In the 60s in the UK, 1 or 2% were obese. By the early 70s it was around 3.5%, 8% in 1980,15% in 1993, 26% in 2010 and 28% in 2019. Post lockdown, it's probably over 30% now.
Even simpler is this graph from the CDC showing the increase of type 2 diabetes in the US since the 1950s. The CDC now estimates that nearly 1/3 of the population has diabetes or pre-diabetes (or 1/2 of the adult population).
Almost everyone knows the dietary advice. At this point, the PTB need to stop doubling down on advice that doesn't work, and fundamentally reassess the advice we've been given. Either the advice is nearly impossible to follow or it doesn't work.
Human's have not fundamentally changed over the last century. I am 3rd generation white collar, car driver but the first generation to become obese.
It's mad, isn't it. I was just about to do a rant on the subject of diabetes advice.
The NHS is still putting forward arguments along these lines:
"Becoming obese is all down to calories, so as long as you reduce your calories, it doesn't matter what method you use to do it. We therefore suggest you stick to the high-carbohydrate, low-fat, calorie-controlled diet because it should work as well as anything else. And don't forget that carbohydrates are the best fuel for your body."
They follow this up with various dark aspersions that sow fear and doubt in the reader's mind (particularly about any diet that involves dietary fat) thus ensuring that he/she doesn't even consider eating in any other way.
The way I see it, even if they're right, the counterargument is something like this:
LCHF advantages:
You effortlessly lose weight and dramatically reduce your risk of developing metabolic syndrome. You do not need to count or measure anything, or feel guilt about what's on your plate. Your general health improves, your blood lipid profile improves, and you feel better.
LCHF disadvantages:
Nutritionists will shout at you and tell you that, despite looking and feeling healthy, you are in fact dicing with death.
Advantages of calorie-controlled high-carb diets compared to LCHF:
(insert rolling ball of tumbleweed here)
Disadvantages of calorie-controlled high-carb diets compared to LCHF:
You become fat and ill. If you are diabetic your remaining lifespan will be nasty, brutish and short.
Don’t muck around TheAwfulToad say what you really feel 😂. I absolutely agree with every word you say. Is this really about bribery and corruption and the value and power of the food industry or have we all become brainwashed into this bling like sheep ?
Bribery and corruption probably explains half of it. I reckon the Dunning-Kruger Effect explains the other half.
You can't blame the general public too much. Propaganda is very effective, and governments are good at propaganda. It's natural to want to believe what experts say, because, well, it's a lot of trouble to go and figure out stuff for yourself, from scratch. Unfortunately, that means that experts can say pretty much anything and the public will believe them, even when it's blatantly obvious that it's not working out.
Maybe it did and still does depend on which so called expert has the ear (or personal mobile number) of the most influential decision maker. A strategically placed droplet of information can quite easily turn into a tidal wave.
I tend to agree. There are far more sugars available to us now that there were in the early 50s, and we are encouraged by advertisements everywhere we look; even on our phones we can't get away from them.
Sugary, carb rich puddings, cakes, pies, ice creams, breaded everything in the supermarkets.
The increase in the highly processed goods with their preservatives, also.
Those are scary and very revealing figures Subtle_badger and perhaps a reason for us all to forgive ourselves a little. It seems pretty clear to me that it has more to do with the increase in sugars and sweeteners rather than any real focus on inactivity. Certainly those of us who remember the 60s have probably also gone through a wide range of fitness and activity types. Have any of these truly made a significant difference, the answer for most of us is almost certainly no. But in my case the realisation of the harm of hidden sugars has been a revelation, but unfortunately only recently. I now regard myself as active or at least semi active. But that alone would not allow me to lose weight. To successfully reach a healthy me, changing my lifestyle in terms of the food choices I make is the only way. What do you and others think?
In terms of exercise- it makes sense that we aren’t going to see weight loss if we reach for a Mars or a smoothie or glucose drink to compensate the energy we have just burned off….
Listening to recent DietDoctor podcasts and comparing to the recent MyFitnessPal blog entries is bizarre.
It’s like DD makes sense and MFP is just nonsense. How can MFP encourage you to eat a bit of sugar if you get keto flu symptoms- you need to consume some extra salt not sugar! Anyway… thank goodness for the more rational advice here on this forum.
Someone (Jason Fung?) described giving sugar to someone with keto flu, is like giving alcohol to someone suffering from delirium tremens. It will alleviate the symptoms, sure, but set you right back to square one.
Salts help, but it's not the complete cure. You have to power through the hangrys and it took me several months to get my athletic "performance" (🤭 - I am not an athlete) back as I became fully keto adapted.
The people who design and market those gadgets/apps know buggerall about fitness, physiology, diet, etc.
Their goal is to sell a product, not to actually help people eat right and become fitter. To that end, they can write absolutely anything they like, as long as it sounds vaguely plausible, and people will be OK with that.
I work in the industry and we have no choice but to pander to people's obsession with calories. We used to get endless emails complaining that our calorie readouts weren't "accurate". We solved this problem by making the calorie readout extremely optimistic (ie., it's about 30% higher than it really ought to be). The complaints stopped.
Are you talking about exercise equipment? I always assumed they bumped up the calories anyway, because people picked the machine that gives them the most calorie burn. Even without complaints, they want their machines to be the most popular ones in the gym, so they gym buys more and replaces or repairs the worn out kit.
There's a sort of arms race in the industry to see who can display the most exaggerated calorie readout. You can now do 10 minutes on the elliptical at level 1 while playing with your phone and gossiping with your mate on the next machine, and still be reliably informed that you've burned 200 calories
Pretty sure it's perfectly fine because it goes along with a serving size being 2/3 of the package and 0 carbs in that serving. Not to mention "no added sugar". /s
I think this is 100% true. My "fat" picture I use to show my weightloss journey was taken the day after I cycled from London to Oxford, over 100km. I doubt I would have been any heavier if I hadn't been exercising at all; for example,I wouldn't have eaten the two buns that fuelled my ride.
Hidden sugars are less of a fixture for me. I have always read ingredient labels.
Hi Subtle_badger i have similar pictures and similar stories. I road Lands End to John O’Groats at a starting weight of 22 stone. A finishing weight over something a in the 19 stones, but that really is the exception. Exercise alone for me does not help me lose weight, it just helps me to feel better about myself. I have only recently started to read labels. 👍x
I'm also a cyclist, by necessity mainly- I don't drive, don't even know how, nor want to know how, ever. I used to do some long distance cycling events for fun but not so much these days. When I don't cycle somewhere I walk. And I run on a regular basis for exercise, not for transport purposes.
I believe it's true that a lot of people and apps overestimate the calorie burn from exercise.
But I also think that Dave's story above, about presumably exercising extensively everyday to get from the bottom to the top of the UK on a bike (well done Dave! I bet some bits were very hilly.....) shows us that if you exercise daily and work it into your routine consistently it can have quite a big impact on weight management.
I think there is a danger of downplaying the role of exercise in weight-management too much....
In my personal experience weigh gain is a lot to do with eating the wrong foods as I easily can gain weight whilst running 10k 3 times a week and walking everywhere in-between. But for weight-loss or weight management I find I need to be doing cardio AND (and I agree it's probably the more important factor) eating the right foods.
So food is the problem but food and exercise are the answer
Hi Professor-Yaffle hats off to you for your eco choice of transport. I agree with your points and sentiments and yes LEJOG was and remains one of the best but most painful things I have ever done. I still thought no of place like Cornwall, Dartmoor, Brecon Beacons, Chap, and Berridale Braize with horror (Just to name a few) 😥😂. Exercise for me and and many I’m sure, is so important in terms of its motivation and wellbeing benefits. I’m sure it does a lot to n terms of maintenance but unless taken to extreme does not significantly produce the calorific deficit that you can achieve and maintain with healthy eating. On my ride I was probably averaging between 7000-9000 calories per day and exhaustion contributed to me not eating as much as I needed in fairness and two weeks was more than enough. The trouble with this is that it does nothing to train your body and mind to eat better and once the exercise stopes or significantly reduces the weight returns.
I agree totally that both are important but in terms of weight loss food is absolutely the most important consideration. 👍
7000-9000 calories daily does sound excessive and obviously you were engaging in something quite extraordinary at the time. I read that on the Tour de France it used to be customary to drink a hell of a lot of wine to fuel the journey. You must have had a very sore bum afterwards by the way? How many days did it take? And yes obviously that calorie burn is not sustainable in most people’s "real" life situations.
Just because exercise is something I'm quite fanatical about I'm going to say this in appreciation of exercise for weight-loss;
I'm a pretty small woman with a BMR of about 1260 according to standard calculations. Knock off at least 100 calories because I have a medical condition. Because I'm small I burn less calories when active than a larger person. My calorie burn through daily activity and exercise (averaged over 2021) is 913 per day. So my exercise calorie burn is about, what 40%? of my total expenditure (if we believe our smart devices are in any way accurate🤷♀️).
I don't think my exercise is extreme, I just use my body to get from A to B, rather than a car, and I do structured cardio at a higher level than the recommended minimum for an able bodied person to maintain basic good health, but not to excess. And yet my exercise calories end up not too far off half of my daily expenditure..... sounds important to me.
I’m not a calorie counter at all but it still makes sense that if I reduced my activity to say, a little walk to the car in the morning and then a few trips to make a coffee in the office, I would need to eat much less regardless of macros to maintain or lose weight. I’d also be less hungry in theory. I do love food and for me, eating less because I’m hardly moving about would be 😭
I very strongly agree that one also has to get one's diet right and for some people maybe a "good" diet on it's own might be enough to manage weight (I do not believe I am one of them)..... for those people though, I would say add in some exercise and feel better - and I suspect I am completely preaching to the converted here Dave. 😊
I also think that there is no reason exercise needs to be a fad that is stopped once desired weight is achieved if we can encourage people to make it a natural part of their daily lives. Hence it becomes a constant, in the same way a healthy diet needs to a constant (rather than periods of low calorie followed by weigh gain followed by low calorie etc.).
When it comes to weight loss, yes, diet is the winning factor! But I suppose I'm conscious I don't want to be seen to be advocating throwing out the runners up (exercise and good sleep) with the bathwater (bad diet). Exercise does help with weight loss, just a bit less than dietary changes. Both/and rather than either/or.
Absolutely nothing I can add to that send I absolutely agree with everything you say. The only words of caution I would give particularly for older people and those starting or resuming and exercise program is gradual progression and take care not to over exercise. As you say adequate and appropriate food, hydration rest and recovery. Listen to your body and when it say ouch stop. Resume carefully and take the time you need to recover. Professor-Yaffle yes saddle soreness was a major factor. 1000 mikes in 13 days + 1 rest day. Into a head wind for the entire ride😥🤪. Have a great evening. X
I really admire your staying power Dave! When I used to cycle long rides just for 1 day, maybe 70miles I used to have trouble sitting in a chair the next day lets alone getting back on my bike. The day after I used to cycle to work standing on the pedals 😂. You have a lovely evening too 🌈
It was wonderful to do but will not be repeated, certainly not over that distance and at that pace. That said I would recommend it to anyone who has a mind to do it. 👍x
The majority of us are less active than we were even 20 years ago, and I see it particularly in the Games consoles and PC Games available everywhere. Kids don't get out and get into the habit of snacking on crisps, chocolate, sodas.
We aren't burning off the energy we are eating, and carbs are the main culprit!
Found a good illustration of the this. A friend posted a picture of her mum with her squad to mourn the anniversary of her death. I found a similar picture of my friend an her squad. There is a little over 20 years between the generations. The older generation is a little overweight, but the youngsters are already obese. Where will they be in 20+ years?
They try to tell us that weight loss is mostly due to diet, not exercise - but this depends on what you call "exercise".I spoke to a man who lost 4.5 stone in 50 days, eating 7,000 calories a day - and walking to the South pole and back!
Yeah, you can lose weight in the short term by intense exercise, but I don't think trekking across Antarctica offers a long term solution to the obesity epidemic. The Biggest Loser contestants lose 60kg by intense exercise. Most of them put it on again.
Yes, weight is just one indication of health - and many diabetics who go on an LCHF or keto diet can reverse their diabetes long before they have got down to their target weight. Since losing 35kg I have had many health benefits.
Muscle damage, particularly in weight-lifting, is what stimulates the body to build muscle and increase strength. It is the load that tends to damage (and build) the muscles, not the duration of exercise.
I "has been" an endurance athlete - and it took me a few weeks to recover from cycling 760 miles in 90 hours - and some think that endurance athletes are more likely to get Atrial Fibrillation.
Fat satiates, and carbohydrate (addiction) makes you hungry - so eating healthily tends to rectify the appetite - especially when done in combination with (Intermittent) Fasting.
When I cycled 15,000 miles per year I was lean. I am now recovering from being disabled for five years, but I walk at least 5km a day which burns over 500 calories per day - which is a pound of fat a week.
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Getting head around eating fat