If I needed to guess, I would put it at about this number.
Watch any movie from the early 1980s. Look for the ‘fat kid’ or ‘fat guy’. Don’t look overweight now, do they?
Disagree with me or with Icon?
Unless you are an Olympic athlete, you are going to gain weight no matter how much you exercise if you are taking on 4-5K calories daily.
Western fast food diet plus phyically inactive lifestyle all contribute to weight gain with scientifically engineered genetics.
Screen and Internet time and obsession don’t help either.
taiwanese average diet -noodles or carby stuff with a little bit of meat and veg as dressing
plus a physically inactive lifestyle - refusing to walk even the shortest of distances. using a scooter to drive to 7 11.
screen and internet obsession - basically all young people in taiwan without exception.
its amazing taiwanese people are not fatter than they are. i put it down to genenetics, their bodys do ok on the all carb diet and minimal physical activity. personally i get fat if i eat almost anywhere outside here.
Disagree with you. I’m with you on the role of diet for weight loss.
Even 20 years ago. I remembered the kid from the cover of Fat Boy Slim album as being ridiculously obese. Now, not so much. (See also Roseanne-era John Goodman, or John Belushi, or The Honeymooners.)
Last night I was watching Star Trek, original series, and it seemed like most of the male cast were of a body type that almost doesn’t exist on TV anymore (although those uniforms admittedly make people look odd). Just … straight up and down, thin, narrow shoulders. No paunch (Shatner’s came later!), but also almost no muscle mass. Even the “regular” actors are broader-shouldered and more muscular these days, never mind the ones that are supposed to be strong.
Study after study show that weight lose is about 75% diet and 25% exercise. Not sure how you could disagree scientifically.
There’s the first article I found with a quick search.
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In Taiwan, anyone more than 50kg is considered obese, regardless of actual body composition. If it’s mostly fat but with a low body weight, it’s still considered “good”.
If you exercise more to build muscle your body weight can easily exceed 90kg and you won’t actually be “fat” but people will consider you to be.
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The average American soldier in WWII weighed 140-145 pounds.
What really did it for me was seeing the opening to the Biggest Loser several years back and viewing the contestants as the sort of people you could see pretty much every day when out and about. Then they displayed their weights - women were 130kg+ which is more than NFL lineman used to weigh.
NOBODY IS DISAGREEING WITH YOU.
lol, sorry for the misunderstanding then
I was asking if you personally disagreed with me or with Icon and your answer was meant to say that no one would disagree with me
Just a mix up of too many ellipses
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this is so true. if you have a stockier or curvier build then you are going to be considered fat. which i just find pretty lame. i know someone who was in great shape, but was higher than 50kg. so goodbye to the curves and hello to the straight lines.
Here is what they missed. The more muscle you have, the easier it is to lose body fat and not gain weight. When I get to 215-220lbs. I just drop fat no matter how much I ate. Even now at 205 , I can eat so much and I don’t get fat.
The best way to lose weight imo is weight training, and not cardio. Both will help, but usually people only do cardio and that’s why they never succeed and pack on weight back.
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^^ This.
When you see those ripped guys on youtube advising you to eat mountains of food (mostly carb-based) it works because they’re massively muscular. A large amount of muscle mass will sink carb-based energy very efficiently, diverting it away from fat storage. People who have very little muscle mass respond to an insulin spike by sending carbs into fat storage … because there’s nowhere else for it to go. If you’re training hard, insulin (which is just a general-purpose anabolic hormone) will tend to promote muscle growth rather than flab.
In biblical terms: Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.
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It’s crazy to see it once you have a lot of muscle mass. You can literally see your muscles get “fuller” when you’re eating a bunch of carbs. Once I get to 220. I have to eat exponentially more and all day. At least 5-6 times a day to maintain weight once I burn through my fat and it starts to catabolize my muscle for energy. It’s a real struggle and really expensive to eat that much.
Of course muscle mass results in higher calorie burn. No one ever disputed that. But how do people build muscle mass? Resistance training and proper diet. Diet remains the most important no matter what the goal. I’ve been bodybuilding over 20 years and the number one issue is people underestimate how much they need to eat to build mass.
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I’d suggest not to get a protein supplement. One of the biggest cons ever.
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I know. In Taiwan I see guys lift for months and not get bigger. I know it’s because they don’t eat enough. When I worked at the gym, changing people’s idea of what is the right diet for them was a real struggle.
I had a friend who was a model in Taiwan for a long time. She was vegan and ate 1500 calories a day and was relatively skinny but still had some body fat that would never go away. I got her to weight lift and she is now a personal trainer. She eats 2000-2500 calories a day now and has very low body fat and looks much better.
At 100 lbs, my secret strategy is eating less carbohydrates and more plant based fruits, vegetables and nuts.
As opposed to animal based fruits, vegetables and nuts…well male animals often have nuts
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I’ve wondered how much this is a factor for me. I’ve dropped about 30lbs in the past year and a half, and I’m now at almost the lightest I’ve been as an adult, and it’s got to be the lowest fat percentage. My cardio exercise (plenty of swimming, decent amounts of walking and cycling) has been consistent for a decade or more, with weight fairly consistent (drifts up and down of about 5 lbs, but a slow upward drift as the years went by) for 20 years or more. Once in a while specific jobs have made exercise tough, but most of my life I’ve had fairly good exercise habits. (Friggin’ stellar compared to most of the population, I suspect.)
Eighteen months ago I deliberately did three things: allowed myself one and only one junk food purchase per week; started measuring out breakfast cereal to 80g dry weight, before adding fruit or soy milk or yogurt (which made for far smaller bowls than I’d been eating before!); and started lifting weights, just in a basic way with dumbbells, at home while watching TV - every 3-4 days. I would not call it training hard, not at all. No other deliberate dietary changes. I started weight-lifting not from any desire to lose weight, but more from repeated articles about how important resistance training is for people as they get older. It still bores the hell out of me, and that’s coming from someone who likes swimming!
However the causes contributed, something’s worked for weight loss when sporadic efforts over the years of “eat less for a couple of months” or “no booze for three months” or “swim really hard this summer” didn’t make much difference at all. (And some of those were successful exercise efforts! I did well with swimming goals and I was absolutely fitter - but the weight loss was minimal.)
I most certainly do not feel or look ripped. I’m way into middle-age - a dad bod is the best I can hope for, nor do I really care about getting bigger; I’d just like to have a bit less flab. The muscles have done something, anyway, because I can lift significantly more and longer than I could a year and a half ago (still kind of crap I suspect, but I’ve never been strong). I do wish I had baseline measurements for what I was at for body fat percentage - total ballpark guess, I’ve lost 40lbs of fat, and gained 10lbs of muscle, but I don’t know how to figure that out.
Anyway, correlation isn’t causation and all that, but weight-lifting for 18 months (along with other things!) has certainly correlated with decent weight loss for me. Just hope it doesn’t rebound, but I certainly intend to keep up these habits, so … maybe it’ll last?
Still overweight on the BMI scale, though. The talk in the thread about shifting standards has amused me: I’ve had a couple of conversations along the lines of “Hey, you’ve lost weight - great! Um, you’re not sick, are you?” Good lord, I’m better than I was, but I am still far far far away from slender.