Dieting is Not the Way to Address Obesity: A Manifesto from James

Hey you! You're probably overweight if you're reading this. You've probably lost dozens, if not hundreds of pounds in your lifetime. You're an expert on losing weight. You may, however, be less of an expert on maintaining it.

I have a particular point of view at this moment in my life, you're probably aware of it if you've read this blog before. I concede that my point of view may change, it often does, but here is what I firmly believe in now, based on what has happened to me in the past months.

A lot of people tackling their weight read things on the Internet that tell them weight loss is 80% diet, 20% exercise. This only relates to calorie-reduction and expenditure since exercise doesn't really burn that many calories. In other words, if the problem of obesity is being too large, then you want to get smaller and that's mostly diet with a little exercise. But what if you focus less on the aesthetics and look solely at the ill effects of obesity. Recent studies say you can be healthy and still be fat, as long as you're fit.

I believe that I'm living proof exercise can cure most of the ill effects obesity. It did so relatively quickly. Do I look good in a Speedo? No. Am I healthy? Yes!

A lot of people think you can go to the gym for an hour, get all sweaty and then hit a buffet and everything will be fine. It won't. I'm never comfortable with the notion of exercising to burn calories. There are much better reasons for doing it.

The 80-20 formula is very common on the dieting/lifestyle web sites, but I'd like to turn that around. In my view, curing the symptoms of obesity, that is to say eradicating the health problems of obesity, could well be 80% exercise and 20% diet.

Society is hell-bent on reducing of the number on the bathroom scale. It shouldn't be your measure of success. This is nonsense because it doesn't mean much in the improvement of your health. Many doctors and scientists are now talking about this. I'm living proof. I'm a huge man, 100 pounds of body fat more than the threshold of BMI-measured obesity. Yet I've turned my health drastically around. From an achy, sore, tired, bed-ridden sedentary lifestyle to being a man with near-normal health and abilities who is past the prime in his life. (I've also cured the problem of aging, to a degree. You can thank me later.)

Do you know what a fit person looks like? You probably do. But can you tell a fit thin person from an unfit thin person? You've been led to believe all your life that thin is fit. It's not. Do some people-watching sometime and try and tell a fit thin person from an unfit thin person. The unfit thin person is pear-shaped to varying degrees, is tired all the time and, in  my opinion, usually grumpy. They look weak when they move around and their lives are quite obviously boring, frankly. You can see it in their soft, pale, pudgy faces. They sit at home picking at vegetables and watch what I presume to be really bad television shows on the couch. It's possible they see playing Checkers as a sport.

Fitness isn't for fat people. It's what makes us healthy, regardless of our BMI. You probably think you'd be healthy and happy thin. But you'd be much healthier and much happier if you embraced fitness throughout your life until your dying day, regardless of your waist size.

The older you get, the more important fitness is to maintain a healthy body. Kids find their own fitness. They're constantly wiggling and moving. Adults are always telling them to sit still. Children build up lean muscle mass from all that moving and playing. When they become grownups, they stop moving and sit behind screens all day. Over time those muscles soften and become marbleized. They need fewer calories and their cardiovascular system wastes away while their arteries slowly clog. Perhaps they have more emotional control and don't over-eat like we do but they too have become unhealthy.

Stop using the scale or your clothing size to judge your health. I'm considered huge by most standards, yet I can do more than a surprising number of thin people my age, and I'm only getting started.

I'm probably 150 pounds over being perfectly ("normally") thin. I defy you to find me a marathon runner who could run on a treadmill for 20 minutes like I do with a 150 pound weight on their back. What we do with our heavy bodies is remarkable. Just walking down the street to your car is athleticism. There's an athlete in all of us yet we choose to keep her or him locked up, shackled and gagged.

(Yesterday I jogged at 4.0 MPH on the treadmill for 12 minutes at a reasonable 87% heart rate. Six months ago, jogging at 3.0 MPH for more than 30 seconds could have easily caused me to have a heart attack because my heart rate would have quickly maxed out at 100% in mere seconds. I can't tell you what this achievement does for my confidence and my feeling of well-being. Your body is just waiting for you to do something so it can adapt and become stronger.)

So what does dieting do for you? I'm no expert but it seems to me there are lots of benefits in eating better. Have you seen the entertaining documentary Supersize Me? The film about eating only McDonald's food for a month showed how crappy the subject eating a high-calorie, high fat diet felt all day. He was tired, sickly, and irritable. I imagine that all severely obese people eat like that to some extent, or have at some time in their lives to get to that level of weight. You'll probably feel better by eating well. Your joints will thank you for putting less weight on them. But is there anything else? Better eating helps, but will it really cure many of the effects of obesity?

I do know there there is no end in the ways exercising has helped me while losing only a small percentage of my excess fat. Although I am still technically obese, I don't feel that way. I don't go out into public ashamed of myself. I'm not afraid to exercise in public any more because I know I'm strong and in control of myself.

Severely obese people often have other chronic health issues along side their excess weight. Let's break down that viral video 23 1/2 Hours and see what science has found in the benefits of moderate exercise. In a  nutshell:

Knee arthritis down 47%
Dementia and Altheimers down 50%
Diabetes down 58%
Post-menopausal women 41% reduction in hip fractures
Reduced anxiety by 48%
People suffering from depression, symptoms were relieved by 30% with a "low dose" of exercise and 47% with more exercise.
23% lower risk of death in one study
And fatigue, of course, was highly cured with exercise.
Overall quality of life improves (who wouldn't want that?)

People seem so ready to starve their bodies to lose weight. The body goes into stress mode as it consumes itself and then does whatever it can to regain that weight. Your body thinks it's not healthy when it's below its maximum weight and tries to help you out by doing what it can to gain it back, so we're in famine mode. Yet exercise seems like so much work that we avoid it at any length. The truth is, once we're out there, once our bodies start to adapt, it's fun. Going for a walk is fun. It's the way we should be living our lives anyway, regardless of our weight or age. Let the skinny out-of-shape people sit on their couches and hate the world. Don't be one of them. Live your life to the fullest and don't worry so much about your weight.