TheSlySoul
Member
It is a real issue that the cheapest food is also not great for your health.
How can we forget the defense of "pizza is a vegetable" when regulations required vegetables to be served in the cafeteria?
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Most common reason kids get bullied? Weight (NYT)
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How can we forget the defense of "pizza is a vegetable" when regulations required vegetables to be served in the cafeteria?
titiklabingapat
Member
It doesn't help that the basic geometries of our cities pretty much mean we have to drive everywhere and have effectively killed playing on the street (combined that with stranger danger).
I think our suburban environments have been getting us fat, and keeping us fat more than most people realize, especially our kids.
I think our suburban environments have been getting us fat, and keeping us fat more than most people realize, especially our kids.
Change in diet being the most important. The bottom line is, there isn't a single study showing a caloric deficit resulting in weight gain.
The first action, and I feel like a broken record at this point in these types of treads, should always be track what you're eating for a couple weeks to see how many calories you actually consume.
John Kowalski
Banned
Hey guys don't forget that the problem at hand is bullying, ok?
It's part of the complicated list of factors for weight gain. It isn't the root cause of bad eating. In other words, scientifically the pyramid would look like this (although obviously, far more complicated - I just whipped this up):
The "vibe" you get from my posts is irrelevant, since I have actually stated my opinion on this score and you don't have to interpret anything:
Amir0x said:
Amir0x said:
Clear as day. Nobody is saying stay fat or that basic tips on weight loss is a problem. We are saying it's not easy - only 20% of overweight people ever maintain weight loss over the long term, so that's a fact - and that people need to actually understand the reasons why people are overweight, so that they have more empathy for those involved in this harsh cycle. Few people actually want to remain fat. Most fat people know the path to losing weight and have tried many, many times to lose weight. The reason it is easier for some to lose weight than others is because of these complicated list of factors involved in obesity.
Another person who believes it's "easy." Yes, it's "easy" to move out of your country of birth (lol). Yes, it's 'easy' to remove oneself from a specific type of economic disparity. Yes, it's "easy" to remove oneself from a system of advertising shaped around disproportionately selling unhealthy foods and from selling unhealthy foods far cheaper than healthy ones.
None of this is easy. Once again, if it was easy more than 20% would stay losing weight. On top of that, when someone is raised as a child in an environment where these unhealthy habits are norm (80% of kids with obese parents will be obese themselves), they take these problems with them into adulthood. That's why the old "nurture" debate is so real. The way kids are raised dramatically impacts who they are as adults. Then you add the host of other complicating factors into the mix such as gene selection, and it gets even more dire for many involved.
Moff, genes cause bad eating. And yes, some people do have different genetic markers for these things based on the culture they're from. Like how certain races have higher risks for certain diseases, for example, like sickle-cell anemia. I do not believe any studies have been done comparing the different racial backgrounds people have with their likelihood to have genetic markers for certain linked causes to obesity, but that's not evidence that this not playing a significant role (especially since obesity experts agree it does play a significant role, and I defer to their expertise on the matter).
What are you talking about? Kids dont drive around, they dont need a car to get to somewhere where they can play and be active. Having a car isnt an excuse to be fat
No, I don't think bullying is causing the childhood obesity epidemic.
Circular logic at best. If a kids habits come from their parents, so does an adult's: by definition, adults are shaped by many of the things they learned growing up. So unless you think obesity is somehow disconnected from that problem, it applies too.
Zoe
Member
To which I said:
But as for the focus of the article, it appears to be split between the two issues.
I say poor self management is a better way of looking at it.
Sone common mistakes
- not tracking your food
- not measuring your food
- not being aware of nutrition labels
- having tempting foods in the house to begin with
- buying food instead of cooking it
Behaviorally this is only true to a point.
The environmental influences a child receives is much more restricted than an adult. Sure, adults are shaped by their environment growing up, but that becomes a lot more diluted as they age.
Add to that:
-confirmation bias
People will expect not to lose weight, attempted a half-assed calorie restricted diet, see that they aren't losing weight as fast as they wanted, and then go back to comforting habits while saying "I tried!"
Obviously, but I'm not gonna blame a kid's fatness on their lack of discipline. Their lifestyle is usually out of their control. But a fat adult? Most often than not that's due to a lack of discipline. There's no excuse unless you have a disability or disorder at that point.
"There is always going to be obesity. What do you want us to say?"
The same thing you'd say about fixing obesity is the same sorts of things you'd say about trying to fight bullying. You get proactive about it, and you work toward reducing the problem. You expand your empathy to understand the complex causes of these issues. You try to solve the root causes instead of applying band-aids.
Yeah the waiting game is tough. But losing a1-2lbs a week is the absolute sweet spot.
What's sad is losing weight is VERY easy theoretically. Just difficult for people to stick with.
As someone with a kid in school, trust me, they're very proactive and it's netting positive results.
The article in question is a thinly veiled attempt at fat-acceptance, not actually about school-yard bullies.
Bullying is a very complicated issue that is much more deeply ingrained in human society than any of us are willing to accept. Obesity is a disease with a prognosis and eventual cure in many cases.
Which part isn't clear?
If you maintain that, in order to lose weight, it's calories in vs calories out, then yes, you have to eat below your BMR. If you want to lose any significant amount of weight (say, 1 pound a week), you have to eat 500 calories LESS than your normal BMR.
Right now, my current BMR is 1,943 per MyFitnessPal. That means if I want to lose a pound a week, I have to eat 1,443/day. If my BMR has actually slowed down as per the NIH article I posted earlier, I have no clue how much lower I actually have to eat before I'll lose weight. (And my weight loss has slowed down.) I currently have my calories ACTUALLY set to 1,200/day in MFP and I eat about 100 more/less day and I'm not losing anywhere near what I was before.
1,200 calories is a lot of Gazpacho with no oil and that's about it. I eat vegetables like crazy and I'm still on a one-a-day per my doctor.
So again, which part isn't clear?
Fair points, one and all.
TheSlySoul
Member
Yeah, I agree.
Parents should be teaching tolerance instead of judging people for being different.
Most parents treat children as miniature versions of themselves, for better or worse.
IceCold said:
The "excuse" is that obesity is caused by a huge list of complicated factors, of which getting a bad roll of the dice means you are infinitely more likely to get obese and stay obese. Only 20% of overweight people ever lose weight, and almost all of them want to I assure you. Lack of "self-control" is also caused by a complicated list of factors, such as how you were raised, different elements of their neurological break down and, yes, their genes.
You can tell someone to "stop stuffing their face" and yes if they did that they'd weigh much less. But the reason so many fail at doing that is because there are far deeper issues at play, many of which literally are beyond their control. Some will successfully still beat the odds, but many won't. And look at how bad the odds are: if your parents are obese, you are 80% likely to be obese in your life. Only 20% of overweight people sustain weight loss. Genes can play anywhere from 25% to 75% role in your ability to stay at a healthy weight, according to science.
I find the need people have to try to simplify these issues into "you're doing something wrong" to be incredibly unfortunate.
marrec said:
"Many" being 20% of cases.
John Kowalski
Banned
It also isn't the cause of global warming but it's still what the article is about. Simply dismissing bullying and otherwise very negative attitudes towards children who are obese because of "fat-acceptance" isn't actually good practice, nor does it actually engage the myriad problems involved in handling these situations.
Especially when stopping the bullying firstly would put the kids in prime position to better their health. If you care so much about it.
the "it's fat acceptance" argument came up in the other thread, too. it's a weak attempt to defend a derail. whether or not someone should be fat isn't really the point.
bullying will make any personal problem harder to deal with, no matter what it is. why don't we talk about that?
Sorry, that should read: Childhood obesity.
Bullying is wrong. Fat stigma and acceptance (what the article is actually about), however... that's a very complicated issue and as I discussed with Amirox earlier I think fat acceptance gets muddled up with attempts to cure the obesity epidemic. We should not accept obesity as the norm, nor should we degrade or be psychologically harmful toward people who are obese.
SchrodingerC
Member
Worst part is the pizza the cafeteria serves is basically cardboard, but kids will still eat it because it's 'pizza'.
It's part of the never-ending struggle with budgeting and dwindling funding.
Everyone wants to boil this down to it's simplest terms. And we all agree, at it's simplest terms, burn more calories than you eat. What no one seems to want to touch is there are a lot of factors that will determine how much you burn at any given time. And no amount of reasoning, studies, hell sometimes even themselves, will make them understand that our bodies all react very differently to various types of stimuli.
They just want to sum it up to it's lowest common denominator. If it were really so easy to just not eat as much as you burn and if we lived in a vacuum, it'd be fine. But we don't - there are huge influences going on from all sides, some in our control, some not.
Food is a hellova drug.
edit - also to add, when people go from realizing that they have been eating what they want and then they realize that they need to lose weight for whatever reason, suddenly you start to question, "is it really worth it to be having to constantly monitor what I'm eating to extend my life 14 years?" I struggle with that question all the time. I'm going to die. If I can say I enjoyed life, even if I have diabetes at 45 and die at 50, I was still happy - instead I'm relegated to constantly battling my inner demon of "I WANT A FUCKING TWINKIE. GIVE IT TO ME NOW." vs "tomatoes and carrots and celery... But hey, I get to live for 15 more years of this!"
Beer Monkey
Member
This is so fucking debunked it isn't even funny. Stop perpetuating horseshit pseudoscience.
It is, calories in and calories out. But for a lot of these kids their home environment isn't going to give them the kind of support they need. They are KIDS.
And before anybody says it's mean to put kids on diets, it's actually child abuse to overfeed kids and make them obese. You don't "put kids on a diet", you "start feeding them what they should have been eating already".
CarpeDeezNutz
Member
I don't like the idea of my son having two spaghetti dinners in one day.
Dusk Soldier
Member
When you say to kids, "Stop bullying fat people," You're indirectly telling them that bullying is ok as long as it's targeted to an acceptable demographic. Whereas if you just tell them to stop bullying other people, it trains them to look for and reduce bullying behaviours no matter what the circumstance.
This article isn't really advocating an end to bullying. Just the idea that we need to accept fat people for who they are.
There are a lot of negative connotations associated with the terms fat and obese that have nothing to do with body weight and image. And that makes it hard to have a serious discussion on the obesity issue, because you can't use those words without coming across as a bully.
But as a society we need to keep talking about it, because obesity rates are climbing. They've risen to a point where we've lost the ability to even recognize an overweight person when we see them.
It's easy in the sense that the prescription itself does not contain many component parts. In every other way it's extraordinarily difficult. 75% of people who struggled with substance abuse will eventually recover and stay clean for their life. Only 20% of overweight people will ever maintain their weight loss. There is a reason for that, and none of them have to do with it being easy.
If it was easy, more than 20% of overweight people would sustain any meaningful weight loss. And I can assure you, they want to lose weight. So how about you stop peddling nonsense too? These are complex issues and trying to bullshit to people about how easy something is will not help the situation when they fail as most of them will many times in their life as they attempt to lose weight.
Instead, we should be honest about how difficult it is and try to do even more research into yielding effective methods for actually combating the complex set of factors involved in making it so difficult to lose that weight.
Ah the old fallacy of healthy food has to be disgusting rabbit feed.
I eat some amazing stuff with dialed in macros.
D
Deleted member 17706
Unconfirmed Member
Doesn't this just support what Amir0x said, though? Their habits, beliefs, and values are largely shaped by their environments growing up, and as they become older they are less and less affected by their environments (thus remain "stuck in their ways" with the structure that was molded through adolescence).
Unfortunately, this idea has helped virtually no one. I argue that it's done far more harm than good. By reducing all foods to a number, it completely obfuscates the truth that certain foods are simply worse than others (contingent on individual goals, obviously).
Yes, it is complex, and "fat stigma" certainly has different layers to it. We're not just talking about obese and overweight people, we're also talking about people (usually women) who are pressured to believe there's no such thing as too little weight.
There are many societal forces that warp people's ability to perceive and deal with the reality of their own weight (pretty much at any weight level). It's not just "bullying" in the classical sense of some schoolyard shithead, it's also a much more subtle effect that can be encountered anywhere.
IMO, "accepting obesity as the norm" is certainly dangerous, but that's not what treating people with respect is, and these conversations really would do better to focus on how to wipe the self-righteousness and misinformation about these problems so that people can see a path to their goal clearly.
F**king bullshit. So little food would kill the child.
Also, what do you propose with the physical activity problem? Make the schools and hour longer and make that hour only physical activity? Cut the classes to make room for more activity? Its the parents responsebility that their kids are outside and playing instead of rotting inside
No the opposite. They become influenced by more and more and what they grew up with, isn't as important.
D
Deleted member 17706
Unconfirmed Member
Interesting. Is there a point where most people kind of stop being strongly influenced by their surroundings? A point at which they've more or less formed their habits and what they believe in. Obviously, people can always change, but surely we've all observed older folks being particularly stubborn or unwilling to change.
Moff
Member
was that in one of your links? honestly never heard of that but I am curious. if people from the countries I listed have a different genetical background (with genetic markers for certain linked causes to obesity) than americans then I'll give you that.
I agree with the rest you said, especially about child obesity. but that only proves that genetics are the least of the problems. eating habits are. and I still believe they are easy to change, yes, as opposed to having bad genes. if italy can do it so can you.
and more importantly: I think we all agree here. that's the point I was trying to make earlier.
I guess you and the guy you argued before would agree that eating habits and their roots need to change, right? that's why programs that are targeted especially at kids are so important.
What's not clear is your characterization that it's "so far below BMR it's a joke" and "you'd risk malnourishment."
Your BMR according to the calculator you selected is 1,943, though it may have decreased. You can reduce calories, increase physical activity to increase the calories burned, or both, to achieve the 3500 additional calories burned in one week to produce the vaunted 1 pound per week rate of losing bodyweight. That you find the number to be "a joke" isn't evidence that it's, in fact, a joke. Perhaps our (not you alone, us as a society) perspectives on what's appropriate caloric intake are off.
Or, granting you that your individual BMR minus 500 is a joke, perhaps the problem is the caloric reduction: maybe you shouldn't aim for a net deficit of 500 calories per day.
Taking a multivitamin isn't evidence that your caloric intake is producing malnourishment. You could triple your caloric intake and still likely need supplementation to achieve the recommended daily intake of various vitamins and minerals, unless you carefully tailored the foods you've eaten to cover all bases.
Unrelated, but I think this thread is conflating the terms simple and easy. The basic fact is that weight loss or weight gain is calories burned v. calories consumed, and that is incredibly simple to understand. Whether it's easy to execute against that, and just how easy or difficult it is, and just how much is truly in the person's control, one's mileage may vary.
None of this is supported by what the research has shown. In study after study, research indicates that the way people are raised as children has dramatic effects on them 10, 20 even 30 years later. In some cases it can directly predict how poorly/successfully someone will react in a myriad of situations.
I recommend reading The Development of the Person: The Minnesota Study of Risk and Adaptation from Birth to Adulthood, which is an analysis of a huge study done on this very issue that breaks down these factors. While they don't deal specifically with obese in this study, the conclusion from the study clearly would cover it: that virtually all human behaviors are in some way informed partially by the way you're raised.
If you want to try to quantify what 'the stuff they learn as children is less important as they grow up'' means, I suppose we can try to analyze that.
Any of it fried or sugary?
I eat a lot of stuff too. Gazpacho being my latest "thing". I eat a lot of salads, chicken, fish and beef. All of it good. But none of those would I call "amazing". "Amazing" is boneless wings at BW3s. "Amazing" is my grandma's fried chicken. Hell, "amazing" is the donuts that are brought into the office every day.
Those things are "amazing" to me. Not grilled chicken with pan roasted asparagus. I'm not afraid to add flavor to my dishes - I use tons of herbs, etc. But no amount of herbs is going to make something that is naturally bland to begin with suddenly become "amazing".
Also, I'm over grilled chicken and fish. I want some fucking fried shrimp. I want to go down to Knock Kneed Lobster where everything except the salad is deep fried.
But again, I keep eating these things - I'm not going to Knock Kneed Lobster. If I eat out, we eat someplace I can get a salad with grilled chicken and the dressing on the side. Or some form of grilled, roasted, meat and some sort of low-oil vegetables.
If you have low-fat-low-cal fried foods recipes - I'm all ears. And while baked "fried" chicken is good, it's not going to be the same.
(If you can't see, there's a theme here. I really, REALLY like fried foods.)
To be fair, the amount we find something "amazing" is directly related to the types of food we are raised to eat. Like how some cultures eat bugs and find it absolutely delicious and the best shit you can eat, whilst others are literally repulsed at the very idea of it.
You're right. My grandma and great grandma were both from the south where (I'm not saying all of the south, just them) you had fried chicken and biscuits and gravy for dinner. For breakfast it was either biscuits and sausage gravy OR biscuits and red-eye gravy made with pan drippings with a giant-ass ham steak. Almost every day.
My mom still makes things like deep-fried brussels sprouts. Pretty much the mantra of my family is "if it's not deep-fried, it's not worth eating" so that is my history and it makes sense why I find everything deep fried so damn good ><
So treating a fat person with respect like any normal person, not assuming that they are lazy and stupid (common assumptions about overweight and obese people) is "fat acceptance"? Any interaction with them that isn't harping on them to change their diet or amend their eating habits is "fat acceptance"? If I eat out with someone who's overweight and they order a hamburger, if I don't shun them socially, is that "fat acceptance"? After all any negative behavior they encounter in society is kind of their fault because of their personal choices? Its so easy to change and not be fat. Its even easier to change clothes, right? So any woman who encounters a negative interaction with society got what she deserved, because her choice, right? That's the logic I'm hearing, show me where its different and I'll show you a liar and hypocrite
my weakness is chinese food. i've been at my goal weight for a while now so I try not to give in to temptation, but man I do love the rare occasions I give in. It's so amazing.
It is weird though how little I like meat. My family was always serving meat, but from my teenage years I really stopped enjoying most meat altogether. I'm not a vegetarian, but I just rarely ever order meat or eat it if I can avoid it. The only time I really make an exception is for a well stuffed and seasoned Turkey.
First, both of your studies are just abstracts. Do you have access to the full articles? Have you read their methods to see what their results actually were?
Anyone worth their salt in research knows the abstract isn't the full picture and makes your paper seem a lot more appealing than it is.
If you can't access more than the abstract you REALLY shouldn't be citing them as sources to back you up. This doesn't even get into how unreliable most long term studies are. They're not only extremly difficult to do, but they tend to come up with soupy statistics so researchers twist things to at least sound interesting.
Anyway
Informed partially is true. But you are exposed to more as you get older and your behavior is shaped by those things. Behavior isn't simple, it's incredibly complex. GAF heavily leans liberal/anti religion. You think everyone, or hell, even 51% were raised that way? And those are some deep core values. That should be your first clue at how being raised really doesn't have that big of an influence in the long run.
OpinionatedCyborg
Member
I disagree with you. A lot of people are shockingly ignorant about fundamental health facts. Some of them are poorly educated or learning disabled (very eye-opening video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGtTZ_vxjyA), some have been led astray by charlatans and/or their peers, and some are delusional. "It's my genetics," "I have a slower metabolism," "I have the thyroid," "you can eat whatever you want on this diet and lose weight," "you are fat because you are full of toxins; once you detox, you body will shed the fat," "I have the sugars, which caused me to get fat," "you should follow intuitive eating; if you want to eat it, your body needs it" and so on.
Well. This is what I'm making tonight.
If fried food is so important to you, have a portion of it sensibly 2-3 times a week to start and slowly reduce it over time or find replacements like the above meal
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