Yeah, I’m with Sin on this one.
Since you like to read Curtis (and Hades), and everyone really, this is good stuff, read this:
http://www.mindlesseating.org/
Its one of the books Brian Wansink wrote.
I was with Sin before he even said anything.
And kasey…
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOO !
Does the sword of omens give you sight beyond sight? Or does it just come in your eye too?
It doesn’t give me shit, I lost the instruction manual.
Curtis dropped a bomb of different kinds of information that go all over the fucking place. Here’s a hint: if you want to make a statement, make excerpts. If reading your articles has made you so smart, then by all means, teach us what it taught you. None of us are interested in reading your wall of text.
You have to read the whole article to get the point of it, so I don’t see why putting excerpts would be more effective. The article is the statement. It may be poorly organized, but it had the info I wanted to express, and just excerpting it would have necessitated visiting the link since you have to read the whole thing to get the point of it.
The reason obesity is not genetic is that if you go back a few generations for all the people who are overweight or obese, the parents of obese parents didn’t tend to be obese. Otherwise, 2/3 the US wouldn’t be overweight without overweight people having massively outreproduced the people who weren’t overweight.
Honestly Sin, you threw some scientific terms around in your post I don’t understand and I’m not sure how it relates to whether obesity or being overweight has genetic components(not to say it doesn’t relate, but it has to be explained more simply to me), but…
Obesity isn’t genetic, but nobody’s saying that. Obesity is the result of environmental and genetic factors. From my own observations of the world, it would seem people’s metabolism is genetic. For instance, if you go back a few generations, as you say, the ancestors of the obese today weren’t obese, but they probably had BMIs that trended higher on the scale than everyone else’s. They probably had slower metabolisms. If two different people eat the same exact diet over a long period of time, they’re still going to end up weighing differently than each other. Otherwise everyone in prison/the army, or any other institution with planned identical diets, would all end up weighing the same. Which they don’t. Another example would be the “gaining muscle” subculture where skinny teens and guys in their 20s consume huge calorie protein supplements only to gain 10-15 pounds. Contrast this with those who struggle to lose weight.
Those examples show some people are going to put weight on more easily, or lose weight more easily. This doesn’t mean they are genetically programmed to be obese, merely that, given the high calorie content of today’s food, their metabolism makes it easy for them to become obese.
TL;DR
Sin, I agree with what you’re saying, I just think your usual blunt approach to communicating it doesn’t really do justice to the complexity of it. I don’t think anything you’ve said is wrong, I just think you’re leaving out a lot of important info. There really are people out there who, for some reason or another, default to being fat. I know you’re the kind of guy who likes telling people what you think they need to hear, but you need to be more open to the fact that there are people 220lbs is a healthy weight (and not a calorie management problem) for, and I’m not talking about bodybuilders.
Well, maybe 220 is pushing it. I just wanted to throw a number out there.
Skinny person: “Holy shit I’m starving!” Three minutes later after eating half a sandwich. “Oh my god I’m so full”.
Fat person: “Holy shit I’m starving!” Three minutes later after eating the entire sandwich. “Holy shit I’m still starving!”
It’s all really simple. Calories in > Calories out -> Weight gain; Calories out > Calories in -> Weight loss. It doesn’t matter what your metabolism is and what your genes say about food to energy conversion efficiency. Current meals at just about all fast food places are designed to have more calories than you need and to elicit appetite and hunger responses through chemical means. If you have the 2/3rds of the country eating more calories than they can burn, then you’re going to end up with 2/3rds of the country being obese.
And hunger is the same for everyone?
Hunger doesn’t stop the relationships from being true. It just controls the amount of calories you put in. It’s also a partially psychological state that you can control, as evidenced by the article. The subjects that were shocked into being thin gained the weight back, and the subjects that were shocked into being obese lost the weight quickly. They didn’t want to lose or gain weight, so there was no motivation to let their bodies adjust. What is a few months or a few weeks compared to a lifetime of eating a certain amount?
That’s why it’s not fair to just place the blame on big, bad genetics. One of the distinguishing features of humanity is the ability to make long-term beneficial decisions that lead to short-term unpleasantness. You’re not going to magically gain weight unless you have magical hypothyroidism.
That’s why it’s more important to develop healthy eating habits early, rather than try to fix the problem later.
Yeah, hypothyroidism sucks.
Seriously, you can debate everything, but it does boil down to calories burned and calories eaten. Obvously, these numbers are affected by a lot of variables, but if you eat more calories than you use, you have excess and this will build fat. Theres really no arguement there.
I like how he has a page called Mindless Products. Hey, without my Thinware plates & cups & glasses you won’t be thin!
Wrong! The mouth is the cause of caloric intake. smug
When you write a scientific article , or hell, a graduate thesis, you have to write what is called an “abstract” which in 200-300 words, will summarize the take home message of what you want to say. If you can’t extract or synthesize the big picture message, it means you don’t understand what its about.
I think I said this before: if you don’t understand something I said, instead of giving up or thinking I’m wrong because you don’t understand it, ask me to explain it.
You are.
To be precise, obesity is an ILLNESS. The difference between disease and illness is that illness is the result of biological and personal factors combining into a greater problem. Note that I didn’t say GENETIC because biological doesn’t mean genetic and because the term environmental is not representative. The biology here is energy management, the personal factors are socio-cultural norms. My point in all my statements is that the personal factors are what interferes with people’s biology to make them obese. You are suggesting it is the other way around.
No. Here you’re trying again to make a genetic or hereditary link - which is the same. The reason obesity is not genetic is that if you go back a few generations for all the people who are overweight or obese, the parents of obese parents DID NOT tend to be obese. Otherwise, 2/3 the US wouldn’t be overweight without overweight people having massively outreproduced the people who weren’t overweight. We wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic all of a sudden EVERYWHERE around the world because everyone would’ve been fat to begin with.
You’re falling back on the metabolism excuse. Do you even know what that means? Do you know where it comes from? It is an excuse people make to avoid taking responsibility for their situation by finding a convenient mystical force they believe they can’t control. To say its not their fault. Does this sound familiar to how you deal with things?
You have to measure what goes in and what goes OUT. (energy wise). Everything that didn’t get expended is stored. This is the difference as to why some get fat and some do not. It is a common misconception that this variability does not exist because people aren’t very good at evaluating subtleties of output, especially if its only a different of a couple hundred calories.
Calorie and protein supplement is an oxymoron. Proteins have the lowest calorie output of all food types. The way the body handles protein is different and the point to doing this is to build muscle, which is a lot harder than building fat. It is in itself an energy requiring process. Losing weight is a complex and very different issue where you’re not trying to build anything, but expend excessive energy supplies.
The examples I used are representative of the problem at large: dysfunctional cultural perceptions of normality. You like to use the word metabolism as an excuse. Metabolism is the process by which the body builds things. It is an energy requiring process. If energy is not spent it needs to go somewhere. That’s the whole point to everything I (and Cless) are saying.
What makes people fat, overall, IS a simple concept, as supported by Cless. I think I did a fairly good job point out that the specifics of what drives people’s behaviors are not as simple, but as a concept, is simple.
By default, you mean…? I interpret that as they become complacent.
The concept of health is a sensitive term. Its like disease and illness. The thing is, you can be perfectly happy being fat because health is a perception of well being. The problem is that with obesity comes increasing risks for developing very specific diseases that are independent of feeling of well being, such as diabetes, hypertension, etc… in the 40s-50s. Most people don’t know the implications of what these diseases mean, they’re just terms that are thrown around by the media. You don’t know that with diabetes you can have blindness, peripheral nerve damage leading to multiple amputations, kidney failure requiring dialysis every other day (otherwise you DIE), etc. Imagine going into a room where people are plugged for 3 hours every other day and seeing someone who is blind and is in a wheel chair because they lost both their feet. This in addition to the travel time to get to and from the clinic and the set up to get on and off the machine. I have seen this. Heart disease is the leading killer in the US because people get heart attacks from the fat build up in their arteries.
What happens with diseases like this is that getting them and the way they evolve is a matter of probability and a matter of disease management with drugs. People in lower socio-economic circles are thus disproportionately affected because they don’t manage the disease well, which ironically, is reflective of their own personal energy management that got them there to begin with. This is why I state that obesity is an illness. Its roots go deep and are complex.
The problem with the probability is like with cancer, you’re going to have a bunch of people that stick their fingers in their ears and don’t want to understand that something is real even if it doesn’t affect everyone the same way for very complicated reasons.
Allow me to put this as explicitly as I can because of obesity, this generation will be the first generation in the history of our species that we see life expectancy go down. We are victims of our own technological marvels.
Man, you really want people to see your point don’t you?
I think I said this before: if you don’t understand something I said, instead of giving up or thinking I’m wrong because you don’t understand it, ask me to explain it.
I did this, though: “explain it to me more simply”.
Originally Posted by Curtis
Obesity isn’t genetic, but nobody’s saying that.You are
I’m saying that it is easier for some people to become obese, due to genetics. Not that genetics automatically makes one obese. You need both the genetics and environmental factors to become obese. Do you disagree that there are any genetic factors whatsoever that can make it easier for someone to become obese?
No. Here you’re trying again to make a genetic or hereditary link - which is the same. The reason obesity is not genetic is that if you go back a few generations for all the people who are overweight or obese, the parents of obese parents DID NOT tend to be obese. Otherwise, 2/3 the US wouldn’t be overweight without overweight people having massively outreproduced the people who weren’t overweight. We wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic all of a sudden EVERYWHERE around the world because everyone would’ve been fat to begin with.
I agree that genetics doesn’t solely make you obese. However, it could be a factor when combined with extremely high calorie diets. Not everyone is obese; do those people who escape obesity really do so because of healthier lifestyles? From what I have seen, I doubt it; vast majority of people eat junk and don’t exercise, yet a substantial number manage to stay in an acceptable weight range. Granted, this is anecdotal.
You’re falling back on the metabolism excuse. Do you even know what that means? Do you know where it comes from? It is an excuse people make to avoid taking responsibility for their situation by finding a convenient mystical force they believe they can’t control. To say its not their fault. Does this sound familiar to how you deal with things?
When I used the word metabolism, I was trying to convey the idea that even if two people eat the exact same things, they will end up with different weights. What do you call that? Is there a better word for it? As for how I deal with things, this is an unnecessary personal attack.
You have to measure what goes in and what goes OUT. (energy wise). Everything that didn’t get expended is stored. This is the difference as to why some get fat and some do not. It is a common misconception that this variability does not exist because people aren’t very good at evaluating subtleties of output, especially if its only a different of a couple hundred calories.
Ok, but how do you explain people who engage in identical diets and extremely similar physical activities with little variability of output(such as prison, the military). You still see a wide range of different weights.
Calorie and protein supplement is an oxymoron. Proteins have the lowest calorie output of all food types. The way the body handles protein is different and the point to doing this is to build muscle, which is a lot harder than building fat. It is in itself an energy requiring process. Losing weight is a complex and very different issue where you’re not trying to build anything, but expend excessive energy supplies.
Ok, but each of those protein drinks still packs in 1000 calories or thereabouts. As you have pointed out, calories are calories and it doesn’t matter where they come from. Furthermore, those attempting to build muscle usually monitor calorie intake to make sure they are putting in a huge amount per day. They do engage in intensive weight lifting exercises, but these don’t burn a lot of calories even when done in large amounts.
Which part?
In rare circumstances. This is not a discussion about rare circumstances.
I already explained that.It is a common misconception that this variability does not exist because people aren’t very good at evaluating subtleties of output, especially if its only a different of a couple hundred calories. Your generalization is hard further to discuss because we’re discussing straw men. Its like what I told Hades about people plugging their ears. Because people can’t directly see an immediate and obvious difference, they think it doesn’t exist. These things build up over time and that’s when you get screwed.
I am going to need you to substantiate your claim that there are that many calories in the average protein based drink a person takes when buffing up.
They monitor calories for specific reasons: to maintain their physiques. These people are not the focus of this discussion. You are comparing apples and oranges.
Wrong. If we’re talking about people who really go to the gym to buff up, they tend to burn a lot of calories over a lot of time.
Everything is about behavior over elongated periods of time over which change occurs very gradually