![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinSo, there's this crazy study out that says that obese teenagers' metabolisms aren't affected by moderate amounts of aerobic exercise in the same way that thin teenagers' metabolisms are... that while the obese teenagers gain important health benefits from exercising, their metabolisms don't kick into high fat-burning gear and thus they don't tend to lose weight from it.
It's almost like two people could eat the same things, exercise the same, and have the same habits and yet have entirely differently shaped bodies based on uncontrollable inherited conditions! And to get even crazier, it's almost as though those habits have a bigger impact on one's health than what size and shape one's skin is in!
Crazy!
Usually when somebody brings up the immutability of obesity in a conversation like this, someone chimes in with "Maybe there are some people who are fat because of a gland problem or something but that's super rare and it doesn't account for most people who are fat." That's a Conversation We Won't Be Having Here, but just to be clear: I'm not saying that most fat people have a problem. I'm saying most fat people have a different metabolism than skinny people do.
Not a worse metabolism. A different one.
One that seems to be shared by a large proportion of the population, which suggests that it's not entirely inimical to the survival of individuals or the species as a whole.
What a world, what a world.
It's almost like two people could eat the same things, exercise the same, and have the same habits and yet have entirely differently shaped bodies based on uncontrollable inherited conditions! And to get even crazier, it's almost as though those habits have a bigger impact on one's health than what size and shape one's skin is in!
Crazy!
Usually when somebody brings up the immutability of obesity in a conversation like this, someone chimes in with "Maybe there are some people who are fat because of a gland problem or something but that's super rare and it doesn't account for most people who are fat." That's a Conversation We Won't Be Having Here, but just to be clear: I'm not saying that most fat people have a problem. I'm saying most fat people have a different metabolism than skinny people do.
Not a worse metabolism. A different one.
One that seems to be shared by a large proportion of the population, which suggests that it's not entirely inimical to the survival of individuals or the species as a whole.
What a world, what a world.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Re: oh so carefully...
on 2010-02-20 05:20 pm (UTC)I used the word "inherited", though, and I'll stick with it. And twin studies and adoption studies and studies of fat mothers who change their own dietary habits before having children and then make sure their children get off to the right start suggest that unless there are voodoo lipids being inserted into voodoo bloodstreams than "not necessarily genetic" looks quite a bit like "not only genetic".
I apologize, I'd link to some but as mentioned in comments above, I'm still rebuilding my bookmarks. I wish I had them, because you can get an interesting education by reading the news articles reporting these results. The press reporting on science usually distills things down to sound bytes and loses some resolution in doing so, but never so much as when they need to make Science! fit our preconceptions. And it doesn't help when the researchers encourage them with caveats about "THIS DOESN'T LET THE FAT PEOPLE OFF THE HOOK!" An article pointing out that overweight people statistically outlive thin people will end with "BUT THEY SHOULD LOSE WEIGHT BECAUSE SERIOUSLY IT'S NOT HEALTHY AND THEIR LIVES ARE AT RISK".
Bwah?
If anything, the research that I've read seems to underscore how easy it is to push your system towards insulin resistance (rising prevalence of diabetes) and fat storage, and how hard to impossible it is to reverse that process,
This is one reason why fat acceptance is of tantamount importance, because one of the easiest and hardest-to-retract ways to push your body towards fat storage we know of is to try to alter your weight downwards. the kid with the "fast metabolism" who can eat whatever she wants and be rail-skinny one day decides her belly sticks out just a tad too much and decides to diet and exercise it away... and not only does she fail but she goes from being a skinny teenager to a chubby adult.
Though our society typically blames it on weak-willed fatties breaking down and binging, the vast majority of people who do get their bodies to lose appreciable weight (below the natural variation their metabolism indicates) end up gaining back more and finding the next weight loss attempt is all the more difficult.
Even people who risk their lives altering their GUI tract surgically hit the same plateau as people who diet conventionally, and eventually for many of them the plateau becomes a wall and they end up bouncing back, too.
Changes in our collective diet might account for some of the collective changes in our body composition, but the rise in obesity corresponds suspiciously well to the rise in "health consciousness", with "health" understood to mean exercising and dieting enough to fit an ever-shrinking definition of thin.
and losing weight is definitely not as simple as "eat less now,
What is it as simple as? If you can answer that question you can go print your own money. You can advertise the only weight loss solution that could scream in big bold letters "RESULTS TYPICAL! THIS WORKS FOR ANYONE WHO TRIES IT AND IT WILL WORK FOR YOU!" You could get Oprah to sign over the keys to her kingdom.