Heh the real challenges of middle age are not the ones I thought they’d be.
When I was on chemo a coupla years back I decided to stop smoking to give the chemo a better chance. The statistics for middle aged male smokers having an effective treatment were too low for my liking so despite the rather obvious hurdle that a recent ex-smoker is prolly no different from a current smoker I quit the habit of a lifetime.
On chemo my weight continued to drop even though most days I was too nauseous to move my ass further from bed to a chair. That all changed when I finished the chemo and my body decided it was healthy.
I really began to pack on the pounds even though I was eating less and exercising more than during the chemo or even before that.
My croaker reckons that when you quit smoking your body begins to ‘thrive’ once more and uses it’s healthier aspect to convert food more efficiently.
It’s a drag that I have been delaying confronting adequately, after being rake like for most of my life I have now acquired extra chins, which is not a good look (as those who should be seen and not heard never cease reminding me). Walking doesn’t do it for me so I am going to have to find a productive form of exercise which does. Am I the only person who feels decadent ‘working out’ in a gym or on an ‘exercise machine’ designed to waste kilojoules as easily as possible?
I mean the concept of consuming so much more than we need that we have to fritter it away on more consumerist crap like an ab-blaster 5000xr or even worse gathering like sheep (mutton dressed as lamb to be specific) in some mirror walled temple of self absorbtion just appalls me. Others of course are entitled to feel differently but I prefer swingin a pick, playing the banjo (shovel) or carrying a sack of something useful to sweating over a machine designed to emulate that activity “in a non-impact way”.
Taking up smoking is really not an option, although I live in the area where all NZ’s tobacco was once grown. Globalisation closed down the tobbacco farms and those that have the correct geographics have moved into making the Chardonnay which people claim to enjoy about this planet. Some of those that can’t afford the change or have the wrong geographics have gone back into baccy. The insane taxes on tobacco mean that some of these old farmers have taken on the aspects of dope growers in the 1970’s which is amusing, it won’t be so funny if the crims move into the game of course but until then it has that air of jaunty buccaneering that is difficult to dislike.
But even though I could smoke again without funding mega-capital or gangsters (dunno why I put the “or” in) I really don’t want to wake up on a cold winters morning gasping for air ever again.
So back to finding productive repetitive anaerobic exercise.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Nov 8 2007 23:11 utc | 3

This chart is based on OECD data and conforms with what b says and with my experience too
BMI chart
there is not much actual data in the links from #4.
As for the question, since obesity-related shame is culturally created, cross-cultural comparisons of the psychological effects of obesity levels seem difficult.

Posted by: boxcar mike | Nov 9 2007 1:03 utc | 5

noting of course, that i am no james dean

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 9 2007 1:25 utc | 7

By pure coincidence, driving to work today I passed a guy in our neighborhood that I’d never seen before, out for a walk. He looked like Sponge Bob Mattress Pants, I’d guess his weight at 450+. He was wobbling along with his wife, girlfriend or personal trainer(?) hovering at his side, as each elephantine leg goose-stepped slowly forward into a new dawn of physical fitness. It was a bloody shocking sight in our neighborhood of rakish English people, but being so, we’re not allowed to stop and stare. An awful lot of abnormal people are trapped behind morbid obesity.
BUT WAIT, THAT’S NOT ALL!
In today’s paper the news that MSRA drug-resistant lethal strep is no more prevalent than the flu. Well, that’s good news! I get the flu almost every year, but manage to push through it, which I’m told no amount of will power will push you through MSRA. And in a related research report I just read, 5 out of 6 hospital patients will have no strep in their nasal passages on admittance, and the 1 of 6 who do, the strep is not MSRA, however, of the 10 to 15% of patients who suffer complications and have to go on wide-spectrum antibiotics, the pre-release nasal swab shows most of them have MSRA forms of resistance, and in a fair share of those unlucky folks, the strep is resistant to antibiotics so powerful as to be lethal if not taken properly. Why is MSRA in the news? Because hospitals now have to report their morbidity statistics!
AND IF YOU ACT NOW, WE’LL MAKE YOU THIS SPECIAL OFFER!
News it appears that not only cervical cancer is really a viral papilloma, but also prostate “cancer” may be virally related to vaginal warts, the varient multi-virus, since internal warts and genital cancers are virtually indistinguishable. Naturally with 50% of men cheating on their spouses and 33% of women, many unprotected, it’s just a matter of statistics before you get a prostate ‘cancer’, if you’re sexually active. One in three men is an overstated statistic, certainly about the same ratio of older men having sex, to the remaining majority monkish married and single men.
You play, you pay!
SORRY, THIS IS A LIMITED TIME OFFER, YOU MUST ACT NOW!
And of course, the sorry news that the experimental HIV treatment actually reduces immunity to HIV infection, the dreaded ‘cure is worse than the disease’. Of course, this is nothing new to Western medicine, most drugs of which are marginally lethal to begin with, or have truly abominable side effects they would love not to tell you about, and certainly no research whatsoever into co-effects when taken with other drugs given in treatment. Hence Franken drugs. Blackened teeth, reddish hair falling out in clumps, multiple sclerosis, death.
300,000 Americans die every year from malpractice, 100x more than died on 9/11. The median-to-mean insurance payment for those deaths is $180,000 to $310,000. Sorry, that’s all you’re worth as a human being to the machine. Speaking of median-to-mean and make-to-market, the latest estimates are direct financial impacts of $1.3T due to the Credit Con, which may likely be six times larger thanks to margin investing.
As the 100M’s of Mom and Pop’s who lost their $10T equity in the Dot Con hydrogen bomb now face the $1.T Credit Con lose of their homes, you can bet the 10,000,000 Americans who die every year in nursing homes statistic is gonna pop up a bit.
RELAX, HAVE A WAFFLE!
Best be a bit overweight going into the 2008 crash. It makes you look successful. Society discriminates more against thin people, especially scrawny under-dressed. Get greased up, dye what’s left of your hair, wear a 20mm gold watch, $400 shoes, then nobody will give you shit about a few extra pounds. They’ll call you sire.
So there you have it, “Gluttony is good!” Just don’t be a sap. Enjoy only the next increment above commercial junk food. Don’t pork out on fois gras and abalone chips.
Nobody will remember how fat you became except the grave digger.

Posted by: Peter Callander | Nov 9 2007 4:26 utc | 9

Debs is dead,
take up squash! you will find yourself in the best shape you have ever known. 45 minutes of squash is equivalent to 3 hours of tennis. squash is easy to learn and a bear to get really good at.

Posted by: dan of steele | Nov 9 2007 8:03 utc | 11

This is why SUV’s are so popular for choice of transportation in America.

Posted by: YY | Nov 9 2007 9:28 utc | 13

I lost 15 pounds this summer water-walking at the local Y and riding my bike.
The bike is best, since it can be done at home with a simple support.
But being overweight (and able to move, not one of the mattress-fatties) might become the new thin when food is thin on the ground.
Historically, thin people have been the POOR ones.

Posted by: hopping madbunny | Nov 9 2007 10:27 utc | 15

I hate sounding like somebody longing for the good old days before X, Y or X, but I still say that as with a large number of things – which I think will be much more obvious in retrospect, if there’s anybody left to study the present day – television is a primary culprit.

Posted by: mats | Nov 9 2007 12:00 utc | 17

Lots have been covered in this thread.

but fat people can be strong and active, there is no contradiction between having the thrifty gene and being fit.

An extremely silly television show, The world’s strongest man shows good examples of this. The contestants pull busses, carry cars, lift huge boulders and such. Though their ideal they feature on their front page has no fat to cover his muscles, the contestants (click video on their site) are simply huge, extremely strong guys. Some has more fat then others, but that is not really a factor when it comes to winning.

Slim trained people fresh out of the gym and very obese folks. There seem to be few between those extrems. My subjective impression is that the second group has grown over the years. While people here in Germany tend to grow a ‘bierbauch’, not so many are allover obese. Said differently: In contrast to Europeans, if U.S. folks get fat, they get really, really fat.

I talked about this with a friend of mine who spent a year as an exchange student in the states (I think it was in high school, could have been college). Fit and strong, but with a body more suited for power sports then endurance sports, she realised she was viewed as fat in USA, and that it was considered more or less odd that she did not binge eat unhealthy food for comfort. Very good of her not too, but strange. And there I think the key to the differences in distribution lies.

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Nov 9 2007 15:33 utc | 19

to second b real, I’ve worked with plenty of sedentary and obese 6-figure earning whitefellas.

Posted by: ran | Nov 9 2007 16:45 utc | 21

You can be too thin. Saying that. As a retired EMT, that I have seen more elderly thin patients die fast, within days of a major problem, then proper weight and slightly overweight. Then again, I have seen the obese die off faster when they have problems also. could it be moderation in those things that you consume, rather then all the odd things that supposedly are good for us. After all to much of a good thing is bad also.

Posted by: James | Nov 10 2007 0:17 utc | 23

Owl, I quit smoking cold turkey after over 30 years of two packs a day. Didn’t have any problems.
I suspect the gentleman in Detroit is the exception to the rule. Even small inner city grocery stores in the city I live in today carry at least some frozen vegetables, fruits, dry peas and beans, canned goods. No, they are not huge supermarkets with overflowing counters of wilted lettuce, wrinkled oranges and bruised bananas, but they can do in a pinch.
As for the walking issue, that is why suburbia contributes to overweight. I don’t include suburbia as part of a city, and I don’t know of any city in the US that doesn’t have sidewalks, and pedestrians walking on them, which was my point about how sterile, unhealthy and people-unfriendly suburbia is.

Posted by: Ensley | Nov 10 2007 4:43 utc | 25

Ten years ago attending UBC in Vancouver, and walking or riding downtown and back
past all the Asian stores with racks and racks of fresh vegetables, I settled on
lots of bok choi, fresh tofu, oyster sauce, black bean sauce, vietnamese hot sauce
and roasted spanish peanuts over brown rice as the daily standard. Got so lean and
mean, people were asking if I was sick. (Nice introduction, huh?) “Excuse me, chum,
but you look like you might have AIDS, eh?” (VFX with Heckel and Jeckel super)
Anyway…that was when Vancouver was still young, like San Fran in the 60’s.
Went back last year for 10-year reunion and most of those stores just have canned
goods and freezer section with Chinese shrimp and talapia, not really safe to eat,
with some roots I couldn’t identify, and a spikey durian that had faded to grey.
That, and a greatly rundown look, while condo towers rose ever higher downtown.
Ten years ago, the white people were cursing the Hong Kong immigrants with their big
boxes and rising property taxes. Now it seems the pendulum has swung back to bland,
I mean whitefellah, Canadian-English “cuisine”, at twice the price of 10 years ago.
The only new venues are their local strip clubs, (and I mean, strip, like nakers).
Sad that even the pearl of the Pacific Northwest can’t rise above Mammon’s Ashes.

Posted by: Euell Gibbons | Nov 11 2007 6:01 utc | 27

Ever since I entered my 30’s, my lifelong struggle with weight defeated me decisively despite my best efforts. My own experience is that your metabolism has “set-point” weight that it will fight like the dickens to defend. If you have always been prone to putting on weight, it will be much harder to lose weight. If you have been a wire all your life, it will be much harder to gain weight. The body’s tendency to maintain a stable weight is probably one of the many ingenious survival mechanisms built into our genetic heritage. Unfortunately, our food infrastructure feeds us in a way that causes this mechanism to push so many of us way towards the “heavy” side of the body-type spectrum.

Posted by: Loveandlight | Nov 11 2007 17:33 utc | 29

I’m with Tangerine and annie here,
meals at set times, of a limited size, and without too many snacks. Being hungry in between was unpleasant as a child, and still is now, but limited calories and limited meal moments make and keep me thin, despite a 50 pound increase that I had once thought permanent. Cheap food, and all the time food sugars up your bloodstream.
Yes, people really do exercise less, and I think we eat partly to compensate for feeling so sludgy after so little exercise. So I’m not mono-causal here. But for me, at least, the only thing that keeps me thin is being hungry part of every day – just like when I was a kid on three meals and one snack.

Posted by: citizen | Nov 12 2007 2:28 utc | 31

congrats on your weight loss jcairo.
in my experience nothing takes off weight as fast as a broken heart.

Posted by: annie | Nov 12 2007 15:31 utc | 33

Deanander wrote: one should note that fatness today in wealthy nations is associated with the specific kind of malnutrition experienced by the poor living with food insecurity in an industrial-fodder ag system: eating as cheaply as possible confines them to a diet of corn syrup, beef fat, soy and corn oils…
Mono wrote: People’s diets reflect entirely what they can afford, not what they necessarily want.
On the other side, b real wrote: this very real noticeable trend in super-sized humans (girth only) is definitely not attributable to class demarcations. nor color lines.
Sorry I don’t have any figures at hand, so take it as impressionistic.
1) It is so that in the US the very poor are economically constrained and eat very ‘badly’. The country in the world that is the most beset by this type of ‘specific malnutrition’ is Guatemala. The Canary Islands are often also lodged under this rubric as well. Cheap calories, etc. etc. (see above.)
But in Switzerland, where obesity is rising as we write, it isn’t so. The ‘poor’ are not thrown back on unhealthy food. Food banks don’t offer junk, VAT is calibrated, the cheapest food ‘budget items’ in the supermarket are regular food, vege, fruit, pasta in 10kg. bags, apples in big boxes, potatoes, cheap cuts of meat, never chips / frozen delights, etc. And the ‘poor’ are advantaged, they are food conscious, and live a more ‘communal life’, meals in company, etc.
The overweight are from all social classes. I had the opportunity recently to review a whole, large. school district with minimal info to be sure – privacy protection – but the ‘fatties’ were all over the board – from refugee without parents living in a home to mom ‘judge’ and father ‘bank manager.’ A similar sort of picture would hold for France and Germany I think.

Posted by: Tangerine | Nov 12 2007 17:10 utc | 35

annie:
but it isn’t all hunky-dory 😉 – with regards to me health, despite my weight loss
just to clarify

Posted by: jcairo | Nov 12 2007 18:27 utc | 37

Discussions from a month ago are quickly forgotten (although they can be revived later as if they were brand new), so I should probably let this one die. I did, however run across a NYT article that was somewhat germane to what had been discussed, so I’ll go ahead and drop it in here in the hopes that sociologists from the future scouring through the virtual archives won’t notice the time stamp and will think it was a more prompt contribution than it actually was.
A High Price for Healthy Food

Healthy eating really does cost more.
That’s what University of Washington researchers found when they compared the prices of 370 foods sold at supermarkets in the Seattle area. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices also are less likely to rise as a result of inflation. The findings, reported in the current issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, may help explain why the highest rates of obesity are seen among people in lower-income groups.
The scientists took an unusual approach, essentially comparing the price of a calorie in a junk food to one consumed in a healthier meal. Although fruits and vegetables are rich in nutrients, they also contain relatively few calories. Foods with high energy density, meaning they pack the most calories per gram, included candy, pastries, baked goods and snacks.
The survey found that higher-calorie, energy-dense foods are the better bargain for cash-strapped shoppers. Energy-dense munchies cost on average $1.76 per 1,000 kcal, compared with $18.16 per 1,000 kcal for low-energy but nutritious foods.
The survey also showed that low-calorie foods were more likely to increase in price, surging 19.5 percent over the two-year study period. High-calorie foods remained a relative bargain, dropping in price by 1.8 percent.
Although people don’t knowingly shop for calories per se, the data show that it’s easier for low-income people to sustain themselves on junk food rather than fruits and vegetables, says the study’s lead author Adam Drewnowski, director of the center for public health nutrition at the University of Washington. Based on his findings, a 2,000-calorie diet would cost just $3.52 a day if it consisted of junk food, compared with $36.32 a day for a diet of low-energy dense foods. However, most people eat a mix of foods. The average American spends about $7 a day on food, although low-income people spend about $4, says Dr. Drewnowski.
But it’s easier to overeat junk food, Dr. Drewnowski adds, both because it tastes good and because eaters often must consume a greater volume in order to feel satisfied. Still, even those who consume twice as much in junk food calories are still spending far less than healthy eaters.
“If you have $3 to feed yourself, your choices gravitate toward foods which give you the most calories per dollar,’’ said Dr. Drewnowski. “Not only are the empty calories cheaper, but the healthy foods are becoming more and more expensive. Vegetables and fruits are rapidly becoming luxury goods.”

Posted by: Monolycus | Dec 8 2007 5:54 utc | 39