I had something like that from about 9 years until about 14 - my parents (both medical professionals) were desperate for me to be slim. So they put me on a calorie controlled, low fat mostly vegan (dairy free almost meat free) diet, weighed me daily, and continually berated me for failing them by continuing to gain weight.

Breakfast was wholegrain cereal (usually weetabix, which contains sugar) with fruit juice poured over as a fat free substitute for milk. I was sometimes allowed sliced fruit as a condiment.

Lunch was usually something like sandwiches, dinner would be boiled potatos/rice/pasta, boiled veg (particularly carrots) and something like quorn/soya/lentils/beans/soyburgers.

Very very occasionally I was allowed boiled white fish. As a treat I'd sometimes be allowed Kendal mint cake, which is basically pressed sugar.

I went swimming regularly, and my mother also took me jogging.

I've since calculated that at one point I was being allowed about 500 calories a day.

I was continually ill and depressed, my lymph nodes were frequently swollen, I had recurrent tonsilitis and my asthma and eczema were really bad. I suffered from terrible insomnia. I had joint pains. These problems were blamed on my wieght.

I'm now a good foot shorter than my siblings, who being much slimmer naturally weren't dieted like this. They were also allow dairy (I'd been diagnosed with dairy allergy)

I spied your profile....so your siblings are like 6'5!? And girls??? I'd be happy, but I get what you're saying. Low fat is such a plague....

To PJ and others....I don't want this to come off the wrong way, but it will. Are you stronger than most average weight people? I would assume it takes a lot of muscle to move you around. I would think your legs are quite strong. Is there a way to measure this? I guess with body fat %....but then how much can we substract from skeletons and internal organs...hmm....is there a way to measure muscle?

Lol, ok half a foot, it just felt like more - I'm 5ft 6, they are/were 5 ft 10 and 6ft.

As to muscle mass, we did some science experiment where you had to run up some stairs and time yourself, then do some calculation regarding your weight to work out your power. I wasn't that much slower than my classmates and a lot heaver so I came off with a much higher power.

After googling, this is the test
http://www.practicalphysics.org/go/Experiment_507.html

Wow, this is like the diet I was prescribed when younger for IBS. I was told fat was bad and to eat lots of fiberous beans and whole grains. I was a truly miserable bloated, gassy, fatigued, and asthmatic. I credit one wonderful doctor who told me that for some people grain fibers are like poson that I am healthy now.

I occasionally meet people who eat a diet like this for IBS or weight loss and I feel very sorry for them.

The fact that the diet prescribed as healthy by most health professionals and educators is like this is just one of the many reasons The Brits/Americans are so fat and sick.

I think things are changing though. The food education wing of the organization is now partnering with the Weston A. Price Foundation...in the past we pushed low fat. I'm pretty excited.

But wow, things are so entrenched. Sometimes, without realizing it, I proclaim something is fatty because I think that's great, and other people think I'm criticizing the food. At an event I said that shanks are full of fatty deliciousness and someone just had to add "BUT They don't have to be fatty, you can drain some of it off."

PJ, you are right, I was very very lucky that when my weight became a serious problem (to me, and again, you are right, to some that took too long) Atkins was all over the news and was pretty popular, more so it seemed than low fat, which I bet would have been a disaster and who know where it would have left me? I am just grasping (I think) the fact (I've been talking IRL about how hard this is to understand/accept, I guess indoctrination?) how for some people with damaged metabolism it is actually possible to gain on few calories. I don't know WHY this is SO hard to accept, I totally believe that almost everything we have been told about metabolism, what we "should" eat, and so forth have been wrong (and perhaps even the OPPOSITE of reality) for a long time, but just getting past the gut reaction of "yeah right" (I don't mean that, b/c I believe and am really interested in posts from people like PJ, Debbie, and several others who have experienced this) that seems almost unconscious is proving difficult.

For example, I don't doubt for a moment the stories of people on this thread who have explained how they gained and were not binging daily, etc... But I still automatically assume that is not the case with person X, does that make sense? I think it would be SO helpful to be able to do some test in a lab and just UNDERSTAND what is going on with our bodies, and be able to say, ok, this is what you need to do, there, go do it, you will weigh less in a year.

I think the problem I have is that I still think (perhaps wrongly) that people who's stories are like yours are a very very small percentage of all, and that leaves the rest of us with the ability to eat a "standard" caloric level (plus or minus carb level, depending on how "lucky" you got genetically, but isn't that kind of the same idea just on a less extreme scale than the super obese person who gets there eating 1200 cal/day?) or not, and whatever weight we reach ultimately IS our own "fault". I think there is very little solid evidence about how to heal metabolism and become healthy other than the very "out-of-the-mainstream" collection of lowcarb evidence, so are only the lucky few who educate themselves on the subject truly completely responsible for themselves? I mean, the gov't, aha, etc, has spread lies for so long that is the majority of the public not to be expected to figure out what to do for themselves? For the vast majority of people with a weight problem I think the problem/solution lies in getting past a food addiction (weather that is spurred by intolerance, and or just plain bad advice leading to overeating starches I guess depends on the person) so can (most) people be expected to figure out a way to deal with their addiction that damages them less as people are expected to not binge drink, smoke, or do other things that are bad for their health. I guess the difference in this case is education? Like if you were a smoker 50 years ago and get cancer you were in on the tobacco suits to cover your hospital bills, (maybe) but if you start now there is no pity? Maybe in 50 years (optimistic?) there will be decent public awareness of how to eat? Seems that would leave the people who are still obese as even worse pariahs though. (if everyone CONTINUES to think they know how so-and-so should be eating to lose weight and they clearly are not doing so, that fat slob...)

I guess it isn't really that different from the not quite so obese who either struggle or do not (but can you tell who is who?) to lose weight and are judged by appearances. I guess the extremity of the situation baffles me but otherwise I'm being arbitrary about where one "should" get hold of the situation (if at all possible).

I agree the situation was desperate and awful. The whole Katrina episode is a terrible blot on our nation, and a scary scary thing. But I still cannot accept that deliberating euthanizing, against his will, a man who was not old and who wanted to live, is not downright criminal. I hate the though of being in a hospital. I always feels so helpless there, and at the mercy of the staff. To think someone might decide to euthanize me "for my own good" gives me total nightmares.

Well short of that there is a huge problem even turning mildly obese patients so they don't get bedsores etc. Short staffing over the holidays can make that a nightmare. Bad enough nursing attention levels in some of our purportedly first world hospitals anyway. It really is best if a family member can be allowed to stay round the clock in the room. Some hospitals allow it. If not, waiting room. You need that advocate. Have family members switch off 12 hour shifts. Really. Especially if it is surgery or any potentially serious situation.

Yeah, I have a friend who had gastric bypass surgery after years at 400+ pounds. She would have died the day after the surgery except that her husband and her mother *were* taking turns sitting by her bedside 24/7. So one of them happened to be there in the room when she stopped breathing. The medical staff would never have noticed until it was too late to try to revive her.

Again, these were not people who were Eugenicists -- they were brave, compassionate people in a completely desperate situation. I am amazed that someone WOULD risk their lives to stay behind.

AND . . . often, stories are exaggerated or falsified. But I don't think these people were criminals. Unless you are in THAT bad a situation, you have no clue how you'll react and had the rescue come a week later, they may have been criticized for letting people starve to death and not doing enough to ease pain. In anything but the most extreme situation, however, things like this won't even come up.

There just has to be so much more to this story. Again, these are people who chose to stay, knowing there was a good chance they would die, because desperately ill people needed them. This story as written just does not make much sense in that context.

Edit to add: A thought that leaves me cold: recovering from surgery in the hospital, a disaster striking, and all hospital workers leaving because they know not only do they have not only a very good chance of dying themselves if they stay, but if they make it through it, there's a good chance of having every decision questioned, and if they made bad ones, being charged with a crime that could leave them imprisioned for the rest of their lives. Truthfully, in a disaster, no one knows just how they'll react, and if it comes down to having to ask if a few die to save many more, who really knows how they'll answer.

Wasn't she on a monitor? Every time I've had surgery I've been on one and had I stopped breathing all sorts of alarms would have gone off. I'm glad your friend was ok -- it's scary to think that she could have died for that stupid of a reason.

How did the surgery work out for her?

A quick google finds at least this malpractice attorney talking about how common it is:

http://www.barrylewinlaw.com/Medica...-Patients.shtml

Another issue is that we are so inundated with alleged nutrition information most of our lives that people assume they already know the answer.

I think most people don't go, "Hey, I have a complete vaccuum of information about this and I just realized I've gained a bunch of weight. I'll go get that information." The government policies are often not-quite what people end up eating to be 'healthy'. No, it's that they've had it pounded into them--as much through marketing as genuine schooling--and so they think they already know.

They think that eating pasta and peaches is waaaaaay better than eating a hamburger patty, not because anyone ever uttered that (note: they *would* have, though, if asked!...) but because a life of indoctrination led them to that.

That's really the key to actual 'indoctrination': the body of knowledge you never even think to question, and don't know you don't know.

The reason this matters is, that in a "query for info", many people would find lowcarb -- or find 'bodybuilder advice' which is at least similar on that road -- instead of just the official party line. If you had told me at age 24, when I was ~200# overweight, that the government has one idea, but the crazy bodybuilders have another, I doubt I would have prioritized the government as the expert source. But I never even though to inquire; I thought I knew. Everyone knew. I didn't even have people around me with alternative stories. In my world, everyone was on the same page about the food allegedly healthiest and that would make you skinniest.

A secondary note that ought to be first, though: The www did not explode until 1995, and while I was on it (I was making websites even back then), search engines and massive data were not so common. Today, I google *everything*. Every word I don't get, bizarre questions I have, every interest I have. Back then, that didn't exist. The best you could do is drive to a bookstore and see what they had. If you bought 3 books and they all said the same thing, you certainly never questioned it again.


Aside from that detail, regardless of if this is the case, the much more important issue underlying all this is what drives feeding behaviors. Every animal on the planet self-regulates EXCEPT when given food their body is reactive to or unsuited for. You don't see enormously fat lions in the wild but you see semi-fat ones in captivity fed 'meal'-foods just like housecats (neuter/spay also affects that of course). When a physical body "refuses to give up fat for energy" as they are designed to do, not only making the person fatter but driving them to eat again--and often, due to stress on energy levels, driving them to eat far worse (carbs/sugar are energy-food)--that is the issue here.

It isn't really a question of who's a pig and the "rare exceptions on a forum somewhere who might be exceptions." The same factors that drive people to eat like pigs, underly superfat people not losing weight easily no matter what their eating habits.

A next- or alternative- step, depending on genetics, is a different kind of illness. Skinny people often eat like pigs too frankly. I know whole families who live on fast food. Sometimes one of the kids will be really fat. Everyone else is thin. They're all eating crapfood but only one is getting fat from it. Just like sometimes only one kid has red hair or is very short or tall.

On the other hand, it's entirely possible that when they're 35, they'll be struggling with their diet, while their sister is dying of cancer and their brother has had a heart attack and other brother's an alcoholic. Obesity is just their body's adaptive way of dealing with a lifetime of intake that amounts to a creative form of poisoning IMO, and other bodies have other ways of adapting. At the point where their body reduces or stops their rapid fat-storage, they're likely to end up diabetic or other-diseased.

Now some peoples' bodies apparently allow a pretty massive amount of storage before disease--or 'another' disease besides the dysfunctional regulation of fat release/utilization, anyway--kicks in. We don't know why that is, any more than we know why some people are ridiculously skinny. I was trying to diet down under 400# when my cousin K was in the hospital because her body was eating her organs, as she had no bodyfat and a zillion efforts to gain it the previous years kept failing. Go figure. Same family... different world.


Because prejudice is inculcated in us from youngest ages and it is based on emotion, not reason. So all your reason doesn't dent it.


I should add that this doesn't mean a person never binged, only that they were not doing so sufficiently every day to merit the weight they ended up if math (rather than chemistry) were at issue. Some people really do gain even on reducing plans as mentioned on this thread. But most people just eat like anybody else, gain slowly that way, and occasionally are driven by their body to eat more (usually because the gaining slowly has made their caloric demands higher), and they gain very quickly then.

In the end, the body storing fat is not the problem. Everybody's body stores fat. Even the skinniest person not diseased stores their food as fat to be released as energy. The problem is with some people, the body doesn't give it back as energy like it's supposed to. The fatter the person, possibly the more this is the case.

So person A is all hyper and wants to go to the beach or volunteers to help their buddy move. All the pizza calories are worked off.

Person B has some new fat, has almost no energy whatever, and their body says, "You got no energy--EAT!!"

This is biological. Not a moral deficiency on person B's part; not laziness, not gluttony. Just a difference in how their bodies are operating, is all.


Though I've always been a science freak, I operate in a lot of alternative fields as personal interests. I've seen people who personally know all kinds of things to be true, still assume that anybody who is not "them or their friends" is a fraud for talking about the very same things. Prejudice is emotional, not reasonable.


Welcome to the wonderful world of Disney! We ALL wish that. Fervently. Nobody knows what the answer is. Even the best experts in the world don't know. Many of them know what 'one' answer for 'many or most' people are. Nobody knows what the hell is going on with super morbidly obese people. There is almost no research on these people at all, aside from some related to "statistics post-gastric-bypass".

They know that for a lot of them, lowcarb + exercise works -- or, works "to some degree" or "for awhile". Dr. Jeff Friedman, head geneticist at Rockefeller U, once talked about how gastric bypass and very low calorie intake had dropped massive weight in people. And yet, even locked in a place where eating was known and regulated, even eating only 700 calories a day, after a certain degree of weight loss, *they were still obese*. Their bodies simply did not lose any further weight, even with calorie reduction, and our science is simply not yet developed enough to understand why.

You look around this forum and you see that most very fat people (with exceptions) can walk into lowcarb and lose 120-180#. But the number of people who go very far beyond that, no matter how large they started, is another story. (Slightly larger amounts seems easier for men if observation is any clue, possibly because of more testosterone and lean body mass to begin with, who knows.) So if you go on a diet and you need to lose about 150#, lowcarb (with body-tailored variant/details) is probably going to work. If you need to lose a lot more than that, well, you can probably lose that much, and past that point it may take "something else" besides lowcarb -- and a very long time -- and that's the Disney version where we assume it WILL work. Eventually. Probably. Maybe.


It goes back to feeding behaviors. Humans are essentially in the animal kingdom. Like any other animal, our body is going to drive our feeding behaviors. Our conscious mind can interfere, to varying degrees, for varying lengths of time, but the body is far more powerful and in the end it is going to be the real regulator of feeding behaviors. A person who weighs 300# needs more nutrition than a person who weighs 120#. Their body will drive them to eat more. This only makes them 'eating to satiation' just like the skinny person next to them. Unfortunately when you add in the modern "drug"-like food supply, you get into far more significant issues than merely caloric need.

You really should read 'Good Calories, Bad Calories'. It is a review of a century of research. It's very dense; very good reading skills (and someone nearby to rant at about the content) and time are required. But it is well worth the effort.

There have been feeding experiments. When they put people on certain diets, some people could eat upwards of 10,000 calories a day (and have the munchies at night!). When they fed them meat, even real incentives couldn't get them to eat half that much. They even offered prisoners out of jail early if they'd gain weight, in one. Most people could eat and eat and not gain or not much, and the instant the experiment stopped they rapidly lost whatever they'd gained again (and without any conscious effort it appears). Because their body was turning that food into energy (as is normal) rather than just storing it and "hold onto it" instead.

Conscious intervention's role is mostly in prevention and mitigation of the damage. If a person is not all that overweight and decides to carefully eat well or eat smaller portions of everything, this can be done, within reason. My stepmother is T2 diabetic and she does that. Her metabolism is officially broken, but instead of gaining more weight, her pancreas just broke.

Super fat people may be those with the most astoundingly robust pancreas or something LOL.

I strongly suspect that it may someday turn out that nearly all very morbidly obese people have significant, combined food intolerances, probably to the dominant foods they ate their entire life. If the intolerance was 'more extreme' they'd be diseased instead, with IBS/Celiac/etc. or alternatively -- the 'more extreme' theory may be wrong -- alternatively, if their body did not capture most of the damaging free radicals and protectively store them in fat cells, they would be manifesting those problems instead of fat cell problems.


Yea, that's the million dollar question. We know that dropping insulin and normalizing blood sugar is a hugely important piece. But that is really just one thing. Getting body metabolism to 'heal' and 'work properly' -- instead of merely "be less extremely broken, at least enough to allow some weight loss" which is not the same thing at all -- it's still up in the air. Half the threads on this forum talk about that. Different people's idea for "what will work" for weight loss -- let alone "healing".


You have to know you don't know, in order to ask.

I had a boss who told me about LC once. I attempted to do it promptly and that didn't work out (not even briefly) for home life reasons, but intended to get back to that as soon as my life normalized so I could focus on anything but me and my then-3 year old's daily survival. I moved to another state and got our house set up, was working literally from waking to sleeping and hiring someone to be with my kid. Just around the time I started getting a small handle on my working life, the gluten/lung issues nearly killed me, and a week in the hospital led to the doc who 'prescribed' a lowcarb book. I assume I would have gotten back to LC anyway, but who knows. I had no evidence it worked.


Probably the case.


You have to know you are an addict first. And you have to know to what you are addicted. Even the few people who recognize this, most people think they are addicted to EATING because they're emotional or weak or whatever. They don't always grasp that their body may be genetically intolerant to gluten and their brain is hooked on the dopamines and the reason they're eating donuts instead of broccoli is biochemical not psychological. It takes quite a bit of self education/reading to begin to get some clear idea of these things.

If they knew that "eating meat/eggs and not much else" would not only lose water bloating but also fat cells (at least for most people, at least for some time) and that it would normalize their appetite and drastically reduce their cravings, they might try it. But things are seldom presented to the public this way.


One thing I was going to mention earlier, I think it was to Carne. When you see morbidly obese people out eating everything in sight, there are two factors you have to keep in mind.

1. They are aware of every other person and the fact that every other person is totally aware of what they are eating.

2. You are usually observing them in a special situation and you are not taking this into account.

#2 is important. Many people eat poorly or well, but don't eat so much except once in awhile, but it's just normal life. Then they go out to a restaurant, or go on a cruise, or something else. And they are likely to say, "I spend my whole life worried about food. For this occasion, I refuse to maintain that neurosis. I want to truly have fun and live life and I'm going to eat whatever I want to eat."

And because they have a lot of body to feed, and because they probably have craving/addict-reaction to common food ingredients, and because they are 'making an exception', and because they are surrounded by foods they probably don't even have easy access to most of the time so it's a special circumstance, yada yada yada, they're just going to eat yummy crapfood with abandon.

And onlookers think, "Ha! No wonder they're so huge!" But they fail to see that daily life and "what you eat when you're out to dinner or on a cruise" are not necessarily the same thing -- not even for thin people.


The extremity of it baffles everybody.

The one thing that research makes clear is this: You cannot simply gain a lot of weight (let alone to morbidly, let alone supermorbidly, obese status), let alone keep it on, *even by trying, even by over-feeding*. What goes in your mouth matters, sure, but the larger issue is what goes from your fat cells to your 'energy source' -- vs. staying in fat cells.

Otherwise, fat people would have massive energy. They'd be bouncing off the walls. I mean they'd have more energy than anybody else to draw from. All our olympians would be fat people, with superhuman energy levels to fuel them. But it doesn't work that way.

If we could (I mean science) figure out *how to make fat cells release content as energy* that would be the key.

Controlling insulin/ blood sugar with lowcarb is not about that, but about preventing the ups/downs of blood sugar that are not healthy, preventing the megaresponse of insulin which is dangerous to the pancreas (when it crashes, there's T2 diabetes), and which prevents the body moving into 'fat burning' ("fat-released-as-energy") regulating insulin so there is not a circulating hormonal chemical preventing the use of fat as energy.

Ketogenic lowcarb is about fat-burning; the idea there is that once the body is using ketones/fat as energy instead of glucose, it will start burning yours. And this generally works up front. But the body seems to "adapt" to this over time and, much like some people can live on surprisingly few calories, it turns out some people can apparently live on surprisingly little fat -- and may get most of that from their diet instead of their body.

Haf the threads on eating plans on this forum are focused on how to get the first thing in place (lowcarb) with the second thing in place (fat-burning) "even for those for whom it no longer seems the ideal answer" (like those who need more carbs to feel decent) AND arrange the third, holy grail thing: the 'repair' of metabolism so the food>fat>energy cycle starts working properly again.

The fact that what works for one person may not work for another just hideously complicates everything.

Actually for her the surgery worked out very well. For *three days* in the hospital she stopped breathing on her own - after that initial alarm. But eventually she began breathing again and her weight loss was dramatic. I mean she lost 150 pounds in the first 9 months. Then it slowed down but she continued to lose. She never did get "thin" by official standards. In fact she is still obese by BMI standards and probably always will be. But she went from about 410 pounds to 220 pounds and then stablized there and has maintained that weight for several years now -and says the surgery was the best thing she ever did and she has a totally new lease on life.

Yes! This is, to me, one of the first principles. A proof of this is the relative stability of mammalian weight in the wild. With the exception of hibernators (who aren't really exceptions, they just have a cyclic metabolism that's in a stable pattern), mammals don't gain or lose wildly on the basis of a few hundred calories' difference in current food availability. As you said, otherwise there'd be fat lions.

"It's not the things you don't know what gets you into trouble. It's the things you do know that just ain't so."
- Will Rogers