Posts by BenWilson
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BenWilson, good to see you can admit to being wrong! I have respect for anyone who can do that.
Heh, I'm wrong hundreds of times every day. So far as I'm concerned, it's the only way to move forward. Insisting on being right before acting leads to paralysis, and knowledge does not grow.
But so far as advice for fat people goes, I'm still waiting for the alternative solutions. So far we've got mine that doesn't work for everyone, and a couple of others that are so damned drastic that they're hardly the basis for public policy. What else does anyone have to offer?
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Apropos convincing people - well, I think if you want to change behaviour, work with human nature by creating an environment that makes change easy. Merely informing them is unlikely to work.
Merely informing them is, however, a vital step. Misinforming them could be a step backwards.
But yup, I go along with that. It could work. It also might not. Time will tell.
Do you understand that how much your body consumes, or stores, depends on factors other than the notional energy value of the food?
Does it matter if I do? Each person is charged with the job of finding out how much it does store by looking to their fat. If it's increasing, the amount is more than enough. If it's decreasing, it's past the break even point. I'm from the school of thought that horsepower should be measured at the axles, rather than theorized about by taking into account every aspect of the engine, fuel, internal friction etc. One is delivered energy, the other is "Knowing shit that won't tell you what the delivered energy is".
I'm sure it's what Dyan was talking about too, and it's in the league of being as patently obvious as everything I've spoken of. There are many kinds of food. But I'm still not convinced Dyan actually gets it at all, and considers the human body a temple exempt from said immutable laws. He can tell me otherwise.
And finally, yup. I was kidding. I think I said this at least twice already. If the recession helps it won't be through enforced poverty, because that will not cause food shortages anyway. It will help only if it can be used as a time to reevaluate lifestyles, particularly attitudes towards excessive and needless consumption. Or not.
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All right then, Islander. I'm wrong. Morbidly obese, clinically depressed people excepted too. What percentage of fat people are we up to now?
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Danielle, you were going to get bitter no matter what. Face it. And that was a true story, and the man himself said he realized he was being duplicitous, which is where the word came from. It's not the only example from my personal experience, which was all I ever claimed to be drawing from.
So yeah, fine. Duplicitous: Bad word in a fat debate. Try the other definitions I gave on, and tell me if you're less offended. Somehow I doubt it. Seems to me you're bitter to your very core about the entire position I hold. I'm a very bad man for not just doing as I'm told and thinking of fat people as sick in the head, rather than what I actually think, that they just need encouragement and support in doing the patently obvious, and even then, only if they actually ask for it.
I'm willing to bet the house that there aren't too many people who practice stomach reduction surgery on themselves.
Heh...touche. OK, people who get surgery for fatness excepted.
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Stephen, I'm not against a debate on how it is that you can convince people to stop smoking or lose weight. But I can tell you exactly what them doing that will look like. For the smokers, it will be them not smoking, and for the overweight, it will be them eating less. Anything else is crazy talk.
Which brings me to:
Dyan, you are missing the point, and I don't think you will ever get it. You're so caught up in your endocrinology you can't see that no matter what your endocrines are secreting, they aren't creating fat from nothing. That is a physical impossibility. OK, get it? It can't happen. If it did happen it would be a revolutionary event. Whoever discovered the means by which it could happen would get an instant Nobel prize. You seem to think that fat comes from air or light or something because I don't get where the hell else it comes from than the food we put in our mouths. I guess it could come from other methods of insertion into the body, but I'm going with the theory you're not advocating that.
What the hell are you advocating, actually? You're so determined to tell me that Newtonian physics doesn't apply to the heavenly fat molecules in our bodies, that you haven't shown one single thing about your vision for the end of fat in one single person. I actually do have a vision, an old vision, an obvious vision, a vision that has worked countless times. What have you got?
You may not think obesity is a problem for society, but every clinical institution and health agency on earth would tell you you're wrong.
And every person who's ever lost weight will tell me I'm right - that they did it THEMSELVES.
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Honey, we're all dying. I just don't buy into all the malarkey about how chocolate is bad for you, and 10 ciggies a day makes you a walking corpse.
I tend to agree. I've got my own poisons. They may kill me. I don't really care. I LIKE them ;-)
Look, are you reading back what you're writing?
Of course.
Could it be because for each person, it's a deeply personal thing?
Probably.
Well, you see, I don't think that, in fact, discussions about fatness, are always about what is required to lose weight.
This discussion was about that. I said time and again that there was no moral judgment at all. But it seems that many people wanted to have a completely different argument with me.
Why, you might ask, when all that is required is a bit less food in the mouth, and a bit more exercise? Because Ben, that's not how our bodies work, by and large. If we expend more energy than we consume, then logically, yes, we lose fat cells. But you see, it's never as simple as that. Does any of this make any sense to you?
It made sense right up until you said 'It's never as simple as that'. Because I can think of many a time when it was as simple as that. Our bodies do work exactly like that. What doesn't work like that is our minds. Some of our minds anyway. And that is the level I'm appealing at, incidentally. I don't hold out much hope since everyone following my advice cares not one whit for this debate, and everyone who refuses to follow it has heard it a thousand times. But you never know when a straw might break a camel's back until you hear the crack.
I just want you to understand that not all fatties are lazy, that not all adipose people are desperate to lose weight, and that, above all, as I think you may have discovered, like it or not, fat is a feminist issue (tm).
Cool, straw men all done then?
-Fatties are not lazy: Having spent untold hours in the gym with fat mates, I know this. Hence my point that the exercise doesn't help that much (although it's still a good thing to do if you like being fit and strong).
-Not all fat people are desperate to lose weight: Good for them.
-Fat is a feminist issue(tm): Fat isn't an issue at all. Unless you want it to be. So maybe you are right. -
Dyan, I've addressed everything you have to say already. If you think that physics does not come to bear, you are as wrong about that as if you thought your mental state would stop physics smashing you into the ground if you jumped off a tall building.
You are right that I don't understand the physiology of obesity, but you don't seem to grasp that despite understanding it slightly better than I do, you don't have any answers which are any different to mine. You just have a much longer way of saying it.
Well, at the risk of hectoring you, you're wrong, still wrong when you insist you're right, and you're no less wrong by labouring your mistaken point.
Aha, excellent, so you have discovered how to make energy from nothing then? I take it all you need is healthy gums and the right mental state?
Ben, you keep using that word "duplicitous" as if it did not carry huge moral freight. I am beginning to wonder if you think it means something other than "deliberately deceptive".
No, it was a mistake. Used once, and picked up on as my entire point. Which I think says a lot more about the picker uppers than it does about me. I clarified in my last post what I meant by it. Or you can say retracted if it makes you feel better.
Really? Why is this any different from any other health issue - for example, smoking? Are decisions about how and what you eat uniquely immune to influence from external factors? I don't think so.
In my opinion, in the majority of cases, no, there is no difference. Quitting is as simple as stopping smoking. Anything less is not quitting.
Oh, and by the way, Ben? I find the amount of words you have used to simply state one thing - ie I used to be fat, now I'm not, yay for me, everyone else should be like me - a bit overwhelming, really.
Well, sometimes you have to say things that are simple over and over and over. Especially when people ask you to. It's like somehow the point isn't getting through.
No, it's not like that, it IS that. The point is not getting through. This is a futile argument, at cross-purposes, as all discussions about fatness tend to be. A few people have got my point, and everyone else claims that it's either false, or trivial, or a veiled insult.
Trivial is the only criticism that I can accept there. It is a trivial point that seemed to need no clarification, but strangely, clarification kept getting asked for continually. Which is all just a sophisticated way of totally missing the point.
As for the falseness claim, which Dyan seems determined to follow, I'm waiting for the thunderous refutation of a long standing law of physics by which the world can solve any energy crisis for all time.
And the veiled insult point is the stupidest of all. I'm not even going to go there because it involves speculation about the motivations to even suggest that. All I can say is that if every discussion about fatness which leads to the well known conclusion, about what is required to lose weight, is to be considered a veiled insult, then the 'obesity problem' really will not be solved. It will be made considerably worse. I've sat here being quite careful not to insult fat people when really that kind of care is actually a total waste of time. They will be insulted no matter what I have to say on the subject. And you know what? I don't care. Anyone who is determined to be insulted by obvious advice will never be able to follow obvious advice and will obviously reach the obvious conclusion of their failure to understand the obvious.
Notice that I usually put 'obesity problem' in commas? I do this because I don't think it's a problem for society. I have no moral judgment of fat people, something that I seem to need to repeat over and over and over. I take Jackie's word for it that she doesn't care if she's eating and smoking herself to death. I don't care either, if it makes her happy, then she should do exactly that.
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Danielle, perhaps you are still mistaking me. I'm not letting anyone who is worried about how fat they are of the hook for being duplicitous about how much crap they eat. That's still the source of their fatness, and the cure is still eating less crap, which probably requires keeping honest records for quite a while. But I suggest that you have taken an extreme reading of that obvious point, adding a moral tone to it which was never there, and perhaps taking the word 'duplicitous' out of context to suggest 'outright liar', rather than 'doesn't know and doesn't care, and is totally wrong in their guesses'. Or even 'wouldn't even know where to start counting'.
There is also the question of averages. For sure, there are some people who can get fat off eating healthy food in the same quantities as people who are not fat, whilst doing the same amount of exercise. But I really don't see many people who are actually like that who are fat. Of the fat people I know, and I know a lot, they all eat a lot of crap. The sheer quantity makes the exercise almost irrelevant. I don't really see why I need to go to the academic literature to make this observation. It's blatantly obvious at every occasion I attend where eating is involved, that the fat people eat heaps more than the skinny people. I'd have to go to the academic literature to find the opposite.
So sure, I don't speak for ALL people. No one in their right mind ever does that. There are probably people with all kinds of actual illness that lead to the most bizarre outcomes consumption-wise. But I don't think that simply refusing to accurately account for how much you are eating and then not trying to cut it back, is an illness. It's normal. Everyone does it from time to time. Some people are more in need of changing that than others are.
The question is not 'how can fat people lose weight'? It's 'will they do what is necessary to lose weight'? The first question has an answer that has been obvious since time began. The second can only be answered by the individual.
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I'm glad I read this thread. I also have one of those sockets that seems to blow the efficient bulbs up, in my office. Really fast - like it only takes seconds. I thought it was faulty, but reading here has prompted me to just try a low wattage incandescent in there. It works fine. Curiously, from months of putting up with working in the dark, I've got used to it, so we'll see tonight whether I actually turn it off out of preference.
Which leads me to totally oppose the idea of banning the incandescents. They have their place. The economics of the saver-bulbs is plenty argument enough for their winning out in terms of overall lighting. If the economics are not compelling, then .... the whole idea is not compelling. But I'm not coming from a greenie angle. Indeed, not coming from a greenie angle is probably why they work.
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Um, so one solution *doesn't* fit everyone? Didn't you just change your mind about what your argument is again?
No, I think you've just seen your own straw man. Nothing about my argument is changing.
And yes, anyone who is fat will need to find their break even point to lose weight. For some people who output almost no energy at all and have incredibly efficient fat storage, that might be a tiny amount of food. But there's no two ways about it - they will either find that point, or they have to find a way to dump the excess energy. Or get fat. Those are the choices.
As for the people who are 'lucky' enough to have inefficient fat storage, yes, they can sit around eating heaps without getting fat. There's no point being bitter about that. I wouldn't care to say they are healthy in doing so. These people probably have the opposite problem, that they find it difficult to maintain weight without eating a lot. They could easily suffer from a lack of energy.
Kyle, I'm not sure what you're trying to prove.You haven't proved that it's not 'how many'. You've just shown how many, if it was cucumbers, for you. And it's a lot. Probably an impractical number. A cucumber-only diet would most likely be a very dangerous thing, and you would quickly starve (given consistent work output). Not to mention any other side-effects from lack of other nutrients.
On the flipside, you could probably eat only one extremely rich energy bar a day and survive indefinitely, even doing some work. Eat 10, and you're dumping the excess, or you're storing it in fat. But eat less, and you will get thinner. For certain. It IS about how much. That is actually the basic, and the sophistication is all about how to measure it.
And measuring it is easy. It doesn't require you to count calories, or understand anything at all about how the body turns food into energy, and at what rates. You just have to record the food that is put in, and weigh yourself. Then cut the food back until the weight begins to drop. It's scientific experimentation that everyone can do, and it's especially relevant because it's for yourself. You don't need to know how much food that would be for anyone else. That's of no relevance whatsoever. It's probably highly misleading, in fact.
To avoid the inevitable straw men, I'll note the following. This break-even point is not static. The experiment is continuous, throughout your life. If you care. And that's the big IF. If you don't, then you will never find the break even point, and you will be bewildered for your whole life how it is that you can never account for your weight. It will be a big mystery.
Furthermore, to short-cut the other straw man: Weight is not the whole story of health. I've never said that. But it is something that people are concerned about for reasons of health AND other reasons. If they seriously want to lose weight, then there's no two ways about the fact that they will have to find their break even point. Maybe that will come by changing the energy richness of the food they are eating. But EVEN IF IT DOES, they will STILL need to take account of the volume. Kyle's cucumber only diet would definitely need careful measurement, so that you would know exactly when you could stop forcing more cucumbers in and yet still maintain weight.
I've personally been in both camps. As a teenager I was dead skinny and could never gain weight. In my 20s, excess food converted into muscle and fat. Now in my 30s, with lowered exercise output, it goes mostly to fat. At this point, becoming concerned, the solution was really just as simple as cutting back the intake. I could try to raise the exercise output, but I will never get it back to the heights of my 20s, nor do I want to. I already had a well-balanced diet. It was just about the quantity.
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