When I was 38, we moved to the suburbs. On my 39th birthday, I was ten pounds heavier. Why? I didn’t have to walk to the subway or to the nursery school anymore. Instead, I drove the Camry. All those years in the city, I stayed roughly the same weight as I was when I was 18, because I had to walk places in New York City. If you asked me if I exercised, I would say no. I would say that I was getting to work.
In the New Republic, Judith Shulevitz talks about the alarming statistics relating to obesity. By 2010, more than 40 percent of American adults and 17 percent of youths were obese or morbidly obese. By 2030,more than half of America’s adults and a third of its young people may fit that description.
How can obese people lose weight? Shulevitz points to several studies that show the limits of diet and exercise. Apparently, people can lose some weight with various methods, but then put it back on immediately.
I think that the diet researchers are asking bad questions. I wasn’t “exercising” between 18 and 38; I was active and car-less.
Also, I’ve never been on a diet. Never. I always eat as much as I like at the dinner table. I have never had hunger pains. But I also cook every night, make several vegetables, use cheese as a garnish only, and make pasta only once a week. I suppose that some people would define our food as the Mediterranean Diet, but, for me, it’s just dinner.
So, I don’t buy the fatalism behind the weight-loss studies. Lifestyle matters! Okay, more anecdotes…
Every morning, as Jonah waits for his school bus, a perky woman walks past our house with her two perky dogs. (I do love when pets look like their owners.) She moves as a good clip as she passes my house. When I walk to the end of the driveway to retrieve the paper, we smile and exchange pleasantries about the weather. About a year ago, her husband suddenly joined her on her morning walk. He must have retired from his job; he looks about 65. Bald and overweight. At first, he joined her reluctantly. She was always a couple of steps ahead of him. A year later, he keeps up with her pace, and he looks like he lost about 50 pounds. The dude wasn’t sweating it on a treadmill at the gym. He was walking his dog every single morning at a smart pace. Lifestyle matters.
When we visited Cleveland last month, we stayed in an area with lots of strip malls and chain restaurants off one large highway. You could drive for miles down this four lane road and see nothing but national chain restaurants and shops. Chili’s, Olive Garden, Applebee’s, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Panera’s, Red Lobster, whatever. There were no local restaurants. One night, we ate at the Olive Garden (my first time). I looked over the menu. I still felt greasy from our lunch at McDonald’s, so I wasn’t in the mood for cheesy, creamy pasta. I asked for the grilled salmon, which happened to be on the “healthy” choices section. I didn’t pick the salmon, because it was “healthy.” I chose it, because I like grilled salmon. Well, that was about the worst grilled salmon that I’ve ever had. It was burnt and drier than toast. I didn’t know someone could cook salmon that badly. I had a similar experience at Chili’s the next night with some dry chicken and undercooked and unseasoned vegetables. The chefs simply can’t cook anything that isn’t drowning in sauce. No wonder everyone else in the restaurant went with the saucy stuff. And my meal, btw, was more expensive than a meal at an ethnic restaurant in Manhattan. Lifestyle matters.
Obesity is also high correlated to SES and geographic location. You’re much more likely to be obese if you are poor and live in Mississippi than if you are middle class and live in Colorado. Lifestyle matters.
So, what to do about obesity? We’re not talking about a muffin top or a little extra cushion. We’re not even talking fat. We’re talking about obesity here. I think the first thing is to stop talking about “diet” and “exercise.” Those are dirty words that come loaded with images of suffering and martyrdom. People need to be active every single day. That can mean walking to the subway or taking the dog for a lap around the park. I also think that people need to rethink their relationship with food.
The problem is that we’ve created communities that have four lane highways and strip malls with Chili’s. We make people sit at computers for 60 hours per week. We don’t provide access to better food. You can’t tell someone to make more money and move to another area of the country. We’ve made it really hard for people to be healthy. Obesity isn’t a personal problem; it’s a community problem. So, without making a shift in an entire community, we are making things impossible for the individual.
Apt. 11d 
One of my students is doing an honors thesis on the relationship between poverty, eating out, and obesity.
I miss living in the city. You’re right–it was so easy to be active every single day. Every time I go back, the kids want to take the subway or a taxi and I’m always “Let’s walk!”
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I don’t think the Olive Garden has cooks in the individual restaurants. It’s pre-cooked somewhere and heated there. I don’t know about Chili’s anymore. I used to eat there a lot when I was in Ohio and younger. The secret to enjoying your meal, if not good health, is to never order anything not deep fried.
Also, I walk and run many miles. I walked to work this morning (3 miles). For a while I was averaging 20 miles on foot a week (counting only longer trips, not incidental walking around the building). I had to cut back because after the half marathon, my tendons were not happy about my jogging. However, none of this resulted in me loosing any weight.
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My doctor used to tell me that he thought I would have lost weight if I’d kept my drinking down. He doesn’t tell me that anymore because I stopped telling him the truth about how much I drink.
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We had a huge, funny conversation on this very subject when I was with my family in WA in June. One of the stories told was of going to Outback Steakhouse and ordering a medium rare steak. The waitress says, “We’re all out of medium rare.”
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I would love for my neighborhood to be more walkable. We don’t have a sidewalk on our street and the speed limit is 35 mph–the kids can’t go anywhere without us driving them. But when the township did a poll to find out if people wanted more sidewalks, the majority voted no. They didn’t want to pay for them. So shortsighted. I would love to be able to tell my kids to walk to the library or park.
I know this doesn’t belong here, but I need some honest feedback from other parents about something. My 15 yo who is an excellent student and all around nice person and has never given us reason to worry about her at all–and who just received a 4 on her world history AP as a freshman–told us last night she was requesting a reward for her work this year: to get a nose ring. I wasn’t prepared for that request at all (she’s a bit countercultural, but not that much–nothing strange done to hair yet, which I would think would be a prior step to this!) , but honestly she never asks for anything more than a ride somewhere. She was hurt and surprised when I wasn’t immediately supportive (not in a spoiled way, more in a “I thought you ‘got’ me and my values” sort of way): she didn’t expect me to be so conventional. Am I overreacting? Will the mothers of her friends be furious with me if I allow it and worry their daughters might want one too?
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Just let her do it and who cares what the other mothers think. It’s much better that 1) she actually asked you if she could do it first instead of letting a friend stick a dirty needle into her and 2) it’s just a nose ring which are cute and at the level of pierced ears at this point.
My own mother forbid me from dyeing my hair strange colors and that initial refusal turned into a game of chicken where my appearance became increasingly stranger and she became more and more rigid about what aesthetic choices were acceptable.
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Check her school’s dress code first and make sure it’s okay, but otherwise, why not? A little gold stud in her nose won’t be very noticeable and will give her a feeling like she’s stepped outside her “good girl” role somewhat.
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Thanks all for the reality check! My husband wasn’t disturbed by the idea at all…but even though I didn’t have a rational argument against it really I had a uneasy feeling of “I wish she wouldn’t do that…”
that was affecting my ability to think clearly.
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I say yes to the nose ring for all the same reasons as everyone else. It’s a very safe way to be rebellious.
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Yes to the nose ring – just make sure it’s at a reputable piercing place. Pretty harmless way to “rebel”. Also subtle. AND if and when she decides she’s had enough, an easy heal.
BTW I have a nose piercing instead of an engagement ring. Back in the day when the man proposed I just wasn’t into the big rock on the hand.
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My high strung sister got a nose stud during her first semester of college, I think hoping it would be a shocking act of rebellion. My mother didn’t even notice until my sister finally pointed it out to her, and my sister was totally crushed. Anyways, she still has it 10 years later, and it hasn’t hindered her professionally or socially in any way.
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Visited Mississippi for the first time last week and it was terrifying to think that perhaps this is the future of the US. There was indeed no healthy food to be found. Our conference group went to a restaurant where almost everything was fried (people joking about frying the salad if they could). The one healthy item on the menu, a salad with shrimp, was not tasty.
I find myself really torn because I’m usually overworked and usually late to pick a child up somewhere. It’s hard to justify taking the extra time to walk somewhere, or even to go to the gym and when I have so little down time or me time, I’d rather spend it doing something I really enjoy, like reading a novel, then at the gym.
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LisaSG, kids gotta rebel somehow. I would welcome such a rebellion because ultimately, it’s not undoable. I would express all my negative feelings about a nose ring. I would tell her I hate it and that while I understand it’s her body, I don’t have to like what she chooses. I’d tell her she has to think about it some more and really make her sweat for it. Then I’d let her have it. I mean, if she’s rebelling, then drag it out as long as you can. The more she focuses on getting this nose ring, the less chance she has to be thinking about the next rebellion, which might be a tattoo (I personally really hate tattoos; it’s not that I think people with tattoos are bad, it’s just that I literally do not like them and think they’re ugly and permanently so) or something else.
YMMV.
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Re daily exercise: I live about 6-7 miles from work. It’s really an easy bike ride, plus I live in SE New England, which is incredibly flat. My issue is cars. I really hate the idea of riding my bike among clueless drivers, and there are no dedicated bike paths into the city. My husband used to bike to work in Manhattan and he got doored once. Scary. 😦
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People get a lot of short-term enjoyment out of eating calorie-rich food and sitting around and watching tv. For some (a lot?) people, it is one of the few enjoyments they have. Because our society is not structured to force activity on people and because food is cheap most people need to actively decide to exercise or deny themselves food to stay at a normal weight. It can be tough to make that decision when all you really want to do is escape into your food because your depressed (can’t find a job, getting divorced, have a chronic illness, etc.).
I have always been thin so I don’t have a good sense of what it’s like to struggle with weight issues. While I’ve never been on a diet, I do pay attention to what I eat and mostly eat healthy foods without completely denying myself the treats I like. On my father’s side of the family, everyone in his generation was/is overweight to obese mostly due to overindulgence in food (eating a lot of bad food and drinking a lot of alcohol) and getting no exercise ever. Among my siblings and cousins, we’ve all lived lives of greater moderation and none of us are overweight. One thing I’ve gathered from my own family, is that it’s much easier to maintain a normal weight than it is to gain weight, lose it and then try to maintain that weight. My father’s weight has fluctuated dramatically over the years and I’m always shocked at how little he is “allowed” to eat to maintain a weight that is still considered overweight.
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Apparently, people can lose some weight with various methods, but then put it back on immediately.
Most people, when they watch the movie “Trainspotting” come away with the idea that quitting heroin is very hard. That’s exactly wrong. The message of the movie is that quitting heroin is really pretty easy, but leaving your friends and changing your life-style is hard. But, if you do that, heroin isn’t a big deal. For lots of people, losing weight is like this. You can’t go on a “diet” and start some exercise class, lose weight, and then quit. But, if losing weight means really changing one’s life-style, most people won’t want to do it. That’s understandable, but it’s a completely different thing than saying that people “can’t” lose weight and keep it off. (The big thing, I think, is snacks. Snacking between meals is a great way to gain weight, is extremely common, easy to do, and hard to quit, but stopping it would make a big difference to many people. It has for me.)
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People who use heroin seem to be mostly thin. Maybe somebody should try to create an all opiate diet plan.
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People who use heroin seem to be mostly thin. Maybe somebody should try to create an all opiate diet plan.
that’s true, but it’s mostly the apathy and the vomiting. You can get those more easily and less expensively elsewhere, in many cases.
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Regarding diet and exercise: at the beginning of the summer, I went for my first complete physical in I don’t know how many years–probably over two decades. At 44, I figured it was time for me to start thinking about my health a little more. I was surprised to realize how overweight I was–this despite generally riding my bike anywhere from 30 to 60 miles a week most of the year. It really struck me–in a way that previous I’d understood intellectually, but hadn’t really connected with my own life–how much my unthinking snacking and carb-heavy diet was really counterproductive to my long-term health. What Laura says about lifestyle and community is exactly right–we’ve structured so much of our lives around certain cheap foods that even when we know better, we fall back on the sauce, the crackers, the cream cheese, the bacon, and the soda, all of which tend to come in big portions, because that’s what’s available, and that’s what is cheap. Sticking with the fruit and vegetables and nuts means consciously resisting the social environment around most of us, and that’s hard.
Regarding nose rings: as long as it was a small ring or stud, I don’t think I’d have any problems with any of my daughters getting one, though I’d want to make them understand first how that would some people in the family and at church a reason to judge them. Given that family and church are pretty much non-negotiables for us, that’s just something they’d have to learn to adapt to and make their own way through. (A big nose ring, or particularly one that goes through the two nostrils, I’d have a serious problem with, just because I think they’re ugly. I grew up milking cows; I don’t want one of my daughters’ faces to resemble one.)
Regarding biking in the city, Wendy: Wichita hardly has any bike paths or lanes either, and none of them are on my side of town. Still, I ride. There are studies which suggest that seeing bicyclists out on the street actually improves others’ driving, but that’s a tipping point phenomenon, and hard to use as a motivation if you know you’re the only one out there. Still, if you’re a competent bike commuter, most clueless drivers can be avoided. Just make sure you’re hugging the edge of the right-hand lane and slow down at every turn or driveway or intersection, even if you have the right of way.
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I totally agree. Earlier this summer, I was in the city a few times. I take the train and walk to my destination, which is usually about a mile. I told Mr. Geeky that if we lived downtown, I wouldn’t need to worry about my food/drink intake.
I’ve learned over the years that I hate scheduled “exercise”. This summer what I’ve tried to do is just move more. If I feel like I haven’t moved enough by 4 p.m., I go for a walk, often with the dog. I’ve lost 5 lbs. I want to lose 5 more. I’ve had to cut back on some thing, mostly drinking. Mr. Geeky and I often split a whole bottle of wine. That’s not good for our waistlines or our pocketbooks.
I agree with Wendy about biking. We have no bike lanes out here or I’d bike to work. I take back roads as is, but they’re narrow and everyone else (cars galore) take them as well. I’ve read about too many accidents to be comfortable with that.
I’d like to lose 5 more pounds before the summer is out and then from there, try to maintain my activity level but increase my calories. I’ve been super careful. Most days, it’s not so bad, but some days, I don’t feel satisfied. Pasta, I’ve learned, is especially unfulfilling – without meat sauce. I try to have a salad and/or veggies every meal, serving at least myself more of that than the meat portion of the meal. For lunch, I often eat leftovers or salads and fruit. Fruit is my goto snack and dessert now.
Our neighborhood is pretty walkable, but no one takes advantage of that. I walked to the Farmer’s Market yesterday and I was the only one I could see doing that, even though most people live within a mile of the market. Even my next-door neighbor confessed she drove over. I bought myself a rolling basket thing just so I could walk and bring my haul home.
We all sit too much. I’ve become really aware of that this summer.
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re: calories from booze. I do like my alcoholic beverages, especially when I’m cooking dinner. A glass of red wine is my reward at the end of the day. But I like red wine too much. I can easily plow through half a bottle of wine per night. So, I switched to Corona Lights, which I don’t like nearly as much. So, I forget about it. I drink half a bottle and end up pouring the rest down the drain the next morning when I find it sitting on the TV or by the window seat. Lost a few pounds by being a forgetful beer drinker rather than a joyful red wine drinker.
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I’ve lost and kept off around five pounds over the past two years by making some small lifestyle changes that initially had nothing to do with losing weight. First, I stopped baking at home. I used to really enjoy it as a hobby but I don’t have time for all of my hobbies anymore so something had to go and that was what went. Lost a few pounds from that. Second, I constructed a standing platform for my computer at work and now I stand at my desk about half of the time. A few more pounds from that. These little changes are easier to maintain long-term than big lifestyle changes.
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I like to think I’m keeping my drinking as the reserve in case I really needed to lose weight. I tell myself, “I’ve lost 10lb, w/o cutting down my drinking. Just think what I could lose if I drank less, but I don’t need to!” That makes me happy.
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Yep. I use drinking as my motivation to eat less, as in “If I don’t eat jelly beans after lunch, tonight I can have more beer.” Of course, delayed gratification doesn’t always work, so I’m thinking of not waiting until night for the beer.
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Yep, I totally do that. I can either a) eat a granola bar or b) have a glass of wine. I’ll walk an extra 20 minutes for the wine. 🙂
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I can imagine that for many people there is no understanding of what it feels like to be within the normal weight range and have a regular level of energy. The benefits of the goal is merely cosmetic to them and anything else is theory.
It’s not just “my clothes fit better’, it’s a HUGE difference in outlook and energy and mood and personality to be fit. Not Olympic fit, just fit.
I agree with the analogy to alcohol or drug addiction – it’s not the stopping of the impulse, it’s the overhauling of the lifestyle/changing friends. Lots of sabotage by others.
I have an active 7 year old daughter and we are a fairly active family. You wouldn’t believe at this age that there are kids who complain about walking more than a block or who get “treats” on a regular basis. I tell the girl “if you have it all the time, it isn’t a treat”.
We talk openly about being active, we zoom across the street to shoot hoops for half an hour after supper, play frisbee golf, walk 40 minutes to school and back, etc. She sees up go to the gym and spin as well. On holiday we swim, waterski, wakeboard.
On the food side, we talk openly about food as fuel for your body. And everything in moderation. Nothing’s “bad” as such, just some things are better choices than others.
The killer for me has been moving from Toronto back to Vancouver. I was downtown and walked everywhere and we had one car so lots of subway too. Here with a less adequate transit system, we have two cars and although in the city, walk less.
In cities like NYC or Toronto you enjoy what I call “vicarious” fitness. Here, although it’s an outdoorsy fit city, you need to plan and be involved in an organized sport or road bike or triathlons.
The slowing down of the metabolism kicks in me the butt too! Oh the days when you could just THINK about losing a few pounds and they dropped off.
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This is something that struck me about at least certain parts of the Fat Acceptance & Heath at Any Size Movement. That fat people should not face social ridicule or discrimination is something I absolutely support, as is the idea that people should focus on health rather than losing weight when adjusting their lifestyle and that fit people don’t all look like super models, but the idea that being obese has no effect on health just seems like denial. A lot of the people who would write about these issues and insist that a skinny person would doesn’t exercise is just as unhealthy as an obese person who doesn’t would then write about struggling to walk up a flight of stairs, or walk more than half a mile, and it was clear they had absolutely no idea how unhealthy they were. I have yet to meet a non overweight person who is not also seriously ill who can’t easily walk up multiple flights of stairs or go for a multiple mile walk, or sprint after a bus, even if they don’t formally exercise.
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“You wouldn’t believe at this age that there are kids who complain about walking more than a block or who get “treats” on a regular basis. I tell the girl “if you have it all the time, it isn’t a treat”.
Amen, @Raincoast Creative. Pretty much every activity my 3-and 5-year-old kids are in includes a scheduled snack time. Even for a quick 45-minute gym class. Drives me batty. It’s almost impossible to opt-out when every other kid is slurping down a Gogurt. It was definitely easier to eat 3 square meals a day and avoid snacking when I was a kid – now the community norms won’t allow that.
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I think with the littles it’s a way to fill up the 45 minute class time – activity, circle time, snack. But it does set a crazy precedent.
At least at soccer the half time snack is oranges! And we parents this past year agreed that the kids didn’t need something after the game til they got home. It also gets expensive for some families to be responsible for snacks for an entire team.
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I had my rebellious phase at 29, when I was stuck in a job I hated and half-hoping they’d fire me. So I got a nose ring to provoke my employers. Alas, no one said a thing at work.
But I got rid of it after my father sang cheerfully one too many times the lines from “The Owl and the Pussycat”:
And there in a wood,
A Piggy-Wig stood,
With a ring at the end of her nose, her nose!
With a ring at the end of her nose!
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I think I love your father. 🙂
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Me too.
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I think lifestyle changes are really tough for grownup. We are not a naturally thin family so we’ve struggled with not passing on our bad behavior to our kids. For us, a big part of this has been organized sports — which let the kids remain active even when we are not active enough as a family.
Our school has been trying to push lifestyle issues: sponsoring walk & bike to school days — there are a number of folks for whom that is a reasonable option, and where changing the community context would make a big difference, for example. Next year, we are switching to a new meal plan, in which food will be prepared fresh, rather than sourced from lunch vendors. The switch will require people to buy lunch by the month in advance, and eat the standard meal plan (which will include vegan & gluten free options, but will have no choices). My daughter is intrigued but we’re not sure how this will work in the long run — if enough of the kids will be willing to accept the standard meal to keep the meal plan viable (though the school might subsidize it).
As the story with the sidewalks illustrates, I think lifestyle changes like these (well, and on other grounds, we could also point to lifestyle changes like lifetime marriage, teenage celibacy, drinking, . . .) really are significantly influenced by our social circles. I find it interesting that there is only one “fat” kid in my daughter’s middle school. Being overweight really makes a kid stand out in the school, so it’s something that people address, if they can.
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Laura said:
“A year later, he keeps up with her pace, and he looks like he lost about 50 pounds. The dude wasn’t sweating it on a treadmill at the gym. He was walking his dog every single morning at a smart pace.”
For all you know, he got a gastric bypass. 50 pounds in a single year is HUGE.
My weight story has been in several phases and my anecdotes are very different from Laura’s. To begin with, my heavy weight gains all happened while living a city life, enjoying yummy ethnic restaurants and walking a lot. I gained about nearly 40 pounds over 2.5 years of graduate school. 1) I met my future husband and we had many romantic (and fattening) dinners and treats 2) I’m a stress eater and I was eating a lot just to keep awake and keep working 3) I wasn’t really paying attention to anything beyond just survival. After I got my MA, I realized with a start what had happened and I made my first effort ever to lose weight, with the idea that I should lose a bunch before we had kids. Well, I lost somewhere between 5 and 7 pounds (woohoo!) before getting pregnant and gaining 38 pounds. I lost the 38 pounds eventually without really trying. Unfortunately, I gained around 50 pounds for my second pregnancy. We were living in a very nice, very walkable neighborhood of DC at that point and we were enjoying very nice and inexpensive ethnic restaurants and I would be out walking with the kids for hours (we’d do 3 different playgrounds in a day). Well, between the demands of having what turned out to be a mildly autistic toddler/preschooler (which I didn’t know at the time) and an infant and once again living the same sort of high-stress, long-hours lifestyle I had as a graduate student, I did not lose that 50 pounds entirely. Some of it went away, some of it didn’t–I’m not sure how much, that whole period is a blur of carbohydrates (which, ironically I realize now, I was eating to stay awake).
Fast forward a bit. The kids are bigger (2 and nearly 5). We move to Texas in 2007 and buy our first car. Eventually, I make it to the college gym and start going regularly and doing several miles on the treadmill, often 4+ miles at a time. This is literally the first time in my life I’ve ever gone regularly to the gym. I listened to the complete novels of Jane Austen, 50 some hours of the LOTR audiobook and a number of other things. I eventually lose something like 18 pounds and I’m thrilled. That said, this was all exercise–there was no substantive change in diet and I had a tendency to backslide during the holiday months (which, coincidentally, is when the college gym shuts down for weeks at a time). Well, sad story–by January 2012, my weight had once again drifted upwards and horrifyingly, I had nearly reached my most pregnant weight that I had had while expecting my second child, but without being pregnant. And then I got pregnant with Baby T.
I’ve told the story before, but to summarize, I got gestational diabetes last year and lived on a very rigid diet for several months, doing what I needed to do to have good blood sugars (I was doing 4 checks a day and I was regularly VERY hungry). My total weight gain for the pregnancy was only 12 pounds, 9 of which was baby. By my postpartum check up, I was around 20 pounds lighter than before this last pregnancy. Right now, Baby T is 9 months old. I am not doing a diabetic diet now (although I follow the basic principles), but I am 25 pounds lighter than I was before the pregnancy, 37 pounds lighter than I was at my peak pregnancy weight. I haven’t touched a treadmill for nearly a year and a half.
Where am I going? I don’t know. After all these ups and downs, I’m 25 pounds heavier than I was before I got pregnant with my first child, 60 pounds heavier than I was when I met my husband.
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I was plateauing this spring (and feeling like I had already done a lot), but fortunately, I had several doctor’s appointments around the same time, and they all encouraged me to lose more weight, as with my history, I have a 5% every year for the next 10 years of going diabetic every year.
I have gotten really religious since about March about jumping out of bed every morning and almost immediately checking my weight and recording it in my book.
I know there must be electronic versions that are amazing, but I like having a book. There’s a chart at the back that I really like, where you enter a weight every week.
I can’t overemphasize how little I identify with Laura’s statement that, “I always eat as much as I like at the dinner table. I have never had hunger pains.” For me to make any progress at all, I need psychotic levels of focus.
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Yes, it’s the same way for me. I managed to lose forty pounds last year but actually regained a lot of it when I went abroad to teach by myself. For me, “watching my weight” is the equivalent of taking a graduate seminar — in addition to raising kids and having a full-time job — every day for the rest of my life. It requires obsessive focus, planning every bite I am going to eat, planning all my outings around the ability to find food that is acceptable — and, oh yeah, cutting out all carbs, flour, sugar, etc.
I’m almost fifty and am now assuming that my best strategy is to wait four years until I’m an empty nester and then become one of those boring, obsessive people who exercises all weekend, etc. I have always required back to back aerobics classes to lose weight, writing down every single bite of food, etc.
My problem is that my husband is quite comfortable with getting down to an extremely rigid diet in order to stay thin but the kids are rebelling since at this point we are pretty much on the paleo diet. Every meal consists of protein, fruit and vegetables — no starch of any kind, no bread in the house.
And I’m still the one who has to do all the cooking — I am just so bored with the food we are eating, and the fact that in order to get my girls to actually eat I would basically need to make two separate meals every night.
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In order to give the kids carbs they need, I often rely on Trader joe’s frozen rice packets or a box of couscous to supplement the dinner. Not yummy enough to tempt us. Not time consuming. They like it.
Wow. And major weight loss for Louisa and Amy P. Nice work!
I have to think about what I eat, too. I eat as much as I like for dinner, but that’s only because everything on the table is a meat or a vege or a boring carb. I have rules for eating out. I don’t eat anything covered with cheese. I don’t eat Chinese food. I don’t eat burritos. I try to avoid fast food. I don’t really consider it a diet, because there’s still plenty of yummy things to eat and I don’t feel hungry.
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I want to emphasize that nobody is effortlessly thin without chainsmoking Marlboro Lights. I actually put an embarrassing amount of time into making dinner. With all the effort that I put into food prep, some might call what I do “dieting.” I think of it more as returning the food habits of my grandmother in Italy. Also, I’m drinking a lot during the food prep time, so I tend to not associate it with dieting.
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My husband is effortlessly thin without smoking. He’s 6’5″ and 165 pounds. A big part of that is genetics-he and his siblings have very low body fat-but a big part of it is that he sees food as fuel rather than a source of enjoyment. He is the kind of person that will go all day without eating because he forgot. I think people generally believe he can eat anything he wants because they’ll see him eat a big meal but don’t realize that is probably all he will eat that day.
I am similarly thin but I have to work at it more than he does. I do get enjoyment out of food so I’m constantly calculating what is ok to have so that I don’t overindulge.
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“He is the kind of person that will go all day without eating because he forgot.”
I have exactly the same situation with my husband–he has to be reminded to eat. Me, I never forget a meal. It’s taken me years to realize that I can’t be matching him forkful for forkful at meals AND eating snacks every 2-3 hours, which is how often I need to eat. I need to eat very frequently, but also very moderately.
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We’ve had some version of this conversation multiple times late in the day:
Husband: I feel really dizzy, I wonder if I’m getting sick.
Me: Uh, have you eaten anything today?
Husband: No, I haven’t! Maybe I’ll eat something!
Me: Yeah, maybe that will help…
I just can’t even understand how this happens because it is so different from how I deal with food. I basically have my whole food day mapped out as soon as I wake up and I’m thinking about it all day long.
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scantee,
Are we married to the same person?
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He would be living quite the double life if we were.
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I can be that person. When I was a kid I just had very little interest in eating. I liked food alright, but just liked other things more. I was very underweight and getting food in me was a big struggle for my mother. When I was a bit older and less monitored, I could go an entire day not eating until dinner, since I would just forget about food. Now that I’m older I do love food and I love the taste, but sometimes I find eating three times a day a big chore. If I could eat several days worth of food in one delicious meal and then not be hungry for 2-3 days, I would. I am also very thin, though I think it’s as much genetic as it is anything else, since my family is also all quite thin. I eat carbs with every meal and pasta about 5 times a week, however I try to avoid pre-packaged or processed foods, and I try to eat lots of vegetables. I get most of my protein from eggs and cheese, and also drink milk every day. If I eat absolutely terribly–bar food & pitchers of beer for dinner every night, cupcakes for lunch every day, I will gain weight over a period of time and also feel terrible. If I eat the minimal amount I need to not be hungry, I lose weight and get unhealthily thin. If I try to eat reasonably healthily but without restricting what I eat, I maintain my weight. I don’t feel that smug though, since I’m only 30 and don’t have kids yet, and I know pregnancy and middle age both can totally change one’s body shape and metabolism.
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I thought we had all read this article and weren’t going to generalize too much about weight loss because it’s actually pretty complex?
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Where’s the fun in that?
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Back when that article came out, there was some interesting discussion online about the assumptions that underlie that article. There’s a retired couple in there that has managed to slim down and keep the weight off but it’s because they are quite obsessive about measuring their food, calculating their calories and then calculating exactly how much exercise it would take to balance everything out. It is obvious that it takes a lot of time, effort and organization to keep this up. The thing that was interesting was that some commenter in another source said that basically they sounded a lot like anorectics except that they weren’t starving — food obsessed, calorie counting, calculating and recalculating, keeping lists, etc. Others pointed out that they were retired and had no other time requirements for things like children’s activities, etc.
I’ve gotten to know a fair number of other dieters recently and it’s interesting how many people keep thin by setting their own food rules, including eliminating entire classes of food. (Gretchen Rubin talks about her own food restricting in her work, yet she continues to give us all advice on how to be happy happy, happy!) A lot of people seem to have rather monastic views on what should and should not be eaten, weird rules (like you should only have a bagel once a week), semi-obsessive rituals (you can only got to Starbucks on the days you go to the gym, etc.) claiming to be allergic to entire classes of food.
As I drove around Mississippi recently, I found myself thinking that the food rules are just one more way in which we truly are two separate and unequal nations. Lately, I’ve been trying to figure out which foods help me feel good (berries) and which make me feel bad (ice cream). But then again we have the income and the transportation to the supermarket and the luxury of eliminating entire food groups. We have the luxury of experimenting with food (found a recipe for a salad with grilled peaches which turned out to be disgusting!) and then throwing it away when we don’t like the results. We can go to the supermarket three times a week to get fresh fish.
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“I’ve gotten to know a fair number of other dieters recently and it’s interesting how many people keep thin by setting their own food rules, including eliminating entire classes of food.”
I was recently reading and re-reading the Weight Watchers book of success stories “Start Living, Start Losing,” I was also noticing that people’s recipes for success were very different. I suspect that having a set of rules that you can follow and then sticking to them is much more important than the content of the rules themselves.
My current list is something like this:
1. Eat every 2-3 hours, no more often, no less often. No huge meals.
2. Carb-protein-fat at every meal or snack.
3. No more than two sweets a day in moderate quantities, ideally only one at the end of the day (it’s the same principal somebody upthread was using with skipping jellybeans to be able to “afford” beer).
4. Salad for lunch (and keep the fixings always on hand–baby spinach, brie, nuts, salad dressing, cherry tomatoes, avocadoes, sunflower seeds, alfalfa sprouts, etc.). I actually like my salads.
5. Dinner that looks like the MyPlate graphic–1/4 starch, 1/4 meat, 1/4 veggie, 1/4 fruit.
6. Keep lots of easy to fix stuff–berries, fruit, plain Greek yogurt, cheese sticks, brie, peanut butter, crackers, nuts, etc..
7. Single-serving items are a helpful visual reminder as to what is actually a serving–one cheese stick, one prepackaged ice cream cone, etc.
I could be stricter about starches, but the time hasn’t come yet.
My 11 year old recently had a birthday, and I’m happy to report that I survived a week of having two skating rink pizzas and the remains of a 1/2 sheet of Black Forest birthday cake in my fridge without disaster.
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“I’ve gotten to know a fair number of other dieters recently and it’s interesting how many people keep thin by setting their own food rules, including eliminating entire classes of food. (Gretchen Rubin talks about her own food restricting in her work, yet she continues to give us all advice on how to be happy happy, happy!)”
I think Gretchen Rubin is a genius. I disagree with your unstated assumption here that people who, say, are addicted to sugar and carbs and have let their weight balloon and their blood pressure get high are somehow happier than people who have a healthier, more mindful relationship to food. It’s fine to hate Ms. Rubin, but I’m pretty sure she’s correct that not being obese and feeling happier probably do go hand in hand – so why then wouldn’t she mention strategies to avoid getting fat?
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I’ve been reading a few general diet books (mainly for moral support) and I came upon this in “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Weight Loss”:
“We question whether a person can really lose weight through exercise alone. We actually have never seen this happen. We suppose that if a person went from being totally sedentary to running in marathons that he or she would lose weight. But we have never seen this happen.”
Another piece of advice I picked up from a Weight Watchers book of testimonials is that whatever changes you make in order to lose weight, be prepared to do it forever.
As Louisa mentions, there’s a lot of intellectual effort involved. One thing I learned from my gestational diabetes is that I do need to eat very frequently (ever 2-3 hours), but the quantities need to be small, and they need to be chosen very strategically (carbohydrate, protein/fat–never just carbohydrate, never just protein/fat).
Speaking of grandmothers, I have some comfort in the fact that there isn’t anybody HUGE in my family, and I have a number of female relatives who manage to keep there weight under control. On the other hand, while my grandma has always been petite (grandpa informed her that in his opinion, getting fat was the only justification for divorce), 1) grandma is always moving and 2) she eats very, very, very little.
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“We question whether a person can really lose weight through exercise alone.”
Spot on, AmyP. There’s a similar saying: “You can eat through any amount of exercise.”
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Studies have shown that willpower is a limited resource, and that people can become ego depleted when they have to engage in frequent acts of self-control. When I am working hard on a project, as I am now (writing is hard, hard, hard!), I can’t both exercise and do house stuff. Lately I’ve been choosing the exercise so I have things at the bottom of my laundry basket that haven’t been washed in months. When I go back to work in the fall either the book project or the exercise will have to give. I will probably work much less on the project because exercise is a mood-booster and I need all I can get what with the effects of perimenopause, but it’s a tough choice.
I think the best way out of the conundrum regarding exercise is to make it so habitual and so much a part of your routine that it doesn’t involve a choice, decision, or anything involving an act of willpower. Having to walk around town because that’s the only or easiest way to get around is perfect–that’s why I would love sidewalks (or retiring in the heart of a city, like my parents did–and they are so fit and healthy). My family is always at its fittest after a vacation, because I make them walk everywhere and refuse to get cabs, but it doesn’t require willpower, because it is just a part of the fun thing we are doing. If I could afford to take my family to Europe every summer for a month, it would get them fitter than any sports camp–we’d walk, walk, walk out to dinner, to the sights, and it would be a pleasure.
One reason the wealthy are fitter, I think, is that they can afford endless doings of the pleasurable activities that keep one fit while not requiring willpower (as well as the most delicious of healthy food; my kids would eat sushi every night if we could afford it). Sailboats, skiing, riding, staying in hotels in the middle of great cities, etc. Also, they can avoid having to engage in other ego depletion activities, such as housework, doing taxes, waiting in lines, working at second jobs, working at any job, taking care of newborn babies without help, etc. Keeping fit is one of the primary jobs for some of the wealthy women in my suburb–second only to child-rearing–it’s almost entirely what they do when the kids are out of the house. They don’t make money and they don’t keep house–taking care of their bodies is it. Of course they do a great job of it.
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“One reason the wealthy are fitter, I think, is that they can afford endless doings of the pleasurable activities that keep one fit while not requiring willpower (as well as the most delicious of healthy food; my kids would eat sushi every night if we could afford it)”
Yes, and I see this in the fitness level at the kids’ school, where both the kids and parents get to choose the kind of activities that they find most pleasurable that are also exercise, along with the support. You can cycle through soccer, baseball, basketball, swimming, tennis, hockey, sailing, . . . . until you find the one your child actually enjoys, as an example. Some kids might find the first activity fun (because any activity is fun or because that one worked for them), but others don’t. In a community with fewer resources, that’s the end of the search. In our community people keep searching, and most of the time, they find something the kid will like (or at least like enough to do). Oh, and you can add bouldering, climbing walls, parkour, . . . as some of the more extreme examples I’ve seen families search for and find when their kid didn’t like running or soccer or biking or baseball, . . . .
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I’m glad to see the discussion expanded beyond a simplistic description of lifestyle changes. Lisa SG’s comment that willpower is a limited resource, combined with the concept that some people need willpower to resist food temptations while others (scantee’s husband) don’t is a nice way of summarizing the difficulty of making the lifestyle changes that result in better weight control. Some people don’t need willpower to exercise or to eat well (or the right amount); others do.
Many of the healthy people I know are ones who have high activity levels because their leisure activities are active (runners, bikers, tennis players). They make time for those activities (and can make time for them, because they are affluent enough that they can play tennis instead of clean their house when the kids are in school) because they enjoy them.
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I know a kid who wears a nike fuel band because she’s like Scantee’s husband — and forgets to eat. Her parents need to have her monitor her activity level and set alarms to get her to eat regularly.
I also forget to eat — unfortunately this doesn’t translate into skinniness because I eat enough (too much?) when I do eat and I am not a naturally active person.
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My problem with a lot of the diet research, including the article that Wendy linked to above, is that it fails to consider life-style. If being obese was simply a matter of mysterious genes and body chemistry, then obesity would be evenly distributed across the country. It’s not. Of course, there are obese people in Colorado and thin people in Mississippi, but statistically speaking, it’s much, much easier to be thin in Colorado than thin in Mississippi. So, geographic location and economics matter quite a bit.
Why? It’s not because people in Colorado have more willpower. It’s because it’s easier to be active and to have access to leaner foods there. Everybody is out on their bikes or white water rafting on the weekends. Your neighbors and friends are also biking and making salads, so there’s a peer-group effect.
Genetics play a role, no doubt. My sister weighs a bit more than I do, because she’s built differently and needs to eat more often. But there isn’t a huge difference between us.
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Colorado is around 80% white while Mississippi is around 59% white and 37% black. That enters into it.
One of the diet books I was reading recently said that black women have a lower resting metabolism than white women.
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You people made me eat sushi for lunch instead of poutine despite the fact that I’m so rarely near the only local place that has poutine.
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Look at you and your sensible lifestyle choices!
I had a donut for breakfast and plan to drink and eat too much for dinner so I guess I’ll just skip lunch altogether.
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I also wonder if some people just get more pleasure from food than others? I like good food, but I don’t find food to be a comfort item. When under stress, I almost always lose weight. I, too, forget to eat.
It’s been a stressful spring/summer, and two people this week alone have told me “you are too thin.” (Do people say “you are too fat” to others? I always wonder that.) And I’m in a healthy BMI range – my doctors think I’m just fine. So I get very annoyed by it.
I’m really active, which I’m sure plays a part. (we also live in a very active small city and have very active friends.) I don’t diet. ever. I prefer veggies to meat but eat lots of cheese and lots of carbs and drink red wine daily. But I have never smoked Marlboro lights, I promise!
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“When under stress, I almost always lose weight. I, too, forget to eat.”
I was thinking of mentioning that–that the world seems to be divided between people who eat under stress and people who lose weight under stress.
“Do people say “you are too fat” to others? I always wonder that.”
Doctors and parents do, although not in exactly those words.
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Whether I’m stress eating or stress not eating really depends on the type of stress I’m under. If it is the type of stress that has me very busy, then I’ll usually not eat. If it’s a mental or emotional stress alone, I’ll usually overeat.
According to my life insurance company, I am underweight. I’ve never knew I was and don’t think I look it but I was almost denied life insurance because of it. I had to go to great lengths to prove to them that I don’t have an eating disorder which felt really absurd.
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I agree that it’s about lifestyle rather than willpower or some magical combination of foods. Imagine a beach vacation. One person is flaked out on the chaise longue the entire time while the other is going for a walk on the beach before breakfast, doing some kayaking, swimming, throwing a football around in the surf, etc. Playing tag. Also interspersed with time on the chaise longue reading.
And before anyone jumps on the priviliege of a beach vacation, it’s just an example. That same contrasting level of activity happens at home or on the weekends.
We’re not talking extreme sports, just being active and moving. What I mentioned above – what I call “vicarious fitness” – it doesn’t have to be a gym membership with onerous, hours long workouts.
I imagine also that once you’ve had that sedentary, high calorie junk food diet for a while, you forget what is a normal amount of food or a normal amount of activity. Dessert is a given rather than a once-in-a-while treat. TV watching is automatically paired with snacking.
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I too am wary of the obesity research that concentrates on differences in metabolism because the evidence isn’t solid. All the studies suggest that it’s the input/output function that matters, and not the efficiency of the engine (diet books to the contrary, which often cite to sketchy studies, or studies that had small effects, or to ideas about mechanisms — resting metabolism doesn’t measure energy efficiency, for example).
Some bodies might also convert smaller energy inputs to greater energy outputs, which in turn, means that some people need less food than others (a good thing if food were scarce). In addition, the biological mechanisms that underlie detection of satiety and other behavioral controls on food intake might vary among different people. So, those differences are possible (even if good evidence doesn’t exist for them -yet — there are some new studies that might hold up in the long run)
I do think that behavioral differences play the major role. The question of how much lifestyles of others around you influence your behavior is another variable that might play a role, too, but I don’t think we really know how big.
Geographic differences don’t necessarily mean that lifestyle is the main driver — Colorado and Mississippi also contain different populations of people (though the cite to race differences is not very meaningful, especially given the admixture of race in America). And people might actually move based on lifestyle desires (i.e. people who live in MI who want to be more active move to CO), reversing the causation prediction in the correlation.
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“And people might actually move based on lifestyle desires (i.e. people who live in MI who want to be more active move to CO), reversing the causation prediction in the correlation.”
Right. Or high-strung, fidgety people who want to walk around, stay up late, dance and drink move to Manhattan.
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“And people might actually move based on lifestyle desires (i.e. people who live in MI who want to be more active move to CO), reversing the causation prediction in the correlation.”
A friend of mine lives in Portland, OR precisely because the weather enables her and her husband to maximize their ability to be outdoors and active. She moved from San Francisco.
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By the way, activity doesn’t have to be exercise, per se. I was thinking of the example of my grandma, a 1950s matron who has always been small. She is ALWAYS moving, although she’s slowed down the past few years (she’s 88). Over the years, probably 90% of her activity is either 1) housework (she can’t bear to see work undone) or 2) farm work. Although I know she played basketball in high school in the 1940s and rollerskated and occasionally skied later on, that would have been just a tiny percentage of the activity she’s clocked over the past 60 years. (She visited us soon after we moved to Texas and we were out on the patio. Pecan leaves and debris were falling from the pecan tree and my grandma picked up a broom and was attempting to keep the patio clear as the pecan leaves continued to fall. It took me a while to persuade her that there were always going to be more leaves coming down.)
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There was a study out there once in which people wore motion detectors while monitoring their food intake. The simple result was that the people who were “naturally thin” had much higher activity levels. They were more likely to be moving during every activity. Sometimes fidgeting, but also getting up and down (for example, if they forgot their coffee, they’d get up to go get it, not wait until their next trip up); they’d pace, just generally move around. Those are deep-seated behavioral differences.
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“Those are deep-seated behavioral differences.”
And not just behavioral, I think. I’m guessing that there are deep inequalities in energy levels between individuals. I read some people’s description of their activities (say, for instance, Laura’s home improvement efforts) and it just makes me tired even to hear about it. I certainly notice that a lot of people seem to have way, way more energy than I do. (I used to compensate for the difference with calories and caffeine, which was not a sustainable strategy.)
The higher activity level thing has a dark side, though. Having a higher activity level may be a result of ADHD or bipolar or some other mental glitch, and treating those psychological problem may lower their activity level and hence increase their weight. How often do we hear of people who suddenly gain weight as a result of being medicated for psychological disorders? Pretty darn often.
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I am very fidgety and restless, which I think keeps the weight down. No ADHD or bipolar, but I am very inflexible and my self diagnosis is it might be caused by all the fidgeting, since it keeps my muscles taught all the time. SSRIs can also cause weight gain, so that’s another reason people can gain weight after getting diagnosed with mental illnesses.
Another armchair theory of mine is that weight gain is in part caused by whatever terrible chemicals that leach into our food as a result of all the packaging. We now know about BPA, and I’m sure there are lots of other endocrine disrupting chemicals that are messing with our hormones in food packaging and common household items. My parents were a bit hippy-ish and avoided plastic as much as possible, and I wonder if that’s one of the reasons my sister and I are roughly the same size and body shape as our female ancestors. I’ve read that in addition to changing size, we’re also changing shape. On women, hourglass figures are disappearing, waists are thickening, breasts are getting larger, hips are getting proportionally narrower, and feet are getting larger.
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“I am very fidgety and restless, which I think keeps the weight down.”
I’ve heard and seen that over and over again.
(Now that I think of it, ADHD meds tend to cause weight loss, but I’ve known people who are bipolar, schizophrenic or violently autistic to put on a lot of weight on medication.)
“SSRIs can also cause weight gain, so that’s another reason people can gain weight after getting diagnosed with mental illnesses.”
What is the mechanism for that weight gain on SSRIs?
I have to say, I take a certain morose pleasure when people who’ve always been skinny suddenly plump up–it’s almost like it’s not entirely been due to their virtue, wisdom and amazing self-control. It must be a huge bummer for them, though.
“We now know about BPA, and I’m sure there are lots of other endocrine disrupting chemicals that are messing with our hormones in food packaging and common household items.”
Hmmm.
“I’ve read that in addition to changing size, we’re also changing shape. On women, hourglass figures are disappearing, waists are thickening, breasts are getting larger, hips are getting proportionally narrower, and feet are getting larger.”
That sounds really freakish.
By the way, I’ve been thinking about how there’s self-reinforcing feedback for weight and fitness. I have two older children.
1. C is mildly autistic, tends to obsess about sweets, has poor core strength (she used to literally fall out of chairs when younger–she did physical therapy), poor stamina, has many sedentary hobbies, and usually needs to be tricked into any physical activity. One disastrous year recently when I was otherwise engaged, her weight shot up 23 pounds from her 9 year to her 10 year pediatric appointment. She’s 60th percentile for height, 88th percentile for weight. Her weight used to be lower when she was younger, but it’s likewise true that she had very little muscle tone then and was actually less physically strong than she is today.
2. D is mildly compulsive (although not diagnosed with anything), doesn’t obsess about sweets, is consciously moderate about food, has pretty much no body fat, is a natural athlete, has excellent stamina, and is freakishly good at climbing. I forget what his stats were, but it was something like 38th percentile for weight, 17th percentile for height. I wonder if he doesn’t need to eat more, actually.
Purely physically, it’s like they’re living in totally different households or are from totally different families and you can see just watching them how (physically speaking) the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
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“Why We Get Fat” by Gary Taubes is an excellent, if controversial, read on this subject. (Punch line: it’s the American preference for high sugar, high starchy carb diets that make us fat.)
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