People can make all the excuses they want for being overweight. Physiology is only a small part of it. What percentage of people were overweight/obese 40 years ago as opposed to today? Do genetics change that much in 40 years where 70% of the AMERICAN population suddenly has the "fat, malfunctioning thyroid gene"? I think not. I'm not "fat shaming" anybody. I just think it is selfish and unfair for the fit/healthy people to have to pay higher medical premiums as a result of all the health issues from the 70%(which, in most cases, is preventable).
I dropped 50 pounds about two years ago. Do I still eat junk food? Yes. Do I still drink alcohol? Yes. What's different? I started exercising, cut out the soda and cut back on the alcohol and junk food. Everything in moderation.
My grandma was, so was my dad, and still is, age 77, btw, on no prescription drugs at all. its your anecdotal evidence against mine. Absolutely, eating junk and not exercising will make almost anyone fat. Bit it will make some people obese, some only modestly overweight. Some of us have to make a job of staying on top of our weight. That is the problem. Life gets in the way. I am not obese, but that is because I have spent half of my waking hours working out, preparing food, reading up on nutrition and fitness. What a drain on time.
Most common excuse I hear. Life is almost always in the way. I work 65 hours a week and I still find the time to exercise and eat properly. Time devoted to fitness/nutrition is an investment against a future of crushing medical bills and doctor visits. It is inevitable that your poor health will also "get in the way" if you're not willing to put forth the effort.
"Time devoted to fitness/nutrition" does not guarantee you won't be overweight.
You can put in the time, and the effort, and still be fat. I hate the assumption that you can tell, just by looking at someone, whether or not they put in the time.
Just because you can do it, everyone can? Even when I was working 50-60 hours a week - it was a LOT easier to spend my spare time cooking, eating healthfully, and working out, because I didn't have kids. I could go lift with my husband, run on my lunch break, shop for and cook healthy exciting meals. I didn't spend every spare waking minute coloring, changing diapers, feeding small children, doing 3rd grade homework. My "free time" to work out is an occasional walk to the park with the kids to play. Sometimes a workout DVD in the morning, but only before they wake up. (Which was at 4:57 am today).
I still exercise many hours a week - I squeeze it in. But it's a LOT harder with small children than people without children realize.
Sounds like more excuses to me. I can't count how many times I've heard the "I've got kids" excuse.
Probably because it's true? And maybe you don't have kids?
The choice is sleep or exercise. Sleep, or plan meals. 4:20 am wakeup today from the toddler, and boy the alarm was already set for 4:50 am and I REALLY wanted those extra 30 minutes. Oh, I went to the gym, and swam anyway, and in fact did my 30 laps faster than ever before. When my friends with small kids would tell me they couldn't exercise (and I also had a child), I pointed out to them that I was choosing exercise over sleep and was, in fact, getting 2 fewer hours of sleep a day than they were. You know what? They started exercising. But at some point you get diminishing returns. If you are talking 7.5 hours instead of 9.5, then okay. If you are talking 6 instead of 8, that's an entirely different ballgame. And if they aren't continuous? Ouch.
If I don't sleep, I get sick - every single sniffle, flu, or anything that someone from work or one of the kids brings home, I get it, and go down hard. So about a year ago, I had to make sleep a priority. If things are great, kids are healthy, I'm sleeping, kids aren't waking me up at night, husband not traveling no problem. I wake up at 5 am and work out.
If husband is traveling or I'm not sleeping, or I'm exhausted because I've up for 2 hours in the middle of the night, I can't get up to exercise. Just can't.
But if you've never been there, you can't judge.
If you'd like to judge for yourself, you can set your alarm for 1:30 am, stay awake for two hours, go back to sleep, wake up at 5:30 or 6 am, go to work, and then borrow someone else's kids when you get home, until 9 pm. Every night. Do their homework, play, give them baths, cook them a healthy meal, do the dishes, pack their lunches.
I never said it was impossible, just difficult, and exhausting.
The most defensive are often the most guilty. I've witnessed your knee-jerk responses the entire thread. Not sure why you felt the need to justify your weight issues with an elaborate story about your lifestyle. Please do go on....this is quite entertaining. Let me guess, its your Thyroid's fault....
You mentioned you "walk" on your lunch break for 30 minutes each day in addition to swimming and weight lifting 2x a week. Weights are good, swimming is better, but walking? I don't understand people that say they "walk" every day but complain that they're not losing weight. You need more moderate/high intensity cardio. Interval training is recommended as you get older. Walking is going to do little or nothing to aid in weight loss. I'll agree walking will do some good for your cardiovascular health, but it will not shred fat. You mentioned your joints hurt, so running must be out for you. Ellipticals are low-impact and great for intervals.
I also find it disturbing that you associate fried foods, bread, and sugar with "fun". That alone says a lot more about you than anything else. Me thinks you're not telling us the entire story. I'm not fat shaming anyone. Most of these overweight people bring up the subject on their own volition while vomiting bullshit excuses to make themselves feel better. Interestingly enough, they initiate the subject WITHOUT provocation, claiming a victim mentality 99% of the time while expecting compassion & empathy from everyone else.
I do find your indirect advice about not having kids valuable though, even though I don't plan to reproduce, ever. Because, evidently, kids make people fat.
No, kids don't necessarily make you fat. Well, if you are the woman who gets pregnant, they do. What they do is suck up time, time that can't be spent doing other things. Those years, however, are fairly short. By the age of 4, you start the "sweet spot". They are potty trained, can play independently for awhile, find it "fun" to exercise with you - my older son, at 4, would do P90X videos with me. Now that he's 8, he's joined me in my 30-day November burpee challenge (though I'm pretty sure he'll give up before the end of the month when we hit 100).
But younger children are a drain and a time-suck. It's no surprise that it's difficult to lose weight when you are stressed or not sleeping - there are honest, actual links with weight and those things called hormones, which are affected by stress. I think maybe my friends who had 2 kids, 2 years apart, were certainly pretty smart. And my friends who had kids in their 20's were pretty smart too (I wouldn't change anything for the world).
When I was training for my half marathons, I found it pretty fascinating how FAST women in their late 30's and early 40's were. I'm not particularly fast, not built really for distance - I was happy to hit a 10-minute mile for a half. But then I started realizing that *most* of the women runners I know - at age 40 their kids are teens, so they finally have free time. They don't need to pay babysitters, and heck they can get their teens training with them! It was somewhat frustrating too because I ran a few races where I would have "placed" in any age group but my own. 40 year old women are fast, dangit!!
The problem I see here is some people take "explanation" as "being whiny or guilty". False. It goes back to something I said on a different thread. There is optimism, pessimism, and realism.
Pessimism is "I'm always going to be fat, and never lose weight because of X (genetics, nothing works, etc.)" I remember feeling that way in my early 30's. I "ate healthy" and "exercised regularly" and was still obese. But then weight watchers "I'll try it, it won't work, but whatever", and it worked like a charm - because I educated myself on exercise, and calories, and healthy food. Lost 57 pounds. Then after, when I would read or hear people say the same thing, I thought two things "1. Oh, I totally understand where you are coming from, I've been there", and "2. You can do it!!" So there is your optimism.
The optimism comes in when you do it anyway, and figure - well, at least I'll be healthier, right? Of course what a "healthy" diet is debated by everyone from IIFYM, to Paleo, to vegan, to Primal, to ... fill in the blanks. But I think that most people agree that vegetables are good for you. It's everything else (meat, butter, beans, bread, carbs) that spark a disagreement.
The realism comes in when things change. I lost 57 pounds in 4-5 months when I was 31. When my first child was 20 months old, I took it as a part time job to lose the baby weight. I lost 20 pounds in 3 months.
Well, fast forward 7 years, and it just doesn't come off like it used to. And that's realism. I've lost 20 pounds in 10 months - 3 times longer than 7 years ago.
And you say that I need "high intensity cardio" - but other people say no, chronic cardio is the problem, you need weight training. See, nobody agrees on what people need.
The realism comes in with what I have to deal with right now.
I try and swim 2-3x a week, for 45 minutes. That's my "me" time. But the realism is - I have to split gym days with my husband, so he gets 3 mornings, and I get 3 mornings.
I like to exercise at lunch. 5 years ago, it was running - realism comes in two-fold now. First, I only have a 30 minute lunch break, so not enough time to change, run, shower, and get back to work. Second, joint injuries that do not allow me to run. I miss running - both for the fitness and for the relaxation benefits. I walk instead because it's something I can DO at lunch. Get away from the desk, de-stress, get some sun, and get some exercise to boot. Before the knee injury I was doing biking or elliptical for intervals, but even those can give my knee a flare up.
I prefer to get up on my husband's gym days and work out in the morning, but since the time change, the 2 year old is up at the crack of 4:30 am. Which means, no workout. He won't let me. Literally.
I could, if I chose, work out after work and before dinner. Pick up toddler at 5, school kid at 5:20, get to the YMCA at 5:40, put them in childcare (throw them a granola bar in the car), workout for 45 minutes or so, get home at 6:40 pm, cook dinner, have dinner at 7:35 pm, put the kids to bed at 8 pm. That seems...I dunno...kind of wrong, so I don't do it.
I work out with the hours that I have, and with what my body lets me do. I wish I could go back to part time (32 hours). That freed up a lot more time for exercise. But my boss said no.
But I'm kind of used to people like you. I once had a boss who was a bit of an expert on different personality types. Everyone is a blend of personality types, but everyone has a dominant trait. And when under times of stress, the dominant trait takes over. Well, I'm an engineer and I work with a bunch of PhDs. Nearly every PhD in my company has a dominant trait that their default failure mode is "be perfect". That's what I see here. Clearly, if things are going the way you want, you have to "be perfect". And if you aren't perfect, you are a failure. And if you ARE perfect, well clearly you are lying about it. (Like the people who get sick on a vegan diet "you clearly aren't doing it right!!") My company President is like this. When something goes wrong, he simply wants to blame someone - anyone.
He doesn't care WHY it happened, he doesn't care to hear HOW we can make it better. He only wants to place blame. He has called me in his office to chat about "things" that went wrong (that I was not personally involved in). When I've tried to make recommendations on how to fix them I'm told "I don't care about the details". Aka, I am going to judge you for failure, but I really don't care if you are doing everything right or not.
The descriptions here are intended to explain the nuances of the body, and life, and hormones, and balancing X,Y,Z. Some people prefer black and white and non nuance. They haven't yet experienced it, or realized the fact that two people can do the same thing and get different results. These kinds of things fascinate me. My one coworker is looking great these days, and we were chatting. She said "well, it took me 2 years to lose 20 lbs, and it didn't happen until my youngest was about 4. You don't realize how stress and sleep affect your weight. It's terrible."
It comes down to experience, and empathy. If you've never experienced it, then you cannot understand. But don't expect anyone to respect your judgment if you really don't know what you are talking about.
As far as associating those foods as "fun" - that was a joke about the SAD (standard American diet). Most people would consider bread, alcohol, sugar, fried foods as "enjoyable" (and in fact, science backs this up). And apparently, somewhere else in this thread, a Frenchwoman backs this up too. Man, one meal a week with a glass of red wine, a slice of fresh bread with bruschetta, followed by a small piece of dark chocolate? That would be heaven.
I haven't had my thyroid checked lately, maybe I should do that at my next Doctor's appointment (apparently my cousin had an issue with this recently). But since I've actually been losing weight (albeit slowly), I don't think I have an issue. I guess I was just hoping for faster results. I wasn't expecting my 37-year old results of 20 lbs in 3 months, but I was hoping for 20 lbs in 6 months. Instead, it took 10, and I still would like to lose 10-15 pounds. 15 might be pushing it though. Things shift after having a baby.