The guy just really could not believe that Z and I eat the same diet, but we do. We totally do. I snack more often than him, but he eats more at a sitting than I do. I suppose for the sake of Science we could do a comprehensive chart of every calorie we each take in, but I can tell you, having lived with him for six years, I know pretty well that we basically eat the same diet. I eat marginally more sweets, he eats marginally more salty snacks. I am more likely to eat when I am bored; he is more likely to snack late at night. Really, on average, day to day, we eat the same diet. And I stress about it more.
I also get a whole lot more exercise than he does.
He gets more sleep than I do.
And I am five feet seven and 205-210 pounds, while he is six feet three and 135-140 pounds.
[Edited to add: this is all covered much more articulately here:
]What's more, both our weights have been almost perfectly stable for six years. We were 22/almost 23 when we moved in together, and are 28/almost 29 now. In that time I have gone down as low as 185 pounds-- I had a physically demanding job and got a throat infection so I couldn't eat-- and he has gone as high as 145 pounds-- when I first moved in I fed him a lot. But these were gradual changes, mostly, and it's made very little difference what we did.
I went through a phase where I was writing a novel (in 2003) and spent 100+ hours a week sitting in bed writing. I rarely exercised, almost never left the house, and... pretty much stuck to my normal diet.
I gained maybe 5 pounds. Lost a little muscle, went up half a dress size.
Then I joined roller derby. That's the only thing that has made a lasting difference in my weight:
I gained about ten to fifteen pounds.
Yep. Muscle.
Z used to have to walk about two miles a day to get to work. He has gone through various changing situations of eating well or not so well (in Jersey, with only a minifridge, he ate a lot of Chinese takeout), and exercising a lot or a little. His weight very, very rarely changes.
It seems to be pretty compelling evidence, to me, that one's natural metabolism has a whole hell of a lot to do with the shape one is.
I'm not saying one should never pay the slightest attention to what one eats, or that one should not make any effort to lead an active lifestyle. Quite the contrary: I believe, and this is more radical than it sounds, that you should only eat when you're hungry, and should only eat things you truly want to eat. (Seriously, seriously look, at a Lil Debbie snack cake. Do you seriously want that? Really? I mean really? Well, OK, I mean, if you really want it, fine. But look at a fresh red bell pepper and a block of cheese and an egg and tell me you don't ever want that instead. Because damn, yo. Red pepper omelets are friggin' awesome.)
But the corollary to that is that you should always eat when you are hungry. And you should eat until you are not hungry. And then you should keep doing that. Don't eat when you're not hungry. Do eat when you are. Try to have tasty food that has actual nutritional value available so that when you are hungry, you can eat it.
Really, seriously, that's all I'm saying.
And as far as exercise-- you shouldn't do it because you hate it. It really feels good. You should find something you like to do, and make time to do it. The making time part is the hard part of it.
Really.
Anyway. That's all I'm saying. And the way he found me was that (e:strip) has such good Google rankings in general that it picked me up for a phrase that's not even in the journal. He found me for "weight acceptance Buffalo" (minus quotes), and that's not even what I call it, so good for (e:strip). Well done (e:Paul)!
I'm going to see if I can convince him to mention this journal in the article. :)
Because I have a separate blog I started just for Fat Acceptance stuff, mostly so I could leave comments on other sites, and I want him to mention that one but it's got a URL that the Buffalo News won't print:
Tee hee. Hey, I thought it was funny when I registered it.
I am actually fascinated by discussions like this. Is that really the focus of your area of research? I would love to know more!
I had no idea about any of it until I went on a really restrictive and harsh diet to "lose the weight once and for all!", having been just on the verge of fat my whole life (that being a moving target, of course, because I could never figure out just what constituted being actually "fat") and had absolutely nothing happen besides me getting exhausted, emotionally unstable, ineffective, and weak. My body kept every pound I had. What the heck!!
And then someone, coincidentally, linked me to an article on :::link::: Shapely Prose, and I read the whole site archives and thought.... Hey. Fascinating.
So I got interested in size-positivity through that.
I think the main point that I am trying to make is that 1) You can't, absolutely can't tell how healthy someone is by looking at them-- if I were the 127 pounds the doctor told me I should be, I would be dead, but American society would think I looked "so much better"; meanwhile people think Z is suffering from malnutrition but I swear to God he eats as much as he wants every single day and is doing just fine and would be just as dead at the 200 pounds the charts want him to be, and
2) Health is not morality. Even if someone *is* unhealthy, that doesn't make them a bad person. If someone is unhealthy and fat, not only may the two not even be related, it's *still* not their fault. If a skinny woman gets cancer she's unlucky. If her fat sister also gets the same cancer, she's unlucky but deserves it. This logic has become so internalized that there was a recent comment thread on ShapelyProse wherein a woman was agonizing over her inability to lose weight and how it was increasing her risk for cancer, and it was a genuine revelation to her that she was no more to blame for that than her mother was to blame for dieting herself to a skeleton and still getting cancer.
And then there's a third point nobody really likes to make, which is that diets don't work. :::link:::
Yes, if you have an eating disorder, getting that properly treated will change your weight. Yes, if you have poor eating and exercise habits, changing those poor habits will improve your health and how you feel day-to-day. But you may or may not lose any weight. And if you already have reasonably good eating habits, dieting to lose weight will destroy your metabolism and make you fatter in the long run. This is what has happened to 99.97 percent of people who have gone on diets.
So I'm really glad I had never wasted my energy on a really restrictive diet before, and I'm really glad I stopped after only a couple of months.
I'm not saying I just eat whatever, whenever. I am old enough that I know better. But I try to practice Health at Every Size, where any eating or exercise choices I make are in service to the ideal of my overall health, not in service of my fitting into a smaller dress size or looking more like Kate Moss.
Because I have totally different bone structure than Kate Moss, and anyway I like my tits the way they are thanks.
:)
I did miss the point and it is an extremely important point. :) Thanks for pointing that out! I am not sure we are on the same page about being obese though. I don't subscribe to the BMI-scale school of thought.
The figures you posted puts you at a BMI of 32.9 (maximum). If you went by textbook standards, this would be classified as obese. But just as you can classify people as African-American, Caucasian etc, on the basis of how dark their skin colour is or how their facial features look, and not have a clue about their actual ancestry, the whole BMI function is misleading with respect to whether it can predict whether the body mass is the wrong kind of adipose tissue or not.
In essence, you are completely right about one major point. We don't know the etiology of obesity at all. After several years of research we are somewhat close to uncovering what causes obesity. Endocrine (or hormone-related) causes are top contestants in the obesity etiology race.
However, what we are sure about is the "kind of obesity" that leads to problems. I think there are a handful of perceptions of what the term obesity actually means. To many, it means just looking "fat". To the statistically inclined, its the BMI calculation, however, to the medical profession, it means an increased propensity to acquire chronic diseases and related disorders.
The more I get into the literature of obesity, the more I think that the BMI scale is completely off the mark, and cannot be used for more than a very very rough approximation of obesity. "Fat", or adipose tisue is not really the same everywhere. It has a different character depending on the site at which it is deposited. If it is abdominal, around the omentum (a thin layer of tissue that shrouds your abdominal organs) or visceral (around the organs), it is the most likely to give you health-related problems. If, on the other hand, its subcutaneous - eg. in the breasts, thighs, buttocks etc, its not a problem.
This distinction is seldom made in most analyses. Most studies are obsessed with BMI - perhaps because we have no real measure to measure what kind of fat is really involved. I am not really sure how to deal with the measurement issues, because I don't think we have an answer.
Anyway, getting back to the central thought, I think what I should have said is the four rules affect your energy balance. If your energy-intake is more than your expenditure, it will mess with the regular functioning of your body.
Long comment, but I had to write all this down because its extremely relevant to my research. Thanks for posting! :)
Tinypliny, what's funny is that the actual main focus of my point was that... I follow these rules, and am obese. Z follows these rules, and is underweight.
This is not a recipe for weight loss.
It's a recipe for stopping the ridiculous obsession with food that makes so many people miserable.
Nice post and that's excellent advice.
--Eat only when you are hungry.
--Try to eat well when you are hungry.
--STOP when you are almost full. There's no use eating as if the world is ending then and there.
--DO NOT eat when you are not hungry.
Four rules and 95% of the people don't seem to get it. :( We are facing an obesity epidemic.