I have read this thread from the get go, and am wondering if any of you have ever been fat. I have. Not morbidly so, but obese, by all clinical standards. The stupid thing about addiction is that it sneeks up on you. Bit by bit, day by day. The addict doesn’t even realize it until it’s too late. I truly believe that food addiction is a “real” thing. Why? Because I lived it. And it fucking sucks!
I am not defending the woman. Her ass is fat. No it’s not attractive in the least, and there is nothing she can say that is going to make me find it acceptable. I cringe in the line at the supermarket looking at the magazine covers full of fat chicks. No, I will not accept that this is the way things should be. I do however understand HOW they got there, and hard it is to recover from it.
I don’t know if the Mods let me drop a link here, but I do believe King Charles sums it up. It’s not necessarily the food it self, but what they are doing to it.
You’re probably familiar from your Psych 101 class, but this shows an interesting part of the picture. The Stanford Marshmallow Study.
… long-term study, which first began more than 40 years ago with the now-famous marshmallow test in preschoolers, may offer some clues.
In the late 1960s, researchers submitted hundreds of four-year-olds to an ingenious little test of willpower: the kids were placed in a small room with a marshmallow or other tempting food and told they could either eat the treat now, or, if they could hold out for another 15 minutes until the researcher returned, they could have two.
Most children said they would wait. But some failed to resist the pull of temptation for even a minute. Many others struggled a little longer before eventually giving in. The most successful participants… delayed gratification for the full 15 minutes.
Follow-up studies on these preschoolers found that those who were able to wait the 15 minutes were significantly less likely to have problems with behavior, drug addiction or obesity by the time they were in high school, compared with kids who gobbled the snack in less than a minute. The gratification-delayers also scored an average of 210 points higher on the SAT.
…They found that high delayers showed more activity than low delayers in a region of the prefrontal cortex associated with impulse and behavior control… Meanwhile, low delayers showed more activation of a deeper region of the brain associated with pleasure, desire and addiction…
Yeah, but as I said, if they were concerned enough about their fatness, they would seek out the right info regarding health and diet, in the same way someone wants to get jacked goes to a bodybuilding website or buys bodybuilding books.
People manage to do all sorts of other things, right? They get a job. They find mates. They study for classes.
Many of them have professions or trades, right? How did they pass their exams? They picked up the appropriate information and studied it.
Come to think of it, those with whom I’ve had failed friendships were all highly indisciplined, including being unrestrained in their eating habits and controlling weight.
Wow! Please understand I am not trying to be an asshole here. But, what are you going to do if your child turns out to be less than “ideal”? What will happen if you have one that eats the marshmallow? Will you end your relationship with the child? YOU do NOT get to choose. In real life you have to play with the cards that are dealt.
I don’t think you’re an asshole in the slightest, and I’m not one either. See my post above regarding idealism. I don’t expect ideals or perfectionism in anyone, and I’m not ideal or perfect either.
I also never said I dumped friends because they didn’t have good eating habits. Of the friends I could no longer maintain friendships with, their gross lack of discipline lead to problems that affected our friendships.
I actually am putting in the work to have a kid at the current moment. S/he might grow up to be undisciplined, despite how my wife and I raise him or her. That doesn’t mean I have to accept that characteristic. And when I refer to discipline here, I am not expecting a modern-day Spartan or Ivy League material. I’m really referring to a MINIMAL level of discipline necessary to have a healthy and functional life, nothing special at all.
Good luck with baby making. Just remember, for your wife, it’s a whole lot more fun getting it in there, than it is getting it out.
I understand what your saying. My son has some form autism, so growing up to be a healthy, functional, adult is still in question for me. Someone asked me the other day if I thought he would ever be able to be on his own. I would certainly like to think so. He already “adults” better than I do…lol only time will tell.
PP, I’m glad you brought up the Marshmallow study, as it has a number of compelling implications regarding the role personal responsibility plays (or doesn’t play?) in obesity.
Anything that stimulates the pleasure center of the brain can hook someone, anyone really.
It’s the reason I’ve refused Benzo’s when offered and probably would have benefitted from them.
That said the rest of my point is better served in a response to:
Two things:
you approach your kid as a kid that eats the marshmallow. So you understand they have impulse or delayed gratification of X, and monitor their consumption of things that aren’t say, peas and carrots.
Other than that, you do what ever single parent worth their salt has ever done since the dawn of time: you do your best, love them, feel guilty 24/7 and sling a bunch of shit against the wall and hope some of it sticks lol.
There is quite a bit of evidence out there that pretty much shows the brain is elastic. IE: it will “re-route” “normal” things in different ways if you train it properly. Without that being the case people with PTSD and ADHD would never be able to feel emotions, or have “normal” memories again.
So what that implies is “everyone is trainable” to “achieve” desired results. It’s a matter of understanding why the result your getting is happening (which is impossible really outside of best guess, so it’s all a crap shoot). And then trying to help your brain “re-map” itself in order to function in a way that achieves the desired results.
Conditioning, teaching, routines, whatever it takes for a person to get through the day, is what it takes.
Our understanding of the brain’s functions is pretty infantile, particularly compared to our other understandings of biology. We have a lot of really good guesses, and fair amounts of seemingly solid assumptions, but we’re pretty damn far away from “experts” particularly when emotional things are involved.
Yes, and let’s say that every time we binge, we have strengthened those unhealthy connections, so we’re MORE likely to binge next time. On the positive side, if I don’t eat the cake today, or tomorrow, it should eventually get easier to avoid the binge behavior. The new cognitive “muscle” that doesn’t give into binging, has been strengthened. I’m sure this makes a lot of sense to people in 12 step programs who count the days of sobriety. Food is in some ways a more difficult thing because we can’t be teetotalers. We have to learn to do it in moderation. Some of the most successful people just DON’T eat any of the binge-inspiring foods.
Not unlike the concept of Mind Muscle Connection. We can relate weight training to just about everything in life. smile.
I’m sure this is true. Humans often have a hard time seeing the long view, and responding to it. We like instant results. If I suddenly developed a medical condition where ingesting chocolate would cause instant death, I’m pretty sure I could stop eating chocolate NOW.
I think its’ @T3hPwnisher who has said this here, in responding to people who complain that they just can’t loose the weight. To paraphrase, it was something like, “You just don’t want it bad enough yet. When you really want it, you’ll do it.”
Fuck it, I’m fat. But I’m also a powerlifter, so that is accepted and also somewhat encouraged in some of my circles. I’m not a huge fat lard, but I have a gut and am built like an offensive lineman who is too short to play in the NFL. I am in good cardiovascular shape however, and can outperform many my age athletically (except in basketball, lol)
Anyway, I’ve been lean. I’ve seen my abs before. Like I said earlier in here, my body shape never affected my social standing with women or otherwise. I always carried myself confidently and respected myself. Of course ANYONE who is a little fatter than they should be thinks about losing weight. But at the same time I am always comfortable with myself and ultimately don’t give a flying fuck what others think about it. The fact that my eating and training habits are contrary to conventional fitness standards are of no concern to me and if they are of concern to you, you’re probably that guy in the gym who checks out his abs in the mirror between every set. I neer wanna be that guy. Of course if I EVER had a health issue I would do what I had to so to get healthy for me and my family. But in the meantime, I want to be big and lift big weights. And I want to eat cheeseburgers. Get the fuck over it fitness community!
I heard this a lot when I was new to sobriety. It was 100% true.
On consequences- I was definitely the kid that would eat the marshmallows. Its true that if the consequences were on the forefront of their minds, they wouldn’t do that. Also an important concept to drive home to newcomers. The thing that drives long term recovery is the benefits though. Consequences will help break a bad habit, but rewards reinforce the good ones. If it were just about avoiding consequence, the novelty of the effort would wear off once the consequence was in the near past.
The analogy of substance abuse to overeating is virtually identical. The recovery concepts are also very much the same.
@BrickHead: I agree with everything you say, but I still think there are still people that want to get to “B”, but just don’t have the IQ to get from “A” to “B”.
For example there is this guy at work who wants to get into better shape and probably could do with losing about 20 pounds. He gets all his info of memes and 30 second videos on Facebook and often likes to talk to me about the latest research on BCAAs, creatine, HIIT while he has actually no idea on what he is talking about or how these things work. While all he really needs to do is stop eating the processed junk that he eats every day and 6 beers at night. But for some reason he can’t process that.
S/he might grow up to be undisciplined, despite how my wife and I raise him or her. That doesn’t mean I have to accept that characteristic. And when I refer to discipline here, I am not expecting a modern-day Spartan or Ivy League material. I’m really referring to a MINIMAL level of discipline necessary to have a healthy and functional life, nothing special at all.