The American "Obesity Epidemic?"

[Thremp]

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seriously, read something

not crap in Men's Health or Cosmo

look at the actual studies/charts and whatnot

if you're going to make ignorant one-liners, I have nothing else to say

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Please, find me a study that is pertinent. Find a study where they take fat Americans who are active and eat a normal trash diet. Then where they take half and have them lose weight, regress for various pre-existing health conditions and then conclude that losing weight and moving to a better diet in fact would not improve their life expectancy let alone improve their quality of life.

[kyleb]

lol this thread is insane, i can't actually believe someone is arguing fat people should stay fat

[SmileyEH]

Like I told Thremp on AIM, I honestly don't care whether being fat has anything to do with life expectancy. If you can't do very easy things for a non-fat barely active person - like say deadlift your bodyweight, do a pullup, jog a mile while carrying on a conversation, or just [censored] move a couch into an apartment without collapsing then you aren't healthy.

FWIW I always liked how crossfit defines "health" as a sliding scale from injured/fat/incapable to high performing athlete (however you choose to define it).

[kidcolin]

agreed, it's about quality of life, which leads me to this:

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lol this thread is insane, i can't actually believe someone is arguing fat people should stay fat


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I think there is a quality of life/health boundary limit that's different for each person. I basically spelled it out in an earlier post in this thread. There will probably be a point where I've got kids, a job, and being super fit just won't be near the top of my priorities. Staying healthy, definitely, but those extra 10-15lbs I'm not going to stress myself over. I bet a lot of people do and it probably lowers their quality of life worrying about it.

[Big Poppa Smurf]

I'm only skimming this but to whoever thinks fat people should stay fat, have you ever known a fat person? They breathe really really loud and have problems getting up and down flights of stairs, and my really fat friends manage to break a sweat eating.

[longbody]

Funny you should bring up stress.

Old people who are overweight live longer, according to recent research.

http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/...g-seniors.html
or just google something like "seniors bmi life expectancy"

There is a growing hypothesis about stress and whacko cortisol levels being the cause of all that ails us from heart disease to diabetes, high blood pressure called the metabolic syndrome. Abnormal cortisol levels are also related to where we store fat on our bodies, visceral fat vs. subcutaneous fat. Visceral fat or abdominal fat is supposed to be very bad. Maybe. So avoiding stress and enjoying life may be way more important than avoiding being fat. I'm going to work on both.

Do a search for P. Bjorntrop at pubmed and you'll find stuff like this
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez...Pubmed_RVDocSum

Of course there is probably a lot of disagreement out there but it is fun to read about.

[Thremp]

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my really fat friends manage to break a sweat eating.

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This isn't funny. Sometime in the lat 18 months I managed to start sweating more than the average person. In fact I even sweat more than some fat people I know. God forbid if I start a ECA stack.

[kidcolin]

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So avoiding stress and enjoying life may be way more important than avoiding being fat. I'm going to work on both.


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Yeah, that's basically what I'm trying to say. There's a balance somewhere. I'm young without a lot of worries other than paying some easy bills and hunting some poon, so there's no reason for me to be in poor shape, so I'm going to fix it. When I'm 40, my priorities will be different for sure.

[MyTurn2Raise]

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lol this thread is insane, i can't actually believe someone is arguing fat people should stay fat

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unreal how one cannot argue that

the argument for telling fat people to become thin has been a catastrophic failure

[MyTurn2Raise]

I understand the message scares most of you... it's about the only one I can come to after looking at the primary studies