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Obesity Tax? (pg. 15)
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| Halcyon+On+On |
Monkey-see, monkey-eat.
And I don't think I speak the language of most fat people - they tend to slur their speech to the form of some guttural breathing hardly audible over the flapping of their chins against their drooping cheeks. Wow, that was gross. |
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| Silky Johnson |
| After thinking about it more, I'd have to take back my previous post. There are definitely factors that contribute to why people make unhealthy choices. Lack of education and low income are two big ones. |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| You can't take it back, it's too ing late. I totally quoted it and everything. I didn't go through all that work just so you could take it back. |
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| Silky Johnson |
| Haha sike! I was just making that stuff up! |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| FFFFFFFFFFFFFF- |
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| Silky Johnson |
| Listen, I'll make it up to you. How would you like to go for some cheesecake? |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
To your credit though, you did specify that there weren't any actual medical conditions which directly contributed to morbid obesity, though I am sure you worded that considering of course that it can be a side effect of several of them.
However, I would consider the very nature of eating to understand reckless eating better - many people overeat quite often, even though they are not obese. It is merely a side-effect of our being reproductive beings who are biologically predisposed to walk around on land carrying our weight in self-contained organs and blood as well as reserves of fat to tide us over in lean times. People eat to stimulate this mammalian urge and it soon becomes a habit, an addiction of sorts, I'd venture. The general unhealthiness of many foods anymore as well as sedentary lifestyles certainly contribute, but obesity has always been a prospect of a minority in our species - so there is certainly a pretense - but the margin for its occurrence is growing smaller and smaller due to numerous other social and physiological factors inherent to everyday western lifestyles, especially.
But I'm pretty sure that's what you meant all along, I'm just now realizing it. |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| quote: | Originally posted by jennypie
Listen, I'll make it up to you. How would you like to go for some cheesecake? |
Only if it's Nacho cheesecake. With sprinkles. |
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| Silky Johnson |
| quote: | Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On
To your credit though, you did specify that there weren't any actual medical conditions which directly contributed to morbid obesity, though I am sure you worded that considering of course that it can be a side effect of several of them.
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Actually I was going to say that I will definitely agree that there are medical conditions that are linked with obesity. Just not that CAUSE obesity. So yes, I would agree with that statement. It would be stupid not to, really.
Of course, being in the position I'm in...I also know that all it usually takes to curb said side effect is a change of lifestyle, and in extreme cases, medication. |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| I think that really fat people probably get used to eating a whole lot of food, so that eating an average amount makes them feel like they haven't eaten enough. |
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| gehzumteufel |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
I think that really fat people probably get used to eating a whole lot of food, so that eating an average amount makes them feel like they haven't eaten enough. |
Obese people stomachs are stretched beyond what they should be usually. |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
Makes me think of this article:
| quote: | The study was rigorous and demanding. It began with an agonizing four weeks of a maintenance diet that assessed the subjects’ metabolism and caloric needs. Then the diet began. The only food permitted was a liquid formula providing 600 calories a day, a regimen that guaranteed they would lose weight. Finally, the subjects spent another four weeks on a diet that maintained them at their new weights, 100 pounds lower than their initial weights, on average.
Dr. Hirsch answered his original question — the subjects’ fat cells had shrunk and were now normal in size. And everyone, including Dr. Hirsch, assumed that the subjects would leave the hospital permanently thinner.
That did not happen. Instead, Dr. Hirsch says, “they all regained.” He was horrified. The study subjects certainly wanted to be thin, so what went wrong? Maybe, he thought, they had some deep-seated psychological need to be fat.
So Dr. Hirsch and his colleagues, including Dr. Rudolph L. Leibel, who is now at Columbia University, repeated the experiment and repeated it again. Every time the result was the same. The weight, so painstakingly lost, came right back. But since this was a research study, the investigators were also measuring metabolic changes, psychiatric conditions, body temperature and pulse. And that led them to a surprising conclusion: fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.
Before the diet began, the fat subjects’ metabolism was normal — the number of calories burned per square meter of body surface was no different from that of people who had never been fat. But when they lost weight, they were burning as much as 24 percent fewer calories per square meter of their surface area than the calories consumed by those who were naturally thin.
The Rockefeller subjects also had a psychiatric syndrome, called semi-starvation neurosis, which had been noticed before in people of normal weight who had been starved. They dreamed of food, they fantasized about food or about breaking their diet. They were anxious and depressed; some had thoughts of suicide. They secreted food in their rooms. And they binged.
The Rockefeller researchers explained their observations in one of their papers: “It is entirely possible that weight reduction, instead of resulting in a normal state for obese patients, results in an abnormal state resembling that of starved nonobese individuals.”
...The body’s metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range. Gain weight and the metabolism can as much as double; lose weight and it can slow to half its original speed. |
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/h...&pagewanted=all
I think the issue is more complex than "fat people have no willpower." As discussed in the article, obesity appears to be a heritable condition: biological children of fat parents are very likely to be fat as well, even if they are adopted and raised by thinner parents. But I guess you could argue that what they have actually inherited is "low willpower"... |
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