I like its note that:
Since 1980, the obesity rate has doubled in 73 countries and increased in 113 others. And in all that time, no nation has reduced its obesity rate. Not one.
There's a lot of idealization of France or Europe in my lifestyle (weight management) group meetings, and I try to occasionally remind people that they're seeing the same social and economic trends as us, just maybe with some delay.
That article makes me really appreciate my PCP.
The article does that usual thing about how doctors only get to spend 5.3 seconds per patient. But the article makes it seem like it would be better if doctors spent even less time with their patients since they somehow manage to find the time to insult their overweight patients.
2: I wasn't sure what PCP is an abbreviation for in this context, but I can think of at least two possibilities.
My doctor has never mentioned my weight, which was a relief when I was well into overweight BMI and was very "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" when I had lost 20+ pounds.
4: Phencyclidine, obviously, if you know Moby at all.
That was totally my first assumption, I didn't realize he could possibly mean anything else until I read 4.
8: That's the divide between employed people with health insurance and drug addicts out on the streets.
Anyway, that was a very good article.
Yes, it's really good, and its by former Unfogged regular Rotten in Denmark, who's made a name for himself just the last few months.
He didn't make "Michael". That's been around since the 50s.
We're awful to overweight people in general, and they get absolutely negligent health care. Society sucks. I liked the article, but I'm not sure the "everything we know about obesity is wrong" frame is quite right. Nutrition is one of the most complicated fields of science I can think of, and as far as I can tell, we have no clue about anything. Except maybe the metabolic chamber folks at NIH. The quibble I have with the framing on the article is that while it's certainly true that obese people in their 20s can be perfectly healthy, I'm not sure that holds for obese people in their 60s. And yeah, thin people can be terribly unhealthy, too. Maybe we will see more healthy obese seniors in another 30 years, but I kind of doubt it. I definitely favor systems that make it easy to get exercise and buy fruits and vegetables, and I don't think fat people are lazy or weak, but I think that it's foolish not to draw conclusions about trends from population level data.
I am in sympathy with the idea that shaming people because they're fat is wrong, and that doctors in particular are going to be bad sources of information on how to lose weight, at least in the U.S. where it's becoming increasingly unlikely to have a PCP who knows anything about you. But the link between obesity and heart disease, type 2 diabetes, etc., is pretty strong, and I feel like we do know what works -- we just don't know how to scale it, and we don't have a way to make it easy or actionable given the society we've constructed.
E.g., Fitness buffs into weightlifting know exactly what they need to do to change their weight and body composition (they also know that it's very hard, and that it doesn't always line up with what's popular aesthetically.) The national weight control registry data suggest that it takes a long-term commitment to tracking calories, exercising, and eating healthily to keep off significant amounts of weight. We know that eating the standard American diet is bad for you, and that it makes some people fat.
I'm not obese by BMI charts because I lie about my height. I'm still pretty active, but I'm starting to fear Wilford Brimley's taunting voice, so I've cut down on drinking. Also, I had to cut down on drinking because of the pain stopping me from sleeping well. It turns out that not-drinking-too-much-me won't eat a second dinner at 11:00 p.n. I think that dinner, not the alcohol, is what gives me problems, so I may try to drink quicker, before I can get hungry.
The above is all science.
Cala!
Do you really think we know? Long story short, my mother was overweight. Her mother and sister were thin, and she hated herself for her (perceived) failures. Sometimes, I try to figure out together whether she was doing something "wrong," and I have no guesses. She ate what the family ate, mostly homemade from scratch, out to dinner once a month, fast food maybe once a week, maybe less. She went to aerobics classes five days a week and hated every minute. Her big daily junk food habit was decaffeinated diet Coke and semi-sweet chocolate chips in a custard cup. I don't know how much she weights, but she was maybe a 14/16 for most of my childhood and an 18/20 at her largest. At this point, I kind of shrug and say "genes," because I can't imagine she was secretly binging on bags of peanut M&Ms.
Did it really say that 80% of American adults are overweight? The linked stat seems to add up to 70%: "an estimated 39.8% of U.S. adults aged 20 and over have obesity, including 7.6% with severe obesity, and another 31.8% are overweight." That's still both amazing and in line with my experience of major Texas airports. (Not to hate on Texas per se: that's just where my layovers are.)
But oh, how I hate the people-first standardization of language that gives us "[people] have obesity". Still, I can't pin down the difference between cases where it sounds off to me, and cases where it's fine. "I have chronic/major depression" sounds less stilted than "I have depression." "I have a mood disorder" sounds fine. "I have obesity"... no one ever.
Anyway, I'd rather not think about "the lean unhealthy." I fear I may have lean unhealthiness! I think I'm not going to worry about that "unhealthy lean people twice as likely to get diabetes as healthy obese people" thing... much... because it looks like what they mean by "unhealthy" includes "high fasting blood glucose" as a baseline. Yes, I bet the small proportion of thin people with high fasting glucose levels [n=351] is more likely to develop diabetes than the small proportion of obese people with normal fasting glucose [n=260]. Total participants 14,685.
The national weight control registry information seems to suggest that what works is consistent, significant exercise, weighing in regularly, and tracking everything you eat. The problem is that what works is really hard to stick with, estimating calorie burn is hard, and is unpleasant if it doesn't come naturally because it takes so long to do properly.
Your mom probably wasn't doing anything "wrong", in that she likely wasn't doing anything unusual. But I think the society really makes it very easy to overeat, and it's particularly hard on women because we're smaller. An average lunch out would blow my calories for the day.
An extra hundred calories a day works out to about ten pounds in a year. That's ridiculously easy to do just by finishing the kids' leftover toast at breakfast (isn't that how one eats toast?) , or by taking an extra half ounce of pasta because that aerobics class left you hungry. So, no shame!
There's no way I'm going to count calories down to the level of stealing toast or weighing pasta. The national weight-control registry is clearly fucknuts. Like the people saying millennials should stop buying $2.50 avocados so they can afford $250,000 houses.
12: omg! I can't believe I missed that. He has a podcast now too, but I haven't listened yet.
You know what I find somewhat frustrating/confusing? I wish amid all these narratives about what does or doesn't work for weight loss would spare a minute to talk about reasonable weight maintenance, which, if you expect to ever in your life go through a holiday season or a period of stress eating or whatever is going to have to include some periods of weight loss. Like, right now I'm right at the overweight border by my BMI, and a smidge more than I'd like to weigh for aesthetic reasons. I used to maintain a lower weight than this pretty easily, maybe 5-7 pounds less (so, 3-4% of my body weight, which, per this article, if I lost now would result in a 17% slowdown of my metabolism that's going to flood me with stress hormones and cause a starvation response?). It's my observation that the thing that ever stops me from being overweight is short periods of weight loss, usually from depression or occasionally Burning Man. (It's almost never intentional anymore because I'm too unmotivated to diet.) But I'd need to either be depressed sometimes or to occasionally diet a little to have any hope of maintaining my weight. I guess I'd just like it if someone knowledgeable would discuss how it is, that if weight loss is impossible, reasonable weight maintenance is possible.
It's late here; pretend that last sentence was grammatical and I put that if clause in a place that made sense.
these articles do make me unsure of what to think sometimes. people obviously can be healthy at any weight, but they can also become really ill at higher weights--this is something we actually know, unlike how to lose weight, which we do not know. and articles like this also seem to focus on overweight people who eat really healthy diets and get lots of exercise but still get treated shitty by their doctors (and no question everyone overweight is treated terribly by their doctor), but just as there are tons of thin people dorking around on the loserweb and eating quesadillas all the time, there are overweight people like that too. it seems a sleight-of-hand to make us care about the virtuous overweight, when we should perfectly well care about all overweight people.
I also not true for me that I always return to my highest weight after dieting (yet!). it's more like I have a number of set points and if I get to one I stick there, and it takes a big shove to move me in either direction. I've been overweight and gone to nearly underweight over the course of 6 years. the first bit was reasonable food and exercise, which resulted in plummeting to a perfectly reasonable weight, and the last big chunk was being mentally ill.
I don't know about helpful weight loss, but as a form of punishment diets are great, and I have replaced serious self-harm with disordered eating, convinced at every point that being 3 pounds lighter will make me happy, despite having thought that 3 pounds ago. right now I'm convinced that if I get to 118 or something everything will be perfect. I'm so close! just two pounds! fuck me. it makes it impossible to tell whether girl y might be headed towards disordered eating, and even if she were I have no moral authority. and everyone tells me how great I look all the time. this is a dumb thing to talk about in a thread on obesity, but just as people make irrational assumptions on the high end of weight, they do on the low end, with my doctor assuming I do way more exercise than I do, and taking all my minor problems seriously, when you read of obese people with appendicitis getting told to slim down.
Fuck moral authority. You have regular authority, which is better.
there is individual self control/will power, which is not built to work over the long haul against very strong countervailing forces. and there is group control/power. shaming fat people and being an interpersonal asshole is unsurprisingly not effective. collectively maintaining society wide rigid norms around timing and patterns of food consumption can be enormously helpful and off-loads a large cognitive load from individuals to the wider group.
i ready something the other day about south korea being unique in having made the transition to a wealthy food abundant society without ballooning, but i don't know if it's true or if anyone has looked at how/why.
almeida, if there is any way you can get support for yourself and your daughter *now* please don't hesitate to do so, even for yourself to have someone trusted to talk about how to be open with her about not wanting to perpetuate disordered eating. such a burden to hand down. wishing you both all the very best from my heart.
true, I have mom authority, which is unassailable. she's 14, so she has a fast metabolism, but 5'6" and 100lbs is a bit dubious. I looked like that at her age but since I was deeply disturbed and wanted to look less like a sexual person for obvious reasons it doesn't seem like a good comparison.
I hate the idea (like some women in the article explain) that you could be overweight and doing everything right in terms of weight loss and exercise but still be at the sticking point where nothing moves; it sounds so awful and frustrating. that you could work hard to get results and have all the weight come crashing back the moment you stop starving yourself must be infinitely demoralizing.
thanks dq; I can see this is a problem without really knowing what to do about it. I do have both a psychiatrist and psychologist with whom I facetime, but sometimes I think seeing me would be better. girl x is going to a therapists appointment next week--maybe one for girl y would be good also. I do think there can be a problem with male doctors caring enough about this in women they find kind of cute, but both of mine are better than that I think.
An extra hundred calories a day works out to about ten pounds in a year. That's ridiculously easy to do just by finishing the kids' leftover toast at breakfast (isn't that how one eats toast?) , or by taking an extra half ounce of pasta because that aerobics class left you hungry.
That might be the most depressing two sentences I've read all day, but it makes (unfortunate, evil) sense.
I have replaced serious self-harm with disordered eating
I know what you mean, but this sentence took me a while to parse. Re: girl y, I would be careful about using just weight as a reason to worry. I think it's sort of a lagging indicator of some sorts of eating disorders. And maybe not an indicator at all for some.
I've been consistently overweight for the past 12 years.* Consistently tracking calories and activity and weighing regularly was one of only two things that worked. The other way adopting some stupid diet that stops me eating everything I like.
I managed to get off and keep off about 13 lbs, around a year ago. And then it has stuck again. No weight loss. No weight gain. My weight tends to be stable at N kilos, or N+10 kilos, and flips between them, but the weight gain isn't inexorable, it tends to plateau.
One thing I find is that basal metabolic rate, etc type calculators are just total bullshit for me. As a guy who is well over 200lbs, and moderately active, it tells me that X calories day will put me in calorie deficit. But practice, I always find I need to consistently stay _way_ below that number to lose any weight at all.
* not entirely unrelated is that that is when I lost most of my thyroid.**
** I can't entirely blame it on that, though. My weight was on an upward trend before, and I think the reduced metabolic whatever contributed rather than caused the weight gain. It's definitely a major contributing factor, though.
I have experienced the judgemental doctor thing, although not as much as some others.
My previous GP started talking about all the things I must surely have -- high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high resting heart rate -- as a fat person. At the time I was doing a lot of walking and kickboxing, so when they actually did the tests, I had very low cholesterol, low blood pressure, and a resting heart rate in the low 60s. So, I was the epitome of fat but fit.
But, I can't kid myself. I'm much less active now, and while my cholesterol is still fine, and my resting heart rate is about 70, my blood pressure is at the high end of normal, and I don't do enough intense exercise. Just walking the 7,000-10,000 steps a day I get in as part of my ordinary daily life, isn't enough.
Lifestyle changes work really well in my experience. When I was working abroad I had regular scheduled time and available space to do exercise, and I was eating differently and wasn't drinking, and those two together brought my weight down by about two kilos a month (and also made me a lot fitter) - and a big part of it was that I was leading a different lifestyle so it was easier to build new habits. They say the same about giving up smoking.
So, best way to lose weight: move to a different country (and stay there; I mostly fell back into my old habits when I came back).
Work and childcare commitments make it very hard to fit in exercise. Not just exercise but other things I actively like to do, like playing guitar. So it's not just a will power thing. Although that's obviously a contributing factor, too.
But yeah, I need to find a way to exercise more, and make more time to cook. Since, when I cook, I naturally default to healthy food, since that's mostly what I actually like. it's when I don't have time to cook, and I end up snacking on the go, that I eat worse.
I have no space at home for free weights, but I do have space for some kettlebells or whatever.
Yeah, 32 was meant more as an observation than as practical advice - "best way to lose weight? disrupt your entire life by doing a different job in a different country" is a bit sledgehammer to crack a nut...
Yeah, the last time I lost drastic amounts of weight was during a major life disruption, and it just happened.
That's the big difference between being in my 20s and my 40s. At 28, if I thought I was chubbing up a bit, I just slightly upped the amount of exercise -- and I was doing less then than I was doing 10 years later -- and laid off the beer a bit. Weight just melted off. Now it takes much more drastic life style changes to have any impact at all.
Anything that veers close to "fat acceptance" is pretty suspect, but I understand the impulse to make the argument. Cala is totally right that we know how not to be fat, but it's also true that being awash in endocrine disruptors and "highly palatable food," in addition to being subject to various time and economic pressures that make exercise difficult, make it exceedingly difficult to do what we know needs to be done. Self-discipline can work for individuals, but it never works for populations. We should channel our energies into burning down Nabisco and Dow Chemical.
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Ogged:
re: the thing we discussed the other day.
>
i ready something the other day about south korea being unique in having made the transition to a wealthy food abundant society without ballooning, but i don't know if it's true or if anyone has looked at how/why.
Well, it famously has an oppressive body-image culture, with the rate highest plastic surgery in the world. It would be surprising if they weren't connected.
Does asking your doctor for amphetamines still work? Asking for a friend.
I've been pretty lucky with the whole staying reasonably fit thing, but recently I feel like climate change is conspiring against me.
Since getting rid of my car, a lot of my exercise comes from walking - about 5 miles a day just to get to and from work. But this year we've had unrelenting suffocating humidity for what feels like 4-5 straight months, so I've gotten into the habit of taking the local shuttle because it sucks to be soaking wet by the time you arrive at work.
I do have space for some kettlebells
I was just reading about a case where some people got murdered by being weighted down with kettlebells and dropped into a body of water, which: horrible. But also I had the thought: the kettlebells should make investigators immediately focus on CrossFit gym members as suspects. But that's a huge problem, because 90% of people at CrossFit are actual sociopaths.
Somebody murdered his family with a yoga ball just this week.
re: the thing we discussed the other day.
Very cool! Thanks.
Of course, you have to fill the yoga ball with carbon monoxide.
I think I should thru hike the Pacific Crest Trail to get into shape or die of dehydration like the ancient Californians.
They always say exercise can't substitute for proper diet because it takes phenomenal amounts of exercise to offset even a moderately bad diet, so why not just walk from Mexico to Canada? Also, being outside means your body is burning tons of energy to maintain body temperature.
I wish amid all these narratives about what does or doesn't work for weight loss would spare a minute to talk about reasonable weight maintenance, which, if you expect to ever in your life go through a holiday season or a period of stress eating or whatever is going to have to include some periods of weight loss.
The podcast and community Half-Size Me does this. I heard some extremely positive things about them and was curious, so I listened to an episode or two. It's:
1. slow-talkers - definitely kick it up to 1.5x
2. aimed primarily at women who are 200+ lbs (or have been in the past)
2. very mainstream, basic white America conversation style, which didn't bug me but could certainly bug someone else.
3. extremely positive in their approach - learning to figure out what you like and love about your body, and strictly focused on making small, sustainable changes that are maintainable for the rest of one's life and trying to disengage from what the scale says.
4. they do frequently talk about maintenance periods, like travelling or holidays, as well as how to decide when to stop trying to lose weight and instead stick with your current lifestyle for the rest of your life.
I really liked that it exists as a podcast. I personally would find it helpful in the future if I gain some weight and am feeling awful, and trying to thread the needle between accepting what I look like vs deciding if I want to try and lose the weight.
I feel a healthy lifestyle should include the occasional six month period of shitting in a small hole outdoors.
I got on the scale for the first time in ages the other night and found myself below 200 pounds for the first time in many years (I've tended to bounce between 205 and 220). This probably has more to do with how godawfully hot this summer has been than anything else, as muggy heat really makes eating feel like a chore. I have noticed one legitimate benefit: I haven't noticed my knees at all the past several months, after a few years of intermittent (but fairly frequent) soreness.
Do they have a small aluminum (aluminium?) trowel as nice as mine?
I'm not in marketing, so I don't know why they picked the former.
45: And come back looking like Reese Witherspoon.
She didn't even finish a majority of the trail.
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What's that web page that lets you compare counts of how many times one thing is mentioned on the internets versus another thing? (Or did I make it up?)
|>
Google ngram does that, but for books.
Right, I'm looking for non-books. It seems to me that the thing I'm thinking of was framed in smackdown terms: "Superman is mentioned more than Batman. BOOM!"
Mobes, the Pacific Northwest Trail has more grizzlies.
Canada's Great Divide Trail sounds like the best way to see a grizzly.
Contrary to Cala, isn't the evidence that what actually works surgery and nothing else?
59: I doubt it's all that accurate, but you can do that with www.google.com
Plus, if you die in Canada, you start again at your spawn point.
59: It turns out that's wrong. You need to go to https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en
OT:
"For Valentino Dixon, a wrong righted.
"After 27 years in prison, a man who loves golf walked free today. Not only that, he was given back his innocence. Of course, the state can regift innocence about as capably as it can 27 years. Nevertheless, the Erie County District Court in Buffalo, N.Y., has vacated the murder conviction of Valentino Dixon, 48, who was serving a 39-years-to-life sentence--the bulk of it in the infamous Attica Correctional Facility--for the 1991 killing of Torriano Jackson..."
You may be thinking "that's great news for Mr Dixon. But why on earth does the article have to mention up front that he loves golf?"
Well, because the article appears in the magazine that led a years-long campaign to overturn his conviction, and that magazine is Golf Digest. https://www.golfdigest.com/story/for-valentino-dixon-a-wrong-righted-murder-charge-vacated-by-court-after-serving-27-years-in-prison
This is even weirder than Teen Vogue becoming a go-to source for foreign political news.
stick with your current lifestyle for the rest of your life.
I think I'm in a good situation overall, and I'm not thinking about this as a fitness issue so much, and for that matter I'm a creature of habit in many respects, and even so this phrase is scary. Depending on exactly what counts I'm currently in my longest stretch of sticking with my current lifestyle at two years and counting, three years at the most, and I hope to make some significant changes in the next year or two. No major changes for the next 40-50 (or, OK, "just" 30 would get me to retirement age, assuming anyone gets to do that in the farcical dystopia we're headed towards) would be mind-blowing.
What I meant was more like "Am I going to burn out on this small change because I can't handle this level of restriction?" and not "I can never revisit or update these small changes, should my life evolve and grow." Things like substituting water for your afternoon coke, or whatever. One small change, sticking with it until it becomes non-challenging, taking on another small change, etc. That's their philosophy.
35: I had a similar experience, being someone who used to be able to "outrun her fork" pretty reliably. Late 20s me dropped some dissertation stress weight by cutting out a bad habit of getting a donut on the walk to the university and going to the gym. Late 30s me has to watch nutrition carefully or gain weight while training for a half marathon, which seems really unfair.
I've had some luck losing weight recently--slowly, like 5 pounds per month over the last three months--mostly due to not-very-careful calorie counting, eating a little better (but I cheat all the time), and walking a lot. (So many Pokemon to catch.) Sometimes I'm a little hungry, but it hasn't really bothered me. I think the walking is the key--it's like 24 steps to burn a calorie, and I can walk 5-6k steps per hour, so I can see tangible benefits pretty easily. It also suppresses hunger a bit and is genuinely enjoyable. Not sure if I'll be able to keep it up in the winter, though, and I understand that the fact it's working could just be a quirk of my current metabolism.
I have lost a bit of weight in the last few months, not sure how much because I never weigh myself but I'm a bit more than one size smaller in trousers.
My "methods" such as they are have involved an eating pattern I wouldn't really recommend to anybody else plus lots of exercise. Both of which are going to be harder to sustain in darker colder wetter weather. None of the people who have congratulated me on my appearance have asked me how I'm doing it.
I'm still quite overweight by any standard and am still surprised to see myself in photos as I look bigger than I am in my imagination. I wish I could control where the weight goes from - all the stuff I'd really like to shift is above my hips but if anything it's my lower half that's shrunk more.
I suspect that I will have to eat more or less like this for most of the rest of my life unless I want it all to go back on - don't know if that will be sustainable.
makes eating feel like a chore
Literally nothing does this for me. Depressed? I could eat. Anxious? A snack might help! I lost...I'm actually not sure exactly how much weight early this year, because at my fattest I didn't feel like getting on a scale. I think 25 but possibly 30 pounds. I think a few of them are back. But it does sometimes feel like if I want to stay closer to this weight than last year's weight, the rest of my life is about what I won't eat despite being in the mood to eat it.
Or, sort of exactly the end of the previous comment.
I was a little cranky about the article, because I think the main focus, on how pervasive and damaging anti-fat stigma is, was terrific and important, but the 'diets don't work for anyone and will wreck your metabolism' bit seemed overstated in a credibility-damaging way. 95-98% of attempts to lose weight fail leaves me not taking the rest of it as seriously as I should have.
I mean, consistently controlling calorie intake is difficult to the point of impossibility for many or most people, and for someone who's getting hassled by their doctor about it, it's a pretty safe bet that blithely suggesting dieting is stupid and counterproductive. And I think that was his real point, which is solid.
My coping strategy for the situation that emir and Mister S describe is that I watch what I eat (basically Atkins) for nine months of the year (Labor Day to Memorial Day) and then I eat what I want over the summer. It's a 25 lb swing, usually, and by the end of the summer, my pants get quite uncomfortable. But why buy new clothes when I'll have lost the excess by Veterans Day?
Just as inequality is bad for society even if it doesn't make people poorer, the US system where doctors are all rich is bad for society. Not only do they have , the whole system is set up so the only people who become doctors are people who have trouble empathizing with the average patient because they are all physically fit, they all have self-confidence, they all come from "good schools", they were all blessed with willpower/grit/whatever it takes to get through the thousand weeding-out exercises that eventually produces a doctor. The article points that out pretty well.
And of course the hardest thing is to understand the struggles of people with less money and less stable lives. Since we live in a country where in any random town the neighborhood of mansions is described as "where the doctors live", it's an unbridgeable gap.
My wife struggles with her weight, and had been doing well on that front... until a change in psych meds added one that is basically an appetite stimulant (and is even prescribed as such sometimes). It's been great as a psych med, but the associated weight gain is itself exacerbating the depression, which is a rough place to be stuck in.
To merge threads, isn't the emerging story advice given on how to dress for a Kavanaugh clerkship interview really just 'no fatties"?
A model looks good in anything, and all job applicants smile.
My doctor used to live on my block, when he was young and starting out.
I might add that all my doctors bar one have been helpful and have not mentioned weight to me.
The exception being the orthopaedic consultant who was supposed to be treating my back pain, when I said I was in too much pain to exercise much and had put up weight since my back got bad, suggested sending me to a dietitian. Since I was already pretty damn educated about nutrition but was finding it too painful to stand at a stove and cook, this was less than helpful.
Same guy also contradicted me that I could be having worse back pain when I had my period.
My foot doctor seems good, but clearly she's more comfortable with keeping the elderly in an ambulatory state than feeling sorry for me because I can't run without taking NSAIDs and can't drink while taking NSAIDs.
I basically think you'll are dead wrong in this thread. Normal levels of being overweight is pretty clearly less of a health problem than being anxious about your weight is. It's better from a purely health point of view to normalize being healthy and happy and any weight than to normalize anxiety around weight and weight loss.
Agreeing with the statements above about South Koreans being terribly oppressive about weight, and with the comment that bariatric surgeries do, in fact, work. I thought it was a trifle disingenuous to leave that out of the article.
Along the lines of re-organizing our whole way of being, such that we don't get offered highly processed foods while the life is being sucked out of us by work and commutes and screens, is that living in dense, walkable cities would help a lot.
And it's not just how to lose weight that we don't know anything about. It's looking more and more like we don't know anything about anything when it comes to health.
I think the Kavanaugh advice was a little worse than "no fatties", although I'm sure that was an expectation. "Outgoing" applied to how to dress seems pretty clearly "sexy, but stay tasteful."
If you aren't wearing a necktie, are you really even having sex?
49: I have noticed one legitimate benefit: I haven't noticed my knees at all the past several months, after a few years of intermittent (but fairly frequent) soreness.
This has also been the most visible tangible benefit for me after having lost ~45 lbs since retirement (also being a tiny bit more nimble getting in and out of kayaks and rowing shells).
Have been very physically active (but was somewhat so before)--I think the difference is that I can be hungry during physical activity but not during typical work activities.
I had one Nazi weight doctor at my work place who gave me shit when I was close to my lowest adult weight. (I am naturally thickset muscular.)
89: I think the Kavanaugh advice was a little worse than "no fatties", although I'm sure that was an expectation.
I am frankly surprised at my mounting anger over the whole Kavanaugh thing. Fucking pricks: him, his buddy in misogyny Mark Judge, Grassley, Hatch, every Republican Senator, the feckless fucking media, the world
Vote for the Rs: Rapists, Racists and the Rich.
Yeah. My knees and feet stopped hurting when I lost 40lbs.
I will never in my life have time to develop these thoughts properly, but: the debate about obesity is the strangest intersection of epidemiology and morality and sociology, in which the unstated objective is to preserve some norm. It just slips from "you should be thin, and people who aren't thin are gross" to "you should be healthy, and people who aren't healthy are gross," to "you shouldn't be complicit in the structural inequalities in our society that make good food hard to obtain, bad food easy to obtain, and exercise a luxury," and all the points along the way. But I think the impulse to shame people for being fat never really disappears in all of these transmutations. Our actual social obligations vis-a-vis the metabolic health of the entire population aren't so clear to me.
Another way to put it is: exactly how important is one's metabolic health? Is it the most important thing in life? Is it in the top three? Individual answers are all over the map. Collectively, I have absolutely no idea.
Did you just make up 93.last? It's very nice.
If you aren't wearing a necktie, are you really even having sex?
Yes, but it's by definition casual sex.
So you're allowed to address the other party by their first name.
96: I rage created it over the last 3 days.
The 4th R, Russia, is subtly implied.
I'm very frustrated by my weight, and not sure if marshaling the effort to do anything about it is actually worth it. I gained 15 pounds during the first three years of my job, then 15 more from cancer treatment/early menopause/spending a year sitting on my couch due to the former.
I am frankly surprised at my mounting anger over the whole Kavanaugh thing.
Oddly, I am completely unsurprised by your mounting anger over the Kavanaugh thing.
83: I've heard of mansplaining but never until now mense-splaining.
Ahimsub, and as those of you who overlap at the tother place know, I am quite fat indeed, and had a little bit of heart attack last year. I lost about 30 lbs over the summer last year, but at least half is back. I have also isolated myself a lot recently, so much of my free time is just sitting around at home. And now that I really have to worry about dying soon, my inability to alter my lifestyle for the better provides one more huge depression/anxiety trigger. Plus I dursn't take too much time off, as I need to save the PTO for if I get sick again. Frustrating.
NMM to studies that say plate size will help you lose weight.
That's the funniest NMM in a while. The long tail of the smut distribution...
I'm really seeing the effect of subtracting and adding regular exercise on the weight of my younger teen. Until last year he played football for a team, with weekly training and matches, and though he's always been on the hefty side his weight was well within the healthy range. Since giving it up, he's gone from hefty to chubby, and is now officially overweight. Having spent the summer with his Japanese family, who are all fanatically sporty and healthy, he's been shamed into a serious attempt at losing 5 kg, and a combination of running and stopping eating snacks is starting to make a visible difference. It's been quite a good, though frustrating, controlled experiment.
I can't stop laughing at 105. I think it's the niche audience being hit with the tragic double whammy of needing a new weight loss method AND a new kink.
106: To be fair, many NMMs are rather sad.
107: How old is your kid? That is, a kid before or in the middle of a growth spurt, being heavy is pretty normal. Newt went from being a 5' fireplug to a 6' beanpole in two years or so.
I went from a 5' fireplug to a 5'8" fireplug in twice that time.
111: Fifteen, and in the middle of a rapid growth spurt in all directions. He's gained weight faster than height. I'm encouraging him not to worry too much about it, if his weight stays constant as he gets taller. But his Japanese grandmother has told him to lose 5 kg, so that's what he's aiming for.
Italian grandmothers just shove food at you.
NMM to studies that say plate size will help you lose weight.
GODDAMN IT. I'm getting rid of this mouse-sized plate and tiny silverware and thimble-cup THIS INSTANT.
Ace is settling into a rounder stage, and I've had an intense set of memories of how my mom put all her anxiety onto me when I entered a similar stage. My mom was motivated by the idea that if she could help me slim down, my life would be easier, and what's bothering me now is that I can relate to that motivation. I'm absolutely not doing or saying anything, but I'm constantly checking and doubting myself (and in fact, I'd like to talk to a therapist and hash this shit out so that I'm on firmer ground and don't inadvertently pass it along.)
I'm sure it says nothing good about me, but 'no fatties' strikes me as a lot worse than 'business sexual.' Obviously, neither is an appropriate employment practice. But if you already look like a model, you are very likely to have something in your closet you can wear to the interview. Whereas if you're overweight, it's sorry, I don't care how smart you are, or how professional your clothes are, I don't want you to be anywhere I can see you.
The thing is that it's additive. If he wants sexy clerks, he wants them to be both non-fat and dressing to look cute. There's not a world where the judge who wants sexy clerks is fine with any body-type so long as she shows off her legs.
If there's a judge with a foot fetish, and I assume there is, why not a leg fetish?
If you really think about women's professional clothing, you start to wonder if maybe everybody involved in setting the rules didn't have a leg fetish.
The evening-wear people were into chests, mostly, but clearly a more diverse group.
The evening-wear people were into chests, mostly . . .
Now I'm curious if it's possible to find a picture of a mimic wearing a ball gown.
86
I basically think you'll are dead wrong in this thread. Normal levels of being overweight is pretty clearly less of a health problem than being anxious about your weight is. It's better from a purely health point of view to normalize being healthy and happy and any weight than to normalize anxiety around weight and weight loss.
sure but correcting that anxiety seems as difficult as losing weight. were you to jettison it altogether you would be predisposed to serious health problems if your weight kept mounting rather than stabilizing, as is likely--I'm willing to believe that some levels of being overweight are not that unhealthy or are even fine, but there is an upper bound at which you can't be healthy at any weight.
I mean, similarly to some degree it's probably better to be happy and extremely ill than to be miserable and healthy, since happiness is the life goal.
but willing yourself out of that misery around weight is more or less as impossible as losing tons of weight and keeping it off forever appears to be. I guess there are more anti-depressants than there are weight-loss drugs, but...
this is one of the best pieces i've ever read on disordered eating, for many reasons: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/06/sisters-eating-disorder-missed-breakfast but primary among them is that it places the disease smack in the middle of family life. '
i think the inescapable reality of humans is that food is at the very nub and heart of our existence as social animals and there is in the end nothing that exists freely independently like "individual willpower." what we experience as individual will is both driven by super powerful biochemical processes not subject to consistent, longterm individual ability to overcome *and* an inescapable web of collective social coercion. in prosperous developed countries we've given over that collective space, our supra-individual organ so to speak, to the for profit food industry. but it's not like if we bring that industry to heel there will be some sort of negative space - the social construction of appetite, eating and perceptions of health will become something different.
This is 100% anecdotal but ... we had a grad student doing studies of workplace interactions a couple of years back. The study involved him making videos of meetings. I looked at a time lapse of one of his videos (which I was in). We have a colleague who is significantly (health-threateningly) large: he was also in the video. What was absolutely striking about the film was the sheer motionless of our large colleague over the space of an hour: he sat there like a rock while all other meeting attendees fidgeted, shifted in their seats, gesticulated, etc. This made me think there might really be something to this push to make workplaces less sedentary by design. Still, I can't think how you might get people to fidget more.
I am all for active travel, taking the stairs, etc. and am lucky enough to be able to get more or less to the weight I want by cutting out the daily coffee shop stop (or resuming it). Getting Christian Bale lean evades me but do I really want to only eat chicken for six months? Since it's very hard to reshape an entire built environment, if there's a health problem that needs solving here it's surely going to have to be tackled by going at the food industry.
"you start to wonder if maybe everybody involved in setting the rules didn't have a leg fetish."
How common does it have to be before it stops counting as a fetish? I mean, virtually everyone has a naked-person fetish.
127.1: studies have actually noticed this too iirc - calorie burn through unconscious twitching, leg jiggling etc is significant.
Maybe we need to make everyone a bit more nervous. Perhaps espresso?
I've probably mentioned before that I lost something like 20-30 pounds during about a year-long period after I almost completely stopped drinking sugary soft drinks and started drinking more coffee and tea (no sugar added to either). I wasn't formally trying to lose weight, or even conscious of it at first, but during that time I had a couple of foot/leg injuries that prevented me from doing much walking so I'm fairly certain the non soda drinking was the only major change I made.
Towards the end of the period of weight loss, I became concerned enough how quickly I was losing weight that I finally went out and bought a scale. My weight has essentially been unchanged in the last three years since. I bought slimmer fitting clothing because everything had become excessively baggy, but a couple pairs of pants ended up being a little too tight and I've never gotten down to that weight. It seems like I went from the upper border of a waist size to the lower border without actually changing the size itself.
I'm still 40 pounds heavier than I was when I first reached my current height - I was pretty skinny, but also in pretty good shape for endurance sports like running and hiking - but despite increasing exercise I don't seem to be losing any more weight. I do feel in better physical shape, though, and I guess that's what counts.
Still, I can't think how you might get people to fidget more
Cocaine.
129: check out this chart and tell me there isn't something in the theory that the great productivity surge from the Depression to the Oil Crisis also being the era when taking speed at work was socially acceptable is No Accident, Comrades:
https://twitter.com/toby_n/status/1042514395685965825
Pity about all the drop dead heart attacks, howling-mad psychiatric breakdowns, guzzling benzos and whiskey to calm down etc. but hey! 5% annual productivity growth and skinny with it!
On the wider point, one thing serious weight lifters and bodybuilders are completely clear about, and this is definitely something I learned from lifting, is that living in a caloric deficit sucks donkey balls through a fine mesh. You should expect to feel like shit all the time, be depressed and cranky, see your athletic performance worsen, catch every germ going, and see your libido disappear. In the light of this I really think it's rough to expect random fat people without much motivation to just go through that for extended periods of time as if it was easy.
I don't offer any particular solution, I just think it's unrealistic to tell great swaths of the general population to do something that highly motivated obsessive athletes find really unpleasant and difficult, and then wonder why it's not working.
132.1 is something I have believed for a long time. It's particularly impressive on that chart that the steadily rising black line isn't steadily rising productivity; it's a steady increase in the rate of increase in productivity. Productivity over that period was on a higher-order curve!
Since it's very hard to reshape an entire built environment
Interestingly, the period Alex is talking about also saw some fairly dramatic reshaping of the built environment.
One of the bits that stuck with me from Tooze "Wages of Destruction" was the bit where he tracks caloric input against productivity in Germany and there's an anomalous period of about a year in which calorie input goes down but the Germans keep being productive, but he digs out medical data to show that this is the year in which every German worker lost his beer belly. He quantifies the national caloric reserve represented by the collective middle-age spread of the German working-age population!
Also, while I'm nihilistically burning stuff down, can I say how much I hate the word "disordered"? It literally means that there exists some order that would be normatively and unequivocally better, that we fallen have lost (it is actually a very religious thing to say), but it lets the user dodge actually saying what that might be, how it would be different, why they know that, or by what right they claim to assert moral authority over the reader.
It is a coward's word and it's no surprise David Brooks-ish opinionators love it. I think it was nutritionists who popularised it via "disordered eating", which is really not surprising given that there is no field with quite as many quacks, unjustified shame-merchants, and producers of unreplicable research.
(Look up Ansel Keys! Not only did he help to start the whole "fat is the enemy and sugar is our friend" madness, he also invented WW2 army K-rations that were insufficient to feed a GI running about with a pack on his back but also so disgusting that the starving soldiers got even fewer calories because they habitually threw the worse bits of the menu away. Also, they were willing to trade almost anything for *British army rations!*, which is saying something.)
134: also, the correlation between coal output and food.
Also, they were willing to trade almost anything for *British army rations!*, which is saying something.
Saying nothing about the WW2 version ("M & V" comes up in a lot of memoirs, and not in a good way) but the modern ones are really not bad; preferred to both US and French field rations.
I looked up the K ration; good lord. That sort of incompetence should have got Keys shot.
Alex, your comment really cheered me up, because I was upbeat all summer but now I'm kind of down and feeling the cold way more than I normally would (it's not even actually cold just not very pleasant) so I'm reassured that this is normal.
137: it is kind of impressive that human ingenuity ran to creating meals that were too vile for people who were slowly starving. I think the K-rat wikipedia article mentions the US evaluators who gave some unit a case of them as a gift and noticed that everyone had thrown up at least once by the next day.
138: I am a little ray of sunshine. With big traps.
139.1: it's worse than that!
Wiki:
One of British General Orde Wingate's units in the Dehra Dun area was visited by quartermaster logistics officers some months after they had last eaten K-rations. At the sight of a box of K-rations carried by the visitors, two of Wingate's men vomited.[12]
That was the incident I was thinking of. It's the ne plus ultra of terrible cooking.
xelA's school sent us the BMI-shaming letter re: his weight, and we've been invited to get involved in some process.
The thing is, he's not over-weight. You can see the little bugger's ribs. He _is_ built like a brick shit house* compared to some of his peers. Big visible muscles on his back, legs and shoulders. And he's not as shaved cat skinny as some of his friends. But by no standard is he fat. They mis-measured his height for a start, they had him at 108cm or something, when he's actually about 112cm.
One of his other friends, who is thinner than him, and a little mouse-like boy, also got the same letter.
* for 5 year old values of brick shit house.
living in dense, walkable cities would help a lot.
Living in dense, walkable, really small and really cheap cities, I assume.*
I'd need to be a multi-millionaire to live within actual walking distance of my office. Google maps informs me it's a 4 hour walk each way, and you could travel an extra 2 hours further on foot and still be well inside London.
It's 12 - 14 miles by bike, each way, which I guess is do-able if you are committed. I have workmates who do 5 or 6 miles each way, every day.
* when I lived in Glasgow, I did fairly regularly walk to work, which was 3 miles, or so, but wasn't unpleasant. Most of the walk was quite leafy.
Yes. I live three miles from my office in a house that was affordable on a university staff salary. It's pretty nice. I'm still too heavy though.
I think if I wanted to live within three miles of my office - not sharing a flat, but with a place to myself and hypothetical family - I would need to be either a multi millionaire or a council tenant.
With only a one car garage and no conservatory, it's a pretty Spartan existence.
This is one of the great advantages of self-employment: I sleep just a few meters from my office. On the other hand, the commute doesn't do anything for my fitness levels.
We have to keep the plants in the dining room, like assholes.
I guess we should move the assholes to the basement.
This is one of the great advantages of self-employment homelessness: I sleep just a few meters from my office.
I admit I do occasionally daydream about the feasibility of living in some sort of Rogue Male-type burrow or sett on Hampstead Heath.
Have you considered building a concern house?
I have my own pet theory about this.
There was a study that showed that diabetics who went for a 10 minute walk right after each meal had better blood sugar control than diabetics who walked for 30 minutes at once. Given that there may be a connection between obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, I think that it would be interesting to see whether doing that helped people maintain a healthy weight. I got just over overweight BMI - though nobody would have said anything because of where the weight fell and lost at oen point 25 pounds (138-114) but really about 15, because I was only at 138 very briefly (more like 135), and I think I was at 114 when I was sick last winter. (I had stopped exercising completely.) You also feel less hungry an hour or so after eating.
There was some paper that is totally not large enough to generalize from but which interests me (n=2) where a researcher and his assistant tried it and found that they lost weight.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3119587/
What I think would be an interesting approach that might be feasible for an adult:
(1.) Some kind of HIIT once or twice a week for heart health. Takes about 15 minutes on a stationary bike or doing body-weight exercises like the Johnson and Johnson 7-minute workout which requires no equipment.
(2.) Other aerobic activity - walking or running or a sport or something for heart health for 30-40 minutes at a stretch once or twice a week
(3.) Strength training (resistance bands?). I don't know what a good recommendation for a normal person would be to maintain muscle mass.
(4.) Taking a 10-15 minute walk around the block right after lunch and dinner.
Have you considered building a concern house?
Since I'm white, it would be a very real concern house.
My phone is gaslighting me. I typed "cob house".
I can't believe your phone hasn't learned the phrase "cob house" yet. I'd expect it to autocomplete once you'd typed "build a".
I'm a bit over four miles from my office, but if I were minimizing both distance and price to downtown, there's a small three bedroom for sale about half a mile from The Point at $170k. The commute would involve a funicular ride. Pittsburgh is cheap.
I think something on the keyboard reset itself a couple of days ago when there was an update.
143: BMI is terrible for bigger kids -- not just heavily built, but tall kids. I think the height scaling breaks down. Sally and Newt were both kind of giant, and we threw out years of notices like that. (I mean, BMI is bullshit on an individual level for anyone. But particularly bad for large kids.)
159 isn't entirely fair because that was as the crow flies; it's 3 miles walking. But still.
We have a colleague who is significantly (health-threateningly) large: he was also in the video.
Oh man. I have a colleague who gets out of breath in conversation, and it drives me to distraction. I hear her a mile away, talking, trying to catch her breath. Especially if she just walked up.
Since it's very hard to reshape an entire built environment, if there's a health problem that needs solving here it's surely going to have to be tackled by going at the food industry.
Both, I think. It's hard to reshape a built environment quickly, but having lived in different parts of the U.S. there are clearly regional differences in how people get around and how easily they can be active.
126: we used to deal with food by having rituals around eating and by not having that much of it, and now we are supposed to snack 24/7 and manage it by willpower and apps.
This is the third time this week that there's been doughnuts/cookies outside my office door. I'm not very fond of doughnuts but it drives me crazy to have the cookies be niggling at my attention. Whether or not I've eaten one, I still am hyperaware that they're there. I just want to throw them out or put them far away.
I tried to bring more ritual back, but my family really objected to watching me sacrifice the chicken.
I tried to bring more ritual back, but my family really objected to watching me sacrifice the chicken.
(This is unusual for us. Birthdays and leftovers from special events.)
Heebie, the sacrifice is the special event.
Still, I can't think how you might get people to fidget more
Ah, finally, my nervousness about nearly everything at life has paid off. How wonderful. I should be skinny any moment.
130: I think for me stopping with the soft drinks, i.e. going from one almost every day to one once a month, if that, basically took me from "actively gaining weight" to "not gaining weight very quickly, all else being equal." To lose weight I had to cut out bread and rice and then calorie-count to a very low limit and go to the gym thrice a week.
At some point my willpower kicked out, as it will, and I'm doing "no soft drinks or alcohol and as few grains as possible except one day a week which often spreads into two because honest to god, Friday afternoon requires a gin gin mule" and some tendonitis in my wrist has messed up my fragile gym habit, and I suspect I am now back into "fairly slowly gaining weight" because life is unkind.
re: 171
Yeah, I almost completely stopped drinking soft drinks, and I cut down on alcohol. I didn't stop either, but way less soft drinks, and a bit less alcohol. Made zero difference to my bodyweight.
135: what would you use instead of "disordered" to describe the eating patterns in the link at 126? i don't think i'm being cowardly in using disordered. i feel just fine saying affirmatively that there are healthier eating patterns than those of both bee wilson and her sister when they were adolescents and god knows recovery takes for-fucking-ever. eating disorders are a serious health issue and scary as fuck, and to be honest i really hope ydnew is right and i'm wrong, but i think almeida is wise to be concerned about her daughter.
re: 161
Yeah, he's not hugely tall. He sits around 60-65th percentile for height, so taller than average but not tall enough for anyone to remark on it much. Some of his friends are much taller. But he's solid. He was quite chubby when he was about 3, but now he's just powerfully built for a 5 year old, rather than visibly fat. There's another kid in his class who is the same.
Luckily, he's not quite worked out his own strength. He can throw a tantrum with us as his parents, and he's quite scarily strong. But he hasn't turned that on other kids. The day someone tries to bully him, if he realises he can, he'll flatten them.
serious weight lifters and bodybuilders are completely clear about, and this is definitely something I learned from lifting, is that living in a caloric deficit sucks donkey balls through a fine mesh
Watching the experiences of the skinny man who wanted to be built, the gainers have the same experience with trying to overrule their default eating preferences.
On biking to work, I saw somewhere that a bike commute of up to seven miles is thought of as something casual riders will do, especially if the driving alternative is inconvenient.
I think of my eating as ordered or disordered. Ordered is when I'm eating mostly along my intentions and disordered is when I would eat seven boxes of Lucky Charm cereal if they were available. It has seemed like the least shaming way to name the ways I eat.
171, 172: I was drinking more like the equivalent of 3 cans of Coke per day, sometimes more.
I was frequently getting a "small" drink at restaurants at lunch which I suspect is something like two cans. Iced tea has really helped me not do this. I was kind of hoping there'd be a comparable thing where mj could help me not miss drinking, but as with the last ninety times I tried it, I don't really like it. I guess what worked better for that was realizing I don't sleep well when I drink. Sleep is important to me. As for sweets, there's no real substitute. I ate a billion cherries during cherry season but we're at the end of stone fruit season and there's a long stretch of nothing that feels like nature's answer to a Twix bar so white knuckles, do your thing!
Well and grains, that's also hard. If you have a ton of money you can eat fancy salads every day but this is also hard if you work in a suburb. Eventually you're going to break down one day and go to Chipotle, and then it's all a careening ride to hell or diabetes from there. (I'm trying to make a joke of much of this because it's frustrating and I don't feel like I'm up for many challenges.)
Can that be done? Asking for a person.
Chipotle sounds pretty good about now.
Pick one with a flared base, for health and safety.
163: This same colleague of mine gets out of breath standing (although he is undoubtedly pretty strong, and he'd have to be). This means he tends to avoid coming over to where you're working to talk about projects, etc. Which means they just don't get talked about as much. I find this sort of heartbreaking. Of course you can go to him, and we do. When we remember.
No one's mentioned stress (and the related lack of sleep): another major factor. Chalk it all up to the massive overhang of our failing social arrangements. A big calving off is due, for sure.
I have a colleague who gets out of breath in conversation
I hope they're getting help with this. It sounds waaayyy more serious than just a weight problem.
179-182. A better argument for legal blow I have seldom seen.
"I mean, BMI is bullshit on an individual level for anyone. But particularly bad for large kids."
As basic mathematics/geometry would hint at.
187: I know they're under doctor supervision for PT and some postop stuff from various knee and wrist surgeries. So I haven't explicitly expressed concern. But I do feel fairly alarmed.
They probably need valve surgery. Just sneak in with a surgeon while they are sleeping.
we're at the end of stone fruit season
This is the underlying principle of my season diet changes noted above.
By Xmas, though, I'll eat the occasional sugar free chocolate bar, to help keep the sweet tooth satisfied.
My deepest food issue is the worry that I'll eventually be compelled to start eating meat again, as part of some obligatory health-driven low-carb diet. This is why I constantly harp on the question of how morally obligatory an optimally healthy diet is: I think it's a pretty common view that individual people's metabolic health is more important than some fantasy-based concern about animal welfare. I've never seen a serious attempt to make the argument, though. There must be some that aren't stupid and self-serving by now.
173: i feel just fine saying affirmatively that there are healthier eating patterns than those of both bee wilson and her sister
Right! Let's say what we mean! We could say "unhealthy" or "bad" or "don't starve yourself" or "don't stuff yourself with dozy sugar".
I had an office mate who had migraines that would not go away despite repeated treatments. She found a doctor who ordered her to eat a chicken breast and her migraines were gone. Also, a bald spot disappeared and she decided to leave graduate school.
That's an awful lot of good just for one dead chicken. Or maybe lots of dead chickens, because she probably kept eating them.
I guess I left out the part where she was a long time vegetarian before that.
I am the poster child for "lean unhealthy" today: underweight BMI as of dr appt last week; have been sitting at home office desk all day littering every available surface with ginger candy wrappers and curling myself into a stressed-out ovoid. Three monitors and a smartphone. I really, really shouldn't be living like this.
Point is, there are a lot of interventions to try before the chicken hecatombs come into play.
It's too bad that the chicken breasts don't make migraines go away for habitual chickenvores. To my knowledge. Maybe if you stop eating them? It's the chicken delta that matters....
I never even heard of ginger candy.
I guess it tastes like a Moscow Mule, maybe without lime.
Heh. When I first found out about ginger candy, I ate so much of it so fast that I gave myself an aversion. Since then I no longer like any association of sweet and ginger (like cookies). The ginger candies with the black and white checks on the ends of the wrappers? Loved them until I didn't.
Which is a milder fate than my grandfather suffered. He gave himself an allergy to fresh tomatoes by eating a bushel one time. Since I believe myself capable of eating a bushel of fresh tomatoes, it is a good caution for me.
I bet that once I finally quit this job, I never want to see another ginger candy in my life. It'll be like the K-rations.
I never thought to look for candy in the canned food aisle.
193: I have my doubts about such arguments being tenable, unless it's just literally not possible for humans to maintain long-term metabolic health without low-carb diets. And I feel like human history until the 20th C argues against that premise.
Like, I don't think you can make an ethical argument that takes as given that people in developed countries will unavoidably get fat from processed carbs, and then have no choice but to murder meat to get better.
My only ethical issue with animal consumption is environmental, and I'm not sure the metabolic health argument would touch that anyway ("please die faster, human," says the environment).
Anyway, interesting idea.
I'm starting to feel that Pokemon Go is too artificial, so I'm going to move on to cock fighting. I'll have leftover chickens from that, unless I'm really good.
194: it seems to me we are talking past each other. your suggested exhortations are at best not helpful and at worst could be extremely harmful for someone suffering from an eating disorder.
152: Really? It's like we're horribly distorted mirror images.
right now I'm convinced that if I get to 118 or something everything will be perfect. I'm so close! just two pounds! fuck me.
Oh yeah, I get it. I've recently lost a lot of weight (over 40 pounds), and I now have this irrational notion that 120 should be my goal, and I'm still two pounds over, but everything will be perfect when I finally reach that goal. Even though, initially, 130 was my goal, but I keep moving the goalposts...
Re: obesity. The problem has to do with food production and food systems, surely? There are, as per Cala, some real health issues associated with obesity; but blaming individuals for their participation in their society's food production and consumption systems seems counter-productive and stupidly moralistic.