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The Mathematics of Obesity
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that Carson C. Chow, an MIT-trained mathematician and physicist, has taken a new look at America's obesity epidemic and found that a food glut is behind America's weight problem, with the national obesity rate jumping from 20 percent to over 30 percent since 1970. 'Beginning in the 1970s, there was a change in national agricultural policy. Instead of the government paying farmers not to engage in full production, as was the practice, they were encouraged to grow as much food as they could,' says Chow. 'With such a huge food supply, food marketing got better and restaurants got cheaper. The low cost of food fueled the growth of the fast-food industry. If food were expensive, you couldn't have fast food.' Chow and mathematical physiologist Kevin Hall created a mathematical model of a human with hundreds of equations, boiled it down to one simple equation, and then plugged in all the variables — height, weight, food intake, exercise. The slimmed-down equation proved to be a useful platform for answering a host of questions. For example, huge variations in your daily food intake will not cause variations in weight, as long as your average food intake over a year is about the same. Unfortunately, another finding is that weight change, up or down, takes a very, very long time. Chow has posted an interactive version of the model on the web where people can plug in their information and learn how much they'll need to reduce their intake and increase their activity to lose."
Fruit is the problem - it's full of sugar. I suppose low-sugar fruits are OK then.
3500 Cal in a pound of fat. This means a caloric deficit of ~500 Cal a day is sufficient to lose one pound of fat per week. Of course, this doesn't work out so simply, which is why the equation provided here is so nice.
A lot of the weight lost can be from water -- not just fat. But claims that you can lose 10 lbs. of fat in a week? Complete bullshit.
It's everywhere and you don't need it. Drink only water and don't buy any food that has sugar (fructose excluded) in it.
You DON'T need it. You like it because your are an addicted junky.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Why is this appropriate for Slashdot, for the math, or for the obesity?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/06/why-the-campaign-to-stop-america-s-obesity-crisis-keeps-failing.html
According to this its a change of diet (as in the promoted healthy diet is anything but) in the 1970's and way too many sugars.
Fruit isn't so bad, because it has fiber -- this keeps part of the sugar in your bowls, until it gets refined by bacteria and farted. Plus you need the vitamin. Fruit juice is another story: might as well drink beer.
Some videos on sugar from the UC:
http://www.uctv.tv/skinny-on-obesity/
More than that even, weight change can go up and down quite drastically in a short period of time, so I'm not sure what the summary is on about. This looks like a case of "mathematical models not accurately representing reality" I reckon.
Far too many Americans are simply not active. This is compounded by the fact that while not active they have easy access to food that it too conveniently packaged for consumption. I love the people at work who blame medical conditions for their weight while consuming a whole bag of chips or having that bagel covered in cream cheese. People don't know the calories they are consuming and woefully underestimate the amount of them in the foods they eat.
So sugar is only part of the problem. I know lots of people who don't eat cookies, drink soda, or the like, and yet they little walking cubed shaped individuals. All because of the mass amount of carb and fat filled foods they consume.
Gone are the long days and long weeks of manual labor. Instead most Americans sit during their workday and spend only a third of their week at most working and traveling too and from work. I am not declaring that working only forty hours or less is bad; but lets be honest those we know who do more tend to get further; but it did leave many people with way too much time on their hands and they don't know what to do with it.
You can maintain a healthy weight and eat some truly trashy food. As part of a diet and exercise contest we have at work I set out to prove that some seriously trashy breakfast foods could be consumed while losing weight as long as the diet and exercise balanced out. This meant items like donuts or muffins with coffee and cream from Dunkin in the morning every work day for two weeks. Yet followed by sensible lunches and dinners which most of us kept logs for. Those who logged their food showed the most loss. That is the real key, knowing what you eat.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Just so we can get them out of the way:
"I tried diet X and lost Y pounds, thus clearly establishing that substance Z is causing everyone to become fat."
"Moral failing Q is the real culprit! We need government policy R! I have no proof!"
"I'm from country C and we have no fat people. You Americans are fat, and I have a ridiculous accent!"
of course, if you exercise as part of the lifestyle change, you'll be putting on muscle, which weighs a lot more than the fat you're losing.
I've just run the simulator in TFA on my known variables for the last year (I got diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and had to make some very controlled, measured, changes to my lifestyle which got me back to being healthy).
It said I'd have lost over 30Kg over that year. I actually lost just under 10Kg, but went from being unable to run for more than 100m to completing a 12Km fun-run and confidently entering for a half-marathon in 3 months' time. I also lost about 6inches off my waistline (as in I gained a waist!).
Also, humans are not controlled by variables and equations. The equations describe an average person, who doesn't exist. They're useful approximations, but in the end just approximations.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Sugar IS indeed a poison, like alcohol...in fact, alcohol and sugar both get turned into FAT, which is killing us because we eat too damn much of it.
Anyway, on a personal note, I have cut out sugary drinks (no sodas) I only allow a few coke zeros (yes I know they are also poison, but I still drink a couple a month). Similarly, cut out fast food, white bread, beef, anything processed, juice, salt. Cook everything yourself then you know what goes in it. Eat natural foods. Once you know how to cook, it will be better than any restaurant anyway. You can always use the freshest ingredients. Anyway, eating healthy and being a normal weight (got a bmi of 21.5, but still fat!) is easy to achieve with a little knowledge and exercise.
Neither preservatives nor flavor enhancers cause obesity. They may be unhealthy to eat for other reasons but when it comes to overweight problems it is calories that count.
Football Odds
Want to find the fattest people in america? they all have two things in common.
1 - they eat fast food constantly.
2 - when they are not eating fast food, they are eating pre-processed food like TV dinners, or other ready to eat foods.
I have yet to find any obese people that are eating fresh fruits and veggies. The crap in cans does not count as that all has added salt and sugar.
It's simple. eat only fresh meat, veggies and fruits. But you have to prepare it yourself, or it must come from a restaurant that starts with ONLY fresh ingredients.
Guarantee you will lose weight if that is the only change you make to your diet.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Baking your own bread makes HUGE changes in diet. Most bread in the store has a metric buttload of sugars added simply because they can. home made bread has t he minimum needed and it is usually consumed by the yeast.
Want to make that baked bread better? slow rise in the fridge overnight. the yeast will consumer more sugars and add in a lot more flavors. Sourdoughs are the best for you.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
From my personal experience, I recently lost a lot of weight. The biggest shift I made to burn off fat was to drastically reduce how much grain I consumed weekly. I exercised about the same amount during the time, but the weight loss tracked pretty closely to my change in diet.
... that the advent of Television (watching movies together, cartoons, simpsons, etc) was much more damaging. How many people are glued to TV or a screen in case of the net these days?
The truth is our minds find it easier to find positively stimulating things on screens then being active.
Take an orange and eat it. You feel full, it tasted good. Take a glass of orange juice (an average size glass can have the equivalent of three oranges, thus three times the calories AND with most of the fiber removed). A glass of juice has the same amount of calories as a can of COKE.
Apparently (IANA Dietician), some fruit contain more Fructose than Glucose, which makes the fructose load more problematic. See for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose_malabsorption, which has lists. Fructose is further problematic in that it chelates some other nutrients, like Zinc and Iron, removing them from the digestive tract and preventing them from being absorbed (can't find the paragraph on Wikipedia anymore, might be wrong.)
There's another article (http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/PRN-this-is-your-brain-on-sugar-ucla-233992.aspx) that did the rounds this morning about the negative effects of fructose on learning and memory.
Of course, this article also mentions omega-3 fatty acids, which are sorely lacking in the modern western diet that relies heavily on wheat, corn, soy and sunflower, as well as on meats, dairy and eggs "grain fed" on these crops instead of natural green pasture. This lack (or rather the imbalance between omega-3 and omega-6 content in modern food because of this) also contributes to obesity (and other "lifestyle diseases" like cancer and diabetes).
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
>>The obesity epidemic is most likely caused by an endocrine disruptor that affects many or all mammals.
Yes, the endocrine disruptor is called "McDonalds".
Whenever it is introduced to a country, the obesity rates skyrocket.
Other factors factored in, like activity, Campbell found surprisingly that many Chinese actually consume about 30% more calories than Americans, yet they had incredibly less overweight people. Again, he didn't compare a sedentary American to a field worker in China, he compared them to an office worker in China to make it fair.
So it wasn't just calories, it is the types of food. Processed foods and animal foods are to blame. China actually proves to be an excellent place to study because they have a wide range of groups that live the same way, eat the same way, and live in the same place most of their lives. Campbell found that the more animal foods and processed foods they ate, the more disease and obesity the had. This isn't just junk science, either. You can do the research for yourself. As third world countries get wealthier and adopt a western-style diet, they also adopt western disease rates and obesity. It is not just their genes. If they move here and start eating like us, they get our diseases at the same rates (or higher). There is nothing special about these people other than their diets.
Our diets combined with our lifestyles are killing us here...and if you want to cut your chances of cancer, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses down, the solution is simple. All you have to do is eat like you live in a 3rd world country. Less animal products and processed foods, more whole foods. It's that simple.
I do disagree with Campbell that you *have* to become a vegetarian. They do eat meat in China, just way less of it. But his studies on people that reversed massive heart disease just by becoming vegetarians is fairly impressive.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
I think I found this here like 5 years ago and I've kept it since.
http://muller.lbl.gov/TRessays/22-ThePhysicsDiet.htm
I've emailed Richard last year by the way and he's still the weight he achieved in that article 9 years later.
FWIW: I'm an endomorph who DOES believe that some people hold weight easier, crave carbs and sugar more than others and have a lower BMR. However science is science - these things only make up a small fraction of the work. 95%+ is simply putting in the effort.
I can also confirm that adjusting diet is far, far far more rewarding than excercise for weight loss, despite other health benefits. Just as his article says.
Lots of meat, almost NO carbs (under 50g a day) tons of green veggies. Lost 11 lb in the first week and around 5 lb/week afterward. I will reach my and since I cook all the stuff I eat, maintenance is easy since good habits are now a given. Grok on!
This is news?
When I was a kid, and McDonald's were few and far between (early 70s) a McDonald's "meal" was a hamburger, fries, and drink.
That's a single hamburger, what is now a small fries, and a small beverage. That was a satisfying full meal for an adult. Is that even a kids meal any more?
Another example, I believe it was mentioned by a poster on slashdot. He was remodeling a 100yr-old farmhouse and he hadn't planned to, but found he had to rip out the cabinets as they were too small - the only plates that fit in the cupboard were the 9" (small) dinner plates, not our today-common 12" dinner plates.
Finally, I was talking with a friend that runs a restaurant. I asked him why their portion sizes were so massive. His response was that it was to camouflage the prices with extra food, since food prices were cheap - it's the labor that drives costs. If he offered a moderately-sized meal, it might cost $8. If he was to DOUBLE the amount of food on that plate, it would cost perhaps +$1. Conversely, cutting the amount of food in half would only save $1. Consumers are far more willing to pay $9 for a GIANT pile of food (they feel they're getting a bargain), than $7 for 1/4 the food. On the latter, they feel they're being ripped off.
-Styopa
I suspect one contributing factor is that in the past (100+ years ago) food simply wasn't as abundant as it is today, not to mention that in the 19th century you couldn't just pop a microwave pizza weighing in at 1200+ kCal, wait two minutes and then eat. Cooking took time. Just look at candy, on my way home from work I pass by a grocery store, right next to the checkout they have candy, large 200 gram candybars each packing 1200 kCal or so worth of energy, and they're being sold for less than SEK 20 (~$2.8), even if your income is low that means an hour's worth of work will buy you a lot more than the energy you need in a day.
I don't even want to know how much energy is in proper pizza from a pizzeria but I doubt it's less than 2000 kCal...
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I think you are just looking at a selective sample. My wife and son have health issues, so nearly everything we eat is home-cooked from fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats. I'm still pretty large.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Really? I spent a bit of time in the USA, in a variety of states, and I didn't find anywhere where it would have been difficult to afford to live on food cooked from fresh ingredients spending only a few dollars a day. Cooking a meal for a family would cost a lot less than taking them all to McDonald's.
I don't know where this idea that fresh fruit and vegetables are expensive comes from. They're the cheapest way of getting food, as long as you have time to cook (and 10-20 minutes a day is enough for that if you don't do anything too complicated).
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The energy balance equation of, food eaten equals fat stored minus exercise, is used in a very misleading way. Most assume you can manipulate it yourself by eating less and exercising more. But that ignores entirely the body's own control system. There are some lab rats that were starved to death by underfeeding, in an experiment, and whilst they starved to death they were gaining fat and died obese. Why? Because they were also receiving insulin and this told their bodies to store fat no matter what, even if they were not being fed, so they converted their muscle and organs into fat and stored that instead. They died of weak heart mucles and heart failure.
It is like a child eats extra to grow but he doesn't grow because he's eating extra, he eats extra and grows because the body's hormones are controlling things and telling the body to eat more and grow. It is all about hormones. Why do diabetics take insulin? To CONTROL their blood sugar. That's what insulin does. Insulin decides that you have to lower that blood sugar. And how does it control it and get it out of the blood stream? It tells fat cells to open up and absorb it. That's what "lowers" your blood sugar. The insulin decides to store it. And as it is storing it, your normal metabolism is still hungry. So the energy equation is used wrong. You don't get fat because you overeat, you overeat because you're getting fat.
What drives up insulin levels beyond normal, beyond what our 100,000 year old bodies are used to? Carbohydrates. You can eat fat and that'll be converted to energy and you'll want to move more. But eat carbs in the massive unusual quantities that we do, like pasta, pizza, bread, potatoes, and sugared drinks, and it all turns to sugar and insulin has to be produced in huge quantities to deal with it. Your normal blood sugar is one teaspoon of sugar. That's it. That's all we're made to deal with. So insulin goes nuts trying to deal with all that "healthy slow release energy" and eventually you get obese and you get diabetes.
The food pyramid was a huge shift towards grains (bird food) and away from fat. The fat / heart disease / lipid hypothesis was wrong 50 years ago and by committee "we have to tell the politicians what to regulate even if we aren't sure ourselves" consensus opinion ended up dominating and it is still wrong today. Eating a low fat high carb diet is a recipe not only for obesity but also depression. Just try switching to a genuine low carb high fat diet (see Sweden's latest magazine, "LCHF") and try it for yourself. After a month carbs just don't look like food anymore. Sleep better, feel lighter, feel satiated all the time (fat is filling, whilst carbs increase appetite or make you sleepy) and have more mental clarity. YMMV but that's been my experience to my surprise.
There are so many things wrong with the current dogma around the food pyramid that you have to undo many issues before you can wade your way to some clarity. But the best thing is to actually try it for a period, and see if what the proponents of LCHF and paleo say is true. Your own body can tell you.
Go and check what that research about bad fat and heart disease was actually based on, how they've repeatedly failed to show in good controlled studies that eating low fat is good for you, or that counting calories and exercising lets you lose wight. Those studies keep failing but the advocates keep hoping the next big study will show it. The start in rise in obesity coincided with the start of that advice about fat being the devil and to make most of your food plate carbs (sugar) instead. It has been a massive experiment on the public and it has gone catastrophically wrong, but rather than say that they just call people weak willed and lazy. All those carbs and sugar simply drive up your hunger whilst storing it as fat and keeping you tired.
First of all, we've known cheap calories were the problem for at least 20 years. For most of the world, and most of human history, one of the most vital statistics economists measure is calories-per-person. When you graph things like that against, say, economic freedom, there's a clear, strong relationship.
So one would expect our society to have the most calories per person.
However...we are also very sedentary, which we weren't in the past. So one could also argue we just don't move enough, which is to say, we don't move much at all.
3000 calories a day makes you weigh 270 pounds. In the past, you were a wirey 170. So "cheap calories" isn't the whole story, not by a long shot.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I'm tired of this lie. My wife went on a health food kick 2 years ago. We've pretty much stopped eating out. Our food costs have dropped 20%. We're not eating fancy snobby "healthy" food, just real food. Do you really believe that $7x3 for meals at McD's is affordable, but $4 for a pound of hamburger, $.50 for 3 fresh potatoes, and 2 cups of flour for buns costs more than $21? Really? Add a head of lettuce, a whole bottle of dressing, and the oil to fry the potatoes, and I'm still well under your $21 "can't afford to eat healthy" meal.
If you don't have the time to cook this simple meal, the you're lying to yourself. You're just lying to yourself. The money you saved buys you an hour a day of labor if you're anywhere near the minimum wage. And that's a fat western meal. If you think a little about eating decently, instead of just replicating mcdonalds, you can do so amazingly cheaply. Rice? Cheap. Flour? Cheap. frozen veggies? Pretty damn cheap, considering. You don't need organic arugula in January to be healthy.
Sugar is a needed and necessary nutrient for our bodies. But, much like anything else, the poison is in the dose. For example, our bodies are mostly made up of water. Good old H2O, necessary for all life on Earth. But drink too much water in too short an amount of time and you can die from electrolyte imbalance. By and large it's the dose, not the substance that is poisonous.
Our bodies were designed to take in small amounts of natural sugars from fruits and vegetables. Large amounts of sugars will, as you said, be converted to fat. and can make you lethargic and ill-feeling.
Ironically, (at least in the US) Most soft drinks and other "sugary" foods don't actually have any sugar in them. Instead they use a far more dangerous substance, High Fructose Corn Syrup, or HFCS.
HFCS is a cheap (due to corn subsidies) easy to transport, slow to spoil, and highly soluble in water, making it an ideal sugar substitute for much of the food industry. The downside is that HFCS in any significant amount causes the human body to react in some very adverse ways. HFCS causes thirst, liver damage, diabetes and as has been recently discovered by researchers at Princeton University causes extreme weight gain and obesity far in excess of what simple sugar can do. In particular, HFCS causes weight gain in the belly and torso. HFCS also causes significant increases in the amount of triglycerides in the bloodstream, a major factor in heart disease, the number one killer of adults in the US.
So it's good that you are cutting out the soft drinks and other "sugary" things, but unless you live somewhere that doesn't use HFCS (South America, parts of Europe, China) make sure you are blaming the right thing. otherwise, i think your diet change is a sound one. Lots of fresh meats, fresh vegetables, small amounts of fruit and grains and an absolute minimum of "sweet snacks". (This is basically the "maintenance" portion of the Atkins diet, btw.)
Also, if you live in the US, be sure to join a group lobbying for the repeal of corn subsidies of all kinds. It's the subsidies that make HFCS so cheap. eliminate them, and the food industry will go back to using much more benign sugar.
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Yeah that's flat-out horseshit. I eat a prepared lunch at Wegman's every weekday, for about $5.00. Buying the ingredients would be even cheaper.
You know what makes you fat? As the article says, input vs. output. It's not "oh god sugar" or "oh god fat" or "oh god carbs". You're eating more than you're expending. More than you need. That's it. So when you see that poor bastard that weighs 350 lbs? That poor bastard is spending way more money than he needs to. And if it's on fast food, it's more expensive than it would be to get decent stuff at the grocery store.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
To lose weight you have to consume fewer calories or burn more of them. Which makes it sound easy, which it is not.
Sucrose and glucose cause insulin spikes which cause fat to be stored. If you've not eaten fat within 2 hours either side, they just make you hungry, but aren't a direct cause of becoming fat.
Caffeine seems to block fat storage to some degree as well as help you burn those calories.
Being inactive probably also causes fat to be stored. Those calories have to go somewhere.
4) There is an obesity epidemic among other mammals, including zoo animals that are on controlled diets.
Not much of an obesity problem with the same breeds of animals in the wild though is there? Zoo animals get fat because they are not living as nature intended. ie. not working for their food / not being hunted for food.
Physically, buying fresh food is cheaper. Time wise it is more expensive.
My wife and I have saved a ton of money by making our own bread, pasta sauce, soups, etc. We only eat fresh fruits, veggies, and meats and have saved tons.
However, the time investment to make a jar of salsa and can it, or to make a large pot of pasta sauce or chicken stock for the next month or two is probably out of the range of time a single mother with two jobs has.
Chow, an MIT-trained mathematician and physicist
The fact it's written by Chow is making me hungry.
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Coming from Germany with its huge culture around sourdough bread I was shocked when I shopped for bread in a Californian supermarket for the first time. It was late already, I just came from the airport and I just wanted to grab something to make a sandwich. When I unpacked the stuff and took the first bite, it was... just horrible. When I studied the packaging, I learned that they obviously added a metric fuckton of molasses to the bread. What... the...??? The stuff was sweeter than some of the cakes I was used to.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
They may be unhealthy to eat for other reasons but when it comes to overweight problems it is calories that count.
No, it's really carbs that count. Specifically refined carbs (sugar, HFCS, white bread, white rice, etc).
Seriously, since switching to a high-fat, medium-high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet I've been consistently losing 5-10lbs a week even though my calorie count is higher than it was previously.
I'd highly recommend reading Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes and The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson.
It really boils down to insulin. When insulin levels are high, you store fat. When insulin levels are low, you burn fat. Avoiding things that cause insulin responses (simple carbs, artificial sweeteners, etc) results in losing fat. As long as you eat plenty of non starchy vegetables (ie, kale, spinach, collard greens, cauliflower, asparagus, etc) you'll get more than enough nutrition.
Cooking a meal for a family would cost a lot less than taking them all to McDonald's.
I don't know where this idea that fresh fruit and vegetables are expensive comes from. They're the cheapest way of getting food, as long as you have time to cook (and 10-20 minutes a day is enough for that if you don't do anything too complicated).
This is one of the most annoying and common fallacies in this whole discussion.
Did you grow up in a house in the suburbs, with a functioning kitchen, at least one parent working only 9-5 and a real grocery store within walking/car/bus distance? Congratulations, you had a better food situation growing up than 60% of people in the united states.
I have a nice house in the suburbs, a kitchen with a functioning stove, a car that works every time I turn the key in the ignition, a fridge and freezer that work, a decent set of pots and pans, all the right knives, a cutting board, all the right spoons, a whole rack full of spices, an understanding of cooking given to me by my homemaker motherm and I can afford all this stuff on only one job.
It costs me $5-$10 to prepare a decent dinner for my family... But i interact with $400,000 worth of stuff most people don't have to do it. The most significant of which is priceless: My upbringing in a household where people were educated, mildly successful, and proficient at cooking.
1.) My post was refuting the claim that junk food is cheaper than good food. Wegman's is a grocery store that also makes food cafeteria style, and my bloodwork after changing my diet to go to lunch there will attest to the healthiness of the food. I know McDonald's is terrible food. I was saying there's no economic reason to go there.
2.) The 510 calorie count for a quarter-pounder includes two slices of cheese, which you didn't include in your home-cooked version. There are 70 calories in a slice of cheese. You don't have 146 calories to make up, you have 6. There is no extra crap, there is exactly the correct amount of crap. You don't have to resort to either magic sauce or Hollywood accounting of cheese to make the argument that fast food is awful for you.
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The things that will make you fat:
Wheat
Corn (including HFCS)
Rice
Oats
Potatoes
Sugar
Too much Dairy
Too many fruits
Things that won't make you fat are on this shopping list. 80-90% of what goes in your mouth should be animal proteins and fats and lots of vegetables.
Look at the list of things that makes people fat and think about fast food.
Any burger/sandwich place: Fries or chips, Soda pop, and the bun on any burger or sandwich are a recipe for weight gain. Get a salad and the insides of any burger/sandwich, and drink water, and your weight will move toward a healthy equilibrium.
Fried food: What gets you fat is not the oil that it's fried in, it's the breading on the outside. Get something unbreaded.
Pizza: All kinds of bad things about the crust.
Mexican: Tortillas and chips (plus Chipotle's rice) are the killers. Get a taco salad but skip the chips/shell. Have salsa, meat, lettuce, sour cream, cheese, guacamole and enjoy a supper healthy meal.
Or as you recommend, get some unprocessed meat, add 2-3 vegetables, and you can't go wrong.
The items on that top list down to and including sugar all act like sugar in the blood stream. Anybody who really wants to learn about weight gain should go look at the website the shopping list is on, marksdailyapple.com.
Mark also recommends moderate exercise totaling about 1 hour a week (1 20 minute cardio, 1 20 minute weight carrying, and a small amount of functional exercises like squats and pushups) to stay fit as opposed to the 30 minutes a day. He does recommend averaging 10,000 steps a day. Although Mark recommends the exercise, he says that weight gain or loss is 80% what you put into your body and 20% activity level.
Check out the Friday success stories to see how others have benefited from this lifestyle.
His name is Chow? How apt.
You also have the factors of above average income workers are less likely to need multiple jobs to bring in their income (meaning more free time to cook), less likely to be a single parent (again time to cook), and most importantly they have the luxury of food price competition within transportation distance (meaning lower price foods).
Sorry, but this is wrong on so many levels. You see, while you get energy from stored fat, it is a quite energy intensive process itself if fat should be the main energy source. You can experience the "hitting the wall" effect yourself after a long endurance training. When the glycogen storage is depleted, the body switches completely to fat burning and suddenly you don't have any energy to go on and breathe much faster, might even faint.
Fat burning is meant to be an additional energy source, not the primary one. The reason why fat is stored is:
1) you have eaten too much food. Otherwise the fat would be all used up
2) You have got far too much fat mixed with carbohydrates in the food. Well, duh, the body takes what it can use right away and stores what it can use only with some effort.
Good grief, if this isn't a fantastic example of missing the forest for the trees....you have it almost exactly wrong.
Fat metabolism IS supposed to be the primary metabolic pathway. It is ideal for fueling the basal metabolic processes and low-level everyday activity. Why on earth would all mammals evolve the ability to store excess energy as saturated fat if the body wasn't fully prepared to run itself on that stored energy? Carrying around that excess weight is a hindrance, and if you have to have carbs present to make use of it I just don't see how it would confer the type of survival advantage that would bake it into the basic structure of our metabolism.
Taken a step further - what fuels mammals during hibernation?
If you look at the 'calorie requirement' calculators, the basal processes + everyday activity will always be the overwhelming majority of the calorie expenditure for a person during the day. Calories burned through exercise is substantially lower in all but the most extreme endurance athletes. this should be a pretty clear indication as to what is the more important metabolic process.
Your example of 'hitting the wall' during glycolytic exercise is also backwards. High-intensity glycolytic exercise is the EXCEPTION, not the rule. It is an activity that ISN"T supposed to happen frequently, and when it does happen it isn't supposed to be of a long duration. There is a very good reason we have only evolved the ability to store a fairly limited amount of glycogen - because historically, any more simply wasn't needed.
Taken together, IMHO these clearly illustrate why the low-carb/HIIT regimen is actually very successful as a strategy. Fat fuels your daily activity, with carbs 'topping up' the fairly minimal depletion of glycogen that occurs during the high-intensity activity. No one approach is ideal for everyone due to personal history etc, but there is a lot of science behind the low-carb/HIIT approach that very easily explains why it works well.
Eating less is quite difficult when you end up spending 3/4 of your day trying to ignore gnawing hunger.
First off, standard "correlation is not causality" caveat.
Second, obesity is a disease driven by the hormone insulin. Insulin (in insulin resistant people) is what causes fat cells to accumulate fat. Chronic insulin levels are driven by chronically elevated blood sugar levels. Chronically elevated blood sugar levels are caused by carbohydrate intake, the only food type that causes significant blood sugar rises.
So, go back to 1970 and promote say, nothing but beef or pork production, and you can have a glut of food, without obesity. Promote "healthy" whole wheat, or sugary fruits, or starchy corn, that raises blood sugar levels, and you'll get obesity.
Stop eating carbohydrates. It's simple.
The things that will make you fat: [snip> Too many fruits
It's difficult to eat too many fruits because after a few of them you'd feel full because of all the fiber you just ate. Fruit juice o.t.o.h. as someone state somewhere above, has *no* (or little) fibers and contains the sugar of many fruits per glass.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
The problem is that some people can tolerate carbohydrate toxicity, and others cannot. We all know that guy who does nothing but chug down sodas, sit on the couch playing xbox, and scarfs down pizza and pop tarts all day without gaining a pound. That guy doesn't have insulin resistance.
All those fat people you see at the mall? They've got insulin resistance, and their carbohydrate intake is what is driving their obesity.
It depends.
Some people can handle a post-agricultural diet just fine. Others can't. You just have figure out what works best for you and ignore all of the stupid propaganda that assumes we're all the same.
We're not all the same. Contradictory anecdotes are to be expected.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That is one of the biggest problem with the entire weight topic. Even though we see it first hand everywhere, as a society, we are in complete denial that there are different metabolisms. It is completely accepted that genetics plays a roll in a persons height, the size of their nose, the color of their skin, and the color of their eyes, but it is blasphemous to suggest that it could have any role in their width, or what their body needs to maintain itself.
Bullshit. The human body isn't a simple engine - it is a dynamic, actively regulated system. In the case of fat cells, fat accumulation is regulated by the hormone insulin, not by how many calories one puts in one's mouth. When you see that poor bastard that weights 350 pounds, horking down a pizza like he's starving, it's because he *is* -> the carbohydrate in his diet has caused blood sugar spikes, which causes insulin levels to rise, which causes his fat cells to accumulate fat (stealing calories from the bloodstream), leaving his muscles in his body starving. Put another way, in order to protect his body from the toxicity of blood sugar levels, his body is as fat as it *needs* to be.
To fix obesity, one has to understand the complexity of the human body, and address the true root cause -> carbohydrate intake. Treating it like a simple mathematics equation is the idiot kind of thinking that got us the obesity epidemic in the first place.
I'm in a similar boat - not morbidly obese, but I could safely lose 100 pounds. I've found that just using smaller plates help. The difference between an 8" and 12" plate doesn't sound like much, but it gives you more opportunities to evaluate your intake. When you're done with one serving, you can take a minute to decide if you really need to go back for more or if you've been eating larger servings because it was already on your plate. No need to starve yourself or make drastic changes to the foods you eat, just give yourself more opportunities to ask if you're still hungry.
> Did you grow up in a house in the suburbs
No, I did not.
I was "well enough off" that I ate free school lunches through most of my childhood. Any adult in my household held down their own job. NO ONE played the role of dedicated maid or house wife. It simply wasn't an option.
Although no one made excuses.
That's the difference between "poor" and working class.
Most people have never had this Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle that you see in old TV shows.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The most expensive "baking" potatoes top out at about $1 per pound when they are not on sale (and they are often on sale). The smaller potatoes bought in bulk in large bags are going to be a lot cheaper per pound.
3 potatoes for 50 cents is not unrealistic.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
McDouble: $1. $4 gets you 4 burgers. I can't eat 4 burgers. $4 gets you 2 burgers and the largest fry size available. I can't eat all that either. You must be buying soda. Your problem isn't eating burgers and going to McDonald's, it's drinking empty soda calories and paying extra to get fat.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
If potato chips are junk food, then so is a baked potato -- a potato is a potato. Grease with french fries or chips, butter with baked, no difference.
Meanwhile, I've never had a weight problem except the two years I was on Paxil and gained 40 pounds, and lost most of it despite trying not to when I stopped. Maybe this mathematician should add drugs to the equation. There's a woman that I see in the bar once in a while who used to be a crackhead. After stopping the crack she went from rail-thin to overweight in six months. And the number of drugs folks take today, and the number of new different drugs, especially prescription drugs is far more than in the '70s. No crack cocaine, no SSRIs, no ADD drugs (they hadn't even categorized ADD) etc. Pot makes some people fat and lots more folks are smoking it today. Rather than blaming "too much food" (I never knew many folks going hungry when I was a kid) maybe they should look at today's drug intake.
The "there couldn't be any fast food if food was expensive" in TFS is completely bogus. McDonald's has been around since 1940, Pizza Hut since 1958, long before they stopped paying farmers not to grow food and long before the obesity "epidemic". And when I was ten in 1962, a McDonald's hamburger, fries, and small coke was thirty two cents. How is that "expensive"? You'll pay ten times that much for the same thing today.
His history omits an important variable -- exports. After the government stopped paying farmers to not grow food, we started exporting so much that ADM's slogan is now "breadbasket to the world". We're not eating more because more's available, most of the extra food is being exported. It also neglects the size of soda, a small coke at McDonalds today is bigger than a large coke was in the sixties. Lots of caloric intake with nothing to curb hunger, a sure-fire way to obesity.
It also doesn't explain why poor people are more obese than middle class people. He would probably say "food stamps" but he'd be wrong. Poor folks are fat because cheap food is fattening --five pounds of potatos is only two bucks, TV dinners 89 cents, while expensive foods usually are far less fatteniing. Poor folks can't afford McDonalds very often, a small order of fries (1/3 of a potato) is a buck twenty while a five pound bag of raw potatos is only eighty cents more. Add a quarter pounder and a cole, and you'll pay the same price as two dozen burger patties and a loaf of bread at WalMart.
I'm sure the guy's maths are correct, but he's a mathematician, not a nutritionist, biologist, medical doctor, sociologist, or historian. A study like this would need input from all those fields and probably more to have any meaning. You don't ask a geologist about solar flares, after all.
Free Martian Whores!
Only if you equate healthy with triple-bio free-range happy rice watered with a genuine Buddhist monk's scrotal sweat.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's amazing to me how irrational people become as soon as the subject of food comes up. Science? Evidence? What's that? People convince themselves of all kinds of ridiculous ideas about food and nutrition, none of which have even the slightest shred of evidence to back them up. Probably because people don't want it to be simply a matter of calories. It's another example of intellectual hedonism. People don't want to believe that the quantity of food they are eating is just too much. So they simply choose not to believe it. Instead they invent some simple rule that does not rely on calorie counting or ever being hungry. Fat doesn't make you fat. Sugar doesn't make you fat. Preservatives and MSG don't make you fat. "Refined" foods don't make you fat. Fast food doesn't make you fat. Burgers and donuts don't make you fat. Even insulin doesn't make you fat. If you are overweight (as I am) the only thing you can blame is your own lack of self-control. It's calories that make you fat. Fat people simply eat too much for the amount of physical activity they engage in. You could live on pure fat or pure sugar and huge amounts of preservatives and lots of MSG and as long as you didn't exceed 1000 calories per day you wouldn't gain weight. In fact you would probably lose it.
It is true that some restriction diets are effective, but not for the reasons usually given. If all you eat is low calorie vegetables you are very unlikely to gain weight and quite likely to lose it. That's because most people cannot manage to eat enough low calorie vegetables to gain weight. Some vegetables are so low in calories that you would pretty much have to eat them continuously the whole day. Carbohydrate restricted diets are popular these days. They don't work because 'carbohydrates make you fat'. They work because people seem to more easily be able to eat fewer calories on those diets. They are probably the most effective diets if you can stay on them because protein makes you feel full faster and keeps you feeling full longer. I've tried this but I feel truly awful for the first couple of days. I get really depressed without any carbohydrates. So I haven't been able to stay on it for long. I also find that I can quite easily overeat on all protein diets. So I'm back to counting calories again anyway.
I've had better luck with calorie restricted vegetable diets, but the problem with those is that I have to constantly eat throughout the day to not feel hungry. I can eat a huge bowl of Romaine lettuce and within an hour I am hungry again. Not only is it a huge amount of work to keep filling my stomach with low calorie vegetables, but it's very expensive and tiring to constantly be preparing food.
I've lived in several countries besides the US and none of those countries have as many overweight people as the US. The only other country I have visited which seems to be able to compete with the US in terms of obesity is Italy. In most countries people eat high calorie foods. The reason they do not get fat is simply because they don't overeat. It really is that simple. Just stop eating before you feel full. You should still feel at least a little bit hungry. One of my most successful diets was achieved just by eating my meals with a thin friend of mine. I ate exactly the same things he did in exactly the same amounts at every meal. He wasn't on any kind of special diet. He just didn't eat all that much food. I lost a lot of weight and I was left only slightly hungry.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
with a functioning kitchen....a fridge and freezer that work, a decent set of pots and pans, all the right knives, a cutting board, all the right spoons, a whole rack full of spices
I think you have a different understanding of 'functioning kitchen' than most people, mate. If your goal is to cook healthy food that tastes at least as good as McDonald's and is cheaper, you don't need most of that stuff. Also, you don't have to live in the suburbs to have a nice kitchen, your statistic is kind of meaningless.
If your goal is to have healthy, homecooked food without spending too much money, well, people living in bamboo huts in developing countries manage to meet that goal.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The reason that I, personally, discount the "differing metabolism" argument is because most of the people I hear it from are the sort of excuse-making fat losers who live on steady diets of pizza and potato chips, or who insist on drinking most of a gallon of milk per day even though they can see in the mirror that their metabolism does not support that sort of behavior.
No, fat people are fat because they are insulin resistant, and consume a diet of carbohydrates that is too high. Now perhaps you can rephrase this as "poor self control over carbohydrate intake" (after all, starches and sugars behave like drugs), but the answer isn't to reduce calories, the answer is to reduce carbohydrate.
You're looking at it from a perspective of great privilege.
For example: do you have a grocery story in your neighborhood that cells vegetables? That is assumption #1 most people don't realize. Impoverished areas have quick-e-marts, because why would a grocery chain with fresh produce open in a ghetto?
Second: if you didn't have a car, how long would it take for you to get to the nearest grocery store? What about if the nearest store was outside your ghetto, and took 1-hour both ways on public transportation (because funding is being cut for busses). That's 2 hours of travel and 30 minutes of shopping out of your day.
Are you even strong enough to carry all of the groceries yourself (a family of 4's weekly groceries are pretty damn heavy if you don't have a car and have to change busses to get home).
What if you worked two jobs, when do you have 2.5 hours free?
And then time to cook?
Being privileged makes it really easy to throw stones from your high horse. Try taking a closer look
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Let me second that the laws of thermodynamics is indeed true, our level of physical activity is so low today that most people could probably live on a 1500 calories or less a day - you can talk all you want about complex dynamic systems but the beauty of thermodynamics is it can tell you something important about a system regardless of its internal working or complexity. If you sit on your ass all day which most of us do at work there is no need for more than a base maintenance level of caloric intake- and our bodies are very good a making do with very few calories - practically,the only way to loose weight is to up your calorie burn a day, an hour of exercise is about 600 calories, which is about 60 grams of fat, so to get serious weight loss you would have to exercise a _lot_ to loose weight quickly