Medicine waking up that telling people to 'exercise more' and 'eat less' hasn't worked

[quote=“Ermintrude”][quote=“urodacus”]What’s wrong with a large bacon sandwich for breakfast? Four rashers of bacon, toasted brown bread, pepper and tomato sauce. With coffee and orange juice.

NOthing for lunch, then a piece of fruit for dinner, and a bottle of red wine.

That’s got all 5 food groups, and nearly no carbs. Surely. Kept me fit for years, that has.[/quote]

You eat like a teenaged girl. They’re usually healthy enough, I guess.[/quote]

I am a teenage girl.

… on the inside, at any rate. Under all that fat.

It does that. I don’t usually skip lunch, but it’s usually something small cos I’m simply not hungry.

Funnily enough I remember someone somewhere recommending eating eggshells for those who think they might be calcium deficient. Spose that might work in theory but I’d rather have glass of milk or something.

As a former overweight person who lost about 60lbs from my peak and am now maintaining around 10% body fat, I thought I’d throw my two cents in.

Research has shown that those who maintain a food journal of some kind have far more success at maintaining weight loss in the long term. In my case, I didn’t even count calories in the beginning, just made a ballpark guess, wrote down each item in a log and reviewed it periodically. When I got lazy and stopped keeping a log, and was living with my parents who surrounded me with junk food, my weight started creeping up.

The reason I think it works so well is that keeping a journal keeps you more honest with yourself and provides you with reflection. What you are budgeting is not purely calories, but also willpower. You’ll start to realize that the amount of fullness provided by healthy foods per calorie is far greater than that provided by junk. Even if you screw up one day and eat 4000 calories, if you log it, then you have a chance to reflect, you’re still keeping the journal, and so you’re still in the game.

Having been inspired my my initial success, I later decided to take it to the next level and started tracking calories and even bought a food scale, but this is because my goal now is to gain lean muscle mass, which requires me to eat slightly over my TDEE, which I find trickier than simply eating a caloric deficit.

We add crushed egg shells to doggies meals for extra calcium.

BTW, my pal is training for some competition. She paid this famous athlete nutritionist to make a plan to lose fat. Lo and behold, remember you guys criticized me for my 2 to 3 hour food plan? Well, that was what he recommends: eating every cycle small, planned portions. She had to set an alarm for that.

I agree a journal helps you become self aware. Nutritionists give you a detailed plan, and you must plan your meals ahead. You do not just stuff your face mindlessly if you are aware, enjoy your meals! If you read in your journal you stuffed yourself, ask why. Was it at a party or were you bored? Or just plain hungry, or because you starved yourself for 16 hours? Happy, healthy, that is the goal.

For me if I exercise regularly everything else falls into place. The exercise changes my thinking and changes the foods I choose to buy and eat. Exercise makes me think positively. As a kid I used to hate drinking water but now I find a very primal animal pleasure in it, especially after a run. Like Man, my body needs this stuff.

I like running for it doesn’t require any special equipment or gym membership, just a pair of shoes. Bicycles sometimes need tuning and repairs, swimming requires a pool and a commute - things that demand more time and planning. But to go for a run I just change into shorts and a t-shirt, put my runners on, step outside and go! I can be back in 30 minutes if I wish, if I have “important things to do”. But when I am in the routine of exercising regularly I know that, actually, exercise is the most important thing.

People who do not exercise sometimes ask very stupid questions like, “How do you motivate yourself?” Or they grimace with pain just at the thought of it. Exercise? Good Lord no! I enjoy air-conditioning. And food! End of conversation. But I have the feeling I enjoy my food more, actually, because I eat when animal hungry, completely without guilt, and not because I’m bored or because it is an addiction. There is something very disgusting about sharing a meal with overweight people who overeat, especially if they overorder even beyond their unhealthily large stomach capacities. And something very sad about the perpetually obese making public displays of salad eating, the elephant in the room whispering, Just wait until he gets home. I far prefer how Taiwanese can openly say, “You need to lose weight! It’s not healthy to be so fat!” over this Western politeness.

A few years ago I heard a scientist on the radio talking about a study of obese children. The researchers completely withdrew sugar from the diet of half of the kids and found many of these children spontaneously started exercising. And at the end of the study many of these kids had lost a lot of weight and become far more healthy. I wonder if there have been any follow-up studies.

[quote=“Formosa Fitness”][quote=“Ermintrude”]finley, is it the blending that fucks up smoothies? I often have these for breakfast because I hate solids, first thing and end up skipping breakfast and overeating at Starbucks or something.

I only use one banana but lots of fruit, nuts and seeds (I hate nuts and seeds and hide them in other food). Will it spike the insulin? I know its sugary but I put spinach in too.[/quote]

Blending it doesn’t change the chemical composition of the food. What can happen is that people eat more fruit when they blend it than if they just ate it. And you can’t just judge foods based on the glycemic index. Nuts like almonds and cashews are very low in glycemic load and very high in calories.[/quote]

Blending can oxidize vitamins and heat molecules due to friction. So you get these fancy blenders that are supposed to prevent this now.

One of the theories of why we should eat whole foods is that the body must expend energy breaking that food down, some of the calories are passed out as the food is not fully digested, the slow breakdown doesn’t mess with your pancreas so much and the fibre helps to ‘keep you regular’. Smoothies don’t seem to have the same benefits.

[quote=“antarcticbeech”]For me if I exercise regularly everything else falls into place. The exercise changes my thinking and changes the foods I choose to buy and eat. Exercise makes me think positively. As a kid I used to hate drinking water but now I find a very primal animal pleasure in it, especially after a run. Like Man, my body needs this stuff.

I like running for it doesn’t require any special equipment or gym membership, just a pair of shoes. Bicycles sometimes need tuning and repairs, swimming requires a pool and a commute - things that demand more time and planning. But to go for a run I just change into shorts and a t-shirt, put my runners on, step outside and go! I can be back in 30 minutes if I wish, if I have “important things to do”. But when I am in the routine of exercising regularly I know that, actually, exercise is the most important thing.

People who do not exercise sometimes ask very stupid questions like, “How do you motivate yourself?” Or they grimace with pain just at the thought of it. Exercise? Good Lord no! I enjoy air-conditioning. And food! End of conversation. But I have the feeling I enjoy my food more, actually, because I eat when animal hungry, completely without guilt, and not because I’m bored or because it is an addiction. There is something very disgusting about sharing a meal with overweight people who overeat, especially if they overorder even beyond their unhealthily large stomach capacities. And something very sad about the perpetually obese making public displays of salad eating, the elephant in the room whispering, Just wait until he gets home. I far prefer how Taiwanese can openly say, “You need to lose weight! It’s not healthy to be so fat!” over this Western politeness.

A few years ago I heard a scientist on the radio talking about a study of obese children. The researchers completely withdrew sugar from the diet of half of the kids and found many of these children spontaneously started exercising. And at the end of the study many of these kids had lost a lot of weight and become far more healthy. I wonder if there have been any follow-up studies.[/quote]

You seem very judgemental. Should
one also be disgusted at ugly people, old people , people who smoke too much, fuck around too much, drink too much, talk too much, fart too much, have a shit taste in clothes., a rudimentary IQ…and so on…?
I don’t like the way people make these gross assumptions and condemnations if fat people., it’s religious in tone.

My kindest and smartest colleague is a very overweight individual. Fat. Really fat. He told me when he was a kid he had days when he are nothing or a jelly sandwich at most. Then he is thrown into a world of junk food.
what does that do to his body and mind? (epigenetic effects are real…addiction and stress are real)

This guy knows VERY well what he eats is crap. But he’s flying around the world constantly busting his ass for his kids, one who of whom is special needs who he treads like a princess, who am I to say don’t eat that crap all the time. He could tell you all about the fats and the molecules and how they interact together in the food. He knows not to eat that…but he does it anyway. Seems like addiction and stress to me.

Sometimes I hear people commenting about him or can see the judgements being made. Yeah he’s fat…yeah he probably eats the wrong food or too much…and then what else do you know about him? Nothing. Do you know this guy could be the hardest working guy in the company? Nah but he’s lazy and slovenly and greedy because he’s fat right? And even if he was those things, that would be okay if he was thin?

PS this guy exercises …doesn’t do anything for him. If he could ditch the car and walk to work he would be better off (like me) , but there is no public transportation in much of the world… He’s working day and night and going on around the world trips regularly. That just messes your body clock up too.

It’s the acts of deliberate gluttony and waste that I find disgusting. And I am certainly judgmental about my society accepting it as normative. As a person of healthy weight and eating habits it greatly annoys me that I should need to defend my decision to eat less. Why have you stopped eating? You don’t need to watch your weight! is something I have heard many, many times. I don’t see why it is OK for fat people to be allowed to say that but it is not OK for slim people to reply with a little bit of hard truth. You should have stopped eating 45 minutes ago. Australia now has, literally, a fat majority and a slim minority. Every year the majority grows and the minority shrinks. I have a lot of respect for anyone trying to lose weight but there is a belief among many that obesity comes naturally with age, as though you are entitled to be grossly overweight by 50. I don’t think this is acceptable, no.

Actually weight gain generally DOES go with age, of course it can be mitigated with proper diet and exercise. I think people should mind their own business most of the time. But you just said earlier it was refreshing that Taiwanese tell people ‘you got fat’ but now you are complaining that (fat) people tell you to ‘eat more’. It’s a bit of a dichotomy that one.

Frankly people in general haven’t suddenly become more lazy or gluttonous, their bodies are instead reacting to the environment around them which has changed rapidly, whether it is food itself, the amount of food available, and also to work and living environments.

All this being said, some societies like southern US or Chinese societies do tend to put a lot of emphasis on ‘the big feast’ which may not be a very healthy thing to do. But then again other societies put a lot of emphasis on drinking to excess or smoking to excess. It certainly be an added challenge to go against the mainstream of any society.
Human nature enjoys excess at times …just need to keep it infrequent.

As you seem to be hinting, that’s mostly marketing to sell fancy blenders to people with more money.

The only macronutrient that is really thermogenic in the digestion process is protein. You burn about 20% of the calories in digesting it. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15466943

Chewing food isn’t a significant way to burn calories. And if you don’t peel the fruit in your smoothie, then you get the same amount of fiber.

It is interesting how society has had such a backlash against fat shaming, and there seems to be a widely held belief that it exacerbates the obesity problem or causes eating disorders. I personally avoid telling people they’re fat because I figure they already know it. Having been fat, I also know how difficult finding the right formula to achieve and maintain a healthy bodyweight can be. What they are fighting is an addiction, and some folks simply have a natural predisposition to becoming addicted to certain things through no fault of their own. However it is symptomatic of addiction that the sufferer believes that they are helpless to fight it and eventually gives up. I think this is the self delusional and the worst thing a person can do.

I have read about research that found when you eat with fat people, you tend to eat more, regardless of what the fat person chooses to eat. So it would seem that fat becoming the new norm also exacerbates the obesity problem. It could be that social acceptance of obesity produces a greater negative outcome than fat shaming. I certainly don’t want to be the one administering the shame, but I also don’t want to be the one who says it’s OK to give up.

Here’s the nutribullet…they call themselves an extractor,
not a blender lol!

dailymail.co.uk/health/artic … ealth.html

This thing was going off in my Facebook feed at Xmas, it’s something new and fun for folks I guess, but I still don’t think it will be better than eating raw fruit or salad.
IF it motivates people to eat better food though it won’t be bad.

Apparently. Fruit in general is not bad, you just shouldn’t overdo it. It contains quite a bit of sugar, but it doesn’t all hit your bloodstream (or your liver) all at once because it’s locked up inside the cells of whatever-it-is. Of course it depends on the fruit. You chew it into bits, and eventually it gets digested, but your insulin response is very different to what you get if you pour blended fruit down your neck. You can probably find the research with a bit of googling.[/quote]

It would have to be a lot of fruit for there to be spillover, until then the liver will fill up with glycogen from the fructose and store it for energy expenditure. Probably the best type of breakfast to have especially in non-solid form as long as there’s a little fiber (i always add a couple teaspoons of flax seed)

[quote=“diakka”]It is interesting how society has had such a backlash against fat shaming, and there seems to be a widely held belief that it exacerbates the obesity problem or causes eating disorders. I personally avoid telling people they’re fat because I figure they already know it. Having been fat, I also know how difficult finding the right formula to achieve and maintain a healthy bodyweight can be. What they are fighting is an addiction, and some folks simply have a natural predisposition to becoming addicted to certain things through no fault of their own. However it is symptomatic of addiction that the sufferer believes that they are helpless to fight it and eventually gives up. I think this is the self delusional and the worst thing a person can do.

I have read about research that found when you eat with fat people, you tend to eat more, regardless of what the fat person chooses to eat. So it would seem that fat becoming the new norm also exacerbates the obesity problem. It could be that social acceptance of obesity produces a greater negative outcome than fat shaming. I certainly don’t want to be the one administering the shame, but I also don’t want to be the one who says it’s OK to give up.[/quote]

The psychology of ‘shaming people’ is dumb. Basically, you can’t ‘shame’ me into losing weight because I’m 40 years old, not 8, and I’m simply not ashamed of myself. Women in particular often modify their behaviour for aspirational reasons, not because they’re told they’re stupid or ugly: they listen to that crap all day anyway.

I think the original article was pretty weak. The doctors of that particular article have an ulterior motive that their research magically supports. They recommend medication and/or surgery. In addition I feel that any science article that uses BMI as a measure of obesity is pretty weak science. I had numerous friends in university that were classed as obese but were extremely healthy. I currently would be classed as overweight. BMI and any article that uses it is a joke.

I think HH2 actually gave a great example of why his original posting is almost dead wrong. It’s hard to eat a healthy diet and maintain an exercise program. In addition to that a lot of the so called diet advice is crap and people usually revert back to their normal diet because they constantly feel hungry and it’s not fun. His co-worker is overweight because he works too hard and doesn’t have time/desire to eat healthy or exercise regularly. My father is significantly overweight (at least +50% of my weight and shorter) because of the same reasons. He worked 12 hour days and ate fast food and convenience store food for years. When I get really busy and overworked I grab more junk food to get me thru the day.

I also have no idea what Finley is disagreeing with Brent about. The simple fact is that people aren’t typically able to eat like Brent does. If they could then they would be significantly less likely to have a weight problem. Getting 600 calories of pure junk is a little on the high side imo but the important part is that Brent gets 1500 calories of healthy food which mostly consists of lean meats, fruits, vegetables and a few starches/grains. The key is that the 1500 calories needs to avoid foods that are full of sugar and starches. Like Brent says 1500 calories of nutritious food fills you up. If you eat 1500 calories of junk then you want to keep eating more and that’s a big part of the problem.

I disagree with Brent (I think it was him) that the food pyramid that was drilled into our heads forever is remotely close to a healthy diet. It significantly overemphasized grains and how many we should eat everyday. The bigger problem with that is that those grains which we thought were healthy were full of added sugar. Imo that was actually a big contributor to the problem.

Smoothies if done wrong can be unhealthy. I make a smoothie 4-5 times/wk (sometimes as breakfast or a snack). 1/2 an apple, 1/2 a kiwi (or a different kind of fruit), 1 small banana, 2-3 frozen strawberries and 15-20 small frozen blueberries (maybe a little vanilla) is typical. An unhealthy smoothie adds juice and/or milk/cream and/or added sugar. Just add water. if you think that a blender makes fruit unhealthy because it removes the fiber then you should try to put blended fruit through a strainer. The fiber is still there. I think it’s laughable if someone thinks that the heat from blending affects fruit at a molecular level. WTF? I would buy an argument that fruit juices could be unhealthy for those reasons.

[quote=“headhonchoII”]Here’s the nutribullet…they call themselves an extractor,
not a blender lol!

dailymail.co.uk/health/artic … ealth.html

This thing was going off in my Facebook feed at Xmas, it’s something new and fun for folks I guess, but I still don’t think it will be better than eating raw fruit or salad.
IF it motivates people to eat better food though it won’t be bad.[/quote]

The recipes they have looks like one of my fridgerator clean-outs …

An interesting aside is the Twinkie Diet, where a nutrition professor ate a terrible diet for a month, but didn’t exceed his daily healthy calorie quota. Not only did he predictably lose weight, but many measurements that indicate health status improved. cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/tw … professor/

[quote=“Ermintrude”]
The psychology of ‘shaming people’ is dumb. Basically, you can’t ‘shame’ me into losing weight because I’m 40 years old, not 8, and I’m simply not ashamed of myself. Women in particular often modify their behaviour for aspirational reasons, not because they’re told they’re stupid or ugly: they listen to that crap all day anyway.[/quote]
I’m definitely not advocating shaming as a miracle cure as it has severe consequences, but acceptance or avoidance may have even worse consequences because we become a society of enablers.

In the case of alcoholics or drug addicts, support is key to recovery, but the wrong kind of support may actually enable their disease and cutting off the relationship may be the only option.

[quote=“diakka”][quote=“Ermintrude”]
The psychology of ‘shaming people’ is dumb. Basically, you can’t ‘shame’ me into losing weight because I’m 40 years old, not 8, and I’m simply not ashamed of myself. Women in particular often modify their behaviour for aspirational reasons, not because they’re told they’re stupid or ugly: they listen to that crap all day anyway.[/quote]
I’m definitely not advocating shaming as a miracle cure as it has severe consequences, but acceptance or avoidance may have even worse consequences because we become a society of enablers.

In the case of alcoholics or drug addicts, support is key to recovery, but the wrong kind of support may actually enable their disease and cutting off the relationship may be the only option.[/quote]

So … ‘You’re right but you’re not.’ Genius.

The issue I have wit “diets” per se is that someday you have to go back to eating normally. Look at this thing, they called it “the cure for obesity” but…

Old is new: healthy mind in healthy body. A healthy diet is part of a healthy life. Moderation in all. You won’t be a skeleton nor a whale.