The Fat Trap

Oh, it's easy to spew scientific-study-based conventional wisdom. Here's how it works in my experience: When a new question comes up and scientists inquire into it, they tend to come out all over the place at first. That's usually because they think they're all asking the same question, but they're not. Actually, they're asking slightly different versions of it. Then they converge in their view of what precisely the question is, and consequently converge in their answers to the question they've agreed they're asking. During this consolidation phase, journalists tend to jump on the articles that make good newspaper fodder and ignore the rest. (The distinction usually turns on soundbites in the original article.) The result is conventional wisdom.

I haven't investigated if that's what happened in this article, but I did hear a few alarm bells in my head. (Weight alone as a measure of what you've lost, cycling as a metric for effort.)

Because today I'm feeling cranky, not judicious. And I'd have to read a lot more than a half-dozen studies to investigate any selection bias by the author.

However, it does sound like a good project for Sunday, when I fly back to America. No promises though. I still haven't delivered on my promise to Robert G. to read the American-Enterprise-Institute study that purports to show Fannie and Freddie causing the financial crisis. (A dark cloud of dread gathers in my mind every time I try to give conservative-think-tank publications another chance of redemption. So I procrastinate. But I digress. . . .) So I'll just say that I may or may not look into those studies, which I'm sure you were dying to hear. :

but it's not new - the research in this area goes back decades

30+ years ago they referred to this as the yo-yo dieting effect. the quick and dirty was: the more you dieted, the less you were eventually able to lose

the more recent studies come to the same conclusion, but there's more research into the why of it - including what Soz posted about the changes in slow-twitch muscle fibre

and this definitely isn't new - it's something our grandmothers knew (and mine definitely told me). They might not have understood why it is more difficult to lose weight as you get older, but they knew it.

If you are, indeed, an addict - and only you know your answers to the questionnaire! - then it may help you to look into how other addictions are being treated elsewhere. In particular, Switzerland has for years had medical centers where heroin addicts go once a day and inject heroin handed to them by nurses; of course the heroin comes from a laboratory, which guarantees its purity, and a nurse remains present throughout to ensure no heroin is taken out of the facility. There are also camp beds where visitors can lie down and take a nap or whatever it is they do after an injection. The percentage of addicts (who must be citizens or legal residents, to avoid drug tourism) has actually declined since this started. Drug dealers have vanished from the country, and petty theft to fund the habit practically disappeared.

Anyone who wants to go to rehab is encouraged but not forced. I don't know if losing weight and keeping it off is harder than using heroin only occasionally (by snorting it like cocaine instead of injecting it), but might it make a difference if you ate just once a day instead of focusing on food (planning/shopping/cooking/eating/cleaning up/counting/writing) for what sounds like hours? Most animals (except ruminants) only eat once a day. There is a natural limit to how much you can eat at one sitting; having to stick with tiny portions countless times a day strikes me as cruelty towards addicts. If the food is only there to be seen and smelled once a day, you won't obsess about it the rest of the time.

It works with heroin, and it also works with people who want to cut back on their drinking. But these people know and accept that they are addicts, so maybe the psychology is differnt. Since you follow the topic, though, I wonder what you think of the horrific ads now plastered all over New York - and I'll spare the thread the close-up of the obese amputee - to discourage obesity?

When they banned cigarette ads from the media they should have included fast food ads too. Every second commercial is about food - tempting, juicy, mouth watering, hard to resist fast food. The average American watches 4 hours of TV every day and I would bet my dollar that these commercials leave their impact on many many people who will succumb to buying what they just saw on TV.

As a nation that gets bigger and bigger, the NIH has to realize that fast food can be an addiction (remember the movie "Supersize me") and if they don't prohibit excessive advertisement, nothing will change.......

.......and don't get me started on school lunches.

Nasty ****, those ads are, for people who really could use some time not being beaten down. Interesting how they smack at the ad model while she's exercising. I recall hearing complaints from people who saw overweight folk at the gym - how dare they??? As if the sight of people attempting to get fit was somehow an affront. Jeepers, folks, how exactly do ya think people get healthy? Or are we supposed to just live in our dark hovels, eating nothing, not showing ourselves until we are somehow acceptable to the world?

I swear, nastiness to the overweight is one of the last bastions of allegedly acceptable prejudice, that it's somehow fun and hip and amusing to be mean to people.

Amen, sister! This poster makes me want to organize a Fat Pride parade, not lose weight.

I agree these ads are not helpful and even harmful. We think we know it all when it comes to obesity, but we don't. Ads like this make overweight people targets for ridicule and bring about even more harsh judgement from others. I can't imagine anyone being inspired by them, if anything they will send people into a depression that could trigger eating. Just the fact that it assumes fat people got that way by eat too many fast food french fries is absurd. There's a movie called Fat Head that challenges what they show in Super Size Me, granted the film maker also has an agenda, but people can watch it on Hulu if interested. I'm not advocating eating fast food, but the movie does explore the fact that there is a lot more to obesity than people eating burgers and fries. (Thomas might like Fat Head it has a Libertarian slant).

I have never seen this outside of elementary or high school. Seriously. And even then, it wasn't that usual.

I think the fact that there are more obese people today has been changing our mindset about it... if there was one large person in your class, they would get picked on, but if 30% of your class is large, it becomes the norm.

The thing is, a lot of kids are very sedentary today. I see so many young people (especially women) who are way larger than me and I've got to be 30 - 40 yrs older than they are. It's a crying shame. If you asked them what they do for fun, it would be different that what we did. We played pickup baseball, rode bikes, skipped rope, played Tag, roller and ice-skated, played backyard hockey, etc etc etc. We also walked to school, to our friends' houses and everywhere we wanted to go. Plus, my family never bought processed food (cheese slices, KD, cheez whiz - which we really wanted), never mind chips and pop. They were way more expensive than the real deal. There also weren't very many McDonald's in those days, and we couldn't afford it anyway, wherever they were. We weren't allowed to watch tv until after dinner, after our chores and homework were done. Now, many kids have tvs in their own bedrooms. Not mention all the games they play - xbox, etc.

A lot of it is lifestyle and kids don't get a choice. At least not in my day. Today, I really don't know what's going on. I don't know many people with kids that age so I don't know what they're doing or what they did at that age.

Are kids forced to run around the field 3x before playing field hockey or football in PE like we had to? How many sign up for team sports, track and field, swimming, gymnastics, etc? School team sports were free when I was a kid, with buses taking you to other schools (meaning parents didn't have to drive you), and the teachers didn't get paid for coaching. The uniforms were free, too. Maybe that's changed today? Ice hockey was huge where I grew up and it's grown to be more popular than ever, with rinks popping up everywhere and time slots filled. That's an expensive sport, but there's still waiting lists.

I rarely see kids here playing outside or riding their bikes. I don't know where or if they're getting any exercise, but it's not like it was when I was a kid when the neighbourhoods and neighbourhood parks would be rife with children. There are 3 parks in my vicinity and I walk by them daily with the dog. I have seen 4 boys once in one park playing ice hockey. Other than that, it's toddlers on swings and whatnot with their parents in good weather.

damned overly polite Canadiens...

I have. I once hired a man who weighed over 400 lbs as a tech to help me in my then lab. The woman whom I talked about on another thread re letting the air out of tires, who worked at another lab down another hallway, used to mock him and semi-torture him. I forget the ways, this was a long time ago. But finally not all that long ago, as the crow flies. She used to 'fix' people for their faults. Anyway, he had been an army cook and army lab tech, had been through a lot, had a loving wife, who had also been through a lot back in France, and ignored the sabotage. That family always liked me because I hired him over a lot of others. I was later their daughter's godmother, an admittedly odd role for me at the time. I've heard about similar more recently. I doubt that it's not a problem other than in high school and elementary school.

Yeah, I'm not saying it doesn't happen. At all. Just that I've never seen it in adulthood. Truly. Especially places there are lots of heavy people. It seems to be more accepted.

I think a lot of it is pretty insidious.

My mom has been overweight for a long time and she has had really vast amounts of prejudice thrown her way for one way or another. She doesn't complain about it a lot, it's just what I see when I'm with her.

And not just directly, as in someone addressing something to her (though that definitely happens), but stuff like the poster. It contains the implication that the woman in the photo is fat because she's eaten too many supersized fries. Not necessarily, at all.

"Fat baiting" has definitely become a public sport. Recently CNN did an on-line profile of a couple who had lost their middle class life due to stint of unemployment, poor health and a new job that didn't pay much. This couple had to use a food bank to get by. Nothing in the article would make you think these people were lazy or not doing the best they could. The woman was definitely overweight, bordering on obese, the man was lean. The public comments under the article centered on how fat the woman was. Nasty comments like how she should become a sumo wrestler or join a circus to make money. People commented that they needed the food bank to supplement her eating and if she didn't eat so much they could afford regular groceries. On and on, nothing about the real problem of health bills and being underemployed, just a stream of mean fat jokes and jibes. Do people think the subjects of the article would not see these public comments? They were cruel and uncalled for and appeared only because of how this woman looked.

The above ads are a good example of how even our government is prejudiced because they believe fat people are so stupid that they can't figure out food portions effect weight. It's like pointing out to an alcoholic that vodka will get them drunk. It's condescending and demeaning.

Another example is to look at what happens when a celebrity gains weight. It's plastered on every grocery store magazine and infotainment type TV show. We are obsessed with poundage and we are not polite about it when we see it.

This is a tangent re the metabolism situation, which most interests me.

I'll admit that the first time I went to Italy, in 1988, wandering with husband for a month, I got used to italians (sort of a primer for me going ital nutso), and came back and was shocked at how the folks at LA airport (LAX) looked. Well, we saw Rome and a lot north which was certainly not all of the country in a short time, and the people at the airport when we landed may have not been typical. I just remember registering the difference re obesity. Diet? Heredity/genes? Amounts of getting around by car? One of those countries with tremendous fast food* choices? One of those countries having many near starving or actually starving in families' memories? (that doesn't work, we did too, a few years earlier). Different sized servings at meals? Different alcohol culture? The culture of bella figura?

Whatever the way(s) body fat happens, including maybe fat cells at birth, the metabolics of weight loss is of serious interest.


* I'm not against food being cooked fast, concept wise.

Yep. In a pale knockoff of Jespah's accomplishments, I have lost 40 lb, and regained 10 of them, since settling in New Jersey. I can report that amazing things happen as soon as my weight crosses the 100-kilogram line. Suddenly my quips are funny, my stories are interesting, and people seek eye contact rather than avoiding it. When I cross the same line in the opposite direction, everything changes back to the initial state. But only in real life, oddly enough. Online, people react just about the same to my remarks, be they funny or serious.

Obese people of a disposition less sunny than mine might turn cynical and bitter over this.

Jespah, CBC Radio has been touting The Nature of Things all day. This evening's episode is "Programmed to be fat?" and investigates the recent claims that environmental chemical polution is making humans and animals fat. The program is hosted by David Suzuki, by now legendary in Canada. You might find it interesting.

The Nature of Things web site--the headliner is tonight's show.

Never met Mame, huh?