I hope that no one will take my critique of Majikthise’s post as me saying that Majikthise herself is anti-fat-people, or a bad person, etc etc; nothing could be further from my intent. I criticizing this one post, not Majikthise’s views as a whole, or Majikthise as a person.
Majikthise is worried that this recent JAMA study (.pdf link), which found that deaths-per-year attributed to “overweight” and obesity were much lower than previously reported – and which even found that the “overweight” tend to live a bit longer than people of “normal” weight – is being misunderstood. She points to this New York Times column by John Tierney, and also to this press release from The Center for Consumer Freedom (which I think is supported by the fast-food industry in some way).
Much of Tierney’s article is tongue in cheek (like the suggestion of picketing gyms, as if the JAMA study had found working out to be unhealthy). He also repeats some anti-fat stereotypes, like the assumption that fat people never exercise. But Tierney’s right on target when he says “the crusade against fat was never just about science.”
Majikthise dismisses the Center for Consumer Freedom’s critique of the CDC:
In the press release, the Center for Consumer Freedom basically accuses the CDC and the authors of the earlier study of propagandizing the public, if not of outright scientific malpractice. The data were there in the Center’s computers all along, they press release claims. Well, yes. Of course data sets used by Flegal and her colleagues [authors of the JAMA study] have been around for awhile. They’re the three National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) compiled by the Department of Health and Human Services and used for countless studies over the years. But that doesn’t mean that it should have occurred to the scientists who made the earlier estimates of obesity-related mortality to use the same statistical methods as the Flegal team.
I don’t think Majikthise has fairly dealt with most of the CCF’s critique. The CCF is critiquing, I think, not just the flawed “400,000 fat deaths per year” study, but also the anti-fat ideology that made it seem appropriate to the CDC to take an obviously questionable study and trumpet it all over the media. From the CCF’s press release’s “timeline”:
March 2004 The CDC releases its report during a highly publicized news conference saying obesity kills 400,000 Americans a year and is poised to become America’s number one preventable death, resulting in alarming front page headlines across the nation.
May 2004 Science magazine reports on the 400,000 deaths figure: “Some researchers, including a few at the CDC, dismiss this prediction, saying the underlying data are weak. They argue that the paper’s compatibility with a new anti-obesity theme in government public health pronouncements — rather than sound analysis — propelled it into print.”
November 2004 The Wall Street Journal publishes a front-page story on errors in the 400,000-deaths study. The paper notes the study “inflated the impact of obesity on the annual death toll by tens of thousands due to statistical errors … Dr. Pechacek wrote to colleagues that he had warned two of the paper’s authors, as well as another senior scientist, ‘I would never clear this paper if I had been given the opportunity to provide a formal review.
The point is, the “400,000” study did not get an enormous P.R. push because of scientific merit. There was an idealogical need to trumpet a study proving that fat is “the new tobacco”; and by serving the needs of ideology rather than science, the CDC put itself in a position where it deserved criticism. (Nor can the criticism be dismissed as solely coming from fast-food industry flacks; independent fat activists have been making the same criticisms since the study came out.)
The huge publicity given the “400,000” did have a scaremongering effect; it encouraged a level of anti-fat hysteria unjustified by sound science. (“Hysteria” is the correct word; the director of the CDC called fat worse than the black plague.) The CDC made itself a leader of the “fat=bad” mentality that emphases bathroom scales and self-loathing for the fat, rather than emphasizing healthy eating and exercise for everybody. Isn’t that something that merits criticism?
Majikthise then goes on to discuss the JAMA article itself. The article made two findings: First, that being overweight is actually associated with a longer lifespan than being “normal” weight. And second, that being obese (rather than just overweight) contributes to about 112,000 deaths a year.
It’s telling how different Majikthise’s approach is, when considering each finding. When it comes to the idea that “overweight” people might be healthier than “normal” weight people, Majikthise is skeptical, suggesting several alternative explanations.
Being overweight is good for you, the flacks insist. Well, not exactly… (Being overweight is probably healthier than yo-yo dieting, eating disorders, or extreme bariatric surgery, but this study doesn’t bear on those important issues.) […] The effects of being overweight are uncertain […] But does being slightly overweight actually improve people’s health? Or is this finding some kind of artifact? […] It certainly doesn’t follow that it’s better to be overweight throughout one’s life, rather than just during the critical years. […] Brooks, Tierney, and the restaurateurs also overlook the fact that being overweight is itself a risk factor for future obesity. […]
(Gee, being overweight is “probably” healthier than having an eating disorder? Thanks.)
There’s nothing wrong with skepticism, of course. But I can’t help but notice that, when it comes to the harms of obesity, suddenly Majikthise’s skepticism vanishes, and alternative ideas aren’t even mentioned:
…There is no doubt that obesity increases the risk of death and ill-health. […] this study suggests that if obesity rates increase, excess deaths will increase as well.
In fact, Majikthise sounds more certain about the obesity/death association than the JAMA authors themselves do. From the JAMA article:
Other factors associated with body weight, such as physical activity, body composition, visceral adiposity, physical fitness, or dietary intake, might be responsible for some or all of the apparent associations of weight with mortality…. Obesity is associated with a modestly increased relative risk of mortality, often in the range of 1 to 2. In this range, estimates of attributable fractions, and thus numbers of deaths, are very sensitive to minor changes in relative risk estimates.
Many of the factors that Majikthise suggests might confuse the findings regarding “normal” weight people – yo-yo dieting, weight-loss surgery, etc – seem if anything more likely to be an issue with obese people. So why aren’t those factors also reason to question the findings about obesity? Majikthise, like all of us, lives in a culture with an anti-fat ideology. It’s anti-fat ideology, not sound logic, which says that findings that “overweight is healthier” should be treated skeptically but “obesity = death” findings from the exact same study, arrived at with the exact same methodology uncritically accepted.
That same ideology also dictates that, even if being overweight might not kill you early, it’s important to bring up the possibility that it’ll ruin your life in other ways. As Majikthise writes:
The study didn’t even attempt to measure the detrimental effects of excess weight on general health or quality of life.
Well, no, it didn’t; that’s outside the scope of a mortality study. To be fair to Majikthise, the study authors themselves brought up this concern. Curious, isn’t it, that the study authors didn’t feel obligated to suggest that there might be detrimental effects of underweight on general health or quality of life?
Imagine for a moment that a new study found the “male early death” factor isn’t as large as once believed. Would people feel the same need to temper this good news by reminding us that maybe men will be living longer, but their quality of life might still suck? Would people still be objecting if newspaper columnists treated such a finding as the good news it is? I doubt it.
Even if obesity “only” kills 100,000-odd people per year, that’s still a lot of preventable death.
There’s probably no word I’m less fond of, in the fat-mortality debates, than the word “preventable.”
What does that mean? “Preventable” how?
Majikthise seems to be thinking of weight-loss diets (i.e., “Maybe relatively modest weight loss will also turn out to be a huge benefit for people who are already obese.”) I’d point out that there are virtually no studies that show that obese people can either 1) reliably become non-obese over the long term through weight-loss dieting, or 2) improve longevity by losing weight. As the JAMA article writers say, “Even if body weights were reduced to the reference level, risks might not return to the level of the reference category.”
Given the incredibly high failure rate of weight-loss diets over the long run – and the damage done by failed weight-loss diets not only to physical well-being, but also to self-esteem and mental health – I don’t believe that pushing weight-loss as a remedy is justified. Weight-loss fanatics have dominated the conversation about fat for over half a century; what can they show for their efforts? Are Americans now less fat? Are we happier about our weights and our bodies?
Pressuring Americans to be thinner has a record of utter failure for longer than most of us have been alive. If people were capable of thinking reasonably about weight, that would be enough to convince most of us that it’s time to try a different approach. But anti-fat ideology is too powerful, much more powerful than logic. It doesn’t matter how much the new data differs from the old: the remedy is always the same. Diet, diet, diet, weight, weight, weight.
Tierney and others imply that if mere overweight is good for people, then our public health programs must be misguided. But if being overweight really extends people’s lives, then we should redouble our public health efforts to stop millions of overweight Americans from drifting into obesity. For these people, even a small weight gain could have dire consequences.
The study actually found no consistent connection between weight and mortality until BMIs of 35 and over. (“The majority of deaths associated with obesity were associated with BMI 35 and above”). Since “overweight” was defined as BMI 25-30, it would actually take a very substantial weight gain to put an “overweight” person into the high-risk category; this study does not support the idea that “a small weight gain could have dire consequences.”
Maybe relatively modest weight loss will also turn out to be a huge benefit for people who are already obese. Even preventing further weight gain in obese people might save many lives. If so, perhaps obesity interventions are even more cost-effective than we thought.
There’s a lot of “maybes” and “perhapses” going on there, and no actual evidence. But in our society, no one is expected to question the ideology that says fat people must be pressured to worry about weight (since we’re so unpressured already!). In our society – in anti-fat ideology – all unfounded speculation seems reasonable so long as it endorses losing weight as the solution.
Again – and I know I repeat this a lot, but it needs repeating – there has never been a diet that’s been shown in a peer-reviewed study to lead to healthy, sustainable weight loss in most fat people over the long run. Much more often than not, weight loss dieting leads to depression, damaged self-esteem, moodiness, long-term weight gain, and in some cases the ill effects of weight cycling – but not to long-term weight loss.
So Majikthise is arguing for an “intervention” that fails to work around 95% of time; that has nasty side effects; that makes the condition it addresses worse at least as often as it makes it “better”; and all of this is to address “modestly” higher risks that may be attributable, in significant degree, to other factors. If the “condition” being treated was anything but fat, we’d think that was crazy. But in our society, it’s difficult to even see irrationality, because anti-fat ideology has clouded everybody’s vision.
* * *
There are probably a lot of preventable deaths in that 111,909 figure. Fat people, due to the enormous pressure to not be fat, are more likely to have tried diet after diet, leading to yo-yo dieting – and, quite possibly, to a higher weight in the end. A lot of obese people would be healthier and live longer if they remained steadily obese, rather than weight cycling. Similarly, extreme weight-loss surgeries – liposuction, stapling, etc – could easily be shortening fat lives. (For one thing, those interventions are sometimes fatal.)
Second of all, the belief that fat is the most important barometer of health discourages fat people from steady, lifelong exercise and healthful eating. A lot of fat people try exercise and better eating for a while, but then quit because it “failed” to make them non-fat.
More appropriate definitions of “success” – such as being able to walk a treadmill longer without losing breath – would prevent many deaths. Unlike weight loss, the empirical data on the benefits for fat people of regular exercise is very strong, and the negative side effects almost non-existent. (I think Majikthise agrees with me that it’s better to emphasize health than weight.)
Majikthise begins her post by criticizing John Tierney’s Times article. This may be the only time I’ll ever agree with John Tierney rather than Majikthise, but I think Tierney has a better grasp on the real problem. The main message Tierney suggests isn’t “eat all the big macs you want!” but “anti-fat hysteria needs to be mocked.” The main message Majikthise conveys, despite her good intentions, is “possibly overweight people are healthy, although maybe that’s just a statistical artifact, but we must not lay off the obesity-equals-death message.”
Fat lives would be both better and longer if we could spread the former message widely, while burying the latter message as deeply as possible.
Roberta, some of what you say is great, but some of it really … not so much. I take particular exception to your comments that we burn muscle rather than fat on Atkins. I understand the theory that “fat burns in the fire of carbohydrate,” which is what I assume you mean when you say “fat requires sugar as a catelyst,” but in studies comparing low carb/high fat plans like Atkins with high carb/low fat plans, the amount of fat lost was actually MORE on the low carb/high fat plan, and the amount of muscle mass loss, little to none.
Way back in 1965 a study was done comparing fasting (the most extreme form of energy restriction!) with a high fat, low carb diet. The fasting group lost an average of 21 pounds, of which more than 60 percent was muscle. The low carb/high fat group lost 14.6 pounds on average, of which only .04 pounds was muscle mass. (Benoit, F.L., Martin, R.L., Watten, R.H., “Changes in Body Composition During Weight Reduction in Obesity: Balance Studies Comparing Effects of Fasting and a Ketogenic Diet,” Annals of Internal Medicine, 63(4), 1965, pages 604-612.)
Similar results were obtained in a 1971 study, in which three groups of young men were randomly assigned to carb intake levels of 104 grams, 60 grams, and 30 grams. While all three groups lost weight, the weight loss by the group eating the least amount of carbohydrate was only 5 percent muscle and was 95 percent fat, while the higher carb groups lost 25 percent and 15 percent muscle mass, respectively. (Young, C.M., Scanlan, S.S., Im, H.S., et al., “Effect on Body Composition and Other Parameters in Obese Young Men of Carbohydrate Level of Reduction Diet,” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 24, 1971, pages 290-296.)
You go on to say:
Since about 30 percent of our dietary protein and as much as 10 percent of dietary fat are converted to glucose, and we do still consume some dietary carbohydrate, this is just not true. I’ve been steadily losing on Atkins for the last two years, for a total of 127 pounds so far. And I’ve lost 7 sizes. My waist has gone from 56 inches to 38.5 inches. My HIPS are now smaller than my waist used to be! And you think I haven’t lost FAT?
Plus sizes are 20 pounds a size, so if a woman is already in plus sizes, they don’t change at each 3 pound mark. They change at the 20 lb interval. Although not all comapanies are that consistent with their sizing, at least in plus sizes. Still, comparing apples to apples, I’ve gone from a size 34 to a size 20 in one company that I buy clothing from on a regular basis.
I do realize that Atkins isn’t for everyone and I hope that I have made that plain in this and other places I write about weight loss and body image issues. BUT… I do take exception to things being presented as absolute fact that are as likely to be opinion or even myth. And the idea that all we lose on Atkins is water and muscle is not supported by the evidence and is, quite simply, not correct.
I really love this way of eating, not because it’s let me lose weight, but because it’s restored my natural appestat.. the very thing you are talking about in your post. It turned off the crazy blood sugar highs and lows and has allowed me, in my mid-40s and after a lifetime of obesity, to self-regulate my appetite and weight without hunger or struggle. I’d hate to see someone else who is like me fail to give Atkins a try because of this type of misinformation.
I’d rather see them not give Atkins or any other restictive eating diet a try since diets don’t work, don’t make you healthier and in the long run don’t even make you weigh less. Seemed like sufficent reason to me.
Just to give another view, I have known a lot of people who eliminated certain things from their diet who experienced huge improvement in their health, such as people with gluten intolerance (around 10-130 percent of us, by the way) who eliminate gluten, or people like me, who for some reason or other can’t seem to tolerate much carbohydrate in their diet.
When I went on Atkins two years ago, I suddenly (in one day) had this huge stabilization of my blood sugar and got a very welcome burst of energy. I feel so much clearer and healthier and more vibrant, and as a result of this I have dropped 127 pounds. I’ve also seen a lifetime of chronic stress diarrhea vanish, and the only time I have any sort of food cravings is the day or two around my period. It’s transformed my life and definitely improved my health.
I never say everyone should eat the way I eat or will benefit from the things that help me, because everyone is an individual and we all have different needs and wants. But by the same token, you can’t make blanket statements about things that DON’T work or WON’T help, because they might work for someone, or help them.
I find Atkins appealing because I’m never hungry and I get to eat things that I enjoy and believe are healthy, so it’s really easy for me. If someone still felt hungry or didn’t believe in this way of eating (for instance, I don’t believe dietary fat is harmful but many people do), they wouldn’t have the same experience with Atkins that I have had. I’m not on a “diet” and I don’t intend to “go off my diet,” I’ve just figured out how to eat to make myself feel wonderful. And I’ve never tasted ANYTHING so good as to make me want to give this feeling up.
I heard this a lot when I got sober, too, that “giving up” alcohol doesn’t work blah blah blah, but in August I’ll have been sober for 23 years. So I think I know what it means to make a permanent life change, and to understand that “giving something up” doesn’t have to be a sacrifice at all.
I would hate, though, to give up my health, well-being, and happiness, so that’s why I’ll stay sober and on Atkins.
And yet, I’m just not surprised that a discussion about studies showing that fat is not the health risk its been made out to be had devolved into a discussion about which restrictive and punative diet works “best”.
Well, BStu, no “punitive” diet is ever going to work well. That I agree with. Maybe the issue is semantic — maybe we shouldn’t call it a diet, but changing nutritional habits can definitely reap benefits. There’s a difference between eating oatmeal for breakfast versus a ham and cheese croissant, at least if you do it every day, over time. This is the problem I have with painting this with way too broad of a brush — what do you mean by diet? Do you really think that input has no relationship to health status (even though it is unlikely to be as direct as it is often portrayed)? How would you encourage people to think about what they eat?
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BStu writes:
I do want to clarify that I don’t give a rat’s ass if people lose weight or not, and that my feeling great began before I lost an ounce. I agree it’s not surprising and definitely worth being conscious of, that this happened, and now that you mention it, it bugs me too.
I think there are health benefits to changing the way we eat. In my case, one of those benefits was suddenly having a functioning appestat, and a side effect of THAT was losing body fat.
I know lots of healthy, fit fat people and I am still one of them. I reject the “fat is bad” message whether it’s the fat on my thighs or the fat I eat. But I do think that having a functioning appestat is a good thing.
Really? Your own injection of diet speak into this discussion bugs you? Or was it just diet speak that goes against your own diet speak?
Personally, what bugs me is that dieters keep appointing themselves the guardians of fat acceptance. You know, their brand of fat acceptance. The one which promotes and/or glorifies weight loss and downplays actual fat acceptance as a “well, if that’s your thing, I guess its okay. Until you come around of course.”
Imagine if every discussion of gay issues everywhere was quickly dominated by the viewpoints of ex-gays? Or if a conversation on race kept ending up being up the difficult issues facing white people? I look at this own blog to see the unified outrage when discussions of feminism get derailed. Imagine if that’s how the conversation always went. If it always got turned back around into being about men. Because that’s what fat people have to deal with. There’s always someone quick to share their weight loss success and to vigorously defend dieting. Always someone who wants to redefine fat acceptance as a diet support group. Always ready to inject diet speak and diet language. Oh its not a diet, you see. Its a “whole new way of living”. They’ll agree that dieting is very bad, but that’s no reason to oppose weight loss through restrictive eating. That’s different, you see.
It reminds me of the privatization vs. personnal accounts nonsense. Whenever people turn on diets (inevitably due to the failure of the diets), the weight loss industry comes up with a new gimmick. A new language to use now that the old one is so tied to failure. They’ve been especially brazen about co-opting the anti-dieting language of fat acceptance to use to promote their own products. You don’t like diets? Don’t worry. We have a healthy eating plan for you. Had bad experience with that phrase? Might we interest you in a lifestyle change? That hasn’t worked? Perhaps you’d like to learn more about your appestat. Heard good things about “Health at Any Size”? Well, we’re here to make “any size” the size you want to be.
Its carbon copy of their approach on the conflicting data which keeps coming out. They just ignore it and march forward. Failure isn’t an option. Fat people are flawed and must be corrected. Never mind if they aren’t actually flawed. Such facts will only get in the way. Onward Atkins Soldiers. Onward Ornish Soldiers. Onward Bypass Soldiers.
The glorification of weight loss is all around us every day. I’m not surprised that it keeps creeping in to dominate discussions on the opposing viewpoint. I’m sick of it, but I’ve long since stopped being surprised.
From Merriam-Webster:
Main Entry: 1di·et
Pronunciation: ‘dI-&t
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English diete, from Old French, from Latin diaeta, from Greek diaita, literally, manner of living, from diaitasthai to lead one’s life
1 a : food and drink regularly provided or consumed b : habitual nourishment c : the kind and amount of food prescribed for a person or animal for a special reason
2 : something provided especially habitually
BStu, if that was directed at me, I didn’t introduce structured diets into this conversation. I don’t diet. I can’t diet, I am congenitally incapable of dieting. Even looking at diet books makes my eyes glaze over. I do like to cook, and I like understanding nutrition, and I actually have been known to sit down with cook books just to read the recipes. Everyone has to eat, and it’s possible to eat well and have a healthy diet (definition 1a) without “dieting” in the meaning of definition 1c. At a visceral level, I believe that for many Americans dieting is like religion: there is a hope that salvation will come in a box (like one hour a week of church) such that you don’t really have to change those habits that are unhealthy (or sinful) as a part of your “true” existence. It doesn’t work — not for weight loss, or for any other health related goal.
But thanks for not answering any of my questions.
BStu wrote:
Yes, it does.
Yeah, that’s an excellent analogy in general. But in my case I’m still fat. Just because I lost a lot of body fat and feel great and have a healthy relationship now to my appetite … and seek to correct flat out misconceptions about an eating plan that I have had good experiences with … doesn’t mean that I’m not fat.
I have a friend who had bypass surgery and lost about half her weight. People still think that she is a “before” when she goes to support groups for weight loss surgery. She and I are both still fat, despite having lost a great deal of weight. And our committments to fat acceptance really have not changed. And I’m even still a dyke. ;)
I don’t know why anyone, fat, thin, or in between, would NOT want a system of their body to be functioning. I never said if your appestat was working you’d be thin, did I?
I don’t disagree with your main point and I honestly do appreciate having bullshit called on me when it’s deserved. But that doesn’t mean that I was all the way over on the Dark Side, either.
Well, thanks bean. I was on a roll because I had just read an article in my local paper about the latest fat hate memoir to hit the shelves. And how this fat hate memoir writer felt she needed to taken on the role of defender of fat women against the admittedly more aggressive fat hate of Kirstie Alley and Judith Moore. Who also style themselves as fat heroines, I suppose. All these fat heroines, but always the qualification is fat hatred. Maybe I’d feel more moved in the message of a wanna-be champion was more inspiring than “well, you shouldn’t hate yourself *that* much.”
Fat acceptance isn’t defined by opposition to the lowest of the low on the fat hate side. That seems to be the standard many seek to apply as they declare themselves fat acceptance supporters. Why? Because they don’t want to treat plus-size clothing stores like crack houses? Because they offer self-serving compramises? I’ll allow that you have a right to ignore the health risks of fatness is you agree to cheer on my stomach amputation. We can all agree that discriminating against fat people is wrong, they’ll generously offer before insisting that this is the point where the discussion must end. Even still, they never hesitate to find common cause with the lowest of the low when it suits them. I used to always use Michael Fumento as a bench mark. If a person quoted Fumento, they cannot even offer a pretense of supporting fat acceptance.
And that’s all it ever seems to be. A pretense. A means to steer things back the world-wide diet support group they seem to want. You don’t believe in fat acceptance just because you “really need” to lose weight or because you “know you’ll never be thin”. Dieting doesn’t magically start to work because someone “really needs” it or because their weight loss goals are “realistic”. How realistic are any goals expected from a system with upwards of 99% failure? Why is it so threatening to have a discussion about the health of fat people that doesn’t become one about how fat people are unhealthy and need to be changed?
Fat acceptance has meant something for decades. Back when the fat underground was doing the seminal philosophical work and the movement was an off-shoot of radical feminism. It has evolved into standing up against not simply the abusive treatment of fat people but the thin justifications for that abuse. I’m tired of self-annoited fat acceptance defenders who don’t believe in any of this beyond the co-opted fat accceptance talk from the weight loss industry.
We need new approaches to treating the health of fat people. Not yet more new approaches to weight loss. Even if the latest model comes with fancy code words.
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I read that atkins diets are still lower caloire diet because you cannot eat every much of it before satiaty sets in, one guy I knew lost 45 pounds on it but I barly could tell, he had lost only a few sizes which is way less than 45 pounds could acheive if only fat was burned.
3 pounds of fat is a size, fat cannot be converted to sugar, otherwise the body wouldn’t need sugar in the diet or wouldn’t use protein to convert to sugar at all. fat is very bulky muscles are not, 3 pounds of muscles takes up a fraction of the space of 3 pounds of fat, fat is only 10 percent water muscles are 90 percent (that is where the massive amounts of weight is lost from when in caloiric deficit (regardless of method used)
references, Exercise physilogy (red textbook about the size of a large dictionary) written by three authors can’t remember got the book out of the library, Bodyfueling by robyn landis, also Exercise physiology for sportsman or sportspeople, covert baileys fit or fat series, his exercise fit or fat books I mean there is more. also the books how to be naturally thin by eating more by jean antenello, also the book the fat instinct which is no longer at the library, that I know of I tried to find it for someone.
I mean I took a bunch of anatamy/ physiology and exercise physilogy books out of the library so as to compare and took notes out of them too, and some of what I wrote I gleaned from that. some of these books were huge textbooks used in colleges. I also gleaned from the net such as I typed exercise physiology in the search and got all kinds of things on it.
when I refer to sizes I mean inches not what the clothing industry’s way of measuring, a size is approximatly an inch if I am not mistaken,
RR
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One question for the “I’m offended that people think that fat people don’t exercise” commentators–do you know any moderately overweight or heavier people that get regular, VIGOROUS (i.e., walking or Curves doesn’t count–I’m talking about running or cross country skiing or biking at a pace that causes you to gasp for air after 5 minutes and causes you to be sore for the rest of the morning) exercise at least five days a week that hasn’t lost a ton of weight?
I do eight hours of walking, lifting, bending–you name it. Hard, physical work on my feet, rushing, going hard. Eight hours a day. 5-6 days a week. I have to walk 1/2 a mile just to get from my car to my work area, every single day, and I’m one of those people who never gets to work early enough to avoid rushing to the time clock. So, yeah, I’m going at a good clip when I’m heading in. I don’t eat at work, because I get so overheated doing my work (I’m sweating from the second I get out of my car until I get back in it) that it makes me sick if I eat. So I wait until I’m off work to eat. So, yeah, we’re talking work that makes you gasp after five or ten minutes of effort.
Guess what? No weight loss for me. It didn’t matter if I were eating salads every day, or big macs. No weight loss. I stay at the same weight (and I’m overweight). I go up a few pounds during the PMS phase, and go right back to my regular weight when my cycle corrects.
Sorry, but assuming that people who exercise hard and “eat right” will lose weight IS anecdotal evidence. It doesn’t work that way for everyone. I wish it did. But it doesn’t.
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