I’m outraged! Here I am, drinking my coffee and reading the morning paper and what do I see? An article comparing diet plans (it’s been an on-going series since the beginning of the year) http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04169/332980.stm. No problem until I get to this paragraph:
Quote:
What discourages me, though, is something I read in The New York Times on June 8, quoting noted obesity expert Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, who says that "body weight is genetically determined, as tightly regulated as height. Genes control not only how much you eat but also the metabolic rate at which you burn food. When it comes to eating, free will is an illusion.
"People can exert a level of control over their weight within a 10-, perhaps a 15-pound range," Dr. Friedman said. But expecting an obese person to decide to simply eat less and exercise more to get below the obesity range, below the overweight range? It virtually never happens, he said. "Any weight that is lost almost invariably comes right back."
Frankly, I think that “noted obesity expert” Jeffrey Friedman can blow it out his you know what …. What kind of message is that, to tell people they’re doomed before they even start?? It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I’d like to point out that WE have many “noted obesity experts” here, such as Karen, Julie, Jack, Beverly, StarPrincess, Mel, myself, and many others who can tell you that it’s very possible to lose weight and keep it off permanently. In fact, we’re all doing it. So there, Dr. Friedman!
Hmmm, I know, apparently since hitting goal in 2001 I should be up to at least 256lbs now, which thankfully I am not. Yes I have gained, but as far as I am concerned my weight gain (of 15-20lbs) is a mind over matter thing (I am finally prepared to work on my inner self which still has a PPFC attitude WAY too often, apparently I was suppose to work on the inner stuff before losing weight, ah well, I like to do things differently I suppose).
I think it's fully detrimental psychologically to print articles like these. Articles like these made me believe when I was overweight (and young and very impressionable) that I would always be plus sized (I am still in the single digits), single, work a crappy job (although I was really smart) and die young.
I still exercise. Most of my food choices are good... Don't listen to that doctor....
To all successful maintainers, you have done a fabulous job. Don't listen to him (I know you guys aren't). Maybe he's jealous of people's weight-loss success or is connected to certain special interest groups, who knows.
Well I have lost 150 lbs in the past and kept it off for over 10+ years, only to regain quite a bit back, but I do not consider that b/c of genes, I had a major set back in my life that triggered my weight gain.
Dr. Friedman wants these poor souls to think they don't stand a chance, what a crime. Wonder how much he's getting out of it $$$$$$$.
Leenie: same here... I didn't starve myself to lose weight. I just learned control and focused on my goals... My weight gain is all me, not my genes.
My fear is that article will turn people off from even trying to lose weight. Trust me, I did not end up at 256lbs by eating normally or healthily. I would eat Fast food at least 4 times a week (super size meals with an apple pie for dessert, drink regular coke, down cookies, donuts and chocolate whenever I wanted, ate big platefuls of pasta. I ate huge portions in general. I also barely exercised. That is what got me to 256lbs, I don't believe at all it was my "natural weight". I think my natural weight though is lower than it is now, sitting somewhere around 145-150lbs.
If this is the same guy who discovered the leptin gene, it is in his personal and professional self-interest to portray obesity as a deterministic, gene-based syndrome over which people have little or no conscious control. Because that view will fuel the grant machinery that pays for his research and his salary. Then if he patents a drug or two that interferes with the leptin pathways, he can promote it as a "cure" for obesity and he stands to become a very, very rich man indeed. As they said during Watergate: follow the money.
What a thing to say! Geez! As much as I love feeling rare, exclusive and terribly special, how can someone believe that? It's that whole "victim" mentality all over again. Grrrrrrrrr!
Let's go kick him in the shins with our now thin and beautifully toned legs
Ain't that the truth! If I have a few minutes today, I'll dig around the Internet and see what's out there about Dr. Friedman.
Ali -- that's my fear too, that someone who's overweight would read that and say: "it's hopeless -- noted obesity specialists say I can't do it -- please pass the Krispy Kremes".
Look, there's certainly some biological/genetic basis for obesity -- and that may determine our starting point (of course the years of eating crap play a big role too!). BUT that's only the STARTING POINT, not the ENDING POINT. It doesn't mean we can't lose the weight. At the end of the day, it's comes down to me -- it's MY hand that holds the fork. No one else; nothing else. No one's forcing me to eat or tying me down so I can't go to the gym. Like Jack said: if you want something bad enough, you can move heaven and earth to get it
Quote:
Let's go kick him in the shins with our now thin and beautifully toned legs
Meg: I agree there too... Some people hold onto fat easier (I figure at least I would survive a famine) and some people have a hard time feeling full (my response time takes a long while to kick in). Some people will also have an extremely hard time losing weight due to medical conditions too and I realize that. Overall though for myself, I know I made a lot of bad food choices and exacerbated my own tendancy to be overweight (I have been overweight since I was 8).
Some people can only eat 1300 calories a day to maintain, others can eat 2800 cals... we're all different, but if we find out what makes us tick(both physiologically and psychologically<yup, I must include the head stuff>), what calorie load we can handle (and yes it will typically be under the average 2500-3000 calories a day North Americans consume on average), make healthy choices and exercise, I'd say a number of people could get down to and maintain a relatively healthy weight and/or size (I realize though some people need more than this and for them tools like WLS can help). Yup, it's true, some of us do have to work harder at losing/keeping of weight, it's not fair, but it's not the end of the world either.
Hearing all teh statistics when I was a kid, it seemed like it was a lost cause.. Then one day, I just realized, hey, I definitely could do better than this and I decided to lose weight. I got my confidence in a writing course I did in University. We had to write a paper about what we know about ourselves and what we were good at (a must do for anyone who's down on themselves, you'll be suprised at all the good stuff you'll realize about yourself).
I also do believe that my post-weightloss weight gain is still all me and not genes. I let things get in the way of it... my initial adolescent weight gain was a mixture of genetic tendencies, environment and apathy on my own part (especially after the age of 16).
This thread is interesting and Meg if you can find out who funds the research it would be nice to know.
That is the biggest load of rubbish that I have ever heard. If that were true then why are there doctors all over the country all over the world for that matter promoting weight loss and the healthy lifestyle!! I am enraged too!! That telling me that I can't change? Just watch me!!
Where can we send our before and after pictures for this whack job?
Michelle
Summary: Jeffrey Friedman studies the molecular mechanisms that regulate food intake and body weight. Genetic studies in mice led to the identification of leptin, a hormone made by fat tissue, that plays a key role in regulating weight. Current studies explore the mechanisms by which leptin controls feeding behavior and body weight. Studies to identify other key regulators are also under way.
Thanks, StarPrincess! Here's the text of the original article from The New York Times that the quote (in my first post) was lifted from:
Quote:
June 8, 2004, Tuesday
HEALTH & FITNESS I BEG TO DIFFER; The Fat Epidemic: He Says It's an Illusion
By GINA KOLATA (NYT)
Ask anyone: Americans are getting fatter and fatter. Advertising campaigns say they are. So do federal officials and the scientists they rely on.
But Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller University, argues that contrary to popular opinion, national data do not show Americans growing uniformly fatter.
Instead, he says, the statistics demonstrate clearly that while the very fat are getting fatter, thinner people have remained pretty much the same.
Let it be said that Dr. Friedman, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and the discoverer of the gene for leptin, a hormone released by fat cells, is not fat. He is tall and gangly, with the rumpled look of an academic scientist.
As an obesity researcher, he might be expected to endorse the prevailing view that obesity in this country is out of control. But Dr. Friedman said he was outraged by the acceptance of what he sees as a hurtful myth, one that encourages people to believe that if you are fat, it is your fault.
The obesity arena ''is so political, so rife with misinformation and disinformation,'' he said.
Dr. Friedman points to careful statistical analyses of the changes in Americans' body weights from 1991 to today by Dr. Katherine Flegal of the National Center for Health Statistics. At the lower end of the weight distribution, nothing has changed, not even by a few pounds. As you move up the scale, a few additional pounds start to show up, but even at midrange, people today are just 6 or 7 pounds heavier than they were in 1991. Only with the massively obese, the very top of the distribution, is there a substantial increase in weight, about 25 to 30 pounds, Dr. Flegal reported.
As a result, the curve of body weight has been pulled slightly to the right, with more people shifting up a few pounds to cross the line that experts use to divide normal from obese. In 1991, 23 percent of Americans fell into the obese category; now 31 percent do, a more than 30 percent increase. But the average weight of the population has increased by just 7 to 10 pounds since 1991.
Dr. Friedman gave an analogy: ''Imagine the average I.Q. was 100 and that 5 percent of the population had an I.Q. of 140 or greater and were considered to be geniuses. Now let's say that education improves and the average I.Q. increases to 107 and 10 percent of the population has an I.Q. of above 140.
''You could present the data in two ways,'' he said. ''You could say that the average I.Q. is up seven points or you could say that because of improved education the number of geniuses has doubled.''
He added, ''The whole obesity debate is equivalent to drawing conclusions about national education programs by saying that the number of geniuses has doubled.''
Not everyone agrees.
''It' s one thing to talk about statistics and another to talk about what's happening to individuals,'' said Dr. Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. ''Everyone notices that there are more overweight people now.''
Dr. Friedman, however, begs to differ. The statistics let scientists get beyond impressions and focus on the evidence.
He is, in a way, an unexpected figure to insert himself into the highly charged politics of obesity. He left clinical medicine in 1980 after discovering that his true passion was the laboratory. By 1981, he had begun his scientific career, and within a few years he was taking on what seemed like an impossibly onerous task, finding a gene whose absence made mice grow massively obese.
He keeps mementos from those days. He still has the purchase order, from December 1986, for the first batch of mice he used for the experiment. Hanging on his office wall is a framed strip of white paper with black blotches, the data that on Sunday morning, May 8, 1994, revealed he had found the gene that he named leptin.
''To me, those data are as beautiful as the Mona Lisa,'' he said.
Over the years, Dr. Friedman says, he has watched the scientific data accumulate to show that body weight, in animals and humans, is not under conscious control. Body weight, he says, is genetically determined, as tightly regulated as height. Genes control not only how much you eat but also the metabolic rate at which you burn food. When it comes to eating, free will is an illusion.
''People can exert a level of control over their weight within a 10-, perhaps a 15-pound range,'' Dr. Friedman said. But expecting an obese person to decide to simply eat less and exercise more to get below the obesity range, below the overweight range? It virtually never happens, he said. Any weight that is lost almost invariably comes right back.
The same goes for gaining weight in general, Dr. Friedman argued. A person who has the genes to be thin is not going to get fat because portion sizes increase. It makes no scientific sense, he said.
But isn't it true that we can decide to eat or not, choosing to skip dinner, say, or pass up dessert? Isn't that free will? Not really, Dr. Friedman said. The control mechanisms for body weight operate over months, even years, not day to day or meal to meal.
''People live in the moment,'' he said. ''They lose weight over the short term and say that they have exercised willpower,'' but over the long term, the body's intrinsic controls win out. And just as willpower cannot make fat people thin, a lack of it does not make thin people fat.
No one, he says, can consciously calibrate their food intake as precisely as the body does naturally. Most people's weights remain steady, within about 10 pounds, year in and year out. But when people count calories, they typically err by about 10 percent. For someone who eats 750,000 calories in a year, that 10 percent error would add up to 75,000 calories, or about 25 pounds.
Obesity, Dr. Friedman says, is a problem; fat people are derided and they have health risks like diabetes and heart disease. But it does no one any good to exaggerate the extent of obesity or to blame the obese for being fat.
''Before calling it an epidemic, people really need to understand what the numbers do and don't say,'' he said.
I say he's looking to invent the "magic pill" that everyone's looking for.
We may have to fight against biological signals to lose weight and keep it off, but that's the whole idea of mind over matter. When he says that people "typically err" by about 10% when counting calories - my answer is, it doesn't matter. If, in our error, we managed to lose the weight, there's no reason that we can't keep the weight off with the same error. His suggestion that our genetic pre-disposition works over longer periods of time also doesn't matter, since it's the decisions we make every day that make up the "average over time". If my body starts sending signals over the course of many months that I need to eat more, who cares? Every day, I'm telling my body what it's going to eat, and that amount isn't going to increase (unless, by some freak occurrence, I start getting too skinny). If my body can't convince me on a given day to eat more, I'm still not eating more in the long run.
He's either: a) trying to excuse people because he feels guilty that it doesn't take him any effort to stay thin , or b) trying to set the stage to make a lot of money for himself.
The same goes for gaining weight in general, Dr. Friedman argued. A person who has the genes to be thin is not going to get fat because portion sizes increase. It makes no scientific sense, he said.
Gosh, I guess Newton and all the work of the classical physicists was just... so wrong. I'll just toss those outdated notions of the conservation of matter and energy right out the window. Oh yes, and the ideas of free will and intention, the basis of all modern law and ethics in the Western world, should be thrown in the trash too. Silly me.
This guy is so obviously attempting to sell a line of disinformation to suit his personal agenda. He knows that by stirring the pot and generating just the right type and level of controversy, he can get his fifteen minutes of fame and probably a few dollars in the pot, if only on the lecture circuit at 5 figures a go. His next move, if he follows the standard pattern, will be to get on one of the more respectable talk shows, so he can push his blockbuster bestseller. It's simply sickening how so-called professionals and scientists can be so easily corrupted by money.
As Buffy the Vampire Slayer used to say: "He's evil and he must be stopped." Hmmmm.... where did I put that frelling stake?
I'm Outraged!
Here I am, drinking my coffee and reading the morning paper and what do I see? An article comparing diet plans (it’s been an on-going series since the beginning of the year) 
If I have a few minutes today, I'll dig around the Internet and see what's out there about Dr. Friedman.
I like the way you think!
telling me that I can't change? Just watch me!!
