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Old August 12th, 2004, 10:44 PM
Concordia
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On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 16:36:48 +0200, "Lictor"
wrote:

"Concordia" wrote in message
.. .


(snip)
I wasn't aware you could get free testing this way.


I didn't say it was free.

(snip)
and also put to rest any concerns that the metabolism is
generally low. A complaint by many obese is that metabolism is
sluggish and that is why they cannot lose weight.


That's because of the general misunderstanding people have on this issue.
And this includes doctors. Metabolism doesn't matter than much, as long as
you match your inputs to it. It's only problematic if it's so low you have
to eat only minimum amounts of food. That's when it's time to exercise some.


I disagree. It _does_ matter to the extent that chances of being able
to match inputs to a higher metabolism are greater. What are people
more prone to do, eat more or less? Wouldn't it be beneficial to
have a higher metabolism, or for that matter increase activity and
muscle mass to aid in that? (Okay, I see you mention exercise too).
Who wouldn't want a higher metabolism?

These are rhetorical questions.

This has been proven time and time again not to be the case, both through
metabolic tests and also by controlled conditions where the patient is
hospitalized and put on a medically supervised diet.


What has been proven is that there is no link between metabolic rate and
obesity.


That is precisely my point.

But *some* obese do have very low metabolism, lower than normal,
either because of crash diets (loss of lean mass) or because of hormnal
problems (thyroid mainly). And some are actually higher than normal.
Guessing from what I have to eat to maintain, I'm rather into the second
category. Which is not a surprise, I have always been muscular, obese or
not.


Isn't this a different way of stating a similar position? Let's not
get too bogged down in semantics

Also, if one were to have a basal metabolism test performed bi-weekly
or monthly over a statistically significant period of time, and graph
the results, metabolism would not generally be all over the place.


If you keep a constant weight and keep the exact same level of exercise. And
if you're not a woman, periods tend to mess things up. Besides, your intakes
have to match basal metabolism + daily activities. So you would have a nice
number, but not many useful things to do with it...


What about those people that insist they eat less than 600 kcal/day,
1000 kcal/day, and so on, and still gain weight. Shouldn't they look
into some testing? However, it seems many more people make such
claims than you'd expect statistically...

In those cases, it could be used to either prove or disprove such
claims. The test doesn't have to yield a precise result to serve such
a function. If it indicates metab. is (for example) somewhere in the
neighborhood of 1500-2000 instead of 600 or 1000, that would be
helpful information. It would also be helpful to know if the person
was actually correct -- but rare. The more likely case is that they
are not being honest with themselves.

Let me remind you, my position wasn't that everyone needed to run out
and get a metabolism test.

You had said:
"The problem is that most obese have no way of knowing how much their
body will burn."

And my counterpoints were (1) one _could_ get a metabolism test, and
that (2) "someone not knowing their precise current metabolism does
not prevent them from eating less and losing weight."

Do you or do you not agree with #2? Yes or no?

(calorie tables)
I'm not talking nth degree. You remember that hot summer we had in Europe?
Hot and warm. Well, farmers reported a 30% increase in the sugar content of
fruits. Likewise, on a bad year, you will have large drops in sugar content.
Same for grapes, being on the good side of the hill is a variation high
enough that one side will give great wine and the other a crappy barely
drinkable beverage. The same applies with a lot of other food. Animals will
have varying fat contents, depending on how they were fed (industrial food,
grazing...) or kept (savage, semi-freedom, battery). That's a lot of
variation you won't find in your calorie table. And I doubt you would have
to go to the nth degree of precision to find it.
Remember that 5% extra on a 2000 calories diet will give out 36000 calories
by the end of the year - that's at least 9 extra pounds... Sure, variations
will cancel each others on average, but 5% is a very small margin of
error...


Gotcha. But it's not that important in the scheme of things when it
comes to weight loss. I seriously doubt people are fat due to these
factors.

Sure, a table will do that. It does have an educative value. You don't need
a large level of precision to sort food items like this. But you do need
that level of precision to keep a stable weight over an extended period of
time. It also becomes problematic when you can't control the food, like with
exotic stuff, at friends or in a restaurant. How do you get the caloric load
of a restaurant meal, if you don't know how it was cooked?


Lack of precision in calorie tables or not knowing exact metabolism
doesn't keep people from losing and maintaining weight. People have
ways to measure weightloss or lack thereof, and can adjust
accordingly.

Besides, I could have told you that by just eat these food. The same amount
of salmon will not give the same lasting satiety as the same amount of
sausage...


True.

(snip what it's like in France, thanks for the insight)

So, you started on Atkins, and eventually ended with a "balanced" diet, or
something pretty close to what doctors recommend (at least what ours
recommend when they don't go crazy on some hyper-proteic ****).


What I am doing is balanced for me, and I have figured this out by
trial and error -- but is not what would be considered a traditional
balanced diet by any means. Note that I rarely eat processed carbs.

This is
still a diet that, in itself, has a high failure rate.


It's not the diets that fail...

There are probably
other factors that explain your success. Like, I doubt the diet itself
solved your bingeing. What did? Did your attitude towards food evolved with
time or do you eat like you used to (except in quantities and kind of food
of course)?


I quit making excuses and started doing what I need to do. Period.

(snip)
Do
you think you would have been successful if you had kept yourself in denial?


No.

Besides admitting what you were doing, did you also come to understand *why*
you were doing it? Do you think that knowledge has allowed you to lose that
weight?


I was hypoglycemic. In my case, eating all those refined carbs were
making me hungry and tired all the time; that was really a large part
of it.

What I'm trying to get at is that most diets only allow people to lose
weight. They don't give them any tool to understand why they became fat and
how to prevent that from happening again (except by sticking to the diet).
Successful dieters seem to be successful because they went beyond the diet
and gained understand of how they work. Their success is a consequence of
their own introspection, not of the diet itself.


Agreed. But I still think they have to find the tools for themselves.

Now, if you scale back to the epidemic level, this means going to an all
diet approach is bound to failure, because it seems only a small numbers of
people are able to make that introspection on their own.


Willing or able? So? If you've got a better solution, let's hear
it.

Again, I just don't buy your premise that there are many of these
"well regulated" slim people running around that have never had to
give a conscious thought to what they eat.


Well, decent dietetic models are rather recent. If you go back in time, all
kind of crap theories were around. Even nowadays, a lot of people do not buy
into the caloric explanation!


Sure they do. They just try quick fixes instead.

(we've discussed this before)

(snip)
If you
limit yourself to the rich part of the population (plenty of food, not much
exercise), obesity was much lower than today. Especially massive obesity.
How could these people maintain their weight? By following the dietetic
advice of the time?


By controlling themselves, I'd imagine.

(snip, it's getting rather long)
That's because noone really believes in the caloric theory. Why? Because we
want to lose weight while being able to eat as much as we want? Yes, in many
aspects we are a bulimic society. We always want more (cars, food, riches,
entertainment, travels...) but we don't want any of it to change us or have
consequences (polution, obesity, poors, evolving...). Our attitude towards
food only mirror our attitude towards society in general.


I agree, but so what? I mean really... it's nice to theorize and
discuss the state of society and all on usenet. And this has been an
interesting conversation, don't get me wrong. However, if one wants
to lose weight, they do the introspection, take the steps, etc.

There is no other way.

But I think there's another factor. The caloric theory is amoral. It doesn't
matter what you eat and how much you enjoy it, as long as you eat just what
you need and with moderation, you will stay slim. There is no evil or good
food. That's dietetic atheism. Somehow, the mind of people seem to revolt at
that. They want some food to be evil. Even in tiny amounts. They want a
price to be paid for pleasure.


Again, you're singing to the choir.

(snip)
That is PRECISELY why I
am advocating the crucial role of personal responsibility in all this.


I still don't think people are responsible. They're not the direct conscious
*cause* of their obesity. That's what being responsible means, being guilty
of something. I don't think they are guilty of being obese. Nor are they
guilty of failing when they try to solve their obesity using the consensual
methods.
Sure, they *can* help themselves, and the only available tool for that is
introspection. Except it's incredibly difficult to access in the current
hostile context. You can't blame people for not finding the gold nugget in
the pile of dung to pay their healthcare with.


You give people way too little credit for the ability to make their
own choices, and tacit permission to be victims subject to the forces
of society. That is a shame.

(snip)
I don't dispute at all that there is a psychological component. In
fact, I think it is a rather significant factor in overeating.


It's a significant factor that gets little coverage in the press or books or
even in doctors' office. It also gets little research. A lot more energy is
devoted in finding the *genetic* roots of over-eating. What's the likehood
that genetics play a large role in the over-eating habits of the majority of
the American population?


I agree, for the most part.

Learned helplessness never helped anyone improve their circumstances.


Understanding why you are helpless is the first step on the path to finding
a way around it.


Lol, that is my point.

(snip)
How are you eating and what are your particular circumstances?


Not hungry = I don't eat. Hungry = I eat. Satieted = I stop eating. Whatever
I want (or crave for, or feel like eating or however you call it), whenever
I want (no set number of meals, no set time, no obligation to eat at any
particular meal), as long as I'm hungry.


Yet you manage to lose weight without knowing your precise metabolism.