From LBN: Many in US in Denial about Weight.

[BurtWorm]

I am not! :evilfrown:

[Angelus]

1. What is the % number of Americans who are overweight?

Is it like 50%?

[BurtWorm]

2. Are you insinuating something?

:|

I mean, considering there are only two of us in this thread...

[Skarbrowe]

3. DANG!

I'm sitting here wanting to eat something, thinking why do I always want to eat something and trying to figure out how to stop always wanting to eat something.

Sometimes I think of people all over the world that never have enough to eat and I just figure I'm fortunate enough to pick my poison.

It's gotta be worse than being a heroin addict.

FEED ME!

:)

Skarbrowe

[TreasonousBastard]

4. I'll answer here instead of LBN.

And take the flames.

Having bounced back and forth between 175 and 300 pounds several times without EVER dieting or execising properly, I think I have something to say about this.

Due to genetics and early childhood diets, different people have different ways of metabolizing calories. Age and sex matter, too.

Muscle weighs more than fat, so it's not entirely weight, but belt size that counts. Take the pinch test, and get off the scale.

It seems to be generally accepted that a few extra pounds of flab make little difference in overall health. Obesity, however, is definitely unhealthy. Diabetes, heart disease, joint and skeletal problems...

And, there is the problem of medical personnel actually trying to work on a morbidly obese person. Ask a surgeon about doing a simple appendectomy on a 500 pounder. Or setting a bone. Finding a vein, stopping arterial bleeding... CPR is lots of fun, too.

OK, there are arguments abounding about the rights and joys of being heavy, but, having been there, I don't buy them one bit. It's all denial and bullshit. You're fat because you're a glutton and don't move enough. Being fat is a personal decision to not be thin, and like a personal decision to not bathe, it is deserving of pretty much the same attitudes. Very few people are genetically destined to be fat, although some get there easier than others.

It is far too easy to find crap foods, and far too difficult to find healthy ones, no matter what the food vendors are trying to sell us. Sugar, fats, and calorie content are far too high in most of what we eat. One Double Gulp gives you at least a week's worth of high fructose corn syrup if you don't get the diet one. Ask a diabetic about just how difficult it is to find genuinely low-carb foods, regardless of what the Atkins purveyors have out there. Ever bother to read how many carbs/calories are in a glass of apple juice? A bowl of corn flakes? Baked beans?

btw, more than one diabetic has gotten into trouble when someone hooked up the tubes wrong on those soda machines, and they didn't get the diet soda. Many carry sugar testers with them to check restaurant sodas.

And we haven't gotten to the fats yet. Calories are calories, and a pizzaburger isn't really any less fattening than a donut. If you don't move around enough, both will end up on your ass or belly. Atkins assumes you don't drive to your own mailbox or sit staring into a computer monitor all day.

I gained the weight several times simply because I didn't watch what I ate and sat around too much. I lost the weight simply because I walked a lot more and paid a little more attention to what I ate.

[rooboy]

6. I agree with most of your post...

but gaining weight is not quite as simple as overeating for many people. Whilst I would agree that eating too many calories will inevitably lead to fat gain if you don't exercise, I suffered my greatest fat crisis when I ate VERY FEW calories. My body went into starvation mode and stored virtually everything I ate as fat.

Since that time I have taken about 8 inches off my waist, hips and chest measurements, but I eat twice as many calories as I did before.

[TreasonousBastard]

8. You are absoutely right that...

things are often more complicated than my simplistic (calories in)=(calories out)equation. Cellulite is but one example of something that's incredibly difficult to control.

However, I still stand by my rant, since most of us who've been scalebreakers got there simply through lethargy and gluttony. I know i did, and I know a lot more out there.

Two of the deadly sins, by the way, for the religious. And far more deadly than some of the ones they like to talk about so much.

I was at a Newark Airport cargo termninal one day when someone was screaming about how much it cost to ship Aunt Sara's recently departed corpse. "What! That's $250 more than they told me over the phone!"

"You didn't tell them Aunt Sara weighed 600 pounds."

"What difference does that make?"

An interesting study in customer relations that was...

[KDLarsen]

5. I am aware of my overweight..

.. but then again, I'm not in the US.

Oh well, time to hit the gym (goes at least 4 times pr week).

[Dogmudgeon]

7. Can you blame them/us?

Even here on DU, "fat" is used as a synonym for "evil".

Over the past 30 years, we Americans have experienced a dramatic increase in anxiety, and at the same time, we've been giving up our traditional vices -- nicotine, alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, and many of us have given up religiomania. We've used food to fill the void left when we stopped dulling ourselves with the other methods.

Then, too, our food has become progressively less satisfying. I think that trans-fat is overlooked as an appetite stimulant and a pseudo-hormone. Sugar and refined carbohydrates, in an insulin-resistent body, also increase appetite while being used, almost immediately, to increase body fat.

You can't exercise these things away by spending 30 minutes a day in the gym. Profound changes in metabolism also depress the ability of activity to use fat energy. The exerciser uses up all available glycogen (stored sugars) and becomes famished. Fat use is metabolically opposed. The body is in a state of preparation for famine, and constant anxiety drives it to a higher pitch.

We need to seriously change our lifestyles, not just our diets. Reducing socially-caused stress would go a long way. Diet, activity, sleep habits, and those vices would change toward a more healthy balance.

Or, we could keep on calling fat people names, even as we grow fat, hungy, and sick.

--bkl

[Nikia]

9. My doctor says that I don't have a weight problem

I am now 130 lb at 5'5''. I feel like I am getting heavy, having regained most of the weight I lost during my month long diarrhea/no appetite problem that I had last summer. My doctor says that I am a healthy weight for me though for my body type. I am going to try to exercise more and drink less soda.