Which nutritional guidelines recommended eating a dozen snacks a day? I don’t recall any. I’m sure there are plenty of folk around who’ve gotten fat whilst eating a dozen snacks a day and purporting to have followed nutritional guidelines…that’s not quite the same.
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Maybe others would contribute their statistics
5’ 10"
Age 19: 68 KG
Age 50/70: 90+ KG ← got all the insulin resistance maladies
Age 85: 71 KG ← reversed all the insulin resistance maladies
Only a 4.4% increase of “set point” weight.
The Captain
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@flyerboys …like you, David, I too put the amount of food on my plate than I’m likely to eat. Taking it a step further, my everyday plates are themselves of a size that, should someone with an oversized appetite put their chosen portion size out, the plates would look overloaded.
A small point, but one that can make it easier for someone who hasn’t yet fathomed all the ways that the apparently “naturally” lean differ from themselves. Large plate size has been commonplace since we first moved to the US in 1986. When my parents first visited us in the late '80s, I recall the first night with my mum helping at dinner time by setting the table. I heard an almighty clattering coming from the kitchen. She was sorting through my plates looking for the plates to eat from …thinking that the plates that I did have were actually serving platters.
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That is the biggest part of Noom measuring the food onto the plate. I am very satisfied with a 300 calorie meal or a 200 calorie snack. I had no idea that was possible.
Yesterday’s lunch, 2 roasted drumsticks, small roasted yellow potato, roasted carrots, and roasted broccoli. Just a tad under 300 calories.
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Shoot. I didn’t delete it. I hit the wrong button. How do I recover it…I’m not going to the trouble of typing it again
I think we have different conceptions on what “set point” weight means. My definition (which I don’t claim is the right one, but it works for me) is the weight that happens without intervention. In other words, it is the weight I would have if I just ate whatever and whenever I wanted. I suspect this would be about 20 lbs higher than what I want.
I like this definition because it identifies a set point that is greatly influenced by the environment. My set point weight would be a lot lower in Ethiopia where the selection of foods that I like to eat are less available. This gives me some control over the set point. For example, I can reduce my set point at home by replacing bad snacks with good snacks. I haven’t done the experiment, but I strongly suspect that a bowl of potato chips is far more likely to induce pangs of hunger from my body than a bowl of broccoli.
There is a growing feeling among the American medical profession that our society has created a food environment where obesity for most people is not curable. We’ve seen on this board where virtually everyone fighting the weight battle has had to do continuous monitoring or periodically return to weight reduction programs. Our society has created and made widely available foods that circumvent the normal biological sensors that say “you’ve eaten enough”. Combine that with sedentary lifestyles and we find ourselves eating more while moving less, a bad combination.
This leaves drugs as the answer for American weight control.
Well, at this point in life they are not for me. Having had some experience with elder care and seeing the deterioration in the quality of life with age I’ve decided that my goal is not to live longer. Rather it is to have a longer period of a physically active life. The only path that I can see for achieving that is weight control that is largely dependent on exercise.
If only deleting fat was so easy. If you click the orange pencil symbol above your deleted post you can see the original.
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I was able to copy paste it!
Paste:
veeenn
2 hours
5’6"
Age 19…not sure. Can’t really remember weighing myself. Probably around 7 1/2-8 stone.
Age 29 (just)…first pre natal check…115lbs. Fat American obstetrician said I was “underweight” dh and I both agreed that “misery loves company”
Age 29 (later that same year) 142lbs (important to note *controlled pregnancy weight gain)
Age 30 120lbs
Age 71 130-134 lbs weight range. Good body composition. Lowish bodyfat %. Relatively high muscle mass…achieved by healthy frugal eating and healthy exercise. Primarily for the purposes of vanity…appearance, race times etc. No skinny fat for me, TYVM
I have no set point. I could start eating more of the high quality diet I’ve consumed since before I started weighing myself, move less/cease weight training and I too would become fat and flabby. Actually. I probably wouldn’t. Given my strong genetic potential, I would probably be rapidly on my way to a heart attack or stroke regardless of my medications.(post deleted by author
End paste.
ralph.
Thanks @btresist for suggesting the “view w the pencil”.
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Thank you so much! See what I mean…not that monumental, but no unexplained gaps in weight gain trajectory. I’m well used to folk who’re overweight talking about how little they used to weigh and how they can’t shift the weight now. I usually ask…what were you doing between then (lean) and whenever you got fat.
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You got it, @btresist …weight gain happens without intervention or accountability.
Oftentimes folk don’t take notice of a significant amount of bodyfat until it’s well established in place …as well as the behaviors that facilitated it. Sometimes, it’s in spite of efforts to control or reverse. Kind of makes a difference in the real world how to address these issues if giving advice.
Not terribly different from dentistry…when very few people haven’t heard the mantra of “avoid sugary snacks etc. and brush and floss diligently”…but dental diseases still rank up there as just about the most prevalent and preventable
I thought I knew what it meant. I looked it up and I should not have used the term. I meant the body’s natural healthy weight eating a proper human diet.
Having seen my father and my best friend die of cancer and the agony it brought not just to them but to the families, I decided that I wanted to die healthy. So far so good, practically no medications needed for over five years.
The Captain
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This was true in my case until I started to research the subject instead of just trying diets. The deep secret is that one needs a lifestyle where one is not hungry all the time yet is able to enjoy food, the right food. It’s not difficult, there is so much variety to choose from.
One discovery was that most doctors, good doctors, know zip about nutrition. Their main mission is symptom control, not cure, which often can be had with no medication by eating right. Real food is the medicine.
My last cardiologist was an excellent doctor in the traditional sense. He had heard about the low carb diet but I was his first patient that had achieved weight loss using it. We got along just fine because he was willing to exchange ideas.
The Captain
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Well, I guess you can only speak from your own experience @captainccs …but my chosen healthcare providers have never struck me as dullards in the field of nutrition. Certainly they recognised the merits of my chosen lifestyle choices…perhaps placing a little bit too much faith in their value to mitigate the modestly raised Red Flag of "mildly elevated LDL-C ".
What would your choice of action have been if their advice during your heart attack had been to go away and eat less/exercise more rather than stent placement and appropriate medication.
Not a good question because it’s a hypothetical that never came up
- I never had a heart attack.
- The first time I had severe chest pains I self diagnosed by doing a stress test at home
- I drove to the clinic in the middle of the night
- They told me I arrived just in time
- It turned out to be Prinzmetal angina
- Ten days later I went home
That was in 1984 or 5. The stent episode was in 1998, a 90% blockage of a coronary artery. All the medical interventions were first class but they did not cure my insulin resistance and the related illnesses. For that I took some eight pills a day for life. In parallel to all this I was reading about diets but it was not until I finally retired that I started to put it into practice. I lost weight and my lab tests improved. It was only with my last cardiologist that I was versed well enough to have the diet conversations.
What modern medicine can do is fantastic but it does not cure insulin resistance, the obesity epidemic and all the associated illnesses. Only a proper diet can do that. Such a diet, if generally adopted, would implode the healthcare industry. Follow the money. It’s not the doctors, it’s the industry.
The Captain
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No one in the healthcare industry would be happier than the practitioners.
I was in my pulmonologist’s office today for my CPAP. He was in the next office talking on the phone to a patient. I heard the list of things wrong with the patient. I began to thank my stars. I was also impressed with my doctor. He took the tougher case before coming into the room with me. He was on duty. It was clear that the patient was a morbid case.
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Yes. Rather than “imploding the healthcare industry”, if folk adopted Good Habits rather than Bad…even simple hacks such as not smoking or eating and sitting to a state of obesity…it wouldn’t eliminate the need for healthcare interventions. It would allow for more attention to be directed towards folk who’se issues aren’t self inflicted.
Something that I’ve realised and experienced myself is that Bad Habits have so taken over the narrative … even among those who ought to know better … that those who manifestly don’t, say, overeat, sit too much etc. etc are likely to experience a degree of supervised neglect, if they’re not careful.
I suspect it’s not just the case with cardiovascular issues like mine, but, given the number of folk eating and sitting their way to insulin dependent diabetes, a good many folk are likely to have symptoms of the “real” diabetes ignored if they look too fit. Likewise hepatology. I oftentimes ask dh if the waiting lists for transplants would disappear if folk with self inflicted liver diseases were excluded.
Why is it always someone else who is at fault? Obesity is like addiction. To deal with it one first has to own it.
There are a lot of overweight individuals in my local grocery store, which stocks all sorts of food. Everyone there is choosing what they want to eat. I’ve yet to see anyone being forced to buy soda, chips, and Krispy Kreme’s. And a bag of baby carrots was a lot less expensive than a pint of Haagen Dazs.
It’s not one or the other, it’s both. At present, the individual’s choices are to eat right or to eat industrial food. At a much younger age I ate the industrial food and got sick. Then I learned about nutrition and changed diets. That’s the scenario you are talking about.
But 100 years ago there was no obesity epidemic, almost no type 2 diabetes or heart attacks. What changed? The rise of the agro-industrial food complex and highly processed packaged food, MGO, high yield wheat, high fructose corn syrup, etc. Now they are working on lab grown meat.
The government has banned drugs, at one time it banned alcohol.
It regulates tobacco. I think the agro-industrial food complex and highly processed packaged food are just as harmful to society. Healthcare is one of America’s largest expense and that makes no sense. People eat themselves sick and then must pay for the avoidable healthcare. it’s a vicious cycle.
The Captain
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The government ban products that are addictive because they take away freedom of choice.
Should the government also be able to ban products simply because they are unhealthy? Don’t people have a right to choose between pleasure and longevity?
Government dictating whether one can eat a Twinkie seems excessive to me.
I don’t think it’s mostly the “agro-industrial complex” that caused it. I think the agro-industrial complex is a result of it. What caused it is a general level of affluence. A hundred years ago, people mostly eked out a living, and sometimes literally didn’t have enough to eat. After the roaring 20’s there was the first jump in general affluence where perhaps 20 to 30 percent rose into a position where they always had enough to eat, and has a surplus. Then after World War II, the USA economy boomed like never before and almost everyone rose up into the ranks of always having enough to eat, and even a surplus. We are seeing the results of that. And the thing that most directly caused the obesity epidemic is most likely the vilification of fat beginning in the 60s, and replacement of fat with sugar in the 70s/80s and beyond.
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Indeed, can you imagine the government selecting a nutritious porridge that we would all be served morning, noon, and night. What a boring world?
We have so much agriculture. So many creative chefs. Centuries of recipes. Many tasty but not very healthy. Variety and moderation are still the best choice for most of us. And it does make life interesting, even exciting, and full of choices. Some better than others.