Does Food Make you Fat?

[sweetnpetite]

Yes. As well as too much of anything can be bad. In my case it was most definitely too much of it.

I just mentioned it because it was that and that more than anything that made me the blob I once was. This at a time when I thought I was living a healthy life. I didn't like any particulaty fat food, and I didn't eat too much of anything. And I did sports and other energetic activities as much as any other kid. But I had a sugar addiction (still have), and it made me overweight.

well, I didn't mean to offend you, and I'm definatly sorry if I did.

I think a large part of the problem is that so much of what we put into our bodies isn't food at all. and we don't even realize it, because we've been taught that it is. And we have so little real food to compare it too.

Love yourself. Don't refer to yourself -even your old sef- as a blob.

 

[Lisa Denton]

I like hearing when peoples order "2 tripleburgers with cheese, a super-duper large fries, and a small diet coke."

I guess they are tryin.

 

[Liar]

well, I didn't mean to offend you, and I'm definatly sorry if I did.

I think a large part of the problem is that so much of what we put into our bodies isn't food at all. and we don't even realize it, because we've been taught that it is. And we have so little real food to compare it too.

Not offended at all. Just clarifying the sugar issue.
Sugar, as well as salt, carbs, proteins and even trans fatty acids are all an important part of the food we eat. But only in the right proportions. What we in this era of Big Meac and fires, micrwawed quick meals and overload of candy and soft drinks suffer from is a shift from Good Food to Bad Food, without realising how much harder our bodies have to work to even that out.

Love yourself. Don't refer to yourself -even your old sef- as a blob.

Hey, I was the coolest blob in school!

#L

 

[Liar]

I like hearing when peoples order "2 tripleburgers with cheese, a super-duper large fries, and a small diet coke."

I guess they are tryin.

That's what they are telling themselves.

Interresting thing is, I was doing the exact opposite. And that was just as bad.

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

With statements like this:



I'd say yes!

Funny, cuz I always pictured Luc as a tall and lanky, geeky-cute kind of guy. maybe it's all that science talk.

Yeah, I'm the other type of geek structure. The one which would have been recruited by the Football team if the Band Couch hadn't been overly protective of people who could play french horn.

I don't quite have the Ian Anderson hairstyle to go with it, however.

 

[shereads]

My mom has always been stick-thin, despite her love of sweets. Her sister fought obesity all her adult life, and used to blame it on metabolism. Sadly, even when she thought she was following a diet, she managed to sneak in foods that she didn't even seem to be aware she was eating. A salad at one of those salad bars where you make your own would be Mount Kilamanjaro by the time she poured on that final dollop of Thousand Island Dressing. The next day she'd say, "All I ate was salad and I gained half a pound." Poor thing was food-obsessed, had been a wedding caterer and later a dietician, and could spend an hour telling you what she planned to serve at dinner next week and asking if it would be enough. She made herself miserable obsessing about her weight, and depriving herself of the things she loved, only to binge and gain back every ounce plus a few more. I often wished she'd just accept her size, get some exercise to keep herself healthy, and cut herself some slack. The starve-and-binge way of dieting that's so common in America is dangerous to our health, maybe as much as obesity itself.

 

[sweetnpetite]

Thank you.

I think that was roughly what I was trying to say.

Had she done as you suggested, she probably would have been thinner, healthier and happier.

My mom has always been stick-thin, despite her love of sweets. Her sister fought obesity all her adult life, and used to blame it on metabolism. ...Poor thing was food-obsessed, ...She made herself miserable... I often wished she'd just accept her size, get some exercise to keep herself healthy, and cut herself some slack. The starve-and-binge way of dieting that's so common in America is dangerous to our health, maybe as much as obesity itself.

 

[EmeraldKitten]

I read some posts and skimmed through others. Mainly because my train of thought would have gotten derailed had I read any more, lol.

I'm not going to sit at McD's and eat two of the Double Quarter Pounders, and say, "Oh my god, these are going to make me fat!" I made me fat. If I choose to do that, I am the fat-maker! lol.

Kind of off subject, but with the people that want to sue McD's for making them fat...
Puh-lease. Speaking as a chubby person myself, that's bullshit.
McD's corperation did not make these people order the super-sized. Yes, it was offered- but as a sales pitch to bring in 40 more cents for the order.
(I worked there for 4 years.. blech, lol.)

I guess the round-about point I am trying to make is, that no, food doesn't make you fat.
Eating in excess like a little piggy makes you fat.
(Been there, done that!)
It's portion control and making health concious decisions.
As far as metabolism goes... I just must not have any.
If an individual knows that they're more prone to gain weight, and that its harder to drop it off.. then they oughta put the fork down!
*Making mental notes to practice what I preach, LOL.*

~K

 

[shereads]

I like hearing when peoples order "2 tripleburgers with cheese, a super-duper large fries, and a small diet coke."

I guess they are tryin.

I love Diet Coke. When the server gives me regular Coke by mistake and I take that first, trusting sip, the syrupy sweetness makes me queasy. I remember when I liked regular Coca-Cola, but it's one of those incomprehensible memories like making chocolate milk with 1/2 Hershey's syrup and 1/2 milk when I was nine.

Back in pioneer days, women discovered and eventually conquered Tab. Tab looked like Coca-Cola, fizzed like Coca-Cola, but had an aftertaste reminiscent of the smell of gasoline, caused by some primitive sugar substitute. But the taste wasn't the point. The emerging feminists of my college generation dedicated ourselves to providing future generations of young women with more efficient eating disorders and a smaller ideal jeans size. Acquiring a taste for Tab was as essential to the budding college feminist as reading "The Female Eunuch" and understanding the zipperless fuck.

It took time and discipline to wean ourselves from Coca-Cola, but we did it. In my college photo album, we're carrying liter-bottles of Tab around the way people carry bottled water these days. By the time Diet Coke came along, anyone who had become used to Tab took one taste of the improved stuff and was in beverage nirvana.

If Coca Cola was music on vinyl, Tab was eight-track tape decks. Diet Coke was and is our MP3. We could go back to vinyl, but why?

I've been known to pull away from the drive-thru without ordering lunch because they said they were out of Diet Coke. If it happens twice at the same place, I never go back.

 

[Liar]

I guess the round-about point I am trying to make is, that no, food doesn't make you fat.
Eating in excess like a little piggy makes you fat.

I get your point, and you're absolutely right. Ppl choose to over-eat and eat wrong. That's not the food's fault.

But isn't that like saying water doesn't make you wet -- throwing yourself into water does?

Same thing, different way to put it

#L

 

[English Lady]

ActuallyI think we're all saying the same thing really.

It's all about knowing what is a healthy diet and trying to stick to that in so far as you can and not obsessing about every mouthful.

get some excercise, eat healthily(another side line is do people know how to do that now? We lve in the age of microwave meals...even the healthy ones are often pumped full of salt and sugar) and be happy with YOU.

 

[Liar]

Microwave food taste like crap anyway.

Isn't it sad that people find they don't have the time or energy to do something as basic as cook anymore? Instead we are so stressed that we eat stuff that we don't know what it is, and we eat not when we should, but when we have time. The stress itself makes our physical health worse too, and all of this leads to more stress. Blah.

#L, slow food freak

 

[English Lady]

Microwave food taste like crap anyway.

Isn't it sad that people find they don't have the time or energy to do something as basic as cook anymore? Instead we are so stressed that we eat stuff that we don't know what it is, and we eat not when we should, but when we have time. The stress itself makes our physical health worse too, and all of this leads to more stress. Blah.

#L, slow food freak

I am so with you there. Thing is some things dont take so long to prepare and people seem to not see that. Stews may take time to cook, but it takes a matter of minutes to prepare. stirfry's., pasta etc etc all quick and simple things to cook. We have so many ingredients now too and so cheap.

I think alot of people think it's expensive to eat fresh stuff. I have tons of tinned and frozen things (all good if youcheck that nothing extra is added in the preserving process) and I spend alot less now I'm eating healthier than I did when i bought microwaved meals and pre-prepared stuff.

 

[EmeraldKitten]

I get your point, and you're absolutely right. Ppl choose to over-eat and eat wrong. That's not the food's fault.

But isn't that like saying water doesn't make you wet -- throwing yourself into water does?

Same thing, different way to put it

#L

Exactly. lol.
There's a fine line of how to say things and make them not contradict one another.

At any rate, I'm guessing everyone gets the point.
It was hard to write that without totally going in circles, lol.


At work, we ususally grab what we can whenever we get the chance. Fast food, like everyday.
Of course, taking time in the morning or the night before to pack something for lunch takes too much effort.

Then, when I get home at 6 or 8 in the evening, I'm so damn hungry I dont want to wait for something to cook, lol.
So its junk-y type food or something microwave friendly.
That's my 'fat lazy pig' disorder kicking in again.

Anyhow, this has been an interesting thread. I like.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

A few things:

First of all, there is no scientific definition of a “food”. We generally intend it to mean anything that human beings ingest that has nutritional value, and under that definition, sugar is a food. It’s a carbohydrate, and provides energy to the body. It’s also a chemically pure compound, and when people see the word “chemical” they start screaming that it’s somehow artificial or unnatural. It’s not. You get the same stuff in organically-grown fruit, just not purified or refined.

Secondly, there’s nothing nutritionally wrong with fast food. It’s as nutritious as anything you cook at home, and the only legtimate knock on it is that it’s high in fats and high-calorie overall, and low in fiber. That’s a legitimate concern, but you could do a lot worse than to live entirely on McDonald’s. It wouldn’t kill you as long as you didn’t splurge and eat nothing but shakes and fries.

Third, the groundbreaking work on nutrition and metabolism was done by some Ivy League guy in the ‘30’s or ‘40’s. He used student athletes and monitored and weighed everything they ate then locked them in special rooms and had them exercise as he analyzed the gases they exhaled and even collected the sweat from their bodies. He found that body weight depended directly on the amount of calories consumed minus the amount of energy expended. He looked at overall calorie consumption, though, not at specific foods.

Despite what they’d like you to think, nutritionists don’t know a hell of a lot about human nutrition, and most of what they tell you comes from a combination of government information, food industry marketing, and hearsay and anecdotal evidence. They’re pretty sure they know how much you need in terms of vitamins and minerals, fats, carbos, and protein, but remember that all these results are extrapolated from animal studies. Nazi’s aside, no one’s going to experiment on people and see what happens to them if they don’t get enough this or that in their diet, at least not intentionally. People my age remember quite well when the experts were urging us to eat more meat and eggs and milk. Now they’re telling us to cut back. I don’t think their evidence is much better for one than the other. They just don’t know.

You should also bear in mind that the way they determine the caloric content of food has practically nothing to do with the way the body handles digestion. Caloric content is determined by putting a known quantity of the food in question in a stainless steel “bomb”, flooding it with oxygen and setting it on fire, then measuring how much heat is produced. Needless to say, this isn’t how your body operates.

There’s a big fight going on in the nuritional/biochemical community on how relevant these caloric measurements are to human body weight, spurred in large part by the huge success of the low carbohydrate diet in which calories don’t seem to matter as much as their source, whether from fat, protein, or carbohydrates. If the low-carb advocates are right as to how their diet works, it overturns some 50-60 years of ironclad nutritional dogma. Again, the sorry fact is that we just don’t know.

Finally, since SnP is blessed with a metabolism that most of us would probably kill for, she’s probably not aware of what a difficult and emotional issue food and body image are for the rest of us, and how galling it is to be told to just love our bodies and relax. It’s pretty much like the healthy person telling the cripple to just pick up his crutches and dance along after her. I earnestly hope you stay this way, love, but if you’re like most of us, as you age your metabolism will slow down and there's nothing you can do about it. The Reese's will start to show, lumps will appear, and there’ll be nothing you can do about it other than try to diet or exercise. Or learn to love the new, overweight you.

The fact is, that body weight is more important to most people than sex or money or even overall health (otherwise you wouldn’t see fad diets and diet pills and bulimia, people putting their health at risk in order to be skinny). People agonize over it, they shed tears of rage and frustration over it, they despair and kill themselves over it. It’s no joke.

Plus, there’s incontrovertible evidence that weight has a very definite impact on health and morbidity. There’s a direct link between weight and blood pressure, which in turn causes heart problems, kidney damage and stroke; diabetes, which has reached epidemic proportions in the United States; and cardiovascular disease, which is still the nation’s number one killer. So it’s hard to get comfortable with your body when you think it may be killing you.

Most people with weight problems – which is probably something like 90% of all of us if you asked us – have tried everything: dieting, exercising, denial, psychotherapy, improving our self-image, religion, forgiving ourselves, and just saying oh fuck it all and giving up.

Anyhow, that’s what I know. It’s not a trivial problem. Not by any means.

---dr.M.

 

[English Lady]

Dr M you are Awesome. I didn't know alot of what you just posted and it was fascinating to read. and you're so right...weight is something that effects alot of people very deeply and not many people realise how to eat healthily...as you've just stated nobody is quite sure how to do it really!

 

[shereads]

if you’re like most of us, as you age your metabolism will slow down and there's nothing you can do about it. The Reese's will start to show, lumps will appear, and there’ll be nothing you can do about it other than try to diet or exercise. Or learn to love the new, overweight you.

That's a fact. Ten years ago it required half the effort to lose weight. I'd get the small order of frieds instead of the large and eventually I'd be where I wanted to be. These days, I have to avoid the fries altogether and change my routine to accommodate more time at the gym, and I still won't achieve the same result in twice the amount of time. Age: bad concept.

Based on just my mom and her sister, who grew up with the same southern-fried influences but faced dramatically different weight challenges (my mom doesn't want to weigh 86 pounds) I suspect there are genetic factors that are at least as important as metabolism and maybe even more difficult to overcome. My aunt dieted with such misery and vehemence that it was like watching an alcoholic swear off drinking for a few weeks, finding it progressively more difficult instead of easier. Physically and emotionally, she inherited the family's version of alcoholism: depression from her father's side, a constant need for food from her mother's side.

One doctor recommended Xenical, the prescription drug that prevents the body from absorbing fat. Her cardiologist nixed the idea, because she was in her seventies, in poor health and taking too many other prescriptions to risk one more. For the same reason, she couldn't be considered for stomach reduction surgery. My aunt died last year from a pulmonary disease unrelated to her weight, and in the final weeks she had no appetite at all. I fed her tiny bites of ice cream from a spoon the last time I saw her, until she smiled and told me, "I'm only eating to make you feel better."



There will turn out to be a brain-chemical imbalance or other tweakable cause for obesity, and the people who beat themselves up for lacking willpower, and cry about it like my aunt used to do, will know they aren't weaklings. It will take some getting used to. The chemical causes of depression, and its link to families with a history of alcoholism or obsessive/compulsive disorder, have been known for a while but haven't done much to alleviate the social stigma. No one would accuse a diabetic of lacking the willpower to produce more insulin. But when similar malfunctions occur above the neck, there's still the temptation among the fortunate to say "snap out of it."

 

[English Lady]

"No one accuse a diabetic of lacking the willpower to produce more insulin. But when similar malfunctions occur above the neck, there's still the temptation among the fortunate to say "snap out of it."


uh huh *nods head*

 

[SadieRose]

She made herself miserable obsessing about her weight, and depriving herself of the things she loved, only to binge and gain back every ounce plus a few more. I often wished she'd just accept her size, get some exercise to keep herself healthy, and cut herself some slack.

Quite right,

About three years ago I had a major operation, prior to which I was required to lose 35 pounds in weight. Having previously never managed to shed so much as half a stone without putting it right back on again, I despaired of ever achieving the goal. My doctor advised cutting out alcohol, which - he said - affected the rate at which I burned off calories. I did as he said and restricted myself to just a couple of glasses of wine during the week (oooh the agony!!) and sure enough, in under a year I shed over two and half stone.

I still drank at the weekends and enjoyed myself virtually as much as before, but willpower (or the lack of it) has been my downfall. Since the op I've put back most of what I lost.

Recently, Billy Connelly made me laugh when he said on his TV series; "You want to lose weight? Eat less and move around more!!"

But, generally, this is an effective measure.

xx.Sadie

 

[sweetnpetite]

Recently, Billy Connelly made me laugh when he said on his TV series; "You want to lose weight? Eat less and move around more!!"

But, generally, this is an effective measure.

xx.Sadie

I have a good friend who eat almost nothing and works her butt off. She's quite heavy. But then she has a caffein addiction and drinks a lot of pop.

Even so, I think that the reasons for weight problems are , more often than we realize deeply related to our subconcious feeling about food, ourselves and the world.

Not saying just 'snap out of it' or 'think differently' It takes a lot of work. (I just think that the things we are taught will work are often the things that sabatoge us- and the real answers are within- and being ignored)

 

[brightlyiburn]

As someone who has lost 40 pounds I can say with a large amount of certainty that food makes you fat.
I didn't go on a diet. I didn't do Atkins. I haven't been excersizing on a daily basis. But I've lost 40 pounds. Granted it's been a slow process, but that's the best way to lose weight. Those people who go on Atkins and lose 80 pounds will more often than not gain it back with extra.
I simply changed the way I ate. Not only smaller portions, though. I knocked off a good deal of stuff that I used to eat all the time. I drink a little soda now, but not as much as I used to. I eat things like cookies or fast food occasionally, but not as often as I used to.
Granted, it isn't food alone. You do need exercise. However, if you want to lose weight, there's no need to throw yourself into a strict regimen of dieting and excerise. You can begin by simply eating right, which I can tell you will most definately work to an extent. Once you've seen that you can lose weight without starving yourself or near killing yourself, you'll be ready to go further by excercising more.

For myself, I'm working out ways to exercise. I have bad joints, which makes it difficult. Unfortunately, while losing weight helps some, it's not enough. I have "mechanical problems" as the doc put it. Even when I was really young and weighed about as much as a stick, I had problems.
But yes...food makes you fat. It's just not the only factor.

 

[Liar]

I have a good friend who eat almost nothing and works her butt off. She's quite heavy. But then she has a caffein addiction and drinks a lot of pop.

Anyone but me that sees a connection there?

She's like I was. I ate almost nothing. And worked my butt off. And drank a lot of pop. Which made me overweight. Simple as that.

Pop is unhealthy stuff you put in your mouth. Sugar, addictive carbs. Liquid junk food.

 

[English Lady]

indeedy. I hardly drink it now. just water and fruit juice (which has sugars in it too so yes i'm careful*L*)

I am putting a bit of weight back on. I know why, this cough/bad chest etc is preventing me from doing any excercise other than slow walking. the food i am eating is about the same and I would feel hungry if I didn't but I can't work it off like I did.

energy in is more than energy out and I've put on a few pounds cos of it.