Programmed to be fat?

Are you seriously proposing the human body is as simplistic a system as an engine? Because I really think we'd have obesity beat already were that the case.

We do have obesity beat. Eat less calories than your body burns for long enough and you will stop being obese.

Again, as I pointed out in more than one post you don't become obese over night. You become obese over a period of time in which there are several poor decisions made relating to activity level and diet. It will take an equally long time to undo those poor decisions. With optimized decision making you can shorten the time. The problem isn't obesity is some fucking mystery brought to us by ancient civilizations to solve its a problem of too many fucking calories in versus too few calories out over an extended period of time.

People want instant results. I referenced this in the diet thread but I'll point it out here too. Back this time last year, a BIIIIIG OL' DUDE signed up as a "resolutioner" at the gym. Smaller than the guy in my long post, but still a big boy by any measure. Probably about 400lbs or so. Hadn't seen him at the gym since maybe February and I figured he had quit (like all the other resolutioners). Turns out, I saw him in about July or August and the dude looked like he had lost about 100 or more lbs. Saw him again the past week and he's still dropping weight. He's still obese but he's waaaayyy better off.

Patience and persistence are the key to overcoming obesity. Blaming your dna, gut flora, or anything else will never solve the problem. There is a proven method to combat obesity but it takes time and effort. Those, are unfortunately, two things a lot of modern people lack.
 
The point is moreso that the explosion in obesity in first world countries is not linked to some propagated cultural flaw.

At the point where you have to always consciously restrict intake your body already has damage at a cellular level in multiple areas. I don't think anyone is arguing that you can't restrict food intake, ingest a better food composition, and increase activity levels to combat obesity that has developed.

The argument is being made for a multifactorial reason for the development and prevalence of obesity in the first place. When the government is telling you to eat 12 servings of bread a day, that fat leads to heart disease, and you have marketers touting that from concentrate juices and refined carb based breakfast cereals are the healthy way to go, you're pretty screwed from the gate. Which is compounded further by socioeconomic factors. Less sleep which is often of poor quality. It goes on.
 
The point is moreso that the explosion in obesity in first world countries is not linked to some propagated cultural flaw.

At the point where you have to always consciously restrict intake your body already has damage at a cellular level in multiple areas. I don't think anyone is arguing that you can't restrict food intake, ingest a better food composition, and increase activity levels to combat obesity that has developed.

The argument is being made for a multifactorial reason for the development and prevalence of obesity in the first place. When the government is telling you to eat 12 servings of bread a day, that fat leads to heart disease, and you have marketers touting that from concentrate juices and refined carb based breakfast cereals are the healthy way to go, you're pretty screwed from the gate. Which is compounded further by socioeconomic factors. Less sleep which is often of poor quality. It goes on.

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The point is moreso that the explosion in obesity in first world countries is not linked to some propagated cultural flaw.

At the point where you have to always consciously restrict intake your body already has damage at a cellular level in multiple areas. I don't think anyone is arguing that you can't restrict food intake, ingest a better food composition, and increase activity levels to combat obesity that has developed.

The argument is being made for a multifactorial reason for the development and prevalence of obesity in the first place. When the government is telling you to eat 12 servings of bread a day, that fat leads to heart disease, and you have marketers touting that from concentrate juices and refined carb based breakfast cereals are the healthy way to go, you're pretty screwed from the gate. Which is compounded further by socioeconomic factors. Less sleep which is often of poor quality. It goes on.

1. People are lazy
2. Because of 1, people do not educate themselves
3. Because of 2, people make consistently poor choices related to diet
4. Because of 3, people become obese

Very few people give a flying fuck what the government tells them. Of course the problem is multi-faceted. What sociological problem isn't multi-faceted? But, every problem has a root cause. What I have argued consistently in this thread is that the root cause of the American obesity epidemic is people eating too much. The compounding factors themselves are not enough. The problem had to start somewhere.

If you eat 10k calories a day of fruits, veggies, and lean meat, have a government that teaches you the latest and greatest nutrition from an early age, and have magical jedi mind trick gut flora, you are still going to get obese if you're only burning off 1500 calories a day. That's just how it goes. The root cause of our obesity problem is overeating. Before that, the root cause is an over-saturated food supply. Before that our food supply is over-saturated because the government subsidies agriculture more than the do any other industry (look it up chumps).

I'm tired of fat people, and fat sympathizers, making excuses. Stop eating so much. Start exercising more. You will never ever look like GSP without massive use of chemical enhancements and surgery; never, get it out of your head. Though that goal is not attainable, it doesn't mean you have to look like Fat Albert or Dom DeLuise. The best a person can hope for might be Dennis Franz but that doesn't sell fitness magazines and supplements so we'll continue to blame everything but the fucking problem.
 
The main driving force being fat, lazy slobs is complete nonsense.

So over the past 50-60 years, America just had a huge culture shift where being a lazy glutton became popular? Parents started raising their kids that being really fat is awesome? It has nothing to do with refined carbs, high fructose corn syrup, FDA guidelines being based on bad science, and the political pressure of the agriculture industries that you yourself mentioned?

The average person doesn't have to go far to get indoctrinated with food pyramid bullshit. Public schools do a great job of that while they simultaneously feed your kid a lunch of either pizza and fries or chicken nuggets with tater-tots, extra chocolate milk with some corporate ice cream and candy vending machines in the corner.

It's incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to eat 10k calories of lean meat, vegetables, and fruit per day. It's incredibly easy to eat close to that of refined carbs that don't fill you up and have addictive properties.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be any personal accountability whatsoever. But the general population is playing against a tremendously stacked deck, which you seem to have a hardon for blaming them for.
 
So over the past 50-60 years, America just had a huge culture shift where being a lazy glutton became popular? Parents started raising their kids that being really fat is awesome?


Yes. Yes.

Its apologists like you and others in this thread that are the problem with your second question. The mere hint of an offset of the personal accountability in your second question I quoted is what allows fat people to stay fat. "Oh, it's not my fault, my mom fed me McDonald's as a kid and dah gubmint told me to eat mo bread lolz so I can just keep eating bad and not go to duh geeim cause meesa fat and its not mai faultz lulz."

Fat people staying fat is their damn fault. I watched my own dad balloon up from 200lbs to about 320lbs during a bout of post-andropause depression (aka, mid-life crisis) because he ate and drank anything he wanted in any quantity that suited him. You know how he fixed it? He stopped eating like a fucking pig and started going to the gym. I ballooned up to 256lbs. in May of 2010 because I ate whatever the fuck I wanted in whatever quantities (despite knowing better). You know how I fixed it? I started eating right and going to the gym.

Now, here's the kicker. I worked with a large dude (600+ lbs the last time he was weighed, also, not the guy I was talking about with the fast food) and never brought up the subject of weight with him. I was on my first weight loss trip (before 2010, was circa 2007 when I arrived here) and he chatted me up about the subject. What I found tremendously saddening was that he had gotten so big that exercise was almost beyond him. He had almost literally no option other than multiple surgeries. He couldn't get just one because the shock would kill him. The docs estimated he would need more than 5 surgeries to get to the weight where he could work out again. He couldn't walk (as extended exercise) because it was too hard on his knees and back. He couldn't do aquatics because his heart rate got too high. He is literally stuck. He can't have surgery because they estimate his chance of surviving the first @ 20%. I asked him how he got so big. I asked, was it genetics? He said, probably not, it probably doesn't help that his entire family is large, but they all eat a lot, and none of them are active. Want to know what he blamed? He was a blue chip football prospect his Sr. year of high school and his "people" put him on a diet program in order to bulk him up. He blew his knee out at the end of the season and he never took himself off the diet. He loved eating so he kept doing it. He was eating like a 3 sport athlete (which he was until his knee went out) but all he was doing was sitting at home playing video games. From the age of 17 to the age of 30~ he ate whatever he wanted. I'm sure genetics had something to do with it. But, the biggest person I have ever met in my entire life blamed himself. I've seen his family pictures. He has every right to blame his genetics. Did he? Fucking no! He was put on a diet to make him bigger. Did he blame his football coach and whoever else was involved in structuring his diet? Nope. He blamed himself. He blamed his own poor decision making and laziness.

After hearing that from him, I can not ever let a single person blame anyone but themselves for their weight problems. He had every reason and right to blame people other than himself, and if he can take ownership of his problem then everyone else can, too.
 
Cool. The new American Dream is to be morbidly obese. Also trying to put things into historically, sociologically, economically, and scientifically relevant context is being an apologist.

Thanks for clearing that up.
 
Cool. The new American Dream is to be morbidly obese. Also trying to put things into historically, sociologically, economically, and scientifically relevant context is being an apologist.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Didn't you know we live in a perfectly just world?

Say, while we're at it, why are poor people lazy?
 
We do have obesity beat. Eat less calories than your body burns for long enough and you will stop being obese.

This is as simple-minded a philosophy as is saying that the trick to financial success is to merely save more than one spends.

It's a notion that is easy to say, takes zero responsibility, and asserts that the person being told it is stupid. How things actually work in the real world is a bit more complicated.
 
This is as simple-minded a philosophy as is saying that the trick to financial success is to merely save more than one spends.

It's a notion that is easy to say, takes zero responsibility, and asserts that the person being told it is stupid. How things actually work in the real world is a bit more complicated.

Straw-man bullshit and you're better than that.

It would be the equivalent of saying that the way to save more money is to spend less than you earn. Financial success is a much larger organism than weight loss. Now, if you want to lose 20% body fat while maintaing muscle mass, you're going to have to tailor you goals and get more specific with what your doing. For simple weight loss, and for most obese people, a caloric deficit over an extended period will more than suffice.
 
Straw-man bullshit and you're better than that.

It would be the equivalent of saying that the way to save more money is to spend less than you earn. Financial success is a much larger organism than weight loss. Now, if you want to lose 20% body fat while maintaing muscle mass, you're going to have to tailor you goals and get more specific with what your doing. For simple weight loss, and for most obese people, a caloric deficit over an extended period will more than suffice.

You just repeated the very line of flawed logic you called a straw man.

The points people are making are not disputations of the basic mechanism of weight gain. Everybody understands that excess calories and lack of exercise make people fat, just as lack of money makes people poor. But the context in which these things occur is by no means simplistic, and it is a cognitive bias to believe that everybody finds a given task as easy as you find it, and thus you're permitted to denigrate them as inferior when they fail.
 
You just repeated the very line of flawed logic you called a straw man.

The points people are making are not disputations of the basic mechanism of weight gain. Everybody understands that excess calories and lack of exercise make people fat, just as lack of money makes people poor. But the context in which these things occur is by no means simplistic, and it is a cognitive bias to believe that everybody finds a given task as easy as you find it, and thus you're permitted to denigrate them as inferior when they fail.

Saving money != financial success

And if you had half the reading comprehension you fucking think you do you'd see I was blaming series of poor decisions more than anything. And yes, in a lot of instances, poor people are poor because of a series of bad decisions they made.
 
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Is really is as simple as eat less get thinner. There were very few fat people in WWII during the blitz in Britain because there was just wasn't much food to eat. There are no fat prisoners in a concentration camp or during a famine.
 
It's funny when I read stuff like: people blame "their genes" to avoid blaming themselves.

The thing is, you are your genes. That's who you are. Blaming your genes is the same as blaming yourself. If your genes do make you not being able to resist eating sugary stuff/junk food all the time despite your own will, then you actually do have a weak will when it comes to resisting eating like shit. Genes are used as a "get out of jail" card for denouncing responsibility, when it should be the exact opposite.

On the contrary, one could logically defend something like: "my environment is partly to blame for my obesity, because I was born into a society with almost unrestricted availability of junk food and, at the same time, I was born weak-willed when it comes to resisting eating it and haven't been motivated enough to get out of my comfort zone and permanently change my activity patterns". But that isn't such an appealing argument to construct, because it doesn't fully circumvent the fact that you are actually responsible for your actions.


Tl;dr: genetic predispositions don't mean people aren't as responsible for their actions.
 
It's funny when I read stuff like: people blame "their genes" to avoid blaming themselves.

The thing is, you are your genes. That's who you are. Blaming your genes is the same as blaming yourself. If your genes do make you not being able to resist eating sugary stuff/junk food all the time despite your own will, then you actually do have a weak will when it comes to resisting eating like shit. Genes are used as a "get out of jail" card for denouncing responsibility, when it should be the exact opposite.

On the contrary, one could logically defend something like: "my environment is partly to blame for my obesity, because I was born into a society with almost unrestricted availability of junk food and, at the same time, I was born weak-willed when it comes to resisting eating it and haven't been motivated enough to get out of my comfort zone and permanently change my activity patterns". But that isn't such an appealing argument to construct, because it doesn't fully circumvent the fact that you are actually responsible for your actions.


Tl;dr: genetic predispositions don't mean people aren't as responsible for their actions.

You are really just arguing semantics here. When someone says you avoid blaming yourself, it means you avoid blaming your decisions.
 
You are really just arguing semantics here. When someone says you avoid blaming yourself, it means you avoid blaming your decisions.

You missed the entire point there.

If you eat a bunch of doughnuts on a daily basis, that is your decision. If your genes predispose you towards exhibiting that behavior, it is still your decision.
 
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