Read the first post if you want to actually comment intelligently on the subject matter. Spamming this thread will be reported immediately. Thanks in advance!!Most people have heard "eat right and exercise and you'll lose weight". Most people think of it as a mantra. If you have no problems losing and maintaining a specific weight, you consider your fatter companions to simply lack the self discipline and moral fortitude that you have "naturally". Obviously, because the media and even our doctors are telling us that fat people can all be thin people "if they just try hard enough."
Well, there has been an overwhelming amount of research that has been done on obesity, but much of the actual facts have been either hushed over in lieu of big "Fat kills" campaigns (mostly paid for by the diet and weight-loss industries, who have the most to "lose"-pardon the expression-if people realize exactly what the truth about obesity is).
So, let's take a look at a few juicy bits of actual research that has been hidden, overblown, or simply lied about, and see that our natural body types, regardless of our lifestyles, may be less of a "choice" than we think.
First off, let's take a look at a
groundbreaking study that shows exactly what happens when fat people become thin and when thin people become fat under the watchful eye of the doctor:
Quote:
The study was rigorous and demanding. It began with an agonizing four weeks of a maintenance diet that assessed the subjects' metabolism and caloric needs. Then the diet began. The only food permitted was a liquid formula providing 600 calories a day, a regimen that guaranteed they would lose weight. Finally, the subjects spent another four weeks on a diet that maintained them at their new weights, 100 pounds lower than their initial weights, on average.Hirsch answered his original question - the subjects' fat cells had shrunk and were now normal in size. And everyone, including Hirsch, assumed that the subjects would leave the hospital permanently thinner.
That did not happen.
Instead, Hirsch says, "they all regained." He was horrified. The study subjects certainly wanted to be thin, so what went wrong? So, what did they find when they looked at these "normal sized people" metabolically?
Quote:
Before the diet began, the fat subjects' metabolism was normal - the number of calories burned per square meter of body surface was no different from that of people who had never been fat. But when they lost weight, they were burning as much as 24 percent fewer calories per square meter of their surface area than the calories consumed by those who were naturally thin.The Rockefeller subjects also had a psychiatric syndrome, called semi-starvation neurosis, which had been noticed before in people of normal weight who had been starved. They dreamed of food, they fantasized about food or about breaking their diet. They were anxious and depressed; some had thoughts of suicide. They secreted food in their rooms. And they binged.
The Rockefeller researchers explained their observations in one of their papers: "It is entirely possible that weight reduction, instead of resulting in a normal state for obese patients, results in an abnormal state resembling that of starved nonobese individuals." Of course, they considered that it may simply be a case of trying to keep people from becoming fat in the first place so as to keep people from going through this "cycle of obesity" that people become trapped in, especially when they start yo-yo dieting or altering their eating/exercise patterns in non-sustainable ways. Considering that most people gain back all they lose plus 10% more within 5 years of weight loss, those numbers don't seem that encouraging to the average fat person.
So they decided to do another experiment, only in this one, they were going to have thin-by-nature people gain enough weight to become obese and see whether or not this caused "lifetime fatties".
Quote:
His subjects were prisoners at a nearby state prison who volunteered to gain weight.
With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent. But it took them four to six months, eating as much as they could every day. Some consumed 10,000 calories a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that there were attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.Once the men were fat, their metabolisms increased by 50 percent.
They needed more than 2,700 calories per square meter of their body surface to stay fat but needed just 1,800 calories per square meter to maintain their normal weight.When the study ended, the prisoners had no trouble losing weight.
Within months, they were back to normal and effortlessly stayed there.
So it was obviously not simply being fat that causes difficulty in losing and maintaining weight.
But there was one more groundbreaking study that clinched the genetic weight-so to speak-of who is fat and who is thin.
Quote:
It included meticulous medical records of every Danish adoption between 1927 and 1947, including the names of the adoptees' biological parents, and the heights and weights of the adoptees, their biological parents and their adoptive parents.
Stunkard ended up with 540 adults whose average age was 40. They had been adopted when they were very young - 55 percent had been adopted in the first month of life and 90 percent were adopted in the first year of life. His conclusions, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1986, were unequivocal. The adoptees were as fat as their biological parents, and how fat they were had no relation to how fat their adoptive parents were.
So even the so-called "evil parents making kids fat" conspiracy has almost no effect on the genetics that predispose body size. Even if a kid's adoptive parents were fat and ate buckets of lard, their naturally skinny adopted child would never become fat. The adopted child would retain the biological similarity of his or her biological parents much more than they would get their body shape from exercise or diet regimens.
But I think that this boils down to something even more insidious than simply talking about how diets don't work and how many people are basically stuck in the body that they were born with for better or worse. And I think it has a lot to do with the so-called
"Fantasy of Being Thin". The whole idea is that people equate becoming thin (or thinner than you already are) as a way to change yourself in other ways that have nothing to do with the number on the scale. The idea is that you cannot love yourself or, indeed, excel at all until you lower your weight to a specific amount and then you'll suddenly become the most attractive person on earth with a harem of people at your feet, equivocally loved by all of humanity, smarter than Einstein and gain magical flying powers not unlike Superman. When someone gives you facts that say "you will likely never be a size zero anymore than you will be an 8 foot tall pixie with wings of ethereal light, regardless how hard you try."
And hearing that you will likely be fat (or at least not as thin as you wish you were), is practically like a death sentence to most people. The idea that you will finally have to sit down and say "what am I capable of" and "what should I do with my life
as I am now" is almost an unthinkable thing to those of us who subscribe to the idea that with thinness comes total and utter satisfaction with life.
I am not advocating that people TRY to become unhealthy, or that people attempt to go outside their natural body size range (from thin to fat, there are many body sizes, all of them are fairly natural variations), but what I am trying to say is THIS:
There is mounting evidence that the "obesity epidemic" is mostly a pack of lies being perpetuated by an industry that stands to GAIN BILLIONS OF DOLLARS if you believe them.
There is also quite a bit of evidence to suggest that dieting and actively trying to lose a large portion of your natural weight may actually be more harmful to your health than any of the POSSIBILITIES of health problems later on in life (and a new
study has shown that obesity, regardless of eating healthy or not, seems to make less than any noticeable difference in the rate of disease).
The bottom line is that we need to start understanding that thin is not an interchangeable term with "healthy" and fat is not an interchangeable term with "unhealthy". We can all become sick, and we will all eventually die, regardless of our eating and exercising.
But it is possible to be healthy and meaningful lives at any size.
And I think that the first step in doing this is to stop bashing on people based on how they look, and to start living YOUR OWN LIFE as you truly have always wanted to lead it. Because you aren't getting any younger. And it is also fairly likely that you will never be thinner beyond a 10-15lb window that will decrease with age and hormonal shifts.
So, what do you think of the idea that your weight is about as controllable-genetically speaking-as your height (no one says that you can grow tall enough to qualify for the NBA if you "try hard enough" so why do that with weight?)
Do you subscribe to the fantasy of being thin? How does this research affect your thinking about that?
Comments from all body sizes are welcome as long as you remember to read the first post! Thanks!
