Quote:
Originally Posted by taxwonk
Just a thought. For some "fat guys" (not all, but some) a sudden increase in activity presents health risks, especially if they have certain cardiac or circulatory problems. Many times, their doctors will prescribe a limited set of exercises to get them into the habit of movoing and begin to slowly improve cardio-pulmonary function. Their cardio may well consist of walking home instead of taking a cab, or walking up the three flights of stairs when they get home.
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Clearly I'm not talking about these people. If you're at the gym and you spend all your time lifting and doing abs and you're 50 pounds overweight, I cannot possibly imagine that doing some cardio work will kill you. Similarly, I doubt the doctor's advice consisted of doing 40 reps of bench press with tremendous amounts of weight and 100 half-ass crunches. But maybe they're just interested in being stronger and don't care about losing fat. But that doesn't explain why so many stupid ab trainers and 5 minute ab tapes are sold, does it?
Quote:
Originally Posted by taxwonk
I'm not disagreeing with your general proposition. However, there are countervailing health issues. In addition, there are also a significantnumber of studies that suggest that if someone is morbidly obese, no exercise or diet regimen alone will produce meaningful weight loss. For some people, surgical intervention will be their only real chance at weight loss.
This stuff isn't always as simple as you suggest.
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I haven't read the studies, but on every single one of those shows where they are tracking someone who is morbidly obese, they are morbidly obese because they eat tens of thousands of calories a day and have reached a point where they can barely move at all. At this point, I don't think your heart could sustain the work required to pump blood around a body that taxed. And I'm not saying the simple rule I proposed applies to everyone. (And I bet EO was already at a point where she couldn't lose that much more weight, so a "subtle" change like cutting out all carbs would do a lot.) But I could take anyone on this board who was overweight, and if I could control what they ate and how much they exercised, they would lose weight.
