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What are your unpopular opinions about health / fitness?
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Need2Exerc1se wrote: »Need2Exerc1se wrote: »quiksylver296 wrote: »Apparently believing frozen meals like Lean Cuisine or Healthy Choice are NOT high in sodium is an unpopular opinion. Do you consider 23-24% of your daily intake high in sodium? I don't. It's one meal. 1/3 of my day.
But is it 1/3 of your daily calories?
Usually pretty close on the days I eat one.
Wow, really? Aren't they all still 300 calories or less?
Nope
not sure what you are eating but it isn't lean cuisines or healthy choice steamers...mine are all under 200....0 -
Bry_Lander wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Packerjohn wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »I have struggled with emotional eating. I still think claiming that some kind of "epidemic" of emotional eating (which probably is common, sure) is why the obesity rate is higher now is odd. I also think it's really odd to go to emotional eating from the posts on experiencing pleasure from food.
IME, emotional eating isn't about enjoying food at all. It's about self comfort and stuffing feelings. To claim it's about appreciating food strikes me as rather like thinking that alcohol abuse is fundamentally about being an oenophile or enjoying the taste of craft beers.
Humans are good at using all kinds of things to dysfunctionally deal with feelings, sure, and I doubt the tendency to do that has changed much over time. (I used to do it with food even as a teen, when I wasn't fat at all, so it also does not necessarily result in obesity.)
Why people are obese now is because food is really easily available and low cost (including the time of preparation), it tends to be around a lot and there are few cultural restrictions on eating, servings and the calorie costs of the most easily available foods are generally up, and people don't really notice, and activity that is required in daily life today is really low and for some people not easy to get without making an effort. Culturally hedonic eating is somewhat encouraged and mindless eating is common.
Indeed, I suspect mindless eating is way more responsible for obesity than emotional eating. Despite my tendency to the latter I think mindless eating was more of a culprit for me, even.
I don't get the impression from the average MFP poster who is struggling that being a foodie or enjoyment of a thought-out evening indulgence is the main stumbling block. Seems like more of them feel guilt and shame about food, eating, and almost don't really seem to enjoy food, to struggle with appreciating more than a really narrow range of foods, sometimes.
So going to "finding pleasure in an evening snack" = "emotional eating" = "the cause of obesity!" strikes me as, well, again, kind of odd.
I would say a fair part of mindless eating is out of boredom which I would consider an emotion.
I would disagree. Boredom eating is seeing food as "something to do" and not about addressing difficult feelings or self comfort, IMO.
Point remains that none of this has anything to do with the comments about desserts.lemurcat12 wrote: »Packerjohn wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »I have struggled with emotional eating. I still think claiming that some kind of "epidemic" of emotional eating (which probably is common, sure) is why the obesity rate is higher now is odd. I also think it's really odd to go to emotional eating from the posts on experiencing pleasure from food.
IME, emotional eating isn't about enjoying food at all. It's about self comfort and stuffing feelings. To claim it's about appreciating food strikes me as rather like thinking that alcohol abuse is fundamentally about being an oenophile or enjoying the taste of craft beers.
Humans are good at using all kinds of things to dysfunctionally deal with feelings, sure, and I doubt the tendency to do that has changed much over time. (I used to do it with food even as a teen, when I wasn't fat at all, so it also does not necessarily result in obesity.)
Why people are obese now is because food is really easily available and low cost (including the time of preparation), it tends to be around a lot and there are few cultural restrictions on eating, servings and the calorie costs of the most easily available foods are generally up, and people don't really notice, and activity that is required in daily life today is really low and for some people not easy to get without making an effort. Culturally hedonic eating is somewhat encouraged and mindless eating is common.
Indeed, I suspect mindless eating is way more responsible for obesity than emotional eating. Despite my tendency to the latter I think mindless eating was more of a culprit for me, even.
I don't get the impression from the average MFP poster who is struggling that being a foodie or enjoyment of a thought-out evening indulgence is the main stumbling block. Seems like more of them feel guilt and shame about food, eating, and almost don't really seem to enjoy food, to struggle with appreciating more than a really narrow range of foods, sometimes.
So going to "finding pleasure in an evening snack" = "emotional eating" = "the cause of obesity!" strikes me as, well, again, kind of odd.
I would say a fair part of mindless eating is out of boredom which I would consider an emotion.
I would disagree. Boredom eating is seeing food as "something to do" and not about addressing difficult feelings or self comfort, IMO.
Point remains that none of this has anything to do with the comments about desserts.
I think that if your life is so boring that you routinely view over-eating as your preferred source of entertainment, then emotionally, you are not in a healthy place.
I don't think people who "boredom eat" see eating as their "preferred source of entertainment," and -- more to the point -- I don't really see what this has to do with the original discussion of dessert. You seem to be trying to bend over backwards now to insist that people are more obese than they used to be because they have some kind of emotional problem, on average, vs. 50 years ago or whenever. There is no reason to believe that is true.4 -
Need2Exerc1se wrote: »Need2Exerc1se wrote: »quiksylver296 wrote: »Apparently believing frozen meals like Lean Cuisine or Healthy Choice are NOT high in sodium is an unpopular opinion. Do you consider 23-24% of your daily intake high in sodium? I don't. It's one meal. 1/3 of my day.
But is it 1/3 of your daily calories?
Usually pretty close on the days I eat one.
Wow, really? Aren't they all still 300 calories or less?
Nope
not sure what you are eating but it isn't lean cuisines or healthy choice steamers...mine are all under 200....
How the heck is 200 calories considered a meal? Are they teeny tiny portions? Similar "healthy" ready meals here in the UK (but more commonly found in the fridge) shoot for about 350-450.3 -
HeliumIsNoble wrote: »stevencloser wrote: »I'm sure you meant to post the OED definition to strengthen the point of it being a perfectly fine word. The fact that they use a reference from an 1800's medical textbook isn't filling me with confidence as to the validity of the word.
That pretty much invalidates every word in the OED and therefore the English language!
Those references aren't there as citations in the standard, as stated by Nuffield, in the publication Broscience Nonsense, issue 38, 2001 sense.
The OED always quotes the earliest recorded usages of words, to demonstrate how long the word has been in use for the etymologists amongst us. (Or people just trying to write historically accurate fiction.) It's kind of its selling point for a subscription.
The definition you quoted is different than the one the prior poster seemed to be using.
To fatten of course means to make or become fat.
The question is whether eating a specific food makes you become fat, and the answer is it doesn't.
The prior poster is using the word in a different way, to mean "calorie dense." That's fine, but saying "calorie dense" would be a lot clearer.2 -
My unpopular opinion that my growing girth and progressing pregnancy is a necessary step in my quest for "bear mode"... at least it's unpopular with my wife at the moment.
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Packerjohn wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Packerjohn wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »I have struggled with emotional eating. I still think claiming that some kind of "epidemic" of emotional eating (which probably is common, sure) is why the obesity rate is higher now is odd. I also think it's really odd to go to emotional eating from the posts on experiencing pleasure from food.
IME, emotional eating isn't about enjoying food at all. It's about self comfort and stuffing feelings. To claim it's about appreciating food strikes me as rather like thinking that alcohol abuse is fundamentally about being an oenophile or enjoying the taste of craft beers.
Humans are good at using all kinds of things to dysfunctionally deal with feelings, sure, and I doubt the tendency to do that has changed much over time. (I used to do it with food even as a teen, when I wasn't fat at all, so it also does not necessarily result in obesity.)
Why people are obese now is because food is really easily available and low cost (including the time of preparation), it tends to be around a lot and there are few cultural restrictions on eating, servings and the calorie costs of the most easily available foods are generally up, and people don't really notice, and activity that is required in daily life today is really low and for some people not easy to get without making an effort. Culturally hedonic eating is somewhat encouraged and mindless eating is common.
Indeed, I suspect mindless eating is way more responsible for obesity than emotional eating. Despite my tendency to the latter I think mindless eating was more of a culprit for me, even.
I don't get the impression from the average MFP poster who is struggling that being a foodie or enjoyment of a thought-out evening indulgence is the main stumbling block. Seems like more of them feel guilt and shame about food, eating, and almost don't really seem to enjoy food, to struggle with appreciating more than a really narrow range of foods, sometimes.
So going to "finding pleasure in an evening snack" = "emotional eating" = "the cause of obesity!" strikes me as, well, again, kind of odd.
I would say a fair part of mindless eating is out of boredom which I would consider an emotion.
I would disagree. Boredom eating is seeing food as "something to do" and not about addressing difficult feelings or self comfort, IMO.
Point remains that none of this has anything to do with the comments about desserts.
The PhDs in Psychology would say boredom is an emotion:
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/07-08/dull-moment.aspx
Excerpt:
"Even though boredom is very common, there is a lack of knowledge about it," says Wijnand van Tilburg, a psychologist at the University of Southampton. "There hasn't been much research about how it affects people on an everyday basis."
Now that's changing, as scientists have begun to take a closer look at this underappreciated emotion. The results of their research are anything but dull.
Boredom is a universal experience, yet until recently researchers didn't have a go-to definition of the condition. Psychologist John Eastwood, PhD, of York University in Toronto, decided that was a good place to start. He and his colleagues scoured the scientific literature for theories of boredom and tried to extract the common elements. Then they interviewed hundreds of people about what it feels like to experience that tedious state.
They concluded that boredom is best described in terms of attention. A bored person doesn't just have nothing to do. He or she wants to be stimulated, but is unable, for whatever reason, to connect with his or her environment — a state Eastwood describes as an "unengaged mind" (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2012).
"In a nutshell, it boiled down to boredom being the unfulfilled desire for satisfying activity," he says.
Sure, boredom is an emotion.
That doesn't make mindless eating, which is sometimes eating when one is bored, the same thing as eating to self-comfort or stuff down feelings.
Mindless and boredom eating is something that happens because food is there, I'd bet. Or because you are hanging out with someone and want something to do and getting a bite seems easy.
Also, and I repeat, don't see what this has to do with the dessert discussion.2 -
Need2Exerc1se wrote: »Need2Exerc1se wrote: »quiksylver296 wrote: »Apparently believing frozen meals like Lean Cuisine or Healthy Choice are NOT high in sodium is an unpopular opinion. Do you consider 23-24% of your daily intake high in sodium? I don't. It's one meal. 1/3 of my day.
But is it 1/3 of your daily calories?
Usually pretty close on the days I eat one.
Wow, really? Aren't they all still 300 calories or less?
Nope
not sure what you are eating but it isn't lean cuisines or healthy choice steamers...mine are all under 200....
Way back in the day Lean Cuisine used to advertise that all their meals were <= 300. But I checked their website. They do have higher calorie meals now.0 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »Packerjohn wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Packerjohn wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »I have struggled with emotional eating. I still think claiming that some kind of "epidemic" of emotional eating (which probably is common, sure) is why the obesity rate is higher now is odd. I also think it's really odd to go to emotional eating from the posts on experiencing pleasure from food.
IME, emotional eating isn't about enjoying food at all. It's about self comfort and stuffing feelings. To claim it's about appreciating food strikes me as rather like thinking that alcohol abuse is fundamentally about being an oenophile or enjoying the taste of craft beers.
Humans are good at using all kinds of things to dysfunctionally deal with feelings, sure, and I doubt the tendency to do that has changed much over time. (I used to do it with food even as a teen, when I wasn't fat at all, so it also does not necessarily result in obesity.)
Why people are obese now is because food is really easily available and low cost (including the time of preparation), it tends to be around a lot and there are few cultural restrictions on eating, servings and the calorie costs of the most easily available foods are generally up, and people don't really notice, and activity that is required in daily life today is really low and for some people not easy to get without making an effort. Culturally hedonic eating is somewhat encouraged and mindless eating is common.
Indeed, I suspect mindless eating is way more responsible for obesity than emotional eating. Despite my tendency to the latter I think mindless eating was more of a culprit for me, even.
I don't get the impression from the average MFP poster who is struggling that being a foodie or enjoyment of a thought-out evening indulgence is the main stumbling block. Seems like more of them feel guilt and shame about food, eating, and almost don't really seem to enjoy food, to struggle with appreciating more than a really narrow range of foods, sometimes.
So going to "finding pleasure in an evening snack" = "emotional eating" = "the cause of obesity!" strikes me as, well, again, kind of odd.
I would say a fair part of mindless eating is out of boredom which I would consider an emotion.
I would disagree. Boredom eating is seeing food as "something to do" and not about addressing difficult feelings or self comfort, IMO.
Point remains that none of this has anything to do with the comments about desserts.
The PhDs in Psychology would say boredom is an emotion:
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/07-08/dull-moment.aspx
Excerpt:
"Even though boredom is very common, there is a lack of knowledge about it," says Wijnand van Tilburg, a psychologist at the University of Southampton. "There hasn't been much research about how it affects people on an everyday basis."
Now that's changing, as scientists have begun to take a closer look at this underappreciated emotion. The results of their research are anything but dull.
Boredom is a universal experience, yet until recently researchers didn't have a go-to definition of the condition. Psychologist John Eastwood, PhD, of York University in Toronto, decided that was a good place to start. He and his colleagues scoured the scientific literature for theories of boredom and tried to extract the common elements. Then they interviewed hundreds of people about what it feels like to experience that tedious state.
They concluded that boredom is best described in terms of attention. A bored person doesn't just have nothing to do. He or she wants to be stimulated, but is unable, for whatever reason, to connect with his or her environment — a state Eastwood describes as an "unengaged mind" (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2012).
"In a nutshell, it boiled down to boredom being the unfulfilled desire for satisfying activity," he says.
Also, and I repeat, don't see what this has to do with the dessert discussion.
No idea what you are talking about. Looks like there are 3000+ comments in this thread. I'm personally not bored enough to track back.3 -
It would be different- I used a different dictionary. I think before I posted, the discussion had involved Cambridge's free online one and Websters free online one.lemurcat12 wrote: »HeliumIsNoble wrote: »stevencloser wrote: »I'm sure you meant to post the OED definition to strengthen the point of it being a perfectly fine word. The fact that they use a reference from an 1800's medical textbook isn't filling me with confidence as to the validity of the word.
That pretty much invalidates every word in the OED and therefore the English language!
Those references aren't there as citations in the standard, as stated by Nuffield, in the publication Broscience Nonsense, issue 38, 2001 sense.
The OED always quotes the earliest recorded usages of words, to demonstrate how long the word has been in use for the etymologists amongst us. (Or people just trying to write historically accurate fiction.) It's kind of its selling point for a subscription.
The definition you quoted is different than the one the prior poster seemed to be using.
To fatten of course means to make or become fat.
The question is whether eating a specific food makes you become fat, and the answer is it doesn't.
The prior poster is using the word in a different way, to mean "calorie dense." That's fine, but saying "calorie dense" would be a lot clearer.
As I said previously, (I think), I would understand "fattening food" to be food that is calorie-dense. Generally in implied comparison to other food that are reasonable alternatives.
Anyway didn't really like either of the dictionary entries posted so far, and it's not a proper semantical argument if no-one willy-waves their access to the OED.
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Need2Exerc1se wrote: »Need2Exerc1se wrote: »Need2Exerc1se wrote: »quiksylver296 wrote: »Apparently believing frozen meals like Lean Cuisine or Healthy Choice are NOT high in sodium is an unpopular opinion. Do you consider 23-24% of your daily intake high in sodium? I don't. It's one meal. 1/3 of my day.
But is it 1/3 of your daily calories?
Usually pretty close on the days I eat one.
Wow, really? Aren't they all still 300 calories or less?
Nope
not sure what you are eating but it isn't lean cuisines or healthy choice steamers...mine are all under 200....
Way back in the day Lean Cuisine used to advertise that all their meals were <= 300. But I checked their website. They do have higher calorie meals now.
INteresting...my favorite and the only one I buy is 160 calories 14 grams of protein. Grilled chicken and potato in wine sauce....I know that there are others that are higher but I have yet to taste any of them.
The healthy choice I choose are the ones without noodles or rice typically...so usually about 240 calories I think but 28 grams of protein.
I do add protein sometimes...depends on waht is leftover in the fridge.VintageFeline wrote: »Need2Exerc1se wrote: »Need2Exerc1se wrote: »quiksylver296 wrote: »Apparently believing frozen meals like Lean Cuisine or Healthy Choice are NOT high in sodium is an unpopular opinion. Do you consider 23-24% of your daily intake high in sodium? I don't. It's one meal. 1/3 of my day.
But is it 1/3 of your daily calories?
Usually pretty close on the days I eat one.
Wow, really? Aren't they all still 300 calories or less?
Nope
not sure what you are eating but it isn't lean cuisines or healthy choice steamers...mine are all under 200....
How the heck is 200 calories considered a meal? Are they teeny tiny portions? Similar "healthy" ready meals here in the UK (but more commonly found in the fridge) shoot for about 350-450.
~see above.
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Bry_Lander wrote: »stevencloser wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »Packerjohn wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »Bry_Lander wrote: »stevencloser wrote: »I am extremely confused by purposely making food not taste good because "it's fuel". Or maybe the argument is the old parent argument of "poor children in Africa can't enjoy their food so you aren't allowed to either"?
So am I, who stated that?
What is your point?
I will agree that you're not explicitly against food tasting good, but you seem to have an issue with people enjoying it. It would follow, logically, that part of enjoying food is enjoying how it tastes.
You seem to have very black or white thinking on this issue. Reading between the lines of what you posted, it's almost as if it's not okay in your books for fat people to enjoy food for pleasure because they're fat.
Why?
Why can't food be good, and pleasurable and still within the realm of someone's correct energy balance?
I think your cut-and-dried, rather dull "food is fuel" and your initial point was that maybe fat people should remove emotions from eating as... what? Punishment for being fat? OR is that your solution to the obesity crisis?
Whatever you're doing, I don't think people who ignore the nuances of humankind's relationship with food have a balanced relationship with it. Food as fuel is just one aspect.
You might want to do some soul searching.
There are millions of people with a destructive, dysfunctional relationship with food - I will leave the deep soul searching to them, and not waste a moment of my time dissecting something that I do actually enjoy and is giving me great results. I'm former military and I think that there is a disconnect between my perception of discipline and delayed gratification and the mindset of others.
You're right. If you use the search function for these forums and search for emotional eating and stress eating (IMO just a subset of emotional eating) you will get 1,000 hits (which is apparently the max) for each of them.
The emotional ties to food surely are resulting in weight issues.
For some people.
Not all.
This is besides the original point, but you two are too busy back-patting each other to realize that you've strayed from it.
OR..
Are you deflecting from the original point BryLander made about the "epidemic" of emotional eating and the need to diminish the prevalence of eating for pleasure?
So emotional eating isn't an epidemic? So what is your theory on why so many people are overweight, did 68.8% of the people in the US just spontaneously get fat?
They don't move and eat too many calories
I'm fairly certain that everyone involved in this discussion already knows that - my question was concerning the psychology behind these behaviors.
It doesn't take a ton of calories to become overweight. In fact I think it was shown that most people have weight creeping onto them slowly over years without noticing or not caring because it's never a lot at once. It only takes just over 100 calories extra per day to gain a pound per month and a year from now you weigh 12 pounds more.
For the people who are slowly gaining (the 100 calorie per day surplus people gaining a pound per month), after about a year there are numerous non-scale warning signs that are appearing and should be difficult to ignore. At that point, if they choose to reverse their weight gain at the same rate, they will have to eat 200 less calories per day. Psychologically, this is tough for some people; it is the equivalent of eating about 2 less meals per week, something that most Americans would find traumatic.
I am curious what point you are trying to make here.
You asked why people were overweight, if not psychologically messed up (the emotional eating epidemic theory).
Another poster pointed out that it's really easy to overeat without doing more than adding 100 calories per day (or less).
You note -- accurately -- that if they realize they are gaining they should be able to reverse it before it gets too out of hand. You then make a snide (and IMO inaccurate) claim that it is traumatic for people to eat 2 less meals per week (or 800 less calories per week).
I think there are understandable reasons why I lot of people DON'T do something about the gain (partly because they don't realize how easy it would be to stop, often because the idea of having to monitor calories/amounts in some way seems difficult, even though it wouldn't actually be if they did it). They feel out of control, don't really understand what led to the gain -- that's why I think it's important to point out that it's calories -- and think they have to do something extreme to lose (not just cut 800 calories per week). They may have no clue how many calories they are consuming and think there's something wrong with them if they have to pay attention, if they don't just naturally eat to maintain.
Sneering at fat people or suggesting that they either must be emotionally disturbed or weak and lazy (traumatized by the thought of missing 2 meals per week and the like) doesn't really make it seem like you are interested in why people might struggle with weight loss/not immediately lose weight.9 -
My favorite frozen meals are the Stouffer's FitKitchen ones, because they're higher protein. The one's I've had so far have been anywhere from 260-450 calories. The sodium in them does tend to be higher than I'd have in a home-cooked meal, but nothing outrageous (not over 1000 mg or anything - probably 40% of RDA on average).2
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Packerjohn wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Packerjohn wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Packerjohn wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »I have struggled with emotional eating. I still think claiming that some kind of "epidemic" of emotional eating (which probably is common, sure) is why the obesity rate is higher now is odd. I also think it's really odd to go to emotional eating from the posts on experiencing pleasure from food.
IME, emotional eating isn't about enjoying food at all. It's about self comfort and stuffing feelings. To claim it's about appreciating food strikes me as rather like thinking that alcohol abuse is fundamentally about being an oenophile or enjoying the taste of craft beers.
Humans are good at using all kinds of things to dysfunctionally deal with feelings, sure, and I doubt the tendency to do that has changed much over time. (I used to do it with food even as a teen, when I wasn't fat at all, so it also does not necessarily result in obesity.)
Why people are obese now is because food is really easily available and low cost (including the time of preparation), it tends to be around a lot and there are few cultural restrictions on eating, servings and the calorie costs of the most easily available foods are generally up, and people don't really notice, and activity that is required in daily life today is really low and for some people not easy to get without making an effort. Culturally hedonic eating is somewhat encouraged and mindless eating is common.
Indeed, I suspect mindless eating is way more responsible for obesity than emotional eating. Despite my tendency to the latter I think mindless eating was more of a culprit for me, even.
I don't get the impression from the average MFP poster who is struggling that being a foodie or enjoyment of a thought-out evening indulgence is the main stumbling block. Seems like more of them feel guilt and shame about food, eating, and almost don't really seem to enjoy food, to struggle with appreciating more than a really narrow range of foods, sometimes.
So going to "finding pleasure in an evening snack" = "emotional eating" = "the cause of obesity!" strikes me as, well, again, kind of odd.
I would say a fair part of mindless eating is out of boredom which I would consider an emotion.
I would disagree. Boredom eating is seeing food as "something to do" and not about addressing difficult feelings or self comfort, IMO.
Point remains that none of this has anything to do with the comments about desserts.
The PhDs in Psychology would say boredom is an emotion:
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/07-08/dull-moment.aspx
Excerpt:
"Even though boredom is very common, there is a lack of knowledge about it," says Wijnand van Tilburg, a psychologist at the University of Southampton. "There hasn't been much research about how it affects people on an everyday basis."
Now that's changing, as scientists have begun to take a closer look at this underappreciated emotion. The results of their research are anything but dull.
Boredom is a universal experience, yet until recently researchers didn't have a go-to definition of the condition. Psychologist John Eastwood, PhD, of York University in Toronto, decided that was a good place to start. He and his colleagues scoured the scientific literature for theories of boredom and tried to extract the common elements. Then they interviewed hundreds of people about what it feels like to experience that tedious state.
They concluded that boredom is best described in terms of attention. A bored person doesn't just have nothing to do. He or she wants to be stimulated, but is unable, for whatever reason, to connect with his or her environment — a state Eastwood describes as an "unengaged mind" (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2012).
"In a nutshell, it boiled down to boredom being the unfulfilled desire for satisfying activity," he says.
Also, and I repeat, don't see what this has to do with the dessert discussion.
No idea what you are talking about. Looks like there are 3000+ comments in this thread. I'm personally not bored enough to track back.
The thing about emotional eating started with a claim that eating dessert is not healthy.0 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »Packerjohn wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »Packerjohn wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »I have struggled with emotional eating. I still think claiming that some kind of "epidemic" of emotional eating (which probably is common, sure) is why the obesity rate is higher now is odd. I also think it's really odd to go to emotional eating from the posts on experiencing pleasure from food.
IME, emotional eating isn't about enjoying food at all. It's about self comfort and stuffing feelings. To claim it's about appreciating food strikes me as rather like thinking that alcohol abuse is fundamentally about being an oenophile or enjoying the taste of craft beers.
Humans are good at using all kinds of things to dysfunctionally deal with feelings, sure, and I doubt the tendency to do that has changed much over time. (I used to do it with food even as a teen, when I wasn't fat at all, so it also does not necessarily result in obesity.)
Why people are obese now is because food is really easily available and low cost (including the time of preparation), it tends to be around a lot and there are few cultural restrictions on eating, servings and the calorie costs of the most easily available foods are generally up, and people don't really notice, and activity that is required in daily life today is really low and for some people not easy to get without making an effort. Culturally hedonic eating is somewhat encouraged and mindless eating is common.
Indeed, I suspect mindless eating is way more responsible for obesity than emotional eating. Despite my tendency to the latter I think mindless eating was more of a culprit for me, even.
I don't get the impression from the average MFP poster who is struggling that being a foodie or enjoyment of a thought-out evening indulgence is the main stumbling block. Seems like more of them feel guilt and shame about food, eating, and almost don't really seem to enjoy food, to struggle with appreciating more than a really narrow range of foods, sometimes.
So going to "finding pleasure in an evening snack" = "emotional eating" = "the cause of obesity!" strikes me as, well, again, kind of odd.
I would say a fair part of mindless eating is out of boredom which I would consider an emotion.
I would disagree. Boredom eating is seeing food as "something to do" and not about addressing difficult feelings or self comfort, IMO.
Point remains that none of this has anything to do with the comments about desserts.
The PhDs in Psychology would say boredom is an emotion:
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/07-08/dull-moment.aspx
Excerpt:
"Even though boredom is very common, there is a lack of knowledge about it," says Wijnand van Tilburg, a psychologist at the University of Southampton. "There hasn't been much research about how it affects people on an everyday basis."
Now that's changing, as scientists have begun to take a closer look at this underappreciated emotion. The results of their research are anything but dull.
Boredom is a universal experience, yet until recently researchers didn't have a go-to definition of the condition. Psychologist John Eastwood, PhD, of York University in Toronto, decided that was a good place to start. He and his colleagues scoured the scientific literature for theories of boredom and tried to extract the common elements. Then they interviewed hundreds of people about what it feels like to experience that tedious state.
They concluded that boredom is best described in terms of attention. A bored person doesn't just have nothing to do. He or she wants to be stimulated, but is unable, for whatever reason, to connect with his or her environment — a state Eastwood describes as an "unengaged mind" (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2012).
"In a nutshell, it boiled down to boredom being the unfulfilled desire for satisfying activity," he says.
Sure, boredom is an emotion.
That doesn't make mindless eating, which is sometimes eating when one is bored, the same thing as eating to self-comfort or stuff down feelings.
Mindless and boredom eating is something that happens because food is there, I'd bet. Or because you are hanging out with someone and want something to do and getting a bite seems easy.
Also, and I repeat, don't see what this has to do with the dessert discussion.
I would even argue that mindless eating doesn't always happen out of boredom. Sometimes it's just a habit. People who watch TV for entertainment and eat at the same time are often not bored, just used to eating while watching TV. Same for eating while doing anything or just because something casual not always related to deeply held emotions triggers the eating like an ad, heat, cold, a certain time of the day, certain activity, a candy bowl on the table, and yes, boredom. It's a whole different category on its own with different representations and thought process. It does not involve feelings of guilt, anxiety, and self hate. It's mindless.
ETA: Re: why people don't do something about being fat
What's the most common thing you hear when someone is overweight? "I have a slow metabolism"
They just resign to that "fact" and decide they can't be bothered to starve themselves to lose weight because that should be the only way someone with a slow metabolism can lose. And yes, I agree, people not doing something about gain does not in any way mean that they got fat by eating emotionally.7 -
I'll throw in what may be an unpopular opinion that I hold: Chasing a number on the scale does not mean I'm obsessing or unhealthy.18
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The difficulty is that we are attempting to interpret the meaning of a term "fattening" to multiple communities.
One being the lay person - those generally ignorant of the issues surrounding weight management.
The other being the average MFP user - while many may disagree on the particulars there is a minimum foundation of the variables impacting weight management.
Having this foundational knowledge does lead one to challenge so called "established" thinking and makes terms such as fattening very situational dependent. There is a great deal of bias in this as the majority of MFP users are more focused on deficit; however this term is going to have a different meaning to those focusing on gaining.
Based upon this thread alone, I'd strongly disagree with the bolded. Reading most of the other threads on MFP would only strengthen that stance. MFP users, as a whole, are just as enraptured with woo, fearmongering and pseudoscience as the uneducated lay person. Cleanses/detoxes. Juice fasts. Apple cider vinegar. Green tea. MLM scams. Sugar/carb demonization. The magickal, miraculous wizardries of keto and IF. Military diet. Gaining slabs of muscle while eating 1000 calories of lettuce and doing 4 hours of cardio per day. Et cetera ad nauseum.
I will, however, agree with the above if we establish "minimum foundation" as being on a level with the derpy weight loss/diet articles found in magazines and the garbage in Netflix "documentaries".
Now there's one that's like nails on a chalkboard for me.
Is this just lazy language, or do people think that the documentaries they see on Netflix are original content (the vast majority are not)?
It would be like referring to movies as AMC movies or television shows as Comcast shows.3 -
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accidentalpancake wrote: »The difficulty is that we are attempting to interpret the meaning of a term "fattening" to multiple communities.
One being the lay person - those generally ignorant of the issues surrounding weight management.
The other being the average MFP user - while many may disagree on the particulars there is a minimum foundation of the variables impacting weight management.
Having this foundational knowledge does lead one to challenge so called "established" thinking and makes terms such as fattening very situational dependent. There is a great deal of bias in this as the majority of MFP users are more focused on deficit; however this term is going to have a different meaning to those focusing on gaining.
Based upon this thread alone, I'd strongly disagree with the bolded. Reading most of the other threads on MFP would only strengthen that stance. MFP users, as a whole, are just as enraptured with woo, fearmongering and pseudoscience as the uneducated lay person. Cleanses/detoxes. Juice fasts. Apple cider vinegar. Green tea. MLM scams. Sugar/carb demonization. The magickal, miraculous wizardries of keto and IF. Military diet. Gaining slabs of muscle while eating 1000 calories of lettuce and doing 4 hours of cardio per day. Et cetera ad nauseum.
I will, however, agree with the above if we establish "minimum foundation" as being on a level with the derpy weight loss/diet articles found in magazines and the garbage in Netflix "documentaries".
Now there's one that's like nails on a chalkboard for me.
Is this just lazy language, or do people think that the documentaries they see on Netflix are original content (the vast majority are not)?
It would be like referring to movies as AMC movies or television shows as Comcast shows.
Note the "in" before Netflix. They mean the category of Documentaries on Netflix, not that they are Netflix produced.1 -
VintageFeline wrote: »accidentalpancake wrote: »The difficulty is that we are attempting to interpret the meaning of a term "fattening" to multiple communities.
One being the lay person - those generally ignorant of the issues surrounding weight management.
The other being the average MFP user - while many may disagree on the particulars there is a minimum foundation of the variables impacting weight management.
Having this foundational knowledge does lead one to challenge so called "established" thinking and makes terms such as fattening very situational dependent. There is a great deal of bias in this as the majority of MFP users are more focused on deficit; however this term is going to have a different meaning to those focusing on gaining.
Based upon this thread alone, I'd strongly disagree with the bolded. Reading most of the other threads on MFP would only strengthen that stance. MFP users, as a whole, are just as enraptured with woo, fearmongering and pseudoscience as the uneducated lay person. Cleanses/detoxes. Juice fasts. Apple cider vinegar. Green tea. MLM scams. Sugar/carb demonization. The magickal, miraculous wizardries of keto and IF. Military diet. Gaining slabs of muscle while eating 1000 calories of lettuce and doing 4 hours of cardio per day. Et cetera ad nauseum.
I will, however, agree with the above if we establish "minimum foundation" as being on a level with the derpy weight loss/diet articles found in magazines and the garbage in Netflix "documentaries".
Now there's one that's like nails on a chalkboard for me.
Is this just lazy language, or do people think that the documentaries they see on Netflix are original content (the vast majority are not)?
It would be like referring to movies as AMC movies or television shows as Comcast shows.
Note the "in" before Netflix. They mean the category of Documentaries on Netflix, not that they are Netflix produced.
The "in" doesn't modify in that way at all.
"in" is the location of the information, which is followed by the source of said information. It would work as "documentaries in/on Netflix," but not as "in Netflix documentaries."0 -
cmriverside wrote: »snickerscharlie wrote: »cmriverside wrote: »The difficulty is that we are attempting to interpret the meaning of a term "fattening" to multiple communities.
One being the lay person - those generally ignorant of the issues surrounding weight management.
The other being the average MFP user - while many may disagree on the particulars there is a minimum foundation of the variables impacting weight management.
Having this foundational knowledge does lead one to challenge so called "established" thinking and makes terms such as fattening very situational dependent. There is a great deal of bias in this as the majority of MFP users are more focused on deficit; however this term is going to have a different meaning to those focusing on gaining.
Based upon this thread alone, I'd strongly disagree with the bolded. Reading most of the other threads on MFP would only strengthen that stance. MFP users, as a whole, are just as enraptured with woo, fearmongering and pseudoscience as the uneducated lay person. Cleanses/detoxes. Juice fasts. Apple cider vinegar. Green tea. MLM scams. Sugar/carb demonization. The magickal, miraculous wizardries of keto and IF. Military diet. Gaining slabs of muscle while eating 1000 calories of lettuce and doing 4 hours of cardio per day. Et cetera ad nauseum.
I will, however, agree with the above if we establish "minimum foundation" as being on a level with the derpy weight loss/diet articles found in magazines and the garbage in Netflix "documentaries".
...shall we say, "MFP users who have made it past their first 200 posts?" ...we can usually crowd-source the woo out of them by then.
...unless they got their 200 posts in ChitChat.
Ugh. I forgot about Chit Chat.
Chit Chat / Fun and Games both serve a highly useful purpose. It gives those people a place to congregate and discuss topics apropos to their levels of discourse, and most of them rarely stray into the main forums. I liken its usefulness to having a childrens' table at family gatherings.32
This discussion has been closed.
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