closetpuritan (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} closetpuritan) wrote,@ 2009-08-21 20:17:00 |
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I've had this thought in my head for a while, and this article brought it to the surface...
My sister and I were talking, and she was saying how it would be better if men were more like women and worried about their weight and their health instead of saying "I'm married; it doesn't matter what I look like," etc. Something about that bothered me, although I couldn't quite put my finger on it at the time, beyond thinking that a lot of women allowed their weight/perceived weight to affect their emotional state and self-esteem in mentally unhealthy ways. Then it hit me recently when one of my coworkers was commenting on a magazine that said "Lose 25 lbs in 2 weeks!" or something like that, and she was saying how she'd love to do that, and I responded, "Losing the weight that fast would be unhealthy, though." She said something to the effect of, "Yeah, I guess you're right." She's also health-conscious in a lot of ways, does running and says she likes to eat healthy foods like oatmeal and salad and yogurt. But she also uses tanning beds (not without qualms), and expressed a desire for rapid weight loss. (It's hard to tell people's BMI by looking at them, of course, but she is by no means in the "obese" BMI category, probably not in the "overweight" category.)
Attitudes like this even in a health-conscious woman are why I'm not sure that men taking on a more feminine concern about weight would result in much improvement in their health. For most women, watching what you eat and exercising are not motivated by health--they're concerned with looks above all, and at best, health's a distant second. They're perfectly fine with eating only grapefruit for a month and trying for rapid weight loss and even, in many cases, taking weight loss drugs, as long as it gets them the aesthetic results they want. And then there's the people who don't eat much, but eat junk food when they do eat, and of course the anorexics and bulimics and drinkorexics...
Although the person who wrote this isn't a woman, this article is at times a perfect example of this attitude: Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin
The big conclusion on the first page:
My sister and I were talking, and she was saying how it would be better if men were more like women and worried about their weight and their health instead of saying "I'm married; it doesn't matter what I look like," etc. Something about that bothered me, although I couldn't quite put my finger on it at the time, beyond thinking that a lot of women allowed their weight/perceived weight to affect their emotional state and self-esteem in mentally unhealthy ways. Then it hit me recently when one of my coworkers was commenting on a magazine that said "Lose 25 lbs in 2 weeks!" or something like that, and she was saying how she'd love to do that, and I responded, "Losing the weight that fast would be unhealthy, though." She said something to the effect of, "Yeah, I guess you're right." She's also health-conscious in a lot of ways, does running and says she likes to eat healthy foods like oatmeal and salad and yogurt. But she also uses tanning beds (not without qualms), and expressed a desire for rapid weight loss. (It's hard to tell people's BMI by looking at them, of course, but she is by no means in the "obese" BMI category, probably not in the "overweight" category.)
Attitudes like this even in a health-conscious woman are why I'm not sure that men taking on a more feminine concern about weight would result in much improvement in their health. For most women, watching what you eat and exercising are not motivated by health--they're concerned with looks above all, and at best, health's a distant second. They're perfectly fine with eating only grapefruit for a month and trying for rapid weight loss and even, in many cases, taking weight loss drugs, as long as it gets them the aesthetic results they want. And then there's the people who don't eat much, but eat junk food when they do eat, and of course the anorexics and bulimics and drinkorexics...
Although the person who wrote this isn't a woman, this article is at times a perfect example of this attitude: Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin
The big conclusion on the first page:
The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.
Sounds plausible enough, for what it's worth. But there are other reasons than weight loss to exercise.
The author's article devotes about 1 sentence to the physical-health benefits of exercise:
To be fair, most people probably know the basics of how exercise helps your health, and hopefully also realize that even if you are overweight/obese and remain so, you'll be healthier if you exercise. But he then undermines this point by devoting an entire paragraph to saying that sometimes weight matters more than exercise:
To be fair, his article also seems to usually mean "vigorous exercise" when the word "exercise" appears; it's the high-intensity gym-bound kind of exercise of which he's most critical... But this is a case of making the first three pages of the article slightly misleading in order to justify the sensational-sounding headline, with the most important, sensible part on the last page:
He spends so much time in the article, especially early on, emphasizing the "exercise doesn't make you lose weight and is therefore useless!" that I'd honestly forgotten until I started looking up quotes for this post that he is actually saying "Exercise* won't make you thin! *Exercise is defined as brief high-intensity activity almost always defined as either running, or workouts taking place at a gym. Moderate- or low-intensity activity is less likely to stimulate hunger." If he'd just spent a sentence or two on the first page on the disclaimers about intensity that he goes into in detail on the fourth page, it would have been a much better article and wouldn't have gotten as much criticism as it has.
Sounds plausible enough, for what it's worth. But there are other reasons than weight loss to exercise.
The author's article devotes about 1 sentence to the physical-health benefits of exercise:
If evolution didn't program us to lose weight through exercise, what did it program us to do? Doesn't exercise do anything?
Sure. It does plenty. In addition to enhancing heart health and helping prevent disease, exercise improves your mental health and cognitive ability.
To be fair, most people probably know the basics of how exercise helps your health, and hopefully also realize that even if you are overweight/obese and remain so, you'll be healthier if you exercise. But he then undermines this point by devoting an entire paragraph to saying that sometimes weight matters more than exercise:
There's also growing evidence that when it comes to preventing certain diseases, losing weight may be more important than improving cardiovascular health. In June, Northwestern University researchers released the results of the longest observational study ever to investigate the relationship between aerobic fitness and the development of diabetes. The results? Being aerobically fit was far less important than having a normal body mass index in preventing the disease. And as we have seen, exercise often does little to help heavy people reach a normal weight.
He spends the rest of his time saying, basically, "why are we bothering to exercise if it won't make us thin, and may even cause us to gain weight?" Although he puts in the disclaimer that exercise has other benefits, his attitude overall seems to be that exercise is not worth bothering with if it doesn't reduce one's weight. I'd be willing to bet that most/all of the "thin-fat" people (people who are normal weight but show metabolic syndrome problems and have unhealthy accumulations of visceral fat) are people who say to themselves, "I'm thin! There's no reason for me to exercise or eat healthily!" To be fair, his article also seems to usually mean "vigorous exercise" when the word "exercise" appears; it's the high-intensity gym-bound kind of exercise of which he's most critical... But this is a case of making the first three pages of the article slightly misleading in order to justify the sensational-sounding headline, with the most important, sensible part on the last page:
The problem ultimately is about not exercise itself but the way we've come to define it. Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity — the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented — may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat....
You should exercise to improve your health, but be warned: fiery spurts of vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain.
You should exercise to improve your health, but be warned: fiery spurts of vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain.
He spends so much time in the article, especially early on, emphasizing the "exercise doesn't make you lose weight and is therefore useless!" that I'd honestly forgotten until I started looking up quotes for this post that he is actually saying "Exercise* won't make you thin! *Exercise is defined as brief high-intensity activity almost always defined as either running, or workouts taking place at a gym. Moderate- or low-intensity activity is less likely to stimulate hunger." If he'd just spent a sentence or two on the first page on the disclaimers about intensity that he goes into in detail on the fourth page, it would have been a much better article and wouldn't have gotten as much criticism as it has.
