The healthy eating concept.

Sorry, not true. People put on weight because they eat too much. Exercise (good though it is) does not play that great a part in weight loss of the diet is not right.

No, wrong, it's human nature and the nature of all mammals to eat when they can so excercise must be the sustaining and developmental factor, not an innate capacity to control diet.

A person can stay slim and be in-active by controlling their diet but they will be mal-nourished in some way.

It's both, obviously. Eat more calories than you expend with activity (whether that be pounding away in the gym or sitting in front of the TV) and you will gain weight. Do the reverse and you will lose.

Best way to lose weight (if you're fat) is to cut your intake a little, and exercise to prevent your basal metabolic rate from falling to compensate for the reduced intake. Dieting alone can work, but they are really hard to stick to and once you give up the weight starts piling on again. Sustained weight loss of 1 - 2lb per week should be the goal. These ridiculous programmes suggesting you can lose half a stone in a week should not be taken seriously because that rate of loss cannot be sustained.

If you're normal weight, exercise means you can eat pretty much what you want and keep your current weight. Having said that, slim people who train regularly are not usually the types to pig out on a KFC family bucket on their own.

Darren's right that it is human nature to eat when we can, but he is mistaken that exercise is the developmental factor (whatever that means!) We've evolved (and that's another thread!) to live through periods of relative starvation - stone age man was a hunter gatherer - so with the 365 days a year of readily available food it's not surprising there's an obesity epidemic.

It means that people develope by exercising and retard themselved by dieting. You're saying nothing and pretending you're right, you're not, people put on weight because they don't exercise, eating too much is just that, eating to much, there's no precedent in nature for having eaten too much so it's clear that people put on weight because they don't exercise. You agree that it's human nature to eat when we can so by proxy you profess with your opinion that it's human nature to be half-way over-weight.

The comments against my premise can be characterised in this metaphor:

The tiger was skewered on a branch from having jumped near trees to much.

I think what Wrighty is trying to say; please forgive me if I'm wrong Wrighty, is that food has never been as available, as cheap and as processed as it is today in the western world. A compounding factor for the rise in obesity and the associated health problems is that many adults now have jobs that are mainly sedentary.

Humans are able to fast for fairly long periods with few ill effects due to our history of having to hunt for food, and it not being as available for our very early ancestors. Therefore when these ancestors did get food, they ate as much as they could due to not knowing when the next meal would come. We are quite likely to still have some of that wired into our hardware, but we no longer have to hunt for food, nor grow and tend our own crops. We are therefore taking in more calories than we are using, hence weight gain.

As a personal anecdote, I managed to lose 2 stones in weight at Weightwatchers, eating good volumes of healthy, home-made food without having to do any extra exercise. I'm not advertising Weightwatchers; I am just stating that we can eat healthily, lose weight, not get malnourished and still not have to sweat it out in a gym 3 or 4 times a week!

Darren, what planet do you come from? Your tiger 'metaphor' is complete nonsense as far as I can see. A bit like Eric Cantona's seagull chasing the trawler.

Karen sums it up perfectly - most people now 'work' by sitting at a computer rather than by chopping down trees. We're hardwired (i.e. our physiological make-up is to eat as much as possible in periods of plenty, to save for periods of famine) to eat lots and now food is available cheaply, with high calorific (and low nutritional) value, 365 days a year, we'll get fat - if we don't exercise and watch what we eat.

Exercise is a relatively modern (in evolutionary terms) phenomenon. I suspect people have only exercised for about 100 years as this is the rough timescale that food, in western/european society has been abundant.

If a man runs around for six months and finds enough food to sustain himself then finds a cove that is full of oysters, that he likes, so he stays to eat them and becomes fat, why is he fat?

Because he didn't excercise enough.

He's genetically pre-disposed to eat when he can and he did that so that's a success.

The sustaining factor, excercise, was not employed here because the man's pre-disposition to eat becomes the over-riding motivation.

I've been giving this concept some further thought and now I think that I can provide a reason for your confusion. Because we're community based mammals we have to have mechanisms in place to deal with each other and success in a group situation can be measured by the amount of influence that an individual has. A good way to gain influence, and maske weakness or failure, is by convincing people to understand concepts in the same way you do and to convince them to see solutions to problems in the same way that you do because then they will not question your solutions to problems and the amount of successful solutions that you provide will grow while you can behave in an easier to maintain mechanical fasion.

So if a person becomes fat they've succeeded and if they can convince people they've become fat because they've eaten too much then that's a further success because it hides the truth, allows the person to become more effective by becoming more delusional, and means that when other people see other fat people they will be inclined to think the reason for the fat being present is because the person ate too much and at the same time think of the person who explained it to them, who then gains further importance within the group and probably more chances to breed.

I think that if taken down to the kernel level that their are few categories that all of human actions are motivated from and I think most of them are termed as being negative when they manifest, noticably, on an interpersonal level. One of those is deceit and most things that are about other people are motivated by a desire to deceive for the reasons that I've mentioned, that it allows people to have control of their future successes and build a source of growing success.

So success in a sense, here, is brought from a state of retardation and provision of deceit. It's an horrible aspect of human nature that even altruism is about deceit, because it convinces people to think like the altruistic person because it brings reward and when they become altruistic gives them opportunity to think about the person who demonstrated altruism to them.

Some people don't do it though and they become the saints, prophets, buddahas and other powerful but restained people through-out history, who fundamentally refuse to gain from the natural motivations that exist at the kernal level but instead seek a truth that encompases more than a way to fulfil desire.

-------------------------------

Why is tiger skewered on a branch?

Because he jumped onto it.

Oh well, medical science and physiology will obviously have to bow to your superior knowledge then Darren. And I will bow out from this thread

So will I. I have no clue what Darren is going on about.

Well, that's me done. Can't think of a reply to that one because I don't understand a word of it. I'm off to work on my TMA for my Human Biology course...

A person rides a motorcycle for one-hundred thousand miles, does the motorcycle become less efficient because the person has filled it with petrol a number of time?

No, the engine wears because it is in use.

So does a person become fat because they fill themselves with food, no, they become fat because they don't excercise enough which they are designed to do.

It's not open to debate if you follow evolutionary theory because that rule was in place before people came along and as such is not open to interpretation.

Mammals are designed to eat as much as they can while performing physical activities.

Tell people to take second best and diet, it works if they eat little enough, but that's what it is; second best.

I still have no clue what Darren is going on about, but, for entertainment's sake here goes.

How does the motorcycle analogy work? Engines wear out. People get old. What does that have to do with getting fat?

Let's reverse your argument. You state that a person becomes fat because they're not exercising enough. Does that mean that the poor kids in Ethiopia/Somalia/wherever the latest humanitarian disaster is are underweight because they're running marathons twice a day? Or is it, like most people believe, because they don't have enough to eat?

As far as I can tell, Darren seems to be suggesting that deceit is an advantageous human trait, and that the presentation of fatness as evidence of success (opulence) rather than as evidence of failure (laziness) is an expression of this deceit which has become a widespread meme to which we have succumbed. (Apologies Darren if I have this wrong.)

I can see how deception could be a selected trait, although I don’t share Darren’s rather gloomy perspective of ‘altruism as deception’ – the fact that altruism may be reciprocated surely doesn’t characterize it as deceptive. It occurs to me though that with opulence increasingly taking on negative connotations like greed and environmental damage, the meme may switch around to presenting fatness as the result of relatively desirable laziness!

In terms of a memetic perspective, there’s some quite interesting work on the spread (sorry) of obesity across social networks which goes beyond simple, intuitive peer group effects. http://christakis.med.harvard.edu/pdfs/078.pdf

Back to the physiology – why does weight pile back on almost instantly when you start eating normally again after a diet?!

>>Back to the physiology – why does weight pile back on almost instantly when you start eating normally again after a diet?!

If you diet, without exercising, you will lose weight but at the same time your basal metabolic rate (BMR) will decrease to compensate for the relative lack of dietary calories. As soon as you revert to your normal food intake you're automatically eating more than your now reduced BMR needs, and hence you'll store the excess as fat, put the weight back on, and so it continues...

Sustained weight loss needs to be very gradual, and you need to exercise to keep the BMR up, despite the reduced calories.

From an evolutionary perspective; we are decended from mammals who were similar to us and they in turn are decended from animals that were similar to them who all had to strive to survive. That's the basis of our existence and the source of humanity. We're built to survive under situations of extreme deprivation which means we have to deal with food very efficiently, which we do, by storing reserves in the form of fat. While I'm not suggesting that the presentation of fat is success, that could be a cultural development, I do state that having gained fat is a success itself, only because we are designed to eat more than we need, alone, and because that design is present it's the case that becoming fat is alone the result of not having excercised enough.

problem-->is fragile-->needs to move to find food and to escape predators-->ancestors have suffered hardship-->is designed to survive hardship by storing fat-->is required to eat to survive-->creatures with strong appetite sense survive-->?Could appetite be a sense?-->eats more than is required-->continues to move-->survives.

So the item that's missing here for many people who become fat is excersise so:

People become fat because they don't excercise.

Unless you don't subscribe to evolutionary practice when people might become fat because they're destined to be that way.

And yes I feel thet deceit is one of a very small number of real emotions that we have from which other emotive actions are developed for personal gain. So I'm altruistic because others have deceived me into understanding that it's a necessary and good way to behave and in turn they have been deceived and should you be able to follow the trail of deception, into the past, then one individual, human or not, would be found who understood that because he suffered some weakness, perhaps, or saw an opportunity to gain power to survive and gain he would have to convice others that altruism was a good way to live. These concepts, like altruism, are bought by people who are willing to sacrifice much of their lives to a path and then follow that path. They're bought by very strong and desperate individuals who are motivated for some reason to have influence more than they're motivated to take the tangible or what-ever is desireable and I think that the individual who introduced altruism began the process of it's development with deceptive motivations. Imagine deceit is a kernal, that was the area that the individual I mentioned began to develope altruism. The individual who developed altruism became successful because he created a concept which others shared and felt was good but he was deceptive because he developed it for personal gain. He became more successful because as the concept became more prevalent his very essence, in a sense, became shared through-out the mammal tree of life, further than his genes would reach, as it continued on-ward.

Darren writes: “I do state that having gained fat is a success itself...”

But success isn’t absolute; it’s context dependant. The reason we can store excess energy intake as fat now is that in our ancestral past the ability to do this improved fitness (the evolutionary kind obviously!), so gaining weight in the environment that existed then could reasonably be considered success. But in a modern environment which has been changed by human culture in a very short period of time, this ability may not improve fitness anymore. If it doesn’t, then gaining weight can’t reasonably be described as success, anymore than adrenalin-induced insomnia after spending the evening playing video games can.

Darren writes: “and yes I feel that deceit is one of a very small number of real emotions that we have from which other emotive actions are developed for personal gain.”

That’s interesting – what other emotions make up this palette of primary emotions?

Darren writes: “So I'm altruistic because others have deceived me into understanding that it's a necessary and good way to behave and in turn they have been deceived and should you be able to follow the trail of deception, into the past, then one individual, human or not, would be found who understood that because he suffered some weakness, perhaps, or saw an opportunity to gain power to survive and gain he would have to convince others that altruism was a good way to live.”

This reads like a creation myth! I don’t think there was any such devious individual, just behaviour that very gradually evolved in populations over a very long period of time. ‘Altruistic deception’ is almost an oxymoron it seems to me. The fact that altruism doesn’t fit with a naive view of evolution doesn’t mean that it must really be based on something a bit more ‘red in tooth and claw’. Altruism could be a selected trait through helping kin or by encouraging reciprocation. Where is the deception in this?

If you intend to mis-quote at least show enough academic etiquette to put a binder between your quote and its source.

Your last pargraph is an ascertion of nothing, you ascert that nothing happened to make emotion evolve into the complex and easily broken psychology that humans share today.

This forum is not designed to support quotations un-yet users here are still doing it, forum etiquette, this time, has been shown disregard.

Yes it's true that we store resources as fat and that's what we have evolved to do,to survive, so that in itself is a success, having not used the fat is not a success because we are also required to obtain our food by physical effort by evolotionary design so unless a person can work in an office, eat as much as they want and not gain weight or only desire enough food to survive in that context then a person becomes fat because they do not excercise enough.

Atticus writes:

"This reads like a creation myth!"

There here I tell you, there here! They surround us, there are trying to get us.

Good lordy LOL.

Check the price of fruit, veg, and whole foods, then check the price of a big of crisps and a kebab. Being overweight has become just as much a sign of social status than it has one of anything from being over-sedentary, to gluttonous, to just having some glandular disorder. Seriously I'm starting to think it'd be easier to manufacture my own muesli and organic produce than keep buying it from the shops! But I digress.

On obesity and diet:
If you sit in a chair most of the day, and you eat the caloric intake of a marathon runner, you will gain. But so many factors go into play on how many calories you really ought to be eating, and what is best for you, that saying it's just a matter of "eating too much" or "not exercising enough" is insufficient. You could eat just one meal at McDonalds in an entire day and end up capping out on what your body needs. What's in the food is just as important as how much of it you eat, for example. Genetics (huge factor), frame size, muscle mass, level of activity, thyroid functioning, metabolic rate, ability to properly deconstruct glucose.. it's all part-and-parcel of why we lose and gain weight. So it's honestly no wonder that so many diets end up failing! Different people have different needs.

Follow a balanced diet, try fat reduction, caloric reduction, carbohydrate reduction, salt reduction, what have you. Play about. See what works for your body and stick to it. And make exercise fun if your life otherwise doesn't require much getting out. Buy a trampoline and bounce around like a kid. Make up jump-rope rhymes to study by. Or just take the stairs instead of the lift. Whatever appeals to you and gets the job done.

Darren writes: “Your last pargraph is an ascertion of nothing, you ascert that nothing happened to make emotion evolve into the complex and easily broken psychology that humans share today.”

My assertion is that you are anthropomorphising a long, complex and unguided process in the way that simplistic creation myths do.

On the fat question I just think that obesity as a symptom of failure of some modern cultures to address evolved human physiology and psychology may be a more helpful way of looking at the issue than characterizing fat acquisition as a success and exercise levels as a failure.

If you want me to respond to the problem you seem to have with my etiquette then you’re going to have to rephrase it because I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re saying.

Nimmy writes: “There here I tell you, there here! They surround us, there are trying to get us. Good lordy LOL.”

I know you have a gift for theological rhetoric nimmy and I really do appreciate you following me around embellishing my posts with it, but if you’re after a job as my acolyte I’m afraid I’m not in the religion business.

Watch it, there's one behind you!

Snow_White mentioned certain medical conditions that can lead to weight gain and I can accept that these things might sit outside of my assumption but nothing else. At least most people are not evolved to circumstance or they would function well in those circumstances with regard to physiological energy resource management without effort and that's not the case.

I haven't claimed that excersise is a failure, I've made my point and you step back each time, look at the situation that's prevelent like Snow_White has done and more or less assume Kellogues leads people to become fat.

Why is a lion fat?

Why is a mouse fat?

Why is a person fat?

A mouse is fat because it sits in a cage and eats, it's fat because it doesn't excersise.

Why is a dog fat?

A dog's fat because it doesn't excersise enough but despite the evidence you claim atticus that a person is fat because they don't take into account their nature and make redress to deal with that situation and Snow_White thinks people are fat because healthy food is expensive.

It may be the case that these issues accelerate the process of weight gain but they are just issues and not a cause.

I love riddles. Now let me see...

The lion is fat because it ate the dog.

The dog is fat because it ate the mouse.

The mouse is fat because someone locked it in a cage!

Human culture to blame again Darren! ;)

Nimmy writes: “Watch it, there’s one behind you!”

Yes I know. Tell you what, as there’s no job, how about I pay you to go away? ;)

There will not be a time when a philosopher's assumptions and claims afford him domain over all things that sit outside of his capacity to influence them, so that he could win a war without sharing a word, but if that time comes your wild claims might also ring true atticus. 

Food and water are fuel for the cells to maintain life.  If only the media

would encourage this basic idea.

If the blood sugar is low then the individual can become dizzy and lose concentration,

among other things.

For example in an exam loss of concentration can result in pass or failure.  If in a cold  

or hot climate excessive conditions can result in illness. 

Educating the public to think of diet being the key to health is surely the

positive way not just weight gain or loss.

How complicated.....and eating should be such a simple thing.  The way we eat now has more to do with social and cultural habits than anything else...most people eat to fill themselves up instead of eating to fuel their bodies and eat to a clock rather than eating when they are hungry.  The amount of sugar and grains contained in processed foods makes people feel hungry all the time (see Dr Robert Lustig for evidence) and leads to more eating and obesity.

We only have a brain and nervous system because we need to move (Dr Daniel Wolpert) so movement is an essential part of our day.  Exercise in and of itself is not an effective way of burning calories for weight loss....if you run at 5 miles an hour for an hour the average person will burn 470 (ish calories) so you would need to run for 4 hours to burn off the average daily intake of 1800 calories or more if you are a man so even if you exercised three times a week running for an hour you would still be overweight.  The point is not to be sedentary and then exercise twice a week but to be moving almost constantly which raises your metabolic rate for when you do rest. 

The reason the "advice" around healthy foods is so complicated is because the food industry is interested in your money, not your health.  Personally, I follow a paleo diet because it makes sense to me-I dont do it to lose weight, I do it to stay healthy and it works and the only reason its not more popular is because there is no money to be made from it-no shakes, no points, no nonsense about good and bad foods and no memberships to pay.  If you want to lose weight ditch the sugar and the wheat and if you want to be healthy think meat and two veg.  Simples!