Tom Nuaghton at the Fathead blog interviews Gary Taubes about his new book:
http://www.fathead-movie.com/index....th-gary-taubes/

Interesting Q&A session, though I admit this exchange depressed me a little bit!

Yup. That depresses me. So I'm going to choose to adhere to the old adage of 'You can't always be right' and assume that as right as Gary often is, he's wrong on this one

I think he's right, having tried to diet off these last 20-30 pounds for forever now. It takes some pretty extreme measures to move them.

They say that you put on extra fat cells 3 times during your lifetime--as an infant, puberty and pregnancy. If you put on too many at those times, you will never lose the fat cells but only shrink them to a smaller size. That is what is disturbing about all the overweight children.

So, you can lose weight, to a point, but those fat cells will never go away. That is, without liposuction or surgery.

If it makes anyone a little happier, 20 lbs overweight looks a lot better as you age. The face naturally thins with age and the extra 20 might be where it doesn't look TOO bad -- like hips or butt.

I hate having a fat face.

I have to disagree with Taubes on one point. We can do something about it. But not with diet alone. In bodybuilding circles, they use clenbuterol and growth hormone, to name a few, to grow leaner independently of diet. Never mind that the same people who do that still believe it's all about calories. But I digress. If Taubes really wanted to grow as lean as he wanted, he could. But then, maybe Taubes doesn't want to look like he's advising people to do something illegal or immoral. Yet I can't help but note that he is telling us that the moral thing to do (semi-starve himself) doesn't actually work.

Well I was a chubby at puberty, so I think there's a liposuction in my future. Not to be defeatist or anything, but even when I was in the best shape of my life, dancing several hours a day, 6 days a week, and by NO means fat, in fact pretty hot, I still thought I had too much body fat around tummy and thighs. It could be just body image issues. Once I get close to goal, I'm going to have some of those extra fat cells sucked out. So they can't reinflate.

I think cellulite is a separate problem? Need to do more research.

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I'm more disturbed by the idea of everyone trying to attain a 'perfect' body. What's wrong with us all being different sizes as long as we're healthy. The overweight category of the bmi range is the healthiest with the lowest mortality rates, that's what I'm aiming for. So I agree with Gary that we can't all be a size 8 - and we don't need to be.

I think that this idea that everyone has to strive for skinny is ultimately destructive. I know several young girls (16 & 17) of normal size - the upper end of the healthy bmi range, but their lives are completely overtaken by diets and obsessing about losing weight and controlling food. They are convinced that they are fat and hate not conforming to the images of super skinny-ness that they see every day. They tell themselves that once they get to this 'ideal' size their lives will start and they will be happy. Sometimes you see it on the forum, someone will post saying they're grossly fat, and when you check their stats, they have a BMI of 23 or something similar.

Lee

That is depressing, especially when your fat cells will forever tell your brain you need to eat. That means the drive to over eat will never go away? Yeah, that's depressing. Not to mention the saggy skin some of us get from losing a great deal of weight. Still, hungry fat cells and droopy skin are better then remaining fat.

I think that's a wonderful point to make; who is to say what is extra, and how many of us could ever attain the degree of skinniness our current society demands?

Obviously some people, like Gary Taubes, feels thwarted; but he continues to make the very good point that even if we cut our carbs and don't lose "enough" weight, it might be better to accept it than to endanger our health with unreasonable demands, or feel badly about our inability to keep up a grinding regimen that can't be sustained.

Remember, those models on the magazine covers are airbrushed, often down two sizes! Their bumps are smoother over, their arms thinned, their hips reduced beyond normal pevic bones.

When professionals aren't good enough; we've reached a ridiculous point.

Fat cells die like other cells. 10% of them die every year and can be replaced by new ones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/h...arch/05fat.html

I think the best thing we can do is observe people. Some thin people look horrendous in what they wear, but I've seen obese people look beautiful. If we watch people and get a feel for why some people look beautiful, we may apply those things to ourselves. For me, I just loved the clothes that Louise Jefferson wore on The Jeffersons and also the clothes Bea Arthur wore on Golden Girls. I loved the soft flow of the fabrics and the colors. But then look at how Roseanne Barr dressed in her sitcom and I certainly didn't want to emulate that!

Nancy, is it that the fat cells CAN be replaced or ARE? I always heard that the number never goes away.

According to that article, they're replaced with shiny new ones! Bleh. Or you can get lipo or nowadays they're freezing them to death too.

And... if you gain a lot of weight, you will make new ones.

Oh crap! I hope that they aren't replaced after lipo...that's my fallback position! And there's this CoolSculpt procedure available now...if I still have chicken wings for arms, I wonder if sufficient strength training would resolve that, the procedure is not cheap...

Thanks for the informative article, Nancy.

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I unwittingly stumbled upon an pro-ana channel on YouTube today, while looking for a show about a model doing a crash diet to become a "size 0" as a media experiment. I flipped through some of the other documentary videos on the channel and was appalled. Girls starving themselves from a size 8 to a size 2...or 0...or 00 - what difference does it make? How different can you really look with a 2 fewer inches on your waist? For many of them, it was the difference between looking smoking hot and seeing ribs.

Now, I'm by no means satisfied with how my body looks right now, but I've come to accept that this is about all I'm going to get from diet. I may drop another 10/15 pounds, if I'm lucky. I've moved on to toning exercises to firm up what the children stretched. And, yes, I'll be more than a little upset if I'm stuck at a size 10 for the rest of my life, but it sure beats the 22/24 I was in when I started. The idea of pushing for a 2 or a 4? It seems almost impossible, and definitely unhealthy.

Back to the interview, I think a lot of what he said depends on where you are. Most of the women here have gone through 2 of the 3 fat creating stages, many of us all 3. A 15 year old embarking on a weight-loss mission, though, they have much better odds...