As an aside, I am a LOT less concerned with fat, than with being able to use the ol’ body. I could care less how much fat I have, but if I can’t run and jump and play, then I’m really missing a big piece of life (in my opinion, naturally, YMMV). The ultra-toned physique is not the ultimate goal in my mind. (This may be coloring the way my words are read, so I thought I’d mention it).

I also do tend to assume a mind that *can* be taught when speaking, and a lack of disease. I do personally know people from all pieces of this spectrum, from medical-causes, to pro athlete, to naturally skinny, and everything in between, and we talk about it a lot.

It’s just my opinion that our bodies are designed to be used, and operate in a particular environment, and we’ve messed with the expected scarcities by, oh, gettin’ civilized. It’s too damn EASY to get a bajillion calories and still be malnourished.

We’re going to NEED medical interventions of some kind to work that out, but meanwhile, I try to stay as flexible and strong as possible. I get that self control and discipline aren’t in high supply, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid to work towards. And I know (believe me, I know) that it isn’t FAIR. I have to work harder than lots of people I know to achieve the same results. But once there’s a pill that says ’10% bodyfat, go’, I’ll be right there in the lineup, baby. I like my beer and wings, I do, so I make the sacrifices, but making it easier is always good. Mark me safely on the pro-medical-tech side.

Anyways, apologies for the late replies and keeping this thread going so long, I’m certainly always glad to see new posts on this feed, this is one of my favourite sites.

I’m a college graduate, completed an MBA degree, and I successfully completed law school.

I’ve been happily married for 16 years in part due to my ability to say no to certain temptations.

A lack of self-discipline isn’t the problem for me, nor is it always the problem for others who are overweight.

Our bodies evolved to survive famines. Technology has rid us of famines, but it hasn’t helped us overcome our evolution.

Yet.

Yeah, I can lose weight, temporarily, with the best of them.

It would be awesome if I could get some help making that loss permanent.

Cheers,
Dave

We’re not that far off, but I still have trouble with the word “deserve.”

If you stick your hand in the fire, well we’ve got good medical treatments, and we would never deny them to you, but imagining that you don’t DESERVE to be burned seems a bit trite to me. It abrogates personal responsibility.

Nonsense. Accepting personal responsibility in this instance requires a respect for cause and effect, period. In your analogy, would a developmentally disabled person who is unclear about fire deserve to get burned? How about a firefighter who sticks his hand into the fire in order to rescue somebody? We can agree that they don’t deserve to have their hands burned. But the drunken teenager who stumbles into the campfire when out in the woods with his friends — surely he deserves the second-degree burns.

I think not. Burning one’s hand (or worse) is a predictable consequence of being drunk and stupid around a campfire. But is it a fitting punishment for the same? I would argue that it is not. The teenager might learn a valuable lesson from that experience, and he certainly doesn’t have any complaints coming to him, but I would be slow to say he “deserved” it.

But never mind. When Stephen gets back from vacation, he can settle this. He’s the house lawyer.

BTW, congrats on the weight loss. I’m two and half years in on a 50 pound loss (although it was closer to 70 at one point.) My lifestyle hasn’t changed much, but my weight has kept trying to creep back up. That’s one of the reasons I’m interested in things like ALA — something that could help “lock in” weight loss sounds appealing.

I’d like to say that I am NOT against finding alternative methods, and I am, indeed, looking forward to them (and that’s what I mean by defeating nature).

I think your analogy is a bit weak though, I’d say it’s more like chopping down a tree, or putting your hand in a fire. No single chop makes the tree fall down, but you can’t really not expect to have it fall after it’s been chopped at for a while. Thus, I think ‘deserve’ is a relatively fitting word, even though I don’t wish harm on anyone. If you stick your hand in the fire, well we’ve got good medical treatments, and we would never deny them to you, but imagining that you don’t DESERVE to be burned seems a bit trite to me. It abrogates personal responsibility.

I guess my take on it (and I’m a guy who has actually come down 40 pounds and kept it off since 1999), is that for now, diet and exercise are the answer. Or at least ONE answer, that will work if applied. It’s a real fix that works, it’s just hard to implement.

I *am* all for new ways to help people with the health problems associated with obesity, I just want to make that perfectly clear.

I hope you can discover exercise you really like. I think that is the “secret” to weight loss, even more than dieting.

Instead, society gives the seal of approval to massive overeating by calling it a disease instead of a behavior.

I don’t disapprove of this ALA. Even if it doesn’t work I still expect we’ll eventually see something like it that does. But is it a good risk to hope that will happen soon enough to help people currently obese before its too late?

Starvation dieting – that is, deliberately eating less than your body needs – does not do much of anything except prompt temporary weight loss, along with some increased metabolic responsiveness to input. (Which is another way of saying it makes you diet-resistant – metabolically responsive bodies adjust their metabolic rate rapidly in response to changes in caloric intake, so if you eat less, your metabolic rate drops very quickly to compensate. Counterproductive, in other words.)

I wondered for a long time why, in the face of much data indicating that starvation dieting, alone or in combination with exercise, fails to permanently change body shape, we still have people chirping “All you have to do is eat less and move more, and the pounds will melt away like magic!” every time this subject comes up. I finally decided it’s because people overgeneralize from their own experience.

Say Joe Blow graduated a few years ago, isn’t exercising as much, grabs a candy bar every afternoon from the machine, etc., and has put on 20 pounds. He’s up at the top of his personal weight range, and doesn’t feel great. So he takes measures: eats a little better, goes for a walk every day at lunchtime, maybe lifts a few weights. A few months of this and he’s lost about ten percent of his weight and feels better. So good for Joe.

Now take John Doe, who’s in a similar situation: his habits have gotten bad, he’s gained some weight, he takes similar corrective measures (eating better [not less!] and being more active), and has similar results – he loses about 10% of body weight. John, like Joe, has gained a lot of health benefits by doing this. Problem is John’s natural weight range is higher than Joe’s, so he gets no credit with doctors or anyone else for his improvements. And Joe, if he sees John, will likely think “Hey, I ate a candy bar a day and weighed 20 pounds more than I do now… so this guy must be eating, like, ten candy bars a day! And never ever moving!” Because everyone naturally has the same body type, and deviations must be caused by differences in eating and exercise levels.

Written out like that, the fallacy is pretty obvious. But people still stick to it. There’s an ideal shape, and if you fall short of it, it’s All Your Fault, and we will keep saying that until you admit you’re a bad fatty and repent – preferably by limiting your food intake to the point of causing yourself permanent metabolic damage. Whereupon we will announce that you have “failed”. Makes me berserk, that kind of ugly thinking.

Meanwhile, the result of this mindset that you can change your body type by sheer force of will is:

- Fat people feel perpetually guilty, shamed, and afraid. They try to do the impossible (change their fundamental body shape) and feel like weak-willed failures when it predictably doesn’t work.

- Thin people feel like they have nothing to worry about healthwise, even if they eat gak and never exercise. They’re thin. And that means they’re healthy, right?

- People who exercise, feel better, and obtain health benefits but don’t lose a lot of weight feel as though they might as well not bother – after all, thin is healthy, and all this exercise isn’t making them thin, so it can’t possibly have a good effect on their health, right?

Relying on conventional wisdom and old wives’ tales is usually not great for health. This matter isn’t an exception.

Sorry about the longwindedness. This whole topic gets me wound up.

That said, it’s major surgery and needs to be researched thoroughly as to the correct procedure (lapband or Rouen-Y gastric bypass) for each individual. And it absolutely requires a commitment to change.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T31-4SBHWY0-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=f7f2fee648205b67a9129b455dcec8fd

“Abstract

Dietary restriction feeding extends survival in a range of species but a detailed understanding of the underlying mechanism is lacking. There is interest therefore in identifying a more targeted approach to replicate this effect on survival. We report that in rats dietary supplementation with alpha-lipoic acid, has markedly differing effects on lifetime survival depending upon the dietary history of the animal. When animals are switched from DR feeding to ad libitum feeding with a diet supplemented with alpha-lipoic acid, the extended survival characteristic of DR feeding is maintained, even though the animals show accelerated growth. Conversely, switching from ad libitum feeding a diet supplemented with alpha-lipoic acid to DR feeding of the non-supplemented diet, blocks the normal effect of DR to extend survival, even after cessation of lipoic acid supplementation. Unlike the dynamic effect of switching between DR and ad libitum feeding with a non-supplemented diet where the subsequent survival trajectory is determined by the new feeding regime, lipoic acid fixes the survival trajectory to that established by the initial feeding regime. Ad libitum feeding a diet supplemented with lipoic acid can therefore act as mimetic of DR to extend survival.”

Interpreting this gibberish, it sounds like the ALA does not keep the weight off (the rats showed “accelerated growth”) but does maintain the lifespan extension properties of calorie restriction (aka diet restriction, DR).

One weird thing is that they took some rats and started them on ALA and a normal diet, then switched them to calorie restriction with no ALA – and those mice didn’t get the usual lifespan increase from the CR. Very strange.

So what favor do we do ourselves by telling obese people that diet and exercise is the answer, knowing that 90% or more of them will fail?

Also, I don’t get the whole “overcome nature” argument from you and GF. Evolution programmed our bodies to be highly efficient at storing fat. If ALA works, it will be one possible workaround for that (now unnecessary) programming. There are others on the horizon.

How is this different from a model of “overcoming nature” that you would in fact approve of?