Fatties and their Haters

[ladyneeva]

That's a hell of a lot cheaper than here, here pork chops are around $10-$15 a kg, ground beef is about $13 and lamb is between $15-$20, food prices are way cheaper there by the looks of it. I would suggest buying it in 10lb packages and freezing it, buy one of each of those $2 ones and there's meat for a few months, and you have variety to choose from.

A kg is a bit over 2 US pounds, and I'm assuming you're also using AU dollars... so your pork chop example there while it sounds really expensive is equivalent to US $2-3 a pound -- which, when they're not on sale (I was quoting prices out of an advertising flier, so naturally it's the products on special sale this week) is about what we pay. Assuming we buy the 10lb packages, generally the smaller the package the higher the price. Lamb I have no idea, I don't care for it... but it's considered somewhat of a 'yuppie' food -- something rich people buy to show off with, not something that is an everyday food for the 'working class' -- so I imagine it's quite expensive. I will look next time I go shopping.

And you also misunderstood the pricing in another way... it is $2 PER POUND not per package. The packages are 10 pounds at $2 per pound, so the actual price you pay for the package is $20.00... when your food budget for a month is only $80-100, you simply cannot afford to blow a quarter of your budget on one item.

[Nyoibo]

Closer to $4 a pound, but yeah about that, and that is on special. Lamb here is basically what beef is to the US.


I got that it's $20 per package for the meat, I'm just curious, if you can't afford fruit vegetables and meat, then what do you eat? I am genuinley interested because I have no clue what sort of stuff households have in the US.

[BlaqueKatt]

And have I mentioned how cold it gets in Kansas during the winter?

I live in WI-I've seen -37f ambient temperature with a wind chill making it -80f-I ride until it snows enough to stick, I have torn up ligaments in both knees, biking is easier on them than walking(no impact) and due to my migraines I don't want to get my DL as mine will render me almost blind at times, all I'm saying is the doctor was more than likely not picking on your weight like you assumed-exercise can help, if you have time for it.

[AdminAssistant]

BK, and hopefully I will have time for it, I just didn't then. And I hate hate hate the cold. One of the other doc students makes fun of me because of my getup for walking around during winter - coat, gloves, scarf, headband, hood up...literally no exposed flesh. I just can't handle it. I'm the odd duckling that prefers scorching heat to freezing cold. So, outdoor exercise is pretty much out from late November through March.

[AFPheonix]

And thats different from what the diet industry does... how exactly?

I'm not advocating for pill pushers either. As I've posted before, I'm advocating sensible eating habits, understanding and getting to the bottom of pathology of obesity and rectifying them, if there's a physical, mental, or socio-economic reason. That's it. If you are mentally healthy, glands are in good working order, and you're happy with your weight no matter what it is, more power to you. If you're struggling with OCD or depression or whatnot and the obesity is a side effect, then I advocate making mental health care affordable.
If you have a craptacular thyroid, then I advocate an extremely cheap $4 generic medication.
If you live in an inner city where there is nothing to eat except fast food or convenience store food because you have no car and no public transportation, then I advocate people getting on board with their local governments to work on zoning and other social issues to alleviate that problem.

It's kind of hard to be happy when you can't leave your own fucking house without being told what a worthless piece of shit you are and how you should just die so that you're not wasting valuable resources. Especially hard to do when even those in support of the whole dieting thing admit it has an 80-90% or higher failure rate. So you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

And that's really unfortunate that people are doing that to you, I'm not advocating doing that to people either. As I've mentioned, I really don't care what weight you are, it doesn't affect me one way or another, just don't spread misinformation to people.

Wow, thats juvenile. Going "I'm right and you're wrong nyah nyah nyah" is snarky in the extreme. I can't afford a JAMA membership to actually read the study under discussion myself, but I can tell right there that it is not a STUDY exactly but rather the study of a set of surveyed statistics... do we know that the statistics were relayed correctly? If all they did is look at the death certificates they're not going to get accurate results. For example, if someone dies of heart failure that is exactly what their death certificate says... "heart failure". If that same person is also "overweight" or "obese" by the BMI measurements, a study such as this would mark them down in the "death by obesity" group. Even though the heart failure could have had NOTHING to do with the weight, and the weight could have had NOTHING TO DO with the BMI.

I suspect that this study and many others went a bit more in-depth than that to keep track of any variables that might affect their findings. Yes, heart disease can be attributable to other causes such as smoking and family history. However, smoking rates have decreased, I suspect family histories have held fairly constant, and obesity rates have risen. Rates of heart disease have also risen, at least in the US. What do we make of that?
We can also thank Big Pharma for putting a bandaid on the problem by making some really incredible new drugs in the last 20 years, such as the beta blocker class, the statins, and others. However, barring for family history, people who stop smoking and start eating correctly tend to need less of those medications because the mitigating factors that were increasing their cholesterol and blood pressure went down.
Eating better and exercising even moderately equals a healthy populace, and costs a helluva lot less than a ton of people on Lipitor.

Example, my father... his death certificate says "heart failure", and his BMI in the 70's would have been around 35 range as he was 6'4" and around 290 or 300 at the time. I seriously doubt a man who made his living climbing telephone poles while carrying 50-60lb rolls of phone line and a tool belt (we still own it and I think most of the tools are still in it, it weighs 40lbs) for 8 to 10 hours a day then went home and did all the tasks required to maintain a functional farming operation was FAT.

He also had a congenital heart condition which claimed his life at the age of 72. His death certificate says cause of death is heart failure, his BMI says he was "obese"... and a study like this would peg him as his death being caused by obesity... even though it wasn't.

If there is one example, there are probably more.

I'm sorry to hear about your father, mine also passed a few years back. But your father was older, that was a mitigating factor, he probably had a family history of heart disease. As has been said before on this board, the plural of anecdote does not equal data.

Secondly, they are including deaths caused by obesity treatment as proof of obesity causing death. For example, weight loss surgery alone, by itself, has a one year post surgery death rate of 4.6% (which is three and a half times greater than that for triple bypass surgery... an emergency procedure performed on usually 75 year old heart attack patients immediately following a heart attack while weight loss surgery is an elective procedure most often performed on fat but otherwise relatively healthy 40 year olds). Undoubtedly they also counted people with depression who killed themselves... even though there is no scientific evidence that fat causes depression but rather that the way you are treated for being fat causes depression.

And again, I'm not advocating weight loss surgery except for the most dire of circumstances, and for those people that do end up getting it, they need to be working with a nutritionist, a doctor and a mental health care provider to keep them from relapsing.
This is still not comparable to what I have been advocating, which is what I've outlined above, and pretty much mentioned in my first post in this thread.

And they probably also counted people who died of heart failure caused by taking fen-phen as contributing to the death by fat numbers. This weight loss drug regimen caused an estimated 50,000 cases of valvular heart disease and pulmonary hypertension (some of which resulted in death) in those taking it. It was on the market since the 70's, the numbers could be higher since a lot of doctors will see "fat" and "hypertensive" and blame the fat without considering it could be a drug interaction. Even after the news broke about that and the drugs were recalled, it's entirely likely some doctors still blamed the fat for hypertension in former fen-phen users. And thats just one diet drug cocktail... there are others, and a lot of them have side effects which can result in death.

That one has been off the market for years. Perhaps Vioxx would have been a more salient example, although that's been off for nearly 5 years as well. All medications have side effects, even ones as innocuous as tylenol or advil. Which is why I would prefer diet to be the primary method of achieving better health.

1: overweight was NOT, I repeat NOT associated with excess mortality... which was the reason this study was cited on the Big Fat Facts website -- the ones shoehorned into the obese label are fewer than those in the overweight category, and it was a discussion of the overweight category NOT the obese category that caused this study to be cited on that website

2: notice that the risks of mortality went DOWN in the two newer studies... could that possibly be because medical care, as a whole, is getting better and a lot of the deaths they blamed on obesity from the earliest study might not have been caused by obesity at all? Might possibly we discover that as medical science progresses that say heart disease is caused by something other than fat and fat is merely a side effect or even completely unrelated? My opinion, and honestly it's not worth much because I haven't studied the subject in any depth.

As I mentioned earlier, quite a few drug classes have come out in just the last 30 years to treat many of the comorbidities of obesity. And again, would you rather people eat better and exercise, or take a pill for their problems? I know which one is cheaper and safer, especially since we just got done talking about how many drugs have side effects.

Please tell me you did not actually just say that fat people are mentally ill if they don't diet. Because thats sure as hell what it looked like.

Not at all. I said that people who are obese as a result of mental illness are preyed upon by FA advocates like Kate Harding. I'm not saying that all obese are mentally ill, I haven't said that yet in this thread. I realize this is a subject near and dear to your heart, but please, actually read what people are posting, don't try to find insult in places where there is none.

And as for the "complaining" thing... I AM NOT COMPLAINING THAT I AM FAT.

I am complaining because people don't fucking treat me like a human being deserving of decency.
-snip-

I am complaining because I am getting blamed for shit that isn't even remotely my fault, such as global warming and health budget spending.

THOSE ARE THE THINGS I AM COMPLAINING ABOUT

REFERENCES:
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content...ct/294/15/1903
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fen-phen

If you've seen me peg any of that on fat people, then I apologize. However, after going through my posts, I don't think I've said any of that in the slightest. What I've said is all plainly here for anyone to see if they calm down long enough to read it.
That goes for you too, Violetyoshi, I don't know if I kicked your puppy or something, but I'm not sure why you're choosing to mischaracterize anything I say.

[ladyneeva]

I got that it's $20 per package for the meat, I'm just curious, if you can't afford fruit vegetables and meat, then what do you eat? I am genuinley interested because I have no clue what sort of stuff households have in the US.

Processed foods. Raman noodles, boxed mac and cheese, frozen pizzas, canned (tinned) pasta products, lunch meats (like really cheap bologna and stuff that I'm not even sure what species it is never mind what part of the animal).

AFPheonix... you advocate for all these big sweeping social changes... but until then we just need to put down the pie, but we're wrong for being offended that you just called us all greedy pigs. Got it.

[anriana]

I got that it's $20 per package for the meat, I'm just curious, if you can't afford fruit vegetables and meat, then what do you eat? I am genuinley interested because I have no clue what sort of stuff households have in the US.

If I couldn't afford fresh fruits and vegetables, my diet would be rice, beans, pasta, and canned vegetables in various configurations. I might add tofu depending on exactly what the budget is, as it's a somewhat cheap protein source. I would make my own hummus (beans and spices). And I would eat packaged noodles from the Asian grocery (just as cheap and a billion times tastier than ramen). It may be just my area, but fresh vegetables like onions and potatoes are cheap and so are fruits like apples and bananas.

Rice is easy and quick to make, even without a rice cooker. I can pop it on the stove and stir-fry some veggies + tofu or mix together some beans and veggies and have a healthy/cheap/yummy dinner and lunch the next day.

This is pretty close to what I eat now except I buy a few more types of fresh fruits and vegetables and occasionally get lazy and buy prepackaged food.

But I'm not the typical American resident as I don't eat meat.

[Boozy]

AFPheonix... you advocate for all these big sweeping social changes... but until then we just need to put down the pie, but we're wrong for being offended that you just called us all greedy pigs. Got it.

[MOD NOTE]

This again. I'm getting tired of it.

Neither AFPheonix nor anyone else here has called you a "greedy pig." Putting words in the mouths of other members is poor form. I realize that people will interpret what people post in different ways, and that's usually fair game for debate. But we take name-calling very seriously around here. Please do not accuse another member of name-calling unless you have a quote or post to back it up. And in that case, the proper course of action is to report the post.

[LeChatNoir]

And you also misunderstood the pricing in another way... it is $2 PER POUND not per package. The packages are 10 pounds at $2 per pound, so the actual price you pay for the package is $20.00... when your food budget for a month is only $80-100, you simply cannot afford to blow a quarter of your budget on one item.

My husband and I also generally shop on a budget. Something we do that helps us get a lot of meals is we buy the bulk packages of meat. Say, 5-6 lbs. package of hamburger, and then we freeze it in 1 lbs. packages. We also buy a large bag of frozen chicken (costs about $7 here for 6-7 pieces). This usually lasts us 2 weeks, sometimes more, depending on what we eat. Granted, we go through a lot of chicken/hamburger helper type meals...but it's a substantial meal for not a lot of money, and that way we're not eating the same thing every single night. Another nice cheap meal option we eat a lot of is spaghetti. A can of spaghetti sauce, half a box of noodles and a pound of meat and there you go.

Anyway, this was kind of a ramble. Obviously my suggestions aren't necessarily "low fat/low calorie" choices, but they keep us from going crazy from monotony without destroying the bank. I can't eat the same stuff all the time.

[Cat]

I like making soup (okay, is the only thing i CAN make). If i make a huge pot, it lasts a week and is only around $20. I change up the spices to try to make it more interesting

[violetyoshi]

[MOD NOTE]

This again. I'm getting tired of it.

Neither AFPheonix nor anyone else here has called you a "greedy pig." Putting words in the mouths of other members is poor form. I realize that people will interpret what people post in different ways, and that's usually fair game for debate. But we take name-calling very seriously around here. Please do not accuse another member of name-calling unless you have a quote or post to back it up. And in that case, the proper course of action is to report the post.

I see, and what about the numerous posts where AFPheonix insinuates that someone has to be mentally ill in order to be fat?

[Flyndaran]

Fat acceptance, www.bigfatfacts.com, one assumes that there is also support for pro-ana then too, because it's the same thing.

Umm, anorexics die very often and very early. The fattest man to live lived over 50 years. Not comparable risk factors.

...
You couldn't get away with saying, being Black isn't a disability, or Mexican, or Gay in the same regards. Yet it's alright in our society to assume, if someone isn't thin, they must be abusing the disability system, and it must be because they're fat and don't have a real problem.

I don't think ethnicity is a disabilty. I don't think I'm in the minority on this.
Also, chubby people don't suffer catcalls. It's almost always the morbidly obese that usually suffer this stigma. So if you plan on hyperbolizing, then please exaggerate every part of your argument. It's less confusing.

... Besides, as he also told me, I didn't have migraines, I had tension headaches. My symptoms weren't "severe" enough for a migraine. Whatevs man. ...

Not every horrible headache is a migraine. For example, most men suffering from severe head pains have cluster headaches that are just as painful, but different than migraines.

... There's yo-yo dieting, the body's resistance to starvation causing one to put more fat on after a starvation period, than before it.
...

Actually yo-yo dieting is healthier than staying fat all the time, as long as the weight was lost in a healthy manner.
Starving is always bad. Eating healthy is always good.

I'm sure AFPheonix will be more than happy, to suggest that people making fun of you while you exercise, isn't making fun of you, it's motivation.

No evil person knows that they are evil.
I guess dicks don't know that they are dicks as well.

...
It's kind of hard to be happy when you can't leave your own fucking house without being told what a worthless piece of shit you are and how you should just die so that you're not wasting valuable resources. Especially hard to do when even those in support of the whole dieting thing admit it has an 80-90% or higher failure rate. So you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
...

...the hell? I seriously doubt you are slammed with such nasty vitriole every single time you leave the house. It may feel like that, but I simply refuse to believe that you are surrounded by that many vocal a-holes.
Dieting almost always works. It's just really hard to keep eating healthy when your very essence screams constantly for food.

...
Example, my father... his death certificate says "heart failure", and his BMI in the 70's would have been around 35 range as he was 6'4" and around 290 or 300 at the time. I seriously doubt a man who made his living climbing telephone poles while carrying 50-60lb rolls of phone line and a tool belt (we still own it and I think most of the tools are still in it, it weighs 40lbs) for 8 to 10 hours a day then went home and did all the tasks required to maintain a functional farming operation was FAT.
...

Actually exercise does not magically make one a healthy weight. It's always easier to avoid eating 500 calories than it is to exercise 500 calories off.
Did you watch that old "Nova" program that took a total of 13 average people and got them into shape to run a marathon? The fat ones were still fat at the end.

I believe they were refering to people who have an obsesive problem or such, basically the same way pro-ana people work, other wise you could say "Please tell me you did not actually just say that thin people are mentally ill if they don't eat."

I'm maybe a little too loose with the mental ill label. Heck, I used to call all religious people delusional. People that are morbidly obese, but for whatever reason refuse to lose weight, are mentally ill in my opinion. My phobia and anxiety make me mentally ill.

I'm not advocating for pill pushers either. ...

Heh, I would be advocating for pills if there were any diet substances that weren't just stimulants or ineffective appetite supressants. If they developed ones that worked as advertised, then I would be perfectly happy to give them out like candy.
Better living through chemistry!

...
AFPheonix... you advocate for all these big sweeping social changes... but until then we just need to put down the pie, but we're wrong for being offended that you just called us all greedy pigs. Got it.

That is uncalled for. Nowhere on this forum did he make such an accusation.
To convince us of your opinions you need to respond to what people actually write rather than what you are afraid they might write.

...
But I'm not the typical American resident as I don't eat meat.

Not everyone can eat totally vegetarian. I tried but got rather ill. I hate that we are evolved to be omnivores. All I can do is avoid eating mammals. I eat chicken, but I feel guilty about it afterwards.

I see, and what about the numerous posts where AFPheonix insinuates that someone has to be mentally ill in order to be fat?

There's a big difference between morbid obesity and simple fat.
Also, it's okay to express a general opinion in this forum as long as it isn't a personal attack. Calling a large group that one believes to be mentally ill such is not a personal attack.
For example, I could call religion a mental illness. Even if you are religious that does not make that a personal attack, just something that nearly everyone will dissmiss as silly or just plain wrong.

[AFPheonix]

I see, and what about the numerous posts where AFPheonix insinuates that someone has to be mentally ill in order to be fat?

I have not made that insinuation. I have made the accomodation that depression and other mental illness can lead to obesity for some people, which is hardly a novel idea.

It's kind of like the idea that all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.

Again, did I kick your puppy or something? You sure have drawn a bead on me for really no reason at all.

Anyways, as for cheap meal ideas, getting really cheap cuts of meat such as roasts and then slow-cooking the hell out of it can be nutritious, healthy, and often doesn't take too much effort as you can throw the roast in the slow-cooker with some veggies and seasonings, head out to work for the day and come back to a fabulous supper.
I love my slow cooker :3

[Boozy]

I see, and what about the numerous posts where AFPheonix insinuates that someone has to be mentally ill in order to be fat?

...it's okay to express a general opinion in this forum as long as it isn't a personal attack. Calling a large group that one believes to be mentally ill such is not a personal attack.
For example, I could call religion a mental illness. Even if you are religious that does not make that a personal attack, just something that nearly everyone will dissmiss as silly or just plain wrong.

Flyndaran offers good clarification here. Thanks.

How AFPhoenix's posts can be interpreted is a fair subject for debate as long as accusations of rule breaking aren't involved. I ask this because when I see someone accusing another of calling them a name, I have to carefully comb through the thread to see if there is some merit to the complaint. And this thread is LONG.

[ladyneeva]

If you can't see how saying someone "eats enough for a family of four" or "just won't put down the pies" are phrases that's only possible meaning is that the person engaging in those behaivors is greedy (taking an excessive quantity that they do not need) or a pig (commonly understood to be someone who is fat, greedy, and often lazy) then I do not now to explain it.

I love how all of you are so happy to tell me what I should be eating to 'cure' my fatness... but not one of you knows what I do eat. I guess it's ok for everyone here to make assumptions about my life, but it's not ok for me to make an assumption about what they meant by saying I 'won't put down the pies' or 'eat enough for a family of four'.