Posted on 06/08/2012 9:07:28 AM PDT by re_tail20
Most of my favorite factoids about obesity are historical ones, and they don’t make it into the new, four-part HBO documentary on the subject, The Weight of the Nation. Absent, for instance, is the fact that the very first childhood-obesity clinic in the United States was founded in the late 1930s at Columbia University by a young German physician, Hilde Bruch. As Bruch later told it, her inspiration was simple: she arrived in New York in 1934 and was “startled” by the number of fat kids she saw—“really fat ones, not only in clinics, but on the streets and subways, and in schools.”
What makes Bruch’s story relevant to the obesity problem today is that this was New York in the worst year of the Great Depression, an era of bread lines and soup kitchens, when 6 in 10 Americans were living in poverty. The conventional wisdom these days—promoted by government, obesity researchers, physicians, and probably your personal trainer as well—is that we get fat because we have too much to eat and not enough reasons to be physically active. But then why were the PC- and Big Mac–-deprived Depression-era kids fat? How can we blame the obesity epidemic on gluttony and sloth if we easily find epidemics of obesity throughout the past century in populations that barely had food to survive and had to work hard to earn it?
These seem like obvious questions to ask, but you won’t get the answers from the anti-obesity establishment, which this month has come together to unfold a major anti-fat effort, including The Weight of the Nation, which begins airing May 14 and “a nationwide community-based outreach campaign.” The project was created by a coalition among HBO and three key public-health institutions: the nonprofit Institute of Medicine, and two federal agencies...
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
The big problem that people run into is when they hit their target weight they “go back to normal” forgetting that “normal” is how they got fat in the first place. They see diets as temporary, it needs to be permanent. Part of my key to having kept weight off is approaching it like a religious conversion, there’s how I used to be and how I am now, I had to spawn a new “normal” that involved less eating and more exercise than the old “normal”.
Which regimen people use won’t really change the long term success since the problem is they tend to leave the regimen the moment they hit target.
How do you know that? Is it not possible that the semi-starvation that they endured in order to lose weight has caused their bodies' natural defenses to push for more intake? That their increasingly intense hunger and cravings are a natural response to the low calorie diets, which the body interprets as a time of famine, such as late winter in prehistoric times? That would be a mighty powerful survival strategy for a successful species. But in our unprecedented times of plenty, it turns us into teletubbies.
That's one theory, anyway.
How long has it been since you saw the light?
. No, after the diet people should go back to their maintenance calories so your point is moot. Maintenance calories are the calories you consume every day where you neither gain nor lose weight. The body recovers/adapts extremely quick. The basic premise is still calories in, calories out.but that is the simple answer but most accurate
Like a machine?
8 years I think, maybe 7 and change. I actually have co-workers that don’t remember me fat. Took about 18 month to burn down to target (70 pounds down, I did not put myself on the strictest regimen because I knew I couldn’t stick to it), and the worst I’ve bounced away is about 15 pounds before knuckling back down to work. And of course there’d been plenty of attempts before, it takes a lot of commitment to really hit it to drive through the hunger and exercise. One of the big things was finding out how few of my “naturally thin” friends actually were, turns out most of them have strong exercise and diet regimens, the biggest difference was they didn’t get fat first.
Exactly !!! Its not losing the weight it's keeping it off long term that detracts 95% of the people. Look at Oprah and Kirstie Alley how many times they have yo yo'd in weight up and down.
But if your body thinks it has just gone though a famine, wouldn't your hunger go into overdrive to the point that what was once your "maintenance" amount of fuel seems to your body to be inadequate for the purpose of replacing the fuel lost during the previous famine and storing up fuel in preparation for the next?
Your experience is that 95% of the people who attain their ideal weight on low calorie/increased exercise diets actually CHOSE to become blimps over simple moderation. Either the human race is almost entirely screwed up, or there is something going on here.
How old are you? How hungry do you get? Is it a difficult challenge to maintain your exercise regimen?
That’s the problem with humans being so goal and reward oriented. People tend to grab onto a mind set of “I’ll do this until the desired thing happens then I get this reward”, in dieting that generally becomes diet and exercise until target weight hit and then “I can eat ice cream again”. Their celebration dinner puts them on the path back to the old weight. That’s part of why my regimen revolved around “reduce everything eliminate nothing”, it gets rid of that temptation.
I turn 43 in a month. I get pretty hungry but I’ve learned it’s good, food tastes better when you’re hungry. I’ve put my exercise regimen in a place where it’s “easy” to maintain because it’s part of my life rhythm, a lot of my exercise is at lunch time, gives me an opportunity to get away from work like “regular” going out to lunch, and it’s cheaper; then there’s the saturday morning trainer appointment and the sunday morning bike ride. The bike ride is probably my favorite exercise, I ride a lot when I’m on vacation. Once you manage to lock into a habit for a couple of years they tend to be pretty self maintaining, they’re my schedule it’s just what I do now.
Your hunger goes into overdrive when your stomach shrinks. Worst week of a diet is shrink week, vicious hunger pains, the body does NOT like the stomach to shrink. BUT if you make it out the other side the diet then becomes much more self sustaining because you’ve now shrunk your appetite, your stomach now only WANTS as much food as you’ve been feeding it. Depending on the diet you’re on shrink week is usually in the second month, maybe third. That’s the week a lot of people bail. If you survive til the “end” when you go into maintenance you’ll actually re-expand a bit for the new extra food.
Watch out for Special high Intensity Training, however... ;-P
Thanks for recommending this book. I hope that I’m as successful with it as you have been.
“Taubes’ manifesto is straight forward. Carbohydrates make us fat and they do so independently of the first law of thermodynamics. Forget about calories, you can eat as many or as few of those as you’d like, ultimately weight is purely about carbohydrates.”
Sorry, but Yoni is full of crap. Taubes DID NOT say an individual can eat infinite calories. What he does say, however, is that one can eat the same amount of carbohydrate and gain weight, while an equal amount of fat and protein will not cause the body to store fat. This is because eating large amounts of carbohydrate causes the body to over-secrete insulin from the resulting spike in blood sugar, which in turn causes the liver to store those carbohydrate calories as fat.
Fat and protein, when eaten in those same amounts, do not cause a spike in blood sugar, and thus cause no over secretion of insulin, no triggering of the liver to store calories as fat. Therefore, an equal amount of fat and protein do not make a person as fat as a person eating a similar amount of high carbohydrate food.
For a pretty decent explanation of brain function in a low carb, high fat diet, try Dr Eades at proteinpower.com.
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/ketones-and-ketosis/metabolism-and-ketosis/
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.