From "Why a Little Extra Weight May Benefit Older People/Even in the age of obesity drugs, researchers say many don’t need to shed pounds" (NYT)(all NYT links are gift links).
There's a bit of a disconnect in that story. The woman was obviously concerned with how she looks not her likelihood of dying from one of the famously lethal illnesses. It wasn't the cancer/heart attack personified and laughing at her ghoulishly. It was clothes from 30 years ago, still hanging in her closet, that, personified, were reproaching her. If only you would try harder, you'd be the person who fit inside us, way back when, but no, you just won't do it!
It might help her to know it's healthier to relax into this new form, with a 25.7 BMI, just over the line from normal, which tops out at 24.9. She's better off not losing that last 10 or 15 pounds. Isn't she?
Posts
22 comments:
Those drugs also reduce your sex drive along with your appetite. No thanks.
It might help her to know it's healthier to relax into this new form, with a 25.7 BMI, just over the line from normal, which tops out at 24.9. She's better off not losing that last 10 or 15 pounds. Isn't she?
LOL! At 5 foot 4 25 BMI puts you at 145 pounds.
That is obese. What are we even doing here?
And of course we can't actually be healthy. We need to spend 1000$ a month of other people's(my) money on a drug to lose weight.
This whole article is a joke.
Meanwhile the de-cluttering gurus tell us we can get rid of clothes we haven't worn for six months.
Aside from the muscle mass issue, a problem with BMI is that the arbitrary cutoffs are too tight.
Our health care system is trying to turn people into fat stupid sedentary cows.
tcrosse, +1.
I try to stay five to ten pounds overweight. Sometimes you have to wait in line at the pizza place. You have to exercise a little discipline, but the rewards are worth it........It's probably healthy to be a tad overweight, but fat is fat and there are lots of downsides to fat. What really annoying about a bumptious belly is the way you have to always keep adjusting your pants. Any more than ten extra pounds and your belly keeps pushing your belt off your stomach.
First, BMI alone is a BS method of determining if you need to lose weight or not - there are so many other pertinent factors. Second, if you only want to lose something on the order of 10 lbs., do not jump to using obesity drugs to get there - they have a lot of downsides (and expense) and should be reserved for more extreme weight loss needs. And finally, at 72 years old, you ARE your mom/grandmother, so face reality and live with it. You’ve got hair colorings, Botox, etc. for improving your elderly looks compared to your grandma, so don’t pout that you can’t still rock those skinny jeans or yoga pants.
Seems like the real question is--is she healthy? Does she feel healthy at that weight? Not whether she matches the chart. Or fits the dress.
I have suits from 20 years ago. Weddings and funerals. If I want to wear them again I might need to take them to the cleaners.
"LOL! At 5 foot 4 25 BMI puts you at 145 pounds. That is obese."
LOL! You sound like those clothes, reproaching from the closet.
I'm surprised that the article didn't dig into the idea that she still has clothes hanging in her closet from 30 years ago. If I did that, what would I think would happen if I did lose enough weight to fit into those clothes mouldering in my closet? My best guess about what she would think is that "If I could wear that garment again, then I would feel carefree, and light, and light-hearted, and fun, and youthful". All those other words boil down to "youthful". So I guess she would be hoping not to lose weight, at the end of a day, but rather thinks or hopes that she has a recipe for feeling youthful again and all she'd have to do to get there is just lose those pounds, and voila, youthfulness. However, it doesn't actually work that way and since she has lived on this earth for lo these many years, somewhere inside, she knows that. And this would be the primary obstacle to losing those 10 pounds. It would not actually produce that delicious feeling of youthfulness. She's not ready to give up on that dream. When I am sitting by the fire cuddling a chubby 3 year old and murmuring grandmotherly things, I like that (I love it) but would I trade an afternoon of that for the delicious feeling of youthfulness? Yes, I probably would, if I thought it was possible.
Im sorta shocked, assuming all this is true, that she walks 3-4 hours, and lifts weights, and does Cardo. And she still fat. She must be really packing it in. A clue might be that she wants to wear clothes from 30 years ago. Not 20 years. Not 10 years. IOW, she's probably been fat for a very long time. Because she loves to eat.
I have an older woman in my family that is obsessed with appearances. Always posing in selfies, always having others take pictures of her. Spends a fortune on beauty care, hair care, nails, has a boob job, gets facial work done frequently. In her 60s, dresses like she's in her 20s, fools no one. Skinny to the point of extreme.
And I keep telling my wife that she's unhealthily skinny, no reserves there. If she gets sick or injured, she'll have a hard time recovering because of it.
Being fat, historically, was a sign of wealth and luxury. The funny thing about luxury is that it has a purpose besides just displays of status and provision of comfort.
If your clothes from 30 years ago are making you feel bad - get new clothes.
There's fat, there's obese, there's skinny, and there's just right. I don't think being overweight by a few pounds matters - no matter what your age. Healthwise.
Its when your BMI get into the 30s that you're in trouble. And it depends on the person. Huge tubs of lard like Jerry Nadler, Chris Christie, or Pritzker seem to do just fine.
My mother stayed overweight because "it makes my face look better". Anyway, that was her excuse starting at 50.
“ She's better off not losing that last 10 or 15 pounds. Isn't she?”
Probably not:
“Calorie restriction (CR)—reducing daily calorie intake without causing malnutrition—consistently extends lifespan and delays age-related diseases in animals like yeast, worms, flies, and rodents.
Human Evidence and Biological Aging
In humans, long-term human clinical trials such as the CALERIE (Comprehensive Assessment of Long-Term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy) study have examined moderate calorie reduction:
• Pace of Aging: A study published in Nature Aging using DNA methylation data (DunedinPACE) found that participants who cut their caloric intake by about 12% for two years slowed their biological pace of aging by 2% to 3%. This slow-down corresponds to an estimated 10% to 15% reduction in mortality risk.
• Metabolic and Health Benefits: Moderate CR reduces visceral fat, lowers blood pressure and cholesterol, improves insulin sensitivity, and decreases inflammation-related proteins like complement component 3 (C3).
• Quality of Life: Unlike severe starvation diets, moderate cuts of roughly 300 calories per day are associated with improvements in mood, sleep, and general well-being rather than psychological distress.”
People love to disparage BMI, but the unpleasant truth is that it is actually a very useful measurement for 99% of people, and chances are that you ain't one of the 1%. Americans have normalized obesity to the point that if you are a normal healthy weight, people think there is something wrong with you. There is nothing beneficial about being overweight, and the only reason why statistics show otherwise is that people with severe illnesses become very skinny before they die. The extra pounds are not protective, they just mean that you aren't currently sick.
My wife is always complaining about being too fat for the clothes that fill her closet, some of which must be more than 30 years old by now.
I tell her that nobody cares what women in their seventies look like, and that I'm overweight too, so there.
My oldest clothing is the three-piece suit I wore for our wedding in 1977 when I only weighed about 220 and which has never been worn since that I can recall.
I can attest to the benefits of having some spare weight. I was never overweight, but had tended toward the high end of healthy unless I was explicitly training for something like a half marathon or an aggressive hike.
Over the last six years I've been dealing with cancer. A year ago I switched treatments. I lost my sense of taste and my appetite, as well as some of my digestive tract's ability to absorb food. I lost 30 lbs over two months.
If I had been towards the lower end of healthy weight that would have put me in the hospital, which is the worst place to be when you are sick.
don't call me portly, pudgy or stout!
Thanks to Obamacare I get to subsidize this insanity.
Health care costs would go down at least 50% if people would just stop eating processed carbs and being obese.
But when people paying for your choices call you out that is mean!
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 4 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith. Also: No italics, even briefly. Use asterisks for emphasis. And don't play with the format by changing fonts or using boldface or all caps. Never include more than one extra line break between paragraphs.