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You know, I spent a lot of time working in both the restaurant and retail worlds and there are a few things I noticed about food and America's relation to it. First off, we dump calories on everything and don't really pay much attention to it. Ranch dressing is absurdly popular and it's, well, basically spiced mayonnaise with some buttermilk. It's basically pure calories, really. Mayonnaise is another real killer; it's calorie dense and a lot of people will slather huge amounts of it on sandwiches without considering the calories. Even people watching their calories will think "OK, this cheeseburger is 600 calories" then forget to count all the extra crap they put on it, which would frequently include 300 calories in just the mayonnaise. Same with fries; they'd not account for what they dipped them in. Then you'd get people saying "I'm having the salad bar, I am on a diet" and then going through a coffee cup full of ranch dressing in the process. Without fail these same people would be lamenting how they just don't understand why they aren't losing weight. Second off, soda. loving soda. I don't think I need to talk much about that but I've seriously seen people drink a gallon of soda in a single sitting. Not one of these people was ever thin. Which was another thing I noticed. If a non-fat person drink soda they'd have one or two and obviously didn't drink large amounts of it, ever. The least fat people mostly drank tea or coffee or some such. Death fat people with few exceptions would drink large amounts of soda or get huge milkshakes.\ Third off, deep fried everything. The fattest people I saw always came in on Sundays because that's when the Sunday buffet was. It was the only day we had all you can eat fried chicken and holy gently caress balls did I see some absolutely colossal people eating multiple plates of fried chicken. Once again some of them would be lamenting about the fact that they're so huge and "just couldn't understand why they aren't losing weight" when eating their twelfth piece of fried chicken. Once again people who were lighter would eat maybe two or three pieces then eat other stuff. Or just not eat the fried chicken at all. Fourth off is just outright laziness. There were times I'd ride my bike to work because I lived close enough to do so and gas was expensive. I figured it was a good way to get extra exercise in and given the distance and traffic issues driving wouldn't have saved me much time. A lot of people would look at me like I was completely loving insane. "But what if the weather is bad?" Well, those days I drive. Rest of the time though I'd walk or bike. Then some days I wouldn't go right home and would just ride my bike around for a while. I'd ride my bike when I had to run errands that didn't take me too far away for the bike to be practical. It was the same thing; people thought I was nuts. Apparently bikes are for hippies and children. Fifth off relates to hippies. You have no idea how desperately some people want to not look like a hippie or some new age twit. They'll avoid certain foods entirely because they're associated with hippies, hipsters, and liberals. Yes, you read that right; some people are so desperate to not look like a liberal they'll let it affect they're eating habits. Healthy food is associated with those people so you have to eat unhealthy garbage all day. Sixth off is what people eat. American food is very heavily processed and is full of whatever ingredients are the cheapest to get. Nutrition is an afterthought at best. The quickest, easiest, cheapest food probably has all of the nutrition of an empty cardboard box but oh gently caress my favorite show is coming on better grab that so I don't miss it. The biggest thing I noticed is that it's a death of a thousand cuts scenario. There isn't one singular big change that a person can make to lose the weight and keep it off and it's never just one small thing making Americans fat. It's little things adding up that make people fat. Sugary cereal for breakfast, snack bars that are only 300 calories, eating chips in front of the TV, ordering the large fries just this one time literally every time, finding excuses every time you go to exercise. It's lots and lots of little things piling up. That and for whatever reason Americans loving hate vegetables. Same as the bike riding thing; I frequently eat a pound of steamed vegetables with a bit of butter for a meal. Some people look at me like I'm a lunatic when they find that out. The idea of eating something that simple with no meat for a meal just seems absurd to so many people. It also is more the amount that Americans eat. Let's face it, we're a gluttonous, lazy society. We encourage overeating while being absolutely sedentary.
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Dec 24, 2015 11:49
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Discendo Vox posted:Going down the list would be difficult, but the basic observational claim of the obesity paradox- that people who were overweight/obese seemed to have lower mortalities compared with normal and underweight- ignored reverse causation. It turns out that a lot of diseases that kill you in hospitals also cause you to lose a lot of weight- like, say, cancer. Variants of this basic explanation- that other conditions and circumstances can effect weight rather than it being unidirectional- explain the "paradox" in a variety of datasets. There are additional statistical wrinkles (it turns out your weight might not be determinative of all diseases, and it turns out familywise error rate accumulation is still a thing that exists), but that's the simple response. It took the scientific community like 2 minutes to notice the causal assumption problem. That reminds me of people criticizing the Atkins diet because Atkins was a huge fat guy when he died. Completely ignoring that Robert Atkins was a 70 year old guy with heart disease when he died. Heart disease can make you gain a ton of water weight. And aside from that the guy was loving 70. Having health problems at 70 doesn't disprove the diet he came up with.
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Dec 26, 2015 22:28
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Discendo Vox posted:To be fair, Atkins was a colossal rear end in a top hat who died rich after profiting from promoting a pseudoscientific bullshit diet against the recommendations of more qualified nutrition researchers and agencies, one which almost certainly got people killed or caused harm to their bodies over time. His "product" continues to mislead and delude people to this day. The real shame is that he didn't die in an autoerotic asphyxiation accident, wearing a Klan hood. Valid point. Still, "Atkins died fat" doesn't disprove his diet. Oh sure other things did but the thing I heard about the most was "if his diet was so good why did he die a fat guy?" Logic and information aren't what convinces people and those aren't what get used for proof. Same goes for which diets do get popular. Science, proof, actual data? gently caress that, let's rely on sensationalism and bullshit.
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Dec 26, 2015 22:46
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The other thing with the Atkins diet is that most people got it extremely wrong. You started at very low carbs but you didn't stay there. Completely eliminating carbs in the long term isn't the best idea but that was never what you were supposed to do with that diet.
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Dec 27, 2015 09:46
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Cockmaster posted:The problem there is that if you don't want to end up gaining back all the weight you lose (as is disturbingly common among people who attempt any weight loss strategy), you need to change your diet to something you can stick with for the rest of your life. Did any of the Atkins literature ever offer any advice in that area? That's a problem with diets in general but that's a mix of the diet industry wanting to keep selling you new diets and people in general being idiots about dieting. There is no such thing as "you can do this diet and then go back to your awful ways." That's another conversation I've had with a ton of people; if you want to keep the weight off you need to change your base eating habits. As for Atkins if memory serves you were supposed to track calories, carbs, protein, etc. and figure out the equilibrium point where you neither gained nor lost weight. Akins also advocated eating more vegetables and fewer calories so it wasn't all bad. But then the miracle diet that worked for me when I was starting to pork up was "quit eating so drat much cake you dumb poo poo." I changed my eating habits to be healthier (less meat, less junk food, no cake, no soda, little candy, more vegetables) and have been non-fat ever since. Really when it comes to dieting a lot of people are looking for something that just plain doesn't exist but the only diets that ever seem to be profitable are "lose 20 pounds in a month and keep it off forever! WOW!!!" For better or for worse Americans just don't want somebody to tell them "lay off the junk food and eat some drat carrots then go for a walk."
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Dec 28, 2015 11:57
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CalmDownMate posted:That would rely on people not being retards. It doesn't help that snack foods are deliberately created to be unfulfilling. It's clever marketing, really; "these are things you eat while watching the TV!" Next thing you know it's 1,000 calories later but you barely noticed.
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Dec 29, 2015 00:53
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axeil posted:So maybe better education around food portioning? When I got my food scale and I found out how much I had been using vs what I thought I was using it was eye opening. The things cost less than 10 bucks, there's no reason that everyone shouldn't have one. That's kind of my point; what's being advertised are diets that you can lose 20 pounds quick on then go back to your awful ways and not gain the weight back. Being healthy and smaller than medically obese is a matter of lifestyle choices in the long term not crash diets. That's the biggest issue with the diet industry and food industries. Portion control and paying attention to what you eat are the hugest deal. It's very interesting to look at pictures that do things like compare various foods in what amounts to 200 calories. It can be a candy bar or like half of a freaking melon. Eating five candy bars is pretty easy. An entire melon is actually really filling.
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Jan 4, 2016 16:52
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Crystal Geometry posted:1. I agree, I mentioned this because it's one of the key points a lot of fat activists make and I felt like the same conversation could be had without even addressing the genetic component at all. A great deal of it just has to do with bad habits, poor food education, and misinformation from the food industry, really. Being non-fat isn't really hard; it's all about habit. But Americans have a bad habit of eating garbage all day while being sedentary. We're bombarded with advertisements for fast food and soda everywhere we go. It's also easy to just not think about food. It also doesn't help that the food industry crams as many calories into everything as possible because that's what tastes best. Processed food is probably the real killer; compare pictures of things like 200 calories of honeydew to 200 calories of corn chips.
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Jan 17, 2016 05:11
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Discendo Vox posted:Define "processed food" in a way that isn't the naturalistic fallacy writ large. I'm referring to heavily processed, industrial food that is crammed full of calories but has little nutritional value. I'm not making naturalistic arguments or saying it's inherently bad just that Americans eat poo poo loads of it because it tastes good and isn't all that filling.
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Jan 17, 2016 10:33
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Trent posted:I won't get into the "processed food" thing since others have, but I agree with the rest. I'd like to add that food can be a pleasant and easy escape from a lovely stressful life. Eating "unhealthy" (read: calorie dense) food is very pleasurable, sometimes the most pleasurable thing in someone's day by a wide margin. Continuing to eat yummy escapist food after you reach an abstract calorie limit is extremely easy (and rewarded immediately by our natural mechanisms), and in fact even thinking about calories and nutrition makes the experience less fulfilling and pleasurable. Fixing this probably means means fixing the lovely low-education and/or wage-slave lives of the underclasses. Stress eating also has a lot to do with it. America is, overall, a stressed nation. Our standards are impossibly high and we're increasingly living in a society that denies opportunity to many. Thanks to how cheap corn is it's very easy to make cheap, calorie-dense food and take a wild guess what poor folks eat. It's dirt cheap to eat large amounts of stuff that's basically just corn, sugar, and salt but more expensive and harder to eat healthy. The other thing is that some people just live too far away from a supermarket to go frequently so they have to buy what keeps. Often that will be the cheap garbage that comes in a box. It doesn't help that a great many Americans have no clue about anything nutritional and also don't know how to cook. Sometimes willfully so; why cook when you can just eat Hot Pockets every day?
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Jan 17, 2016 15:30
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Calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods are those that have a lot of energy nutrients but little else. They're a massive problem in American diets and is where the phrase "empty calories" originates. Look at the labels on foods. There's a lot of heavily processed food available in America that has a lot of calories but is deficient in most or all of the other things needed. Soda comes under fire for just that reason. This is also why there's those "eat a drat vegetable or piece of fruit once in a while holy gently caress" movements going on. I've met a ton of people who eat junk food pretty much all day and constantly lament that they're fat and have no idea why. Calorie-dense food also sneaks in in ways most people just don't think about. Some sauces and dressings have a gently caress load of calories but get slathered over everything and not thought about. Mayonnaise and ranch dressing are probably the biggest. I've seen a ton of people say "I'm eating healthier now it is salad time!" then douse the salad in ranch dressing which is basically spiced mayonnaise. I also worked in a restaurant for five years and you have no idea how often people would come in and order fried chicken then get french fries with it and want extra ranch for all of it and the rolls while complaining it's not their fault they're fat! It's genes, I swear! edit: The other thing I noticed when we got a latte machine is that a lot of people would suck down 800 calories of coffee drinks regularly and not realize it was making them gain weight. Some people knew what was up and just didn't care; for some people it was "yes I know this is why I am fat and I'm OK with that." But it was truly amazing how often I saw people that didn't realize they were consuming 3,000+ calories a day while living an inactive lifestyle and complain that their diets weren't doing anything. Or people who wanted some magical way to eat deep fried stuff covered in ranch all the time while being sedentary and still being thin. Sorry folks, it just doesn't work that way. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Jan 17, 2016 |
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Jan 17, 2016 18:14
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silence_kit posted:I think a lot of that is that the people who eat 'natural unprocessed' foods have bought into the healthy lifestyle. They aren't smokers, drug users, or heavy drinkers. They exercise regularly to keep their hearts and bones healthy. They don't live in sewers or do risky behavior which would expose them to communicable disease. They get plenty of sleep and effectively deal with stress. They don't undereat or overeat. The benefits of those other things get attributed to the type of food they eat. To be fair they probably also pay attention to what they eat and ensure they have a balanced diet. It's pretty hard to be actually malnourished in America but it's balls easy to consume massively unnecessary amounts of calories.
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Jan 17, 2016 20:07
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When I was younger I started to get fat because I ate cake every day. I quit eating cake every day and went back to being thin in pretty short order. Once I read more about food and nutrition I started eating less meat and more vegetables. I like to make stuff like vegetable soup and vegetable stir fry because I can eat as much of it as I want without giving any shits. I can eat like four bowls of vegetable soup and not worry about getting fat. I can eat until I feel full every meal without worrying about eating too many calories because, you know, vegetables. Biologically speaking that's how humans are supposed to eat; we relied in the past more on gathered stuff than things like meat. My health overall improved considerably when I gave up soda and actively avoided heavily processed foods. I don't eat stuff like hot pockets and pop tarts. Snacks are generally fruit, nuts, and bread. Unlike a lot of Americans I actually pay attention to what I eat and make sure I'm at least trying to be healthy. By some mystery this keeps me non fat. Do I still indulge in junk food from time to time? Yeah. Who doesn't? Fishmech this is the sort of points I'm making and you're utterly ignoring them. Instead of acknowledging my point you're arguing semantics "But calorie is a nutrient!!!!" Well technically yes but you're acting like eating nothing but calories is a healthy diet. It isn't. Nutrition is actually pretty complex and you need more than just energy. The reason Americans generally don't deal with deficiencies or malnutrition is because Americans eat meat basically every meal and lots and lots of cheese while overeating like crazy. However some Americans have their calorie:not calorie ratio hosed up severely. Part of this comes about because of how we process food. We bread it, inject sugar into it, deep fry it, throw cheese on it, then drown it in mayonnaise. Our attitude toward food is "more calories. There are never enough calories. Calories, calories, calories!!!" This is the point people are making. American food is high in calories and salt but low on everything else and it's making Americans fat. Pointing out that a calorie is a nutrient so potato chips are actually nutritious is not arguing in good faith and is, in fact, incredibly loving stupid. It's not just missing the point but deliberately ignoring it while declaring victory based on "nuh uh!!!"
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Jan 18, 2016 05:39
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falcon2424 posted:Which micro-nutrients, in particular, do you think people should be concerned with? One major issue with fad diets or the belief in super foods is that nutrition as a whole isn't looked at. Which nutrients varies depending on just what the situation is. I don't think there's one simple list of "these nutrients you should pay close attention to" because that varies based on what foods are readily available, what food restrictions somebody has, and what sorts of diets they're following. I, for example, can't eat seafood. None of it. All swimmy things gently caress me up badly. That gives me trouble getting enough iodine so I make it a point to specifically buy iodized salt.
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Jan 18, 2016 07:18
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Stinky_Pete posted:For example, when I was in high school, we had access to the college campus our school was sort of on, and they had a food court with Taco Bell, Panda Express, and Chik-Fil-A, along with a place that had these big freshly baked cookies, and movie-sized M&Ms. My school was too small to have a cafeteria. If we made the cafeteria food not suck then a dirty poor might experience a fleeting moment of joy and that is not loving OK.
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Jan 20, 2016 19:43
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Chicken gets a bad rap because Americans loving love deep fried chicken. The difference between a breaded, deep fried chicken breast and a baked one is a few hundred calories. It's massive. Another issue is fiber; vegetables don't have much when it comes to carbs but plenty of fiber. It fills you up faster without putting as many calories in.
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Jan 21, 2016 08:19
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There's also multiple kinds of vegetables so if you don't like broccoli you can just like, you know, eat something else. This idea that healthy eating = broccoli is absurd.
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Jan 21, 2016 15:48
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Cingulate posted:No but you can't always get what you want. Or in the case if a fat person wanting to be lean, almost never. You can come to terms with not having what you'd prefer to eat, and you can go the hard or the less hard way. But it's inherently about not getting what you want. Ever. That's not entirely true. The people I know who succeeded in their diets were the ones that cheated on them. Probably the most successful way is "6 days of healthy eating and if I behave I get to eat garbage for a day." It's way better than eating like crap 7 days a week and turns your favorite food into a reward instead of some tantalizing thing always out of reach you can't have anymore.
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Jan 21, 2016 16:04
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When I noticed myself porking up I changed my eating habits away from "cake every day" to "no cake at all" by not buying cake. Really when you're hungry you'll just eat whatever is in the kitchen. If you fill it with healthy food that you like it's hard to eat badly. If you have 12 boxes of snack cakes, ten pounds of chips, and a refrigerator full of nothing but chocolate and whipped cream take a wild guess what you'll be having for dinner. I primarily changed my eating habits by just not buying so much crap. I also bought a wok and learned how to stir fry. poo poo's good, yo.
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Jan 21, 2016 17:51
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JFairfax posted:everyone ITT needs to post their height and weight Well, I'm 6' and I think 160/170 right now. Haven't been weighed but I don't look fat so I'm not concerned with the exact number.
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Jan 21, 2016 23:26
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fishmech posted:You're aware pizza with chicken on it exists right? To consider them to be entirely seperate things is folly. All foods are exactly identical to all other foods. Got it. I'm going to live entirely on salt now.
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Jan 22, 2016 12:47
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Cingulate posted:Well in this thread they were entirely cheap sophistry, somewhere between pointless and actively harmful. It basically amounted to "my grandpa smoked and got 78 years old, cigarettes -> lung cancer for 100% of cases is not proved causal beyond unreasonable doubt". One of the issues with the conversation is that you can't seem to say "being fat literally kills you" without pissing certain people off. While I'd agree that we shouldn't be shaming, shunning, and casting fat people out because some of them genuinely can't help it this active hostility toward actual, legitimate medical research is insane. Being 500 pounds is absolutely not healthy but you're getting piles of people acting like we shouldn't even mention weight ever or do research on it. Even saying to one of your friends "hey man you're eating yourself to death please stop I would be sad if you died of a heart attack at 35" is considered a bad thing all of the sudden. Apparently it's now a bad thing to actually care about the people you like enough to try to get them be healthier. I mean if somebody is happier being fat, gluttonous, and lazy then fine, that's their business, so long as they realize they're shortening their life. However, this idea that we should encourage that as acceptable behavior is a massive problem. Granted it's also one of those situations where the people mean well but blow it out of proportion and go way too far. There are some nuggets of truth there; we should not be photoshopping models into absurdly slender, unrealistically tiny forms or acting like 2% body fat is the ideal that everybody should strive for. It's almost as if... wait for it... the truth is actually somewhere in the middle on this one.
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Jan 23, 2016 19:52
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khwarezm posted:It seems to me that its that the HAES crowd is not so much about the 500 pound people, but the less extreme weight categories that a massive fraction of the population is in at this point. There's lots of questionable studies and quirks that they can point to, look at the obesity paradox stuff that was brought up earlier and it manages to keep the water muddy enough that some otherwise intelligent, well-meaning people go along with it. Like there's lots of people who look like they know what their talking about who peddle the kind of stuff that HAES laps up, and the general perception of nutrition among the general population tends to be one of utter confusion, so if you read an article in a relatively reputable place like Time or Slate that aligns with what the fat acceptance or HAES crowd says about the evils of dieting or whatever you might end up going along with the whole thing. The problem with HAES is that they're deliberately twisting information to justify eating themselves to death. Studies have shown, for example, that being underweight is unhealthy and that being a bit overweight doesn't hurt you. There's actually a pretty big window of "healthy weight" all told and being somewhat husky is in that category. The problem with HAES is that they're saying "being underweight is unhealthy so you should be as huge as possible" or "this study said that being 50 pounds over doesn't hurt you so being 500 pounds over must also not." They're deliberately spreading misinformation that is literally killing people. A super obese person has a dramatically reduced quality of life as well as life span. There are people saying "so fat you can't even walk" is a perfectly healthy state to be in. It isn't.
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Jan 24, 2016 10:15
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That's actually another issue with the conversation; being huge doesn't guarantee you'll get those problems. It vastly increases your risk but I have, in fact, met 500 pound people that were perfectly healthy at like 60, same as I met a guy that smoked three packs a day starting at 13 and had perfectly pristine lungs at 70. Some people are just flat out immune to certain things for whatever reason. The issue is that those people do not mean it's safe for the rest of us to have those habits. Most people who smoke that heavily won't see 70 and most people who weigh 500 pounds for multiple decades will die of it. I, for one, decided to maintain a lower weight and have healthy eating habits because my gene pool has a ton of diabetes in it. I don't want to increase my risk after watching relatives suffer from renal failure in their 50's. Working in the restaurant world I'd watch regular customers literally eat themselves to death and decided I didn't want to go through that.
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Jan 24, 2016 12:11
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BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:To be completely fair, most HAES bloggers or "fat activists" are the mobile obese. They aren't anywhere near 500lbs. They're fine with moderate walking and swimming (and the new craze is pole dancing...) The people who are scooting around in motorized wheelchairs aren't as delusional as the people who are living normal lives but obese. And that is the sinister part - these people have decent bloodwork and post videos of them being not entirely sedentary and extrapolate that to perfect health. Most of these people are not having health problems now aside from limited physical endurance (which, as they'll note, is true for anyone who doesn't exercise), but they are at massive risk for health problems as they age. That's the crazy part, really; I see the same thing from smokers. "Well I'm not dying now so I'll just smoke for a while and quit before I develop serious issues." Like OK yeah you're 22, of course smoking isn't causing you problems yet but "I'll change my ways tomorrow" tends to lead to a gently caress load of tomorrows. Next thing you know you've been smoking for 40 years and can't walk without gasping for breath. Or you're dying of lung cancer at 57.
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Jan 24, 2016 17:14
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Mandator posted:It's not a joke. I think that calorie restricted diets are an effective and proven way to lose weight. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Weight is actually a pretty complex thing but in the case of America for most Americans that's half of the equation. Americans, as a whole, are sedentary and consume too many calories. You could, for example, eat 5,000 calories a day and still lose weight if you burn them all. There was a period of my life where my job involved a lot of heavy lifting and I liked to ride my bike a whole loving lot. My calorie needs were very, very high so I looked like a glutton when really I was just active. Now I make a point of eating not as much as before because, well, now I'm a slightly crippled software developer and my calorie needs are much, much lower.
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Sep 27, 2016 00:49
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