I've always wondered what would happen if all internet diet and exercise advice had to be qualified with the author posting pictures of themselves flexing in a swimsuit.

There are NOT medical conditions that allow an adult to eat 1800-2300 calories a day and weigh 350 pounds. An 8-year-old CAN'T get to be 200 pounds on a diet (balanced or not) of 1200 calories a day.

You just can't create energy or mass out of nothing.

Yes, there are medical issues, in the sense that mental health and pyschology are part of one's medical health and condition. But no one has a physical condition that makes 4000 calories out of 2000.

Losing weight it HARD. Keeping it off can be harder. I know.

But eat less and you weigh less.

Eat more and you weigh more.

On school field trips, I'll look at the lunchs kids bring from home.

Calories in the lunch correlates amazingly well with BMI.

Healthful food (turkey sandwich, carrots, an apple) versus crap (Dorritos, Twinkee, Lunchables pizza, Snickers bar - yes!, exactly that selection) perfectly predicts behavior in just the ways you'd expect - attention, manners, focus, rule-following, academics. The food isn't the only cause. But it sure does track all the other causes (parenting, parenting, parenting).

I'm on the far right.

Skinny doesn't always equate healthy too. I know several people who look fabulous in a swimsuit that have crappy diets, cholesterol problems and who are smokers.

Diet = die with a t. Healthy lifestyle is more important and makes everything fall in place. Long term successful weight loss takes a load of small changes to make it a permanent way of living.

And yes... I consider myself an expert... self-proclaimed. No swimsuit photos yet (and I know your post wasn't in reference to me and that it was a general comment)... but here's a photo that illustrates my feeling of being able to shoot my mouth off... lol. (excuse the bad hair).

David... I worked at my son's school when I was pregnant with Kaia. My duties included being a lunch/outside play monitor. It was certainly enlightening to see what many kids get in their lunches. The amount of junk was astounding and some kids where getting 3 times the RDA for sodium and the same with fat. Juice boxes were the norm as was pop. As far as I am concerned juice is just as bad as pop - eating the fruit is a better choice.

I helped head up a nutritional snack program to help but there wasn't too much that we could do about what was brought from home. Not saying Tobias' lunch is perfect but he's 10 years old and just under 80 pounds. He eats more than some of his peers but he also runs 5 km three times a week and is extremely active. A typical lunch for him is hummus and veggies to dip, a piece of fruit, a sandwich with lean chicken or cheese (or a pita with salad and chicken), and a granola bar. Any bread products are whole grain. There is a ban on seafood, nuts, kiwi, melon, and eggs in the school because there are children who go into anaphalaxis. He takes a Camelbak with him for drinks and he buys 250 ml of milk each day at school. I let him have chocolate milk. There was one girl who simple had a bag of chips and a pop, another pair of siblings whose Dad delivered McDonald's meals or pizza slices to them everyday. I remember remarking about it to the Principal.

On the playground, many of the kids sit on the benches but there is a group of boys (my boy included) that play soccer or basketball for the entire 35 minutes outside (they have two outside breaks and the first one is about 25 mins). Not surprising, every one of those boys is fairly fit. There also seemed to be a correlation with what they had lunched on.

There was a school in Toronto that has banned all balls on the playground because a parent got hit in the head with the ball. In many schools kids can't play tag because the touch can be considered aggressive contact. It's little things like this contribute to inactivity.

And... it all begins at home.

Edited by Laurie_Ann on 12/12/2011 12:50:14 MST.

>And... it all begins at home.

+1

I should have also included that this is an inner city Catholic School so perhaps there is some relationship between the income levels, parental education and food choices. I do know that part of the reason we started a nutrition program was because there were also students who came without having breakfast and didn't have a lunch. There were kids that weren't properly dressed for -15°C weather in January (no socks, hat or mitts... and one or two even in spring jackets)... but that's a whole other topic of discussion.

I also wanted to address the comment someone made about being medically unable to lose weight. While it may be more difficult... it is not impossible. I'm a walking example of someone whom the doctor basically told "don't bother because your hormones will prevent it". I switched physicians and got off my keester and moved. Eat less. Eat balanced. Move more. Problem is that we are a society who expects things instantly and long term successful weight loss takes time. People don't put the kind of weight on that comes with the label "morbidly obese" or "severely obese" in a fortnight... so it isn't going to come off in a little time.

David Thomas wrote:

"There are NOT medical conditions that allow an adult to eat 1800-2300 calories a day and weigh 350 pounds. An 8-year-old CAN'T get to be 200 pounds on a diet (balanced or not) of 1200 calories a day."

I completely understand what you're trying to say but right off the top of my head I can attest to two medical conditions that promote weight gain regardless of eating a healthy diet and regular exercise.


Thyroid disorder
Type 1 Diabetes

While I am no medical professional I am someone who has had a great deal of experience with nutrition. Being a type 1 diabetic for over 20 years I've stayed up to date on nutritional science and practice what I've learned.


One other thing David; you may want to read up on the accuracy of using Body Mass Index as a calculator for determining if someone is overweight. Most medical professionals I know agree it's not a very accurate way of determining a healthy body weight.

Please don't get wrong I'm not disputing that people need to eat healthy, exercise, and consume the right amount of nutrients in their diet. I'm just saying that things can be a bit more complex in some cases and the simple 'burn more than you consume'.


Edit to add:

Craig asked for it so:

Edited by chadnsc on 12/12/2011 15:11:43 MST.

If you look at Obesity like smoking there is 1 product you could stop youth from purchasing without too much argument. Sugared Pop (and diet to). It is probably the worst thing that you can eat in terms of weight gain. It is pure calories and does not quench your appitite at all. In fact people after consuming pop are prone to eating more than if they had just drank water.

Restricting Pop purhcases to individuals over 12 and banning consumption of pop by kids under 12 without a parent or guardian present would be a good step. It is a little nanny statish for my liking but I think it would help. There is no reason kids need pop in schools.

Chad... correct me if I am wrong (as I may be here) but I thought that type 1 diabetics had issues with weight loss not gains. Most T1's I have known have been underweight as opposed to overweight... Type 2's the opposite.

Type 1 Diabetes

While thyroid disorders can make weight loss very difficult - it is not impossible and I've known some who've had great success as long as they stayed on their medications and worked at it. One of my dearest friends is in that situation and she made great strides.

Two things... even unsweetened fruit juice can be as bad as pop. We have a rule in our house... eat the fruit instead of having the juice. The average person drinks enough OJ in one sitting to equal the juice of 3 to 4 oranges and by drinking the juice one doesn't get the benefit of the fibre which helps make you feel full. Not to mention what juice and pop does to the teeth.

The diabetics you know that are super thin probably have too high of blood sugar.

For a diabetic with blood sugars in control (A1C under 7.5) things are a bit different.

Difficulty loosing weight in conjunction with type 1 diabetes is due to how the body absorbs and uses injected insulin. It's a bit complex to explain but the short version is that when using injected insulin your body wants to naturally store calories as fat.

Combine this with the other factors such as:

Not having insulin stored in the live prior to absorption and thus not having a normal link to the brain that helps tell when your full.

Having to rely on physical feeling of being full from the stomach (by this time you're over full).

Having to eat when you're not hungry.

Low blood sugar basically turns off what remaining 'full sensor' diabetics have as we've learned to eat when we're not hungry in order to survive.


. . . . and you can see it's a complex matter for a type 1 diabetic to loose weight.


As for having a thyroid disorder only making loosing weight difficult, yet that is true. Then again this is for the people who's thyroid can be under control with medication. Some people's thyroids are so messed up that they have to be removed and this get's you into a hole other situation where finding the right dose and types of medication can be a continually challenging process.

As I said before weight loss can be a complex task, especially when medical conditions arise.


Edit to add:

The link you provided list the symptoms of UNTREATED type 1 diabetes. This is where a persons body is producing basically no insulin and their bodies cannot us the foot we eat to run our organs. Once a type 1 diabetic begins a life long treatment of insulin injections then those symptoms are gone. There is no other effective treatment for type on diabetes other than insulin injection. Even pancreas transplants perform very, very poorly compared to insulin injections (it has to do with the anti rejection drugs you must take raising blood sugar and the new transplant can't handle it) .

On a side note not taking injections of insulin would result in comma and death due to massive organ failure in about 5-8 days.

Edited by chadnsc on 12/12/2011 18:07:31 MST.

Chad: Yes I'm aware of shortcomings of BMI, especially for the very fit and the musclebound. Arnold never could have gotten out of Austria, been Conan, Terminator, Governator, married a Kennedy, pawed so many women, had so many adulterous affairs, or procreated so many kids in those affairs with a BMI of 21. I used it as shorthand for having an appropriate lean body mass and % body fat and that's not what it reports. I should have been more careful in my wording.

I totally accept that there are medical conditions that make it harder to lose weight. Potentially VERY hard. But are there are adults who, if locked in a cell and fed 1000 calories a day, wouldn't lose weight? That's what I reject. It just takes a certain amount of energy for one's basal metabolism and to keep a human-sized mammal warm.

Dave Thomas wrote:

There are NOT medical conditions that allow an adult to eat 1800-2300 calories a day and weigh 350 pounds. An 8-year-old CAN'T get to be 200 pounds on a diet (balanced or not) of 1200 calories a day.

Well, it's much harder for an 8-year old, but the 1800-2300 calories a day range covers 500 calories a day, or (multiply by 7, get 1 lb of fat, multiply by weeks in a year) about 50 lbs a year. Assuming the person "uses" less than 1800 calories a day, in only a few years they'd balloon in size. (Here is where one should see start to see problems with a pure calorie-count model.)

Consider the fa/fa Zucker rat with a dysfunctional leptin receptor. However, and this is the fun part, restrict the fa/fa rat to the same caloric intake as a non-obese Zucker rat, and you'll see that it still gets fatter. You have to really starve them to balance out the weight, and even then the percentage of body fat is much higher.

Now, I have no idea if this is the case with the Cleveland kid; similar genetic problems in humans are pretty rare, but are linked to early onset obesity. Compounding the problem, leptin deficiency is also going to encourage overeating.

Sigh . . .

David it appears you're making some rather sweeping generalizations simply in order to antagonize other posters here. All you're accomplishing by doing this is damaging your credibility.


Oh and for the record it would be possible for a sedentary adult who weighs in the 150 pound range with a metabolism on the lower end of normal, housed in a prison cell in a temperature range of say 80 F to subsist on 1,000 calories a day and not loose weight.


Clearly you have an over simplistic understanding of nutrition, human metabolism, and the medical conditions that can affect them. There is nothing wrong with not understanding a subject but please don't try and act as an expert in such a subject.