If you look at the numbers for people trying to lose weight most can lose some weight for a while. How much and for how long and what cost to the rest of their lives is another question. For the vast majority the weight is regained within five years and there is evidence that the yo-yo effect of gain-loss-gain is really harmful.
The cult of thinness is a huge part of American culture, but that only helps perpetuate the diet culture that says that being thin should be the most important goal of fat people, and to that end any means are good, even taking deadly drugs such as phen-fen and amphetamines. It’s the view that fat bodies are morally corrupt and people who are fat are also moral failures. Is that conflating diet culture with general American culture? Maybe, but it is hard to separate them sometimes.
Talk about putting words in people’s mouth.
My point is that what you are saying established science “basically”
says is untrue, not supported by the evidence of genetic causes of high cholesterol, is not established in any meaningful way as a treatment for most men or an acceptable medical outcome and that you are thus slightly providing misinformation while speaking in a way that suggests a level of authority, and it serves the interests of a company whose only purpose is to sell drugs more than anyone else for things we don’t fully understand where a lot of our scientifically established understanding has definitely been wrong for many many years.
If in all of that all you can do is say “no I didn’t” and then accuse me of being broadly anti-science then I feel vindicated in calling you out for it.
How many ‘diet’ proponents have actually passed a college-level nutrition class? 8-(
Okay, i see better what you’re getting at, and agree with most of it.
I’d guess though that the vast majority there fail to keep excess weight off because they’re doing short-term “diets,” and not doing lifelong “lifestyle changes” like eating less junk and exercising more.
Yes, some people are prone in whatever ways to being bigger and can be healthy that way, but many others are suffering bad health in many ways from weight they could lose if they ate and otherwise lived differently. (Which is all aside from ills wrought by a diet culture that indeed does unrealistically and detrimentally glamorize thinness.)
Ah, food/diet; a topic that’s just divisive as politics or religion, but which is less immediately detrimental.
See, here is the assumption that just doesn’t hold up to people’s lived experience. People can and do manage to lose weight. Then they usually gain it back. To maintain weight loss people have to make thinking about their diet a major part of their life. This is exhausting and discouraging. Many people increase their exercise, only to cut back as the rest of their lives need that time slot for necessary activities. I, for example, could only have exercised regularly if I had given up on an hour of sleep. As I was barely getting enough as it was, that wasn’t going to happen.
And many, many more people adopt these changes, only to see very limited success. As I said once, if these were really effective strategies we would be seeing lots more thin fit people.
As I also stated, we do not know how metabolism works in any detail. There are people who gain weight on highly restricted diets. There are people who don’t gain weight on highly caloric, highly fatty diets. We have no idea why.
Eating a healthy diet and getting exercise will help people live better lives, but it might not make them thin. And pushing thinness as the only metric of success, with the do-or-die push of drugs, fad foods, body-shaming and all of the other accompaniments is the diet culture.
Oh God yeah that too. I distinctly recall after her heart attack my former mil added like a half-cup of broccoli to her cheese casserole and switched to baked lays. Those were the only diet and exercise changes I saw her make.
Her heart issues didn’t improve.
I’m afraid I didn’t follow that line of reasoning, but let’s just leave it be. I don’t think there’s a fruitful discussion to be had here.
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree.
I’ve seen people (including myself) gradually lose weight, and keep it off, by developing different dietary and exercise habits. My parents had bad (fatty, high sugar, etc.) diets, and they hardly exercised regularly, and those became my habits.
Then I learned about better food and fun ways of moving around more, and felt better as a result, as those became new habits. They weren’t “exhausting and discouraging,” they just became parts of a different way of living. And they had little to do with the tyranny of thinness favoritism and fat shaming (which, granted again, are awful things indeed).
Eating a healthy diet and getting exercise will help people live better lives, but it might not make them thin. And pushing thinness as the only metric of success, with the do-or-die push of drugs, fad foods, body-shaming and all of the other accompaniments is the diet culture.
Agreed. And I’m not pushing thinness as the only metric of success. I don’t think what im talking about is part of “the diet culture.” And I’m also not claiming that everyone could or even should lose weight by doing it.
I agree with so much of what’s being discussed here. Eating well and exercising shouldn’t be for the sole goal of becoming thin. It should be about being healthy, whatever that looks like for a person.
I also know that even if eating healthy isn’t necessarily more expensive in terms of money, it can be in terms of time. Especially if one doesn’t yet know how to shop or prepare food. Or lives in a food desert. So I always like to share this resource:
Please pass it on to anyone you know who might benefit. I’ve been very poor before, not so much lately. But, as part of an exercise I recently made myself live on the amounts our US standard food benefits allotments are based on for a few months, to see what it is like. It’s something like $150 per person per month, iirc. This book was an amazing resource. It is free as a pdf, and it has all the cooking and equipment guidance you’d wish we learned at home or in school.
ETA: I updated the food benefits reference for clarity and accuracy. Thanks @anon3072533
I think the general point of contention is whether or not most big people could loose a good bit of weight though maintainable lifestyle changes or not.
I’m more of the belief that most could be a few pounds lighter but for the most part, big people are wrongly judged for their lifestyle habits and have too many things about their health assumed by people frankly just evaluating the size of their ass. And big time weight loss is just not possible for most overweight people.
Telling people to eat well and exercise is dangerously tied to a number on a graph in our current culture. No one told me to eat better or exercise more when I was thin, before I had radioactive iodine treatment, but my partner who was fat got treated as unhealthy or as having problem habits all the time despite the fact that he ate less junk than I did and was more active. He is a bit smaller now due to a new more structured exercise routine and feels great about it but It doesn’t make any difference to how he is viewed and judged by strangers.
And diets are for weight loss, that’s why the concept exists. If we want to talk about real health we do need to recontextualize these discussions.
I know you also think fat shaming is awful but I do think that the idea that most people could really do better does feed into that overall kind of thinking. Do better is just heard as be thinner and it’s going to be a lot more work to make that stop being true.
As long as the trigger for talking about health keeps being weight this is going to remain a painful quagmire of a discussion.
As a society we are so scared of giving a fat person a break, we have been made to feel like it’s literally letting someone kill themselves instead of realizing most people are not going to optimize their health all the time, most people just get by and that’s mostly actually ok.
Yeah that is one of the tough things about the fat acceptance movement. On one hand yes it can become just as disordered and destructive as pro ana. On another level though. People are unreal with the shaming. When one gains weight it is often not just like random eating and even if it is there’s probably a reason for that somehow. That is to say very often for people who ever were thin at some point in their life it follows a major illness, depression, disability, stress, grief, childbirth… something that makes a real material change to the body.
I gained weight after one of the toughest periods of my life and it was really unhelpful most of how people treated me. Lot of restrictive ed in my part of the family so one can imagine the godawful things I heard. But really I had to adjust to a new body.
Like a really different body that didn’t work the way it did before. And it was hard… because now I was also kinda fat.
I can relate to that because I was trying to find what was wrong and the attitude was often “well you’re getting fat so stop that and maybe we can care about something else…”
Which was frustrating because before my thyroidectomy it was like “well nothing could be wrong, look at you, youre skinny!”
So much this, my doctors keep asking me how my eating habits have changed.
They haven’t, I just don’t have a functioning thyroid anymore, and I spent a year on antibiotics and whatever that did to my gut. It would be easier to keep up healthy habits without the weird shame. I have to keep telling myself that nothing about my old body could ever be worth starving for, and just try to be more active and accept that I have a middle aged body that has just been through a lot recently.
Although I might need to be on a tiny bit more thyroxine, I’ve been tired and moody as well. I need to get a new endocrinologist and a new GP this month, my old ones both just moved. Yay! /s
What concerns me is not just the assumptions about what people are eating. It’s also that focus on it ignores other factors that affect health, but are less under people’s control. Things like environmental factors, genetics, and problems with healthcare for people who aren’t part of the usual groups included in studies. Those points were raised above, but it always reminds me of people I’ve met who were failed by the worldview promoted by folks really into wellness and fitness. One was a runner who advised less meat, more veggies, aerobic exercise, etc. He died young, from cancer. From the time he was diagnosed until he died a year later, the folks who were his fitness fans were convinced that he would beat it, because he was in such great shape.
I believe it’s worse than just focusing on becoming and staying thin. Some of this is really linked to anti-aging and folks who are being convinced that if they just eat the right things/take the right drugs/have the latest “procedure,” they’ll seem younger and live longer. They set really unrealistic expectations of controlling what the body tends to do naturally at later stages in life. As was also pointed out above, marketing and pharma firms love this, because convincing folks they can pretend to be 30 for 30+ years is worth lot$ of money. This is partly where some of the “one drug fits all” problem comes in, because if you can announce a miracle drug and hand wave side effects for groups that weren’t in the trials, or get the word out that a medication people need for a real condition also helps folks shed a few pounds, there’s more profit.
As a person who’s no longer able to be as active due to injury, this really resonated with me. I’m not burning as many calories as I used to before. It pissed me off to have my doctors bringing up BMI with me, after I figured out they listed my height as two inches shorter. Their target weight for my actual height is a number that would make it possible to count my ribs. The healthcare industry profits from some of this, through medication, weight loss surgery, and plastic surgery. We’ve had the discussion in other threads about the ways members of marginalized groups have been harmed by being simultaneously overlooked and over-medicated.
What scares me now are older people so desperate to be thin that they are literally starving themselves. They’ve shifted from changing what they eat to not eating at all, and using all kinds of rationalizations about human evolution, modern agriculture (grains of any kind are bad/nothing US agribusiness produces is untainted), and avoidance of chemicals to justify eating as little as possible until they pass out. 
As a child of the '70s who grew up on a mix of homegrown and processed foods, I’m firmly on Team Acceptance. I’m not going to starve myself or attempt to avoid every “bad” type of food out of fear that will be the thing that kills me. Do I eat junk every day? No. Am I gonna avoid the occasional treat? Nope. I’m surrounded by stuff that will kill me. It’s in the air, water, soil, and just about every consumer product that I come into contact with on a daily basis. Tried to read the labels on baby shampoo and hand lotion once, and I’d like those minutes of my life back. Moderation is my mantra and keeping up with medical checkups to make sure all tests are in the OK range is enough.
This. Specifically, large population studies show that the largest expected weight loss that is sustainable is 5 lbs per year. More than that generally will just come back (often more regained than was lost) and has worse health outcomes than maintaining weight or even mild weight gain.
On top of that, many people who are overweight face an uphill battle in losing weight - decreased metabolism, muscle loss, and musculoskeletal injury make exercise more difficult and less efficient at burning calories.
Yes, I see what you mean, and certainly agree.
I’m also saddened to hear of your condition.
My apologies for coming across like i was just saying most people should just do better. That’s not what I wanted to contribute.
(Not meaning to go off-topic from discussion of the anti-diet movement, but just to add something to your comment…)
Just as a matter of interest for anyone who may not know, SNAP isn’t intended to actually be enough to live on, i.e., it’s not intended to cover all of one’s food expense—hence the name, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The amount of the award varies by income in relation to family size (and may also vary from state to state). Of course, when there isn’t enough money to pay all needed expenses, people do wind up making their SNAP benefits stretch to cover all of their groceries 
(Source: I received SNAP benefits for a while, twice—first when I was laid off in the Great Recession, and again when I was laid off after a couple of years on the next job.)
(ETA to correctly quote @ClutchLinkey 's edited comment 
)
Saying “it’s all about calorie reduction” is a bit like saying winning a marathon is all about running faster. That’s not a plan.
We eat about a million calories a year, and if at year end you’re within a pound of where you started, you got to 99.7% of target intake. If you maintain 5lbs weight for five years, that’s like 99.99% accuracy. That’s not willpower; free will just ain’t that accurate. There’s powerful regulatory systems working, and none of them are well understood. It seems very likely to me that what we eat interacts with these regulatory systems.
Unfortunately, “eat well, in moderation,” isn’t easily marketed, nor is it easily sold, engineered. The amount of behavioral, social, psychiatric, neurowhatever the fuck kind of shit has to go right for people to have a healthy, sustainable, enjoyable weight and body is a new level of crazy difficult to manipulate safely. Going to Mars or curing cancer is easy by comparison. The gustatory drive is so readily hijacked and led astray, no wonder he who controls the chicken tenders controls the universe?
