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The Weight I Carry

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Weight I Carry

#21

Post by zachruss92 »

I feel for the author. I have also struggled with my weight my entire life. At my heaviest, I was 265lbs. I definitely struggled, and continue to struggle with body issues. I was definitely addicted to food and was an emotional eater. I literally had a term called "stress cheeseburgers" as when I was stressed that's what I'd do.

I finally decided to make a significant change last year. It started with me doing meal prep for my lunches. Previously I would eat out for lunch every day, and I would never make good choices. I was able to lose about 35lbs by just doing that and making no other changes in my life.

In August, I decided to start the keto diet. I started not for the weight loss reasons, but for the lifting of the "brain fog". I didn't realize how much carbs controlled my life until then. Eating keto 100% changed my life for the better:

* My relationship with food has completely changed. I am now concerned about what I'm eating, nutritionally speaking, instead of just quantity and taste. I am eating a lot more whole foods.

* My overall pain level has gone down significantly (I have back problems).

* I literally crave vegetables. My first couple of weeks I ate nothing but bacon and other unhealthy meats. After a while, all I wanted was a big plate of broccoli!

* I have much more energy and mental clarity. I also noticed my recovery time from working out is lessened.

As of this morning, I weigh 196lbs. I don't know how long keto is sustainable for, but I plan on sticking to this for the long term. If I do stop, I will definitely apply the lessons I've learned from going keto: mostly eat whole foods and carbohydrates that have nutritional value.

Re: The Weight I Carry

#22

Post by citizen_e »

citizen_e wrote: post #16

blah blah, fatty is sad. Why don't we have such sympathy for smokers, who are targeted with something which is at least as addictive, and more deadly? It's because we recognize it's something indulgent and destructive, you reap what you sow and all that. This guy deserves to die early.

screw the downvoters, I'm right.

Re: The Weight I Carry

#23

Post by jaggederest »

nxc18 wrote: post #4

Being significantly overweight is really tough. Body issues and shame make it so much harder. I wish people would understand that better. There’s a pretty nasty cycle of looking in the mirror, feeling like shit, eating to not feel like shit (the key problem step - note that it never actually works), looking and feeling like shit because you eat too much. I’ve lost 70 pounds in the last ~7 months. 50 pounds to go. I’m…

> Also, IME, exercise makes me hungry for more calories than I burn. Exercise to get healthy, treat the metabolism boost as a bonus. Exercise does not cancel out foods (this is speaking to fat people like me - if you’ve been skinny your whole life your body probably works differently).

Conveniently summarized as "You can't outrun your fork". No amount of running replaces a calorie deficit.

Also, props for 70 pounds of weight loss. That's a huge number.

Re: The Weight I Carry

#24

Post by johnkpaul »

Jtsummers wrote: post #10
johnkpaul wrote: post #2

I've been 400 pounds most of my life. I empathize with every single sentence in this article and cannot imagine making myself write something like this. The vulnerability is incredible. I'm really glad that exercise is being called out as useless to treat obesity more and more. I hope that trend continues and things like Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaigns never happen again. Carbohydrate addiction is no joke, ev…

I'm curious what the problem with the "Let's Move" effort was. I was only aware of it (I wasn't part of it, and never set out to read about it, just caught reports on news or random articles), but it seemed to emphasize two things: eating healthy (which got a lot of flak from conservative commentators for some reason) and exercise (the "move" in the name). If it only focused on the latter, I'd agree with you. But nea…

As a child obese person (obese at 2 years old, morbidly by 8), hearing that you're supposed to play more and move more to lose weight and then for years attempting to do that and failing over and over again is not only useless but actively detrimental to young children.

Also, I only ate "healthier food options" during that time. I ate too much of it, sure, but "portion control" doesn't mean much when there's healthy carbohydrates everywhere to eat.

Re: The Weight I Carry

#25

Post by jemfinch »

bko wrote: post #13

I found this study from 1973 interesting where an extremely obese individual performed a supervised fast for about a year and dropped from 456 to 180 pounds. > A 27-year-old male patient fasted under supervision for 382 days and has subsequently maintained his normal weight. Blood glucose concentrations around 30 mg/100 ml were recorded consistently during the last 8 months, although the patient was ambulant and atte…

> I don't know why I haven't seen more studies where extremely obese individuals just stop eating.

Primarily because it's not considered medically safe, and a study along those lines would be too dangerous to the patients to be permitted.

In this particular case, the 27yo male patient informed the doctors of his plan and said, "This is what I'm doing, you can monitor me or not." They didn't propose the study themselves.

Re: The Weight I Carry

#26

Post by hombre_fatal »

neaden wrote: post #5
nxc18 wrote: post #4

Being significantly overweight is really tough. Body issues and shame make it so much harder. I wish people would understand that better. There’s a pretty nasty cycle of looking in the mirror, feeling like shit, eating to not feel like shit (the key problem step - note that it never actually works), looking and feeling like shit because you eat too much. I’ve lost 70 pounds in the last ~7 months. 50 pounds to go. I’m…

I think exercise for weight loss/management isn't going to be a good idea for the vast majority of people. As you said, you get hungrier when you burn those calories and it's very easy to spend five minutes and eat all the calories you burned working out for an hour.

When I exercise, it puts me on a health-minded path every day that snowballs into other good decisions. It's like how they say making your bed in the morning helps put you on task the rest of the day.

I find your line of thought unconvincing. The thing in common among everyone I know who is overweight is that they don't even work out at all. The amount of people I know who don't do anything is astonishing. The problem people have with exercise is that they don't build the habit at all. That's where they fail, long before your hypothesis could even be tested.

"Better not exercise so I don't overeat!" sounds like every other self-sabotaging bargaining we do to avoid effort, like not jogging because you can't yet afford nice running shoes. This seems like the last excuse that we need to be peddling to people trying to turn their life around.

Re: The Weight I Carry

#27

Post by crysin »

jki275 wrote: post #9
paulcole wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that no matter how much we try, exercising and eating less won't work Definitely disagree here. These are the only things that work. How else can you lose weight other than by moving more and eating less?

The key is that people actually don't eat less. They feel more hungry when they exercise, which drives them to eat more , which pushes the vicious cycle even further.

There's also eating less and actually eating less. You can eat less food, but if the food you're eating is higher in calories then you're not going to lose weight. Part of the problem with eating less, is the size / portion of what you eat matters just as much as what you are actually eating. As an extreme example: The size of a slice of cheesecake is roughly equivalent to the size of a breast of chicken however eating the slice of cheesecake is eating a lot "more" than eating that breast of chicken.

Re: The Weight I Carry

#28

Post by sctb »

citizen_e wrote: post #16

blah blah, fatty is sad. Why don't we have such sympathy for smokers, who are targeted with something which is at least as addictive, and more deadly? It's because we recognize it's something indulgent and destructive, you reap what you sow and all that. This guy deserves to die early.

We've banned this account.

Re: The Weight I Carry

#29

Post by nxc18 »

growlist wrote: post #12
nxc18 wrote: post #4

Being significantly overweight is really tough. Body issues and shame make it so much harder. I wish people would understand that better. There’s a pretty nasty cycle of looking in the mirror, feeling like shit, eating to not feel like shit (the key problem step - note that it never actually works), looking and feeling like shit because you eat too much. I’ve lost 70 pounds in the last ~7 months. 50 pounds to go. I’m…

I find protein bars are pretty good at fighting my hunger pangs.

High protein, and (while still calorie restricting) high fat does wonders for appetite.

Also: water! As an obese person I kind of had to learn what thirst is because I almost always interpreted it as hunger. Also vital while your stomach is shrinking if you're used to overeating (as I was).

Re: The Weight I Carry

#30

Post by graeme »

nxc18 wrote: post #4

Being significantly overweight is really tough. Body issues and shame make it so much harder. I wish people would understand that better. There’s a pretty nasty cycle of looking in the mirror, feeling like shit, eating to not feel like shit (the key problem step - note that it never actually works), looking and feeling like shit because you eat too much. I’ve lost 70 pounds in the last ~7 months. 50 pounds to go. I’m…

Actually you're more of less agreeing with the conventional wisdom of those who do weight lifting. The vast majority of fat loss is simply diet.

Walking, is helpful. And strength training is good to prevent muscle loss.

Anyway, the above is actually the conventional wisdom of those who go to the gym and try to get lean. This is not the message you hear in pop nutrition however.

Congrats on your progress! If you do ever do strength training (or for anyone reading this), one very simple metric to add is weight + waist measure.

After all, the goal is fat loss, not "weight", per se. When doing lifts, it can be discouraging to see the scale not moving. However, in lost cases the fat is still going away and the waist shrinks.

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