Posted on 08/20/2008 10:53:25 AM PDT by redstates4ever
LOL! I don't think I have any before/after. Maybe from when I had a beard--shaving made me look thinner.
At least it's a woman asking :-). I was nervous at first.
Throw out the BMI it’s worthless. It was designed in the 19th century to prove poor people were poor because God made them that way. Then some people looking for government funding thought it would be a handy way to declare the world overweight, and when it didn’t give them scary enough numbers they shifted the “healthy” part of the chart (which isn’t normalized for age, gender, bone mass or muscle density) left.
How are your clothes fitting? Over all energy? You can get fitter without actually losing weight. Are you eating enough to not kick into starvation mode? What kind of exercise? Depending on what you’re doing 3 times a week might actually be not much, when I was really pushing to lose weight I was exercising 10 times a week (yup, 3 double dip days).
I've started wondering about this recently. Especially your post in light of post 33. If thresholds for "disease" keep getting tighter, and life expectancy doesn't seem to be a problem, are we just missing something? Sure, everyone posts extremely fat people on these threads but BMI puts this guy in the "obese" category:
(This isn't me, it's from Jimmy Moore's diet blog)
I need to eat more... we’re in second place and I want to be number one next year!
You could be banned for that. >;-)
All of these "obesity epidemic" studies rely exclusively on BMI. It makes things useless because people remember all the 80-inch waist shoppers they saw electric-scootering around WalMart and think if you have a BMI of 30, you must be that. Meanwhile you have the eat-less-move-more-fixes-everything crowd that doesn't take any body differences into account. I remember people lambasting Brittany from Biggest Loser on online forums because she wasn't losing weight late into the competition even after eating right and exercising 6 hours a day. They found out why later on:
Q. Mark, RealityWanted.com: What about the Rubix Cube comment by Jillian, did you guys find out what was wrong and why she was having trouble getting you to lose weight?
A. Brittany, The Biggest Loser Couples: She did and Jillian is brilliant. She had never had a contestant work as hard as I did and lose so little. She spent hours researching this and one day she asked if I had Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. When I told her I had a cyst removed a while ago Jillian started screaming and jumping up and down. She found out I had a hormonal imbalance and had too much testosterone which kept me from losing the weight I should have been losing. I am supposed to see an endocrinologist soon and I am using an estrogen cream until I do so. Thank God for Jillian, without her I don’t know if I would have found out what my issue was.
How are your clothes fitting? Over all energy? You can get fitter without actually losing weight. Are you eating enough to not kick into starvation mode?
I haven't noticed much with my clothes, and my energy varies still. For a while I was so hungry I couldn't concentrate and my productivity at work took a dive, so I started making sure I had enough to eat.
What kind of exercise? Depending on what you’re doing 3 times a week might actually be not much, when I was really pushing to lose weight I was exercising 10 times a week (yup, 3 double dip days).
I do 30 minutes of elliptical and 30 minutes of weight machines. The reason why I don't do it every day is because I feel sore the next day and need to recover. My biking to work used to be 35 minutes each way, but I got a better bike and now I can do 16-20 minutes each way. I'm impressed with the 10 times a week. I used to do 2 hour a day 5-6,000 yard swim practice in high school, but I don't think I could fit that into my schedule now.
Health crisis get a lot of funding, so there’s always a push by various researchers to make sure their ailment is a full fledged crisis.
Don’t get me wrong, some of the increase in diagnosis is legitimate, we have a deeper understanding of a lot of health issues that causes an increase in the rate of diagnosis. But a lot of it is just a quest for cash. You can really see that in the BMI chart shift around 2000, all of a sudden with no real explanation the CDC declared nearly 10% of the population obese by changing where on the chart “obese” began.
Body fat percentage is really the measure to use. But not form your scale, those things are junk (mine changes 20% depending on if I tell it I’m athletic or not). If you have a trainer they should have a set of calipers and a magic chart that does pretty good (though be warned the belly measurements tend to tickle), of course there’s also the submersion which is even more accurate but expensive.
Those pictures are more depressing than funny. I can only imagine how hopeless those women feel.
I would like to have a measurement I can do on my own. I have heard that your recovery heart rate is supposed to be accurate. The problem is doing it requires exercise, but the treadmills at the gym have those little heart monitor grips, so doing it shouldn't be too difficult.
I think I found them...
Let me finish with something from my old chum Desmond Morris, who turns out to be an even longer-standing friend of Pat Williams [chair]. Over a leisurely and congenial lunch in Oxford, which involved rather more than the recommended 3 units per day of alcohol, we persuaded him to write an article for publication on our web site to do with food and eating from a zoologist's perspective. We thought he would dash off a witty and interesting piece about lions and their taste for wildebeest, or something like that. Instead, what he sent me was a moving account of his mother's death, which had occurred a short time before. The title was 'A little bit of what you fancy'. In it he said:
"It was a meal to make a food faddist swoon away in horror. My mother was piling her plate high with a greasy, fatty, fry-up of a mixed grill and tucking in with gusto. When I say 'with gusto', I mean she was eating with the urgent pleasure of a predator at a kill. Although she was born during the reign of Queen Victoria, she was more in tune with the robust food pleasures of the eighteenth century, when a feast was a feast, and nobody had heard about health foods, diet regimes, or table etiquette that demanded you chew each mouthful 32 times before swallowing."
"Watching her in action and trying my best to match her appetite, I glibly remarked that if she kept ignoring the words of wisdom of the health gurus and diet experts, she would die young. This may sound like a cruel thing for a son to have said to his mother, but the fact that she was in her 99th year at the time of the meal in question, helps to put my remark into perspective."
After some eloquent attacks on the pontificators and what he terms the 'diet fascists', and after calling attention to Man's omnivorous nature, Desmond returns to the story of his mother:
"When my mother was dying (just in time to avoid putting the Queen to the trouble of sending her a telegram, as she expressed it) I asked her if there was anything she wanted, 'A gin and tonic' she whispered. I had to feed it to her through a straw. 'If you've got to go, you might as well go with a swing' she said. And where food and drink is concerned, you might as well stay with a swing."
That, for me, is more than sufficient reason to argue that bad habits are, indeed, of value – that they make us human.
Eat less move more does work, with certain provisos. First is that it’s “eat less” not “starvation”, eat too little and you throw your body into starvation mode. Next is too remember your body does have a natural weight that might not be the number you want and getting below that is nearly impossible without some seriously unhealthy behavior. Then of course there’s side issues like Brittany had which blow all the math out of the water.
It is important to know that in general your body will either lose weight or girth, for strange reasons it never seems to be both. That’s why it’s handy to have a few things around to let you know when the girth is going away because the scale won’t budge then. My watch is one of my favorite girth measurers, metal band, no stretching, happy days when I had to take links out.
When your stomach shrinks it’s going to be unpleasant. First time mine shrank it was a very hard week, constant hunger pains. But there’s good news: once it shrink down to a “proper” appetite your diet is pretty much self perpetuating. Once you’re full on a healthy amount of food life is good.
That’s a pretty good exercise regimen depending on the intensity. Soreness kind of becomes your friend after a while. Periodically I’ll take a week or two off (I hate exercise, something my trainer has a hard time understanding, then I remind her what I used to look like), and there’s always a weird morning about day 4 when my legs don’t hurt. The 10 days a week thing was a necessary jump start, I had a lot of pounds to get rid of; it was “light cardio” (that’s what I call walks, casual swimming, easy stuff) after work every day, “hard cardio” (kicking ass on the elliptical, to understand the difference the “light” walk was about 3 1/2 miles in an hour, the “hard” run was about 3 miles in half an hour) for lunch 3 days a week, weights with the trainer once a week, then extra long Sundays usually light cardio but twice as much (so a two hour walk). That only lasted a couple of months, I don’t like exercise. But it burned off about 1/3 of the total goal (70 pounds total, a little over 20 came off in those early months of hell), and got me on pattern. Now the after work walks are mostly a thing of the past, and I’m sick of the elliptical so I do weights and light runs on the treadmill for lunch, and extra long Sunday is now a 26 mile bike ride, coming in a little under 2 hours these days. I’m in maintenance now, weighing pretty what I want. It was a long hard trip, but worth it.
Might be worth visiting a good trainer, get an idea of what your strengths and weaknesses are. Could be you just need to build more muscle. I was actually doing weight training for a couple of years before I went on my serious weight loss run, even though I didn’t lose any weight during those years the muscle tone helped. There’s no way I could have survived the 10 a week stuff if simple lunges with an empty bar left me walking funny for a week, had to get to the point where lunges with actual weight only left me walking funny for an afternoon. You could just be too early in the process of refitting your body.
Problem with heart rate stuff is heart health and body health are different things. Yes burning fat and elevating your heart rate are good but you could have all kinds of other problems keep your heart unhealthy. And those grippy things tend to be pretty junky, there’s some at the gym that say I’m dead (no heart rate) and some that say I’m gonna die (scary high heart rate). They sell those band things that go around your chest, some of the RF to the exercise machine so you’ll get your reading from those.
If you’ve got a spouse/ roommate/ maid you could probably get a caliper set and have them do body fat measurements. It only takes a couple of minutes, the only problem is you have to stand relaxed and straight, so you can’t really do your own pinches and read the thing.
Yeah the health nazis never seem to understand quality, they’re all about quantity.
When I went on my weight loss program I had a list of non-negotiable quality of life issue:
Beer
tortilla chips
soda
greasy meat
bread
not counting and logging all kinds of crap about my life
These were important. I was willing to cut back on all of the first 5, but there was going to be no elimination, not even for some sort of two week “induction phase”. I was even willing to keep track of a few things like what the exercise machine said my calorie burn was, but 4 years and 70 pounds later I have no idea how many calories have been in any meal I’ve ever eaten.
I totally relate to that last paragraph. When my grandmother was dieing we smuggled in OJ and vodka because she really wanted a screwdriver. Kind of funny actually.
I remember reading somewhere several years ago that there tends to be more obesity in “Red” states than in “Blue States”. There is a little bit of truth to that. All of the states with the highest obesity rates except Michigan are largely “Red” states. All but three of the states with the lowest obesity rates are largely blue states (Utah and Montana are strongly “Red”, Colorado a little less so). A lot of it is regional to some degree. Obesity rates are highest in the South and lowest in the West and some parts of the Northeast. Overall, the South is generally poorer and there are plenty on welfare. My grandmother lives in Oklahoma and, despite being one of the “reddest” states, welfare is rampant. That is definitely also the case in Mississippi, West Virginia, and in one part of Michigan (Detroit). The Southern diet often includes a lot of fattening fried food (just ask Huckabee). A lot of people in the West and parts of New England (particularly Vermont) tend to be more health conscious and stay active with a lot of outdoor activities. Even though it is not on the list, I would suspect that New York is pretty high on the list of states with the lowest obesity rates. I was in NYC a couple of months ago and I noticed very few obese people. I attribute it to the fact that large numbers of people there walk a lot more than they drive.
My 18 y/o daughter was just diagnosed with Polysystic Ovary disorder; she has been trying to loose 15 lbs for weeks and is getting very discouraged. Thanks for posting that comment about “Brittnay”. Now we have an avenue we can explore!
Actually that came from Dan.
15 pounds isn’t much. One of the things I learned was the less overweight you are the harder it is to lose. The first half of my 70 pounds went easily, the last 5 was a nightmare to get rid of. I actually gave up on the final 5 for a year or so. The effort to get rid of a pound started dramatically increasing when I got within about 20 pounds of the final goal, and every pound was harder than the one before.
And we shouldn’t forget that she could be at her body’s natural weight, the BMI is especially inaccurate for women and the young since it was basically normalized around middle aged men who lack certain fatty deposits and youthful muscles that make young women the stuff of song. So if that’s her guide burn it, of course you definitely want to look into how that disorder is effecting not only her weight but the rest of her health. But don’t let her obsess over 15 pounds, even if she is legitimately 15 pounds overweight the stress of obsessing on it is probably more damaging to her health than the pounds.
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