Asymmetrical Information

"But no matter how sad or lonely I feel, eating a cookie does not produce any sort of emotional reward in my brain."

Interestingly, eating a chocolate chip cookie is the only sort of food that produces an emotional reward in my brain. Hard day? Fresh-baked -- or at least recently baked -- chocolate chip cookie. It's like collapsing on the couch.

But then, I was fat until my teenage years.

Studies showing that being underweight is worse for you appear to have all missed an obvious control: people who are seriously ill often lose weight even long before their disease becomes apparent.

I'm curious-- have they also taken into account the fact that other health problems would tend to make a person more likely to be obese? Obviously, if you have joint problems or are in a powered wheelchair or are bedridden or have other mobility problems-- many of which correlate with lifespan-limiting conditions-- you're not going to get as much lifestyle exercise as an average healthy person. And assuming that you're still in good enough shape to have control over your own access to food (as opposed to being hospitalized or institutionalized), being less mobile would also lend itself to recreational eating. (At least if, like me, you're prone to it anyway.) So it at least seems as if certain sorts of health problems would need to be controlled for on the overweight side as well.

This occurs to me in part because (by dint of a fair amount of work) I've managed to not be obese for a couple years now, after being so most of my life. (This may not sound like long, but there's a reason that the National Weight Control Registry will counts anyone who's kept 30 pounds off for a year or more as "long term"-- more stringent guidelines would risk not having enough people to study.) But that's a combination of fairly constant vigilance on the intake side and an hour a day on the treadmill, every day. I'm fairly certain that if my health failed in a way that didn't involve chemo or some other process that directly or indirectly caused wasting, the result would be to push me back over the line. (Especially since ill health and the prospect of a shortened lifespan anyway would likely predispose me to seek out what comforts and enjoyments I still could manage.) So I wonder if the sick people are really as concentrated among the underweight as you suggest. Especially with that lengthened baseline, which includes more people in the early stages of coping with a serious disease or injury rather than the later, more severe phase that's more likely to involve hospitalization and wasting.

There's also the problem that these sorts of studies tend to rely on BMI, which is garbage.

The "comfort food" phenomenon seems widely recognized in our culture, though, there being entire cookbooks associated with it and the persistent pop cultural reference to the woman who eants a quart of ice cream when her boyfriend dumps her.

I developed a weight problem fairly late. I had been very active until severe knee and back injuries curtailed my favorite forms of exercise. However, I have always eaten like an obese person. I derive emotional satisfaction from food. I have always felt hungry all of the time. I eat to relieve boredom. I can derive hedonistic pleasure from food. Something else, I almost never feel full. Even on occasions like Thanksgiving where I do eat enough to feel full, I also feel hungry at the same time.

I am also a recovering alcoholic. I quit drinking 17 years ago, essentially immediately after realizing there was a problem. It is a physiological dependence that I inherited. I've never had a relapse or any difficulty in maintaining sobriety.

The difficulty with obesity is that complete abstinance is not an option. An alcoholic can choose environments without booze for the tough periods of his recovery - periods when the chemicals in his body are informing his brain that it is not getting enough alcohol. Those periods end eventually. An obese person can not choose to be where there is no food all the time. There never comes a time when your body stops telling you that you need more food. It is like living your whole life in the early stages of withdrawl.

Wow! You worked for PIRG?!

Rob,

"comfort food" / pop cultur(-e/-al)

pun intended? if so, a Good one!~

Jane, you've brought up an issue I'm deeply interested in. I'm one of those fat people who thinks about food the way a 15-year-old boy thinks about sex. My partner is like you, though -- food is good for what it's good for, and that's it.
Something else I've noticed is that I have an incredibly sensitive sense of smell, whereas she is stuffed up all the time and can't smell a thing. Smell and taste are intimately related.
So I'm curious -- how is your sense of smell?

My sense of smell is pretty good . . . but my ex, who has a deviated septum, can barely smell, and also doesn't care much about food.

Part of the problem is that our eating patterns are still geared for the way things were in the old days, when most people did lead more strenuous lives. Portions that would be just fine for hungry farm hands are 'way too much for sedentary office workers.

In addition, a lot of people have a big, big knee-jerk about "finish what's on your plate!" Yes, I know about wasting food, but here in the US we're swimming in the stuff.

To top things off, here-and-now fat is associated with being poor---poor people eat heavy-on-carbs diets that pack on pounds, and mostly don't have lifestyles that allow them to keep weight off.

I have a weight problem and I know my kids will, too. I DO NOT encourage them to finish empty their plates. I quite deliberately toss their leftovers (or save them) and leave them alone about quantity. I may make them eat more vegetables before they get seconds of meat or something like that, but even then, I use small quantities. We also avoid using candy or treats as rewards.

EI

There is some evidence that fat people are physiologically different from thin people. There is also plenty of evidence that fat people can lose weight but tend to become fat again in the long term (over 5 years). Despite what grocery store magazines tell you, most people will not be able to lose and keep off more than 10 percent of their weight for the long term, if they have been overweight for a long period of time. Medical researchers who have studied weight loss find that the odds of maintaining a larger percentage of weight loss for more than 5 years are extraordinarily, ahem, slim. However, no one trying to sell you a diet will tell you this, and most medical professionals don't tell their patients this either, because they feel it will discourage the patient and prevent then from even trying to lose weight. (Losing 10 percent of body weight will NOT make most fat people slender and attractive, but it does deliver some health benefits.) The problem, of course, is that not telling the public this sets unrealistic expectations for fat people, and sets them up for hating themselves and being hated by others when the nearly inevitable failure occurs. If you gain weight, you'd best lose it quickly before your body gets used to having it around.

I have never read any indication that fat people are less disciplined about other aspects of their lives (work habits, financial habits, child care, etc) than thin people, yet there is persistent discrimination against fat people. Full disclosure: I'm overweight - facing potential health issues doesn't make me angry, but facing people who think it's quite reasonable to be mean to me makes me very, very angry. (Their logic: After all, they are being helpful by encouraging me to lose weight, right? N.B. Our hostess Jane has always been quite kind and reasonable, I am not talking about her.)

Medical types that have seriously studied the issue admit that prevention (or surgery) is the only known cure for fatness, and that the best known prevention involves getting plenty of exercise. People who move more throughout their day-to-day existence (NEAT: non-exercise activity thermogenesis) have a tendency to be a lot thinner than people who do not. However, a tendency towards stillness is probably inborn.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050128224400.htm

Hi. I'm an interesting case, because I lift seriously. Thus I have had to, at times, eat *way* more food than I wanted in order to gain weight (you need lots of excess calories in order to gain muscle mass) and, for 3 months per year, do a very low carb diet (ketogenic diet is a great book). I find that the amount of food that makes me feel satiated lags the amount I'm training myself to eat by two to four months. I wonder if the reason fat people are fat is they've trained themselves to eat a certain quantity of food. One of the side effects of this is I've more or less lost the ability to tell when to stop eating by feeling full -- instead, I have to visually measure all the food I eat. However, between meals, I don't crave food.

And the fat people that I'm personally friends with eat *way* more food than I do -- and I'm personally on a 3500 calorie/day diet to maintain 215lbs with 8 percent body fat.

I took a nutrition class this summer and it covered a lot of the hardcore scientific aspects of nutrition and related issues including overweight and obesity; yes, there are myriad issues, genetic and chemical and functional, that create wide individual differences. That's why skinny people can be so harsh and judgemental about overweight/obese people. They project their own experience of food and weight on others and judge them deficient.

And yes, there are emotional issues around food, too. Skinny people leave food on their plate once they take the edge off their hunger. Food is just food and the only reason to eat is hunger signals. Unskinny people feel guilty about leaving food and don't have full signals and equate comfort with fullness and food and eating has many meanings including emotional meanings, and they plan to have access to food and hate to think of being deprived.

My class showed me how complex everything is when it comes to nutrition, food, and eating. The textbook projected that within 10 years there would be testing available that could exactly pinpoint a person's genetics and biology in this area, for a very customized intervention and treatment plan.

Until then, let's respect human dignity and not pile on the insults and the pressure that heavy people already experience constantly...it just serves as an emotional trigger to overeat for comfort anyway, it's counterproductive.

Disclosure: overweight but losing--slow and steady wins the race, active athlete in off season rest period, cancer patient who isn't wasting away--no tumors just a high cell count. Understand about the I'm dying let's indulge impulse. LOL

BTW...the studies I read for class, low BMI

oops, got cut off--too longwinded? BTW...the studies I read for class, low BMI

And yes, even if you're overweight, if you get your exercise, you're still better off than yo yo diet weight cycling without exercise. It's not all about the scale. I'm overweight but my cardiovascular system kicks @$$ and my blood is perfect except for the cancercritters. Highest hemoglobin they've seen in a female patient ever. It's the blood chemistry changes from my intense training. Yes, I had performance and speed and strength improvements in my sport this season, after a long plateau; however, the middle aged tummy is still there. Go figure.

I don't know why the combox won't let me finish that sentence! Last try. Low BMI less than 18 is more dangerous, even when they remove sick and wasting people and count only apparently healthy people. Higher morbidity and mortality rates as compared to BMI 18 to 22 ppl.

I know why it cut off the sentence. I was using the less than sign and the system was thinking it was a HTML marker. Duh.

Funny you should mention gastric surgery, since I know a woman at a local business who mentioned she's considering that, to get below 200 pounds. I don't know her well enough to make any observations about personality, though.

Anecdote: I once knew a guy who was the model of "jolly fat man", always ready with a joke and easy to make laugh. By any measure he was obese. He once confided in me that he got sad/depressed easily, and when that happened he usually found himself at the McDonalds in town, and "after the 2nd or 3rd hamburger, I feel better". The emotional connection can't be denied, although the "why" of it seems more complex to me than it once did. I also know a fellow who has a number of alcoholics in his family; he's never touched a drop of booze, but can't keep away from the candy, and other sweet stuff. Type II diabetic now...

Anecdote: I've worked with people who are in the 1st generation off of farms, and some of them indeed eat as though they are going to go back out and bale hay until sunest. They also tend to be fond of ingredients such as pure lard, "cracklins"/chiccarones, etc. that are guaranteed to put pounds on. This is social/cultural stuff that can be hard to change; food cooked with lard has a different taste than food cooked with vegetable shortening, and it isn't as 'comfortable' to eat. It is not at all easy to give up some of these things, because of the smell/taste/feel/associations with family.

Observation: Serious obesity among some American Indian tribes, such as the Pima people & some of the Apache nations is stunningly high. It is politically incorrect to speculate on genes, but the Pima people at least used to live in a very hostile environment, so we can sidle up to the issue by observing how Pima diet has changed in the last 30-50 years. However, one cannot help but note that some humans live on a miniscule diet of stuff we moderns would call 'bizarre', and succeed in reproducing as well. That surely would select for some mechanisms to use the food presented as efficiently as possible...are those genes present in others, if they exist?

Social observation: A lot of people eat when they are bored. They aren't really hungry, but do want to have something in their mouth that tastes good. People who grow up in familes where everyone sits down and has a meal 2 or 3 times a day tend to find it easier not to graze. Theodore Dalrymple noted a while back that many of the prisoners he works with have never, ever sat at table with another person and eaten a meal. Instead they consume fast food in the street, graze out of refrigerators, etc. eating on whim. Grazing is one thing as a hunter-gatherer, it's another thing when you only have to "hunt" for the fridge...and that's another social/cultural thing that unhappily is reinforced by the snack food industry. "Stressed? Bored? Just reach for a bag of this stuff..." isn't quite what is being said, but it's close. Keeping that stuff out of the house goes a ways towards controlling the pounds, for many of us. But not all of us.

"Hungry all the time" is interesting, I wonder if anyone has ever seriously looked at all the signalling hormones that we know exist in this context, because even when I was donating plasma twice a week as my sole income, eating soybeans & brown rice for breakfast and dinner, & a Hershey bar on Saturday night was a big, big splurging treat, I didn't feel hungry all the time. I weighed about 40 pounds less than my middle aged self, but didn't feel hungry all the time.

Finally, Body mass index as computed is worthless, due to failure to differentiate between muscle mass and fat. Using conductivity is better, the immersion in water method is better still.

Thanks for an interesting posting, Jane.

I think you've entirely missed the point of the fat acceptance movement. Sure, being obese is a health problem. Absolutely. Not going to argue with you about that.

But after many decades of residing in a culture where being obese is strongly socially penalized, I think we can safely say that social pressure not to be fat is not particularly effective in causing people to be less fat. The stigma around fatness is only cruel, rather than productive, and is probably counterproductive in that it makes eating even more emotionally laden than it would otherwise be.

Fat and fit may be rare, but it's a hell of a lot easier and more likely for most fat people to become fat and fit than for them to become non-fat. And reducing the stigma around fatness (making it socially easier for fat people to work out, for example, because they're less ashamed of themselves) can only help in that direction.

I know it's hard to look at a situation that can be simplified to Bad Thing + Incentive to Avoid Bad Thing and believe that the result is going to be anything other than Less of Bad Thing, but there really isn't much of any good evidence that Widespread Obesity + Massive Societal Disapproval of and Disgust toward the Obese = Less Obesity.

While it may be comforting to think that one's being overweight is "genetic", there can't have been a major change in our population's genetic code over the last 50 years that explains the obesity explosion. Why weren't the parents and children of the 50's and 60's mostly fat if today's obesity is caused by genetically determined physiological factors such as different sense of smell, lack of brain chemical signaling of "full", and all the other reasons suggested? Food wasn't scarce or expensive then, not did the majority of Americans work on farms.

Discussing this thread with someone else, it was pointed out to me that increasingly we don't have "special, festival food" much anymore. For example, nobody in China is sitting down to eat General Tso's Chicken every night, it's a festival food. Farmers in Mexico don't eat tamales every night, it's a special thing for Christmas and some other times. Other than festivals, people in the farm world eat a bowl of beans and some rice, or the local equivalent.

Some of our habits nowadays are like sitting down at the TV with a 3-tier wedding cake on our lap & the punchbowl off to one side, where we can put our face & trotters into it...

While it may be comforting to think that one's being overweight is "genetic", there can't have been a major change in our population's genetic code over the last 50 years that explains the obesity explosion. Why weren't the parents and children of the 50's and 60's mostly fat if today's obesity is caused by genetically determined physiological factors such as different sense of smell, lack of brain chemical signaling of "full", and all the other reasons suggested? Food wasn't scarce or expensive then, not did the majority of Americans work on farms.

Genetic predispositions are expressed and shaped by the environment. (The amount of available food will also determine whether a person with a given set of genes will be 5'6 or 6 feet.) The long term trend in the West for at least a century has been for food to become cheaper and more available, and for malnutrition to decrease and for obesity to increase. Crossing over to a majority being overweight wasn't a sudden discontinuity-- there were also more obese people in the 50s and 60s than there had been in the 20s and 30s, and so on. (Reducing diets first became a mass phenomenon, IIRC, in the 20s.)

Note that food was substantially more expensive in real terms even in recent decades. in 1950, Americans spent 30% of their income on food. In 2002-3, it was 14% (despite much more eating out). Snack foods were less accessible and less convenient, portion sizes were smaller, more people did physical labor, fewer labor-saving devices were available. People ate less and exercised more, not because they were predisposed to or preferred to, but because that's what their environment offered. (After all, ultimately we're all predisposed to be hunter-gatherers one bad season from the edge of starvation, that being where we spent the vast majority of our evolutionary history. Which may be why it's only a minority of us who have much of an "off"-switch for the desire to eat.)

Obviously, there are also cultural factors involved (hence different obesity rates in different Western countries, though AFAIK it's trending up in all of them). But of course people don't choose their base cultures much more than they choose their genes. (Presumably immigrants from, e.g., Japan, don't intend for their kids to be fatter or more prone to heart problems than they were, but preventing it isn't exactly simple.)

Certainly in my own case, weight loss (for however long it lasts) was rather more a matter of exerting control over my environment than it was minute-to-minute willpower. While it came out after I'd developed my own strategies, Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating is a pretty good guide to some of the issues involved. His reports of various studies he's been involved with also help demonstrate why it's difficult. It's not just what food is available at all, it's how easy and convenient it is to get, in what portion sizes, etc. (The experiment in which most people ate more free stale popcorn simply by increasing the size of the container was particularly striking, as was the experiment showing the differences produced by giving staff members candy dishes that were either transparent or opaque, on their desks or across the room.)

I suspect that "comfort" foods raise testosterone which increases a person's sense of well-being temporarily. Probably there are some other hormones involved as well. I doubt it's an entirely learned behavior.

Given the numerous feedback loops between the endocrime system and parts of the brain, "learned" behavior has more dimensions than we care to admit. I do not have the URL to hand, but read recently of experiments in which the adult behavior of mice was determined in part by how much grooming they got from their mother: less grooming, more timid; more grooming, more bold. The act of grooming appeared to actually activate certain genes...

On a tangent:

When I lived in NYC and my roommate and I had fairly basic cable, I would frequently have the bad-television moments -- times when I found myself like a lump in her armchair.

Here (in Atlanta) we don't have cable -- we don't have service, period, actually -- and I don't miss it. When I feel empty (as I probably will this evening -- I've got a 10-page final to do) I'll often read something mindless. But I've got out of the habit of using TV to fill up the empty moments. I think I am one of the few people in history whose commute got less exhausting when I moved from Brooklyn to Atlanta.

Continuing the tangent, back when I worked in the TV business I didn't watch that stuff away from work. I had a 6" Sony portable that I got out to watch a show, then put it away when I was done. I found myself out of step after a while; didn't know the "in" shows/jokes, didn't know what I was supposed to think about politics, and so forth. Even now with basic cable, I watch stuff on the "go fast and blow up" channels more than on the major networks.

"Mindless" either means playing some strategy computer game, or reading a magazine/book nowadays. Mindless TV just makes my stomache turn...

In re pushing fat people to lose weight because of health issues: Imagine that you could live an extra ten years, or even twenty, but the price is substantial physical pain, distraction, ten or more hours/week of maintenance work--and all of this while being surrounded by pain relievers you can't let yourself use in adequate quantities.

"Some of our habits nowadays are like sitting down at the TV with a 3-tier wedding cake on our lap & the punchbowl off to one side, where we can put our face & trotters into it..."

ellipsis, no doubt. 30 % of our Economy could disappear overnight and no one would be in Jeopardy. We are so incredibly productive, even given the inefficient levels of our organizations, we have to literally dream up ways to consume it all. And we think Sisyphus had it hard...

sortofplump: "Why weren't the parents and children of the 50's and 60's mostly fat"

What I remember from the 50's is kids walking and riding bicycles everywhere? Did any moms cart their kids anywhere back then? I don't recall it.

In our early teens we were hiking 5 miles with other boy scouts; biking across town to an afternoon little league game; delivering newspapers up and down the neighborhood streets; trekking with our pointers across acres and acres of fields in search of quail.

Do kids do any of those things anymore? I did see a hundred or more young kids in the last 5K I ran. But I see more kids piling out of mini-vans at the mall or the local arcade.

I was just skimming through this entry, after not having been back to this site in awhile.

I haven't eaten much today, and was just needing to fix something... but lacked the energy - Looking about halfway down this entry may be what I needed.

However, I noticed the first comment in this thread. Incidentally, cookies were what I thought might be best for now... because I have a ton of pending (and overdue coursework), during this final week of the semester... And it can be hard to eat something that substantive (like some of the items described by Jane here), when needing to type essays and such.

And in relation to that comment by Ezra... I incidentally was looking for something to lift my spirits - and perhaps my energy level - and was hoping that cookies could help with that (the caffeine for some reason, doesn't seem to be helping too much - but perhaps I just haven't had my regular dosage yet!)... The only chocolate chip ones in the house though, are still packaged, for future CR meetings.

One significant change in diet over the passed few decades is the prevalence of soda. Soda sails are brisk enough to pretty much keep the entire fast food industry in the black all on their own. Sodas are heavily loaded with high fructose corn syrup, which spikes and then crashes blood sugar levels. Fat build-up is what happens after the crash (when the sugar is being metabolized into fat and the addict is reaching for another coke). It's bad enough dealing with hunger on a diet - it's worse when thirst is also a factor in weight gain. The added variable of caffeine addiction is no help here either.

My personal story: 2 years ago I was moderately overweight (5-10/215 and chubby), and totally out of shape. I couldn't run more than 2 minutes without losing my breath and had little muscle. I decided that I needed exercise, but hated it. I figured that an organized team sport would be more mentally engaging and social, and I might be able to stick with it. I picked up Ultimate Frisbee and found that 1) I loved it and 2) I was getting beat by people 25 years older than I was. After a few months of playing, I had begun to change things for the better. I dropped below 200 lbs for the first time since HS and could run for 20-30 minutes at a stretch. After maintaining that weight for a while, I resolved to drop down to my HS weight of 165 lbs. I had read somewhere that a pound of fat was 3500 calories, so I figured if I could eat 7000 calories less per week than I burned, I could lose two pounds a week. This turned out to be almost exactly accurate. I started by counting calories without changing diet at all in order to establish my baseline burn rate (assuming that I was burning as much as I was eating, since my weight was roughly the same). Then I started budgeting 1000 calories fewer per day. My chief weapons in this fight were 1) cutting all non-diet soda, 2) drinking more water and 3) lean pockets. I weighed in every morning and sure enough, I was losing roughly 2 pounds a week. I kept this up for a few months until the scale read 164.5.

That was about 6 months ago. Since then my speed and endurance in frisbee have picked up tremendously and I've started distance running. I've run a few half-marathons and plan to go out for a full marathon in the late spring.

All in all, my experience was very similar to my decision to kick a caffeine habit. Food was definitely an addiction, and a particularly difficult one since I need it to survive and it's everywhere. I didn't experience too much in the way of social criticism when I was heavy, and my wife was fine with it. I on the other hand was not fine with it. "Fat acceptance" never entered my mind. I had no desire to remain fat and felt bad about my inability to lose weight. The experience I had when I finally put my mind to it and dropped the weight was overwhelmingly positive. I feel better now physically, mentally and emotionally than I ever have. All told, I lost about 50 pounds and re-gained about 5 (mostly added muscle from athletic activity I'd wager). That would be just shy of 25% of my "before" weight.

I definitely don't support ostracizing or judging anyone, but I worry that the fat acceptance movement might be discouraging others from embarking on the journey that treated me so well.

pinto,

Way to Be. You explained, well, what I was alluding to, above, in my comment about "pop" culture. Your story of "Ultimate" provides me the, necessary, I think, context to suggest to all, the many positive attributes of (the) www.pdga.com and associated disc sports, in general. Just ask Aerobie, a little "frisbee" can go a long way.

Also, if you don't mind my saying, it's obvious, from your post, that you feel way better about yourself. To me, that's the greatest message that can come from this whole 'discussion'/ thread.

This is where the Shangri-La diet is interesting, as it addresses the 'feeling hungry always' part, helping people who feel that way get the appetite of our hostess here

"This is where the Shangri-La diet is interesting, as it addresses the 'feeling hungry always' part, helping people who feel that way get the appetite of our hostess here"

That's actually the reasoning behind Atkins, though it is through chemistry, not psychology. Avoid the foods that produce cravings to reduce unnecessary eating. There are actually some good refinements to Atkins. Not every carbohydrate affects blood chemistry so as to cause cravings. I was on one of these for a while, and it worked. I lost my constant hunger, and 15 pounds. Then I got kidney stones - a lot of them. I'd rather have the hunger and the 15 pounds.