h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Lady C, the nice thing about malls are all those lovely benchs, strategic in location and usually outfitted with some pleasent greenery. I'd take advantage of them often and simply wave like a princess on a parade float as the others run their laps.

Wonderful advice, Spy. My knee won't take much abuse right now, but I am doing my exercises to strengthen it. Did I mention that my friend who is coming is also a physical therapist? She gave me the exercises..........kind of neat, don't you think?

Lady C, I'm in the same position as you. I have a bad ankle that finds me unable to walk very far unless I'm wearing shoes with custom-made inserts inside them.

It galls me to be overweight because, 1. I was also extremely thin as an adult, able to eat whatever I wanted, having to roll the waists of my skirts and trousers to make them fit, and 2. I was an athlete, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound ... on horseback, anyway.

My metabolism changed so suddenly I can tell you the month I noticed it! I believe now that's when my thyroid went wonky. In retrospect I think I was hypermetabolic, and then when my thyroid went out, I dipped the other way. Now I'm on synthroid, but the NP thinks everyone is the same, biochemically, and so I subsist on a dosage that does NOT make me feel like my old self.

So my contribution to this thought is, right, we are not biochemical clones of each other, so why should we be expected to have identical metabolisms?

And why should we be forced to compare ourselves to those entities on the red carpet in Hollywood, people who go on exercise regimens two months in advance so that they can fit into a dress on one particular night, after spending the day being spray-tanned, professionally made-up and coiffed? I should go to the supermarket with those same expectations??

Lady C was underweight until after niece was born. I on the other hand was never underweight. But I never thought I would be as large as I am now.

I was already overweight then gained a lot more after F got so sick. Everyone told me I should lose weight because of the stress, but the exact opposite happened. Now it won't budge. It's like I've reached this set point and my body is refusing to even consider shrinking. And the foot and back problems don't make me want to go out and do the amount of exercise I'd have to do to reset my metabolism....like training for a marathon.

And there are so many other, more interesting things to do than ride a stationary cycle or lift weights or whatever!

>>My metabolism changed so suddenly I can tell you the month I noticed it!<<



*head under pillow*
These things don't happen...don't happen...don't happen...

I have friends who gleefully assure me that one day my metabolism will slow down and I'll be dieting like the rest of them. sometimes I think I need new friends.

A neighbor cut her weight by cutting all junk food. Another guy around here dropped a hundred pounds through portion control. But of course there are lots of biological factors that confound simplistic approaches for some people. Did you know the USA is heavier around the middle then at each end?

I think swimming provides the best total-body exercise, and applies the smallest possible amount of stress on the afflicted body parts.

In the Perfect World [which is constantly undergoing design revisions], everyone would have direct access to a righteous swimmin' hole.

Oh, I remember swimming in a real natural lake. Them were the days.

I've never been thin - was very fat, and am now merely quite fat. I got almost thin for the wedding (lost 100 lb) by exercising like mad (2-3 hrs a day) and not eating (almost literally in the four months before the wedding) - now I'm *only* exercising six times a week and am back to having meals again I'm fatter and fatter almost by the week. *sigh*

I simply can't cope with the sustained level of denial plus exercising every spare minute required for me to be anything other than fat. Yep, I'm *that* weak-willed, it is a major moral failing on my part, because if I just took in fewer calories than I used I'd be thin in no time, the fact that I fail at this just goes to show what a lazy, gluttonous lardarse I am.

I don't like swimming.

Wait - I didn't mean it like that. But I find laps to be the most boring of exercises. and you never feel like you're exercising anything.
The only things I'll "lap" are the butterfly stroke and some special strokes invented by my head lifeguard because of the objections mentioned above, because after two long laps of those you are fully justified in collapsing gasping against the wall and then getting about doing something more interesting.

Also: muscles used to swim and muscles used for pretty much everything else rarely overlap.

Beyond that, my WSI book insists that swimming is healthy, (though laps don't rank too high) and of course I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from frequenting their local pool so yeah, swim away.

I never understood that whole 'diet with exercise' thing anyway. Exercise makes me hungry.

Kelli, being fat is NOT a moral failing.

Oh, believe me, in our family, stress does NOT cause one to lose weight! In fact, it works just the opposite way on us. I blame a lot of my weight gain on hormonal changes, ie., the big M at age 50 or so. Now that was probably more than you wanted to know so....

The only way I can truly lose weight is to cut out all, and I mean all, the things I love to eat--no more pasta, mashed potatoes, bread, fried chicken--I'm sure you are getting the big picture by now.

It isn't sweets that is my problem--it's other starches. Lord C. would rather have me fat and sassy than skinny and crabby.

Fatkelli, I respect your situation, but your last paragraph is a dreadful downer.

You're NOT a moral failure. I don't know you personally, but I will stick my neck out and publicly proclaim this.

I advocate positive thinking, simpleton that I am. There have been times in recent years when I battered my self-esteem to a pulp. Is it any surprise then that my negative habits weighed me down? That I damned near lost the will to live?

Well, along comes the inner child, to save the day....

kelli, obesity is not equated with morality or immorality either. There are any number of factors that contribute to it. One of the biggest factors, IMOH, is genetic. Right Hyp? Our parents were both overweight. Mother cooked all the wrong things to promote healthy eating and now it has become a major problem for us since those are the types of food we like--we call them comfort foods.

My mind knows the right choices to make, but my tastebuds tell me otherwise.

See, this is just what the article is saying. We are willing to go to extreme situations to try and lose weight or keep from gaining weight. Why should anyone be expected to exercise vigorously 3 hours a day and live on starvation rations in order to achieve a weight that other people just have naturally without any effort at all? How has physical appearance gotten so important that large portions of society are penalized for displaying natural genetic variations?

And we keep buying into the philosophy that it is somehow our own fault because that is what people who don't understand the complexeties of the situation keep telling us.

I completely agree that there's no reason on earth to eat and/or exercise in special ways to look like other people's definition of normal.

Where I do do see the need of putting together a diet or taking on an exercise regime is where weight starts causing health problems - hypertension, type 2 diabetes, etc.

I have a cousin who has been severely overweight - and at one point, actually was in a severe risk of not reaching 40. He managed to get it under some kind of control - but it still fighting with it.

Hyp mentioned the lack of sidewalks, etc - I stayed in a hotel in Orlando once (actually, that little area had sidewalks!) that had a list of nearby restaurants etc, sorted by distance. The list was divided into "within walking distance" and "above walking distance". I could conclude that anything above 1/4 mile was out of walking distance. We, two Danes, happily walked 1½ mile or so back and forth to our restaurant of choice.

And while you always have to be careful concluding about breakfast styles in a country by what's served in hotels, I'll have to say that the US is the only place where a very significant part of what's served is nearer cake than anything else - there's usually far more muffins than good bread...

So from these quick glimpses I get, I get the feeling that there is a lot of options of eating not very heathily and a lack of options of burning off calories by walking or biking around.

And having said all that, the amount of overweight Danes are also rising quickly - in spite of sidewalks and bicycle paths and all that - so we're not really in a place to point at anyone.

I see I should have added a wink or two - my last sentence was really to illustrate what Hyp had been saying earlier in the thread - it is the received wisdom that appears to have been internalised by almost everyone, including those that are overweight (interesting to note that one of the responses was to make me feel bad about not feeling good about it!). I wanted to give some sort of example of the lengths I had to go to to get 'thin' for my wedding photos, and the fact that I now excerise *far* more than most people but am still fat just goes to show that there is something very different about my metabolism/body/whatever from those that seemingly do no exercise at all, seemingly eat fairly normally (ie don't scrutinise the labels of everything every time they eat) and don't have a problem with their weight.

I'm trying to get pregnant ATM so I don't want to be starving myself -I don't think that is healthy, but I am sort of dreading what will happen if we have trouble conceiving - I can just see the approbrium of the medical establishment looming ahead of me (did I ever tell you a doctor of mine once told me I was disgusting?). Ach, I'm quite fed up of all this because I really don't have the mental capacity to keep this at the top of my mind all the time, and I can't justify the time for exercise every day that I did last year - I'm just too busy!

Sodit, who needs to see their feet anyway...

Fatkelli, my sister dropped by last night, and that reminded me of a conversation we had a while back about diets and self control.

She’s noted that the whole idea of failing to diet as a moral failing is a lose-lose approach.

When people see dieting as a matter of self-control and resisting a terrible urge to eat that cheesecake, one of two things will happen:

1. They’ll eat the cheesecake anyway and spend the night beating themselves up for their lack of self control and obvious weakness of character.
2. They wont eat the cheesecake and they’ll spend the night yearning for it, but miserably constrained by their self-imposed limitation.

She doesn’t hold much with this trash, and found that it just reduced the quality of her life, so she decided to look upon every piece of cheesecake as a choice:

1. she could choose to eat the cheesecake, and accept upon herself the ramifications because she feels that it is worth all the results.
2. she could choose to not eat the cheesecake because the scanty pleasure does not justify the long-term losses or the damage to her lifestyle.

Once a choice is made it is final; that’s what seemed best at the time, the choice is made, it has nothing to do with poor personal characteristics, so there’s no beating up afterwards, and no wishing you hadn’t, because you understand why you aren’t.

I’ve found it quite effective on the one or two occasions I’ve tried it out. It’s a mindset change, but it works. At any rate, my sister went from plumpest in the family (ok, not saying much there) to thinnest, and manages to strictly adhere to these ‘lifestyle’ diets where you pretty much swear off everything in the name of future good health and current good feeling.

I don't do beating up afterwards.

I think I'm failing to get over the sheer mental difficulty of being in a position where I have to make the no- choice pretty much *every* time, and the don't-skip-the-gym choice and all the other choices. People who don't face having to consider the long-term ramifications of almost everything the eat and do never seem to get this.

And what you advocate again seems to imply that if I'm fat, I've made the poor-health choices the majority of the time - if only I'd made different choices I wouldn't be this fat. Other people (and myself I'f I don't get *very* stern with myself) see this as a character weakness.