Healthism!!11

[angry.bob]

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.

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.

[Trippy]

For vegans the biggest issue is B12.

[Malakili]

 

[Tale]

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.

[Samwise]

 
Jennifer Lee is part of a “fat activist” movement, which claims that correlations between weight and health are exaggerated and unfairly shame fat people. “You can't actually tell someone's lifestyle or health by looking at them,” she says.

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

[Megrim]

 

[Hatred of humanity has increased] +1

[schild]

Tumblr is leaking again.

[MahrinSkel]

[Hatred of humanity has increased] +1

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

--Dave

[lamaros]

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.

[Cyrrex]

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.

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.

[Maven]

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.

[Draegan]

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:

Height: 6 feet, 2 inches
Weight: 205 pounds

Your BMI is 26.3, indicating your weight is in the Overweight category for adults of your height.

For your height, a normal weight range would be from 144 to 194 pounds.

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

[angry.bob]

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.

[Ironwood]

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

I see a lot of that.

[Draegan]

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

[Lakov_Sanite]

Also, whole foods is really fucking expensive.

[01101010]

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.

[Phildo]

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).

[Numtini]

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 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).

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[Merusk]

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.

[Phildo]

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 yet.

[01101010]

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.

[Sky]

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.

Kate Finlay says she tried everything to lose weight before resorting to surgery — from pills bought on the internet, to the Beyoncé lemon detox diet. Within months of having lap band surgery, Kate had lost 52kg. “I thought I was king of the world,” she says. But soon after, things started to go wrong. She was vomiting daily, was constipated for up to 20 days at a time and had liver failure. She also had complications after having plastic surgery to remove excess skin.

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.

[Cyrrex]

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

[Morat20]

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.

[Draegan]

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.

[Fordel]

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.

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

[Merusk]

Freedom.

[Ironwood]

The right to bear arms.

[Trippy]

I'm assuming he's referring to BPA.

[01101010]

Freedom.

Asshole made me spill my water. 

[Hoax]

Freedom.

Asshole made me spill my water. 

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

[DevilsAdvocate25]

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 yet.

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

But things really took off in the 1950s with the promotion of convenience foods whose design and marketing was aimed at the increasing numbers of families with both parents working outside the home.

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 to make them more clear about what goes in the food, trying to reduce the amount of bad fat that gets put into food, and working at educating people through stopping exaggerations in advertising and more clearly explaining how much fat is in your food 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.

[Count Nerfedalot]

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!  ) 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).