Island Life: The Prime Minister will see you now
324 Responses
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Gio, that may be true. But it also could just be an excuse. Or both. I personally know that no-one else is responsible for my own overeating. No one ever forced me to eat. They just made nice food that I both like and can afford, and I was unwilling to change my habits as a skinny highly sporty teen when my lifestyle moved to middle-aged and sedentary. It's only as I've got older and wiser that I've been able to cut the intake, and hey, presto, guess what?
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Ben, I have no problem with you personally - I just think your argument is wrong seven ways from Sunday. But let me just sum up, so I can be clear. Basically, your position is:
1. You don't know or care what the academic literature says about environment, heredity, processed foods, low-calorie diets, weight control, type two diabetes, exercise, PCOS, or any other conditions.
2. From this position of neither knowing nor caring, you somehow also know how to fix the entire obesity problem in one fell swoop.
3. All fat people you know are in denial, ignorant and duplicitous about food and exercise.
4. But you love them, you really love them. Just like Sally Field.I mean.... OK. I seriously have nothing else. <shrug>
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Hey, you got me! Except you managed to inflate it from one point to four. Cut back, baby.
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Cut back, baby
Did anyone else get the Austin Powers accent that time? (I swear there's audio creeping into PAS these days)
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Did anyone else get the Austin Powers accent that time?
I'm getting more of a Mr T vibe from Ben in this thread. 'I don't have no time for scientific jibber-jabber! I pity the fool who can't lose weight!' Heh.
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Chortle :)
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Still audio, innit..
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What's my prediction for this diet? PAIN!
But I prefer Bruce Lee - The Art of dieting without dieting. Why you eat my Master's Lunch??? Why?....Whywhywhy!!!
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The simple fact is that fat comes from eating food. Period. It really is that simple. And yes, denying that is lying.
High school science taught me that fat doesn't come from eating food, and isn't that simple at all.
Fat is stored energy. Which comes from eating food. Fat accumulation occurs primarily when you intake more energy than you burn up. There are various other complicating factors that varies how that works with each individual.
The nature of the food also makes a difference as to what happens with it once it enters your body, and how much ends up as fat.
'Eat less food' is a very simplistic answer which often won't be correct for an individual. 'Eat better food' and 'do more exercise' is much more likely to be the answer.
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"Eat less food" goes against every instinct for most people. Aversion to food is a pathological state. Not eating abundant calorie-rich food is a ticket to extinction. Not storing those spare calories against inevitable famine times is a ticket to extinction.
Which is why solutions to an "obesity problem" require more than finger-wagging at people who somehow fail to exercise willpower. The corollary of such an approach is the ridiculous idea that people are suddenly massively more weak-willed than they used to be.
Society doesn't have an obesity problem, it has a "heavily-marketed cheap crap food for people taught to sell their time in return for unnecessary goods and services" problem. Solutions to unhealthy overweight (and every other human problem) need to go with human nature, not against it.
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This episode of Stephen Nails It Again was proudly brought to you by Public Address System and Purina One.
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Stephen Nails It Again
Heh! True.
The Scientific Facts are no doubt correct, but as always they're a work in progress, rather than holy writ delivered from on high. And the scolding tone doesn't help. Academia is part of the solution to the problem, it doesn't own it.Also, if anyone's really interested in taking the anti-obesity message out there into the darker reaches of the web, the really fat kids are the ones with the skull avatars.
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Thankyou Stephen. That saves me a rant.
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High school science taught me that fat doesn't come from eating food, and isn't that simple at all.
Fat is stored energy. Which comes from eating food.
I think I lost you right there.
"Eat less food" goes against every instinct for most people.
Yup, fat people particularly.
Which is why solutions to an "obesity problem" require more than finger-wagging at people who somehow fail to exercise willpower.
Yes, that would be far too easy.
Society doesn't have an obesity problem, it has a "heavily-marketed cheap crap food for people taught to sell their time in return for unnecessary goods and services" problem.
I think it's more of a "Too many people like eating too much shit" problem. You can externalize it to society if you like. I personally don't, and that has helped me.
I've shot my bolt on this thread. If you guys want to continue having a long and convoluted discussion, digging up whatever the state of the art in dieting science is, go for it. Personally, I see a thriving industry that utterly fails to deliver, and have no time for it. Some problems do have simple solutions for everyone who is willing to take them, and everyone else is fucked and that's all there is to it.
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I personally don't, and that has helped me.
Again: just because you lost 20 pounds one time, that doesn't solve obesity or health problems for everyone.
Some problems do have simple solutions for everyone who is willing to take them, and everyone else is fucked and that's all there is to it.
I thought I was out, but this 'one-solution-fits-all' assertion is egregiously fucking wrong. Example: about one in ten women have polycystic ovarian syndrome, which causes a lot of weird hormonal shit to go down in their bodies. Some of them are undiagnosed. The majority of women with PCOS are obese - about 60% of them. The obesity is actually a complication of the condition, not a cause, and it also means that those women are not biologically *capable* of losing weight at the same rate as other people without that condition. They could be eating less and exercising more and jack shit is happening. (There are studies, but obviously all those fat women are just duplicitous liars, so I won't bother referencing them.) Oh, and PCOS puts you at a higher risk for type two diabetes, because it fucks up your insulin. Which is another condition which makes it rather difficult to lose weight.
I don't even know why I bothered posting this. I suppose perhaps if someone is reading, and thinks that maybe, out of every twenty women they see on the street, one of the fat ones is not, perhaps, stuffing her face with chips 24/7, I'll be feeling slightly better about this whole thread.
(Of course, it would be nice if that person thought 'hey, the size of her body is none of my fucking business', too. But I suppose that's too much to hope for.)
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I don't even know why I bothered posting this. I suppose perhaps if someone is reading, and thinks that maybe, out of every twenty women they see on the street, one of the fat ones is not, perhaps, stuffing her face with chips 24/7, I'll be feeling slightly better about this whole thread.
My father was certainly somebody who did his best to lose weight, which was highly detrimental to his health, but couldn't, and yet his diet was exemplary. But he had a physical handicap that impaired his mobility, and although he overcame it as a young man by insisting to climb mountains (and building quite a physique in the process) as an older man he found he could move around very little indeed. Too little. But the quality of his diet was reflected in his blood tests, which always received high praise. "I'll make a very healthy corpse some day", it's how he used to respond.
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"I'll make a very healthy corpse some day", it's how he used to respond.
:) and my dad often quotes someone's thought(dunno who)
Keep fit, eat well, die anyway. -
Dyan, I think you might be Mr Spock. ;)
Er, well I did do awfully well in my philosophy courses on logic.
From cultural studies or feminist angles, the word "estrogen" means something beyond clinical or scientific considerations. The folks here bring depths of expertise in many different fields. The cross-pollination can be delightful as well as fractious at times.
Estrogen means something beyond clinical and scientific considerations? How on earth can it? Besides, the feminist medical historians, as quoted by Danielle, were scathing of the use of estrogens in men on sci/med grounds. And that's just, uh, uninformed. It's like my friend Helen who thought it was silly that her parents ever worried about their cash situation when she, even at five, knew all you had to do was use a cheque and simply write in the amount you wanted.
But I certainly accept the presence of social and cultural biases in medical treatment and studies - this was evident to me long before I ever studied medical ethics. But I'd argue that race is more relevant than sex, when it comes to discrimination.
My mother in law Myrtle was hit (hard!) in the face when she was giving birth to her eldest child, by a nurse at National Womens (was that where and Aucklander would have a baby in 1950?) . "You Maoris can't do anything without making a lot of noise can you!" Then she heard a group of white nurses lamenting, loudly and within earshot, the fact that such a handsome white man as my father in law would have married a Maori woman. Myrtle was convinced that all procedures done by those white nurses were done with an aim to cause maximum humiliation and pain, and she's probably right.
But I still can't see what possible criticism a person with no understanding of the many sci/med fields involved in that particular endocrine/clin chem/cardiology study could possibly have on any study. And to use estrogens on men with CHD is really, really, not nutty.
Danielle, if you think my having an opinion on fatness based on observations of both myself and other people around me is insulting, judgmental and anecdotal, then all I can say is: Too bad.
Ben, treating obesity (metabolic syndrome) is just not that simple. And as both Danielle and I have tried to tell you, you can eat a fairly small amount of food and still have quite a bit of adipose tissue. You can actually be quite slim and have quite a lot of adipose tissue. Size is not the issue.
Beatrice Faumoina and athletes that size who have a high muscle to fat ratio are in way better shape than a tiny person like Rene Zellweger when she fattened up to play a role in a film. Her dimensions may have still been tiny - but the adipose tissue around her middle would have played havoc with her endocrine system and would have stressed her organs, and it's likely that even years down the line, that will affect her health.
If it were as simple as a matter of "will power" or "eating less" then that would solve everything and there would be a lot less illness in the world.
As Islander has pointed out earlier in this discussion, race plays a role in obesity. In fact, the last obesity conference I worked on was called Sociocultural and Ethnogenetic Determinants of Obesity for that reason. If an indigenous person did what Rene Zellweger did their health would suffer much more than someone with white ancestry. When we see Pacific Islanders and Maori (and in my country, First Nations and Inuit people) who are overweight and swamping the medical system with health problems, it's not a matter of willpower, it's a matter of unfortunate genetics. There are other factors at play - that a First Nations teenage girl is something like 19x more likely to try to kill herself with an overdose than her white counterpart is less genetic than cultural, but public health problems are never quite as easy to fix as people think.
When I first started working in the field of AIDS/HIV prevention, 25 years ago, I bounded into the job, eagerly expecting all I needed to do was inform all those drug addicted male prostitutes, and they would simply change their behaviour. Boy, was I surprised when I discovered that they were actually quite well informed (for that era anyway) and the thing I had to change was their self-loathing and not so sublimated wish to die. Things are never as simple as those who are outside the field think.
Ben, far more than willpower or even "exercise" in the form that most people think of, nutrition and the "built environment" are greater factors. Obesity is not a medical condition that is likely to respond to an individual's own attempts. I'm not saying it's not possible I'm saying it's not likely. A better approach is within the community - and starting from childhood.
In Vancouver (my hometown) the laws governing property development stipulate that any urban project must include 1)green space 2)playground or some facilities for children 3) drinking fountains 4) public art 5)must not obscure more than 2/3 of neighbouring buildings' views.
This not only ensures Vancouver feels much more comfortable and picturesque, but it actually has quite profound effect on the health of the city's inhabitants. Mental as well as physical health. Not all Canadian cities are so lucky, and where the developers have been allowed to ruin public spaces, you find a great deal poorer health.
Probably the biggest factor in helping the public keep leaner rather than more adipose is the "built environment". Exercise, the kind where people go to the gym and so on is not as effective as simply living in a city like Vancouver, or even NYC, where the built environment encourages people to get out and move on a daily basis.
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Estrogen means something beyond clinical and scientific considerations? How on earth can it?
With you 100% there, Dyan. When people write scientific papers that mention estrogen, they don't mean "the value-laden post-modern meaning of estrogen", they mean bloody estrogen.
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Were they "scientific" papers or political/sociological ones? Danielle?
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The stuff I'm talking about was more on the 'history of science' tip, rather than the postmodern end of the scale.
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Meta-science though?
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Well, not at someone like Giovanni's level of meta. ;) Gender history of any stripe does tend to be all about framing and context, of course...
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That's kind of what I meant. Our friend and foe, context.
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Last thing you'd ask a scientist about, frankly.
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