And I'm cheating all the time, drinking sugar, eating fruit, overeating on occasion and still losing four pounds a week! It's nothing to do with my metabolism, though, of course not! I must just be better than you - na na na na na!

On a serious note, I thought once I got this low my metabolism would slow down but it's been the opposite. It sped up like crazy after my "set point" was out of the way (I never beileved in set points before) and it hasn't mattered whether I 've been a slug or exercising like crazy, in fact, I lost the most during a two month hiatus from exercising. Anyhoo, I hope the same for you.

Janine

Chandra, you are a sweetheart!

Have we met in RL?

Or maybe pound rocks?

I'm lazy and irresponsible, so I am just going to become a nudist so I don't have to expend any energy washing clothes.

Maybe we met when I visited Colorado Springs.

Sometimes I feel guilty because it seems like I'm the only one who has a "normal" weight. Yet, I have to operate with a set of constraints that are abnormal to say the least. I HAVE to constrain myself and calculate everything I eat, inject insulin, cross my fingers, make voodoo charms and hope it comes out right. Then I HAVE to do my cardio and dumb bells to make sure I don't become so insulin resistant that I can no longer control it. I MUST be careful to choose healthy, low-GI foods so that the voodoo charms will have some chance of working.

If I were normally abnormal, or abnormally normal?, I can't see myself going to these extreme measures. But when the consequences of bad choices are a severely shortened lifespan, it is pretty a much a no-brainer to make myself do these things.

Even after doing all those things for years, after 3 pregnancies and a back injury, I managed to gain too. I was lucky in that low-carb allowed me to lose the weight, but I was eating pretty low-calorie too.

Pounding rocks sounds good. So does milking the cow and churning your own butter!

So many euphemisms!

That is an excellent question and I don't mind it at all.

I was never overweight until the age of 36. I'm 41 now. Until then, the heaviest I ever got was 130, but typically, I was between 115 and 120. It wasn't "natural"--and I never said metabolism has nothing at all to do with weight, just that metabolism can hardly account for the severe degree of overweight and the extreme numbers of overweight in today's population. (I know someone else made the "metabolism" jab but I figured I'd just stick this in here.) For example, you might naturally be, say, 135 and I might naturally be 120 and that could surely be due to metabolism given that we were the same height, age and basic activity level. But if you were 195 and I were 120, that is much less likely to "just" be due to metabolism. I'd think that was pretty much common sense but as I said, the comment was made, so I'm addressing it.

I think I did explain why I'm overweight now, but I'll explain again. My first child was born when I was 19, and following calorie restriction (the "big thing" of the day), I got down to 105 pounds about four to five months after my son was born. I didn't have children again until much later, when I remarried. I got pregnant at age 35, I ate and ate my way through that pregnancy just like the first one, but the second time, I found myself less able to "calorie restrict" following the birth. I was older...I had less patience for "ooh, look at me, I'm dieting"...I don't know. I tended toward calorie restricting for a time, then bingeing. Then, I did low-fat but very high-calorie and primarily refined carbs--as in, probably not a vegetable for full days or even a week at a time.

I found CAD, lost 20 lbs., then stopped losing because I was pregnant again. Again...ate my way through the pregnancy. I knew what I was doing. I was disgusted with myself but kept giving myself the same platitudes. "Oh, some of that weight is placenta." Well, frankly, I challenge anyone to uncover a case of a 60-pound placenta, but what can I say.

After my third son was born, I tried Atkins (had loosely tried it several years earlier), went off it...tried intuitive eating, pigged out...tried calorie restriction, felt faint (probably psychological...I wasn't severely restricting)...futzed around for a full two years, and am now back on CAD again and am having success.

So that's why I'm fat right now.

I don't think 15-20 pounds sounds that overweight. I don't think most of this country is only 15-20 pounds overweight, though. It sounds to me like you're doing wonderfully. I wouldn't change my WOE for just 15 pounds if the WOE were working for me and my life; again, when I talk about the degree of overweight, we're talking overweight. Like the overweight I am right now (I'm five foot one). Like many, many more people are today in comparison to any previous generation.

Did I not specifically say that losing weight isn't easy? In pretty much those exact words? (Go back two or three of my posts, I think...I don't remember...)

I didn't say "losing weight is easy", but if that's all you could come up with, so be it. I understand that my personal responsibility posts ticked people off. That actually wasn't my intention, but if you're ticked, you're ticked...let the (unwarranted) accusations fly!

But on a serious note, I did say, and continue to believe, that saying it's someone else's fault that we gained weight isn't good enough, at least for me. Nor is saying that "my metabolism" made me grossly overweight; if so, then my previous family members should all have been grossly overweight, just like me. And trust me when I tell you they ate carbs; they just ate less of them (and less of everything), moved around a lot more than I do, and didn't use excuses. As far back as the 70s I recall my grandmother telling my mother she didn't want any more potatoes because "starches" "make one heavy". So saying this is all new knowledge gives me pause, too.

And I also still say, getting back to the OP, that it was ridiculous to spend money on a study when similar studies, and probably thousands of anecdotes, have already told us that people do discriminate, outwardly or subconsciously, against the overweight.

It's neither. Do you not get yet that I'm going through the same things as most people here? I'm just taking personal responsibility for getting there. Why not address what I've actually been saying? That's my question. Is it easier just to get angry and put words in another's mouth?





Again, I specifically said overweight people do care and do try different things. Are you by any chance addressing someone else's post? Because I don't recognize mine in the rejoinders you believe you're making. As for the whole laziness thing, someone else brought up the point of people today not being lazy--I was initially responding to that, and in various aspects of society, not just eating. But since you're obviously just skimming for the "bad" parts you can get angry at rather than really reading, you may have overlooked all those (many) descriptions. So I'll give you a pass on that.




Can I refer you to my post where I specifically said the "you" was generic and NOT aimed at Wifezilla and that I had no idea whether she did or didn't do what I described? And did I not specifically ask her questions (most of which she didn't answer) about her personal experience?

LessLiz, did you actually read any of my posts? Or is it more comfortable just to freak out and make a person out to be the bad guy based on things she didn't even actually say? If that's your comfort level, that's fine, but it's not reality and I wanted to point that fact out. Just as I can't make assumptions about you personally (and don't believe I did, actually, anywhere on this thread), you are unqualified to make these assumptions about what I "meant" based on what I said (and even, it seems, based on what I never said).

What if you don't reach your weight goal? Would you consider yourself weak-willed?

I also gained weight during my pregnancies but I never had the luxury of pigging out because I was on a calorie-controlled diet at all times. I gained because I became insulin-resistant, which is the real driver of weight gain. I know that is the case because I injected 3 times as much insulin as I did when not pregnant.

You can't assume why people gain and why they don't lose. What we know about the human body is tiny compared to what we don't know.

But that wasn't my intent at all--to make anyone feel worthless. If you read what I wrote, I said I felt that taking personal responsibility does the opposite. It empowers us. There's another thing to make something die. It's to sit back and allow it to die. It's to allow it to think it has no power over its own life or health, that others call the shots and therefore, nothing can be done.

And a funny thing happens when you tell someone else (or tell yourself) that nothing can be done...that person just doesn't try any more.

My original argument was against people saying that other people "made" them fat by "telling" them what to do--despite the fact that even the diets these people have described weren't along the Food Pyramid or whatever other diet was described. I pointed out from the first that the reason I understood this was that I had done it too. It's a little overblown for you to write off my every word as just trying to "make someone feel bad". And that assertion itself shows ignorance. I was not at all ignorant in my post. I pointed out things that we all actually do, or have done, and how sick it has made us as a nation. And we are.

If you feel that's badmouthing or putting people down, I can't change that. Nor can I change my own belief that if you empower yourself, you will feel better--and that the withering and dying will surely begin once you start laying the blame on others and saying you just can't help your own life or self.