Exercise 'not key to obesity fight'

I'm going to give up my chocolate biscuits. That might seem a bit drastic but I can't just have one or two.

Just the excuse the Barbapapa crowd need, for remaining resolutely sedentary.

You can not outrun a bad diet.

That`s why the call it fast food! doh

My daughter went from 13 stones to 9 stones in just over a year by cutting out sugar and eating the right stuff.  .She also did no exercise whatsoever.

Exercise 'not key to obesity fight'

I don’t know why this is news, people have been saying it for years.

In 2007, the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine jointly published physical activity guidelines. These are people, then, you’d expect to be saying exercise more if you want to be thin.

What they actually said is:

“It is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditure would be less likely to gain weight over time, compared to those who have low expenditures”

Which means, those who exercise are likely to stay reasonably slim whereas those who are lazy will gain weight. But they continue –

“So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling”.

So the very people you’d expect to be telling you exercise makes you lose weight are saying it’s not by any means certain.

I don’t think it is surprising. If you wanted to make someone hungry, you could deprive them of food. But if you wanted them to get hungry faster you’d make them exercise. Exercise is guaranteed to stimulate appetite.  But what do they tell you to do to lose weight, exercise more – the one thing likely to make you hungry and when combined with eating less, impossible to follow in the longterm, unless you consider being miserable and starving as desirable for quality of life.

Because the main problem is that everyone’s metabolism is different. Some people can eat tons of carbs and burn them well. But most people can’t, certainly not as they get older. But often even when young. The diet is so skewed in the direction of carbs and that so obviously is a disaster, given that carbs are guaranteed to make you hungry (everyone knows the Chinese meal effect where despite stuffing your face you are hungry an hour later).

Obese people cannot help it. Their brains tell them to eat, it is a problem with insulin and leptin and how foods interfere with those signals. If you eat fat it is true, you don’t need to exercise, although exercise is beneficial for so many reasons other than trying to lose weight. But as a mechanism for losing weight nothing beats a diet based around good fats and moderate protein.

I suspect you're right, FM. I certainly don't buy the assumption that fat people are all lazy ne'er do wells gorging on junk food.

As to fitness. My old doctor used to say as long as you can run for a bus and then climb to the top deck without collapsing, then you're ok. The irony of his demise was not lost on me, or the conductor who attempted CPR on doc.

How we laughed over the vol au vents.

A cynical point of view would be to examine the different vested interests in all this stuff.

I mean every fast food company in the world, every food manufacturer in the world, every fizzy drinks manufacturer, alcoholic drink company, every supermarket or food retail outlet, every brand of gym, every dieting company, every television station with food programmes, every celebrity chefs selling recipe books at Christmas etc etc etc.

Loads making a fortune from encouraging you to eat, exercise, diet.

If everyone did as they really should i.e. smaller portions of decent food, all those businesses would be decimated.

And, I also wonder, that if the billions spent on advertising crap food was spent on advertising fruit, vegetables, fish, meat and other unprocessed foods, and hardly anything on processed foods, (the polar opposite of how it is now) how much difference it would make to what we eat.

I decided to try and lose weight from Feb 1st.

I work outdoors and get about 30 hours exercise a week. I gave up a lot of alcohol, crisps (don't eat cake/biscuits anyway),cheese, went veggie for a while and stopped buying spuds.

I weighed 207 lbs Feb 1st. I now weigh 205 lbs.

Truly bizarre.

Exercise is good for you though.

I hate all this media crap, it's simple
Eat healthy + reasonable excercise = decent chance at long life.

It's never about one isolated miracle...

Jack, in answer to your question, I believe earlier this millennium the big food corporations of the USA had a meeting where they discussed the terrible impact of their processed foods on the public. Their response was that they already provide 'healthy' options (some of these of very dubious benefit to anyone's health, like the gluten-free rubbish) and it's up to the customer to buy what they want. Effectively they washed their hands of any responsibility. Yet they regularly alter food, like the good old Mars Bar. I don't remember anyone making it clear that you are now eating Soya Lecithin when you eat one, when did they start doing that? They have no intention of stopping and like the tobacco industry, where we look back with amusement and horror at the ads of doctors recommending certain brands, we'll be doing the same with the likes of Coca Cola a few decades down the line, in my opinion.

Injera     25 Apr 15 13:41 
I decided to try and lose weight from Feb 1st.

I work outdoors and get about 30 hours exercise a week. I gave up a lot of alcohol, crisps (don't eat cake/biscuits anyway),cheese, went veggie for a while and stopped buying spuds.

I weighed 207 lbs Feb 1st. I now weigh 205 lbs.

Truly bizarre.


How much bread do you eat. How much wheat products( eg cereals) do you eat.

Modern wheat is the major problem of weight gain. Because it produces huge amounts of sugar, which is worse than eating ' fatty  foods ' . People who stop eating bread / wheat products notice a sometimes remarkable weight loss.

^ spot on. I lost over a stone and dropped a waist size in about 6 weeks. No exercise, just cut out a lot of carbs from my diet.
No bread, no cereal, no fruit juices. I still eat plenty of rice, potatoes and pasta so I'm still getting carbs but they are lower GI carbs than the first 3 I mentioned.

I'm not surprised in the least, Platini.

I used to argue it was a simple 'calories in - calories out' equation, but I'm increasingly of the opinion I was wrong; there are 'different types' of calories.

Does the bread made with rice flour taste ok?

http://gluten.lovetoknow.com/rice-flour-bread-recipes

Rye bread is good too.

thanks

English food and diet  is terrrrrible - can you buy anything that isn't oversugared ,oversalted or swimming in fat ? - no wonder a nation of lardies .

you have to work hard to find healthyish food

and the only ones who do any exercise are the ones who eat healthy in the first place

The French diet is swimming in fat and they have the second lowest rates of heart disease on the planet.

don't fear "fatty" foods, they don't make you fat. sometimes the clue is not in the name.
calories is another red herring.

Facts - thanks for that. I do wonder about bread..


I eat 6-8 slices of bread a day. I try to eat the linseed/soya one. Bergen?? I recently started eating granola or all bran but then realised the bad press re cereals!!!

I hear brown rice is better than white rice and that complex carbs are the way to go.

As you say, processed sugar is the devil..

bread was the toughest to give up. I used to eat at least 8 slices per day. Now I just look at it and see pure sugar. (I' talking about standard white bread obviously). Brown rice is better than white but I find it rancid, so I'll stick with white.
I do eat quite a lot of pasta, rice and potatoes, but I never eat them after 7. And that makes a massive difference I believe. Cut back on your carbs, try to eat ones with lower GIs, and when you do eat them, do it earlier in the day.

GIs Platini?

No bread no this no that.....heres an idea.. moderation in everything.

He means ones that raise your blood sugar as little as possible, low Glycemic Index, GI.

What are G I 's ?

http://www.nhs.uk/chq/pages/1862.aspx?categoryid=51

Thank you

Look up the GI scores for some foods. You'll be amazed at some of the bad ones.

'The French diet is swimming in fat and they have the second lowest rates of heart disease on the planet'.

________________________

read that fats via dairy (france)  don't hang around in the system like others as the calcium binds the fat

I tend to believe that dairy is a healthy fat, it’s the carbs in it that cause people problems.

But the French don’t just eat a lot of dairy fat; they eat a lot more meat than we do. In 2002, they consumed 101kgs per person compared to the UK’s 79kgs. I’m also willing to think that our meat consumption is higher in so-called healthier leaner white meats like chicken whereas theirs is higher in fatty (and red) meats.

India’s meat consumption at that time was 5kgs per person, their heart disease rate 5 times higher than France’s. Now I’m not cherry picking the examples… well I am, but the fact remains that France, with its high meat and dairy consumption, and they’re not slouches when it comes to alcohol and cigarettes, are they? far outstrips countries that ought to be better with their low-fat choices.

I think of the observations and studies that have been done on people like American Indians, the Inuit and the Masai. These cultures  were observed and documented before we got to them with our grains etc, and they ate diets high in fats. That’s not so much the muscle meat, but the brains, livers – the lot, where obesity (and cancer etc) were unknown.

Dairy is not healthy, it is not good for you. If you want to look at nations' eating habits then nations that don't eat dairy have lower rates of osteoporosis that nations that do. In fact it is believed that dairy actually leaches calcium from bones. And here we are being told that dairy is good for your bones as it has lots of calcium.

A senior nutrition scientist for the Physisians Committee states "There is a compelling argument that today’s pasteurized milk, in all its guises, has virtually no redeeming features at all, and serves only to cause disease and poor health. By simply switching from dairy to non-dairy milk we will make a dramatic and long-lasting improvement to our health."

If you want to be really healthy then avoid dairy as well as gluten and sugar.

I wonder how many people would eat pate de foie gras if it were marketed under the literal translation of its French name (paste of fatty liver).

Very few, I expect, yet what could be better for you than fatty liver? I suspect that all sorts of widespread health issues trace back to the decline in liver eating. As Len Deighton comments in his Action Cook Book: "If you don't like liver, learn to like it - you need it."

I make a version of the German dish of Himmel und Erde once a week (fry up potatoes, onions and apples in butter, then, when the pan's got hot, add duck livers pre-soaked in milk for a few minutes at the end; season with ground pepper).

Have you had your cholesterol levels checked recently ?

No.

I'm not interested in shallow, statistically-based scare stories when it comes to nutrition, and the cholesterol scare falls into that category. I prefer to consider the chemistry, but that's a bit difficult, which is why nutritionists avoid it. Hence stupid Daily Mail "X Gives You Cancer, Say Scientists" headlines, but who care? It's only a job.

Re fats:  trans-fats and those hydrogenated vegetable oils you get in stuff like margarine and sweeties are awful. They're what oxidize the chemical on the surface of low-density lipids in your cholesterol and cause the problems associated with it. It's just a pity all fats, essential animal fats and harmful "artificial" ones, have been lumped together as bad for us.

i ran for ten years, put on some muscle in my legs. Getting on now so i'm walking three times a day. noticed everything tightening up again.... not just the legs. So I think walking is the better exercise. All this strenuous stuff is a bit mad. best exercise is swimming. no impact.

My pal Mick always said there wasn't any fat ones came out of Belsen as his advice on losing weight.Tasteless but very true when it come s to obesity.

Was Mick there ?