I don’t normally agree with Matthew Yglesias, but his experience with weight loss seems to parallel my own:
The biggest gym-related thing I’ve done to lose weight is that I did some sessions with a personal trainer who warned me up front that you can’t really lose weight in the gym—you need to eat less food.
As one who has worked hard to stay in shape, exercising regularly, I have not (until recently) watched what I ate. Then, when I realized that was putting on weight, despite regular exercise, I needed to act.
So, I started keeping track of what I ate, cut out certain things and found that jeans that once fit snugly quickly became more comfortable. And people started taking notice.
Now, perhaps, I might not have needed to cut my calorie intake as much as I did, given how much I’ve been sitting at my desk blogging and working on my dissertation. Yglesias points out that:
It is worth pointing out, though, that for all the apparent gluttony of the contemporary American lifestyle, Americans actually don’t consume a particularly large number of calories in historical terms. Estimates I’ve seen of medieval calorie consumption often go up to 4,000 a day or more. But it’s not that medieval peasants were fat, or that they were really rigorous about doing 40 minutes on the elliptical machine every day. . . .
The bulk of human history was spent with our bodies operating at a generally higher metabolic level than happens nowadays.
Indeed.
Yeah, but didn’t the churls work like 18 hours a day?
1. All government data regarding obesity must be taken with a HUGE grain of salt because they judge who is obese based not on body fat, but on BMI. Body mass index which is a height to weight ratio. Well, that makes just about every muscular guy in America “obese” because a 6’2″ 210# muscular guy is outside his recommended BMI.
2. The threshold for what is obese has recently been lowered. (withing the past decade)
3. Yes you can lose weight at the gym.
People gain weight because they
1. Become more sedentary
2. eat more calories than they used to or
3. both.
Americans are becoming fatter, NOT because their diets have changed, but because computers and mechanization have drastically cut down the amount of activity they get both at work and at home.
And the decrease in physical activity results in loss of muscle mass which in turn lowers metabolism and exacerbates everything.
The fact is going to the gym can greatly help you (and I mean the generic “you” not you in particular) lose weight if you are doing the right things at the gym. You will NOT lose weight by trying to burn off calories doing aerobic exercise like treadmills and stairmasters. You will do much better to build muscle with weight training which, in turn, raises your metabolism, and have your new muscles and higher metabolism burning more calories for you around the clock. The key (if you are trying to lose weight) is to be careful that you dont increase your caloric intake at the same time.
Americans are NOT fat because their diets have changed, they are fat because they have become far less active. Not just what we think of as exercise either, but all sorts of physical activity.
Bacon Double Cheeseburgers existed twenty years ago — facebook, twitter, blogs, World of Warcraft, and computers on everyones desktop at work did not.
Oh, and quitting smoking will lower your metabolism and increase your appetite as well — and millions of Americans have quit smoking in recent years. Just another contributing factor.
And while I have been lean all my life, I say more power to overweight people. I am sick to death of hearing leftists like Michelle Obama thinking it is their business to tell other people what to eat or how much to exercize. F#ck her! Its none of the government’s business.
AE, used to be just by running I stayed lean. But, cardio alone doesn’t do it, so I’ve combined cardio with a diet change. And I also find that when I eat more fruits and veggies, I have more energy
LOL x235. Ah, the myth of the “fat American” who eats too many calories. My favorite subject! It is true that in many periods, people had fattier diets. Trust, me the Victorians and Edwardians loved their meats and breads too.
You were also younger, sweetie.
They dug fat chics too, particularly since it was a sign of good health/wealth.
I blame blogging for making me fat!
And if Americans are really getting fat, doesn’t it follow that clothes should be made bigger? Finding a XXXL shirt or pants over a size 38 ain’t easy.
As recently as 1989>
My grandma would get up early, fry at least a pound of bacon or sausage and fry the mornings eggs in the grease remaining. She would then take grease held from the day before and put it in the flour for the morning’s biscuits. Flour would be folded into half of the morning’s meat grease to make sausage/bacon gravy to go over the biscuits. All of this served with coffee or iced tea with enough sugar in it to cause the spoon to stand on its own.
Then she, my grandfather and sometimes many of their ‘field hands’ would hit the fields, inspecting lots, plowing with open-cab tractors, haying, combining, ginning cotton, pulling watermelons that weighed upward of 50+ pounds, tending hundreds of head of livestock, often before daybreak.
I estimate their average breakfast caloric intake was a solid 15-2000.
Lunch was another feast of fatty meats, stewed or fried, a plethora of vegetables, ‘stir-fried’ in the aforementioned bacon grease and 2-3 slices of white bread or biscuits, the sweet tea; for yet another 1000 calories minimum.
Dinner often mimicked lunch [or in the South, dinner=lunch and supper=evening meal{dinner}.]
So, we have 3-5000 calories a day (there were snacks.) My grandparents worked to live. While their intake was that high, their PHYSICAL work day was often 12-14 hours each day, with Sunday for rest.
When my gma died, she was 97 and weighed 105 lbs. She’d been trimming her hedges 3 days before she passed in her sleep. My gpa was 93 and passed away under an oak, from a walk he took at midday, checking fields…he just didn’t wake up. Neither of them had any disease whatsoever. They were just done with what they had to do here.
I on the other hand…have gained four pounds in the telling of this and am encouraged again to plug on with my weight loss. Thank you for some well-timed encouragement, Dan.
Oh, and I’m a physical therapist and still have to preach daily to myself about my weight, fitness and lifestyle choices. I’m of Dutch (not the taller Prussian version) and Scottish descent, so I’m one of the stockier, built-low-to-the-ground models.:)
I am losing weight on the Atkins Diet — when I was all low-fat, beans, whole grains crazy, I gained weight although walking 3.5 miles a day.
Not everyone’s body is the same. My problem with the government pronouncements is that they assume every “body” functions in the same way when it comes to weight. Not necessarily so.
Also, we should accept the fact that mature humans weigh more than the just-post-adolescence figure that has been forced upon us as the norm. Look around — every mature animal weighs more than young animals. That’s nature’s design.
This thing about what we should eat is just one more thing the government messes up.
“Good Calorie, Bad Calorie” is one of the most important things you can read. It probably isn’t even the calories, but what you eat compared to how well your whole hormonal, and by this I mean Insulin usage is working
The older you get, the more resistant you are- And yet we have a whole bevy in the world that can’t face that most of us shouldn’t be eating near the carbohydrates that have been foisted on us the last couple of decades.
Observe: the more they push us to eat 60% percent or more of our intake of carbohydrates, even using that government created idea of “complex”, the fatter we get.
“Hey Susan(Powter)!!! It wasn’t the fat making you fat.. it isn’t the bad guy. It’s all those carbs breaking down as sugar for the fat making hormone, Insulin, that were and are making us all fat.”
I look on this topic similar to planning your household budget. You can’t spend more than you earn. Same with this. Calories in vs. calories out.
Whatever you do, do not eat chocolate before you go to bed; it will leave you crashing the following day, despite breakfast.
I have found that once I remove crap food from my diet, the food becomes unappealing. I can eat foods from the sugar-and-hydrogenated-vegetable-oil-group in small occasional doses but for the most part, junk food puts me off. And even the thought of pizza or cheeseburgers is nauseating most of the time.
OTOH, I did make a batch of homemade pumpkin seed brittle last night to celebrate the arrival of autumn. And it’s teh awesome!
My BMI tends to hover around 24, which is at the high end of the healthy range, but I have a broad-shouldered, linebacker build so I don’t think it’s unhealthy. And I don’t sweat it too much. As I see it, sure, I could eat nothing but wheatgrass and probably live to 100, but I’d rather have 70 good years of eating like a man than 100 years of eating like a cow.
You have a touch of the psychic in you, Dan? I work in a small office with 2 other people (male and female) and we’ve been on some kind of health kick recently that’s getting better and better. Smoking was the first to go. I’m now at over a month smoke-free and it really hasn’t bothered me as much as I thought it would, not to say I haven’t had moments with BIG cravings because I have. The patch seems to have helped this time, never did before. Now we have all decided to lose weight and begin on Monday. Guess misery does love company… 🙂
With my last hospital job, I managed to lose 25 pounds in almost 3 months without changing my diet at all. We found that we were walking anywhere from 12-15 miles per day around the facility. Our patients always complained that the hospital was so cold, but I spent the whole day sweating because I was hustling from one assignment to another. I got a fanny pack with two water bottles in holsters on the side and always drank on my way to the next assignment.
Oh and I’d gotten in the habit of getting McDonald’s for lunch almost every day on the way to work.
Daniel, you know I’m a personal trainer, you should shoot me an email or face book message. I would love to help you out if you ever need any.
Diet is 80% of what you look like, well and genetics. But you will never change your body composition if you don’t eat well.
Darkeyed, will do, but my diet strategy seems to be working! -)
I can’t lose weight because of my 7th grade math teacher. It’s her fault, really. I can prove it.
She was terrible. Despite being pretty in good with the math, nothing I did was to her liking. She was always giving me grief about how I solved problems. Because of her, I have hated math my entire life.
Stay with me now.
In order to lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you consume. You need to know how many calories you burn with no exercise every day, how many with the exercise, and then figure out how many you need to cut out. And you need to count them, and add them up every day.
Losing weight is a math problem.
See? I told you it was her fault. 😉
All jesting aside, it is a b*tch to break years of bad eating habits. And it’s really no one’s fault but mine.
I weighed 100 pounds, at 5’3,” when I graduated high school in 1991; I weigh between 135-138 pounds now. My metabolism remains fast, although it has slowed a bit in my 30’s. I also don’t overeat anything. But I do eat some junk food…
FACT: Most Republicans are grotesquely OVERWEIGHT.
Look at Rush Limbaugh – that fat drug-addled PIG weighs 300 pounds! BWAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Two keys: 1) exercise in the morning. It will help raise your resting metabolic rate over the rest of the day. 2) dietary fiber. Seriously.
[Citation needed]
If you look at him now, he weighs far less than one of Ed Schultz’s chins and probably far less than your mother’s ass, fucktard. Guess you forgot that liberals went apeshit because he lost weight “too fast”, eh?
More projection Proud Liberal?
And what does it say when an allegedly “fat drug-addled pig” shows Harry Reid to be the total ass that he is?
Kicked Puppy worships the man who can’t kick his nicotine addiction and finds Truthers valid coworkers and negotiation partners.
He’s just upset that Rush beat his demons, and Kicked Puppy can’t even beat his own [redacted]