Sometime ago one of my facebook friends posted pictures of classical art that had been altered so that the women in them – mostly figures of Venus – conformed to the new “preferred body type.”
At least two of the figures looked disgusting – as in, so thin that they bordered on sickly. Twiggy arms and legs. I mentioned this.
Someone immediately chimed in to the intent that there was no shame in our culture preferring athletic bodies to sedentary ones.
Where to begin?
First of all most of the Venuses (though not all) in the classical paintings don’t have sedentary bodies. Yes, they have curves, but they look perfectly toned. Look up Boticelli’s Venus if you don’t believe me.
Second, this person insisted that he’d seen many women like this in his own gym, that well-conditioned healthy bodies looked like this, and of course, we were just making arguments that it wasn’t fair, but beauty was never fair and blah, blah, blah.
Beauty isn’t fair. And I’m not making claims that my current body should be considered wonderful – it’s been out of kilter since I spent six months in bed, during my pregnancy with Robert. Between that and one of the more severe cases of pre-eclampsia the doctor told me she’d seen (I was retaining more than 50 lbs of water. I lost forty pounds via catheter the first two days. My joints were permanently changed.) and the post partum depression that ate the following year and that (while I was still active, we moved twice and prepared a house for sale in that year) made my eating and exercise very odd (there was the day of the twelve meringues. No, I’m not going to discuss it) and a complete break with my habits before, I’ve never quite found my balance.
Which doesn’t mean that I come by my weight honestly, or that it is a sign of present (or more than a month or two, while the balance of my mind was disturbed) gluttony or sedentary living. This year has been terrible for my walking, but normally I walk at least three miles a day, and I do a lot of physical work around the house. Also, although this might strike people as odd, I don’t eat the world. In fact, the worst that can be said for my eating habits is that they’re very weird. I prefer to grab small snacks on the run, and hate having to sit down for at least a meal a day, though I do it because I think it encourages family cohesion.
Could I be thin again? Sure. At various times in my life I’ve lost weight though never to close to the weight I was when I had Robert. During one of those periods, my doctor tried to advise me on weight. He said, if I just ate 1200 calories and exercised half an hour a day, I’d be back to a size seven. No, I didn’t listen to him. I didn’t listen to him because at the time I was eating 800 calories and exercising two hours every morning. That’s what it takes to lose weight – very slowly, but never below about a size 14. How is this even possible? I don’t know. I know that we’ve come to the conclusion that there is a lot more to weight than calories, and also that about three years ago I found out the caesarian was botched in a particular way that not only makes my hormones a mess (and caused people to diagnose me as menopausal starting in my mid thirties. And no, I still am not, fully.) but also, likely, makes my body convinced it’s in some state of pregnancy, though not exactly. I don’t know what that does to my body. Neither does anyone else.
However, every time I see a new doctor I get told the same thing. Not “dear lady, let’s work together to find out why your weight is insane. Let’s try this, this and this. If that doesn’t work, then let’s figure out this and that. Oh, and let’s run blood panels and figure it out.” No, it’s always “if you just ate less than 2000 calories and exercised a bare minimum, the weight would drop like a dream.”
This gets old, not because they want me to lose weight. I want to lose weight. It gets old because they treat it like I’m sinning and if I’ll just follow the moral and decent rules, my sin will shed from me.
Okay – I want to lose weight partly because it will make clothes fit better and easier to wear and because, well, d*mn, I used to be gorgeous (and didn’t know it) and though I realize I’m much older, but I’d like to be passable again. I’d like to lose weight before I’m 80.
However, two points: first, women in my family, on my dad’s side, looked much as I do now at my age. We have family pictures. Consider they lived in a society with no convenience foods (not that I use those) and mostly off fish and veggies with some rice and that mostly they worked on their feet, tending subsistence farms and cooking and washing by primitive methods. But their body types – accounting for the fact most were shorter than I – are indistinguishable from mine.
The other point is that I’m not out of shape. Okay, okay, this year I am. When I have respiratory stuff and go out of breath and cough at any exertion, I cut back on my exercise. And yeah, I feel icky about it, not least because when I’m not exercising I don’t sleep well and that has other effects. So, part of my plan as soon as I feel better is to get back in shape, and I hope to start that over the holidays. However, out of shape for me means I feel somewhat tired after walking three miles at a fast pace, not that I can’t walk around the block without getting winded, nor that I can’t carry clothes from the basement two flights up without gulping for air. (Unless I carry three baskets at once and run. Which I do sometimes. Sigh. You see, I have this inner teen boy. He does crazy stuff. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Yes, it scares the cats.)
Again though – this is not a defense of my body. My friend Kate says we Odds are as strange in body as in mind, meaning that we have shapes rarely seen in nature.
I could stand to lose fifty or eighty pounds. And when the kids are out of the house and we don’t have to sit down for a meal, I might manage it. Also, cutting carbs keeps me from gaining massively, (I’ve been low carb for four years, and I don’t gain as fast, though I still gain, mostly seeming to be related to hormones) and maybe cutting dairy (which I haven’t managed because I eat on the run and like cheese sticks) might — who knows? — do it. I’ve heard stories.
But that is not the point. I just laid it out so you understand that I don’t expect anyone to consider my body a model of attractiveness, because frankly I don’t. I don’t look like Boticelli’s Venus, and heck, Rubens might balk. As far as I remember my female ancestresses were little and round and I’m working on that as I get older, too.
This is not about the unfairness of beauty or of our standards of beauty. All standards of beauty are unfair and they always were. Women in the renaissance couldn’t have clear skin that easily.
What I’m talking about is the person who came back with the whole notion that these were “athletic” bodies and that you know, anyone who took the trouble to exercise would look like this, so implying that anyone who didn’t was in fact neglecting her appearance AND her health.
At some point, and I can’t find it with a quick search, Instapundit or maybe Ace of Spades linked a photo essay of gold medalist winners (in the Olympics.) These people were by definition in peak condition. About 10% of the women conformed to the body type that’s considered “beautiful” – and I’d have thought they were unhealthily thin, but I clearly was wrong. Some of them – and not the weight lifters, either – looked almost as I do. All were in peak condition.
(Part of my issue with any weight measures is that I put on muscle at a distressing rate for a woman who doesn’t want to look like Attila the Hun. I laughed at the description in Monstrous Regiment about the woman who could carry a pig under each arm, because that would be me with very little effort. Even when I was a size seven, I weighed about 30 lbs more than people expected, and doctors kept telling me I should be thirty pounds lighter, even though stripped you could see all my bones without an x-ray and I hadn’t been that weight since I’d grown to my adult height. OTOH I could always beat the “guess your weight” games in carnivals!)
I don’t have any problems with the current standards of beauty as standards of beauty. The only person I want to please would like me to lose a few pounds, but loves me anyway.
As some of you know I draw and since I can’t convince anyone to pose for me, and if I brought in young women to pose it would annoy the neighbors and corrupt the boys (er… or amuse them) I use model cds. This one is my favorite. Healthy, pleasant looking young women, right? No problems with it. There is one book, which I can’t find now, where the models look anorexic. I can’t find it because I don’t use it. But that one is okay. In fact I find the live models series, which has more realistic body types a little embarrassing. I really don’t need to see 60 year olds nude. Yes, there’s beauty in the human form of all types, but I’m enough of a prude to feel embarrassed.
What I object to is the assumption that if you don’t fit the very skinny (more than the virtual pose 3 models) standard of beauty, you’re somehow flabby, out of shape, and well… a sinner. “You should be taking better care of yourself.” “You shouldn’t eat so much junk food.” (Unless you count the occasional string cheese stick, I eat none.) “You should stay off fast food” (what all two times a year?) and “You should exercise at least half an hour.”
I believe the current preference for smaller bodies IS part of the exteriorization of the thought that we should not be better off than others. It’s the same as the preference for spare interiors, something that started in the early twentieth century with guilt over WWI and a turn to egalitarian ideas. Each age has the aesthetics it deserves, and no sane woman tries to fit those (I’m not for natural Barbie, either.)
To me it’s all pretty much academic, since I took myself out of that race decades ago.
BUT the whole conflation of beauty with health (and heck, we know that’s not true) and of failing to conform with sin bothers me, at a level I can’t begin to describe.
It’s entirely possible that I’m desperately unhealthy. I do keep getting sick. I think that’s mostly because I lived under great stress for a dozen years. I mean, what will shock you is how often Dave Freer and I are sick with the same stuff at the same time. What we have in common is stress, nothing else.
However, the fat or lack thereof is not a good indication of this. My ancestresses all lived to their late eighties or more. And they were, by our standards, rotund. (It’s unlikely I’ll live as long because of that truly awful pregnancy and also because of a certain respiratory fragility. OTOH who knows? If we don’t destroy our medicine, there is hope.)
And yes, I do realize that “you don’t fit in” has ALWAYS been a sin. Might be the only “sin” society recognizes. Much of what was wrong with the virtual theocracy of the middle ages is that no matter how good or just a religion might be, when it becomes an instrument of social cohesion, it’s going to view external things as marks of sin.
But part of the problem we have right now is confusing moral feelings and feelings of social cohesion with science. We feel uncomfortable when people don’t fit, and we try to show they’re wrong “because science.”
So, the fact that I consider some of the twiggy bodies in the pictures as icky bothered someone who had to defend them as “athletic” (bah. I could carry one of them under each arm and run one mile. I don’t think anyone with those arms and legs COULD run one mile.) and healthy. Because, social cohesion.
And the fact that most doctors have bought this one size fits all thing too kept me from seeing new doctors for over ten years. Because I didn’t want the lecture. Telling me “you’re aware you’re overweight” is stupid, unless you think I’m mentally retarded. And telling me to eat under 1200 calories and exercise half an hour a day is fine, but if I tell you what I’m actually doing , don’t say “impossible.”
Dave Freer once told me that every zoo keeper knows that animals – sometimes animals of the same litter – have widely different dietary and exercise requirements. The only place this isn’t recognized is human biology, where if you aren’t getting the same results as anyone else, you must be a sinner and evil and a glutton.
You figure it out.
I have grown resigned to the fact I have the type of body that makes me “woman, strong like bull, pulls plow in field.” In my mind, I wanted to be the long slim English beauty type. But in my mind, I’d also like to have a talent for music and not transpose digits when doing calculations. I can do a little towards it, but not that much. And btw, I’d be more likely to manage those last two, given my heredity, than the first.
So, why is this whole thing bothering me so much?
Because our medical establishment has bought into “one set of guidelines” and “one healthy body type” and “one way to obtain it.” … and if the government enforces their control over our health, a body type that’s not “Athletic” might consign us to inferior or even no treatment.
After all, if we don’t take the trouble to keep ourselves in shape, why bother to heal us?
That is what is wrong with central control of medicine. But it’s also wrong with viewing deviating from social “ideal” as a sin. And believing in one size fits all. And again, this is what is wrong with medicine that aims to ideals not individuals.
How to fix it? I don’t know. To begin with, let’s not handle our health care to bureaucrats. And then we can work on convincing practitioners of medicine that one size does NOT fit all.
* No, I haven’t read the book yet, but I’ve bought it, thanks to Kim Du Toit who has infected me with Evelyn Waugh who — for whatever reason — had escaped my reading before. ATH is CULTURE.
According To Hoyt 
As far as “Standards of Female Beauty” go, I came to the conclusion a while ago that these standards change over time and always represent whatever is hardest to do.
In the days when food was harder to get, the standard of beauty was to be heavy
when most people worked outdoors, the standard of beauty was pasty white (never seen the light of day)
when most people started working indoors, the standard of beauty became tanned
and as food has become more plentiful,, the standard of beauty has become thin
go through any female fashion or trend in history, and I don’t think that you will find any that were ever easy.
It’s as if the society of people who decide what’s “beautiful” is trying to make it so that only a small elite can possibly meet the standard
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“It’s as if the society of people who decide what’s “beautiful” is trying to make it so that only a small elite can possibly meet the standard”
Of course they are!
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one other thing that goes along with this is that to engage in the effort needed, historically, the males in their lives needed to be rich enough that the females would not need to work and so could spend their time doing ‘other things’
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Well, under my “could I have the ideal body?” Yeah, if I gave up writing and exercised six to eight hours a day. Probably. BUT I LIKE writing.
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Don’t forget that there are two standards. The first one, that is the one most often heard, is the female standard of beauty. That is what women consider beautiful. I believe that that is what you are referring to in your posting and what is pushed in women’s magazines. The second one is what men consider beautiful. That tends to be closer to what is reproductivly healthy, in other words the sort of woman who can be expected to have a lot of children easily. That is the type of woman that is seen in men’s magazines.
I believe that the women’s idea of beauty is driven by a need to be able to tell themselves that there is no way that they can be beautiful and that many of their problems (especially with relationships) are thus not their fault.
Feel free to critisize (or flame) as needed.
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I’ve been told by a friend who has worked in the fashion industry that there’s another standard (which probably overlaps significantly with your female standard), ie the gay, male, fashion designer standard. This one tends towards androgynous, under-developed, and skinny. The adolescent male body IOW. The ostensible reason being that such body types don’t interfere with the way the designer’s fashions drape on the body as breasts and hips would.
Insofar as women judge themselves by the fashion model standard, they’re trying to look like an ideal that won’t attract most men. The Playboy Bunny standard is more the straight male ideal.
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Agreed.
There is something disturbing that the fashion designers take the attitiude that the people that wear their designs are there to mke the design look good, rather than the design making them look good.
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If designers are making clothes that fit teenage boys best, then they obviously hate women, because most women don’t look like that.
Can medication change the way you feel about food? I’ve always been a carb addict, but now after a couple of months on Januvia, all I want to eat is sugar. I never used to feel that way.
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There are now teenage boys who model as women’s clothes models. Look it up.
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Wow, the fashion industry really is beyond parody at this point.
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That’s why I lik,e classic styles. Also, not all designers were like this: Ralph Lauren was known as friendly to the female figure.
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Januvia was not good for me. I craved more sugar, more sugar, and more sugar, all the time. After about 2 months off the stuff now, that’s getting better.
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Oh thank you!!
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I tried to explain to someone one day how foolish that idea of the “doesn’t interfere” body style was. *I* would want to see how the fashion looked on the person it was designed for.
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There’s also the fact that the male brain comes equipped with a powerful set of filters that can make almost any woman who can flip the Will_Sleep_With_Me bit to TRUE beautiful.
And for those few women who defeat the filters, why do you think we invented beer?
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Oh geez – you took me back to my Navy days and the “six beer” women joke from the guys. *snorting
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What we used to call a “half-rack beauty queen.” :)
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Oh yes– You learn things when you run a shop of mostly guys lol
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If, by “men’s magazines”, you mean Playboy, Penthouse, etc, I think they have become infected with the PC body style standard, too (I don’t see them too often, though, so I may be wrong). If, on the other hand, you mean the women they use in other types of men’s magazines, such as Muscle Car magazines, I would agree with you.
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Dunno about now, but back in the 1990s the art director in charge of the playboy nudes was a *very* out Homosexual.
He and Heff drove the “tastes” in the primary magazine.
In the “Specials” (Girls Of, Lingere edition etc.) the four (forgive me, that was 15 years ago) of the five people in that department were women.
I spent 3 years in a big name art school that had a fashion design department. I’ve *never* met a straight male that wanted to be in the fashion industry, other than outdoor clothing, or as a mens tailor.
Not to say it can’t or doesn’t happen, and it wasn’t exactly a scientific study.
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Possibly one of the most fascinating discussions on this topic I had… wait for it.. with a doctor who worked at a clinic in college. He said that he had to move to the midwest after working at least 5 years in sub saharan africa, because he was tired of treating wannabe actresses for starvation trying to get roles. It bothered him painfully that in a land of plenty, people would deliberately starve themselves into looking like something they’d have to be dead to accomplish.
He said that there IS no standard of size to health. That even the military uses two standards, the real one that is based on frame type and other abstractions that require individual assessment, the other, the BMI, which is used almost exclusively so the Drill Sergeant has an excuse to yell at anyone. It was designed to look plausible, not to be a true guide.
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You know, if you were someone who was familiar with, say, early-20th century progressivism, you might be tempted to look at a centralized health care system, one particular standard of “healthy”, and the thought that those who don’t comply with that standard aren’t deserving of proper care and think that maybe just maybe that looks a teensy-weensy bit like another swing at eugenics. But that’s just crazy-paranoid.
Gah. It’s like they see people and think “widgets”.
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‘ It’s like they see people and think “widgets” ‘
They do. All people who aren’t them are widgets.
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No, chessmen. to be moved about the board by the hand of the chess master, and not to move on their own.
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Take a look at the British “fat and fags” movement, or “patient responsibility,” as the bioethicists prefer to call it. The line there is that anyone who smokes, or is overweight, is to be denied all health care except immediate life-saving care in medical emergencies. The idea is apparently becoming popular in the UK; one study I read about showed a majority of doctors in favor of it. I don’t suppose the smokers will be exempt from paying the UK’s very high cigarette taxes, though.
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I bear a more than passing resemblance to the Irish women of the 19th century photographs – the ones who could do laundry all day and then carry a pig home under one arm and a fighting toddler under the other. By the all-important *ak-pathooy* BMI, I’m borderline obese, with all the warnings and finger-wagging that brings. On the gripping hand, the guy who runs my gym is worried because I lift so much weight. Can I get down to a “healthy” BMI? Possibly but not and keep my hard-earned muscle mass. Is the .gov going to be a pain in the arse because their technocrats have found a number that they like that lets them declare “you are dietary sinners, you are saints?” You betcha. It’s a magic number, not unlike 36-24-36 (which ain’t me, BTW).
And yet these same people are arguing for “fat studies” classes and scolding businesses and individuals for “discriminating” against the truly obese, and insisting that it’s dangerous for young girls to have an unhealthy body image and so we should have more heavy/curvacious/rotund women as role models. I wonder if they ever get mental whiplash from snapping back and forth.
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They want a system where they can declare everyone either a sinner or a victim. They never see individuals.
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BMI was meant as a statistical tool for studying populations not individuals.
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I read somewhere that BMI was used to study starving populations. It was a very easy way to get a handle on how bad a famine was.
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You read wrong.
BMI is a simplistic hack, but it is uncannily accurate for the 90% of the population who are’t freaks of one kind or another.
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Long practice with doublethink gives one a certain amount of mental flexibility, but it does horrible things to things like spine.
It also makes the person nearly impossible to have an honest conversation with, because in order to assume that position, you have to believe contradictory things – at least one of which will not be true, and possibly none of which is ever actually considered and analyzed – so the person is constantly lying to themselves, saying whatever will sooth the potential cognitive dissonance. And thus, saying to others whatever soothes the cognitive dissonance is just a natural next step.
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In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
― Theodore Dalrymple
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Daaaaaaaaaaang.
I mean, he’s right. But daaaaaaaaaaang.
I really need to add Dalrymple to my RSS feeds.
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I’ve already suggested a Classic Fantasy for our January read on goodreads. But I may suggest Modern Sociology for February so I can then nominate a work by Dalrymple
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Life at the Bottom is another worthy Dalrymple read.
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Excellent for writers who want to add realism to their characters.
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Obamacare makes the collection of BMI statutory.
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Only if they’re paying the freight. Let it be a caution; don’t sign up.
M
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I’m 67 years old, 215 pounds, five feet nine inches tall, and I STILL sink to the bottom of swimming pools. Most people can float: I can’t.
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Me too (a sinker that is). I’ve had a number of people including a sortof girlfriend of mine insist that everyone could float. And they are actually right, I do float – with my head about 2 foot below the surface
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I might float now, but part of what hindered me learning to swim, as late as my thirties is that I CAN’T float.
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This plagued me as a kid, because “everybody floats!” I figured I was doing it wrong. How do you “float wrong?” No idea, but so much of what “everybody” did made no sense to me so there must be a secret that nobody’s letting me in on, right?
Hmph.
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If I heard “just relax” one more time… I floated, sort of, enough to pass the Navy swim test.
None of my maternal uncles did.
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Hard to ‘just relax’ when you’re sinking below the surface…
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Yea– I managed to fake floating in the Navy bootcamp test– with my nose just out of the water. ;-)
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I’m balanced. I breathe in, I float. I breathe out, I sink. Of course, that leads to problems with the “breathing in” part after breathing out…
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I float by arching my back and wiggling my fingers and feet unobtrusively. I quit wiggling them or unarch (is so a word) my back and I sink.
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Yep ;-) wiggle wuggle wiggle (wuggle is so too a word)
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Yea – I sink too– unless I am on my back and arched–
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and holding my head up– I am so afraid of drowning because of it too– ;-)
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Mayor Mike, is that you?!?!?
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My dad was in Navy Boot with a gut who had the most perfect swimming form anyone had every seen and he maintained it right to the bottom of the pool until the instructors dived in to pull him out because he sank like a stone.
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Only by making their demands incompatible do they avoid the fearful fate of having them met. Why, they might have to go back to quotidian good deeds in order to convince themselves that they are good!
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One size fits all never fits everyone. It’s true with our clothes and with our lives. People are different and that’s not a bad thing.
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Might amuse you to take a look at Diana Nyad’s book Basic Training for Women – at the time (circa 1980) she could have made a credible claim to be as fit as anybody in the whole wide world (and even today age adjusted) – certainly able to do things nobody else could do – and yet ran a high proportion of body fat – the numbers are I think worthy of being called amazing. Notice that swimming for exercise is less likely to lead to fat loss than running at the same intensity (for good reasons), just as there can be differences between results with free weights and machines and so it goes.
There is an aspect of control in taking quite valid research as in Kenneth Cooper’s work on running and applying it universally. Carb loading is good for runners but not for programmers. Edward ‘Eddie B’ Borysewicz ( a cycling coach who brought the United States to world prominence) wrote that he had issues maybe qualms? with taking a young athlete with a gorgeous body and great potential in any field of endeavor and ruining the aesthetic and taking away options as he coached for more and more specialization.
Amazing what a nanny state will lead to.
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This is /exactly/ what bothers me about one of the main reasons Common Core is defended. “We need to make sure that a kid from Kentucky can move to Utah, and not be amazingly ahead, or shockingly behind!”
Never mind that the same kid could move a neighborhood, or even just a classroom, and be amazingly ahead, or shockingly behind.
Never mind that a single class, in a single grade, will likely have at least one kid amazingly ahead, and one kid shockingly behind.
Never mind that a single kid /can be/ amazingly ahead in reading, but shockingly behind in math (or vice versa).
Yet, we insist that everyone /has/ to progress at the same rates. That everyone will learn to read in 1st Grade, and learn fractions in 2nd, and if you are doing it faster, you need to be held back…but if you delay learning for a year, you’re permanently labeled “special” and held back for the rest of your life.
Common Core is evil, not because it tries to do something new, but because it’s merely what we’ve been doing the several decades, only on steroids.
What’s the best way to handle that kid moving from Kentucky to Utah (besides home schooling, which is probably the best thing to do)? Put him in a modern equivalent to a one-room schoolhouse. Figure out what he /can/ do, and start from there. Let him learn at his own pace, which may be fantastically quick today, but shockingly slow tomorrow, but will most likely average out over time regardless.
But we can’t do that, because everyone needs to be the same, and we will destroy the funding of schools that have lots of kids in special programs, because…well, I don’t know. I have no idea how we got stuck in this mindset, with either education /or/ medicine! (Well, I have a hint or two: we became enamored with “Progressive” thought, and/or attracted to the faulty promises of “social engineering”….)
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I agree. I’m nowhere around the education system, so before this my knowledge of “Common Core” is limited to its spelling, but having been lumped in and labeled as a kid, I have to admit to feeling a certain animosity towards the Common Core concept. I was the dumb smart-kid, or the smart dumb-kid, depending on which class I was in. I hated math and science classes, and very nearly flunked every history class I ever took, simply because it was mostly rote memorization of names/dates/chemical compounds, or they blew through advanced math concepts faster than my braincell could grasp them. Now, after being out of the public education system for *mumblemumble* years, I’ve discovered a love for history AT MY OWN PACE, and have read articles/essays by history professors that, without even having to hit my bookshelves, I could find errors and inaccuracies. The problem is that we’ve made teaching so difficult and regulated, that those who love to teach and would be willing/able to mentor kids who need a little extra encouragement are unable to put up with the BS politics, so we get teachers who, for the most part, teach for the paycheck (several friends from church are teachers, and have told me I need to go into teaching…after spending an hour complaining about the politics and infighting and backstabbing and having their hands tied. LOL). I weep for our future.
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Sarah. . .
To quote Fernando (and BOY, am I dating myself with this one. . .)
You. . . .roook. . . . .MAHVELOUS ! Absorutery Mahvelous. . .
(And thus, the obligatory link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXydX9p_ZxA )
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I stopped worrying about it ages ago, to be honest. One of the hottest girls I’ve ever met was officially a good 50 pounds overweight, yes did have fat in all the “wrong” places, and traveled to Scotland with her then-fiance-now-husband to compete in the Highland Games. IIRC she won the caber toss and even managed to beat a number of not-small guys at it. She terrified me on a regular basis (we were at the same boxing gym together, which is why I know about her trip) just because she’d throw tractor tires around with glee and abandon.
It’s actually helped me personally a lot, because as soon as I stopped caring about it, it became much easier to lose weight. (Okay, weight watchers helped, and so did being a guy.) I topped out at 400 while drinking a gallon (yes, really a gallon) of soda a day, became diabetic, and between WW, Boxing, and just cutting soda out, I’m down below 300 and have been for a couple of years, if only just. My wife on the other hand had Lap-band done, eats like a bird, and even when exercising has never been able to get below 280s. Doesn’t bother me much, I just worry about her health due to asthma.
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Most of the popular discussion of weight I’ve run into assumes what I think of as the accounting model: income (food you eat) minus outgo (operating expenses) equals profit or loss (weight change). That’s a very linear model; it assumes that you can predict how a system behaves by simple arithmetic. But a lot of systems don’t fit that model: They have nonlinear responses, they have internal feedback loops that generate those responses, and they may have sensitive dependence on initial conditions—all the things that make weather inherently impossible to predict ahead of time. (I suspect they also make capitalist economies inherently impossible to predict ahead of time, but few economists seem willing to admit that.) And the human body has lots and lots of internal feedback loops. You cut food intake a little; you may lose a little weight. You cut food intake a lot; you may push your metabolism into an entirely different mode that desperately stores food to get you ready for famine. Catastrophe theory has beautiful three-dimensional graphs that describe this sort of thing—but I don’t think they enable you to predict where the edge of the cliff is before you fall over it.
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interpolation works, extrapolation is dangerous
take a wooden ruler, attach one end to the desk, hang a 1 pound weight to the other end, how much does it flex.
now calculate how much it will flex if you have a 100 pound weight to the end, now try it and discover that the ruler breaks instead of bending as predeiced
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the basic problem with the simple arithmatic model of weight loss is that you cannot calculate the outgo, two people sitting and doing nothing are going to be buring different amounts of energy because their metabilism is different.
not to mention the supply problem of different people metabilize food differently, so feed them identical meals and they get different amounts of energy from it.
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Heh. Tell me about it. Back when I was doing geological mapping in Lapland I would walk, most days, for hours (over 12 hours on some days when the sun was up the whole 24) on pathless tundra or forest and then haul the rock samples back to the camp, eat well under 2000 calories a day because I was hoping I’d lose weight and I counted and didn’t have the chance of going to the store or hamburger place for anything unhealthy even if I had wanted to because the nearest store was a few hundred kilometers away. And did that for three months each summer. Did I lose weight on those summers? Not really, a couple of summers I managed a couple of kilos, some summers nothing. If those damn theories held water I would have been able to at least buy trousers at least one size smaller at the end of a summer than I had bought in the beginning of it. But I never lost even that much. At best I was able to tighten my belt by a notch or two, the trousers would be the same size.
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What did your belt do?
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I could tighten it a bit. But just a bit.
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Most of the popular discussion of weight I’ve run into assumes what I think of as the accounting model: income (food you eat) minus outgo (operating expenses) equals profit or loss (weight change).
Don’t forget, it’s also based on the assumption that “how much water this can heat when it’s burnt” is an important metric for a human’s metabolic system.
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Well, yes, but I don’t have a problem with applying the laws of thermodynamics to the human body.
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When you’re applying them on the assumption that same amount of potential function out of a 100 calorie block of wood as it will from 100 calories of sugar, you’re misapplying thermodynamics.
What next, a claim that those who hold that a diesel engine and a gas engine should not be run on the other’s fuel, nor on water, are failing to apply thermodynamics?
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The difference isn’t in the caloric output, it’s in the caloric ingestion.
For caloric purposes your alimentary canal is not “inside” your body.
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Which has nothing to do with the original statement, where I pointed out the insanity of thinking that calculating what your body is going to get out of food based on how much water it will heat is a bad model.
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Unless you’re saying that they are measuring calories from chemicals in the food that aren’t being converted to energy (which would reduce the effective number of calories and thus make them less likely to promote weight gain), I’m not sure what your point is.
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Are you claiming that the human body has a uniform energy extraction result from all ingested substances?
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Last time I checked, the Krebs cycle didn’t run on combustion. Considering that there are parts of food that are inedible, like fiber, it always seemed odd to include the heat from those inedible parts burning away in a bomb calorimeter in the results.
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Yep.
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-difference-between-a-dietary-calorie-and-physics-calorie.htm
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I don’t think that’s how they calculate food Calories. I’m pretty sure they do standard chemical analyses to find the amount of fat, protein, and carbohydrates in the food and then multiply by 9, 4, and 4 (which comes from the bomb calorimeter); add that up and you get the Calories per serving.
And the Krebs cycle still turns acetyl into CO2 and water, which means that the energy released is the same. The power may be different, and there may be energy expenditures that reduce the net energy extracted; but the latter can simply be combined into basal metabolism and made a term of the “energy out” portion of the energy balance.
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It was a common enough P-chem experiment to take the measure of energy from a mass of food using a bomb calorimeter and then scale that up to a serving. Pretty accurate, quicker, and cheaper than a wet chemistry standard chemical analysis. Problem is that it doesn’t exactly sort out the indigestible material not brought into the metabolism because the enzymes select against it.
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Maybe, but since food labeling laws require breakdowns of fat, carbs, protein, and fiber, I don’t see how you could get out of the wet chemistry. Once you have those numbers simple algebra would be far easier than playing with a bomb calorimeter.
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And yet, there’s the guy who lost weight on the Twinkie Diet: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html
And just because I like to be pedantic, heat calories and food calories aren’t the same thing. You may be fully aware of that of course, but I think most people aren’t, so I like to clarify it when discussions turn towards calories.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_difference_between_a_heat_calorie_and_a_food_calorie#slide2
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At the store, we often have a book series “Eat Right for Your Type.” As in blood type. A different diet for each blood type. And if I remember correctly, you have four different blood types in your household. You’ve done a wonderful job at making the boys and hubby lose weight without starving, but if there’s anything to those books, it might help explain why the diet you’re cooking works better on the boys than on you. Yes, given the info on the women in your family, it might be irrelevant.
It’s amusing that the female star of the number one movie in the country says, “by Hollywood standards, I’m obese.” Looking at pictures, (I haven’t seen the movies) it would never occur to me to think Jennifer Laurence was fat. I would not be surprised to find she weighs 150 pounds, but then she’s close to six feet tall. And she’s obviously a star only because two movies in a row, one the start of a hit series, required a big, tough Kentucky mountain girl, which is what she apparently is.
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No. We only have two blood types. Four would be impossible, Charles. Dan is O. The boys are A+ as I am. But there’s more to it than blood type too. They’re now doing DNA tests for this in Russia that SUPPOSEDLY work. Or at least 90% of the time.
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LOL. Ok, I REALLY misunderstood that conversation. And am way confused on my biology. Sorry. I might have heard three variations of A, and considered them three different blood types.
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Russia. Yeah. One of the USSR’s top female snipers was sent on a goodwill tour of Washington while she was recovering from being shot, after months of crawling through rubble to set up posts from which to shoot the Fritz. Women in Washington politely remarked on how heavy she was and recommended diets.
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Doesn’t the idea of sending one of the top USSR snipers on a goodwill tour of Washington qualify as A BAD IDEA?
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timing is all. there were a few years where it would have been a goodwill tour. after all, we sent our own aces and the like on tours to factories and the like.
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Four’s perfectly possible — though not in your family. An A mother and B father, if heterogeneous, could have an O child and an AB child (and an A and and B). Or a AB mother and an O father could have an A child and a B child — only.
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yes, sorry. That was dumb of me. My mom was O my dad was AB, I’m A and my brother is B.
BUT Dan is O and I’m A. (I don’t think O functions as a recessive, at least not back when I studied it, but it’s been a long time.)
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Interesting… My mother is an O+ and my Dad is an A+. We have only A or O positive in the family. I am an O+ and the hubby is an A+. :-) It probably means that Mom is an OO and Dad is an AO to get O+ children.
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AH — See, when I was in school (pre-history) I was told you couldn’t have O as a recessive. Shrug.
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Blogging — not only fun, but educational! 0:)
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I was told the opposite that O is a recessive. ;-) Of course I didn’t get into it until I was going to a community college course in the early 80s.
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It’s not really recessive, blood-type genes are co-dominant (that’s how you get AB types), it’s just that the gene for O doesn’t code for blood-type antigens, so it’s functionally recessive.
In other words, the O gene is expressing, but it’s expressing nothing, so it’s drowned out whenever something else is present.
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So close to the same that my brain is having a hard time twisting around expressing nothing… You express or you don’t. ummmmm.. Okay… drowned out I can understand though. –weak signal
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Blood types are determined by the presence of antigens on red blood cells. For the ABO typing there are two different proteins, called A and B. The genes have three forms, one codes for the A protein, one for the B protein, and one doesn’t code for any protein at all, that’s the O. You get one gene from each parent, and both are expressed, but if one of them is O what is expressed is a lack of antigen protein.
It’s not so much a weak signal as dead air.
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As I see it, the “O” gene is basically a placeholder. It doesn’t do anything one way or another. “A” says “make A antigen”. “B” says “make B antigen”. O remains silent.
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Right. And then your body makes antibodies to any of the antigens you don’t have. That’s why getting the wrong blood type can be fatal. The antibodies latch onto the proteins and cause the blood cells to clump and be destroyed, clogging capillaries, dumping a crapload of hemoglobin into your bloodstream, and generally making a mess of things.
So, since type O blood doesn’t have any antigens present anyone can receive it, hence universal donor. And since type AB people don’t have any antibodies to blood proteins they can receive blood from anyone, so they’re universal recipients.
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And this is why the missus and I get very nice phone calls from the Red Cross every six weeks. If I’m understanding the discussion correctly (I never took biology), she and I should create a whole generation of universal donors!
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Clams got blood cells!
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They like to avoid giving blood that does not match. You don’t get many antibodies with the transfused blood, but you do get some.
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What effect does not having an antigen protein have on the body? –other than the normal blood transfusion problem?
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As far as I know, none. But then again, what we don’t know we don’t know about the body could fill a few books. I wouldn’t be completely surprised if there’s something to the “Eat for Your Type” diets, though I’d bet on the effects being caused by a suite of genes that evolved together rather than a direct impact by the blood type genes.
It’s also important to bear in mind that the ABO isn’t the only kind of blood type, it’s just the one that impacts blood transfusions. I think they’ve identified around 20 others, including the Rh factor (that’s the + or -).
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I do know the RH factor ;-) but I hadn’t known about 20 others. I have had to have blood transfusions due to my disease. I also find this kind of thing interesting. In another life I would have been a biologist.
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Well, the “Eat Right for your Type” diet recommends the no or lo carb diet for O, so it may have something to do with Dan doing so well on the lo carb diet.
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I have repeatedly (some would say tiresomely) marveled that, just as we approach true capability of individualized medical treatment (DNA analysis) the government has decided that standardization is the route to go.
Super-genius.
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It does seem to me that something in the relatively modern US (developed world?) diet has changed over the last few decades. I don’t know what it is but it seems to me that the average body shape has become rounder everywhere. I suspect that a chunk of this is that we are in general moving less and have better heated homes etc so in general we need less food but I don’t think that’s the only thing, nor do I believe that it is the size of the meal per se.
One thing I have noticed is that the US, in particular, adds sugar (or these days HFCS) to just about everything. For example I just bought some italian spicy sausages at the local supermarket. In addition to all the usual contents (pork “products”, water, salt, spices…) there was corn syrup. In fact it was next in the list after the pork bits and the water which means it was the 3rd largest ingredient.
My understanding is that this is partly because of the “anti-fat” crusade. If you remove fat then the food is tasteless so you add sugar as a simple way to add flavor
I’m sure there are other factors but I can’t help thinking that this is one of them. I’ve tried very hard to eat as much food as I can that is cooked from scratch or nearly scratch to cut out as much of that kind of false addition as I can. I think it helps.
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We’re not on sugar. Things that changed in the last few decades: the US particularly is startlingly free of intestinal parasites. They were alarmed when I completed my form and said yes, I’d had them several times. They made a doctor certify I was now free of them. In Portugal in the eighties, intestinal parasites were an episodic thing.
That alone — consider these evolved with us — makes a huge difference.
Also high Fructose Corn Syrup — a governmental boondoogle — is generally bad for you.
But for everything else — good heavens, Francis, I grew up marinated in sugar. And we walked less than we do here because it wasn’t “seemly” (I can still outwalk all my female relatives there.) And yet everyone was thinner than here and than they are now.
I don’t eat sugar. Or flour. Or… anything with carbs, including fruit. (I do eat green vegetables) It stops me gaining weight, is about it.
And yes, I think the US is worse off because we work HARDER. Going to Dan’s company picnic when programmers were expected to work 16 hour days was an education. I was SVELTE at 50 lbs overweight.
Also, btw, another factor is the enormous sleep-debt, worse in the US than in the rest of the world.
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Sleep Debt is a huge factor.
I didn’t start making progress on much of anything until I was able to get my doctor to hear me when I pointed out that my poor sleep started several years before my weight gain. the ‘accepted wisdom’ is that if you don’t sleep well it must be because you are overweight.
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Oy. yes. Same with female things. This is why no one looked at my hormonal issues and instead went “you’re going into early menopause, because you’re overweight.” Until two years ago. Mind you, I’m still gaining weight, but that IS menopausal — I don’t sleep well. I REALLY don’t sleep well — and it’s very slow, thank heavens.
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I wasn’t particularly commenting on you Sarah, just making general observations
I think parasites is big. Firstly they consume the food so you don’t. Secondly and probably more importantly the body’s defences against them and their byproducts does involve a lot of energy consumption. I’ve seen hypotheses that our large brains evolved in tandem with the invention of cooking because cooking removes many many things that the immune system would have to deal with and the diet of a caveman wouldn’t have been able to cope with the energy demands of large brain plus strong immune system.
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We’re also finding we’re about 50% of various internal flora. There have been experiments with fecal (sorry) transplants that might indicate our issue is antibiotics killing off the “right” flora. I’m not going to kick. I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t doused with the stuff in infancy, but… antibiotics are since what, the fifties?
I know Charlie Martin dropped like 10 pounds after a probiotic. Once I’m done with this bout of antibiotics, I’m going to try it.
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This probiotics thing sounded like something to try. The problem is, I’m taking an antibiotic for papalopustular rosacea and that may be a “rest of my life” kind of thing so that may not be an option.
Thus, once again one size does not fit all.
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You might want to double-check that. I’m no doctor or nutritionist, but i would think that regular infusions of GOOD bacteria would be a good thing in that case. Naturally, the antibiotic would kill them off, but if you keep replenishing them, you should still get the benefit.
Of course, the interaction would likely encourage them to become antibiotic-resistant, and I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not.
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In that case I would be left with wanting more information about these probiotics.
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yeah, but replenishing might not hurt.
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Guess what there may be a pill for that soon
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/521936/a-pill-filled-with-bacteria-instead-of-drugs/
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Parasites are a fascinating conundrum. We are learning that although billions of people worldwide have them, and they are a massive drain on health and cognition (nutritional deficets while developing retard brain development) which may say a lot about the third world. However, by eliminating them, the parts of the immune system devoted to combating them are turning on our own bodies and leading to the epidemic of allergies rising in the first world.
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Maybe auto-immune diseases as well imho
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You are quite right. I’m doing some research right now on the connection between mood and gut biome, for a blog post, don’t know if that will be for MGC or my own blog. But our normal biota are a powerful force, and only in the last couple of years are we starting to understand it. Hopefully, the advances will lead to a better understanding of weight gain and loss. Personally, i see a connection to hormones much more than to diet and exercise, after a certain point. Mind you, I’m trying to lose a bit, and the first thing I’ll do will be to cut out sugar and walk more!
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Walking (weight bearing exercise) is very good for most women imho. Cut out the fructose corn syrup first though. You have no idea how many products have HFCS including bbq sauces. *sigh
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I try not to eat a lot of pre-prepared things for this reason, although frankly, from a chemistry point of view, fructose is fructose. It’s more that I don’t need as much sugar as I consume. (sorry, one of my pet-peeves are faddish diets and food things based on bad science, so I get a little twitchy about it)
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Actually– it might be the same in chemistry, but the body doesn’t deal with it in the same way. –or not every person deals with fructose the same way either. I was looking into IBS for a friend and those with that problem deal with different fructose types in different ways– diarrhea or constipation depending on the person.
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Yep – goes back to the whole every person is unique thing. For instance, I can no longer digest lactose, although milk sugar wasn’t a problem for most of my life…
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You said it with more clarity. ;-) I have the same problem with milk sugar– I used to have no problems with it until after chemo–
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Robert is allergic to it, and I think he gets it from me…
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Can he eat honey?
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no.
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Figures, they are both fructoses. It’s amazing how sensitive the body is on a molecular level.
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Robert also has mild reaction to fruit. We heard him complain about bananas being spicy…
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I took the hubby off of a lot of sugar and fruits because of a problem he was having– the only sugar he could eat without a problem was maple sugar. I don’t know why.
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One of the indicators of Type II Diabetes is increased short-temperedness.
I anticipate a day when Hollywood “actresses” and fashion models flock to the new “miracle” slimming fad: tapeworms!!! Used under a doctor’s supervision, with therapies to limit their growth, of course.
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speaking of parasites
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Hmm. let’s try this again this
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Don’t forget the no-fat diet. We need fat to digest some things. I saw people balloon when they tried to go with no-fat (of course no-fat and high fructose corn syrup). It happened around the same time– I think.
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I house-sat for someone who had “fat free half-and-half” in their ‘fridge. Why bother? (Yes, I tried a little. Don’t waste your $$.)
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I agree ;-)
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Full fat milk simply tastes better. Same goes AFAICT for any dairy product.
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Also protects against prostate cancer. Apparently.
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Dang it, don’t say the “p” word … ulp, too late.
Be right back.
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You wanna join the brown ribbon campaign?
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I get annoyed whenever I see that stuff. In my opinion, it it false advertising as half-and-half by definition has fat.
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One half isn’t milk, the other half isn’t cream.
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I was going to ask what the no fat half-n-half was half of.
The one that always gets me is the fat-free refried beans.
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Yeah, that makes sense. We’re heavier because we don’t have so many internal parasites anymore.
?
AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!
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Well, ~100 years ago they were advertising tapeworms as a means to lose weight.
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I still remember the time I posted my spaghetti sauce recipe and someone said she might do it in order to avoid HFCS.
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Sleep debt for creative people may or may not cause them to have health issues but it certainly causes them to lose creativity.
I mean yes all programmers do the occasional “all nighter” and yes for brief periods when debugging/testing rather than developing from scratch it probably doesn’t hurt. But if company policy is (even unstated) 16 hour work days then the output they will get will be worse than they would get if they mandated 8 hour work days and forbade overtime.
If managers don’t understand that then they should be fired with extreme prejudice
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Yep. When Dan got to a position he could change it, he would say “go home. Come in fresh tomorrow.”
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Yeah, I’m another one who only came near the weight ideal for a handful of years around the time that I retired from the military. I could swear that my metabolism was mixed up and turned inside out by a weird allergic reaction to a prescription drug (I had a case of chemically-induced hepatitis which astounded the clinic where I was seen) but had the temporary beneficial result of actually having me loose weight without dieting particularly or changing my exercise routine. Lasted for a good few years. Otherwise it has been eat like a bird and exercise like a fiend to make any headway at all.
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Well, I lost a lot of weight right after having my teeth removed and before I got the false ones. I ate mostly soup at the time.
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There is a recent commercial touting a diet meal plan that I find particularly noxious. A woman claiming to be mother of several children brags that it’s the first year she has felt proud to take them to the pool. They cut to a scene of her in a tiny bikini climbing out of the water. I swear to me she appears borderline anorexic, and on the wrong side of the line at that.
Sorry to rant, but the attitude common in many doctors and middle managers to treat people as interchangeable parts is one of the more pernicious evils to come out of our current age. The desire to treat individuals en masse is understandable, but results in less than optimal medical treatment by physicians and a total disregard of exceptionalism in industry. Not to mention that with my formal training in system engineering, statistics, and quality control I know without doubt that even cookie cutter machine parts manufactured with the intent to be identical actually are not. Otherwise explain how one part can last for years while a supposedly identical part fails within weeks.
As for medicine, any doctor who fails to recognize the extreme variation inherent in their patient’s individual body makeups and chooses to treat them each and every one the same is nothing more than a hack, or more precisely a plug and chug formula junkie with no true feel for their profession.
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Now that you mention it, entire mathematical branches exist, of statistical methods and engineering practices–quality control, tolerances, etc–devoted to the fact that no two parts are identical, but we could at least produce them “identical enough” that we could have any hope of interchanging them.
And this is for something as simple as a piece of steel! Yet our society automatically /expects/ humans to be identical cogs, whether it be in medicine, or education, or even employment…
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“if you just ate less than 2000 calories and exercised a bare minimum, the weight would drop like a dream.”
This type of statement is proof that a physician is not competent in the area of nutrition and diet recommendations. Then again, many nutritionists and their supporting epidemiologists are idiots about diet recommendations (hence the absurd food pyramid and the more absurd concept of one diet for all).
There are two ways to generate workable individualized diets. The first is to make a guestimate and have the patient try a not-too-difficult diet and exercise plan and evaluate the outcome. a different plan is tried if that doesn’t work. The second approach (mostly for patients with more complex medical issues) is to use the patient’s medical info, weight and diet history, family history, lab tests (thyroid hormones, cortisol, sex hormones, and possibly insulin levels), food preferences, and exercise preferences. These results must be intelligently interpreted to develop a customized diet and exercise plan that may include drugs for those with hormone problems. I know some endocrinologists who do this successfully.
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If I ate a 2000 calorie a day diet I would starve to death. I eat 8-10,000 calories a day just to maintain weight. While the opposite problem of those trying to lose weight, it just goes to show that those moronic geniuses who think standardized health care is the way to go, need their heads examined… preferably with a chainsaw.
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I eat 8-10,000 calories a day just to maintain weight.
I hate you sooooooooo much…:-(
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I don’t have a chainsaw. Can I use an axe instead?
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Oh yes, yes. Can’t agree with you more. The chiding and nagging makes me want to slap the condescending jerk. yet i know when I was fit, I was still built like a draft horse not a freaking svelte race horse. One would never tell a person, just starve that draft animal and you’ll get a nice race horse.
But humans, we’re all supposed to be equal easily replaceable widgets.
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I hate going to a new doctor. They look at my weight and “tisk tisk” me. Then they have me strip down and say “well, I wasn’t expecting that” when they see the size of my legs. I’ve always been built like a brick house, and I know this going in and tell them (“Doc, I leg press 600 pounds regular, so my legs are huge” “That’s nice, but you’re obese.” “Seriously. In college, I lifted a Buick. It’s mostly leg muscle and a little fat in the stomach.” “Nobody’s legs account for that much weight… holy sh*t”). It gets old.
Only doctor who ever really “looked” at my weight and my body proportion moved to another city. He was pretty good, recommending that instead of cutting out calories I should perhaps just try some abdominal exercises instead. Good doctor. I liked him a lot. When I got really big (I quit exercising for about 2 years following shoulder surgery) he helped me get back down to the 220 range.
If doctors would listen instead of cramming everyone into what their “ideal” body shape is, there might actually be some positive results out of going to the doctor.
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I resemble that! My weight fluctuates between 200 and 230. My current doctor accepts that as “normal” for me. The Air Force expected me to be within ten pounds of 174. The last time I weighed 174 was when I was a sophomore in high school. I’m currently 67. I raised pigs in high school as a 4H project. I used to ROUTINELY throw two 50-lb bags of pig pellets on each shoulder and carry them about 100 yards to the barn. I could lift a 100-lb bag of cow feed with one hand.
I started out in high school at 5’8″ tall, grew to 5’11”, and I’m now 5’9″ due to degenerative disk disease and some other joint problems. My stomach protrudes, and I’ve tried to get it down, back to what I was in the 1970s. My doctor stopped me — said it was all the muscle tissue and internal organs from a 5’11” body being compressed two inches by the disk disease. I’ve since accepted it — the same thing happened to my father and my grandfather. We just shrink as we get older, and do it more than most men.
My wife was slim when we got married (size 5), and didn’t gain weight, even with childbirth, until her thyroid started going crazy and finally quit working. The only time she loses weight is when her thyroid medication is exactly balanced. That hasn’t happened much in the last 20 years.
“One size fits all” doesn’t work in clothing, automobiles, or much else. Why should it be expected to work in medicine?
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“the woman who could carry a pig under each arm”. Sounds like good woman, give strong sons, and defend the motherland.
My darling decided she wanted to weigh less.
Supporting her in every way… but buying her a treat now and then so she remembers the rewards…
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BTW Instapundit had this link yesterday – http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/27/the-power-of-a-daily-bout-of-exercise/?src=me
I’m going to say that it seems to me that even small amount of daily exercise help a lot. When I worked in Germany I had about a year when for various reasons, I mostly drove to/from work and did hardly any midweek exercise, just some running on the weekends, I plumped up nicely. As soon as I started taking public transport to work more (which meant I had to walk ~20 mins each way) I slimmed down again quite quickly.
Having said that I do think that it is clear that prolonged overweight leads to major metabolic change and you simply cannot get back to the old metabolism (or at least it is extremely difficult, bordering on impossible outside of encountering a prolonged famine).
But I don’t think that matters – doing some exercise every day will give you immense benefits even if you don’t lose weight (or even lose girth which is probably more important).
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As I said, I exercise every day — or I simply don’t sleep. And I hate not sleeping :-P
Honestly, I think in my case what tipped me over was the being in bed for six months (embroidering was too exciting for me!) and the general hormonal mess. in support of hormonal mess, my weight fell spontaneously only ONCE — while pregnant with number 2 son, who was born a plump little butterball. As soon as my system recovered from birth, I started gaining again.
No one is disputing exercise helps. No one is disputing finding the diet that works for you helps (I was down to 800 calories all carbs and GAINING. I gained on Slimfast.) What I’m disputing is the idea that if “you just do this” you’ll be the ideal slim weight.
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not disagreeing with you. See metabolic change comment.
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Metabolic change is a fact of life for menopausing women. The researchers are now finding out that men go through menopause too at a slower rate– (Women’s menopause is abrupt)–
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one diet book that I recently read talked about a major diet study that was done (“the A-Z diel study”, compared several diets from Atkins to the Zone diet, thus the catchy title), and the study showed a ~5 pound difference on average between the different diets, but each individual diet showed something like a 50+ pound difference between indivuduals on the diet, with some actually gaining weight on every diet.
This was in a pretty controlled situation and the analysis was that the people who gained weight were not cheating on the diet, just reacting differently to it.
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The slimfast thing shocked me. I was replacing two meals and gaining weight. PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. Except of course, I’ve found my body does interesting things with sugars, and this being the nineties those were ALL sugar.
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Slimfast makes me gain weight too.
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Slim Fast worked great for my mother but it makes me gain weight. Having since figured out why (soy + Hashimoto’s = crazy body) I’ve started checking labels. The two times I’ve lost weight were more than a decade apart; the first time I was living on espresso and granola bars, getting about 4 hours of sleep because of stress and couldn’t stomach anything else because of same. I got down to a size 12 and that’s the smallest I’ve been in my adult life. The second time, we were mostly broke and decided to splurge so we bought the big pack of bacon and the big pack of eggs and that’s almost all I ate for a week. I lost about 10 pounds.
I started yoga to save my back and legs from one of my jobs and my clothes fit better now. I haven’t lost any weight but everything’s where it’s supposed to be and I have more energy. That combined with the hormones I have to take for everything else keeps me from gaining. I look like most of my ancestresses, too, if a little shorter; big boobs, big butts, 5’10” or taller, capable of pulling the plow or picking up the really big knife to defend the children.
The people who love me don’t care, the people who don’t don’t matter. I’ve learned to live with what I’ve got even if I would occasionally like to look the way I did when I was starving.
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I had a mouth injury that meant no solid food for a while. I started on the Slimfast– and was shocked when I read the label. IIRC it was MOSTLY sugar (HFCS) salt, and gums. Not what I’d recommend for losing weight.
It might have gotten better –> nope, just checked:
FAT FREE MILK, WATER, SUGAR, COCOA (PROCESSED WITH ALKALI), CANOLA OIL, MILK PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, FRUCTOSE, GUM ARABIC, CELLULOSE GEL, MONO AND DIGLYCERIDES, HYDROGENATED SOYBEAN OIL, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, POTASSIUM PHOSPHATE, MALTODEXTRIN, SOY LECITHIN, CELLULOSE GUM, CARRAGEENAN, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, SODIUM BICARBONATE, SUCRALOSE AND ACESULFAME POTASSIUM (NONNUTRITIVE SWEETENERS), SODIUM CITRATE, CITRIC ACID, …
Still mostly sugar, oil, and salt.
The Livestrong website damns with faint praise, citing the 1/3 of daily requirements in vitamins and minerals as a good enough reason to drink it. Seems to me, you’d be better off with a multivitamin tablet and a glass of whole milk.
zuk
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yep. But the point is it has like 130 calories, and if you’re having that for two meals and a salad for your third you SHOULD technically lose weight. No. Apparently I don’t process sugar into energy. It goes straight into fat. Or something :-P
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Yep. Carbs + insulin = fatty acids, which may get stored or burned depending on many other things. You’re already doing low carbs, maybe you’ve read Gary Taubes (2 books, the shorter is “Why We Get Fat”), seems to be a pretty good science writer who cares about the history, and explains why since WWII, American doctors have ignored earlier research and done the oversimplified “calories in – calories out = weight” advice. There’s more to it, and I think Taubes over-simplifies vs. body types & unique problems, too – but his version of low-carb does work for a lot of people.
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^^ this. Calories might have been a useful shorthand when metabolic pathways were poorly understood, but I don’t see it nowadays.
1000 calories of sugar is going to be processed by your body differently than 1000 calories of protein. (and differently by my body than yours.) Do the simple experiment and see how you feel after. I’d be stunned if you felt exactly the same from each 1000 calories.
From Gary Taubes, a quote that lends perspective:
“The hypothesis favored … a half century of authorities on human obesity is that fat accumulation is fundamentally caused by positive energy balance.” Taubes responds, “The alternative hypothesis begins with the fundamental observation that obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation and then asks the obvious question, what regulates fat accumulation. This was elucidated by 1965 and has never been controversial. ‘Insulin is the principal regulator of fat metabolism’…”
“what regulates fat accumulation” that is the key to approaching the issue.
Strict Atkins worked for my wife and I. (There are a LOT of misconceptions about the Atkins diet, we followed his actual multi phase plan religiously.) I know we were eating WAY more than 2000 calories a day, and yet we lost 10% of our starting body weight in the first phase. We kept with it for years with great results. Only when we started backsliding did we put weight back on. 9 years later, I still haven’t put the last 30 pounds back on, and I eat pretty much what ever I want now. (Still limit sugar, and mostly eat whole food, and limit processed.) Sugar has an immediate and dramatic effect on me– it puts me to sleep. So it makes sense that a diet that focused on sugar would have a big effect.
Finding what works for YOUR unique body is, I think, the only way you will lose the fat. (if that is your goal- simply losing weight is easier by losing muscle mass, 4 to 1 ratio if I remember correctly. That’s also why it can be frustrating to workout while dieting. You add muscle mass -weight- faster than you lose weight from reducing fat. If your only measurement is weight, it can be hard to gauge your progress.)
Also, there are plenty of diets that would say you are not eating ENOUGH to lose fat, ie. your body is in fat saving mode, because it thinks it’s starving.) I think this was most popular in the ‘set point’ diet, but there is a component of it in Atkins too.
In any case, good luck!
zuk
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We only read it after going low carb. i went low carb because my eczema reacts to carbs. which by itself bespeaks a messed up carb methabolism.
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Look, you’re not exempt from the First Law of Thermodynamics. Calories in – Calories out – change in weight = 0. The problem is that Calories out depends – in ways that are poorly understood, but are certainly strong and highly non-linear – on Calories in. This is further complicated by the fact that Calories out is also influenced by age, gender, heredity, environment, mood, time of day, and phase of the moon. OK, I’m not sure about the last one, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
The only correct answer to “How do I lose weight?” is “Damned if I know, try a bunch of things and see what works.” Maybe someday we’ll have a machine that can take a blood sample and design a perfect diet and exercise regemin, but for now we’re firmly in the trial-and-error stage, with the trial to error ratio at, near as makes no difference, 1.
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If calorie count was the only needed measure and “any calorie from food will effect you the same exact way” you’d be able to eat 2000 calories of refined white sugar every day for a month and have the same outcome as eating 2000 calories from a mix of different types of food. (add a multivitamin for completeness sake)
Common sense says the results will be different.
I’ve done this myself. For nine weeks I ate primarily sushi, and mostly sashimi at that. Ate so much I couldn’t swallow another bite, every day. Lost 20 pounds. Had to eat additional fats to feel sated, even when I was so full I couldn’t breath fully. (Some lay’s classic potato chips for the curious.)
If you want to lose fat, you can vacuum it out, or cause your body to burn it. The Atkins low carb plan (really the ‘no sugar plan’) does that by putting your body into ketosis. Fat loss is quick despite eating lots of food. Is this healthy for a long time? Probably not, but you don’t stay in phase one for longer than 2 weeks. You start adding carbs immediately after, and keep adding them back until you get to the maintenance stage. You do continue to avoid sugar.
So for the purpose of _losing weight_ by decreasing the amount of fat in your body, I still maintain that WHAT you eat is more important than how many CALORIES you eat. And we have decades of experience that counting calories is a terribly inefficient way to lose fat for most people.
z
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That’s kind of what I meant by ” Calories out depends – in ways that are poorly understood, but are certainly strong and highly non-linear – on Calories in.”
On the other hand, if you could fix your Calorie expenditure at 2000 Cal/day, and you consumed 1800 Cal/day you would lose weight, not matter what form those 1800 Calories came in. Sucking down 900 grams of sugar every day might have a few side effects, but you’d lose weight (assuming you had a magic Calorie expenditure dial).
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If one attempts to apply the laws of thermodynamics to diet and fitness, one demonstrates one has no understanding of the laws of thermodynamics. Calories in – calories out is a law of physics, but is about as relevant to human diet and exercise as saying runners gain weight due to relativistic mass increase as they approach the speed of light. It’s true, but flat-out dumb. Calories in – calories out is utterly irrelevant in practice when describing humans because neither is measurable. The calorie labelling is barely relevant to what an individual body absorbs, and calorie figures for exercise applied to individuals are laughable. (E.g. they give figures for “walking” which don’t account for weight, terrain, or pace for a start.) To even make an approximation of calories in – calories out, you would need to not only burn the food in a calorimeter, but the excretions. You would need to have the individual live in a calorimeter during the experiment, and you would need to (impossibly) burn the individual to ash in a calorimeter before and after the experiment to measure changes in their bodies. Fat is certainly not the only potential change, nor the only calorie-relevant one.
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When I was in high school and doing body building I went through all my mom’s old SlimFast (because it was free and protein drink mixes were expensive) and managed to gain weight on it. Of course I was mixing it with whole milk, busting three raw eggs in it, and drinking it WITH my breakfast.
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When I was going into the Navy, the guidelines were so rigid for women that I almost didn’t go make it. I was 5 foot 8 inches at 154 pounds and wearing a size ten. I was doing karate every day and walking three miles to work and back. I was 120 pounds once– after a two week illness. I ate very little cause of the vomiting and drank water. I looked like a skeleton at 120 pounds.
Okay 20 years later I was 180 pounds and a size 14. The doctors all said I was overweight, but I walked 3-5 miles a day. My German doctors said that if I hadn’t had the weight and the good health I would have died with the disease that started around that time.
I was seeing a nephrologist and was on 40-60 mg of prednisone. He was telling me that I was too heavy for my kidneys and needed to lose a min. of 50 pounds. I was eating too much he said. I was eating under 1,000 calories a day. I wasn’t allowed to eat much protein — I would gain a pound every time I took a bite. I told him it was the meds. He just gave me a look.
Well last year I was taken off pred and I had been on another med. I lost 40 pounds in a few months. No change in exercise and no change in diet. I found that if I push too hard with the exercise (because of the long-term pred use) that I pull muscles so I try to do some, but easier. I will probably never get to the body health I had at 40.
I always beat the carnival guys too– I was about 20-30 pounds heavier than the guy thought. I build a lot of muscles and fast. ;-) I am not like the rest of you in that it makes me a heavy lifter… it turns lean.
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I read an article a while back that your gut biome may have a great affect on weight (link was on instapundit). The researchers raised rats in a sterile environment. Some were given the biome from thin rats and the others from fat rats. The thin rat biome produced thin rats no matter what diet and vice versa. The whole nutrition thing is cargo cult science.
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Gut biome may also have affects on your mental well-being, we looked at a couple articles in micrbiology class today. That surprised me.
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OMG, Cedar. I fix my gut bacteria and stop being able to write? (Runs into the dark, screaming.)
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No, no… fixing your gut keeps the bugs where they are supposed to be, and they don’t affect your mood. Anxiety is not conducive to writing!
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It certainly suggests that the “character voices” have a far different origin …
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And you thought “pulling it out of one’s behind” was only a figure of speech.
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In my business, you never think its only a figure of sppech.
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That is a point of view expressed by no less than Charles Dickens,
No, Calmer Half took a round of one of Charlie’s recommended probiotics, and his third book is looking better than book one and two (major character rewrite still to go, but that’s because he’s grown so much as a writer, not because it was worse.)
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Considering that I have had issues with my digestion pretty much my whole life, from a baby, that is a very interesting branch of research for me and I have been reading a lot about it. Problem being that they seem to be at the stage where they can say yes, it is a factor, and possibly a very important factor, but not yet where they could give any reliable ways to deal with that problem.
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About 10% of the women conformed to the body type that’s considered “beautiful” – and I’d have thought they were unhealthily thin, but I clearly was wrong.
I’d quibble with this for those who have so little bodyfat that their female cycles shut down– it may be very good in the short run for the goal of winning, but if your body is shutting down reproductive systems at peak reproductive age it ain’t healthy!
Doesn’t hurt your point at all, just a hobby horse from when I was in the Navy, very physically fit, and I now suspect doing dire harm.
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I always wanted the kind of body Jane Russell had, ever since I saw her in ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ in my early teens (or Marilyn, they weren’t that different, I just liked Dorothy better than Lorelei). I suppose she would be considered a bit overweight now. The irritating thing is that if I had been able to lose about fifteen kilos when I was in my early 20’s I would have had it. Well, provided my cup size would have stayed the same, which is of course not certain. :)
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Just a mention– Marilyn Monroe who is still considered beautiful was a size 16.
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Yep. And some consider her too fat. Seems to be more women than men, though, especially those women who have managed to attain the current movie star looks.
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Yep– but my hubby still drools a little and other men as well… He thinks bags of bones are NOT sexy at all.
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As I have been known to remark, Kate Moss is an unusually creepy form of insect life.
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lol
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No, Marilyn Monroe was nowhere near any such dress size (dress sizes are notoriously unreliable from time to place to price level anyway). See e.g. the Debby Reynolds collection prior to it’s recent dispersal.
Facts or legend? Facts are available might as well use them.
On an only vaguely related note Einstein always made great grades in math. FWIW a biographer who failed to drink deeply did enough research to find the grades were sometimes very low numbers and sometimes very high numbers without going so far as to notice that in the case of the low numbers numeral 1 was the high grade and higher numbers (1-10) were lower grades. In the case of the higher numbers numeral 10 was the high grade (10-1) – changing school systems is fraught with perils for the student’s reputation.
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Not today’s “size 16”, and even then probably not:
http://www.snopes.com/movies/actors/mmdress.asp
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A couple of different things about that page:
1) Rather than dress sizes being smaller than they were 50 years ago, I’ve been told many times over that the exact opposite is true. I’d like to see the actual measurement standards from then and now to compare.
2) Ii implies that Marilyn would, unlike the implication in the claim, NOT be considered “fat” or “chunky” today. Well, *I* certainly wouldn’t consider her that way, but I know several people who would, and have seen a multitude of comments online calling women with similar body sizes such terms.
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Look Snopes doesn’t always get it right imho. BTW she was voluptuous. I watch America’s Top Model once in awhile– (I know a guilty sin) and the plus models in that show are too small to be plus models. They are size 12 at the most. So if you have a bust you are now a plus– even if you are a size ten.
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The size 16 reference was originally to a UK size 16. Further many of the dresses worn in the movies are extant. As mentioned supra In connection with the dispersal of the Debby Reynolds collection and otherwise there are any number of as measured numbers floating around.
Virginia Postrel
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eh – seriously I don’t think voluptuous women are plump… so yes, I do know what UK size 16 is–I won’t get into why– but I wore one and my waist size at the time was 24-26 inches. Even then I would have been too “plump” for modeling or other types of Hollywood glamor. Just saying. Plus I do NOT think size 12 or size 14 is zaftig… I was being sarcastic. Size 0 in my humble opinion is not a normal size for a woman. Size 21 and over may be zaftig… but not the plus model size of today– I think most models who are 12 and 14 today are athletic… and not necessarily plump.
My first comment about size 16 on Marilyn Monroe was the point that a well-rounded curvaceous woman is sexier than the boxy thin women (and sometimes boys) of modeling today. So I am not trying to get into a fight with you about the real size of Marilyn Monroe. I am just saying that if she was placed against Lindsay Lohan for instance she would look better than Lindsay (or other young actresses– take your pick) and have more curves.
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Uh…. *looks down* I’m about an inch shorter than the lady was. (5’4-5’5, so probably five four)
I was a 34 until I had kids; now I’m a 36 or 38, depending on the make of the bra.
“Modest” 34 inch bust?
Never mind the “data” ignores that clothing was designed to shape, and she was sewn into it.
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as an add here — I have a 36 — DD (36 is just go around, not the bust!) — and I HAVE to wear large and often XL clothes. Yes, okay, I’m zaftig other ways, but even when I lost weight and was wearing smaller clothes, I can’t go below a large on shirts, because… boobs!
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Sarah,
You remind me of one of my favorite webcomics. It started as a “slice of life” comic about a rather . . . busty young lady and over time various supernatural elements got added turning from “slice of life” to “modern fantasy”.
In any case, this comic is where I learned that they _do_ use the rest of the alphabet:
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/grounded-and-smart/
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And by “this comic” I mean the series, not just the particular page to which I linked.
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Adjustable bras are a great joy– now if only the makers would decide if they’re going to have the hook that’s the smallest size match the labeled size, or the hook on the largest!
Sports bras, when could wear them, were 34. (The only time I’ve been professionally measured was by the Navy, and that’s the same folks who think I wear size eight shoes. Left to myself, I get size five to six boy’s…..)
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Foxfier — size six boys here (I finished wearing out the boys shoes, as each of them outgrew that size with tennis shoes and sandals un-worn) and I’m a size NINE. I can’t imagine squeezing into an eight. It would have eaten my feet.
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I should probably have made it clear that it was in combat boot, which I believe is male. :D
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Also– size 9 womens, 7 mens and my feet are so wide I can wear men’s shoes better than women’s shoes. *sigh Size 18 now– used to be 14 before illness. Meds caused my weight gain.
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size 26.
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:-) curvaceous
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thank you.
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:-)
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Some folks are built like this
Some folks are built like that
But the way I’m built
Now, don’t you call me fat
‘Cause I’m-a built for comfort
I ain’t a-built for speed
But I got ev’rything
A-that a good girl need
Some folks they rip and run
Some folks don’t believe in sign
But you get me, babe
You got to take your time
‘Cause I’m-a built for comfort
I ain’t a-built for speed
And I got ev’rything
A-that a good girl need
(sax & instrumental)
Now, don’t you call me fat
Because you know I’m fine
You get me, baby
You’ve got to take your time
‘Cause I’m-a built for comfort
I ain’t a-built for speed
And I got ev’rything
A-that a good girl needs
(piano, bass & instrumental)
Well, I ain’t got the diamonds
And I ain’t got gold
But I do have a love
To satisfy your soul
‘Cause I’m built for comfort
I ain’t a-built for speed
And I got ev’rything
A-that any little good girl needs.
(instrumental to end fade)
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Perfect
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42D here– I used to be a 36c before I became ill–
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52C here. I wear men’s 9EEEE sneakers.
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I thought it was just us guys who were supposed to have size-comparison contests…:-P
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Wow. I partially inherited my mother’s feet (she wore a 7AAA women’s, and, when she could get it, with a AAAA heel). I buy men’s Medium (they don’t come in letters anymore at the price point I buy), and lace them up until the uppers are overlapping.
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I do love men size Crocs ;-)
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I think I’m in 46DD now. After my second son, I wore a 40F nursing bra. Those were the most comfortable bras I’ve ever worn.
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IIRC, part of the debunking of Snope’s debunking was the problem that Ms Monroe’s movie clothes were literally sewn on to her. (Never mind that any self-identified professional should be looked at VERY carefully when they make a big debunking on a popular belief, nor that just LOOKING at her makes it obvious she’d be popularly classed as “fat.”)
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I have to admit that I do check with SNOPES for a lot of things. I don’t always believe them though. As for Marilyn– yes
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They’re not going to lie, but they have a definite world-view and occasionally believe stuff because they want to believe.
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Yes –
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I not only can change the water in the water cooler by myself — those jug hold forty pounds of water — it no longer causes my heart rate to go up.
Downside: I have to wear large. It’s lucky I like loose fitting clothes, because nothing else fits around my arms. And I’m not that muscular.
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AMEN! Say on, Sister! If it weren’t for leg-o-mutton sleeves, I d have to give up on my Victorian styles.
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Loose fitting clothes? I have to buy pants with a waist 4 inches too large just to fit my thighs into, and have ever since I was 12, and weighed 88 pounds (No, I wasn’t dangerously skinny, I was well under five feet tall at the time). One time, I found that women’s pants fit me better, but it’s hard to find any with long enough legs.
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Some women’s pants come in tall. I have the reverse problem: Large waist and slender thighs.my hips aren’t much wider than my waist.
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Skimming through the comments I don’t see that anyone else has posted this so here you go, the body shapes of Olympic athletes:
http://www.boredpanda.com/athlete-body-types-comparison-howard-schatz/
Personally, I’ve always wished for “gymnast” (You see, as a kid I grew up on comic books. And while I knew, even then, that there was no way I could ever be Batman, I thought maybe Robin was doable…) What I ended up with was more “stubborn like bull, smart like tractor.”
More recently, I have argued for years that one size does _not_ fit all, not with body shape, not with diet, and not with exercise.
So preach it, sister!
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You notice that ALL those athletes have a layer of fat over their muscle, unlike, say, body-builders.
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Where are the female Ice Dancers? They always seemed to me to be the best balance of muscle and shape of all the Olympians.
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Take a look at the abdomens of Johnny Weissmuller, Buster Crabbe or any of the other “he-man” types of Hollywood past. Used to be that actors and actresses didn’t spend half an hour pumping up before shooting their scenes (read some of the promo interviews for Hugh Jackman’s recent Wolverine film to see the absurd lengths to which the on-camera talent goes in order to appear “chiseled” for the camera. For that matter, look at the training regimen Victoria’s Secret angels go through before their annual show — Giselle Bundchen’s husband confesses her training regimen before a show makes his work-up to the Superbowl seem easy.
Take genetically extreme individuals (no amount of working out is doing much to change your skeletal structure) put them through unnatural physical training and shoot them with favorable lenses and lighting and you reach an absurd standard of physical appearance.
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Point of order though. Bodybuilders “cut” like that for specific competitions, where the purpose is specifically to display the musculature. In between competitions they, too, have that layer of fat. This is true of the ones I’ve known and is described in numerous books on bodybuilding.
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Well, yeah, you have to actually work to get yourself looking so unnatural (and ugly).
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No question there. I was just pointing out that it’s not an “all the time” thing but something they do specifically for competitions.
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I imagine that, if they actually do perform athletically for any length of time, those bodybuilders with nearly zero body fat prove to have relatively poor stamina. There can’t be many calories in reserve to support that muscle mass when it’s active.
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“You notice that ALL those athletes have a layer of fat over their muscle, unlike, say, body-builders.”
Most of those are body-builder MODELS, which have about as much relationship to day-in, day-out, body-builders as women models have to everyday women. They are built for looks, not performance. I had one friend who was built like that naturally in high school, and he had to eat breakfast and eat shortly before he lifted or he would get sick as well as being weak. 3% body fat (what he had) is not generally a desired goal for anyone who plans on doing anything requiring stamina.
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“The only place this isn’t recognized is human biology, where if you aren’t getting the same results as anyone else, you must be a sinner and evil and a glutton.”
It doesn’t appear to be limited to modern human biology. I was somewhat flabbergasted to read the recent reports that there may be fewer human ancestors than previously thought because archaeologists weren’t taking into account the potential for variation. Two finds that varied within the range of modern humans would be considered two species. (Google “ Skull Fossil Suggests Simpler Human Lineage” for variations on the story.)
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Back in my single days, when I was running 10 miles a day, eating very lightly/sporadically (yeah, some of those meals were fast-food), hiking nearly every weekend, and riding my bike more than driving, I stopped at a booth at a health fair after a 5K road race for a body-fat analysis. They used the caliper method, and the poor girl had to give me a minimum 1% bodyfat measurement on my legs because there was simply nothing but skin and muscle. I had the typical distance-runner pudge around the middle, and have always hated upper-body workouts, so those were no problem. She measured me at 7%. The Navy, using the rope-n-choke method, had me at 13%. Waistline, I could have worn a size 32 jeans. But they felt painted-on around my legs, so I always had to buy a 34 to avoid cutting off circulation. Nowadays, my knees are shot (hereditary. Thanks, Dad.) and I’m married with a kiddo, so my exercising comes from pushing a buggy around the grocery store. I could stand to lose about 50lbs, but cutting sodas completely out and eating healthier home-cooked meals hasn’t dropped my weight any.
Personally, I prefer (and always have, even when young[er] and dumb) women who can hold their own against the world vs. those who must be coddled and wrapped in layers of fur to keep from snapping in two. Give me a woman who can hike all day, carry a Mosin and not complain (those things are heavy! Mad props to the Russians who hoofed those bastards around the battlefields), and retain her footing when faced with a stiff breeze. You can keep the twigs. Looks fade. Personality doesn’t.
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Back in my youth I rode a BMX bike nearly all the time, and for a while, when not riding it, I was either swimming (just snorkeling or playing in the water) or riding motorcycles and ATCs (remember when ATVs only had 3 wheels?) off road, and in winter cross country skiing, so I too wore 32 or 34 waist pants so they’d get over my 27″ or so thighs (they got a bit bigger after wards) while having a 28″ to 30″ waist.
The year I broke my leg, I even had well cut, six pack abs. I have to find that kid some time. My legs are back to the 27+ but it is because my waist is around 36 to 38.
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Yeah, all your dad’s fault.
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My non-athletic cousins have the same issue.
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The idea of social cohesion and social sin is one that has always interested me. Particularly in a heterogeneous society such as ours. A society arguably designed to remain heterogeneous.
How do we maintain social cohesion and reasonable social standards with so much variance? Body type and standard of beauty are a good marker, as these are dependent on genetics, developmental environment, culture, age, etc. Within the confines of the U.S. there is significant variation in all of these factors, then we add the new immigrant population in any given generation.
Aside from whichever group currently holds the media microphone and shouts the loudest (said group being mocked and ignored by various other groups), what mechanisms for social cohesion do we have? And which are valid vs those that are about homogeneity and otherization?
For me, I believe the attempts to homogenize our population are among the most egregious social ills to be found. It results in these disruptive assumptions others have remarked on regarding healthcare and education. And it compounds the problems of external validation, as the ‘standard’ can only ever be applicable to a select few. Additionally, I think it increases inter-cultural friction as it creates an expectation that everybody will be like us and demonizes the discussion of observable differences. Inevitably, the differences bump into the assumptions and we can’t discuss them because racist and sexist and gender normative and blech.
From my reading I gather past American culture was actually more aware and more tolerant of variation than our current elightened age.
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From my reading I gather past American culture was actually more aware and more tolerant of variation than our current elightened age.
That doesn’t sound right to me. The Melting Pot always struck me as a better model for building social solidarity and cohesion than the Multicultural Salad Bowl. IIRC, recent studies have supported my gut in this, in that the more “diverse” a society, the less social cohesion. People are more likely to trust people that they have a lot in common with, and whose values and responses they can reliably predict. If you don’t know whether Joe Other is going to reply to your friendly wave with a nod or a boot to the head, you’re less likely to be very trusting of him.
Via Instapundit: http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2013/study-asks-is-a-better-world-possible/
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I think we’d have to define the level at which we’re working to reconcile the concepts, because I agree. We have to have an overarching (and dominant) American culture, as in the melting pot analogy, to have a functioning society. But a core concept in American culture is that people are different, it’s a function of individuality. And we’re far more tolerant of individual quirks (within broad limits) than many other societies. Therefore, outside of certain strains of intellectualism, the cultural variation from state to state/coast to coast/rural to urban or whichever is far more tolerated here than in many more homogeneous countries. There can be remarkably broad variance that is still accepted as American.
There’s a certain intellectual trend to invalidate many of those variances occuring these days, that I think undermines our social cohesion far more than the variance itself.
I also believe that the more intimate the social level, the more likely trust is equated to similarity. I have less concern for the cultural oddities of the guy working on my car than I do someone I’m bringing in to my family. This is inherent in human nature.
So, under the unifying American culture, I think there’s a great deal of room for variation, but that variation is often less tolerated lately. I suspect much can be laid at the feet of the blurring of public and private spheres. But that’s a different topic.
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One of the defining characteristics of American social cohesion is, I think, a shared willingness to be tolerant of certain kinds of diversity (that haven’t been as acceptable in other historical cultures). We’ve made up for that in our history by being very intolerant of other kinds of diversity, but that’s homo sapiens SOP.
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To clarify my above comments, before I lead anybody too far down the bunny burrow, I think we need to establish definitions.
We ought throw out the modern treatment of ‘tolerant’ which says tolerance=acceptance=agreement. False equation, that.
Additionally, I think culture is treated as a monolithic in much conventional thinking, rather than as a subtle form that is applicable in different ways to different situations, people, and times. Work/personal, public/private, friends/family, and onward with a close approximation of infinity.
Factor those back in, and add the increasing blurring of any demarcation between public and private behavior, and I think (though I’m often nuttier than a fruit bar) my contention that there was actually more tolerance in the past has a little better chance of standing up.
As an aside, the hazing and ostracization of new immigrant communities: How much was in response to otherness and how much was a mechanism to encourage adoption of American culture? It’s less that you’re Italian/Irish/Polish and more that you’re carrying on in public like this is Italy/Ireland/Poland…
To try and drag this back toward the post topic: Progressivism really needs people to be interchangeable cogs, variations from that disrupt the success of progressive policies. So they keep trying to hammer Americans into their little molds. This bleeds over into other cultural mechanisms and we get this obsession with ‘athletic’ body types and an attempt to categorize everyone accordingly. A quick look at an American football team will give the lie to this particular category. Massive variance in body types, usually grouped by specialization of position, and most in modern football meet the realistic definition of athletes.
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So, under the unifying American culture, I think there’s a great deal of room for variation, but that variation is often less tolerated lately.
This falls right in with the cogification (totally a word) of society by the Left. They think that the Cultural Salad Bowl (That’s a great term, jabrwok) is a good thing, as long as the cultures are anything but the dominant American one, yet everyone should fit a body type and…
You know what? I had several more positions that I was going to put in that prior paragraph, but trying to write it out makes my logic circuits fry. There’s NO WAY that anyone could hold all those positions and actually understand their implications at the same time.
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Well, see, that’s your problem. The need to understand is an artifact of the patriarchy, and is reflective of your white heterosexual maleness. Reason and logic are nothing but tools of opression, and crutches to prop up your sagging irrelevance.
If you’re not gagging, I applaud your tolerance.
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I forget the exact quote of a blogger who’s familiar with those who say that “diversity is our unity” but he’s also seen those whose unity was their unity, and frankly they seemed more — unified.
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Takes us back to needing to define at what level we’re working. I’m familiar with remarkably homogeneous socities that are low-trust at suprisingly narrow levels. Insular family structures, basically. The U.S. has a much higher trust level nationally than some socities do municipally. Wherein do unity and diversity impact these evaluations?
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Just a couple of other thoughts with regards to different body types…
First, when I was in college, I saw a doctor just because I figured I could use a checkup. He ordered a cholesterol test for me, and then mailed the results, which said that I had high levels, and should cut out eggs and other high-cholesterol stuff out of my diet. The problem was that my diet pretty much consisted of a couple of pieces of banana or pumpkin-chocolate-chip bread and some chocolate milk in the morning, and whatever meal caught my fancy at the college cafe in the evening, and whatever I could scrounge up during the day…
Currently, I am at a new company, and I am losing weight–I’m doing so by drinking sodas and juices and Gatorade (lots of sugar), about three per day, and then eating a meal in the evening; occasionally I can scrounge up some leftover pizza from when the new recruits are being trained.
Overall, I have found that the times I get regular lunches–particularly restaurant lunches–are the times I am likely to gain weight. My previous job was particularly notorious for going out to eat, and later bringing in lunch for the company.
I have also found that places that have plenty of snacks can cause me to gain weight, too: I naturally snack, so it’s a challenge to keep myself from overindulging…
In any case, who in their right mind would recommend drinking soda to lose weight? I know I wouldn’t! And I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, either!
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The alternative lowering method is fiber. Lots of it. Soluble fiber binds to bile salts in the gut, which causes them to pass from the body and not be recovered to turn back to bile acids. so your liver needs to make more bile acids and uses more cholesterol to do it.
My doctor had never had a patient lower cholesterol as much as I did by purely dietary means. (and I had started a fiber supplement on top of my high fiber diet as an experiment, because of someone recounting how it had helped him lose weight.)
Warning: work up slowly. I take three doses of supplement a day, it took me a month to get that high, and I should have gone for six weeks.
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Do you ever get toilet clogs because of it?
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No.
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Note that she is not male nor a teenager.
I had brothers, I know whereof I speak, and they weren’t even on fiber!
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No, NOT using fiber is what causes the clogging of the toilet, except in the first couple of days of an increased fiber regimen.
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When I worked at an aluminum foundry, I used to drink a two-liter of Mtn. Dew just about every day. My mother complained about it a lot, so eventually, I started drinking water at work. Gained 20 lbs. Went back to drinking the Dew, lost about 10, but then went to the molding room, where the heat was, and lost several more. Then, I was drinking about 3 quarts of gatorade a day.
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Heredity wise, all of us are sticks as kids and then at some point hit the metabolism wall, some earlier than others. Some in my family could eat an entire box of Lucky Charms in one sitting every day, plus tons of other food and not gain weight for years, if ever. Others have fought and struggled from their late teens on.
I hit that hereditary wall when pregnant with my first when I was close to my 30s. I was on three types of asthma medication, had a half healed broken ankle – triple break with hardware installed to keep it all in place – and lived in the ghetto next to a busy, exhaust-filled street. Exercise was difficult. It has been a fight ever since. Fortunately, I have had doctors who have been good about knowing my heredity and knowing me. They help in the right ways and understand that you can still be healthy if not at the “right” weight.
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‘all of us are sticks as kids and then at some point hit the metabolism wall’ – Heh, but my skinner than a toast-rack adult son was so fat as babe, he couldn’t open his eyes properly (and was the only kid I ever heard of who had to have his breast-milk rationed. poor little devil was on diet before he was 6 months old. No wonder he eats twice what a normal adult does now. Very fast metabolism.).
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I think that some of the obesity hysteria is based on an ongoing shift in society’s ideals of female beauty. The rank and file are tending to curvier, and the self-appointed elite are worried that they will be unfashionable.
But this is an unscientific impression of mine. We’ll see.
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Oh, is this ever a topic near-and-dear to my heart… I have a collection of links on the subject, did a thesis on the topic for a college class, and basically have come to the conclusion that the whole concept of female beauty is put in place as a system of control—not by one unifying central authority, but by every petty penny-ante group that wants a piece of the pie. You’ve got the advertisers, who want to sell you things that you won’t be sold if you’re happy about yourself. You’ve got two big groups in the female contingent: the first group is composed of the bullying types, who want to keep their high status, and the second group is the ones who have invested so much in buying into the cultural conception of beauty that it would crush their worldview to have that overturned. (See: “I invested all that time for *nothing*?”) You’ve got the clueless-male contingent*, who can’t comprehend that women have a purpose outside being their for their viewing pleasure. And of course, you have the concern trolls, who “are worried about your health” (but who are, in fact, just indulging in holier-than-thou smugness.)
A sin? Of course it’s a sin. There has to be *something* that offends their sensibilities, and daring to be less than perfect for their viewing pleasure is the only thing that is deemed a safe space. I’m thinking of Connie Willis’ writing about “aversion trends” here—I actually had a friend get mocked on the street WHILE SHE WAS WITH HER DAUGHTER because she was daring to exercise in the public view while fat. Cruel, juvenile behavior.
In years of casual research, I’ve come to the conclusions that a) nobody’s state of health can be determined from just looking at their body, and even doctors should understand that, b) size often follows ill-health rather than the reverse, yet people keep telling those they deem as too heavy to “lose weight so you’ll be healthy,” (counter-productive if you don’t fix the underlying problem first!) and of course, c) so much dietary advice is countered within ten years that your best bet is to ignore it all and eat food that you’ve cooked yourself, since at least that way you know what’s in it.
I’d also add that “fermented foods” seem to be a big help, which sounds weird until you realize that yogurt, pickles/sauerkraut, sourdough and alcohol fall into that category.
Anyway. In my case, I’m generally a healthier person when my BMI (which is a CROCK**) starts edging into “overweight.” I tend to run on stress when my weight falls, and stress is not a happy thing. People tend not to believe me when I tell them my *size*, which is odd, since I’m the one buying the clothes. I’m lucky to have only ever had one medical person tell me to watch my weight, and that was when I got pregnant, and another nurse at the same visit rolled her eyes when told this and said, “She’s never had a kid.” Gotta love sensible medical types.
*NB: I am not saying that all or even most males are like this, but there is a visible group that has trouble understanding that maybe women are not just there to be part of the man’s story.
**Lots of links about that, too.
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Sarah and I are proof that germs are passed through the internet. Immediately wash your eyes out with disinfectant after reading this message. To take the point: ‘bodies and metabolisms are not alike, are very complex systems which means that the predicting outcomes for _INDIVIDUALS_ is very difficult and often wrong, just one step further: humans and their minds are not alike either, and if anything more complex. Which means statements like ‘men are x’ (therefore you are, even if you are not) or Asians are Y (therefore you are, even if you are not) are as reliable and infallible as ‘eat 1200 calories and do 1 hour’s excercise and you will be thin.’
Just a thought for next time you are stereotyped , or engage in stereotyping;-)
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<- the Genetic Beanpole For Life Who Eats Like A F***in' Garbage Disposal has nothing to contribute to this… ;)
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I used to be a semi-beanpole who could eat anything, and then I turned 23. But the bod didn’t really go to pot until I turned 35. Sigh.
I actually did pretty well on Slimfast, but I think it was the milk more than anything. I seem to need a fair amount of milk and protein, but I get sick quick on low carb. Right now I cook from semi-scratch with the crockpot and rice cooker, a good chunk of the time, and feel fairly healthy and energetic. I walk several miles a day, I can bike pretty far, but OTOH, I really wish I’d drop a few pounds, because I’m rather loud when going down the stairs.
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Then lower yourself, don’t drop.
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Late to the party because FINALS. Next week. Ugh.
Two things:
1.) There are people who understand the blood group thing, and I am not one of them because it’s irrelevant in my life and I have better things to learn about.
2.) I love love LOVE big women. Stick figures actually repulse me. Google pics of Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren or OMG Christina Hendricks (!!!) to get an idea. (Actually, Liis Windischmann is more my style, but I appreciate that she isn’t for everybody.) On the skinny side: Jane Russell, Ursula Andress and Marilyn. I ignore all fashion models, because their clothes are, as mentioned above, designed for young teenage boys by a largely homosexual designer set. Give me a big, strong woman with huge bazongas and childbreaing hips, and I am lost. (Maybe it’s because I’m kinda burly myself, but whatever.)
Okay, three things. I don’t recall mentioning Evelyn Waugh to Sarah, but I’ll cop to it anyway. EVERYONE should read Evelyn Waugh; he should be required reading in high schools instead of the crap they currently set. The world would be a better place. “Put Out More Flags”, “Scoop”, “Handful of Dust”… oh hell, just read them all. No need to thank me; it’s all part of the service.
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Well, I’ve found the perfect way for anyone to lose weight. :-)
Start with neck cancer. Then surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy. Kill every taste bud. Kill every saliva gland. “Sunburn” the inside of your throat. Require local anesthesia to swallow. Repeat for 3 months.
I ended up looking like a skeleton.
But I’ve survived for 2 years now after the end, and everything looks good. So, this was a success.
To the point of the original post — everyone’s body is different. For example, now I can eat, but I can’t gain weight. I eat 6 meals a day, and I’m constantly trying to stuff myself. And with protein and fat and little carbs. Just doesn’t work — I’m surviving fine, but I just can’t add substance.
Most people who know my situation would cheerfully strangle me. Or they offer a transplant of some stuff I could use…
Someone with a normal metabolism (like me a while ago) would explode in size.
I gotta agree, people are just different metabolically.
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I lost weight easier than that. Got my wisdom teeth out with a bad impaction and then came down with the flu. Lost ten pounds that week.
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I once knew (and somewhat lusted after) a girl in N.O. who was 5’1″ or 2″ and close to the 36/24/36 ‘ideal’ but (and what a butt … erm … sorry) she was exceedingly fit so she weighed, depending on time of year, 135 to 140 or so. She raced bicycles. She was also a Nautilus Champion at one time.
sweet girl. She took huge weight lifters with her when going out for drinks with friends. Not as dates, but to keep her from hurting those friends when she had a few too many (know one guy she put in a headlock and strained his neck).
The other obviously fit but don’t “fit” the “Ideal” are women swimmers and divers.
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Swimmers? My daughter’s on swim team. Now, at nine she’s only just starting to develop but I’m an SF writer and can extrapolate. And what that extrapolates to is “where’s my shotgun.”
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Ah, well, back in the day I worked in a bicycle shop that was down the street from Tulane and Loyola colleges, so most of the swimmers I knew were in the 17-24 year old range (I note the Swimmers tend to stay competitive far longer too) so you got plenty of years to keep that shotgun handy ;-)
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My mom still swims (not competitively) 2-3 times a week. She’s about to turn 75. Not as many laps as she used to, and the pool she uses is slightly cooler than what I cook my oatmeal in, but yeah.
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The homophilic media started it all by teaching us that our women should look like teenage boys…which is just sick. We are ancient Troy. I may be just a bit cynical…
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