The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

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George the original one
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by George the original one »

Peanut wrote:
George the original one wrote:I can understand the argument that one is too busy to exercise, but it makes no sense for not cooking healthy meals. Bag of prewashed healthy greens dumped into a bowl is about as easy to cook as anything!
Kudos if you like that, but it doesn't sound tasty to me or presumably 99% of Americans.
Ime, meals do take time. Kiddo eats "magic broccoli" eagerly only because the magic involves roasting, garlic, lemon zest, olive oil, parmesan. 35 minutes and it's just the side dish :?
Thanks for making the point, that it's a CHOICE people make :!: Some people try to justify their choice even though they know what's healthy and what's not healthy, what takes time to prepare and what is easy.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by theanimal »

George the original one wrote: Thanks for making the point, that it's a CHOICE people make :!: Some people try to justify their choice even though they know what's healthy and what's not healthy, what takes time to prepare and what is easy.
+1.

There have been a number of different instances in the past 6 months where I've had coworkers tell me they are going to start eating healthy. They do so for a few meals, inevitably cheat, and head right back to the crap they were eating before. To a certain extent, people know which foods are good for them and which are not. Yet, they eat the crap anyways. It's an addiction.

I get teased for eating healthy. How odd is that?!?

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Ego
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Ego »

Dragline wrote:...but whereas Nietzsche believed this singularity corrupted humanity, Girard believes this singularity is the manifestation of a power that reverses the violent foundations of culture."
I'd argue against the premise of culture's violent foundations, but that's beside the point. There may be some truth in the idea that Christianity doesn't reverse the violence, it redirects it from harming others to harming oneself, with Christ the crowning example.

Society functions because parents are willing to give everything for their children and people are willing to rush to the scene of a disaster. It is a beautiful characteristic.

It's sad that the self-destruction also seems to become a virtue. No simple answer here.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Dragline »

Ego wrote:
I'd argue against the premise of culture's violent foundations, but that's beside the point. .
Yeah,lots of people don't like that premise these days, but its ingrained due to people (and mammals) wanting what other people have: You may not agree with the two videos here, but its hard to deny them other than in exceptions that prove the rule: http://www.prospectingmimeticfractals.c ... -lens.html

The history of successful cultures is ones that corral random violence into officially sanctioned violence, such as depicted in Shakespeare's "Coriolonus."
The reason Shakespeare is so good and so relevant even 500 years later is that he captured the natural human condition of mimetic rivalry described in the second video in the link above.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Ego »

Dragline wrote:You may not agree with the two videos here, but its hard to deny them other than in exceptions that prove the rule: http://www.prospectingmimeticfractals.c ... -lens.html
I agree with a lot of it. But in the second video there is a frame dealing with the exception of hunger. Hunger, they argue, is not a desire but a need. Deciding what to eat is the desire.

Along those same lines, could it not be true that love itself is not a desire but a need? Romanian orphans? Do good = feel good. Do bad = feel bad. It is the underlying default setting. You don't control that reaction. The autonomic nervous system produces it beyond your control.

People do bad thing when their definition of "Do bad" gets perverted. I guess what I am arguing above is that some people are becoming obese in order to show others that they follow what I consider to be a perverted definition of "Do good". A certain culture built that perverted definition.

But it is not so simple because a well functioning society need people willing to follow a somewhat perverted definition. No good answers.

Dragline
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Dragline »

Oh, I agree that the whole concept of who is a victim has become perverted in Western societies. In fact, its practically a requirement that "victims" be identified before any official action is taken in most circumstances. Listen to any Western politician's speech and it is about identifying the "real victims" and correcting some injustice upon them. ("Atlas Shrugged" and "The Jungle" are the same story with the protagonists and antagonists reversed, but both based on the salvation story of Saul of Tarsus. We tell the same stories over and over again, just changing the modus operandi. We like to pretend they are different to make ourselves feel special or enlightened.)

This is exactly why you see these weird mental gymnastics being used to claim sacrifice and victimhood. Everybody wants to lay claim to being the sacrificial victim. It is embedded in Western societies, or so-called WEIRD societies in the lexicon of Jonathan Haidt.

This is also why some of Donald Trump speeches seem so abrasive when they stop being about victims, but start being about order in society, which requires officially sanctioned violence. These are pre-Christian norms, that are still common in cultures like that exist in China, India and most of the world.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Ego said: Peanut, that Tina Fey example is spot on. It seems to me that Tina Fey is in great shape, so it is logical for her to question the value in going from great shape to Hollywood great shape. Sadly, others see that and use the same logic to avoid making improvement when improvement is needed.
True, but how do we judge when to spend the next hour or bit of discipline/attention on health/fitness/Zone 00 rather than picking up a book, a cello, your toddler, another piece of contract work, a pack of seeds, a note from an old friend, tub of spackle, a political protest sign etc. etc. etc ? I apologize if I get a bit reactive on this topic at times. I am a person who started out reasonably slender/fit, then I had some fat years ,and then I whipped myself back into something resembling reasonable shape (my BMI is still in the overweight range, but my WHR is .7 and I can do a whole lot of squats without stopping for a rest -lol), and I did this while married to one of the world's most unhealthy thin people (smoke, drank, claimed to be allergic to most fruits and vegetables, never exercised, dysthymic, always complaining of various forms of dis-"ease", BMI naturally on the verge of underweight and reasonably rangy/muscular), so I have had too much intimate experience with exceptions that prove the rule of BMI.

I was chatting with one of the 4 quite reasonably fit men over 50 I am currently dating (We all must make our own choices about where to be over-achievers. I have also read far more novels on the Modern Library top 100 than most people.) about this topic and one thing he said was "Whatever diet you are on is the best diet." and the other thing he said was that only 2% of people who visit the Grand Canyon choose to hike it. I think his first remark was spot on, especially if you consider the sort of paleo vs. vegan debates that occur on this forum. It could naturally be extended to something like "Whatever exercise you are doing is the best sort of exercise." What I was trying to get at with my previous comment was something along the lines of "Whatever motivates you to choose whatever sort of diet and exercise practice you choose is the best motivator." Some total couch-potato guy who spends 20 hours/wk watching sports on TV or playing sports video games, might eventually be effectively motivated towards healthier diet/exercise regimen by the desire to play sports himself. Never, ever, ever would that have worked with me, because I have zero interest in team sports on any level. However, just over some sort of line from sports lies the world of fun-to-me challenges such as hiking down/up the Grand Canyon or swimming to that island in the middle of the lake, or being able to do anything vaguely resembling what the contestants on "So You Think You Can Dance" can do. Also, being able to slip into a reasonable selection of cute dresses available at my local thrift store is motivating to me and having/maintaining good enough knees for gardening and sex in my 80s. So, if I was trying to encourage somebody else to lose weight or get more fit, I would try to observe what they already enjoy or find interesting and then urge them towards going up some notches in that direction rather than trying to encourage them to change their interests or preferences altogether.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by jacob »

7Wannabe5 wrote: True, but how do we judge when to spend the next hour or bit of discipline/attention on health/fitness/Zone 00 rather than picking up a book, a cello, your toddler, another piece of contract work, a pack of seeds, a note from an old friend, tub of spackle, a political protest sign etc. etc. etc ?
This question seems to fall under ethics. How does one choose between different [exclusive] choices?

So obviously, there's a ton of different answers. For example, I could take the individualist approach and say that one must make choices so as not to be a burden to others. If that is accepted, then one can be overweight as one is mobile and doesn't suffer ill-effects because that would impact negatively on others(*). This also means that there's really no need to be extreme in any way.

(*) On the other hand, I have made tens of thousands of dollars investing in companies that serve the diabetic community---it's my single best investment ever---so maybe eating donuts actually helps others?!? [There's a broken window fallacy hiding in here.]

Another set of ethics is the "be the best you can be". You find that ethics expressed in bodybuilding gyms for example. Here it's not a question of how fit, to use an all encompassing term, you are but how much blood, sweat, and tears you are willing to put in. IOW, it doesn't matter what you've done, what matters is how hard you try. It's quite anti-Yoda in that way.

Then there's the "good enough for competency and add value" ethics which is the standard I advocate. It's a combination of the two above. Here the standard is absolute. In the ERE book, I say something like "must be strong enough to pull oneself back up if one fell off of the roof and is hanging on for life by the gutter". Some people thought it was a joke. Others dismissed it as another example of extreme-crazy-jacob(**). However, I was actually quite serious. Ditto, the ability to carry another person out of a burning home, I mention that one too. IOW, here the "ethics" doesn't specify the low bar of avoiding meds to stay alive or the high bar that always must be pushed higher, but simply an absolute question: "Can you save your own ass (basic competency) and maybe someone else's (add value) too?" If so, that's good enough.

(**) I didn't even ask for a lot. Recently, there was an example on the MMM facebook group, where someone asked a mathematical question stating that they weren't good at math. I wrote down the answer in the form of an equation and while most people liked it, many found it crass and "too extreme". This is despite the fact that my answer would be understandable by an 8th grader ... or at least a 8th grader back in the 1980s. That's another example of me having absolute standards whereas the general attitude is that "it's okay to completely ignore certain skills if your talents/focus lie elsewhere".

In any case, that's how I decide.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by jacob »

In terms of diet there are a bunch of factors at play.

Start with cognitive identify protection. Real men don't eat quiche. Consider the ridiculous amount flak I've caught over the years from I believe a single mention of what I ate that during grad school. Had I eaten Ramen nobody would have singled out the lentils despite lentils being a superior choice over Ramen.

US meals are typically meat plus a side dish. It's not real food if it doesn't contain meat. Meat and corn. Meat and peas for variation. Kale is a standing joke. Comments about rabbit-food, etc. Healthwise, the SAD puts one at a significant disadvantage already but it's also important how the diet is eaten!

I've noticed different attitudes towards food and how they seem to infect different families like memes. Aside from the diet itself and the obvious genetics connection, I suspect this factor is quite important.

For example, the "leave room for dessert"-meme will move a family towards a junkier diet that's more heavily concentrated in fats and sugar. "Finish everything on your plate" is another one. Relative performance too: People keep eating as long as family members keep eating or they think they need to eat just as much food. As a result if the family has both active and inactive members, the sedentaries get fat from trying to keep up with the intake of the actives. Body-image factors in as well. Most American's would self-describe as "average" even if the majority are overweight and there are more obese Americans than there are people normal weight. I see the same thing going on inside families. Members of family where the majority are obese will agree that they could all stand to "lose a dozen pounds or so" but you won't hear any talk of needing to loose 100+ pounds to get down to normal weight. There's some identity protection going on again, where normal is redefined as "skin and bones" and overweight is considered optimal.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Jacob said: This question seems to fall under ethics. How does one choose between different [exclusive] choices?
I was thinking more in terms of general economics in making the choice, perhaps something along the lines of "Which of these choices at the margin will most likely increase my overall sense of leading a fulfilling life?" However, obviously, ethics would be one of the factors to consider. I have no known problem with metabolizing sugar, likely because I do not tend towards central accumulation of fat, but I recently met two women my age and approximately my size, but more apple-shaped, who do. So, I decided that I wasn't doing the social community any favors by offering to share chocolate croissants.

One minor problem I have with the fitness/sports community is that the metrics are self-referential looping and mostly based on ideal performance for 16 year old Roman warrior boy. I mean, I certainly do like some of the tangible results when I date a man who still plays hockey at 58, but what has really been accomplished with all that exertion and effort? Therefore, I appreciate the fact that in the book you attempted to bring it into the real world of doing something that is actually useful like picking up and piling sacks of corn. Yesterday morning I got up early and marched in a political protest, and then I spent the entire afternoon helping dig a swale on my property using shovels and a Honda FC600 front-tine tiller. I say that I helped, because my friend insisted on mostly being the one who ran the tiller through thatched grass and clay soil, but I was able to operate the tiller, and I did most of the shoveling and hauling and dumping. The real world that I live in is the American Midwest, so I am surrounded by men who would like to believe that they are capable and competent at doing things like changing tires and operating rototillers, and many of them are. Both the 40-something-year-old Greek guy and the 20-something year old Yemenese guy who live on either side of my lot volunteered to help with the project yesterday, so this may be an international beyond my locality sort of thing. Anyways, it has been my lifelong experience that the only times I have not been quickly dispatched into the position of helper when attempting anything along these lines was when I was married to a not-so-useful man (and therefore somewhat blocked from offers of assistance from other men except my father or father-in-law or son or paid professionals) or alone in the woods with my sisters. So, my real world plus-1 self-evaluation would be either something like "When helping with task requiring physical exertion in the company of very-fit-appearance man my age, do I still rate the level of respect that would result in somebody nick-naming me Energizer-Bunny?" or "Can I spend the night sleeping on the floor of an airport and then as soon as I get off the plane in Alaska keep up with my youngest sister (appearance/fitness somewhat like Tina Fey) on a 5 mile hike up a mountainside?" I don't think so much about emergency situations involving falling off of roofs, but I suppose I could work on my swimming strength some more and learn some more CPR and then my rescue job could be lifeguard. I can't remember not knowing how to swim, so I have no fear of the water, and I won't need to compensate for my heavy bottom with super-duper upper body strength.

Anyways, due to conflicting inputs such as the fact that my waist-to-hip ratio puts me in the Excellent category for women 20 years younger than me, but my BMI is Overweight, my resting pulse in very good, but I can't do a single boy-style push-up, I have zero health problems except a tendency towards rosacea and severe peanut allergy, you guys said that being able to do 300 squats in 10 minutes was very good, and very affluent, quite reasonably fit men my age are not embarrassed to be seen with me as their dinner companion and I am not embarrassed to be seen sans clothing by them, but they would be dead if they expected me to pull them up on to a roof, etc. etc. etc. My overall at-the-margin-economic self-evaluation is that I am still functioning amazingly well for age 51 in the phenotype category of sexy Amazon who can do whatever she wants to do, BUT I could stand to lose 10-15 lbs and gain some upper body strength.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by jacob »

7Wannabe5 wrote: One minor problem I have with the fitness/sports community is that the metrics are self-referential looping and mostly based on ideal performance for 16 year old Roman warrior boy.
I agree there. Most sports are only proxies for real world performance. Consider a 400 pound powerlifter who can't do a single pull up despite being able to flip a mid-sized car. He would fail the "emergency-test"(*). For physical fitness, I prefer the "emergency-test", because it's applicable(*) and consequential. If you can't save yourself in an emergency you're either a liability or a fatality. If you can't save yourself as well as someone else, you're not helping (i.e. not desired on the emergency team). In some sports, like heavy-weather sailing or free climbing (or war or fleeing such a war), this becomes a factor because such environments don't offer time-outs or breaks. The wind can't be stopped with a time-out and when the boat is pointed at the shore with the mainsail blown, one can't take a break.

(*) The roof gutter test. Of course he'd ace the "keeping people from getting crushed under a car"-test.

So I think the emergency-test is an ethical issue.

The stacking sacks of corn is an economical issue. E.g. one person does the heavy lifting and the other one does the light lifting. E.g. one digs the holes in the garden. The other plants the seeds. They are paid accordingly. However, this too can become an ethical issue [in small groups/teams] if the digger wants to plant but the planter can't dig. The lack of digging competence on one part then forces the arrangement.

Similar arguments can be made with self-inflicted health issues. Should healthy people be forced to work so that other people may receive treatment for self-inflected injuries? E.g. should the hockey player pay for the insulin of the guy who ate too many donuts? Conversely, should the donut eater pay for the hockey player's knee injury? Do people have a duty to themselves to stay healthy? Do they have a duty to others to stay healthy? This is real issue ... retirement ages will eventually be postponed because insulin and related diabetic expenses(*) for Medicare/aid are getting too high.

(**) 245 billion USD in 2012.

Getting back on point ... the increasing lack of fitness and obesity is changing society and technology which makes it harder to fix these problems. E.g. people get so fat out of shape they can't walk 3 flights of stairs. Escalators are then installed to make it easier for people to be sedentary. As a result, people get fatter. More escalators are added. Eventually, the regular stairs are removed and it's escalator-only. It's not hard to find an office build in the US where the only real stairs left are those in the fire-exit which is typically egress only. That's an ingenuity gap. Even if people wanted to walk or bike, it is now much more difficult because other solutions (car infrastructure) have taken over.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

jacob said: So I think the emergency-test is an ethical issue.
I don't disagree. I should note that I have no difficulty pulling myself up on to the side of a pool or boat. You guys need to try doing that roof free hang thing with 2/3 of your weight below waist level and only 3/4 muscle mass. So, maybe try hanging off the side of a roof with your wife hanging from you with her arms grasped around your waist then pull yourself up. Some of us are carrying the nutrients necessary for the brain development of the next generation along with us, and some of us aren't. Different survival mechanisms apply. Anyways, I looked up the requirements for becoming a lifeguard and I already easily qualify for shallow water. I'm pretty sure that I can do everything for deep-water, depending on how fast I would have to swim the 300 yards. 20 yards of swimming using only legs or 10 yards with 20 lb. weight would be super-easy for me. I also can easily swim to deepest bottom of pool and bring up 10 lb brick. I just did that for fun fairly recently. The 550 yards for waterfront would be a challenge, especially in choppy water, so I will have to do a bit of training.
Physical Requirements

Anyone who will be 15 years old at the completion of a lifeguard training course may qualify for training by proving he can swim 50 yards without stopping for shallow-water lifeguarding or 300 yards without stopping for training as a deep-water lifeguard. Candidates for deep-water lifeguard training also must swim 10 yards with a 20-pound weight attached to their bodies, whereas shallow-water lifeguarding candidates can walk the distance in water while holding the same weight. The full 300 yard swimming test includes both the breaststroke and crawl stroke and surface diving. Waterfront lifeguarding courses require a 550-yard non-stop swim, additional surface dives, treading water and completing 20 yards of swimming using only the legs.
That's an ingenuity gap. Even if people wanted to walk or bike, it is now much more difficult because other solutions (car infrastructure) have taken over.
Ah, Gotcha now. So, it would seem like the obvious solution would be to purposefully reverse this trend. I generally opt for the stairs in any situation where I might have to wait for an elevator, and I bounce up and down three flights in the very old buildings where I teach. I insisted on operating the rototiller part of the time yesterday, in part due to being curious about whether I could. My friend who was mostly operating it prides himself on being quite fit and he admitted to being totally whipped by the end of the afternoon. He said it was the equivalent of 3 rowing workouts, but now he was going to have to do it 3 more times because he didn't like that it whipped him so hard. I told him he looked like a pioneer trying to handle out-of-control animals attached to a plow, and he said "You think pioneer. I think plantation." My other new friend who might be equally fit (haven't seen him with his shirt off yet) volunteered to help me next weekend too, so if I can continue to manage the French farce aspects of my current lifestyle, I will have all my economic need for upper-body strength covered. My other two friends who are also fit, but a little bit older, are covering the high-level social help with political cause and escort to cultural events end of things. It is SOOOO much better having 4 very useful men part-time on my team rather than one not-so-useful man full-time. Also, circling around to the top issue of ethics again, as those of us who read "Freakonomics" know, I am seriously benefiting the sexual health of the community and the heart and prostate health of the individuals within my circle due to my current high-level functioning in this realm of physiology. The rest of my female peers are clearly not pulling their own weight in this regard.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by jacob »

7Wannabe5 wrote:You guys need to try doing that roof free hang thing with 2/3 of your weight below waist level and only 3/4 muscle mass. So, maybe try hanging off the side of a roof with your wife hanging from you with her arms grasped around your waist then pull yourself up. Some of us are carrying the nutrients necessary for the brain development of the next generation along with us, and some of us aren't. Different survival mechanisms apply.
No, the exact same mechanism applies. The way is get back up on the roof is to pull with the arms, not to give birth to the next generation 8-) The roof doesn't care where the bodyweight is carried. Either you can or you can't. Yodaism applies. Do or do not, there is no try. Insofar the emergency-test goes, reality sets the parameters of life and death. The roof does not award special points or breaks for bodyweight distribution. It is an absolute reality-based test.

In particular, if I was hanging off the roof (presuming the gutters didn't fail under the combined weight) with DW's arms around my waist. I'd have three choices. I can't pull in excess of 300 pounds, so either we both die or she gets her hands onto the gutter---mostly without my help since I wouldn't be able to hold 300+ pounds in one hand for very long despite what one sees in movies. In if that happens fast enough I live. Since she can't pull herself, she dies unless I can get up fast enough to reach down and pull her up, which I could. Or knowing that she's probably not going to make it up, I'd pry her off so that at least one of us survives. DW would have three choices. Either she does nothing in which case we both die. Or she heroically lets go in which case she dies and I live. Or she tries gets her hands on the gutter: If she's fast enough, I live and she has a chance to live if I'm fast enough too. If she's not we both die. That's the reality of that situation that's made bad because of her inability to do a pull-up.

Going the economics route to do some triage, the game theory of the situation where one person is capable and the other is not is this in terms of survival rates.
Sacrifice: 100% 0%
Panic: 0% 0%
Attempt: 30% 10%
It would be hard to make the argument against the sacrifice. Compare to two capable people where the attempt row turns into 75% 85% (the others being the same) in which case the attempt is the optimal choice. Just counting pure survivability here.

Maybe we're too focused on the roof pull-up. Another test would be the 9/11 test. Can you descend;/ascend a few hundred flights of stairs in half an hour without holding others back? Can you assist others? Can you beat up a terrorist? Can you run 300m in under a minute to get to safety if the building is coming down behind you ... Alternatively, the tsunami-test. Can you outrun it? Can you climb to the roof of a solid building or make it to high ground fast enough? Such reality-tests points towards being somewhat physically well-rounded.

I fully acknowledge that for a given body-weight, men are much better at upper-body work and women are as good as or better at lower body work. However, it's not like one pull up is utterly beyond the female gender. Harder, yes. Anything near impossible, no. Neither is running down or up 150 flights of stairs utterly beyond the male gender. Harder, yes. Impossible, no. And in any case, reality doesn't care.

I'm not saying that my "good enough in reality to help at least oneself and optimally one other person" for the majority of issues one could face in life is the only metric to consider, it's just the one I use and consider ethical. I feel the same way about literacy and various other competences. In permaculture terms, in my code, zone 00 should never be a liability for one self or anyone else.

However, we have built a society and a code of ethics where the standard is "good enough to help 200 other people for a single specialization somewhere out in zone 45" while we ignore/excuse everything else "because talents lie elsewhere". Indeed in that code of ethics, "we have a duty to work for others" and "to pay others to work for us so as not to render them without pay".

I submit that this [normal approach] has the potential for zone 00 damage because we rely on experts/others to compensate for these liabilities.---Ultimately the compensation is then built into the system with experts and escalators and then it gets built into our identities as well, e.g. "I don't need to know 3rd grade math because I'm a talented art director" or "I don't need to be able to run faster than a walking pace because I'm an manly man and all my strength is in my upper body which is good enough for lifting heavy stuff and killing spiders", and then it gets built into the culture itself "real food contains meat", "leave room for cookies", and "men are strong and women are weak". Thus a fat tail of risk is built for the immediate gain of specialization.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Ego »

Mrs. Ego would climb up onto my shoulders like a monkey, swing up on the roof in a heartbeat and pull me up with her. I'd then have to talk her out of trying it a second time for fun with the roles reversed.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by George the original one »

> That's the reality of that situation that's made bad because of her inability to do a pull-up.

Ah, but if she's agile, she can swing legs to side so one knee-to-foot hooks onto the roof/gutter and do a "girlie" pushup to finish getting onto the roof.

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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I don't know. It just seems more sensible to me to prepare for things that have more likelihood of happening than falling off a roof. For instance, just two nights ago I slipped on a puddle of water that one of my sister's dogs had spilled on the linoleum right in front of the bathroom. I totally wiped out, my feet went right out from under me, but I bounced right off my bottom with no injury whatsoever thanks to the sturdy mattress like combination of muscle and fat padding my hips and pelvis. Everybody knows that skinny old white ladies crack like china once the estrogen supply is gone. Not only does the fat interlaced with muscle on my bottom protect me from breakage, it stores estrogen that will be slowly released into my system after menopause (which is not the simple one-step-end-game that most people consider it to be.) Also, keeping my inert-because-not-on-belly body fat percentage reasonably high and engaging in frequent vigorous sexual activity ending in orgasm will increase the likelihood that I can delay menopause by several years and thereby gain a much greater increase in longevity than would be afforded me by getting skinny enough to do pull-up in order to avoid risk of death by falling off of roof. Since almost every organism that engages in sexual reproduction starts dying as soon as it loses reproductive capability, I think these young women who are trying to make themselves look like muscular 16 year old Roman warrior boys to the extent that they lower their body fat to the level of amenorrhea may be taking an ill-advised risk.

So, I suppose the question is how do I test my male companion for ability to pull both of our weights before I agree to go shingle a roof with him? Clearly, just the ability to throw me up on a counter-top would not be nearly enough. When I dated a man who was 6'5" and did 500 push-ups a day, he could lift me up over his head, but I was maybe 10 lbs. thinner than I am now, and that is still not pulling both of our weights combined. Maybe that man does not exist. Maybe he would be like the male version of Barbie (sigh.) So, maybe it is up to me. I think hanging from man's waist would actually be a lot easier because I could wrap my legs around him and grab on to various body ledges to shimmy my way up to his shoulders and then throw enough of myself on to the roof to be able to pull myself the rest of the way. GTOO's suggestion of swinging leg up might also work if I was hanging from the gutter by myself. I can test that one next time I am on the playground. Another option might be to purposefully try to knock part of the gutter loose and then swing down holding on to it. Obviously, if there were any window ledges or other toeholds that would help. Also, I still have no clue why I am up on a higher than one story roof without using appropriate safety equipment. Probably my bottom is padded enough that I could survive a one story jump.

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Ego
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Ego »

There are one or two advantages to carrying excess weight, such as extra padding during a fall. There are many more disadvantages, such as increased mass (F = ma) which translates to a harder fall (more force). I think that the inability to hang onto the gutter might be a metaphor for these fifty ailments that tend to plague those with excess weight.

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7Wannabe5
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Ego: I don't disagree that there are multiple risks with carrying excess weight around the central body. My question would be which of those ailments apply to extra weight carried on a woman's bottom or thighs, given numerous studies indicating that this fat is either inert or helpful in various ways that range far beyond simple padding. I currently have none of those listed ailments or any factors indicating risk of any of those ailments beyond simple BMI. My resting heart rate is low. My blood pressure is low. My sugar metabolism is fine. Etc. etc. etc. I have considered that wear on joints might be a risk of carrying even inert fat, so I freaked out when my knee hurt, but it seems as though my muscle and flexibility is doing a good job of compensating. I think it is great that there are a thousand different ways a woman can manifest a healthy waist-to-hip ratio of less than .75, whether she is tiny and muscular like that soccer player you posted, or short and rounded like Victoria Principal or tall and angular like Uma Thurman or short and muscular like Dorothy Hamill or tall and curvy like Beyonce etc. etc. etc. Obviously, due to the laws of physics, the women who manifest their healthy waist-to-hip ratio in a shorter, leaner more muscular format will find it easier to do a pull-up, but maybe Beyonce would be better able to kick open a door?

Also, the modern-day obesity epidemic is not countered by a past in which most women looked like super-muscular soccer players or those obstacle course girls. Healthy women looked like the sculptures and paintings from many eras and regions. Lots and lots of variability to be found in any museum in that regard, everything from waif-sylph-like to soft-voluptuous to stolid, but not so much super-husky-defined-arms capable of swinging tiny hips across Iron Woman course. These are both new things, and I would suggest not completely unrelated.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Science, facts and reality:

http://www.livescience.com/52998-women- ... st-popular


Did you catch the bit about even the way the muscle fibers are constructed is different? Also, the length of your ring finger relative to your index finger is indicative of exposure to testosterone vs. estrogen in the womb and your later tendency towards muscular development and pattern of fat deposition. My ring finger is much shorter than my index finger indicating higher than average exposure to estrogen in the womb leading to higher than normal development of feminine body structure and fertility, and also inability to perform a pull-up. Women with ring fingers that are longer than their index fingers are more gifted at sports than average.

Dragline
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Re: The ingenuity gap of the obesity epidemic

Post by Dragline »

I'd bet you'll be just fine -- its usually the visceral fat around the middle that causes most of the issues.

But what can I say? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JphDdGV2TU

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