f13.net

Soooooooooooo... in other words, no.  :why_so_serious:

No doctor is signing off on that.

The delusion of some people astonishes me. I need to lose 30 pounds, I call them my 30s gut and love handles (which are melting slowly through mildly better eating and more exercise). I am miles away from the type of fat that some of those people are and I don't even consider myself close to healthy at the moment.

The trainer's question was the correct one. The fatty was just dodging the question :why_so_serious:

I.e. you can be overweight and healthy and you can be skinny and unhealthy.

Nothing she said was untrue, though. Why do we need a fitness trainer to tell us what he thinks about a woman being happy with her body? Fat people are happy being fat, good on them. We're not the body police.

He said fantastic that they were happy. Then he asked a more serious, clinical question having to do with healthiness as assessed by a doctor - which was dodged like steamed broccoli.

Hey, to be fair, it's the only fucking thing she's capable of dodging.
Source: I'ma fatty too!

Are we just going to ignore Healthism, then?

(http://i.imgur.com/L8gXNbQ.jpg)

Which is also none of his fucking business since he isn't her trainer and ain't paying to put the food in her mouth.  :grin:

I think the point is more that we don't go around asking thin people if their health has been assessed by a doctor.  

I refuse to assign fat people protected group status. There has to be somebody left over for us to hate on after all the other options have been removed.

A while back I suggested that we establish a threshold whereby if X posts have been made in a picture thread discussing a picture, a new thread is split out so we can continue posting pictures in the picture thread.  Someone suggested 10.  I like that number.

 :grin:

The trainer was asked for his professional opinion (as someone whose job is helping people to get healthy) on her weight.  He asked if she's in good health.  I guess that makes him a monster?

Health-ism is a pretty fucking stupid word, no matter how fat or thin you are.

I am sure that most people who degrade other people over their body weight are just expressing concerned about that person's health.

Fat unattractive person does have a point though.  We're all going to fucking die, so what the fuck does it matter?

It would only really matter in a healthcare discussion and I'm not sure anyone here gives a shit enough to have another one of those.  Especially when we can more easily beat up the fucking smokers instead of the fatties.

I think, though, the way Aryan Douchebag phrased the question was hugely unhelpful.  The correct answer would be 'Yes, I'm glad she's happy.  I think people who are healthy and happy are aces.'

And then let the much more subtle point sink slowly into the rolls and rolls of blubber and whale-oil.

Properly steamed broccoli is delicious  :eat:

My take is that it's your own business how highly you prioritize your own health, but don't be a bullshitter.

Like, don't say you're perfectly happy with your weight and then complain about how much your knees hurt when you walk as if that's being caused by fucking space wizards rather than simple physics.  You just value doughnuts more than you value not being in pain is all.  That's perfectly valid.

I'd like to weigh about ten pounds less and am having a hell of a time getting there because having dropped forty-some pounds from my max I've reached the point where I don't give quite enough fucks to keep making the sacrifices necessary to continue losing weight.  That equilibrium is a little different for everyone.

It makes him a guy who's probably tired of morbidly obese people pretending they don't have a problem (either mental or physical). Plus he was asked a question, and he answered it. Probably nicer than most would.

Can you be happy at any body type? Absolutely. But you can't be healthy at every body type. You can absolutely be too fat or too thin. You can also be in denial. There are mental disorders on both ends of that spectrum, let alone the physical damage to the body. There's a reason you don't see many 300 pound 80 year olds.

But let's also be honest, who enjoys watching a fat person be really smug about how they are fat?

Counterpoint : Gym sessions have allowed me this very day to get back into my old 32's, which is rather awesome.

I've hated every fucking minute of it and will continue to hate it and do it because I quite like not dying suddenly clutching at my chest, which is, as you all know, a Scottish hobby.

And I've never really been 'big' in the traditional sense (I'm about a quarter of Jabba up there, I'd say).  It's less about Equilibrium of size and more to do with an understanding of how the environment that surrounds you will just kill you.  I mean, seriously, has the woman in question checked or considered diabetes and other lifestyle shit ?  It's not all throwing people into the Pit of Carcoon.

Or is the original show just about image and nooky ?  If so, who cares.  Men will pretty much fuck anything.  They're scum that way.

 :heart:

To me it's basically like watching someone walk around with a knife to their own throat and acting like everything is just fine.

Where's this from? Why was this lady being interviewed? I'd need context around being asked about her health versus that of a thin person.

Her response to his question seems like she's throwing up a bullshit smoke screen -- Healthism! If she's happy but ignorant to any health issues, that might be something she wants to get right on.

It seems to me that taking care of yourself *is* a moral obligation in the same way it is a moral obligation not to drink and drive. Isn't it about the risk / burden you create for others through your own decisions? In the case of fitness, staying within a reasonable level of health / fitness would reduce your risk of costly medical problems in the future, prolong life, etc.

Exactly the same for me, and also I have shoulders now which is a novelty. I've done it by beating people up with sticks rather than going to the gym though, which I can promise is 1000% more fun and helps with stress too (unless you get stressed out by an old guy telling you that you're pathetic I guess).

Yeah, I've actually bulked up elsewhere, which is an added bonus.  It's just getting rid of the spare tyre.  Though if I'm brutally honest (and you know me, I am) this is more about supporting the Wife who's really unhappy about where she is and wanting to sort it.  I guess that's probably another reason I'm not really as smitten with it, even if the results are good.

Anyway, this isn't my fucking blog.

Very few people like working out. I'm certainly not one of them. I still do it too. But you can not work out and be just fine in the overall health sense, as long as you are mobile.

However, you don't get to be huge due to just not working out. You get there by eating 5,000 calories a day.

The day the healthcare industry starts charging per pound I'll stop calling them a problem and judging them for their weight.  That woman weighs more than me, and I'm 40# over where I should be.  Yes I'm fat, yes I'm disgusted by it. Judge me, too.

Nobody who's fit should be subsidizing my healtcare premiums when I get "diabetus" and bad knees from the extra weight.

Or the point is they specifically are talking to her. If they wanted to pull out a skinny person or slightly overweight person and get them agree to be on, then fine.

And besides, he is a supposed personal trainer. What the hell did they think he was going to ask? His work is getting people active and healthier. The first thing my buddies who are personal trainers ask is if the person has talked to a doctor and is ok for physical activity. If they ask Mike the barber, it would have been different I'd think.

Then again, talk show.  :oh_i_see:

This splitting-off Threadism is offensive to those of us who stand for Smaller Threadcounts and Less Moderator Oversight.

Entirely justified.  Sam is the enema in the colon of Picture threads.

Smaller Threadcounts And Minimal OverSight.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/JohnStamosHWoFFeb2012.jpg/220px-JohnStamosHWoFFeb2012.jpg)

I almost split and denned this post, but I'm not sure everyone would understand my subtle brand of humor.   :why_so_serious:

Huh?  Ironwood has a fucking blog?

Yes.  It's had no updates in 16 years.  Marriage, eh ?

An Australian television program called Insight (http://www.sbs.com.au/insight/), which is a moderator lead discussion of an issue, with a crowd of invested and interested people (professionals, patients, etc).

As a fat unattractive person I used to think like that too, till I started falling asleep while commuting for no reason, and having problems going to sleep at night.
High blood pressure, shortness of breath. Everyone dies, yes, but I don't wanna live like that.

Before entering the healthcare industry I would have shrugged and said that the woman's fitness is entirely her own business, as long as she's made aware of the consequences. I still mostly think that way, but there's so many things that start going horribly wrong and are invisible about it until it's too late. Her body is destroying itself trying to maintain as close to normal function. I don't know her but she's most likely prediabetic if not diabetic, has high blood pressure, and terrible cholesterol. If she's okay with blindness, amputations, and a shitty death from random organ failures then power to her. But I guarantee she'll be one of the seemingly endless stream of people I see who can't be bothered to change a single aspect of their bad habits even after losing a foot.

Seriously guys, doctors and other health care professionals do a crap job of explaining the consequences of this stuff. I've had high blood pressure since forever and never dealt with it. After learning in class all the horrifying stuff it causes long term I've never missed a pill and exercise when I can.

It's true that everyone dies. What's not true is that all deaths are equal when it comes to suffering. My grandfather died a month and a half ago at 87. He jogged every morning and played golf everyday as well after he retired. He was was active, alert, and able to take care of himself up to the night he died in his sleep. I'd much rather have that then a shitty decade of downhill health, operations, and assisted living starting at 65 because my body is a wreck from being neglected.

I gotta give credit to my doctor, when I went in for a long-overdue physical at age 29 just to make sure I didn't have anything seriously wrong with me, he told me in the nicest way possible that I had "early death due to fatness" written all over me and that if I was smart I'd try to drop some weight while I was still in my 20s and it was relatively easy.  I had slightly high blood pressure, slightly high cholesterol, and slightly poor liver function, all linked to being overweight, and odds were good if I didn't correct my course it'd all just get worse.

Six months and 25 pounds later he redid the labs and everything was where it was supposed to be; blood pressure normal, liver function normal, and he said he'd never seen someone cut their cholesterol so drastically without meds.  And I felt better -- less joint pain, I slept more soundly, didn't have heartburn any more, way more stamina.  Really wish somebody had told me when I was 22 and started putting that weight on that it was going to kill me, apparently that's all it took to make me stop stuffing my face.

I'm one of those people whose unhappy with his body, despite going from 240 to 165 over 5 years. That unhappiness has helped motivate change and at other times has contributed to severe depression. As a secondary *consequence* (rather than as a primary reason for motivation), my health has gotten significantly better.

Her happiness, while great, appears to be an illusion based on ignorance.

Bob and Rk :  You kinda missed my point by grabbing the first sentence and running with it. 

I mean, that's ok and all, I don't much care, this isn't politics, but, hey, you're upsetting me.

I may cry.

These people drive me crazy. There's a hideous tyranny about size for women, but they're equating the health effects of someone being an active athletic 12 or 14 with someone being a sedentary 22 or 24. These are not the same things. And these people are not helping with the mentality that there are only two attractive sizes 2 and 4 0 and 2.

I'm not sure most of us men can envision what those sizes translate to.  What, for example, does an active athletic 12 or 14 even look like?  That sounds like a pretty big person to me, but I don't honestly know.

(http://media.tumblr.com/d8d31dc8060bd12bdfc253c51c94673f/tumblr_inline_n5sz869e441sohk3w.gif)

 :why_so_serious:

(http://img.pandawhale.com/post-24885-Emma-Watson-YES-thumbs-up-gif-ahXs.gif)

This is Robin Lawley, she's size 12. That's considered to be "plus size."

(https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQwt_QMJE6zsojYXST621-HKBaMHVP-Pmio2B02jSbPcsnvTXza0Q)

She gets a +10 in my book. Of course she is not carrying a spare tire or arm wings so she is not a typical woman.

And sizes are arbitrary. Size 2 in one place is a size 4 or 6 in other places. And even then, some places just print a number size lower than what the actual measurements call for. Marketing at its finest.

There is always a difference between being a fatty fat fat fuck and just having a different body shape. People who conflate the two are stupid.

It's a quite average woman. Numtini shared a good picture but if you Google around there was a fairly famous photo a few years ago showing average women (rather than models) and their body size.


Yep, that's exactly WHY women's clothes are sizes rather than measurements. To allow them to vary while hiding the size changed.  Apparently, "Vanity sizing" has also taken hold in Mensware now and some lines don't hold true when it says "32 waist" because it's actually a 34-36

Yeah, if that's an "athletic 12", then sign me the hell up.  But I suppose there are a lot of different body types that are that particular size, some of which would be deemed attractive and some less so.  Body composition means a lot more than weight or size.  I'd avoid using the word "average", however.  The "average" American body is an overweight, not terribly healthy body.  I don't think it necessarily means normal.

Anyway, being a tad overweight does not make you automatically unhealthy, though I bet most are.  Being obese is the definition of being unhealthy.  Several have already chimed in on the things it does to your body, and the extra stress it puts on your organs.  Another thing to add is that it also places a PHYSICAL stress on your organs...literally, the extra weight and stomach fat is smashing the shit out of your internal organs, especially when you lay down.  Ever wonder why really fat people snore?  Because their airways are essentially being smooshed by the extra mass.  Sore backs from simply laying in bed, because your spine cannot handle the extra stress on it.  Etc.

Obesity scales are fucked up, though. It says I'd be 'normal weight' as a 5'11" male weighing 135lbs. I weighed 155 and was stick thin in high school. I'm slightly overweight right now, but the BMI chart says I'm a sliver away from obesity.

I made that discovery last year when I bought a new pair of jeans from Old Navy. I wear a 32" waist, 31" is snug but I can get into a pair if need be. I got a pair of 32" regular jeans and they are way too loose. I grabbed a tape measure and sure enough, my waist is still 31". Measuring the waist on those jeans was 33.5". Americans are growing out but we are keeping the numbers on our clothes. Makes me nuts. And to think this has been going on with women for...ever.

As for BMI... it is bullshit without other indicators. End of story. BMI was created by a math guy with no medical background and it is used in medical research now as some gold standard, often as a single indicator which I find appalling since I work as a data manager and routinely do data pulls for docs that request this as an measure of obesity. I am shocked the medical research community uses this without even a question and when it is so easily disproved. 6'1" 220lbs is overweight according to this BMI math, but I don't think Adrian Peterson is even remotely overweight. He gains 10lbs and he is considered obese. Project this to insurance companies that are trying to drop costs by making people fit into BMI categories sight unseen - they use BMI and then bombard you with weightloss adverts and get healthy incentives without considering the person's activity and other clinical indicators. I don't know why I still find this shocking, but I do.

A really great illustration of this is in the Body Worlds exhibit, the museum thing with the plasticized corpses. They have a cross section of an "average" weight person next to an obese person.

Don't click the spoiler unless you want to see plasticized cross sections of actual human bodies. Not bloody or even gross, but some people find them disturbing.

(http://i.imgur.com/qRCAzsk.jpg)

I'd like to think that's not the actual transcript of what they said, but I know that it is.

It's really hard to exercise ?

Er ?

I wouldn't be able to function on that show without throwing things.

It is when you're super fat!

Not even kidding, unfortunately, and it is a trap that overweight people fall into like lemmings...the more out of shape you are, the more you feel like simple exercise is really, really giving you a hard workout.  Which is patently false.  Just because you are sweating more and breathing harder, it doesn't mean your body is accomplishing more.  The opposite is more likely true.

The fatter you are, the harder it is; however once you get exercise built into your routine, it becomes easier. The main thing not in that dialog is the more important part of the equation: diet. Losing weight is mostly about a change in diet and then about becoming more active.

I suspect that what she meant was that it's really hard to motivate yourself to do it. Which it is, it took me years to find something I could actually stick with; if my only options were jogging or the gym, I'd still be out of shape.

I tried to get my ex to understand that 100 calories of ice cream is not the same as 100 calories of fruit. And for gluttony night, we should eat salmon and broccoli rather than pizza. *shrug*

As far as exercise goes, stop using elevators. Do things the hard way. I tilled my garden by hand, two neighbors offered me their motorized tillers. I haven't replaced the battery in my riding mower and I'm considering selling it, push mowing the yard as fast as possible is a nice piece of cardio.

The problem with that last conversation is that it reduces the issue to an absurd degree.  Sure, the guy was answering the question that was asked.  But it was the wrong question to ask, designed to come out as "See anyone can do it!"

Sky, your gluttony night sounds like bullshit, ya nerd.

Trainers focus too much on exercise as a solution. Doctors will flat out tell you that unless you change your diet, exercise is going to make you upset when you don't get results, then you'll stop.

Absolutely.  Changing your diet - not dieting - is a fundamentally important thing to being healthy. But that's really part of the critique of the whole thing.  There are lots of skinny people with shit diets that are in poor health.  But people don't go out of their way to ask those people if they are healthy, if they eat well, and if they need to exercise more. 

It's kind of like when people find out I'm vegan and I almost always get asked how I get enough protein.  In reality I get more protein than most of the people who ask because I care in the first place.  No one asks the average person if they are getting enough protein in their diet.

The question doesn't come out of a concern for your health, it comes out of an inherent discomfort with your choices.  It gets disguised as concern, but it's basically just a reaction to subversion of norms a lot of the time.


Yeah, Salmon and Broccoli is most people's go out of their way to eat healthy night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk

For lust night he and the wife snuggle on the couch.

I don't care if you're vegan. My problem usually starts when people drone on and on about it parties. I don't really have a problem with fat people. I do have a problem with fat people trying to justify their fatness as anything else but a combination of laziness, mental and emotional issues, and poor health.

I don't see a problem with that second image aside from the overweight woman coming up with a pithy statement that had nothing to do with the question being answered.

It is hard. It requires willpower and motivation. Worse, when you're that overweight, it does take a lot of time to get it off, years maybe. Thing is they don't even need to do that much to drop, say, 50 pounds. Light exercise and proper diet will take care of a significant chunk of an obese person's initial problems.

It has to be made a part of the routine though. I went from 240 to 210 pounds doing nothing but Nutrisystem and careful portioning. I understand the temptation and difficulty with self-regulation. I understand how you'll be affected by cravings if you drop the weight that someone who was that weight in the first place wouldn't have to deal with.

But that doesn't change anything about what it takes to lose weight. The problem is their state of mind, not biomechanics.

False Dichotomy. My problem with a lot of this sort of talk is that it is a lot like the "bootstraps" rhetoric we hear.  Just suck it up and do it. Sure it's hard, but it's an individual issue.  There are lots of social reasons obesity/being overweight is such a widespread problem.  Just boiling it down to "eat better and exercise more" is essentially a useless statement to make if you are serious about solving the problem on a systemic scale AND it makes the person who is overweight feel shittier about the situation too.

Well at least they are aware about being vegan and are aware of the caveats to it. When my buddy went vegan back in the late 90s, I asked him about it and he gave me the skinny. I thought he was crazy, but didn't give him shit for it. I had no clue about any of it so there was little conversation.

And yeah, health topics always take that "bootstraps bitches!" tone. We can't get simple healthcare laws passed in this country without grief, what makes you think we can change diet at a societal level? Schools, sure, but what is in the grocery store? Good luck.

(http://i.imgur.com/GtUulKb.jpg)

 :why_so_serious:

In fairness, the average person, or average American at any rate, gets way too much protein. In your case I'd be more worried about getting enough of all the amino acids you need.

For vegans the biggest issue is B12.

 :why_so_serious:

Wow, you have a three-page discussion thread using pictures from an Australian show (edit - just realised that's pointed out on page 1).

Here's the episode the pictures are from (http://www.sbs.com.au/insight/episode/overview/544/Fat-Fighters#.U5D4fazZFpA).

So, yeah, I think asking her if she is actually healthy is a COMPLETELY fair question.   :uhrr:

[Hatred of humanity has increased] +1

Tumblr is leaking again.

Just wallow in human misery until you hit the overflow error, then everything is wonderful again.

--Dave

People with a poor diet who aren't obese are less likely to have as many health issues as people with a poor diet who are obese. They still will have issues, but they will probably hit fewer of them.

The focus on exercise and 'dieting' is just people making money off people with issues. If you want to be healthier the most important thing is to understand that your diet is an everyday thing that you do forever, and to eat less.

I think you are both right and wrong at the same time.  You are right about the societal reasons, and God knows that, especially in the US, the system does not tend to make things easier.  That said, as much as I dislike the word, it IS a bootstraps issue for the great majority who have this problem.  At the end of the day, it is up to the individual to make the choice to change the way the live, and I cannot and will not accept that these people don't know that obesity is a health issue, and I also cannot accept that they do not have the means to do something about it.  This is the information age.  It isn't terribly hard both to learn the truth and to find a path forward.  Committing to it might be hard, sure...but that is the point.  They can only decide that for themselves.  These people have no idea what hard really is.

One thing I've learned through personal trainers, instructors, and classes is that I'm capable of more than I think I am. Even pros deal with this -- I heard a story about a cyclist who would say "he's done", but his support team would say he's got at least 50% left in him and would push him to keep going, and he'd do it.

We avoid the pain even when it's good for us.

I agree about what Malakill says about society, but I don't know what can be done without violating free market principles and the primary agency of personal decision-making. Anything I think of would revolve around childhood. A healthier lifestyle *is* a choice to live a life that involves more work and may not be as optimal or efficient as others.

The individual has to do the work. Those weights won't lift themselves.

Society's influence is only as influential as a person lets it be. Ignorance gives it greater power.

Unimportant side note: We're having this discussion on Facebook about how one naturally-thin friend never learned to eat properly until she was 25 and got the combo of a desk job and slowing metabolism. Now she eats less than she used to and struggles to keep weight. Another friend is rail-thin, eats nothing but junk food, drinks like a fish, and is 28, though I couldn't tell you her health levels. Me? Did Not Give A Fuck or Appreciate A Healthy Lifestyle (your typical Computer Gamer) most of my life until I hit 240 lbs, then been slowly dropping weight over the last 5 years through diet and exercise. I still don't do enough and look at the dessert section at my work's buffet *every damn time*. However, my latest exercise effort is reducing sweet's seductive sway over my senses.

Last time I was in shape was right around when I got married. Wife an I got in shape for our wedding/honeymoon. Did kickboxing 2-5 times a week. Dropped down to 205 lbs for the first time since highschool. Now I'm in the 230s again. Yay.

Those BMI charts are stupid. Even at my best weight where if I spent 3-4 weeks eating green stuff and "shredding" or whatever people do to get abs, I might of been able to pull it off. I was still like 30 lbs overweight

Look at this:

When I ran track and played soccer when I was 16, I was 185 lbs. Body types. and all that. I laugh at everything.

I think a lot of people are really underestimating the level at which the American food supply is adulterated. If you're eating anything that someone you personally know didn't prepare from all raw, base ingredients chances are you're eating a lot of shit that your body doesn't do well handling. It's at the point now that you can't even use canned tomato paste, you have to make your own from tomatoes. If you don't whatever you make with it with the canned stuff will be nearly as bad as just using an entirely processed end product.

I'm not saying that we're way too sedentary but it's not helping that short of growing all our own foot or buying organic our diet is killing us.

Pushing your lifestyle on your cat isn't as bad as your kids.

I see a lot of that.

My wife dragged me into healthy ingredients. It started with that we never buy anything with High Fructose Corn Syrup. Now everything we use is either fresh organic vegetables or farm raised non-hormone meats (she's vegetarian).

We're all the way on non-GMO/Organic/Fresh stuff with a few exceptions.

Our only problem is eating way too much fresh baked bread. :D

Also, whole foods is really fucking expensive.

That really is the key here. You can try and eat healthy and even sometimes get it into your budget, but overall, eating healthy usually is more expensive. Add in to that equation wage stagnation and having to do more with less income and it just leads to a feedback loop in terms of diet. Luckily I live alone and can manage my diet way better than I did.

I'm someone who lost weight just by working out (running a lot), but eating badly has started to catch up to me.  The eating healthy part really is the hardest.  I don't like to spend a lot of time in the kitchen preparing food, so even when I do cook for myself, it still consists of convenience foods (premade pasta sauces, etc).

You just need to eat real food. It doesn't have to be organic. There's a lot of scamming in organic foods anyway. You just need to avoid what Michael Pollan calls "edible foodlike substances." The big hint is if it comes in a box, it's not real food. You're a thousand times better off eating fresh GMO non-organic produce than the organic "all natural" fake foodlike substance in a box from Whole Foods.


I'm the opposite. I love to cook and the desire to make and eat tasty food has been a gateway to being heavy for most of my life. However, since I cook almost entirely with olive oil, real food, and with very little sugars, I tend to come out with the usual tests like cholesterol and blood sugar as if I'm completely fit. (Often to the amazement of my doctors.) Unlike what I imagine the people brought up at the top of the thread would say, I don't have any illusions that means I'm healthy. It just means the tests aren't looking for the ways in which I'm not healthy.

Trying to buy food that's not processed now is very tough. I'm somebody who cooks all the time, and even I struggle with trying to get ingredients that aren't just sodium loaded crap.

It takes some reconditioning. It takes understanding that the cost of good dinner is actually higher than you'd been taught by fast food places. It also takes understanding that you're investing in yourself, and that you can't afford not to do that.

I've transitioned into a lot of dinners that include brown rice, beans, lean meats, and green leaf veggies. I also like sweet potatoes, broccoli, peas, zucchini, squash, and all manner of peppers. Pretty much the only canned stuff I buy now are tomatoes, and that's because I like the flavor and prep better.

You can do like Voodoo and just make some things from scratch then freeze/ preserve them.  Though it takes more time to do if you do it in bulk it lasts a while.

It's really the only way to avoid the sodium & sugar trap America has spiraled in to. Since our taste is so oversaturated with both each new product year just ups the ante more.

I have a housemate that does the preserving in bulk thing.  She still has sauerkraut from three years ago, it's almost turned into a hoarding issue.

This is probably a good time to see if everyone has read Salt, Sugar, Fat (http://www.amazon.com/Salt-Sugar-Fat-Giants-Hooked/dp/1400069807) yet.

I am more of the ilk that something every now and then is not going to break you. I buy those bagged dinners in the frozen food aisle when it is on sale. I eat maybe 2-4 of those a month. The rest of the time is meats and fish with vegetables. Usually I go with frozen vegetables because they keep way longer and i hate throwing away rotting fruits and veggies because I didn't have a taste for them that week. As long as you are buying the frozen stuff that doesn't have a sauce in it or other crap (syrup/sugar from fruits), it is fine to eat... at least for me.

Sadly, I am in the opposite camp here. I have been underweight my whole life. 6' 145lbs all through college, hitting 150-155lbs a few times here and there. Now that I am more vigilant about what I am eating and being able to find points in time where I can eat a bit more, I had to make sure I wasn't filling it with crap each time. That said, cookies or cakes here and there along with mostly health conscious 4 meals a day finally broke me into my target weight of 180lbs. Odd as it may sound, putting on weight is almost as tough as taking it off.

What I meant by gluttony night was when I just want to eat until I'm over-filled, I do it with healthy stuff. Keeping the pizza for nights when I really need some damned pizza, and then I'll have a couple slices instead of half a pie. But yeah. I'm a bad glutton. Except for beef jerky.

Spending time in the kitchen shouldn't be seen as a chore. Put on some good music and enjoy the experience. It's even better if you have someone to share it with. Two nights ago I prepped up enough for 2 dinners and a lunch, basically pork burritos with grilled pork loin, a bell/poblano/onion mix, chipotle, avocado/lime paste, black beans, brown/wild rice, wilted spinach/kale, roma tomato, swiss cheese in a tortilla. Took maybe 20 minutes, about the same time it would take to hit the fast food joint and get back home.

She tried EVERYTHING from pills to Beyonce. What the hell else should she do? Eating right and exercising is HARD. Not like surgery, daily vomiting, constipation, liver failure and more surgery with complications.

The Beyonce Lemon...what the...fuck?  Some people deserve their diabetes and amputations.

I know someone that had the...whatever the tube is around your stomach. (The latest one, the easy-to-remove, hard to fuck up surgically one). Before he got the surgery, he spent a year working with a nutritionist on a strict diet (seriously, there are foods you apparently DO NOT EAT with one of those, like celery I think). Partially it was a serious attempt to get him to lose weight strictly by diet and exercise. (And yeah, he stuck to it and it was a very strict diet, and he did lose weight.

But mostly because he spent a full year (and his wife) on a diet that works with the surgery and is, you know, healthy. So, you know, he had the habit of eating correctly instilled. And he's been losing it steadily, before and after the surgery.

If you're gonna have surgery, that's the way to do it. Not just have it and expect magic to happen.

I also think "The Biggest Loser" is probably the worst thing to happen to America in terms of losing weight. "Look how much you can lose! (if you work out four or five hours a day with personal trainers, every meal is monitored, and also you want life-long health problems and gain it all back!).

So...I run (well I stagger. I'm at the point where my feet and calves give out before my lungs and energy do, but the heart rate gets up where it should, so I'm doing something useful). I try to eat well, avoid fats. I'm still trying to figure out starches and how to even that out.

I had a friend come in 2nd place on Biggest Loser (actually he was sent home with 3 other people left, but he won the stay at home challenge and beat everyone else on paper) and I can tell you he was in and out of the hospital with complications of having his body go through that much shock. That show is dangerous.

What makes American tomato paste so much more deadly then Canadian tomato paste?

Freedom.

The right to bear arms.

I'm assuming he's referring to BPA.

Asshole made me spill my water.  :awesome_for_real:

I'm now imagining you reading that, laughing and doing the retard sway backwards and forwards while clapping and thus spilling your water.

One thing I saw on the amazon page for that book from the author is this:


When we work longer hours and spend more time outside the home, finding the time to eat healthy is difficult. If anyone in the game industry who works in software could chime in on working 16 hours a day and what their eating habits were like during crunch time, it might give someone pause when they say that shopping healthy and then preparing and eating healthy is the only way to fix this problem.

It's not like the government hasn't tried to help in the U.S. Changing the labels (http://www.fda.gov/food/guidanceregulation/guidancedocumentsregulatoryinformation/labelingnutrition/ucm385663.htm) to make them more clear about what goes in the food, trying to reduce the amount of bad fat (http://reduce the amount of bad fat) that gets put into food, and working at educating people through stopping exaggerations in advertising (http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2010/12/dannon-agrees-drop-exaggerated-health-claims-activia-yogurt) and more clearly explaining how much fat is in your food (http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentidonly=true&contentid=2010/12/0673.xml) are ways the government has been able to help people.

But we want it to be personal choice, so we fight against things like limiting serving size of sugary drinks and serving healthier food in school cafeterias. it's almost like we want to ensure that we have someone to point at and make fun of when they fail at living a healthy lifestyle. We seem to have this sick fascination with setting others up so that when they fail, we can be justified in our belief that other people suck.

Whiny obese lady in OP image who attacked a perfectly reasonable, responsible and even courteous question is the perfect poster child for an age of instant gratification, massive sense of entitlement, and total denial of personal responsibility.  Yes, you can often tell by looking if someone is unhealthy. Not always, and it's certainly harder if that someone is skinny, but it's really easy with an extremely high rate of accuracy if they are as overweight as she is. 

The BMI is a bullshit statistical freak of misapplied mathematics that has no more relevance to an individual's reality than the 0.9 children I supposedly have as an "average" American.  Especially given that it's name is a self-referential lie since it actually is not a measure of mass (nor density, much less muscle or fat), just weight vs. height with no account for volume!  Anyone who believes that numbers don't lie never studied statistics (or accounting).

There are no (lasting, healthy) quick fixes to problems which took years to build up.

Yes, it really is a matter of eat less, eat better, and exercise more.  Surgery (or medications, or whatever), if handled properly, may help in special cases, but not by itself and not without many risks. Fad diets (other than eat less and eat better) are more likely to hurt than help and most likely will make no lasting change at all.  And exercise is hard, but absolutely necessary.  There is NO substitute.  There are tradeoffs though.  You can get the vast majority of the benefit of extreme exercise by instead practicing moderate exercise. You will have to spend more time at it, but may well feel better overall and have less injuries/complications than with extreme exercise.  Or not.  Every person is different.

Yes, unless you are one of the lucky few who's bodies magically meet the perfect balance of need vs desire vs metabolism vs environment the deck is stacked against you, and the farther you've let yourself go the higher the odds are stacked against you.  And there are far fewer of those bodies in reality than there are people who think they (or appear to) qualify.  I was a classic case, being just shy of 6'1" and 165 for years, able to eat anything and everything I wanted and never gained weight.  Turns out I was Celiac, the food I was eating was causing my digestive tract to self-destruct and I was on course to progress from able to stay skinny no matter what I ate to unable to extract enough nutrition from what I ate to sustain health, or, eventually, life.  And now that I've stopped eating the stuff that was destroying my gut, plus slowed down and gotten older, I have to actually work to manage my weight.

There is no moral solution to the problem on a societal level.  Any solution that doesn't involve the individual choosing to do the hard thing and work at improving themselves is going to involve external force and thus be morally problematic.  And because of that, any individual who chooses not to even try (and keep trying, over and over, no matter how many times they fail) has only themselves to blame, no matter how badly the odds are stacked against them.

Everyone is different, but for me, moderation and gradual improvements have been the key to success.  Other than needing to completely avoid stuff that my body just outright cannot handle, I've had FAR more success with gradually reducing the bad stuff and gradually increasing the good stuff.  Yes, it takes years.  Fewer than it took to put on the excess weight, but still nowhere near instantaneous.  Instead of setting ambitious targets and flogging myself every time I fail with the risk of giving up each time, I set myself easier targets, often just to simply do better next time, and get to cheer for myself every time I succeed. If you say "no more sodas", you fail and have to deal with failure every time you drink a soda. If, instead, you say "fewer sodas", you succeed every single time you drink water or even sweet tea or juice instead of a soda, and you get the psychological morale boost of having succeeded! (I'm not sure swapping bourbon for coke has quite the same benefit though!  :why_so_serious: ) In three years, I've worked myself down from close to a gallon of (corn syrup sweetened) soda a day, to a couple (1-5) cups of tea with one teaspoon of sugar each, and otherwise pretty much just water. I drink maybe one or two sodas a month, and I don't worry (too much) about it.  I've done the same for adding more vegetables to my diet, reducing chips and fries and sweets, finding healthier (even if not completely healthy!) snack alternatives, eating more fish and chicken and less beef and pork, walking daily, etc.  And I've gone from 215 lbs to now hovering around 180-185 lbs, and my spare tire is gone, as is my sleep apnea.  I also grew another inch (!) sometime in the past 20 years when I wasn't paying attention, as well as added a full number to my shoe size (that at least is probably due to falling arches with age).

There's a bunch of systems out there that are proved to work. The problem is people see early success and give up. Instead they need to see it through and then, yes, for the rest of their life, consider everything they eat, with some type of regimented cheating program.

Fast food and take out are not designed to help that  :awesome_for_real:

If by "bunch of systems out there that are proved to work" you are talking about Weightwatchers and similar diet systems, those are pretty much all in the category of "eat less", with possibly maybe perhaps a whiff of eat better (but I doubt it).  So yes, those and any other diet plan will work, up to a point, IF and only AS LONG AS you stick to them.  And they do provide most of the convenience of at least grocery-store convenience food and eliminate a lot of the hassle of planning menus and such.  But they are even more expensive than eating healthy, and I know of VERY few people who last more than a week on them before they start cheating.  Those are some REALLY small portion sizes, even for a healthy-sized individual, much less someone hauling around double or more of their ideal body weight and with a stomach and appetite sized to match.

We just didn't evolve in (or weren't designed to handle, if you prefer) an environment where we sit around most of the day and are constantly surrounded by overabundant and easily-accessed sugar, salt and fat. In such circumstances our bodies work against us both to drive us to eat way more than we need and in storing up a lot of the surplus for leaner times.  We are children walking around in one gigantic candy store with bodies designed for surviving on hunting and foraging and moderate continuous exercise most of the day.

They're probably the same, I'm not sure though. Anyway, the tomato paste in our grocery stores that people pick up to use as a base for their "healthy" home made sauce and soups has the same amount of crap like high fructose corn syrup as Ragu or some other ready to use sauce. So other than personal taste the stuff you spend time making is no better than crap you'd dump out of a jar you bought. To make anything healthier you need to start from scratch at the tomato level. That's just what I ran into when I decided to make our own spaghetti sauce to try and eat healthier as a family. I imagine just about everything is like that. It wouldn't even surprise me if dairy companies were adding HFCS to milk now.

One of the benefits of living in the heart of Socialism:  we have fewer worries about shit like that.   Not zero worries, but definitely fewer.  HFCS isn't even a thing here, for starters.  And if it was a thing, no way the government would allow it, commie pinkos that they are.

I just went out to the pantry and checked the ingredients on a can of tomato paste.  You ready for this? 

My Tomato paste is just like Cyrrex's, the only ingredient being Tomato's.


Like, I'm fully willing to believe the American tomato paste is full of shit and assholes, I just find it difficult to wrap my head around at the same time. You mush up tomatoes and put them into a can, it's not rocket surgery.


Then again you fuckers managed to screw up Kraft Dinner. I don't know HOW, but American made Kraft Dinner tastes like feet. To the point where I won't buy any of it that was made in the states.

Yeah tomato paste is just tomatoes and sometimes salt. That's why I thought he was referring to BPA in the packaging. Tomato sauce, on the other hand, can have all sorts of crap in it.

CAN have....but doesn't need to have.  I don't happen to have a can of marxist tomato sauce at the moment, but if I did I bet I wouldn't find anything more inappropriate than a bit of basil or oregano.  Maybe salt, but I'm not even sure about that.

Note:  I am not talking about ready-made spaghetti or pizza sauces.  Those will have sugar in them, as that is kind of part and parcel to the taste. 

Ugh, tomato paste. Read those labels! Stopped using ketchup when I saw Heinz, the most readily available condiment, contained High Fructose Corn Syrup. I still consume too many processed foods but there's a growing availability of natural ingredient snack food. This is Los Angeles though, your locale may be different.

Side note, if you can get your hands on it, Umami Burger's Umami Ketchup is pretty awesome.

I'm not saying you should go out of your way to eat it, but HFC is no worse for you than sugar. That ketchup bottle you read would just say sugar instead of HFC if it wasn't in there. Pretty much every ketchup has a sweetener of some kind.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/02/business/yourmoney/02syrup.html?_r=2&oref=login&

Just like this push to accept fat people, there is an overreaction in the other direction saying you should only eat unprocessed foods. Everything in moderation. Anyone with children understands just how difficult it is to cook healthy foods. My wife and I both work, and she goes to school in the evenings. I don't get home with my daughter until after 6:00 PM most days. There are days where the kid is screaming, the cat puked on the floor, and my phone is ringing off the hook with some emergency at work all at the same time. Well guess what, it is hot dog night again.

That is NOT true, but not for the obvious reason.  The problem with HFCS is not so much its chemical makeup.  The problem is that it is put into things that do not need it at all, and there tends to be more of it in the products that do "need" it.  Go look in beverage aisle.  Go find random soft drink A sweetened with sugar.  Now go find random soft drink B sweetened with HFCS.  The HFCS drinks always seem to be higher calorie and way sweeter for no goddamn reason.

And, well, tomato paste apparently.  Just the fact that it can even be included in tomato paste should tell you all you need to know.  It is about the corn farmers in the US and the way they are subsidized, and the way they are trying to get their fucking shit product into EVERYTHING.  HFCS is worse than sugar because of politics.

Edit: oh wait

Edit2: I googled heinz tomato paste and I was impressed that google brought back the ingredients list directly on the result page sort of like how it does with weather.  I noticed it had corn syrup but then I also noticed google failed me by giving the ingredients for ketchup, not paste.

I don't know why I was fascinated by the tomato paste discussion but I can't find anything worse than citric acid (http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?Find=Find&_refineresult=true&ic=16_0&search_constraint=976759&search_query=tomato+paste&cat_id=976759&search_sort=4) in American stuff.  Even the no name cheapest generic can has 'tomato pulp' as the only ingredient.

The reasoning behind making things sweeter is to offset the mass amounts of sodium preservative in those drinks.

Hunts is Tomatoes.
http://healthyheartmarket.com/huntstomatosaucenosaltadded.aspx

Heinz I can't find a label for.

They changed Kraft cheese powder about 10 years ago when they introduced the microwavable single-serves.  I used to love the stuff but it's really gritty and grainy now and doesn't mix with the milk and water anymore.  Probably cheaper chemical cheese flavoring.  I miss the real stuff Canadians can still get.

Saying you can't make a meal because you're home at 6:00 is an excuse you're telling yourself. I know because we used to make it ALL THE TIME.  "Oh it's after 6:30, can't cook, order a pizza."  "Oh, i want to watch this show/ play this game/ putter around the house/ read F13 instead of cook."   When you start to actually log what you're doing when you get home you find you're blowing a lot more time than you think.

It honestly doesn't take any longer to prepare a decent meal vs. a prepackaged one once you've started practicing cooking and plan a menu. The 'takes forever' part was always the deciding what to make in our house.  Plan ahead, get the meat in the fridge the night before and it takes all of 20-30 mins to do a lot of healthy meals.  

Will your kids bitch and throw a "i'm not eating that" fit sometimes? Yes. Guess what, they're not precious little angels who you should bend will to, they're assholes.  Tiny, self-absorbed pains in the ass who you'd bitch about if they weren't your genetic material.  It's your job to teach them they don't always get their way before the rest of us have to deal with them and call them out on being self-absorbed assholes. Start with meals.

Yes there'd be sugar vs HFCS, the problem is quantity not quality. Processed foods have a shit-ton of it and more gets added each year.  Our tasts acclimate to the quantity of sugar and salt in something so it doesn't taste salty anymore.  The more foods that have it the faster the tolerance builds. So MFRs have to engage in an accelerating arms race to get us to see things as 'salty' or 'sweet' vs bland when they're already carrying 2-3 times more than they need for flavoring.

Not like that's any better, but you knew that already.  And other drinks seem to manage fine with lesser amounts of regular sugar.  The comparisons are easier to make when you look at the non-carbonated stuff.  The differences can be vast.

Thanks for the parenting advice. I thought my job was to be their friend until I read this.

Both Heinz (they call it "Simply Heinz", I just bought some like an hour ago) and Hunt's sell Ketchup without HFCS, they use sugar like they did for decades.

And the reason the HFCS thing took off is not just because of the corn lobby, protectionist trade policies to protect sugar cane farmers in the south from cheaper cane products from the Carribean and South America sent food companies scrambling for an alternative. HFCS just happens to be cheaper than sugar and because liquid is its normal state it is easier to use in food processing since it mixes easier.

I'll have to go look in the store next time I go shopping. It's been a couple of years since I saw that. I;m  pretty sure I'm not imagining it, but it's possible. It's also possible they changed the contents in the intervening time since we had a big push back on HFCS in foods since then. Regardless, I started making my own paste out of tomatoes. It's not hard, just really time consuming. Well more a pain in the ass because you have to flip the stuff every 20 minutes or so.

Only in America can you find people who will complain that they are too poor to be skinny.

There are still people who don't read labels?

Oh that's right, I was just at walmart where I get glared at because I'm taking too much time reading labels. Which is ironic because then the fat, toothless genetic mess that looked down on my researching ingredients then clogs up the entire isle by moving .001 mph with their overloaded cart of half-thawed 'frozen' food and meat well within the danger zone (daaanger zooone!).

So there are some reasons behind why healthy people get aggravated by lazy entitled people. We have to share the planet with them.

Most people wouldn't know what to do with the information even if they took the time to read it anyway.

This is how you stop people from getting fat.

(http://i.imgur.com/KFR4tHs.gif)

We noticed that the last time we were shopping. Shop and Shop has an earthy crunchy house brand and it was made with plain sugar. It tastes different and imho better, though that could be better ingredients or a different brand in general.

I'm inclined to believe the stuff about HFC not satisfying the craving for sugar based on the retro-pepsi, which I seem to drink a whole lot less of. Though mostly we don't drink soda, we drink the blood of Palestinian slaves, ie, soda-stream fizzy water.

S&S generic tomato paste is tomatoes and citric acid.

There is no substitute for Heinz Ketchup.  It has no equal.

I have to agree.  Heinz ketchup is yummy.  It might be because of all the stuff that's bad for you, but you can't get around it's yumminess.  I'm the only one here who uses it from time to time so I get away with buying teeny bottles of it that last a long time.  I will sub bbq sauce sometimes, but I'm sure it's got naughty things in it, too. 

If you like liquorice, you could try those very salty Scandi ones.  Fazer Tyrkisk Peber Volcano is awesome but really really hot.  Some of them from Sweden that aren't hot but just very very salty are pretty awesome too.  Dutch make good salty liquorice, too.  I'm sure you can find some of them in the Scandi and Dutch sections of your grocery store.  Wot??  Your grocery store doesn't have a Scandi or Dutch section?  Find a new grocery store!  Where else can you get your Stroopwaffels??

I buy the Simply Heinz because it doesn't have the HFCS. Believe it or not, I think it also tastes better. I try to cut down on the HFCS anywhere I can, not because I'm super against it, but because it is in damn near every thing you buy. Like the commercials the corn lobby put out awhile ago, HFCS is just fine in moderation. The problem is we don't really get to moderate it on our end without going out of our way to do it.

I am in this boat as well - except for the simply Heinz. I don't eat enough ketchup to ever care about it. I been drinking Sierra Mist (cranberry if I can find it around here) for about a year now since it is one of the few to use real sugar and also is caffeine free. Not that I am against caffeine, but after redoing my diet, I cut out a lot of my excesses.

Heinz makes a jalapeno ketchup that is fantastic.

On the subject of HFCS being everywhere, it is literally everywhere in the US.  Subway used to bake it into their wheat bread.  Looks like it was changed recently, but there's still sugar in all of it.

I saw a big advertisement on the television about that. When I heard Subway had HFCS in its bread, I immediately stopped shopping there. I really enjoyed the sandwiches I got there too for the price -- but even if they made that change, I'm not so keen to go back.

It's still listed as an ingredient in lots of their meat-product.

I cut back on as much HFCS as I can, but mainly I just try to keep the calorie per serving (that I eat) low.

The issue is calories are determined by burning food. 100 calorie of broccoli = 100 calorie Caption Crunch. But our bodies don't work that way.

I eat lumps of coal.

And probably shit diamonds too.

Here's some more since you're interested.  :grin:

Cook meals like sauce for pasta, chili, soups, braised meats, or stews on the weekend. Make 3 or 4 at once and freeze. You only trash the kitchen once and making the starch/veg for the meal takes way less time than the protein.

I do all my cooking on Sundays during tax season, since that's my lone day off.

It's winter then, so stews work best, brown rice in containers is easy to make in bulk for the week, baked sweet potatoes in foil reheat in the oven fast, and I can make a quick fruit salad with no effort.

I just wanted to chime in and say newman's is not loaded with shit ingredients and isn't much pricier than the ragu crap when it comes to sauces.

When I am lazy, the only bottled sauce I buy is Newman's Own Sockarooni.  It doesn't take much doctoring to make it a great sauce.

Newman's Own does have a metric fuckton of sodium.

I like this thread.  It's sort of like a Politics thread but whimsical.

1. Read labels
2. Avoid eating crap

Years ago, I fell back to drinking black coffee.  I also backed off to mostly drinking water.  I think that sort of simplification is a good idea and represents a lifestyle change, especially if you are gradual about it, and so can be sustainable.

I can make my own marinara with just tomatoes and a bit of seasoning.  I don't need to load it up.  I don't even put sausage in it anymore.  Actually, I don't really eat pasta anymore, either.  It was pretty gradual.

Im going back tochips and frito lay chips tonight WHY? BECAUSE I CAN.

I also like Krispy Kreme and those mysterious Little Debbie "coffee cakes".

Krispy Kreme feels like spooning vegetable shortening into my mouth. Dunkin/Timmies style all the way.

Has anyone tried these pre-packaged ready to cook things like Blue Apron? They send you the full ingredients all fresh and you cook it yourself. We were contemplating it to add some variety as we've gotten into ruts. A rather elite rut, but a rut nonetheless.

Every time that Krispy Kreme vs Dunkin come up I feel bad for both sides that they've apparently never actually had a good doughnut.  :cry:

Doughnuts are health food, right?

Going back to the women on the talk show, I wonder if they've ever seen Wall-E. That type of future and what it implies helps to motivate healthier living.

I haven't tried Blue Apron, but we did join a CSA which gives us all kinds of random veggies that forced us to find recipes for them. Most of them turned out good!

Yes, but only the bit in the middle. 

I still can't cook one zucchini properly.  I like the idea fine, but getting a random box of ingredients is difficult to manage properly.

God I wish. Our options on CSAs here on Cape Cod are dismal. One place we tried was obviously reselling supermarket stuff--the squared off blemish free tomatoes were a hint. The other was just a terrible deal, we'd eat the entire basket as a side dish in a single meal.

One zucchini: cut thin on a mandolin (http://www.amazon.com/Benriner-BN1-Japanese-Mandoline-Slicer/dp/B0000VZ57C) and wilt in butter with a little onion (also on the mandoline)

I'm probably overcooking it.

Fat picture lady isn't even correct in her assertion that only fat people would be asked if they were being healthy.  If I was asked to assess the health of some bodybuilder with jacked-up muscles, I'd ask them if their doctor had given them a clean bill of health, too.  Or someone who looked crazy skeletal thin.

The thing is, health isn't voodoo.  Humans are keyed to be able to assess the state of other humans at a glance; it's wired into us at an instinctual level.  If someone's body is fucked up, other people are going to notice because it's fucking obvious to us when something's not right with someone.  You don't need a medical degree to point at the fat person huffing up some stairs and say, "Hey, that can't be healthy."  It's not any kind of discrimination, it's a simple fact.  Now if you mistreated the fat person, fired them from their job without cause, or something of that sort, yeah, that's discrimination and you're a shitheel.  But the state of a person's health isn't a matter of opinion, it's a fact, and people trying to claim otherwise are goddamned stupid.

She was right insofar as you'd only ask someone who had an unhealthy looking body type if they were healthy. Which is of course a particularly unhelpful point but apparently it makes her feel better victimised.

We have a local bakery that makes square donuts from scratch, they open at like 5am and stay open till they are gone. OMG they are the best glazed yeast donuts ever. We call it the "box of evil goodness" when they bring a box to us.

Zucchini is easy to grow, but then again I can make dang near anything grow. Green beans are pretty decent to grow too, along with green peppers (which in Indiana we call mangoes or mangos), and they taste awesome.

Zucchini is one of my least favorite due to us growing so much of it, same with green peppers, it makes the dish taste or overpower with that flavor (peppered beef is awesome...but the peppers over power it for some reason, same on a pizza, the green peppers take the other taste away).

I've also been trying my hand at some canning, fresh green beans with potatoes canned is awesome.

Random people off the street won't comment on whether or not someone who's a bodybuilder or thin is healthy.

Zucchine is a goddamn weed is why.  I plant ONE for my wife.

If only garlic produced like that.  I've got ~35 Romanian Red growing this year, and most of that will go towards seed for next year to expand the crop.  At least the scapes are ready for harvest  :grin:

The asparagus patch should start producing harvestable amounts next year as well, if I can keep the goddamn cats from digging around and crapping in the raised bed.  Next year I'm covering the top with chicken wire.

I dunno about the thin part. I have overheard plenty of people comment about others that are too thin/sickly looking.

There is very much a socially acceptable range of weight and it has been expanding (yes, pun...) over the last decade or two. Whether it is right or not is a matter of opinion, just like whether or not you let it affect you. Sticks and Stones no longer is the mantra to live by.

It's all shit. All the pre-made, pre-packaged convenience food is garbage.  Period. It takes so little time to make high quality food if people just take the effort to learn. 

You get one body.  Taking care of it seems like a no-brainer.

Well that certainly sounds like a reasonable and well informed response holding no agenda or bias whatsoever.

What would you like to know?  I'd be happy to discuss the biochemistry and toxicology of the many preservatives used in most convenience foods.  I'd also be willing to explain the effects of elevated sodium levels, the overuse of HFCS in the US, and how the food industry lies in most of its marketing.  

If I have a bias, I'd be glad to hear what you think it is. 

 

How do you keep vegetables fresh for longer than a few days? Some days I am not in the mood to eat some of the vegetables I bought but know they will be overripe in 12 more hours. My only quip with making food from fresh ingredients is they hardly last long enough to get to them and I really don't want to drag my ass to the store every single evening - I mean this is not Europe.  :why_so_serious:

Freeze them?  Vacuum seal them?  Seriously?  Is this your big objection?

How about making your own sauce and freezing it?  It's really easy and much healthier and requires very little extra work. 

 :oh_i_see:

Bullshit. You are completely wrong. There may be more fat people and you know what they are harder to miss because they are fucking huge but believe me that there are plenty of roid dudes and crack addict looking thin people that everyone assumes are living an unhealthy life and yes its not unusual to comment on it when pointing them out.

Let's all be honest here.  Unless you have a biochemical or psychological disorder, we know what "healthy" is and/or feels like.  It's just easier to make excuses. 

I don't think this is true actually.  A lot of people have no idea what healthy is or feels like.

If you aren't willing to go to the market every few days, buy flash-frozen and buy from farmer's markets.

Know why that shit goes bad in a few days? It's spent a week or better traveling to the supermarket before being put out on display. That's why they only have a few days shelf life.  Farmer's market goods will last longer because you've gotten them sooner in the process.

You know the old "one bad apple.." idiom?  It's true.  Rotting vegetables make others rot faster because they give off ethylene as they decompose. It's why you don't stick bananas near anything and don't put them in an enclosed space. They emit more ethylene than just about any other fruit or vegetable.

Fresh veg is going to have a lot to do with the quality of your supermarkets. Stop and Shop and Shaws/Star in Massachusetts are pretty damned good. Back when we lived in the DC area though, the produce anywhere even in the huge mega-Giant in the burbs was complete crap and barely edible the day you bought it, much less a few days later. Locally, the broccoli and zucchini or yellow summer squash are all good for two or three days. Lettuce is good for a week in the crisper, as long as you don't mind discarding the top few leaves.

Generally though for day to day food, we do frozen peas, corn, and green beans (green beans only from Trader Joe's) which are the ones we find palatable when they're frozen.

My partner loved the idea of trying out Blue Apron, so we're giving their three meals a week plan a go. I'll let people know my thoughts. It's obviously more expensive than buying it all at the shops, but we need to have our general menu shaken up and its a good chance to try some new things even if we cancel it after a few weeks. $10 a meal, fresh food, all the spices, and delivered to your door.

It was also probably picked green (so greatly lacking in flavor, texture and nutritional value), grown in a field irrigated with water loaded with unhealthy amounts of human wastes, picked by people who are either clueless or careless about hygiene, washed and packed in a processing facility that handles dozens of farms which cross-contaminate everyone's crop if even only one slips up, and then handled by who knows how many people between the packer and the store shelf you picked it up from.  And that's the "healthy" organic stuff, you don't want to contemplate the industrial farm or third-world origin stuff!  :ye_gods:

The moral of the story is, grow your own, and/or buy local from someone you know and trust. Well.  And for the vast majority of us who can't do that, wash everything, cook as much as you can as well as you can, wash your hands every time you touch anything, don't touch your face after touching anything from the grocery store until you've washed your hands again, don't reuse the containers you bought fruit and veggies in especially not to put the newly cleaned things back in(!), definitely don't reuse plastic grocery bags for food storage, wash all food prep and eating surfaces before and after you use them, every time, etc. etc.  All of a sudden, high sodium, HFCS-sweetened processed food with a dozen chemical preservatives in a BPA-lined can seems almost healthy.  Or not, but the alternatives aren't all that great either!

About slowing fruit and veggie spoilage, my sister swears by those green bag thingies but I haven't bothered to try them yet.  Do they actually work?

And after losing 2/3 of my garden crop last year (everything maturing after mid-July was pretty much destroyed by a plague of Egyptian proportions of every single kind of beetle, fly, worm and moth known to inhabit this area, plus mosquitos, ticks and fleas) and finding those icky green worms in the broccoli I just picked from the garden this evening, I'm about ready to go nuclear with the pesticides myself.  :cry:  It's not a big garden, just a few small raised beds with a couple of each type of vegetable that I actually like to eat (except corn which takes up way too much space) a few herbs and usually one new experimental veggie each year.  Two years ago the experiment was a resounding success as I discovered, much to my surprise, that Swiss Chard is actually quite good AND incredibly easy to grow AND very disease and pest resistant!  I'm thinking I might try turnips next year.  Or sweet potatoes.

Oh, and zucchini is so damn prolific we joke about having to lock the car doors at work from mid-summer till frost just to keep people from dumping their surplus as a gift in your car seat - after it actually happened to a friend one year! (Zucchini wasn't immune to the bugpocalypse though - I got no zucchini or squash at all last year. :cry: )

Most people who do backyard organic gardening get away with it because there aren't enough food crops in the area to support the relevant bugs.  Then it passes the critical density and an entire city worth of them gets wiped out.

--Dave

Honestly, this is a knock-on effect of bad urban/suburban planning. I had the same "buy & hoard" mentality when I moved to Europe six years ago, but I've since adjusted and it's actually wonderful. No more worrying about anything going bad, no more fridge crowding, far less waste and cash outlay.

What's really needed is a return of the neighborhood market - whether that's a general store/greengrocer/butcher trio or a one-roof deal, doesn't matter, but being able to walk five minutes to buy stuff at almost any time of day solves this problem handily. Save the car trips to the big store for nonperishable bulk goods and unusual ingredients.

Funny thing is, you see a very similar problem happening in Iceland; they let suburban sprawl take over in the past 10-20 years and have become an American-style car culture, with infrequent shopping at malls and hypermarkets. The local stores are collapsing (yay unemployment), consumption of (imported) convenience food is rising and - surprise - waistlines are expanding.

(http://i.imgur.com/dzUGXC4.jpg)

I call bullshit on your bullshit. How many meme-y internet pictures can you find inviting us to laugh at skinny or muscled people because of their bodies, outside of communities where that sort of thing is topical? Are there popular websites (http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/) basically built on them? Are they this year's highest-voted Reddit submission (http://imgur.com/a/SjcgE)? How often do they feature in the f13 funny (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=11268.msg1287024#msg1287024) picture (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=11268.msg1278914#msg1278914) thread? Yeah, nobody wants to be thought of as anorexic or on steroids, but people are particularly smug about fat for whatever reason.

People are smug about fat because fat people have been trying to include themselves under the same victimization headers as other groups with actual unchangeable conditions.

At its core, grossly fat happens because you're lazy and eat like shit. You don't get special treatment for obviously killing yourself in public, and then complaining you are persecuted.

Or you were born into a family where you never learned to live a healthy lifestyle and now you're just an adult trying to live your life and don't really need random people giving you shit about it. 

The reality is you have no idea why a given person you meet is fat.  Don't be a shit to them.  That might mean you are occasionally nice to someone who is "lazy and eats like shit" - the horror.

Make all the rationalizations you want, the root is satisfaction of a desire to feel better than another. Funny how golden rule goes out window in the face of prejudice.

You know how I know I feel better? I'm not aching to walk up the stairs, or constantly complaining about my back, or a myriad of other health problems.

I don't feel sorry for them. I'm not going to buy into their level of bullshit they can't change or that shit is hard, or the other bullshit excuses that get tossed around in our everybody is a victim society. Fat people aren't victims. It's insulting to people that are actually victims of unchangeable circumstances that meet with real discrimination and prejudice.

That doesn't mean I'm going to poke them with a stick and yell HEY EVERYONE LOOK AT THAT FAT BASTARD! You can treat people the way you want to be treated, and the way I'd want to be treated if I was making excuses about killing myself through food would be for someone to call me on my bullshit.

The problem with fat prejudice is that people are trying to equate it to racial prejudice. But it's actually more of a smoking prejudice, and look at where we are with that. It's impacting your health, which is impacting my medical and insurance bills. You have the 'right' to be obese, but you should then pay for it like a smoker does.

On going to the store: I go at least every other night, it's just part of my routine. Much like time spent in the kitchen can be an enjoyable experience, making the trip to the store into a social thing where I see a lot of people regularly that I otherwise wouldn't because life, is a pretty awesome thing. And I keep in touch with the sales and pricing trends and can stock up and save a shitload of money with little effort. Also develop a relationship with my butcher and produce guy, so they key me into upcoming specials or set aside stuff (last year the produce guy gave me a deal on a full box of honeycrisp what you knew they were going to come up in this thread).

Healthy eating, cooking and sourcing has kind of become seen as a burden, when it's actually a vibrant and enjoyable part of a daily routine. I can only imagine the same people who don't take joy in these things also sleep on old mattresses and wonder why they sleep like shit :)

Which is fine if you have the time to do it.

Alas.

The people saying "I don't have time to eat right" or "I don't have time to workout" often have plenty of time for TV and movies.  

Most people have the time.  This isn't the 3rd world.  It's all about making choices.

I know exactly what it's like to have limited time. From February to April 15th, my life is basically work and sleep. And yet, I still find time on my one day off a week to make enough food, put it in containers, and have them ready to microwave at the end of the day. It's really not that bad. It absolutely is about choices. It's also cheaper than eating out all the time.

Wait a fucking minute here, I was talking about Sky's idyllic 'go to the local shops and chat to the butcher' bullshit.  I WISH I had time to do that, but by the time I'm home, he's closed.   :why_so_serious:

Of course, the one time I DID manage to chat to The Butcher, he said 'Ahhh, Fresh Meat' and chased me around with a cleaver.

Some interesting stats from the UK health service between 2011-2012:

No of people admitted to hospital between an obesity related condition: 11,570
No of people treated in hospital with a sports related injury: 388,500

FITNESS KILLS!!!  :awesome_for_real:

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/79/1/6.full


Come on guys, this stuff is pretty well known at this point.  We all known someone who is lazy and fat and has (apparently) every opportunity to change and doesn't, but on a societal level this has a LOT to do with social and economic class, education, poverty, etc.

So I really don't get the hostility here.  If you seriously think people need to change, the average person isn't going to benefit a lot from you telling them to stop being lazy and eat better.  

While I don't mean for this to apply to this topic...

I find it amazing that we're in an age where information is more easily available than ever and yet people still choose to be ignorant.   

I work with someone who stunned me recently by asking what the difference was between sugar and carbohydrate. I thought he was being sarcastic but it turns out he wasn't. After I explained, he said "Oh, I thought sugar was like fat." 

Not only is this guy an adult (older than me) but he's also a diabetic.

Yes, fitness is bad and we should all be obesee to avoid injuries instead.

Cherry picking a narrow window stats instead of looking at a long-term effects. What are you, a Republican?   :why_so_serious: :drill:

At the moment, in the US, over a third of the population (just under 34%) is classed as obese. Comparatively, according to a recent US census, just under 15% of the general population is classed as living in poverty.  Figures from the CDC NHCS (National Center for Health Statistics) show that, in men, the prevalence of obesity was similar regardless of education or income (in fact, in some ethnicities, men with higher income were more likely to be obese).  In women, generally those with a higher income or with a degree were less likely to be obese).

Source (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db50.pdf)

Information overload plus education decline plus willful ignorance makes world strange place where the smarter we get, the dumber we get too. If we live in the Information Age than made we have information class structure to match.

I was looking for gout information after foot pain left me hobbling. After a couple of hours of research on the goggles, I found a lot speculation and the feeling that a witch doctor would be more useful.

Unhealthy people are cheaper. Becoming sick and dying is expensive. However, everyone becomes sick and dies eventually. The difference between a healthy person and unhealthy person is how long they're on social security before that happens. Yes, there's a cite. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.9748884.html?_r=0)

This is my problem. I hate the grocery store and the local market. The other customers make things unbearable. They are overwhelmingly rude and selfish in their behavior at every chance. These places are like fucking petting zoos with too many animals for me. There is no social quality at all to be found in these cesspools. If people would have some common courtesy and manners, I would not be so negative...but around here, that is next to impossible. Big city problems I guess, but minimizing trips to the market leave me better off in the mental health dept than the chance to get fresh produce. I think I will stick to frozen stuff.

I'll say it. It is because they fucking choose to be that way. They deserve derision and ridicule. Protected status is only for people that cannot make a choice to change, examples would include, the handicapped (mental and physical), minorities (gender and ethnic), homosexuals (of every particular flavor), the poor.

I refuse to cut extremely fat people a break because they are fucking lazy. Don't even try to sell me on that people can't eat healthy if they don't have money or time. Stopping at McDonald's is a choice, eating an entire pizza is a choice, eating an entire box of hamburger helper is a choice, portion size is a choice, not exercising is a choice. I've got thirty pounds to lose because I made the choice to be sedentary and eat shitty. Nobody made me fat but me, and I don't expect anybody to take the blame but me. The super crazy fat people you see in pictures being ridiculed took years of bad choices and extreme laziness to get that way. They deserve their shame. If we quit treating them like special snowflakes and quit playing into their self image maybe they would be motivated to change.

Are there going to be examples of people that are outside of the parameters of my rant? Sure, there are always outliers, but for the majority of fat people, they are that way because they are lazy and delusional. I've only got so much sympathy and bleeding heart to go around and, unfortunately for them, fat people don't deserve a slice of that pie.

Edit: Somebody equated fat prejudice to smoking prejudice and I totally agree with that. I don't smoke anymore because everybody I know thought it was disgusting and I changed because I was tired of people being grossed out by my smell and habits. Frankly, I don't see how that process was negative for me. Maybe the same type of social pressure will work on obesity.

Politics in 3... 2...

The truth hurts, but we're not doing obese people any good by pretending they are just fine until they die at 53, leaving two kids in college and a mortgage.

McDonalds has started putting up their calories on all the menus. I applaud that, and I want it on every menu in every establishment in the United States, on every item. I want it to be so fucking obvious that you're making shitty choices, that you own your garbage. Nobody gets to claim ignorance anymore.

And its wimpy kids fault for being wimpy, bullying them helps them get stronger.

Let's make fun of unhealthily fit people:  Stop skipping leg day! (http://news.distractify.com/people/personal/people-who-prove-you-should-never-skip-leg-day/)

Nice try.

(http://i.imgur.com/ZAUxmao.gif)

I like the comparison, both have lifestyle and genetic components. Both have people sprouting non-sense that shitting on them is for their own good.

You don't know their situation. You don't know their health issues. You don't their family history. The way to you prejudge them as lazy and gluttonous says more about you than than you.

Correct me if I'm wrong: All sugars are carbohydrates, but not all carbohydrates are sugars.  Specifically, sugars are simple carbohydrates that are easily used for energy, but more complex carbohydrates require energy inputs to break them down (but still produce a major net surplus)?

I'm sure the proper organic chemistry explanation is a lot more complicated.  I just know that my system seems to treat potato starch as directly equivalent to sugar of equal weight.

--Dave

I would buy this if I hadn't heard so many people complaining that THEIR DOCTORS were "fat-shaming" them by advising them to lose weight in order to improve their health.

Since we're twisting what everyone else says for our own benefit, how many doctors are telling people to pack on an extra fifty+ pounds of fat to be healthier?

But I'm an eskimo and I'll die without blubber!

Depends on how many see anorexics.

It's not OK that I have to subsidize morbidly obese people's insurance and long-term care. Since insurance is mandatory in the US now, this doesn't get to be an "I'm ok with me" issue any more than smoking and drunk driving. Your behaviour affects us all.

It still could be, doctors aren't without prejudice. Everyone needs to floss. I know it, but *effort*. But my old dentist was real jerk about it. Can easily say he floss-shaming me even if it was good medical advice. It didn't work made me less liking go to the dentist. You see slut-shaming from doctors all the time in regard std testing.

I left my last GP because I was tired of her shitty advice. But really, a big part of it was that she was fat, and not that 'size 12 model' fat. Hard to take health advice from someone who is probably not healthy.

See that assumption there?

And floss shaming is something I miss since we got a new hygienist. She's ok, but not amazing like the one who floss-shamed me. I'd apologize in advance, even though I floss pretty regularly. Imo it's her job to bitch me out when I'm being less than perfect with my dental hygiene. But I can live with the fact that I'm less than perfect and don't have to have people speak to me in soothing tones or I get offended.

Fat people don't have long term care, they die.  As mentioned already everyone dies of something.  The guy who made it to 90 because he was super healthy is just going to die of something exotic and expensive, plus he had 40 more years of using the hospital system than the fat guy who died at 50 of a heart attack.

You're not saving the health system any money by living longer, quite the contrary.  Smoking and drunk driving hurt other people directly.

If that's your thing Sky, I am sure you can find nice lady to berate you for $2.99/min.

All GPs give shitty advice.  You know why? Because the health guideilnes that are in place are about as flakey as a leper's scalp. 

You know how we know somethings are true - like the fact that you get after exercising for a long time because of a build up of lactic acid in the muscles? A lot of it is crap - normally based on a misunderstanding of what's actually happening or confusing correlation with causation.

So: switching to a low fat diet will stop you getting fat.  Well, between 1970 and 2000 (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5304a3.htm), the average amount of fat consumed per capita in the US went down. People did actually listen and they did start switching to low fat diets. It had fuck all effect on obesity though - those stats still climbed. Why? Because even though they cut the fat, the amount of calories being consumed per head went up (and most of it was carbohydrates).

Still, saturated fat must be bad because it's got cholesterol right and cholesterol is bad and a major cause of CHD? Yeah, well, that's not quite as it seems either.  The Framingham Heart Study (http://www.framinghamheartstudy.org/) which has being going on since 1948 hasn't significant correlation between cholesterol in the diet and occurence of heart disease. Even Ancel Keys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancel_Keys), who pioneered (if you can call it that) a lot of dietary health science is quoted in 1997 as saying "There's no connection whatsoever between the cholesterol in food and cholesterol in the blood. And we've known all along. Cholesterol in the diet doesn't matter at all unless you happen to be a chicken or a rabbit."  More related reading:  http://qjmed.oxfordjournals.org/content/105/6/509.full (http://qjmed.oxfordjournals.org/content/105/6/509.full), http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/805580 (http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/805580)

But your GPs probably won't be aware of any of this. They'll be too busy measuring your BMI and telling you to eat low fat and low cholesterol and eat your five a day.

Even at the moment we're on the verge of either another major dietary revelation (or possibly a damp squib) regarding over consumption of carbohydrates and it might turn out that Atkins, of the infamous low carb, high fat Atkins diet, might have been right. Remember that bit above about the increase of calories and carbohydrates in relation to obesity? Well, it's been theorized for a while that being overweight and inactive can build insulin resistance and lead to type 2 diabetes although don't ask about people like Steve Redgrave, the multi gold winning Olympic rower, because he's a statistical anomaly.  There have also been studies about the postive effect of low carb diets on the insulin resistance (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100619173919.htm) of people with diabetes.

Recently, however, there's been more of a call (led by renowned South African sports scientist Tim Noakes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Noakes) in particular - although he's earned himself a massive amount of scorn and abuse for putting his head above the parapet) for research in relation to carbohydrate consumption and developing insulin resistance based on the theory that our general move to low fat, high carb diets has, for a lot of people, imbalanced their diet and fucked up their insulin resistance which has, in turn, led to a continuing rise in obesity. The new theory is that switching to a low carb, high fat diet may counter this and lead to better health and weight loss.

Of course, you try to tell people about that and they cry "fad diet" and look at you as if you're a climate change denier or an anti-vaxxer.  Because it goes in the face of what we all know - fat is bad, carbs are good, right? And yet, it may be a theory which has more merit (and far more demonstrable and less impactful on the rest of us than denying climate change or the other).

Who the fuck knows? Who do you believe? The up to date research? Your GP? The "revolutionary" scientist? It certainly makes life as a personal trainer a little more difficult - do you stick to government prescribed guidelines because they're accepted, even though you're not sure they're very good or do you recommend something that could come across as a bit of quakery?

Perhaps I'll just stick with "I don't know. Eat less, move more, shut the fuck up and run faster".



Fake edit: this turned into more of an incoherent rant than I planned but fuck it, it's late and I want to play games.

For me a big worry is always noticing how many people have stomach/intestinal/whatever issues.  A scary amount of people I know, fit, obese, whatever have acid re-flux, or have been diagnosed with irritable bowl syndrome and other general digestion problems that can't seem to be cured even with diet changes.

Ok, fine, I'll nibble in this thread then.


To those who say "shame on the fat" in their own ways, I can see your reasoning and understand the disdain, irritation or whatever you want to call it for those who do not take the initiative to educate themselves and improve their diet, etc.  Personally don't agree with it, but I do understand the line of reasoning.

As an outlier, since I believe I would qualify as such for most peoples rant, what about me?  Would you make the distinction and understand the circumstances that have put me here?  Or would I receive the same disregard and disdain that accompanies your viewpoint for other fat people?

For your informational evaluation:
I have severe psoriatic arthritis throughout most of my body, which got me through Social Security Disability in 3 months (which is unheard of, even by people working in the departments I've talked with).

I was placed on 10mg of Prednisone (a highly potent steroid) in order to attempt to deal with the side effects from the witches brew of medications I was placed on to attempt to curtail the massive edemas and swelling I had in wrists, ankles and knees.  Because of that swelling, physical workouts were a no-go, with walking to the bathroom involving mental calculus of how much it was going to hurt and how long would it take me to get there while trusting joints that could decide they didn't want to work at any moment.

With that level of Steroid consumption, and knowing what that meant, I moved to reduce my caloric intake by at least 10% and up to 15% if possible.  I gained 70 pounds in 3 months, with the stretch marks to prove it.

Being on fixed income and with painful arthritis, talking with dieticians, doctors, etc, the only real option for any kind of fitness regimen involved zero-impact workouts in swimming pools, which on a low-fixed income, were impossible to pay for whilst living in the San Franciscio Bay Area.  However, moving out wasn't an option as my support network of family and friends all lived close by, and without them, I'm not sure what I would have done.  It was an ugly 3 years until we found what works.

However, with the weight having been put on with prednisone, no real way to take it off.  Daily mobility of getting around involves handicap placards and a cane to walk around and I've had some relief through acupuncture and pain management.  And thankfully, we've found medication which mitigates my arthritis, but it's VERY expensive (which ACA covers most of, and my parents spot me for the donut hole, since Humira is up to $2700 per month)

What's my point?  Well, what could I have done differently, as the arthritis was pretty much unavoidable being genetic, and weight-loss is difficult at best, without finances to support any kind of program.  Secondly, would I be treated any differently than the person on the street who is fat because "exercise is hard"?

Nope, per the people in this thread you're just a lazy fat fuck who needs to stop being fat, eat better, and exercise more.  Were it only so simple for everyone.  My mom has extremely bad arthritis and is on a similar cocktail of drugs.  The only way she's been able to not balloon up is because she truly eats next to nothing anymore: a piece of bread or two for lunch, maybe a chicken breast and some veggies for dinner.  It isn't pleasant to see her having to go through this, and I'm concerned for myself because what she has can be genetic.

My super-sized weight gain (120lbs to 310lbs in 2 years) was a combination of not really caring about anything and extreme hormonal imbalances.  Fortunately I recognized that shit had to change, so I'm down to 200 or so (which for 6'3" isn't exactly that outlandish) but it sure required a ton of effort of both exercise\diet and medication.  Fortunately no one other than my family ever shamed me into losing weight.

I guess I haven't been reading close enough because I haven't gotten that vibe from hardly any of the posts.  Some people are going to get screwed by the genetic lottery and they can't do much about it and it sucks.  That doesn't change that many more people are just lazy fat fucks who need to stop being fat, eat better, and exercise more, like myself for example.

I think if you have a cane and look like you need it cane sympathy will probably outweigh (lel) my disgust for your fattyness. If you are still in SF maybe I'll run into you some day and we can find out. Also I only see Paelos (lol) and Pennileko on the hardcore fuck fatties bandwagon. Everyone else is saying, I don't feel sorry for them and I may mock them behind their back but so what? I mock all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons which was the point of my post about crackhead or juicer looking people pages ago.

Unless you were the dick at Winter Soldier (at Metreon) who was fat as fuck and sat down in front of me without any regard driving the back of his chair into my knee fucking hard with his fat disgusting ass. Piece of shit motherfucker that guy was. My knee still hurt when I got up and left the theater. Seriously fuck that guy. If that movie hadn't been so great I would have def laid into him when it ended but I didn't see the point in spoiling my good mood.

Asshole is asshole, regardless of weight, disability or general appearance.  Oh, and tweren't me...but if you wish to fuck him, have at  :grin:

My bad. 

Triax clearly falls into that category I laid out in my post where I said people that don't have a choice fall into protected status. He is also in that outlier exception category.

Also, I don't go around being rude to fat people or shit on them in public. I just refuse to buy into their bullshit or give them special status. So I guess that makes me only half an asshole.

Sober, reasoned, universal dietary education *appears* difficult to come by. I'm still learning new things.

As an example, my go-to for information is the Fitness sub-reddit FAQ. It broke down the importance of focusing on protein / fat as the primary macronutrients to focus on for your daily caloric needs, then worrying about carbohydrates to achieve your surplus / deficit / maintenance levels. On that basis, Atkins *does* have it right.

When I was growing up, Fat had such a strong, negative evocative effect because of the anti-Fat campaign. Ignorance sucks.

Focusing too much on macro-nutrient breakdown is a big mistake, unless you have very specific health issues or are a serious bodybuilder.  Energy In versus Energy Out is still king.  For people who are simply overweight, it is 99.9999% (totally made up percentage) likely that you simply fail to be on the right side of this equation, regardless of what the hell you are eating.  It is quite possible to eat absolute shit and still lose weight or maintain weight.  Hundreds of millions of people do it all the time.

And I hate to say it, but the same thing applies to most people who claim that serious health issues are holding them back.  What most of you fail to understand is that a human body that just sits there like a blob all goddamn day will STILL burn through a shitload of calories.  The majority of your metabolic burn is simply used to keep your body functioning on a basic level.  The actual number of calories each of us burn on average is determined by different factors related to specific metabolism and body composition.  Some small amount is also burned based on our physical activity.  What this means is that a really fat dude who lays on his sofa all day in the fetal position is still burning through at least a couple thousand calories a day.  It doesn't matter if the cause of his inactivity is a serious medical condition, or simple laziness.  That side of the energy equation will be more or less the same.  In other words, it is still a total bullshit excuse.  Not understanding macro-nutrient impacts makes the problem worse only in that these same people are probably also tending to overeat the simple carbs that both mess up their blood sugar, but also require slightly less energy to digest.  But this is mostly a red herring.  Eat fewer calories than your body requires, and you will lose weight.  Almost all overweight people are overweight because they eat too much, not because of medical conditions or lack of knowledge on macros.

I don't mean to disregard it completely, because understanding the types of energy you are consuming is important, and it can also be useful in understanding why we hit plateaus (in either direction) and how to break through them.  Not to mention that it plays a role in your overall health.  But a very overweight person is just adding unneeded complexity by focusing on such things.  

Eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables.

We all have individual responsibility for our own health, but as a society we could make it much, much easier to achieve. If all we focus on is the individual responsibility without tackling the more complex, larger scale issues then things will only continue to worsen.

Moralise at overweight people as much as you like, it won't actually change anything.

That was about the perfect summary.

But that begs the question: How much is individual and how much is societal responsibility? How much easier does society have to make things in order to withdraw itself from the conversation?

America has a huge issue with shirking individual responsibility and blaming everyone and everything else for their problem. Compounding the issue is that people get away with it which creates a feedback loop to bolster the behavior.

Yep, America loves itself some individualism right up until the responsibility for poor choices part kicks in.

Absolutely. Different situations, different needs. Looking at total caloric intake and working with that is a good starting place. However, I disagree with the first statement and the criteria you use. I would agree that focusing *only* on it is a mistake.


The United States is a world leader in rationalization. Just look at all the bullshit we've exported in the last half century!

I think the biggest problem is that most fat people never learned how to eat right.

I work with a guy who is fat. He knows he is fat and should do something about it. He tells me that he comes from a big family. His ideas about eating are totally off. He thinks he can keep eating like he is now and just needs to exercise. He thinks eating healthy is his wife making a giant pasta and cheese casserole instead of eating McDonald's. His portion sizes for lunch are easily double what I would normally eat. He brags all the time about how much his kid can eat. At his first birthday party he talked about how cool it was that his son devoured his cake. His child is already chubby at two years old. Fat people pass on their own stupid ideas around food to their children who repeat the same process.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but breaking that cycle is the only thing that will help the problem.

He thinks he needs to exercise because people make money off telling people they can be healthy if they just exercise more. Or if they just 'go on a diet'. Actually considering being overweight, underweight, or whatever, as a lifestyle issue that needs radical change and a new relationship with food in a really significant way is a bit much for some - plus there isn't any money in selling that message.

In the case of food companies, they are a very real problem in this debate. They are actively poisoning the world while chasing their profits. Take the example of Subway who recently HAD to be publicly shamed for putting yoga mat materials into their bread. There was no real reason for that chemical to be there. It was there to speed up the dough, making it faster to produce, and thus more money. Nevermind the fact that it's potentially dangerous, or that it flies in the face of Subway's "Eat Fresh" lie. The food companies are cutting corners constantly with additives that have no place in regular foods.

This goes on all the time. The only way around it is to eat foods that have no processing, but those are now some of the most common foods. I don't blame people for being confused about what's in their foods. It's often a complete mystery and it's designed that way by the food companies.

But no matter what you eat, portion control is always a decision. That's where things get out of whack for many fat Americans.

Just do yourself a favor and ignore the fitness subreddit.

Oh I completely agree that food manufacturers bear some responsibility. Additives for the sole purpose of making it cheaper (and also worse for the consumer) are a bane on diets. HFC instead of sugar, adding a shit ton of sugar to offset a shit ton of sodium which is there for some notion of preserving and extending shelf life... etc. Since we can't have overregulation (politics incoming!), they are made to list their ingredients, and now their nutritional content instead of developing healthier foods and a slightly higher cost. In the RAH RAH free market rhetoric, the companies making shit foods should go under because no one would buy it... but that is another issue.

I am not arguing that food manufacturers are not to blame for stocking the stores with cheap, unhealthy food stuff. I am curious though as to how much regulation is needed to remove them from the argument and if that will actually have any noticeable effects give the current climate of individual responsibility or lack there of.

It's not necessarily about regulation is it is education. The big move to put calories on everything as a standard is my first step. Everything.

One regulation I would do is to standardize serving sizes. Food companies play fast and loose with this all the time, and divide a small bag of chips into 2 servings. That's not the way it should be.

The other would be for companies to label additives and preservatives separately and clearly. They try to mix it into the middle of fine print right now. I wouldn't let that stand. The reason people went after Subway is because they were educated on the stuff they were eating. Similar issues would happen if food companies were simply telling you what you were putting in your body.

More fuel for the fire. European Court of Justice to rule on whether or not obesity could be viewed as a disability:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27809242


Edit: clarity

I lost close to 100 pounds by watching my calorie intake like a hawk. Sure, I changed WHAT I ate as part of it simply because some things I was eating (like fried cheese sticks from Arby's) contained a TON of calories for a relatively small serving size and not eating those types of things made it easier to keep inside my calorie budget and not feel like I was starving myself because I had only eaten a couple of calorie dense snacks instead of lower calorie but more filling meals. But the weight loss was pretty much entirely the "Burned>Eaten" in a normal day thing. I still have a pretty shitty diet in terms of some of the things I eat and I don't eat anywhere remotely near enough vegetables and fruits, but I am better off than I was.

But exercising and getting in better shape only happened after I had taken off 60-70 pounds.

Now I am in more of an exercise mode because I want to take off a few more pounds and build up some muscle tone I lost over the years as I got sedentary and older. That and I find I feel better if I get to ride the bike or run or even walk a bit most days.

Unhealthy food is one of the few things I enjoy in life so whenever I start to eat right I go into a deep depression.  I know if I was able to stick with it for a few months the positive effects of eating right would kick in but I have been unable to bridge that gap.

I'm only slightly overweight but I have been on and off diets for years. Totally eliminating the things you love is impractical. Give yourself one bad meal a week and do really well the rest of the week. It gives you something to look forward to, to work toward, and helps keep your sanity. Otherwise you will stick to a diet, do really well for a few months and then binge when you get off because you missed those things so much.

To preface this, I am a skinny framed guy whose metabolism slowed down through his thirties and could now stand to lose twenty pounds, mostly around my gut. Twenty pounds sounds like nothing, but when your target weight is 145, it's quite a bit.

I realized when I decided to start dropping some weight last year, that one of my bigger mental roadblocks was the whole "Clean your plate - think about the starving Ethiopian kids" thing that was drilled in to me as a child. Have we finally gotten away from that? It seemed to be a huge thing in the eighties - shaming each other in to over eating rather than "wasting" food. Really, we should have just focused on learning make smaller portions.

I know what I need to do to lose weight - back off the beer, back of the between meal junk food snacks. Problems is, I really don't want to. I've done it for stretches, dropped ten pounds, felt like I accomplished something, and then rewarded myself by putting it back on again. Yay cycles.

As for the whole healthism thing, yea I'm guilty of it. I tend to judge people based off their appearance. Wish I didn't, but when you first see someone, its the only thing you've got to make an opinion from. But whether I'm judging them in my head or not, I'm still polite and sociable. I don't make fun of people or put them down for their weight, that's just not the kind of person I am. Yet part of me wishes I would.

I say that, because I know people who are overweight that I really wish I could convince to do something about it. The worst being when it's kids. I can't tell my friend's 16 year old daughter, "Hey, your're way too fat. Do something about it." but I really wish I could - because I'm concerned for her. I recognize the effect that carrying around an extra 20 pounds has on my body - the idea of what an extra 100 pounds must be doing to someone scares the shit out of me.

That's true of everyone. Every single person is racist, classist, sexist, "healthist", or some combination of a thousand other possible prejudices. It's an unavoidable part of human socialization, and anyone who thinks they're immune is kidding themselves. All you can do is call that shit out when you see it and try to make baby steps. And that means calling it out in yourself first and foremost, or you're just a hypocrite. Saying "I'm guilty of it" and seeking to self-improve is the most important thing you can do.

If that were the kind of personal responsibility that internet forum toughs could take to heart, maybe we'd see some fuckin' social progress.

I just had a Monte Cristo with jam and onion rings.  Totally healthy. 

Everything I've read about the Subway thing from a credible source seemed to say that there wasn't anything wrong with the additive they were using, it played the same sort of role it did in making Yoga mats (that is helping stabilise air bubbles (iirc)) so that the overall texture was better, whether softer mats or fluffier bread. The only cases where it was found to be harmful was being directly exposed to very large quantities of the stuff. Complaining about it was the equivalent of going apeshit about arsenic being in your cranberry juice because someone added apple juice to it. Yes it is a potentially harmful product but it's not going to have any bad effects on you in the doses present and it's being used for a valid reason. The lady with the blog who started this whole thing has basically no facts beyond 'well it's harmful to people directly exposed to huge quantities and they use it for stuff that isn't food so even if studies show it's perfectly fine how do we know Also Yoga mats!'

Which is kind of the flipside of the problem with being conscious of food additives, etc. Even when you become aware of them there's a whole lot of other shit to take into account. 99% of us don't have a good enough understanding of chemistry to even identify what most of those things are or whether they might be bad for us. I think having the ingredients listed is an important thing but really the main thing is having the nutritional information available. And, as in Europe, have it available as a listed serving size and per 100g.

I agree with having a standard serving size across the board, but the main issue with that is no one in America, save for your ultra-nutritionist, is going to have any idea how much 100g or 8oz is exactly. Especially with dry goods, how large/small is 8oz of potato chips or cookies? One of the main arguments in having a 'serving size' listed on drink bottles or small serving bags of stuff is the listed serving size is always 2 or 2.5 or 3 in order to make the calories and nutritional content seem less than what is actually in the bag. I have to go exploring, but I thought I had read that there was a push to relabel this stuff, as it was somewhat deceptive, to just label the nutritional value according to the bag and leave out this 2.5 servings per bottle/bag/etc. So that bottle of soda would be labeled as to the values in the bottle and not in a 1/3 of the bottle.

There is a push to adjust the serving sizes on the labels to make more sense. A few items I have purchased have actually had the total per container as well as the per serving (usually smaller snack sized things).

I bought a nice digital diet scale about a year and a half ago and it really has helped me get a better feel for what a portion size by weight really is. One of the most useful $20 expenditures I have had by far.

Simply put, our culture doesn't know what chemicals are harmful until 10 years after the fact, and the companies insulate themselves from this by preparing funds for potential lawsuit settlements. You know, instead of just baking fucking bread like normal people.

They also bank on being able to say, "Well we've done this for 10 years without problems so it can't be us.  Prove it's us. Here's our reports and scientists that say you're wrong."

Asbestos, Smoking, and Lead are great examples of this strategy and they continue to be adopted by others.

Now this is why we are fat.   :uhrr:

(https://scontent-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpa1/t1.0-9/1606965_714341735306639_213764584187273936_n.jpg)

How would that even work? Do gummy bears survive heat that well?

I'd imagine they'd melt into amorphous blobs sort of like chocolate chips in a cookie.

I can not imagine why anyone would find that flavor/texture combination appealing.

I'm assuming they are trying to make a similar product to "The Beast Mode" sausage, which has skittles instead of gummy bears.  That one was made for the Seattle Seahawks.

Yee-haw, that them there is a clever idear, Jeb!

I love that New York started doing this (I believe because NYC started doing it under Bloomberg?). I don't know if it's impacted the sales on the most profitable of the super size options. But putting the information out there lets those that care make better decisions while not preventing those that don't care from having what they want. I haven't had a frappucino nor smoothie since  :oh_i_see:

People like that are everywhere, every country, every town. There's a higher percentage of them here because we as a society don't give enough of a shit about others in that society. We'll leave it to the individual to do it right or wrong because that makes us feel better.

But that runs afoul of any shared social service we all share the bill for.

It's not about rationalization. That's shit that only come up when people are asked directly. Most of the time, people aren't actively trying to eat the wrong thing or amount. Instead they just pick up what they want and then don't stop eating until it's all gone. They don't know they're gaining the weight because they ain't weighing themselves. About the only time they begin to wonder what's up is when there's a wardrobe change, or diabetes if they wait even longer.

THAT is how many Americans operate our lives, and why it's so easy to market to us. Gut decisions, hope it's right, get annoyed when they're called on it.

The truth is very simple, but it's so vague as to be useless: less calories, less fat grams, after you've lost 20%, you'll have enough energy to start considering light walking. It all sucks because it could mean years (or in my case: decades) of rethinking everything. And worse, that's not the behavior change. Losing weight is relatively straightforward. Keeping it off is the problem, and the one that requires the mental work.

After some time at a target weight, you then can start worrying about BMI and vegetables and all that. And you probably will, because if you've been significantly overweight like I have been, once you lose it, you'll find any way you can to keep from falling back.

Even if it means eating a banana instead of a pancake. Fucking bananas.

Bananas are delicious.

I wasn't allowed to eat processed sugars (and a bunch of other stuff) as a kid. A lot of the crappy food other love I just don't have any desire to eat - because it tastes way too strong and rich for me.

I would think that anyone who hanged their diet significantly over time, and maintains it, would also find their taste changing? Tough maybe it a lot harder to hange childhood habits than adult ones.

Offhand, women have it particularly shitty. For starters, the media ideal of 'healthy' for a woman is unhealthy. (Did you hear about the Miss American contestant? -- I think it was Miss America -- she was called 'plus sized'. She was a fucking size 4).

Secondly, women's metabolisms can be an ass. The one I'm familiar with personally is PCOS, which is basically when the human body says "You're gonna be fat. Enjoy". It's a nasty little hormonal feedback cycle between estrogen, testosterone, and some insulin receptor. In addition to the fact that it basically makes your body prioritize fat stores about everything else, it also tends to make you sterile and give you a nice chance of cancer -- and it's pretty common. Women with it tend put on weight in an unusual way (stomach, but not butt or thighs).

Anyways, it's basically like a handicap to losing weight. I'd imagine it's pretty discouraging to learn you have to work four times as hard to lose weight as anyone else. (I honestly don't get the science -- something something mimic insulin resistance something androgens something trigger weight gain something), but apparently your body prioritizes fat over everything else. It'll pack on fat over muscle, and since it's a feedback loop, if you don't catch it really early it can get really bad.

Luckily, in the last decade or so, they've come up with a pair of common drugs that break both sides of the cycle. Just to give you an idea: The one girl I know that had it? Six months on the drugs and she lost almost 30% of her body weight without changing a bit of her diet or exercise (and neither drug is a stimulant -- it's birth control pills for the hormone side and glucaphage to deal with the weird insulin problems the hormone imbalance causes) and kept it off for five years. (She honestly should have stayed on BC pills and she'd have kept it off indefinitely.).

I'd imagine it's a nasty kick in the teeth to learn you're 30% heavier because your hormones are screwed. They never had much luck handling it with diet or exercise -- you had to literally starve the body while working it to the bone, something that's not very easy for most people to do.

Somewhere between 5% and 10% of women, right there.

I'm overweight because I eat too much and don't exercise. My body's not trying to sandbag me too (well, other than pushing 40).

I don't think that's right at all. Americans (not "America") have a huge issue with turning "individual responsibility" into a near-religious excuse to never help other people.

A totally random (and probably not representative) anecdote:

I spent 3 months in the US at 14 (father got a scholarschip at a big-name clinic), and I ate at the JR high school cafeteria every day. The menu consisted of a whole lot of fries, a donut, a piece of fruit, 3 dl (I think?) of chocolate milk, and the main meal of choice: chicken sandwich / pizza / hot dog / hamburger [edit: I seem to remember an optional soft drink / soda too, but I just stuck with the chocolate milk and water]. Now, in those 3 months I picked up *10 kilograms* of weight and actually got stretch marks on my stomach. Then I dropped off this extra weight over the next few years -- of course it wasn't as easy as picking it up in the first place.

Of course this may have happened due to some sort of metabolism issue, too (hypolactasia runs in my family, but I was only tested positive for it at 16-ish); also, in retrospect, I could've just skipped the donut and left some of the fries on the plate. Thing is, my 14-year-old mind didn't have the foresight / self-control to do that!

Both of these statements are true. Cognitive dissonance is our default mental state.

Everyone else's problems are personal failings, my problems are the unfortunate result of circumstance despite my best efforts.

That's...very true, really. Although it's more "people I know's problems are the results of misfortune" and "random strangers are personal failings/evilness".

I remember my mum reading one of those 'fad' diet books (I think it was called French women don't get fat) that was basically this story. French girl goes to the States for a year of university, puts on 15kg and gets back to France to find she's still overweight. Sees a doctor who looks at her diet and basically says 'you're eating a whole sweet pastry every morning, having full dessert with lunch and dinner and snacking on chocolate bars, of course you've put on weight.' At which point she has the realisation that she got into some seriously bad eating habits as a young 20 year old in just a year of living in the States. Of course the main gist of the book boiled down to 'have nice things but just once a week or only take a couple of bites' along with a half assed diet to follow. Good advice but not easy to work even if it did push the message that it shouldn't be a diet but was about changing your attitude to eating.

Personally I've found the only way to really keep myself anywhere near on track is counting calories, and now I'm still guesstimating them. But I also spent 6 months or so pretty religiously weighing everything I ate and eating home cooked stuff almost always so I've got a better idea of portion size, so I think the guesstimates are halfway accurate. I still drink too much and binge every now and again but at least I know roughly how much I've had and can factor it in. Getting comfortable leaving food because I'm not really hungry is still really fucking difficult though because I've learned I really, really like eating nice food  :nda:

I don't know. Just looking at that makes me not want to ever eat again.

Not really. They melt together into a massive multi-colored gelatinous mass. I took a five pound bag to burning man once and it turned into a brick because I forgot to throw it in a cooler.