary lives. By this theory, we are at the Pavlovian mercy of the food industry, which spends nearly $10 billion a year advertising unwholesome junk food and fast food. And because these foods, especially fast food, are so filled with fat, they are both irresistible and uniquely fattening. On top of this, so the theory goes, our modern society has successfully eliminated physical activity from our daily lives. We no longer exercise or walk up stairs, nor do our children bike to school or play outside, because they would prefer to play video games and watch television. And because some of us are obviously predisposed to gain weight while others are not, this explanation also has a genetic component -- the thrifty gene. It suggests that storing extra calories as fat was an evolutionary advantage to our Paleolithic ancestors, who had to survive frequent famine. We then inherited these ''thrifty'' genes, despite their liability in today's toxic environment.

This theory makes perfect sense and plays to our puritanical prejudice that fat, fast food and television are innately damaging to our humanity. But there are two catches. First, to buy this logic is to accept that the copious negative reinforcement that accompanies obesity -- both socially and physically -- is easily overcome by the constant bombardment of food advertising and the lure of a supersize bargain meal. And second, as Flegal points out, little data exist to support any of this. Certainly none of it explains what changed so significantly to start the epidemic. Fast-food consumption, for example, continued to grow steadily through the 70's and 80's, but it did not take a sudden leap, as obesity did.

As far as exercise and physical activity go, there are no reliable data before the mid-80's, according to William Dietz, who runs the division of nutrition and physical activity at the Centers for Disease Control; the 1990's data show obesity rates continuing to climb, while exercise activity remained unchanged. This suggests the two have little in common. Dietz also acknowledged that a culture of physical exercise began in the United States in the 70's -- the ''leisure exercise mania,'' as Robert Levy, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, described it in 1981 -- and has continued through the present day.

As for the thrifty gene, it provides the kind of evolutionary rationale for human behavior that scientists find comforting but that simply cannot be tested. In other words, if we were living through an anorexia epidemic, the experts would be discussing the equally untestable ''spendthrift gene'' theory, touting evolutionary advantages of losing weight effortlessly. An overweight homo erectus, they'd say, would have been easy prey for predators.

It is also undeniable, note students of Endocrinology 101, that mankind never evolved to eat a diet high in starches or sugars. ''Grain products and concentrated sugars were essentially absent from human nutrition until the invention of agriculture,'' Ludwig says, ''which was only 10,000 years ago.'' This is discussed frequently in the anthropology texts but is mostly absent from the obesity literature, with the prominent exception of the low-carbohydrate-diet books.

 

[Amused]

Originally posted by: blackllotus

Originally posted by: Amused
The fact of the matter is, genetics plays a HUGE role in how someone will react to a given environment. It's VERY hard to keep weight off if your body is constantly telling you it's starving. This is why most dieters fail.

Eating and physical activity also play a "HUGE" role as well. If genetics was the only major reason that the obesity rate in the U.S would not be so much higher than many other places in the world.

Notice I said " how someone will react to a given ENVIRONMENT"?

Put someone with the right genetics in an environment with plentiful food and no activity, and they will gain weight while someone else in the same environment will not because of their genetics.

And the rest of the world is rapidly catching up to the US. Most of Europe, Asia (especially China) and many third world nations have rising obesity rates as well as their environments change, but their genetics do not.

 

[dragonfang]

Originally posted by: Amused

Originally posted by: vi_edit

Originally posted by: Amused

Originally posted by: IcebergSlim
1) no portion control
2) everything is processed
3) chemical/hormone additives
4) hydrogenization
5) high fructose corn syrup

in summary people are fat because they eat alot of food with low nutritional content.

I do not know a single fat person (with a sedentary or active lifestyle) that has a clean natural food diet with reasonable portion control.

On the flip side, the vast majority of skinny people I know don't watch what they eat either.

The idea that skinny people somehow have more discipline than fat people is absurd. The only skinny people with dietary discipline are those who have to diet to remain thin. Most skinny people do not have to diet. In fact, most skinny people couldn't become obese if they tried.

I don't agree. There are two *main* types of skinny people. Those that watch their diets and eat well, and those that are malnourished/under eat. These are actually the *majority* of skinny people. These are people that simply eat to survive and nothing more. They are essentially starving themselves and their energy and health levels show it. (This group is not to be confused with eating disorders).

You do have your genetic freaks with the metabolism of a blast furnace that can get away with anything, but they are the minority.

I count my calories almost down to a science. I know the nutritional/calorie contents of many meals/foods and take notice of what others eat. There are a lot of very poor eating habits out there on both sides of the scale. Diet plays a huge part in being able to gain, shed off and keep off the pounds.

Sorry, but in my 40 years of life on this earth, I can say without a doubt that of all the skinny people I knew that were never fat, NONE watched their diet. Not a single one. The only skinny people I knew that watched their diets were formally fat people who had to diet to get skinny.

I was one of them. I was stick thin all my life until my mid 30s when I gained 30 or so lbs around my waist. I NEVER watched my diet and ate like a horse. All the skinny kids I grew up with were the same. In fact, when I grew up, kids didn't go on diets and the first low fat diet craze was just starting among adults. NO ONE watched what they ate. They all just ate what they wanted.

Funny how the diet craze PRECEDED the obesity epidemic by about a decade.

I am your skinny minority. I'm 5.6' and 120lbs.
no matter how much i eat my weight stays the same and i also eat like a horse (and could eat one too with my appetite) and still not gain any significant weight

 

[Amused]

Originally posted by: Mike Gayner
Why is everyone so quick to blame genetics? The USA wasn't this obese 200 years ago, and genentics havent changed in this time. Your diets have. You're a bunch of overeating, underexercising fat slobs.

Actually, diets have LESS fat in them than 200 years ago. People would freak if they saw just how "unhealthy" food was prior to the "low fat" craze.

Yes, our environment has changed, though. Food is more plentiful and cheaper than ever before. But the main change has been activity levels. And one need only go back 25 years, not 200 years. The obesity epidemic did not start until the mid-late 1980s and really exploded in the 1990s. Food has changed very little, if at all in 25 years. And it hasn't gotten much cheaper in that time, either.

So what really has changed in 25 years if food hasn't?

That's right... activity levels. 25 years ago we didn't have cable/sat TV in wide use. We didn't have home video games in wide use. And we certainly didn't have the internet in wide use. We were still a manufacturing economy, instead of a service based economy. Now the majority of jobs are basically sedentary.

Add all that together, and now throw in the favorite thing people like to do when sitting around all day: Munching. The biggest change in the food industry in 25 years has been snack foods. The variety of snack foods has exploded in the past 30 years or so due to the demand for more snack foods as people have become more sedentary.

If you're moving all day not only do you burn more calories, you don't have the ability to snack and munch.

Are we slobs? Nope. We are victims of our own success. The very genetics that allowed many of us to survive famine in the past now causes us to gain weight.

In other words: The people you call lazy slobs were FAR more likely to survive 200 years ago than you (or I) were. Evolutionarily, they have superior genes.

 

[sixone]

Originally posted by: Amused
In other words: The people you call lazy slobs were FAR more likely to survive 200 years ago than you (or I) were. Evolutionarily, they have superior genes.

And they'll be more likely to survive after we nuke ourselves to kingdom come, too.

 

[Mike Gayner]

Amused, you have a very warped idea of reality. The amount of fat in a diet is IRRELEVANT - we're talking calories here. And the activity levels you harp on aobut are only a small part of the problem - diet is a much larger issue. How can you say food hasn't changed substantially in the last 25 years? Where have you been living?

edit: And about fat slobs having superior genes - that's my whole point. Their genes havent changed a bit - they're just lazy and eat too much. There is no genetic superiority here.

 

[Amused]

Originally posted by: Mike Gayner
Amused, you have a very warped idea of reality. The amount of fat in a diet is IRRELEVANT - we're talking calories here. And the activity levels you harp on aobut are only a small part of the problem - diet is a much larger issue. How can you say food hasn't changed substantially in the last 25 years? Where have you been living?

Read my entire post.

Where have I been living? All over the US. I'm 40 years old. I actually remember what the world was like when NO ONE dieted... and there was no "obesity epidemic."

Care to explain how food suddenly became evil in the past 25 years?