Thin Privelege -- Yay or Nay - General

[QUOTE=Death_God;37838684]then you try harder "I only lost a few pounds after trying to diet oh well time to give up and go eat more mcdonalds and whine to fit people because god hates me :("[/QUOTE] Bullshit. I exercise 150 minutes per week, the recommended amount, plus I do strength training, and I eat a balanced diet. I'm still fat. It's more complicated than calories in, calories out. Peace, Shannon [editline]28th September 2012[/editline] To understand why losing a large amount of weight (greater than 10% of your starting weight) is nearly impossible to sustain for more than one year, you need to understand how the hormones leptin and ghrelin work. You need to understand adaptive thermogenesis. You need to understand that although the body obeys the laws of thermodynamics, there's also a system in place to respond metabolically to both exercise and caloric restrictions in order to conserve energy, either for the hard work your body senses or the famine it fears. If you are eating healthy and exercising and it doesn't make you thin, that doesn't mean you're necessarily doing something wrong. That's just what your body is meant to be like. There are better metrics of health than weight. Peace, Shannon

[QUOTE=atchka;37838960]Bullshit. I exercise 150 minutes per week, the recommended amount, plus I do strength training, and I eat a balanced diet. I'm still fat. It's more complicated than calories in, calories out. Peace, Shannon [editline]28th September 2012[/editline] To understand why losing a large amount of weight (greater than 10% of your starting weight) is nearly impossible to sustain for more than one year, you need to understand how the hormones leptin and ghrelin work. You need to understand adaptive thermogenesis. You need to understand that although the body obeys the laws of thermodynamics, there's also a system in place to respond metabolically to both exercise and caloric restrictions in order to conserve energy, either for the hard work your body senses or the famine it fears. If you are eating healthy and exercising and it doesn't make you thin, that doesn't mean you're necessarily doing something wrong. That's just what your body is meant to be like. There are better metrics of health than weight. Peace, Shannon[/QUOTE] We don't use signatures on Facepunch, so you should probably refrain from that.

I'm fairly stocky, partly because I keep physically fit because of my job, but also because it's close to my natural shape. So, not only can I really get skinny, but it could affect my overall safety and I wouldn't be as healthy.

[QUOTE=Megafan;37841154]We don't use signatures on Facepunch, so you should probably refrain from that.[/QUOTE] Force of habit. Thanks for the tip.

[QUOTE=Marbalo;37832508]The only people who seem to claim just how easy it is to lose weight or not gain it are seemingly the same people who were thin their whole lives.[/QUOTE] All the posts I've seen about people saying it's easy to lose weight or such, like me, were fat at some point in our lives. [quote] I ate less and exercised at a gym three times a week for thirty minutes[/quote] How hard were you exercising? I see overweight people come into the gym all the time and they'll leave after half an hour and won't even be breathing hard. If you're not even sweating you're not exercising right. When I was losing weight, I went to the gym every other day for an hour and a half. Now, I go for the same hour and a half, but six times a week. You really do get out of it what you put into it.

[QUOTE=atchka;37828049]And no, I don't buy low-carb or paleo or any other diet fad.[/QUOTE] Eating as our ancestors have for a million or so years is not a fad. The principle of paleo eating is sound, whether or not someone's particular implementation of this principle is effective or not for weight loss or other goals doesn't change this. Smart folks in the paleo community are greatly interested in scientific research, whether or not the findings conform to paleo-informed expectations. Carb restriction, which is compatible with paleo, is the most effective and painless way for overweight humans to lose body fat. This was pretty well understood 80 years ago. The low-fat nonsense first popularized int he 1960s is losing popular acceptance. One could argue that this is more of a fad.

[QUOTE=deaded38;37835907]Except I have tried to lose weight. Yes, I lost a few pounds. But it wasn't instant like you seem to think it is. It took me a month to lose four pounds. [b]I ate less and exercised at a gym three times a week for thirty minutes.[/b] With that routine, I'd have to continue for almost two years to get even close to average weight. It's not that I'm lazy. It's that I don't see a need to waste a good portion of my life just so I can be classified as healthy. Sure, it helps my health. But I'd rather live life well than having to be hungry all the time and go to the gym almost every day. People can do a lot of other productive things that isn't related to being in shape. I'd lose weight if it was easier. Again, not everyone can lose weight like you guys. So don't try to act like you know everything about losing weight just because you did it. [/QUOTE] But what were you eating to supplement your exercise regime? And were you really working out in the gym or just going for 30 minutes and doing slight exercise that doesn't even push you?

[QUOTE=Unfrozen;37851555]Eating as our ancestors have for a million or so years is not a fad. The principle of paleo eating is sound, whether or not someone's particular implementation of this principle is effective or not for weight loss or other goals doesn't change this. Smart folks in the paleo community are greatly interested in scientific research, whether or not the findings conform to paleo-informed expectations.[/QUOTE] If you've got research, please share, I'll read it. And I never said the paleo diet was unhealthy, just that it wouldn't lead to significant weight loss. I have not read any long-term (one year or longer, but two-year studies are even more revealing of the failure of [I]all[/I] weight loss strategies) research on the weight loss efficacy of paleo, but I guaran-damn-tee that there isn't a single study that shows more than a tenth of paleo dieters losing greater than 10% of their body weight. Feel free to prove me wrong. [QUOTE=Unfrozen;37851555]Carb restriction, which is compatible with paleo, is the most effective and painless way for overweight humans to lose body fat. This was pretty well understood 80 years ago. The low-fat nonsense first popularized int he 1960s is losing popular acceptance. One could argue that this is more of a fad.[/QUOTE] Caloric restriction, low-carb or otherwise, does not result in a calories in, calories out loss of body fat. This is due to adaptive thermogenesis, which I explain, and provide exhaustive citations for, in [URL="http://fiercefatties.com/2012/08/01/in-and-out/"]this post[/URL]. Again, show me one long-term study of caloric restriction that shows sustainable success rates in terms of retention or overall weight loss. They just aren't out there, and everyone in the research community accepts this fact. The only people who don't accept that there isn't a single successful way to lose weight is the general public. My point is not to disparage any particular dietary approach. It is to simply redefine "success" for that program. If you are able to live the paleo lifestyle and that's what you want to do, more power to ya. But you shouldn't measure the "success" by how many pounds it has made you lose, but by how it has impacted your metabolic indicators: blood pressure, sugars and lipids. If your cholesterol improves (namely, an improved HDL-to-trigs ratio, but also dropping LDL), your blood pressure is within a healthy range and you have good control of your blood sugar, then what you weigh doesn't actually matter. And the fact that people have been led to believe this is true has created unrealistic expectations. And those unrealistic expectations ultimately lead to the adoption of a lifestyle long enough to see that it hasn't made them then. Then they give up the lifestyle and move on to the next big thing. And I think that low fat has just as much evidence of efficacy as paleo. If you put Dean Ornish in a room with whoever is the most effective paleo proponent, that both groups would come out saying the exact same thing: their guy won and the other guy got his clock cleaned. The Ornish diet has [URL="http://ukpmc.ac.uk/abstract/MED/1973470/reload=0;jsessionid=rxzSeV17DgWl34p9izWj.0"]long-term research[/URL] showing that it reverses heart disease. [URL="http://www.pritikinresearchfoundation.org/research.html"]Same with the Pritkin diet[/URL]. I just don't think there's any one dietary prescription that will lower obesity rates. In any case, obesity rates haven't risen since 1999 for women and children and since 2004 for men, according to [URL="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22253363"]a 2012 NHANES study[/URL], the only population study of its size and kind because it actually weighs its participants. Focus on healthy behaviors and the most important metrics of health, of which, weight is near the bottom of the list. Paleo, Ornish, doesn't matter. Find something that works for you and stick with regardless of what it makes your body look like.

Thin privilege is bullshit. I am fat and it may not completely have been up to me throughout life but I have the choice on whether or not to lose that weight. Due to my body type, I'll never be truly "skinny" but if I were fit I wouldn't have fat flabs and moobs, and I'd just have a big chest. Aside from that, being fat doesn't limit you THAT much, it's better to be skinny, no doubt, but you can still be athletic when you're fat, I am, you can still have a friends or even a girlfriend while fat, I do, and I've seen a much fatter guy than me, get a much better girl.

[QUOTE=Eeshton;37870195]Thin privilege is bullshit. I am fat and it may not completely have been up to me throughout life but I have the choice on whether or not to lose that weight. Due to my body type, I'll never be truly "skinny" but if I were fit I wouldn't have fat flabs and moobs, and I'd just have a big chest. Aside from that, being fat doesn't limit you THAT much, it's better to be skinny, no doubt, but you can still be athletic when you're fat, I am, you can still have a friends or even a girlfriend while fat, I do, and I've seen a much fatter guy than me, get a much better girl.[/QUOTE] As a fellow fat man, I agree with you. But that's because the bar is set lower for men. For women, it's entirely different. Women much smaller than me are still held to unrealistic expectations in terms of their body size and shape.

I agree with the majority of the posts here saying that if you can't manage your own weight, you shouldn't be given special privileges. However, sometimes it's good to exersize a bit of good old fashioned sympathy. I know what it's like to be on a slippery slope; be it with employment, weight issues, depression etc. Once things really start to get on top of you, it really feels like there is no way out. The concept of making an effort towards a positive change can feel incredibly daunting.

As someone who is 179.8 pounds with a BMI 26.6 I am considered over weight for my height. I have never felt disadvantaged because of my weight even when i weighed 205 and maybe that is simply because I'm not obese. This being said there Are situations where thin people are treated better but often that can be sorted out as long as you're a pretty positive person. [editline]4th October 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=Ardosos;37804088]I want you to do a little experiment. I want you to not eat anything, and not drink anything except for water for 48 hours. Make note of how you feel, and imagine feeling like that [B]all the time[/B], because that's what happens to fat people when they switch to a diet of less food. It is like that constantly, and it never goes away. Ever. Simple? Yes. Easy? Ha ha, ha ha. No.[/QUOTE] Actualy I don't struggle with that feeling at all, if I feel hungry I drink some water or go for a jog.