We Eat Healthily And Exercise A Lot, Say America's Obese.
According to a new survey of 11,000 people carried out by Thomson Medstat, over three-quarters of obese Americans claim they have healthy diets. 40% of obese people in the USA say they do vigorous exercise three times a week or more. The researchers in this study wondered how many of the USA's obese citizens really understood what is meant by a healthy diet and regular, vigorous physical activity.
Let's see if I've got this right... since "obese" people claim to be eating healthy and exercising, the researchers think these people don't actually know what "healthy" or "vigorous" really is? Give me a break! We're fat, not stupid.
Or as my husband put it... "I'm wondering if the researchers understand what is meant by the term 'obese' "
Hmm... let's see. According to the BMI, I'm "morbidly obese." I briskly walk a minimum of about 2 km a day, 5 days a week (usually 7 days a week). That's not counting the extra kilometers I walk simply because I don't have a car, often carrying about 20 or more pounds of "stuff" in the process. I eat 3 modest meals a day, plus the occasional snack. I home cook our meals from scratch about 95% of the time, and I do know what a healthy diet is. Yes, we do have the occasional pop or chips, but very little overall. My husband also exercises daily, including swimming laps, Tai Chi, 3 hour long walks ending in a 200 step staircase, weight lifting, and using an elliptic, among other things. Neither of us is loosing weight.
Could we be making improvements? Of course. There's always room for improvement. However, we both exercise more than "average." We have diets that are healthier than "average." Medical tests repeatedly show that we are healthy; blood pressure, cholesterol counts, heart rates, etc. all showing us to be healthy - which is frustrating, considering my husband's continued mystery health problems that he's been battling for years. Yet, according to "conventional" wisdom, because we're fat, we must be lazy, unhealthy, and too stupid to even know what a healthy diet or active lifestyle looks like.
Yeah, right.
To the researchers who did this study, do you think it could be possible that these people really *do* eat well and exercise, but are still fat anyways? That maybe, there's more to being large than calories in, calories out?
Or is that just too difficult a concept to accept?
I read the same article today. It was in both of the papers I read too. I do need to exercise more and eat better, but I am fat only becasue of that. I can lose weight all I want and exercise each day and it comes right back plus. It is like the more I try the heavier I get. This article just perpetuates all the sterotypes that people have of overweight people.
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