Diets and exericise was TIME's poster girl

[Guest guest]

Very true, but I can't imagine squelching my granddaughter's love of outdoors by

not going out with her, so we both can enjoy it. That's a win-win!

The following excludes people who have metabolic issues or are on medications

that prevent weight loss.

About the diet thing, I've had people tell me that they lost weight on this diet

and that diet. Then they say that once they go off the diet, they regain all

the weight, and then some. Well, duh!

I've yo-yod so many times that staying at a constant weight is unheard of. Do I

blame any diet? NO! *I* choose what *I* put in my mouth and how much I move

around. It's entirely up to me and always has been! Now, did I inherit a

metabolism that makes me an easy keeper? Yes, I did. But that's the hand I was

dealt and it's up to me to decide how I play that hand. Until *I* make

healthful food and exercise choices every day, *I* will keep myself fat. Do

diets work? As far as they go, yes, they do. Do people go off of diets and

return to their old eating habits? Yes, they do.

Maybe it's the term " diet " . I mean, everything we eat, good or bad, constitutes

our diets. So, let's call it healthful eating versus unhealthful eating. So,

with " diet " out of the conversation, is it not true that healthful eating works?

Now, before we nitpick what defines healthful eating, let me say that, for me,

I'm eating healthfully if I'm losing weight (or maintaining ideal weight *for

me*), my cholesterol numbers are in a healthful range (according to current

medical recommendations) and I have energy and am not always hungry. What gets

me there might be vastly different from what gets anyone else there. I would

hate to think that the size of my body is out of my control.

This is an interesting thread.

Best,

Becky

RE: TIME's poster girl

Unfortunately, the real or percieved dangers in modern society means

that many parents don't want to leave children unsupervised; accordinly,

unless a parent can also go out and keep an eye on them, many children

aren't allowed to go outside anymore.

[Guest guest]

So, Edd, it sounds like you're saying that people do NOT choose what

they eat, or that people get fat regardless of what they choose to eat?

I choose what goes into my mouth - every day, every meal. When I see

someone who is obese eating pizza and chocolate cake for lunch I kinda

know why that obesity exists, don't you? I'm certainly not knocking

exercise - it works. Some people do have medical problems, or take

meds, that make losing weight difficult, if not impossible. But with

education and personal responsibility we each can choose a healthy food

plan. I don't consider Atkins to be a diet. It's a food plan and I get

to choose the foods that go into the plan - pizza and chocolate cake are

not included. Most of the overweight people I know are overweight

because there are so many foods that they just " can't " live without.

Unfortunately, they are not living too well with those foods in their

eating plans.

CarolR

Edd wrote:

> When I started this post, my intention was to explain how obesity &

> weight control works -- and it's different from believing that people

> choose what they eat -- but I'm rambled on too long already.

>

[Guest guest]

I do not agree. Sure some eat the bad foods and are fat. I eat the healthy foods

and I am fat. I do not lose on anything. G

[Guest guest]

I couldn't have said this better. Thank you, Carol.

AJ

Carol wrote:

> So, Edd, it sounds like you're saying that people do NOT choose what

> they eat, or that people get fat regardless of what they choose to eat?

> I choose what goes into my mouth - every day, every meal. When I see

> someone who is obese eating pizza and chocolate cake for lunch I kinda

> know why that obesity exists, don't you? I'm certainly not knocking

> exercise - it works. Some people do have medical problems, or take

> meds, that make losing weight difficult, if not impossible. But with

> education and personal responsibility we each can choose a healthy food

> plan. I don't consider Atkins to be a diet. It's a food plan and I get

> to choose the foods that go into the plan - pizza and chocolate cake are

> not included. Most of the overweight people I know are overweight

> because there are so many foods that they just " can't " live without.

> Unfortunately, they are not living too well with those foods in their

> eating plans.

>

> CarolR

>

[Guest guest]

I agree with Edd. G

[Guest guest]

Carol wrote:

>So, Edd, it sounds like you're saying that people do NOT choose what

>they eat, or that people get fat regardless of what they choose to eat?

>

They choose what they eat. I'm saying it doesn't matter much

what you eat. If people all ate the same thing, some would get thin

while other would get fat.

> I choose what goes into my mouth - every day, every meal. ...Most of the

overweight people I know are overweight

>because there are so many foods that they just " can't " live without.

>

But skinny people can't live without those same foods. They

eat those foods and don't gain, so they're not criticized for eating

chocolate cake. There are a lot of strange questions about weight

control that people are aware of but ignore. Why do some people gain

weight on the same food that doesn't put weight on another person. Why

is a fat person's weight generally stable when he's not dieting? If a

fat person over eats all the time, shouldn't he be gaining weight every

day? If he's not gaining, then he must have control of his eating.

But if he has control, why doesn't he eat less and lose weight? Why

does the typical dieter regain his weight? And why does he regain back

to his original weight? Why do we hit plateaus when we diet? Why are

there morbidly underweight people who can't seem to gain weight to

healthy level? Why don't they just eat more?

We've all been taught that old formula: Calories consumed less

calories burned equals fat left over. Well, that formula is

incorrect because there's an important incorrect assumption in it. It

assumes that we all burn calories at the same rate. We don't. That

belief is usually defended by saying the laws of physics can't be

broken. A calorie is a calorie. While that's true, it's also true that

our bodies can change the way it deals with calories. When it chooses

to, it can burn calories very wastefully or it can squeeze every bit of

energy from each one. A gallon of gas has a fixed amount of energy in

it, but if you drive one way you can get 20 miles out of it. If you

drive another way, you could get 30 miles from it.

There are two basic factors that control our weight, genetics and

the environment we live in. It's very difficult to change your

environment. While we can make some changes, for the most part within a

particular environment, our weights are determined by our genetics.

Our bodies have an automatic system that controls our weight. They

use the engineering term " set point " to describe it. Set point is like

a thermostat on a heater. When it gets too cold, the thermostat

senses that and turns on the heater. When it gets warm enough, the

thermostat turns the heater off. The human body is filled with set

points. Take breathing as an example. You never have to consciously

decide how often to breath. Your body senses the carbon dioxide level

in your blood. If it's too high, you inhale and exhale. When you

exert yourself, you breath more frequently automatically. Our weight

is controlled in the same kind of way.

Our weight set point is set at a particular level for each of us.

We inherit that from our ancestors. It's not really a point so much as

a range of points. As our environment changes, the particular point in

the range changes with it. Consider the amount of exercise we get as

part of the environment. But just looking at the mechanism, set point

controls a couple things, hunger and how efficiently we burn

calories. There is no such thing as a " slow metabolism. " Studies

have found that thin people and fat people who are not dieting have the

same basal metabolism rates. They just weigh different amounts. In

the same way, when a fat person diets and a thin person starves, the

same things happen to their basal metabolism rates. The set point's

job is to maintain our weight at the set level. If you gain weight, it

brings you back down. By the same token, if you lose weight, it will

struggle to bring you back up. That's why a dieter regains to his

original weight.

Let's say you begin dieting and losing weight. Set point wants to

preserve your remaining weight and and encourage you to eat more to

regain what you've lost. It turns on hunger so you're more hungry.

And you'll remain hungry until you've regained your weight back. That's

why dieters complain of being hungry all the time. If you continue

losing weight for a while, your body will begin burning calories more

efficiently to help preserve your remaining weight. That'll make it

easier to maintain your weight while eating less food. You'll notice

that because your diet will hit a plateau. As you continue dieting,

you may hit other plateaus as your body readjusts further. All this

will make losing weight harder. The experience we're all familiar

with. The reason we're able to lose weight at all is because we're

able to marshall tremendous force of will to resist the constant

hunger. Many of us can do that for a long time. My longest

successful diet lasted 14 months.

Dieting causes bingeing. And that's because your set point is

making you hungry. During my 14 month diet, I binged several times. I

remember one that I'm still too embarrassed about to tell you all these

years later. But I don't feel the need to binge any more. and the

reason is that I don't diet any more. I'm not hungry, so I don't

binge. People fall off their diets and " go back to their old eating

habits " not because habits are so strong. It's because they're

hungry. If you spend a year losing weight, by then you've pretty much

changed your habits. Why would they spring back so suddenly? Set

point won't turn off the hunger until you've regained your weight. It's

inexorable. It never stops.

Fat people are accused of being emotional eaters. you have a bad

day and get stressed out, so you eat. The usual explanation is that

you're eating comfort food or that you've confused happiness with a full

stomach or some such nonsense. Thin people have comfort foods, but

they 're not fat. And the idea that fat people are emotionally

abnormal has been disproved by a number of psychiatric studies. The

only difference between the personalities of fat and thin people is that

fat people tend to be a bit more rigid. and that makes sense, because

we have to be rigid to stay on diets as long as we do. Thin people are

just as neurotic as we are.

Here's a better explanation of why we eat when stressed out.

Exerting will power to resist hunger is very hard. It takes a lot of

emotional energy. When we get over stressed, something has to give.

You have to eliminate something stressful, so you eliminate something

you can control. And that's usually the stress of resisting hunger.

Once your stress levels return to the tolerable, you can add back

resisting hunger and start the diet again. That explanation is

consistent with set point and it makes much more sense than just saying

fat people are crazy.

I lost a lot of weight on Weight Watchers. And while I was doing

it, I worked very hard to convince myself that I was following a diet

that I would stay on forever, and that I'd never regain. I had myself

convinced that I was not hungry, that Weight Watchers was supplying me

with all the food I needed. But I was fooling myself. On the very

evenings that I told myself that, I would pace back and forth from the

living room to the refrigerator. A hundred times a night I would open

the refrigerator's door and look inside. Then I would close the door

without getting anything. Now does that sound like a man who was not

hungry? But at the time, I had myself convinced. I thought my

bingeing was a " bad habit. " All that went away when I really stopped

dieting.

Set point works in the other direction as well. Let's say you gain

weight. Set point will turn off your hunger and begin burning your

calories wastefully. It actually can raise your temperature to do

this. And since you lose your appetite, you eat less until you've

lost all the " excess " weight. Every once in a while you'll read about

some movie star who force fed himself to gain weight for a movie role

and then lost the weight later. I always find it interesting that they

focus on the force feeding, because the move actor always complains

eating all those milkshakes was fun at first but later became really

unpleasant. That's because of the set point. It's hard to eat when

you're not hungry. Generally, those articles kind of gloss over the

actor's weight loss after the movie, but they hardly ever say it was

hard to lose. perhaps they'll say it was hard to lose the last few

pounds. That's because they lost easily until they reached their set

point;, getting below that became hard.

Why can't skinny people gain weight? Because they've inherited a

low set point. Otherwise they go through the same things as the rest

of us. If they try eating more, they soon find they've lost their

appetites and then it become unpleasant to eat.

Just maintaining weight, whether you're skinny or fat, is a mystery

unless you consider set point. When asked how they control their

weights, most people will just say they watch what they eat. They make

it sound so easy, but is it? How easy is it to know exactly how much

you've over eaten today so you can under eat tomorrow? It turns out

it's very hard.

If you ate as little as 100 calories per day too much, you'd gain 10

pounds in a year. In ten years, you'd be 100 pounds over weight. It

40 years you'd be 400 pounds over weight. They point to us fat people

and accuse us of eating out of control, but how many 500 and 600 pound

people do you see on the streets. Not many. How easy is it to make a

100 calorie mistake? Too easy. There was a study in which subjects

were asked to cut back 100 calories per day, but eat normally

otherwise. Their consumption was measured and they all cut back far

too much. Some of them cut back 500 calories or more. 100 calories is

pat of butter or half a small apple spread over three meals and

snacks. When you eat a meal, can you tell that your dinner has 1/3 rd

of a pat of butter too much in it? But control that precise in

absolutely necessary to avoid gaining 100 pounds a decade.

Here's a calculation nobody does. How accurately do you have to

eat? Let's assume you are 150 pounds over weight and that you gained

that weight over 40 years. That means you overate about 50 calories

a day. That's an undetectable amount of food. And it means that you

ate with over 99% accuracy. What you ate was 99% correct, but 1%

over. And now you're 150# over weight.

When we over eat, most of us consume far more than a mere 50 or 100

a day. How could we possibly recover from Thanksgiving or the

Christmas season? The answer is that set point handles it.

The environment is the other important factor. The harder you have

to exert yourself, the lower your set point goes. So exercise more.

Over the last 30 or so years, Americans have been gaining weight.

everybody wants to blame that on fast food. Maybe. But I'd place my

money on exercise. More machinery to do our heavy work for us. As I

said in an earlier post, when I was a kid I walked to school. No one

does that today. We drive everywhere. We have washing machines and

dish washers. When I was a kid, my mom washed clothing on a scrub board

in the bath tub. We have jobs that don't require a lot of walking or

exertion. And when we're home we're watching TV or playing on the

computer, both of which require sitting very still. I think the major

reason our nation is fatter is because we're exerting ourselves

less. Each generation before us was thinner and thinner. I believe

that a large part of the explanation for that is that they worked harder

physically than we do. They worked harder so they were thinner.

Because they worked hard and were thinner, they had less diabetes.

That's why many of us seem to be the first diabetic in the family. The

genes were there all along, but the just came out in us.

People are complaining of more childhood obesity now. I see that as

a problem of less and less exercise. There are a lot of reasons why

kids don't walk to school anymore. I won't argue about those, but kids

are not replacing that kind of exercise with something else.

There are lots of diet plans out there. I'm old enough to remember

when that's all they were. Now they insist that you exercise as well.

They all tell you that exercise is a great supplement to their diet.

ly, I think exercise is the best way to lose weight. Those diet

books are encouraging you to exercise and then give the credit of any

weight loss to their diet. Now to me, that's crazy.

So no, I don't think it's what we eat that determines our weight.

Thin people eat crappy food al the time and never get fat. It's

important to look at the whole picture. It's wrong to blame what we're

eating when the same food isn't making others fat. Our bodies control

what happens to the food after we eat it.

Most people will read this and just say that eating making us fat

is common sense. I know it seems like common sense to blame obesity on

eating, but it wasn't that long ago that common sense told us that a

heavier object will fall faster than a lighter one. But Galileo proved

that was wrong. Sometimes common sense is trumped by science. If you

want to read about research into obesity, then you'll come across set

point. There are no studies that show eating makes us fatter. The

studies all point to an idea like set point, an automatic self

regulating system. If fact, I recommend you read up on the science of

obesity. I don't mean some doctor's article in a newspaper or magazine

warning us to lose weight. I mean real research.

Do an Internet search for " set point. " Go to your library or

www.half.com and get either of these books which are well written

summaries of research since W.W.II.

_Dieters Dilemma_ by (1985) or

_Fat, Fighting the Obesity Epidemic_ by Pool (2001)

Edd

[Guest guest]

Betty, how I envy you the thin years. I had some with much struggle but with age

the pounds came on and I also got tired of the constant hunger. I understand the

higher weight may feel better now. G

[Guest guest]

whimsy2 wrote:

>Wow, Edd, that was quite a tretise! And it sounds like you've put a lot

>of thought and effort into it. Thank you.

>Vicki

>

Perhaps I get carried away.

edd

[Guest guest]

To feel really fat, I just remind myself that I now weight 20 pounds

more than at the peak of my pregnancies. I think I could do with a

few less pounds but my doctor doesn't agree. I've lost 3/4 inch since

this time last year. Am I fatter or just more compact? Using the BMW

I'm ok. I am really thankful for my daughter, a very brittle T1, as

she can just balance glucose without the poundage worry. I think

some thin people overeat just like some fat people do. Whatever I

imagine most of us overdo some...of course some overdo a LOT.

Betty

> Betty, how I envy you the thin years. I had some with much struggle

but with age the pounds came on and I also got tired of the constant

hunger. I understand the higher weight may feel better now. G

>

>

>

[Guest guest]

A " PS " to my post.

I used to be ok eating any and everything and still was too skinny.

Now lest you think I have it too easy, I watch, and limit what I eat

otherwise I am sure I would gain weight. So I just try to hold my

own where I am. I know that is still easier than loosing weight.

Betty

> > Betty, how I envy you the thin years. I had some with much

struggle

> but with age the pounds came on and I also got tired of the

constant

> hunger. I understand the higher weight may feel better now. G

> >

> >

> >

[Guest guest]

Cora Henricks wrote:

>Well, at least there was some thought and substance to your

>post --

>

Thanks. I do what I can with my limited resources.

>..Those reading digest version have to scroll thru

>all the stuff to get to the next post, whereas it may not

>be so bothersome to those who read the list, as once they

>find the meat of a post and read it,

>

It was rather long. I apologize for that. I try to be

concise, but often fail.

Edd