Haven't seen the show, but you made me curious about how many dieters choose low-carb as their preferred weight-loss strategy.

And the answer is: 5.9%

http://www.medscape.org/viewarticle/528758

Dragonwolf wrote: »

KETOGENICGURL wrote: »

I hate the surgery is being touted as this "cure all" type of thing. No, it's not the surgery, it's the strict diet that comes with said surgery that works.

That is the reason I stuck to low carbing after sitting through a LapBand presentation about 10 years ago. I even started getting my ducks in a row to have the surgery, but after careful thought, realized I would have to low carb anyway, so why not just do it the 'hard' way and be healthy. No knives.

does reveal most US Ameicans only walk 170 yards a day..from bed to shower to car to work, and back. sad.

While I'm not the kind of person that says that the solution is to just "eat less and move more," there's not much denying the fact that the overall slimmest populations are the ones in more pedestrian friendly cities and where walking or biking are the norm. I think it illustrates the fact that the reasons behind our increasingly obese and sedentary populations are a multifaceted issue (we move less, because we're more reliant on cars, because our societies are built around cars, because we don't walk as much....) That video illustrates that beautifully, where you can see the places with a lot of pedestrian-friendly cities (or a lot of farm/ranch country) are slower to increase the amount of overweight/obese people (I think California started "catching up" due to the rise of Silicon Valley, which brought in a ton of people, and a ton of people commute via car for 1-2+ hours each way; and don't get me started on the destructive nature of the tech industry).

And that guy strikes me very much as someone who's seen only the people who are fat due solely to eating too much and not moving, with his comments like "there's no such thing as fit and fat" and his insistence that dietary changes will basically never work for large amounts of weight loss (very much a "my way is the only successful way!" message).

Gary Taubes convinced me that fat is a disease and not a product of being lazy. However, the disease can be treated and it takes a lot of hard work. That's where we lose people. You gotta execute.

As for skinny cities, they generally have much less access to the ultra low cost processed foods. The rents in crowded areas are too high. Access to cheap processed food is probably part of the equation. You may also see part of the population voluntarily relocate if their primary mode of transportation (walking) is no longer available (because their bodies no longer support it). You end up with a population of more affluent people (because rent is high) which tend to be leaner. Thin is the next topic for class warfare. Carbs are cheap.

sweetteadrinker2 wrote: »

I think a large portion of the problem is that carbs are cheap. It's much more expensive to eat good quality proteins and fats than it is to live off chips and soda and pastries.

Except it's not, it's an illusion, especially when you consider how much is required to be satiated by one vs the other.

Yes, a steak costs more than a bag of chips, but that steak can feed you all day, while you can polish off that bag of chips and still be searching for more.

@Akimajuktuq‌ talks about this all the time. Hell, she lives in the freakin' Arctic (like, way out, the "next town over" has to fly her orders in then fly them to her), and she found it was cheaper to fly grassfed meats in than it was to buy the shoddy stuff at her local stores. Then, when you consider that ounce for ounce, the good food is more satiating and you ultimately eat less overall, the savings continues to add up. Add on that the reduced medical costs when you no longer have to ingest (or inject) a pharmacy's worth of drugs three or more times a day, every single day? Suddenly, that good food isn't so expensive anymore. (By the way, you're looking at about $4300 a year in diabetes prescriptions alone, if you're insulin dependent. That doesn't include hospital and doctors visits and anything else stemming from complications.)

That is very true Sweetteadrinker2. The shows I did try to watch the foods ordered in as in pizza and many other kinds of take out had to be expensive. Some of it might have been staged to make the program more stunning too.

I do remember the exact time I did have 5 dollars. I bought a 20# bag of potatoes and a 15 cent a pound lard like butter to last me for a month. It was before the first go round with Atkins for me and looking back This is not how I want to live again.

IamUndrCnstruction wrote: »

A bag of beans and a bag of brown rice make a complete protein that is quite filling...it will also last several days...it is also under $5. Money is not always an excuse. Sometimes it is not necessarily a lack of money, but lack of knowledge...

This is also very true. I was clueless back then.

sweetteadrinker2 wrote: »

But for folks who live in cities, who do their grocery shopping at the corner liquor store, there is no grass fed meat option. And satiety is a nice thing to talk about, but when you don't have the money for the steak but can afford the bag of chips, you're going to get the bag of chips. If you have 5 bucks, you can buy more carbs than steak. We're Lucky to be able to think of satiety and health, some can't.

"Grocery shopping at the corner liquor store" is not an affordability thing, it's a decisions and priorities (and probably education) thing. Alcohol is orders of magnitude more expensive than just about any food (and any food a liquor or corner store has is going to be jacked up in price to begin with).

I grew up working poor. Even after 10+ years working at the same company (with a degree), my mom only recently broke $10/hr. I qualified for the free lunch program until my sister graduated (we were at that borderline level). We still had more meat and real foods than we did just about anything else, and we never had chips. My mom has found people who raise chickens and sell their eggs for $1-2/dozen, and a farm that sells raw milk (she's in a state where it's legal) for $2-3/gallon, from which she makes all sorts of stuff. Yes, we still had carbs (usually in the form of spaghetti or Ramen), but mainly because of the fact that we basically followed the USDA recommendations and the idea is still drilled in their heads that bread is good. The spaghetti always had meat sauce. The Ramen always had tuna salad sandwiches served with it. The macaroni and cheese always had a meat (often venison, sometimes some beef dish, sometimes tuna or other fish). One box of macaroni and cheese between my mom, my stepdad, and me, two packets of Ramen, one box of spaghetti (and the spaghetti had just enough left for my mom's lunch the next day). Most of the time, a vegetable (granted, canned green beans where the most common) was included. Breakfasts were my carbiest meal, which I usually subsisted on a rotation of batch-made pancakes or waffles, cereal (one box per 1-2 weeks, generally Cheerios), and oatmeal, until I quit eating breakfast at home. When my stepdad was out of town, my mom and I typically ate salads. Even Pop Tarts and toaster strudels only made a very, very occasional appearance in our house. The worst thing we had was the occasional half gallon of no-sugar-added ice cream, that would generally last the three of us 2-4 weeks, or the occasional popcorn that we bought in bulk form and popped on the stove.

Still not the piles and piles of garbage carbs (chips, cookies, sodas, etc) even by carb standards you see in a lot of people's carts or cupboards.

It ended up that way pretty much because we all found we were more satiated when there was a meat included. For a while, my mom made breakfast burritos -- tortillas wrapped around eggs, sausage, cheese, and mushrooms. Now, I think she does omelets with pretty much the same things. She could do (homemade) pancakes or waffles for quite a bit "cheaper," money-wise, but they both found that her and my stepdad's blood sugar crashed after eating them, requiring them to keep glucose tablets and those peanut butter cracker sandwich packs around (essentially driving up the cost of that meal, and wreaking havoc on their long-term health).

Hell, even when I moved out, and there were times where I didn't even know if I was going to be able to afford rent (and didn't have a license or car), I didn't eat the junk food carbs (actually, I generally subsisted on peanut butter sandwiches and tuna melts, plus the occasional pizza from my better-off roommates and friends). If we had cookies in the apartment, it was because I made them from scratch or someone else bought them. That was without a concerted effort to eat fewer carbs (mainly because I didn't know better at the time). It actually wasn't until I started getting more financially stable and had some more money that things like pizza, soda, cookies, and chips made a frequent, abundant appearance in my house.

So yeah, the idea that if you're poor, you can only live on crap carbs doesn't really hold water with me. You may not be able to go straight to grass fed meats and if you're trying to reduce your carbs, you probably can't do the "throw out everything in your cupboards and start fresh" thing, but soda and chips aren't your only option, either.

Also, with that $5 -- nowadays, I'd probably buy hamburger and make something with whatever else I have on hand. Or I might buy tuna and mayo (Kroger has 4-packs of 3oz cans for something like $2.50, a small jar of mayo is about the same). When I was first on my own, I might have included a box of mac & cheese and/or a loaf of bread and peanut butter, depending on what I already had on hand.

These people are being "used" for entertainment value. They are deeply damaged and live with enablers who are also damaged. It is making TLC rich. The failure rate is 90%. because there is no support at home. Many are poor and undereducated.
Look at their families who are almost as heavy as they are .
One lovely man, I forget his name, died after skin removal surgery.

These people need mental health treatment before deciding to do the surgery and their caregivers should be considered abusive on a level as they continue to allow a morbidly obese person food in the amounts they are giving them.

Gnulie wrote: »

KETOGENICGURL wrote: »

Gnulie wrote: »

I just find the similarities between drug and food addiction fascinating.

Gnulie there are several easy to find reports on this similarity. Mice fed cocoaine and then sugar ( it was in the form of Oreos I believe) wold turn down the drug and take the sugar every time, other studies show mice over supplied on mouse chow would not get fat, and moderated their diet, but once sugar and junk food was added they became obese and did not chose their own food……grim. Just saw a video on bigfoodcorp actions to induce early 'addiction' in kids. Baby bottles with pepsi logos? Schools got rid of sodas, but installed juice machines, which was far higher in sugar. Those bottles of SOBE teas…pink, green liquids with 'energizing' herbs yadayada..all sugar based.
The Food Lobby Goes to School this is a 6 min, to the point view, of food lobbyists and the multi billions spent on lunch programs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVfAWbitBTs

It's truly disgusting IMO the way sugar and HFCS is pushed on us from every direction. Big tobacco...ha they ain't got nothin on the food industry. Not meaning to offend anyone here just my thoughts.

Well....let's put it this way....

Philip Morris owns Kraft, and Kraft owns:

Milkbone
Maxwell House
Yuban
Starbucks
Capri Sun
Tang
Kool-Aid
Post Cereals
Oscar Mayers
Nabisco
several others (and that's just Philip Morris)

So.... a large chunk of the food industry is the tobacco industry, for all intents and purposes. When you realize that, it's no wonder the food industry is using the same shady tactics. It's the same people.

Talk about losing faith in humanity, eh?

In the end, no one forces anyone to pick up the box of sugar cereal and put it in the cart. Do they make it look pretty, taste good, easy to see in it's prime middle shelf location? Yes. But no one forces you to buy it. There are eggs right down the aisle to the left, and they are cheaper.

Yes, it's very very sad. I saw a photo of a friend's son in his second grade class....at least half of them were overweight. I was shocked. It takes work to feed your child healthy foods and make smarter choices. Also harder to get them to exercise with the phones and tablets and video games. It's hard enough to do it even for just yourself. Maybe it's a matter of priorities, not sure. It is definitely sad.