Those are really small cheeseburgers. And in this particular case, it was 30 adult men who were instructed to do at least a brisk 45 minute walk for half an hour a day. Their calorie intake to maintain their size before the study started was 3200 per day.
Granted. But there are plenty of 300 and 400 pound people that have good mobility anyway, and there are plenty of people of normal or even light weight that have trouble moving.
The child of a friend of mine has severe arthritis due to some genetic defect. The little girl is skinny, but if she ever gets fat it will be because it hurts her too much to exercise. She was on anti-inflammatory cortisone steroids and painkillers before age 10, and cortisone steroids have weight gain as a side effect. For a lot of fat people you would expect that any problems they have exercising are due to their fatness making the joints hurt, but in her case - and probably some others - it would be that the excruciatingly painful joints came first. (I am not trying to assert that a large portion of the obese have this problem, just that some small percentage do.)
Actually, statistically speaking the biggest predictor of additional fat gain for obese people of any age is being on a diet. The easiest way to keep the 260 pound person from reaching 270 is to tell them to eat healthy and stop monitoring their weight.
But more importantly, these diet drugs don't indicate a reduced risk of mortality. If my physician tries to prescribe something to slim me down but can't provide evidence that it will help me live longer, I'm not going to bother. (See for example all of the cholesterol-lowering drugs that don't affect mortality risk.)
Obese people lose fat and reach normal weight all of the time, but statistically speaking, keeping it off more than five years is rare.
Further, keeping the fat off for more than five years is rare even though the media, their medical professionals, and their peers are all willing to remind them obesity is unhealthy.
Further, keeping the fat off for more than five years is rare even though modern beauty standards trend to slimness in everything except women's breasts (and there's no known way to concentrate body fat in one particular part of the body).
List all of the successful diet studies that followed participants for five years or longer. I dare you.
So maybe one third or more of the first world population around the globe are lazy gluttons and we all pig out despite knowing full well that it's unhealthy and unattractive, and every single one of us lacks the strength of character to fix the problem on our own. And certainly some significant percentage of us are just lazy gluttons. But all obese people, all over the world? Even most?
To be pedantic, there are storage methods - pumped water, stored heat, compression, or even colossal batteries - that allow wind power or solar power to generate 24/7 energy. The technology exists, and is well-proven.
The problem isn't feasibility, it's cost. Our economies are built on cheap power. A solar power plant that provides power under direct sunlight is relatively cost competitive. A solar power plant that provides power 24/7 using storage multiplies the cost per kwh by some huge factor - 3, 5, maybe more.
In 10,000 years, an equivalence in coal use would be over 10 trillion tons, and as others have posted, burning coal releases radiation too. So instead of being dead from radiation from spent nuclear fuel, our descendants can all be dead from radiation from burnt coal plus black lung.
The nVidia proprietary Linux GPU drivers are substantially better than the AMD proprietary Linux GPU drivers. So while Valve can buy any GPU they want, getting an AMD GPU to perform with Linux as well as it would with Windows is probably difficult.
I don't think Microsoft wants to kill PC gaming at all. But I think Windows 8 makes it clear Microsoft wants to move PC gaming towards using the Microsoft App Store as the preferred distribution platform. i.e. they want to replace Steam with the Microsoft App Store, so they get the money Valve is currently collecting.
I think it's a fine plan, and it makes sense for Microsoft to do it. But in turn, it makes sense for the owners of Steam and any other similar product (lesser players like Desura, for example) to react by condemning Windows 8 (which they generally do) and moving off Windows to another platform in which they cannot be slowly muscled off the platform by an official app store from the platform owner. Hence... SteamOS.
I want SteamOS to take the world by storm, but I fully expect it to crash and burn. Let's hope I'm wrong.
The two are NOT equivalent. The US nuclear industry generates about 20% of our national power and 2,300 tons of radioactive waste per year.
The US uses about a billion (with a 'b') tons of coal per year for 50% of our national power.
So if we replaced coal energy generation with nuclear generation, we would have roughly 5750 tons of radioactive waste to handle instead of soot and particulate emissions from burning roughly 174000 times as much mass in coal.
So you have a choice between unsightly outhouses here and there (storage facilities for nuclear waste) or pissing all over the lawns of everybody all over the country. The difference in scale is mind-boggling.
I don't think any of us fat folk are advocating that we all give up and live on twinkies, Pepsi, and booze. What I'm saying is that depending upon genetic factors, it's possible no amount of willpower will permit a given person to be thin - and anyone who asserts otherwise is a dick, and it's impossible to know just from casual interaction which people are fat from sheer laziness and which have a difficult or impossible fight to be otherwise.
DogDude hates the fatties, you won't get any sympathy from him.
I suggest strength training with slow repetitions, it's easier on the joints. You don't have to use heavy weights relative to your personal maximum to get some benefit, either. If you can do 10 dumbbell squats holding 30 pounds in each hand, you'll benefit just fine from doing 10 dumbbell squats holding 15 pounds, and you won't dread the next workout as much either. Good luck.
Swimming is great too, I just can't handle that personally because I have an old shoulder injury that acts up after a few weeks of swimming laps in the pool.
People who lose more than 10% of their peak body weight tend to have a metabolism 20-30% slower than someone the same weight, muscle mass, and activity level that was never fat, while still having an appetite similar appetite.
That's why no diet study lasting longer than two years has had a majority of participants successfully keep off more than a 5% loss of weight. Even the new drugs advertised in the article only demonstrated a 3.7%-9% fat loss over the placebo, and were only studied for one to two years.
It's even worse than that, many of the people spouting hate didn't put as much work, or any work at all into being thin. They blanket assume every fat person has the same naturally appetite as they do but decides to eat an extra chocolate cake or extra pizza the way they might decide to watch an extra episode of Looney Tunes or have another ice tea.
These drugs also provide 3-8% more bodyweight loss than a placebo, and the long term weight loss isn't tracked. So it's not enough additional weight loss to move the person significantly towards thin, and we don't have evidence that the weight stays off any better than with a traditional diet (in which, most of the time, it doesn't stay off).
But it's nice to see all of the assholes on Slashdot chime in that the entire international obesity epidemic is a mass case of laziness.
Look at these AMAZING diet drugs referenced in the article, the first provides a 3.7% fat loss over a year, the second provides 7-9%. So if you're 300 pounds, you can pay a pharmaceutical company for years at a time to be 289 or maybe 263 pounds. I'm sure everyone will be complimenting you on how svelte and sexy you look.
The original diet drugs were methamphetamines that led to addiction. Then we had heart problems and such from fen-phen and Redux. Are you really going to risk all of that so that you can go from "really really obese" to "really obese"?
People who lose a significant amount of weight have a metabolic rate 20-30% lower than someone the same weight, same muscle mass, and same activity level that was never fat. See the Minnesota Starvation Experiment and several other studies for documented proof.
So if Jane is 130 pounds and needs 1200 calories a day when she used to need 1500, and she's only hungry for 1200 calories a day, then life is good. If Jane is 130 pounds a needs 1200 calories a day but is hungry for 1500, her will is in a battle with her hunger and sooner or later - maybe in one year, maybe in three, maybe in seven years - she's going to lose.
That's why long term, large fat loss is so difficult. If you lose less than 10% of your peak fat level, the metabolic shift doesn't occur or isn't as severe. Otherwise, it is - and that's why yo yo dieting happens. Someone who loses 100 pounds knows how awful it feels to have 100 pounds of excess fat and how awesome it feels to be thin and athletic by comparison. They would trade a limb not to gain the fat back. But if your appetite is permanently set at a higher level, that's damn difficult.
Here are two more 100% correct assertions: you can live forever as long as you avoid death, and you can be wealthy by earning more money than you spend.
During World War 2, the "Minnesota Starvation Experiment" was conducted. 30 healthy men had their maintenance level of calorie intake measured for a month or two, and then had that calorie intake cut in half with no changes to their daily minimum half an hour of exercise. At the end of the study, the participants had an average drop in resting metabolism of 30%, and that's not 30% lower than when they were heavier, it was 30% lower than predicted for someone at their new skinnier sizes. Most of the men had developed an eating disorder, a mood disorder (bipolar, depression, etc...), an obsession with food, or all three.
The problem with food diaries is that some disorders take a long time to manifest, and a long time to clear up.
I have a sibling who suffered from chronic diarrhea for most of his adult life. It turned out he had undiagnosed celiac disease (inability for his digestive system to tolerate gluten from grains). He had tried a gluten free diet for weeks at a time many times just as an experiment, and it didn't help. It turns out that some celiac suffers need to eat fanatically gluten free (including using separate pots, pans, plates, and utensils from those that touch any form of gluten) for over six months before the symptoms improve.
He had done food diaries many times, desperate to have normal digestion, but it didn't help because of course having excellent records of what you ate yesterday or last week doesn't help if you need to make a change for half a year before it has any impact.
I don't mean that you would get fired for it, I mean that there's a fair chance your boss will be embarrassed that his or her superior got the message. Then your boss may not do anything openly bad to you, but take every little opportunity to make your life at the company unpleasant. You might get poorer performance reviews than your work deserves, or find your requests for equipment denied without explanation and then later be blamed for productivity problems you have due to lack of that equipment, or get stuck with all of the least interesting jobs, etc...
A resilient person, whether they're a manager or not, can accept criticism of their decisions and challenges to their decisions with an open mind and humility. They won't take the challenge to their judgement personally, and will instead try to examine the counter argument to make sure there are no factors they overlooked or weighted inappropriately. In my experience, resilient people are uncommon and resilient managers are especially rare (probably because being a manager adds stress). If you find yourself opposed to your manager on something with ethical implications or serious business implications, and you meet the manager in private to express your concerns and are still ignored, my suggestion is to leave.
In my experience, bosses that do a very bad job estimating a proper investment in security also tend to react poorly when they perceive their judgment as threatened.
I don't think x86 is here to stay forever. What are some of the most popular video games in the world: Candy Crush Saga (or whatever it's called), Angry Birds, Draw Something, Cut the Rope, Minecraft. Smart phone and tablet sales keep climbing and desktop and laptop sales are stagnant.
I don't expect Android to dominate consumer operating systems next year, or five years from now. But I can readily believe that 15 years from now Microsoft consumer operating systems will be in a decline, and so will x86 outside the server room. (Of course, this is just wild speculation from some random guy on Slashdot.) But my wife does more computing on her Android tablet than on her Windows 7 PC.
Slashdot Mirror
Those are really small cheeseburgers. And in this particular case, it was 30 adult men who were instructed to do at least a brisk 45 minute walk for half an hour a day. Their calorie intake to maintain their size before the study started was 3200 per day.
Granted. But there are plenty of 300 and 400 pound people that have good mobility anyway, and there are plenty of people of normal or even light weight that have trouble moving.
The child of a friend of mine has severe arthritis due to some genetic defect. The little girl is skinny, but if she ever gets fat it will be because it hurts her too much to exercise. She was on anti-inflammatory cortisone steroids and painkillers before age 10, and cortisone steroids have weight gain as a side effect. For a lot of fat people you would expect that any problems they have exercising are due to their fatness making the joints hurt, but in her case - and probably some others - it would be that the excruciatingly painful joints came first. (I am not trying to assert that a large portion of the obese have this problem, just that some small percentage do.)
Actually, statistically speaking the biggest predictor of additional fat gain for obese people of any age is being on a diet. The easiest way to keep the 260 pound person from reaching 270 is to tell them to eat healthy and stop monitoring their weight.
But more importantly, these diet drugs don't indicate a reduced risk of mortality. If my physician tries to prescribe something to slim me down but can't provide evidence that it will help me live longer, I'm not going to bother. (See for example all of the cholesterol-lowering drugs that don't affect mortality risk.)
Obese people lose fat and reach normal weight all of the time, but statistically speaking, keeping it off more than five years is rare.
Further, keeping the fat off for more than five years is rare even though the media, their medical professionals, and their peers are all willing to remind them obesity is unhealthy.
Further, keeping the fat off for more than five years is rare even though modern beauty standards trend to slimness in everything except women's breasts (and there's no known way to concentrate body fat in one particular part of the body).
List all of the successful diet studies that followed participants for five years or longer. I dare you.
So maybe one third or more of the first world population around the globe are lazy gluttons and we all pig out despite knowing full well that it's unhealthy and unattractive, and every single one of us lacks the strength of character to fix the problem on our own. And certainly some significant percentage of us are just lazy gluttons. But all obese people, all over the world? Even most?
To be pedantic, there are storage methods - pumped water, stored heat, compression, or even colossal batteries - that allow wind power or solar power to generate 24/7 energy. The technology exists, and is well-proven.
The problem isn't feasibility, it's cost. Our economies are built on cheap power. A solar power plant that provides power under direct sunlight is relatively cost competitive. A solar power plant that provides power 24/7 using storage multiplies the cost per kwh by some huge factor - 3, 5, maybe more.
In 10,000 years, an equivalence in coal use would be over 10 trillion tons, and as others have posted, burning coal releases radiation too. So instead of being dead from radiation from spent nuclear fuel, our descendants can all be dead from radiation from burnt coal plus black lung.
The nVidia proprietary Linux GPU drivers are substantially better than the AMD proprietary Linux GPU drivers. So while Valve can buy any GPU they want, getting an AMD GPU to perform with Linux as well as it would with Windows is probably difficult.
I don't think Microsoft wants to kill PC gaming at all. But I think Windows 8 makes it clear Microsoft wants to move PC gaming towards using the Microsoft App Store as the preferred distribution platform. i.e. they want to replace Steam with the Microsoft App Store, so they get the money Valve is currently collecting.
I think it's a fine plan, and it makes sense for Microsoft to do it. But in turn, it makes sense for the owners of Steam and any other similar product (lesser players like Desura, for example) to react by condemning Windows 8 (which they generally do) and moving off Windows to another platform in which they cannot be slowly muscled off the platform by an official app store from the platform owner. Hence... SteamOS.
I want SteamOS to take the world by storm, but I fully expect it to crash and burn. Let's hope I'm wrong.
The two are NOT equivalent. The US nuclear industry generates about 20% of our national power and 2,300 tons of radioactive waste per year. The US uses about a billion (with a 'b') tons of coal per year for 50% of our national power.
So if we replaced coal energy generation with nuclear generation, we would have roughly 5750 tons of radioactive waste to handle instead of soot and particulate emissions from burning roughly 174000 times as much mass in coal.
So you have a choice between unsightly outhouses here and there (storage facilities for nuclear waste) or pissing all over the lawns of everybody all over the country. The difference in scale is mind-boggling.
I don't think any of us fat folk are advocating that we all give up and live on twinkies, Pepsi, and booze. What I'm saying is that depending upon genetic factors, it's possible no amount of willpower will permit a given person to be thin - and anyone who asserts otherwise is a dick, and it's impossible to know just from casual interaction which people are fat from sheer laziness and which have a difficult or impossible fight to be otherwise.
So you have evidence that obese people who lose weight don't have a similar reduction in metabolism? Please post it.
DogDude hates the fatties, you won't get any sympathy from him.
I suggest strength training with slow repetitions, it's easier on the joints. You don't have to use heavy weights relative to your personal maximum to get some benefit, either. If you can do 10 dumbbell squats holding 30 pounds in each hand, you'll benefit just fine from doing 10 dumbbell squats holding 15 pounds, and you won't dread the next workout as much either. Good luck.
Swimming is great too, I just can't handle that personally because I have an old shoulder injury that acts up after a few weeks of swimming laps in the pool.
People who lose more than 10% of their peak body weight tend to have a metabolism 20-30% slower than someone the same weight, muscle mass, and activity level that was never fat, while still having an appetite similar appetite.
That's why no diet study lasting longer than two years has had a majority of participants successfully keep off more than a 5% loss of weight. Even the new drugs advertised in the article only demonstrated a 3.7%-9% fat loss over the placebo, and were only studied for one to two years.
It's even worse than that, many of the people spouting hate didn't put as much work, or any work at all into being thin. They blanket assume every fat person has the same naturally appetite as they do but decides to eat an extra chocolate cake or extra pizza the way they might decide to watch an extra episode of Looney Tunes or have another ice tea.
These drugs also provide 3-8% more bodyweight loss than a placebo, and the long term weight loss isn't tracked. So it's not enough additional weight loss to move the person significantly towards thin, and we don't have evidence that the weight stays off any better than with a traditional diet (in which, most of the time, it doesn't stay off).
But it's nice to see all of the assholes on Slashdot chime in that the entire international obesity epidemic is a mass case of laziness.
All this even though the children of obese parents are more likely to obese even when they're raised by someone else.
Look at these AMAZING diet drugs referenced in the article, the first provides a 3.7% fat loss over a year, the second provides 7-9%. So if you're 300 pounds, you can pay a pharmaceutical company for years at a time to be 289 or maybe 263 pounds. I'm sure everyone will be complimenting you on how svelte and sexy you look.
The original diet drugs were methamphetamines that led to addiction. Then we had heart problems and such from fen-phen and Redux. Are you really going to risk all of that so that you can go from "really really obese" to "really obese"?
People who lose a significant amount of weight have a metabolic rate 20-30% lower than someone the same weight, same muscle mass, and same activity level that was never fat. See the Minnesota Starvation Experiment and several other studies for documented proof.
So if Jane is 130 pounds and needs 1200 calories a day when she used to need 1500, and she's only hungry for 1200 calories a day, then life is good. If Jane is 130 pounds a needs 1200 calories a day but is hungry for 1500, her will is in a battle with her hunger and sooner or later - maybe in one year, maybe in three, maybe in seven years - she's going to lose.
That's why long term, large fat loss is so difficult. If you lose less than 10% of your peak fat level, the metabolic shift doesn't occur or isn't as severe. Otherwise, it is - and that's why yo yo dieting happens. Someone who loses 100 pounds knows how awful it feels to have 100 pounds of excess fat and how awesome it feels to be thin and athletic by comparison. They would trade a limb not to gain the fat back. But if your appetite is permanently set at a higher level, that's damn difficult.
Keep it off for five years?
Here are two more 100% correct assertions: you can live forever as long as you avoid death, and you can be wealthy by earning more money than you spend.
During World War 2, the "Minnesota Starvation Experiment" was conducted. 30 healthy men had their maintenance level of calorie intake measured for a month or two, and then had that calorie intake cut in half with no changes to their daily minimum half an hour of exercise. At the end of the study, the participants had an average drop in resting metabolism of 30%, and that's not 30% lower than when they were heavier, it was 30% lower than predicted for someone at their new skinnier sizes. Most of the men had developed an eating disorder, a mood disorder (bipolar, depression, etc...), an obsession with food, or all three.
The devil is in the details.
A common symptom of autism is a lack of tact. So the rude delivery of their pronouncement might back up their claim to be autistic.
The problem with food diaries is that some disorders take a long time to manifest, and a long time to clear up.
I have a sibling who suffered from chronic diarrhea for most of his adult life. It turned out he had undiagnosed celiac disease (inability for his digestive system to tolerate gluten from grains). He had tried a gluten free diet for weeks at a time many times just as an experiment, and it didn't help. It turns out that some celiac suffers need to eat fanatically gluten free (including using separate pots, pans, plates, and utensils from those that touch any form of gluten) for over six months before the symptoms improve.
He had done food diaries many times, desperate to have normal digestion, but it didn't help because of course having excellent records of what you ate yesterday or last week doesn't help if you need to make a change for half a year before it has any impact.
I don't mean that you would get fired for it, I mean that there's a fair chance your boss will be embarrassed that his or her superior got the message. Then your boss may not do anything openly bad to you, but take every little opportunity to make your life at the company unpleasant. You might get poorer performance reviews than your work deserves, or find your requests for equipment denied without explanation and then later be blamed for productivity problems you have due to lack of that equipment, or get stuck with all of the least interesting jobs, etc...
A resilient person, whether they're a manager or not, can accept criticism of their decisions and challenges to their decisions with an open mind and humility. They won't take the challenge to their judgement personally, and will instead try to examine the counter argument to make sure there are no factors they overlooked or weighted inappropriately. In my experience, resilient people are uncommon and resilient managers are especially rare (probably because being a manager adds stress). If you find yourself opposed to your manager on something with ethical implications or serious business implications, and you meet the manager in private to express your concerns and are still ignored, my suggestion is to leave.
In my experience, bosses that do a very bad job estimating a proper investment in security also tend to react poorly when they perceive their judgment as threatened.
I don't think x86 is here to stay forever. What are some of the most popular video games in the world: Candy Crush Saga (or whatever it's called), Angry Birds, Draw Something, Cut the Rope, Minecraft. Smart phone and tablet sales keep climbing and desktop and laptop sales are stagnant.
I don't expect Android to dominate consumer operating systems next year, or five years from now. But I can readily believe that 15 years from now Microsoft consumer operating systems will be in a decline, and so will x86 outside the server room. (Of course, this is just wild speculation from some random guy on Slashdot.) But my wife does more computing on her Android tablet than on her Windows 7 PC.