7 ms·

It's tough to hear but no matter what your genetics or internal flora are, being overweight is still your fault. It may not be "fair" that someone puts on less

by randlet 11y ago

It's tough to hear but no matter what your genetics or internal flora are, being overweight is still your fault. It may not be "fair" that someone puts on less weight than someone else eating the same diet, but ultimately you're the one responsible for maintaining your own weight (by controlling what you put in your mouth) no matter what the state of your gut microbes. edit: not picking on you Onion2k...I end up commenting a lot on these stories because it really irks me when so many articles and people are looking for something external to blame for their weight problem. You may or may not be able to change your metabolism but you absolutely can change the number of calories you're consuming.

mightybyte 11y ago
And to add to your point, you also can absolutely change the number of calories you're burning. Exercise (especially at high intensity) can make a huge difference.
nommm-nommm 11y ago
http://news.discovery.com/animals/fat-pets-obesity-weight.htm http://news.discovery.com/animals/fat-pets-obesity-weight.ht... - Mammals that live near or with humans, from lab rats to pet pooches, have gotten fatter over recent decades. - Fatter lab animals are the hardest to explain, since their diet is tightly controlled and well documented. - Endocrine disruptors, pathogens or temperature changes might play a role and could also factor into human obesity http://www.bbc.com/news/health-23970219 http://www.bbc.com/news/health-23970219 A study showed that transplanting gut bacteria from obese people into mice led to the animals gaining weight, while bacteria from lean people kept them slim. The findings were published in Science. Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine, Missouri, took gut bacteria from pairs of twins - one obese, one thin. The bacteria were then put into mice which had grown up in completely sterile environments and had no gut bacteria of their own. Mice with the obese twin's bacteria became heavier and put on more fat than mice given bacteria from a lean twin - and it was not down to the amount of food being eaten. --- Ok, so you may need 1300 calories a day to maintain an "ideal" bodyweight but The Minnesota Starvation Experiment shows that amount of food intake causes severe emotional stress and depression. So yeah
- randlet 11y ago
  Where did the 1300 calories a day number come from? How big is the person that number is for? What is their activity level?
  - nommm-nommm 11y ago
    I made it up completely as an example. I used to exercise 3-4 days a week. Lifting weights, cardio, and yoga. I wasn't losing weight. I started gradually counting and cutting calories and when it didn't help I cut more. The only way I was at a good weight was on 1400 calories/day. This made me completely miserable and anti social (I wouldn't eat outside my house). This may be sustainable for some, but it wasn't for me, eventually I just had to eat more. I kept it up for a couple years though. I didn't have a body image problem either, my weight was a couple pounds below "overweight" BMI. On the other hand a decade before that I ate junk food every single day and was very thin. Something seems to have changed in my body, but I don't know what. When I was thin my diet was truly horrible! Even when I was a kid - Every single Halloween I would eat an entire pillow case worth of candy over the course of around 3 weeks, but I never gained a pound. There is SO MUCH we don't know on this topic! Yes, one can cut back on food, but willpower and the ability to control are limited to some degree.
    - ashark 11y ago
      Very similar experience here! 4K+ calorie daily average mostly of junk food from ages ~15-21, maybe 30 minutes/day average of weightlifting, rarely some cardio, visible upper ab muscles, call it a "4 pack", full on six-pack abs if I happened to be slightly more active in a week (a few hours of casual swimming, for instance). Then I decided I wanted to cut down to the six-pack bodyfat level and stay there, so for the initial "cut" phase of that plan I dieted at ~1400 calories a day, every single day (no cheating) for ~2-3 months, and started doing way more cardio. Only lost a couple pounds, little or no visible difference, so, confused and frustrated, I gave up. Makes no damn sense according to any "weight loss calculator" I've ever seen (which all claim that my BMR should sit in the low 2000s), but that's what happened. Packed on fat immediately when I went back to my usual eating patterns, took me years to get that under control. To this day I seem to easily hit a plateau a bit over what I'd call my healthy range when dieting at any reasonable (not near or under starvation level) caloric intake. OTOH I've found that strength training's more effective for me than it "ought" to be but requires time, which sucks. I'd love to be able to diet my way to a trim waist, since maintaining an intake under what weight loss tables/calculators say should work for me is something I find easy to do. Too bad it doesn't. Don't know what the explanation is, but something weirder than the "calories in/calories out, and calories out is fairly easy to guesstimate with useful accurately" orthodoxy is going on.
nsxwolf 11y ago
It's not really worth it, though. If I eat much less than I do now I just suffer, and the weight loss quickly plateaus at a point that doesn't have any aesthetic value and isn't likely to improve my health. So I can weigh a little less by becoming obsessed with what I eat and always being in a bad mood. And I get no credit from the smug thin people who still see me as a lazy obese person.
codingdave 11y ago
> ...no matter what the state of your gut microbes. Or your mental state. Or working hours. Or illness and injury. Or depression. Or lifetime habits, possibly due to choices your parents made. Yes, it is all our own faults. That doesn't mean it is easy to change. Nor does it make somebody a lesser person for having made poor choices. BTW, It is also your own fault for everything else that is wrong in your life. Ever answered a question wrong, made a mistake, messed up a project, gotten a speeding ticket, injured yourself, or hurt anybody in any way? All your fault. Perhaps throwing blame at problems just isn't a good approach to making things better?
- randlet 11y ago
  I certainly did not mean to imply that it was easy. Simple yes, easy? Hell no. (I lost 45lbs last year, not fun). Nor did I imply that someone was a lesser person for being overweight. However, I do believe if you want to change your weight you need to take responsibility for the things you can control.
mtviewdave 11y ago
>...being overweight is still your fault Citation needed. The ability of human beings to control their biology through willpower is limited (if you don't believe me, try holding your breath for 30 minutes, or not drinking anything for a few days). Willpower itself is limited, and motivation is itself influenced by mental health. And diseases like Prader-Willi and Emery-Dreifuss demonstrate situations in which motivation and willpower are irrelevant. And that's only what we know. Sometimes when I have dinner with friends, I'll observe a situation where two of them will order the same thing, the bigger one will wolf down the dinner and the thinner one will pick at it and eat maybe half. I don't see two people equally tempted, where one gives it to his cravings and other is morally strong. I see two people with two different drives. Why do different people respond so differently the same meal? What is it our society that leads so many people to consume a calorie surplus? It's disappointing the number of people that don't even want to investigate the biological and psychological origins of such phenomenon, instead claiming (without evidence) that it's all about moral failure. In the 19th century, when painkillers first started becoming available, physicians would refuse to give them to woman in childbirth, because the Bible says childbirth is supposed to be painful. Women had sinned, therefore they must suffer. That's nonsense, of course, but people really wanted to hold onto their moral judgements, even at the expense of biology, good medicine, and relief of suffering. I think we should be suspicious of any impulse to use moral judgement to avoid investigation into the causes of medical conditions. Like obesity.
- rayiner 11y ago
  > In the 19th century, when painkillers first started becoming available, physicians would refuse to give them to woman in childbirth, because the Bible says childbirth is supposed to be painful. Women had sinned, therefore they must suffer. This is a great analogy. "It's your fault" is not a public health policy, it's a cop-out. And it doesn't even make sense. Obesity is rising dramatically in developed countries. Is the current generation just morally inferior to the ones that came before? Obesity is peoples' fault in the same way car accidents are. That doesn't mean the proper response is to simply blame people, instead of using science to devise solutions.
  - 11y ago
xenadu02 11y ago
Having been 330 lbs at one point and now being less than 220 you're both right and wrong at the same time. Your statement is the equivalent of saying its a heroin junkies own fault: Technically true but useless. It also has many parallels in the way you grew up, differing genetics, etc. If it were just a matter of willpower or simply eating less then I would already be my ideal weight. It isn't that simple. You can't detox off food and quit eating. At least a drug addict doesn't have to take just the /right/ amount of the drug every day to stay healthy! The drive to eat is one of the most basic instincts. Evolution has created signals and feedback mechanisms far more powerful than our puny frontal lobes. The problem of too much food has simply never existed before. Fruit eventually falls to the ground and rots. During winter food becomes scarce. Excess food is consumed by other animals. For our entire evolutionary history the correct long-term survival move was to eat while the eatin' was good because there was definitely going to be some kind of lean time ahead. The only simple or easy part of losing weight was cutting out sugared soda. That dropped 30 lbs. The rest was a slog and using various techniques to trick my body (like eating a large meal before going to the grocery store so I wouldn't buy anything outside my meal plan). It also involved lots of extremely strong urges to eat more and hunger pains. I have to think about what I eat every day and no matter what I do I will never be my ideal weight. Internal or external, this is a battle a lot of people just never face. They just eat when they are hungry and stop when they feel full. Of course their myopic view says it's just "calories in, calories out" (which the research has already proven is false... Some people gain more weight on the same calories).
- leshow 11y ago
  > At least a drug addict doesn't have to take just the /right/ amount of the drug every day to stay healthy! spoken like someone with no experience with drug addiction. ever heard of a maintenance program?
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    That's an option, not a necessity. It also tends to involve restricted access. But with food is it impossible to go to rehab and stop eating over a period of a couple weeks. If lifelong drug maintenance programs were the only option to quit abusing, there would be a lot more relapses.
randlet 11y ago
Based on all this discussion I regret using the phrase "it's your fault" which sounds too aggressive. Instead I wish I just emphasized that regardless of biological and societal pressures everyone of us does possess the ability to control your weight. Specifically by accurately counting calories (with a food scale) and tracking your weight you can adjust your caloric intake to lose, gain or maintain weight.
- nommm-nommm 11y ago
  >everyone of us does possess the ability to control your weight. Yes, buy only to a degree.
- aantix 11y ago
  It's just not the simple. The body fights back with a caloric reduction either through drowsiness, reduced thyroid, and hunger pains. The body wants to maintain. It's easy to posit so that some people's responses may be more intense than others.
  - npsimons 11y ago
    It is that simple; it's just not easy. Having been there, yes, it was hard. But it was also worth it, and I didn't have to change my gut biome or epigenetics to do it.
    - aantix 11y ago
      Again, that was you. And your level of difficulty may not be equivalent to someone else's. Our responses can be different, some more intense than others.

by randlet 11y ago

mightybyte 11y ago

And to add to your point, you also can absolutely change the number of calories you're burning. Exercise (especially at high intensity) can make a huge difference.

nommm-nommm 11y ago

http://news.discovery.com/animals/fat-pets-obesity-weight.htm http://news.discovery.com/animals/fat-pets-obesity-weight.ht... - Mammals that live near or with humans, from lab rats to pet pooches, have gotten fatter over recent decades. - Fatter lab animals are the hardest to explain, since their diet is tightly controlled and well documented. - Endocrine disruptors, pathogens or temperature changes might play a role and could also factor into human obesity http://www.bbc.com/news/health-23970219 http://www.bbc.com/news/health-23970219 A study showed that transplanting gut bacteria from obese people into mice led to the animals gaining weight, while bacteria from lean people kept them slim. The findings were published in Science. Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine, Missouri, took gut bacteria from pairs of twins - one obese, one thin. The bacteria were then put into mice which had grown up in completely sterile environments and had no gut bacteria of their own. Mice with the obese twin's bacteria became heavier and put on more fat than mice given bacteria from a lean twin - and it was not down to the amount of food being eaten. --- Ok, so you may need 1300 calories a day to maintain an "ideal" bodyweight but The Minnesota Starvation Experiment shows that amount of food intake causes severe emotional stress and depression. So yeah

randlet 11y ago
Where did the 1300 calories a day number come from? How big is the person that number is for? What is their activity level?
- nommm-nommm 11y ago
  I made it up completely as an example. I used to exercise 3-4 days a week. Lifting weights, cardio, and yoga. I wasn't losing weight. I started gradually counting and cutting calories and when it didn't help I cut more. The only way I was at a good weight was on 1400 calories/day. This made me completely miserable and anti social (I wouldn't eat outside my house). This may be sustainable for some, but it wasn't for me, eventually I just had to eat more. I kept it up for a couple years though. I didn't have a body image problem either, my weight was a couple pounds below "overweight" BMI. On the other hand a decade before that I ate junk food every single day and was very thin. Something seems to have changed in my body, but I don't know what. When I was thin my diet was truly horrible! Even when I was a kid - Every single Halloween I would eat an entire pillow case worth of candy over the course of around 3 weeks, but I never gained a pound. There is SO MUCH we don't know on this topic! Yes, one can cut back on food, but willpower and the ability to control are limited to some degree.
  - ashark 11y ago
    Very similar experience here! 4K+ calorie daily average mostly of junk food from ages ~15-21, maybe 30 minutes/day average of weightlifting, rarely some cardio, visible upper ab muscles, call it a "4 pack", full on six-pack abs if I happened to be slightly more active in a week (a few hours of casual swimming, for instance). Then I decided I wanted to cut down to the six-pack bodyfat level and stay there, so for the initial "cut" phase of that plan I dieted at ~1400 calories a day, every single day (no cheating) for ~2-3 months, and started doing way more cardio. Only lost a couple pounds, little or no visible difference, so, confused and frustrated, I gave up. Makes no damn sense according to any "weight loss calculator" I've ever seen (which all claim that my BMR should sit in the low 2000s), but that's what happened. Packed on fat immediately when I went back to my usual eating patterns, took me years to get that under control. To this day I seem to easily hit a plateau a bit over what I'd call my healthy range when dieting at any reasonable (not near or under starvation level) caloric intake. OTOH I've found that strength training's more effective for me than it "ought" to be but requires time, which sucks. I'd love to be able to diet my way to a trim waist, since maintaining an intake under what weight loss tables/calculators say should work for me is something I find easy to do. Too bad it doesn't. Don't know what the explanation is, but something weirder than the "calories in/calories out, and calories out is fairly easy to guesstimate with useful accurately" orthodoxy is going on.

nsxwolf 11y ago

It's not really worth it, though. If I eat much less than I do now I just suffer, and the weight loss quickly plateaus at a point that doesn't have any aesthetic value and isn't likely to improve my health. So I can weigh a little less by becoming obsessed with what I eat and always being in a bad mood. And I get no credit from the smug thin people who still see me as a lazy obese person.

codingdave 11y ago

> ...no matter what the state of your gut microbes. Or your mental state. Or working hours. Or illness and injury. Or depression. Or lifetime habits, possibly due to choices your parents made. Yes, it is all our own faults. That doesn't mean it is easy to change. Nor does it make somebody a lesser person for having made poor choices. BTW, It is also your own fault for everything else that is wrong in your life. Ever answered a question wrong, made a mistake, messed up a project, gotten a speeding ticket, injured yourself, or hurt anybody in any way? All your fault. Perhaps throwing blame at problems just isn't a good approach to making things better?

randlet 11y ago
I certainly did not mean to imply that it was easy. Simple yes, easy? Hell no. (I lost 45lbs last year, not fun). Nor did I imply that someone was a lesser person for being overweight. However, I do believe if you want to change your weight you need to take responsibility for the things you can control.

mtviewdave 11y ago

>...being overweight is still your fault Citation needed. The ability of human beings to control their biology through willpower is limited (if you don't believe me, try holding your breath for 30 minutes, or not drinking anything for a few days). Willpower itself is limited, and motivation is itself influenced by mental health. And diseases like Prader-Willi and Emery-Dreifuss demonstrate situations in which motivation and willpower are irrelevant. And that's only what we know. Sometimes when I have dinner with friends, I'll observe a situation where two of them will order the same thing, the bigger one will wolf down the dinner and the thinner one will pick at it and eat maybe half. I don't see two people equally tempted, where one gives it to his cravings and other is morally strong. I see two people with two different drives. Why do different people respond so differently the same meal? What is it our society that leads so many people to consume a calorie surplus? It's disappointing the number of people that don't even want to investigate the biological and psychological origins of such phenomenon, instead claiming (without evidence) that it's all about moral failure. In the 19th century, when painkillers first started becoming available, physicians would refuse to give them to woman in childbirth, because the Bible says childbirth is supposed to be painful. Women had sinned, therefore they must suffer. That's nonsense, of course, but people really wanted to hold onto their moral judgements, even at the expense of biology, good medicine, and relief of suffering. I think we should be suspicious of any impulse to use moral judgement to avoid investigation into the causes of medical conditions. Like obesity.

rayiner 11y ago
> In the 19th century, when painkillers first started becoming available, physicians would refuse to give them to woman in childbirth, because the Bible says childbirth is supposed to be painful. Women had sinned, therefore they must suffer. This is a great analogy. "It's your fault" is not a public health policy, it's a cop-out. And it doesn't even make sense. Obesity is rising dramatically in developed countries. Is the current generation just morally inferior to the ones that came before? Obesity is peoples' fault in the same way car accidents are. That doesn't mean the proper response is to simply blame people, instead of using science to devise solutions.
- 11y ago

xenadu02 11y ago

Having been 330 lbs at one point and now being less than 220 you're both right and wrong at the same time. Your statement is the equivalent of saying its a heroin junkies own fault: Technically true but useless. It also has many parallels in the way you grew up, differing genetics, etc. If it were just a matter of willpower or simply eating less then I would already be my ideal weight. It isn't that simple. You can't detox off food and quit eating. At least a drug addict doesn't have to take just the /right/ amount of the drug every day to stay healthy! The drive to eat is one of the most basic instincts. Evolution has created signals and feedback mechanisms far more powerful than our puny frontal lobes. The problem of too much food has simply never existed before. Fruit eventually falls to the ground and rots. During winter food becomes scarce. Excess food is consumed by other animals. For our entire evolutionary history the correct long-term survival move was to eat while the eatin' was good because there was definitely going to be some kind of lean time ahead. The only simple or easy part of losing weight was cutting out sugared soda. That dropped 30 lbs. The rest was a slog and using various techniques to trick my body (like eating a large meal before going to the grocery store so I wouldn't buy anything outside my meal plan). It also involved lots of extremely strong urges to eat more and hunger pains. I have to think about what I eat every day and no matter what I do I will never be my ideal weight. Internal or external, this is a battle a lot of people just never face. They just eat when they are hungry and stop when they feel full. Of course their myopic view says it's just "calories in, calories out" (which the research has already proven is false... Some people gain more weight on the same calories).

leshow 11y ago
> At least a drug addict doesn't have to take just the /right/ amount of the drug every day to stay healthy! spoken like someone with no experience with drug addiction. ever heard of a maintenance program?
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  That's an option, not a necessity. It also tends to involve restricted access. But with food is it impossible to go to rehab and stop eating over a period of a couple weeks. If lifelong drug maintenance programs were the only option to quit abusing, there would be a lot more relapses.

randlet 11y ago

Based on all this discussion I regret using the phrase "it's your fault" which sounds too aggressive. Instead I wish I just emphasized that regardless of biological and societal pressures everyone of us does possess the ability to control your weight. Specifically by accurately counting calories (with a food scale) and tracking your weight you can adjust your caloric intake to lose, gain or maintain weight.

nommm-nommm 11y ago
>everyone of us does possess the ability to control your weight. Yes, buy only to a degree.
aantix 11y ago
It's just not the simple. The body fights back with a caloric reduction either through drowsiness, reduced thyroid, and hunger pains. The body wants to maintain. It's easy to posit so that some people's responses may be more intense than others.
- npsimons 11y ago
  It is that simple; it's just not easy. Having been there, yes, it was hard. But it was also worth it, and I didn't have to change my gut biome or epigenetics to do it.
  - aantix 11y ago
    Again, that was you. And your level of difficulty may not be equivalent to someone else's. Our responses can be different, some more intense than others.