response 36 of 378:

Mar 4 22:54 UTC 2006

resp:35

I first read that statistic in "The Obesity Myth" (aka "The Diet Myth")
by Paul Campos. I gave my copy away though but it was my impression that
yes, 95% (give or take depending on the study) of participants gained
back all of the weight they had lost or were actually heavier than when
they started. The current book I am reading which was writting by a
couple of eating disorder experts mentions it too but doesnt cite
specific studies, unlike Campos. 

No, I am lumping obese people in with everyone else who has something
about them that is a health risk that either would be impossible to
nearly impossible to change. I remember my health econ prof, while
talking about health studies and evidence based medicine, mentioning
that being male is a huge health risk. He said it wasnt as risky as
smoking but it was about as risky as being obese. But being male isnt
something a person can control, you say. It is a state of being and not
a behavior. But is obesity also a behavior? Or is it a state of being?
Eating a healthy diet is a behavior. Exercising is a behavior. Being fat
is not a behavior. 

response 38 of 378:

Mar 5 00:33 UTC 2006

Interesting study. Thanks for the link. 

Some comments about the study mentioned in resp:147

*It studied only two very specific types of diets. I dont know anything
about them. They do seem to be two types that involve more medical
intervention than the average self imposed diet. 

*a lot of the people in the original groups (some groups had as few as
50% of the original subjects available) that lost weight were not
available for the 4 or 5 year followup. I think the possibility for self
selection should be considered i.e. people who gained all of their
weight back would be more likely not to want to participate in the
followup. 

*There is no mention of the percentage of original subjects who had any
weight loss at all. Which means that when they say something like that
there was an average weight loss of 3.0kg (Which is around 6.5 lbs)
there is no way to know if 3.0kg is a typical amout of weight loss for
most people in the study or if a few people lost large amounts of weight
.

Mary says, "It's pretty much understood that an obese person can make a
significant improvement in health by losing just 10% of their body
weight." 

I am not sure that is true but I dont exactly doubt it either. But ok,
lets assume that you have a 300lb person who is 6ft tall and who loses
30lbs by eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly. Would you say
that person is healthy? Would you say that person is doing all they can
for their health assuming they dont engage in other high risk behaviors?
I would. But that person would still be over a hundred pounds
overweight! 

Mary says, "Heck, not gaining sounds positive, which is what probably 
would have happened had they given up and not tried to lose weight to
begin with." 

I dont believe that is true necessarily. FWIW, most of the people I know
who have stable weights dont diet. I havent gone on an "official" diet
in around five years and I havent gained any significant weight during
that time. (not counting when I gained back the weight I lost when I
went on Zoloft a couple of years ago). 

FWIW, I am not advocating that people start stuffing their faces with
pizza or french fries or snickers bars or anything like that (although I
think if someone does want to do that, they should be able to without
being subject to ridicule and shame but that is another subject). I am
saying that for a lot of people, dieting is harmful for their health.
Not all weight loss diets are healthy. Most weight loss diets fail.
Diets can lead to eating disorders. 

I am not even against weight loss, btw. I think that whenever an
overweight person with a bad diet and poor exercise habits changes those
behaviors, they will probably lose some weight. That is natural. But
they will not necessarily lose enough weight to put them into a normal
weight catagory. Some people will still be fat even if they eat a
healthy diet and exercise. 

response 40 of 378:

Mar 5 01:07 UTC 2006

at first, i was going to read mary's post, but then i realized it wasn't about
me.  :(

response 42 of 378:

Mar 5 12:41 UTC 2006

Re: 38 The research looked at two different types of diets, not really 
specific diets.  VLEDs are very low energy diets (low calorie) diets and 
HBEs are diets where the Harris-Benedict equation is used to calculate a 
person's specific caloric needs and then setting a caloric goal just under 
maintainance requirements.

 "But ok, lets assume that you have a 300lb person who is 6ft
  tall and who loses 30lbs by eating a healthy diet and exercising 
  regularly. Would you say that person is healthy?"

I would say that person is healthier.

 "I am saying that for a lot of people, dieting is harmful for their 
  health. Not all weight loss diets are healthy. Most weight loss diets 
  fail. Diets can lead to eating disorders."

Agreed, not all diets are safe.  But for the most part people don't tend
to tolerate reckless diets for long so they don't damage their bodies as
much as they give themselves the message they are failures and it makes
it harder to try again.  And if someone weighs ~300 pounds they already
have an eating disorder. 

response 44 of 378:

Mar 5 15:34 UTC 2006

resp:39 - I would consider such a diet a success too!

resp:42 I think I will have to disagree with you. I think it is possible
for a person to be overweight and healthy. In fact, in my own family, my
severely obese grandmother has been healthy her whole life (until
recently) and is currently in her nineties. I think that when you get
into the over 100lbs catagory, there are some weight related health
risks but because diets fail so frequently, it causes more harm than
good to tell people to lose weight. It is better to recommend a healthy
diet and to encourage exercise. 

Here is an exerpt form Laura Fraser's book _Losing It_ where she talks
about a study done at Cornell.

"The health risks of being underweight haven't been calculated into any
of these equations... In a 1996 study, David Levitsky and his colleagues
at Cornell University analyzed 60 previous studies involving weight and
early deaths, involving 357,000 men and 249,000 women (many times more
than the Nurses' Health Study), and found that the health risks of
moderate obesity were exaggerated, whereas the risks of being
underweight have been neglected. For women, there was little
relationship between weight and early death at all. For men, after
controlling for confounding factors such as smoking and disease, the
data showed . . . those men who were very underweight were as likely to
die early as people who were seriously obese. For everyone between the
extremes, weight wasn't a substantial factor in their death. "The health
risks of being moderately underweight are comparable to that of being
quite overweight and look more serious than most people realize,"
Levitsky said."

Here is an exerpt from an article in The New England Journal of Medicine
written by Jerome P Kassirer, MD and Marcia Angell, MD.

"Given the enormous social pressure to lose weight, one might suppose
there is clear and overwhelming evidence of the risks of obesity and the
benefits of weight loss. Unfortunately, the data linking overweight and
death, as well as the data showing the beneficial effects of weight
loss, are limited, fragmentary, and often ambiguous."


I also do not necessarily think that every person who is overweight or
even severely overweight has an eating disorder at least not in the way
I think of eating disorders. I think anyone who eats when they are
hungry, eats reasonably healthy foods,  and who stops eating when they
are no longer hungry probably doesnt have an eating disorder. Of course
if one defines an eating disorder as having any eating habits that lead
to be one being fat than any fat person would have an eating disorder by
definition. 

However, I will grant you that it is probably pretty hard to find
someone who weighs over 300lbs who doesnt have some sort of messed up
ideas about eating. Partially because I doubt you can find anyone who is
that overweight who hasnt tried just about every diet in the universe.
And partially because of the way our culture treats obesity as a moral
issue. If a person is given the message that being fat is a moral
failing (and trust me, every fat person gets this message in one way or
another), and that no one who eats a healthy diet and who exercises can
possibly be fat, then every bite of food gets questioned and a person
might find they have food issues. 

resp:43 - I think there is a lot of room for improvement in my own diet.
But, my diet isnt totally bad. I eat a lot of fruit and veggies. I never
have been a big fan of pop and have recently pretty much cut it out of
my diet totally because I have decided not to eat high fructose corn
syrup. I did buy a pop imported from Mexico and made with sugar last
week though so it isnt that I dont drink it. On a typical day I will
have oatmeal for breakfast although twice a week, I have pancakes and
sausage. For lunch, I'll have something like baked chicken and a side of
veggies from the work cafeteria. Dinner is often pasta with garlic and
olive oil and maybe some parmesan cheese and a salad or something.
Sometimes I have toast and goat cheese and sliced fruit. I used to eat a
lot of processed food for dinner (i.e. frozen dinners) but I have been
getting away from that. I usually take an apple to work in case I get
hungry. I snack on fruit a lot and veggies less often. Sometimes I will
eat sweets in the evening. Not every day but often enough that I am
probably eating too much sugar.  Until I hurt my knee in January, I took
the dogs on a half hour - 45 minute walk 3 or 4 days a week which is
more exercise than a lot of thin people get but not exactly a huge
amount of exercise either. 

FWIW, I probably have an eating disorder although on the spectrum of
eating disorders, I would say that I have a mild case. I binge once or
twice a year, usually as a response to stress. I have found that I eat
on a schedule more than as a response to actual hunger. I respond to
external cues about when to stop eating (i.e. I clean my plate) . I did
get a book recently about eating disorders and I am following their plan
for overcoming it. I am not totally sure about all of their advice yet
but I have decided to give it six months. Even if I do happen to
normalize my relationship with food, I dont expect that I will lose much
weight. 

response 46 of 378:

Mar 5 19:20 UTC 2006

http://www4.army.mil/ocpa/read.php?story_id_key=8157

Just amazing!

response 48 of 378:

Mar 5 22:01 UTC 2006

I can imagine that thin people don't fare as well in colder climates.

response 50 of 378:

Mar 5 22:20 UTC 2006

They bloat up and smell like old bologna.  I saw it happen to a fat Iraqi
Republican Guard general's body.

response 52 of 378:

Mar 6 05:22 UTC 2006

I agree fully with Lynne on society's degrading fat people.  I have been on
the receiving end (overhearing comments about look at the woman stuffing the
ice cream/candy bar/dessert into her mouth).  I hurts.  Especially when the
one type that they were rather obvious and loud was when I felt like having
an ice cream cone (single scoop rather than the wanted double or triple) as
a small treat after a month of very healthy eating, good exercise and a scale
showing a 10 pound loss.  What was really agravating was that she was pointing
it out to her child while the two of them were also "stuffing ice cream" into
their mouths.  She felt that it was ok for them to have an ice cream treat
on a hot summer day, but that I shouldn't be allowed the same thing.  I figure
that if I eat right at least 5-6 days a week, let alone a whole month, I
should be allowed to have the right to eat an occasional ice cream, piece of
cake or pie, a cookie or two, or a candy bar on day 7 or 30.

Eating healthy doesn't mean cut it out all together, that just leads to
binging.  It means "in moderation."  Having dessert or a sweet or a handfull
of chips once every week or two will not harm you, it won't even mess up with
weight loss if it is a small treat.  If you deny unhealthy foods all the
time it just leads to overeating them when you finally do give in to them.
And you will give in to them at some point.  People like that woman and her
kid kind of re-enforce the what the hell, it doesn't matter what I do people
are against me anyway, I might as well forget about this whole healthy eating
thing and eat what I want when I want.

response 54 of 378:

Mar 6 17:16 UTC 2006

Along these same lines, NPR is reporting this morning on a study where
heavy teenagers replaced high-calorie beverages with no-calorie options
and it supposedly made a difference of a pound a month.

response 56 of 378:

Mar 6 17:42 UTC 2006

I heard that story on NPR too and it doesnt surprise me one bit. It 
kind of makes sense that the body processes liquids differently than 
solids (the solids, after all, have fiber). Since I decided to give up 
high fructose corn syrup, I have found that it is in more drinks than 
one would imagine. It is often added to fruit juice which I think is 
just wrong. 

Unfortunately for me (or fortunately for me depending on how you look 
at it), I cant lose weight by giving up sugary drinks because I dont 
drink them regularly. I will admit though that the reason I dont drink 
them has more to do with being cheap than because I dont like them. Why 
would I go buy a Coke when water is FREE???

response 58 of 378:

Mar 6 18:21 UTC 2006

resp:52 Personally, I think that it is ok for anyone to make any 
choices about their own health that they would like to make and I think 
it is disgusting that someone would dare make a comment about someone 
else's choices in public. It doesnt matter if that is your first ice 
cream cone in a year or your 50th one that day...it is NONE OF THEIR 
BUSINESS. 

And to do it in front of their children! Well, that is sad. It reminds 
me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine. She was talking about 
how, now that she is a parent, she has to watch what she says around 
her kids. In her case, she was worried because sometimes her husband 
makes fun of fat people and gay people. She said she is worried because 
you just never know how a kid will grow up. And she worries that if her 
kid grows up and is gay or fat, that it will be really terrible to not 
only have the main stream culture against one but one's own parent. 

resp:57 I am reading a book written by a couple of experts on eating 
disorders right now. They pretty much say that food is not like other 
things to which a person might have an addiction because it is so 
necessary for our bodies. They talk a lot about eating foods that you 
want and never depriving yourself. 

They talk about some study done at the University of Toronto where they 
had two groups (People currently on a diet and non-dieters). They 
divided those groups into three additional groups. The subjects where 
told that they were doing some kind of ice cream study. One group was 
just sent in to eat ice cream. Another group was given a milk shake to 
drink before going in to eat ice cream. The third group was given two 
milkshakes to drink before going in. Then they measured how much ice 
cream each group ate. The non-dieters ate the most ice cream when they 
were sent into the room without having had a shake first, then less ice 
cream if they had one milkshake and finally even less ice cream when 
they had had two milkshakes. But the dieters had the opposite thing 
happen. When they went in without having had the milkshake first, they 
ate the least amount of ice cream. If they had a milkshake first, they 
ate more ice cream, and if they had two milkshakes first, they ate even 
more ice cream. The theory is that if your body is in starvation mode 
(which is what happens when one goes on a diet), when it finally gets 
some food, there are powerful forces that make one want to eat more. 
Now of course, no one is holding a gun to anyone's head and forcing 
them to eat but most people will eat more following a period of 
deprivation. 

Anyways, these eating disorder specialists say that one has to get over 
the idea that certain foods arent allowed. And then, once one does 
that, one is more likely to choose to eat a salad or yogurt, or 
whatever other healthy foods that people eat. Partially because most 
people want to be healthy but also because healthy foods make a 
person's body feel better than unhealthy ones. I guess the difference 
is that eventually one is suppose to think "I can have that ice cream 
cone but I would rather have this piece of fruit" as opposed to "I cant 
have the ice cream cone because it is bad but instead will have this 
fruit because maybe eating fruit will make me not want the ice cream so 
much"

I have decided to give this approach a try since I have tried so many 
other things and failed. If this doesnt work for me, than that is 
fine...I will move on to something else. 

response 60 of 378:

Mar 6 20:54 UTC 2006

Lynne, if health care and related costs are taken into consideration, a
person's eating habits are just much a matter of public concern as a person's
smoking habits.