The stupid explodes: obesity now a disability

I met up with a Pasifika bloke today - excellent guy, about 30; in a good job, renting a very nice house, not any kind of idiot, although he is a christian.

I met some of his family as well - his Mrs, two brothers and one of their wives.

This guy was 5' 9" or so and would have weighed 150 kg, minimum. (that's 330 lbs to numerically illiterate) An absolute shame, I thought - he's killing himself with his teeth. I make his BMI roughly 50.

Saddest of all, he wasn't even the fattest person in his family.
 
I hate it when people start working out just for the purpose of losing weight. If you do that, when you lose the weight you will lose the incentive to exercise. Better to exercise just for the numerous benefits. You feel better, you feel stronger, even if you remain fat.
 
blutoski said:
....

The reason this is a problem is that there are billions of dollars spent in misinforming the public about how we can eat anything you want because we can just exercise it off. The reality is that we can't exercise off the food they want to sell us.

...
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It's really not a matter of can't, but a matter of won't...


I've never seen a fast-food advertisement ( or any food advertisement ) with any information about exercise..
 
Skeptical Greg said:
It's really not a matter of can't, but a matter of won't...
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Actually, no, literally can't. There aren't enough hours in the day, there is too high a risk of injury, and there is the exercise threshold (we have a maximum amount of exercise hours in a day). This is the point I'm trying to make, and the reason I've been posting actual research instead of morality tales.


Skeptical Greg said:
I've never seen a fast-food advertisement ( or any food advertisement ) with any information about exercise..
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Of course not. The same way you don't see oil companies advertising anti-climate-change commercials. People know they have a conflict of interst, so the strategy requires unlinking from the brand. It's about mindshare. "Doubt is our product." In the case of calorie pushers, they operate programs like ParticiPaction or the [Global Energy Balance Network].
 
casebro said:
My take on the excerpt is that the psyches are different between the two groups. And my general concept is that it is all psychological. And the lack of psychologists being able to cure it means the "science" of psychology sucks.
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I disagree... what the two cohorts had was different information. We have an 'you can always exercise it off' cohort the same way we have flat earthers. They learned it somewhere. From there, they built a weight management strategy. One (eat less) works better than the other (exercise more).
 
blutoski said:
I disagree... what the two cohorts had was different information. We have an 'you can always exercise it off' cohort the same way we have flat earthers. They learned it somewhere. From there, they built a weight management strategy. One (eat less) works better than the other (exercise more).
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Yeah, exercise burns a dishearteningly low number of calories. It doesn't help that fitness trackers and the displays on exercise machinery tend to be very generous with their estimates of calories burned.
 
rustypouch said:
Yeah, exercise burns a dishearteningly low number of calories. It doesn't help that fitness trackers and the displays on exercise machinery tend to be very generous with their estimates of calories burned.
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My feeling is that if the machine doesn't ask you to tell it your gender, age, weight, and efficiency with this exercise, that it's estimating calorie burn based on worst case scenario and therefore pitching way too high.

It was probably in this thread (I would check, but in the interest of time, i'll just repeat myself briefly) that I mentioned I had done some estimates with a physiology grad coworker during my fitness center management days...

I think a good portion of the exercise machines are not only assuming the user is a large male with muscles who is naiive to the exercise (who will burn more calories during exercise than somebody who is efficient for that specific functionality), but I think they are also including BMR.

So, if the machine says you're burning 200 calories in that 30 minute treadmill, OK that's technically true, but if you are trying to figure out the value of performing the exercise versus not, you have to subtract the 55 calories you would have expended if you were watching TV instead, for a net expenditure of 145 calories. Half a Snickers' worth, with all the injury risk.
 
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Skeptical Greg said:
To argue that exercise is overrated, is analogous to saying breathing is overrated..
Sure, you can get by with less, but at the cost of quality of life.
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I'm not arguing that it's overrated... just that it isn't 'a solution to the obesity problem'.

We don't exercise enough, and we should exercise more, there are many long term health benefits. Weight management just isn't one of them, we should not be trying to 'fight obesity' with exercise, it is a strategy that is objectively proven will fail.
 
blutoski said:
Actually, no, literally can't. There aren't enough hours in the day, there is too high a risk of injury, and there is the exercise threshold (we have a maximum amount of exercise hours in a day). This is the point I'm trying to make, and the reason I've been posting actual research instead of morality tales.




Of course not. The same way you don't see oil companies advertising anti-climate-change commercials. People know they have a conflict of interst, so the strategy requires unlinking from the brand. It's about mindshare. "Doubt is our product." In the case of calorie pushers, they operate programs like ParticiPaction or the [Global Energy Balance Network].
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Additional citation: [Coke is the biggest nongovernment contributor to ParticiPaction].

A recent topic: [Fitness trackers in every Happy Meal]
 
blutoski said:
I'm not arguing that it's overrated... just that it isn't 'a solution to the obesity problem'.

We don't exercise enough, and we should exercise more, there are many long term health benefits. Weight management just isn't one of them, we should not be trying to 'fight obesity' with exercise, it is a strategy that is objectively proven will fail.
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I don't disagree with what you are saying.... But...


It is proven that dieting usually fails also.

So if dieting and exercise is not the solution to weight loss, what is?


I think it is important for anyone who wants to lose weight to accept the idea that increasing their physical activity will be an important part of that endeavor..
 
Skeptical Greg said:
I don't disagree with what you are saying.... But...


It is proven that dieting usually fails also.

So if dieting and exercise is not the solution to weight loss, what is?


I think it is important for anyone who wants to lose weight to accept the idea that increasing their physical activity will be an important part of that endeavor..
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I think there are two different aims. Increasing exercise is helpful for general health, but especially if one is initially sedentary and overweight, I suspect that one would be unlikely to burn significant calories until one has got fitter.

On top of this, it takes a significant amount of time to burn significant calories, and it is probably difficult for many people to fit into their routine. I have cycle commuted 40km a day for the last eight years, and *do* eat a fair bit for my weight and build, but although it is only about 30 minutes longer per day than by car, it is still quite difficult to fit it in. Saving about £1000 per year is an incentive though.
 
Skeptical Greg said:
I don't disagree with what you are saying.... But...


It is proven that dieting usually fails also.
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Correct, but the research shows that people who diet are more likely to succeed than those who choose exercise. Let's go with the odds.



Skeptical Greg said:
So if dieting and exercise is not the solution to weight loss, what is?
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Right, so this is a good question, but throwing out suggestions that we can see don't work can't possibly be the answer. It's a "god of the gaps" of weight management. "Yes the science shows that dieting and exercise don't work, but I like the idea of exercise so I'm going to keep saying it's the answer".

There may not be a single answer. It appears to be a broad cultural problem, and we may have to combat pieces in a multifaceted effort. One part of this would be to educate the next generation who are getting intentionally confusing messages from food and exercise marketing that exercise is not effective as a weight management strategy.

As skeptics, we should appreciate this: we fight urban legends all the time, particularly those that are leveraged and perpetuated by commerce. Aspartame 'toxicity' is another one.



Skeptical Greg said:
I think it is important for anyone who wants to lose weight to accept the idea that increasing their physical activity will be an important part of that endeavor..
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I don't think that's important, because it's proven not to be true, and the research shows that this misinformation increases the chance the person will be obese. This is my point.

Notice how hard it is to shake allegiance to misinformation that has been so successfully ingrained in our culture? This is intentional. They've been very successful.
 
Skeptical Greg said:
I don't disagree with what you are saying.... But...


It is proven that dieting usually fails also.

So if dieting and exercise is not the solution to weight loss, what is?


I think it is important for anyone who wants to lose weight to accept the idea that increasing their physical activity will be an important part of that endeavor..
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How does dieting fail?

It works great.

It's people that fail to stick to a plan, or change their habits.
 
Guns don't kill, people do...:D


( I hear what you are saying..... )



blutoski said:
.........

I don't think that's important, because it's proven not to be true, and the research shows that this misinformation increases the chance the person will be obese. This is my point.
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This flies in the face of your earlier statement:


We don't exercise enough, and we should exercise more, there are many long term health benefits. Weight management just isn't one of them, we should not be trying to 'fight obesity' with exercise, it is a strategy that is objectively proven will fail.
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I'm not saying to tell people to exercise to lose weight, I'm saying exercise is part of a healthy lifestyle, whether the goal is to lose weight or not.
 
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It's absurd to deny that a sedentary lifestyle does not contribute to obesity, or to suggest that more physical activity would not be an important part of reducing it...

If the obese are discouraged by the idea of exercise, then it's a lost cause.
 
rustypouch said:
How does dieting fail?

It works great.

It's people that fail to stick to a plan, or change their habits.
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I think the principle is that people know to diet, but can't seem to do it. So, if we're going to design an approach, just repeating the same advice "eat less and exercise more" doesn't seem to work, we shouldn't keep banging our heads against the wall.

I'd like to know why people don't stick to the plan, maybe there are solutions in that space. And there are: we have interesting knowledge about obesogenic environment features. Mitigation is just difficult to implement because it challenges commercial interests, and to some extent, political preferences vis a vis our sense of autonomy.

Which brings me to casebro's prior post where he assigns some blame to psychology. I actually half agree. The solutions we find in environmental management are psychological. The problem is in implementation, unfortunately, as the environment is partially (or largely) out of the subject's control.
 
Skeptical Greg said:
It's absurd to deny that a sedentary lifestyle does not contribute to obesity, or to suggest that more physical activity would not be an important part of reducing it...
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On a national level, it's not absurd... we observe it. This was the point of my many posts. Have a look through the citations I posted above. There's a solid pattern of people investigating the benefits of exercise, and weight management isn't one of them.



Skeptical Greg said:
If the obese are discouraged by the idea of exercise, then it's a lost cause.
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I hope I'm not 'discouraging' anybody from exercise. Just asking the sellers of exercise to stick with the facts, and more importantly, state resourcing. Exercise won't manage your obesity any more than it will cure cancer. It has other benefits, so we should all get as much exercise as is practical.

Please appreciate that it sounds like you're doubling down in opposition to the facts because you don't like them. This is why I brought up the God of the Gaps analogy.

It was hard for me to shake it (I managed recreation centers for 25 years and was a nationally competitive athlete) but I was a rogue among my peers in that I strove to start with the science and develop an approach from there. Meanwhile, my peers were just too overwhelmed with the commercial conflicts of interest to break out of their mindset.
 
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