march83 wrote:CKinnard wrote:I can definitely confirm this. I am the office's resident "skinny athlete". I'm currently 83kg at BMI ~24. I easily have 5kg I could lose before I would call myself skinny, possibly more, and yet there persists this idea that I am ridiculously thin and fit and somehow my body type and what I do is unattainable to everyone else. The fact that they all eat garbage, drink a lot and none of them exercise is lost on them.
I know that office culture very well....cake for every birthday. Hospital nurses are the same.
When I was young in the 60s and 70s, we had a lot of relatives on farms. We'd get up there on school holidays from time to time.
Country folk used to give us city slickers a ribbing for being soft.....and we were!
I used to be in awe of my grandfather who at over 60yo, could swing a sledge hammer or axe with supreme mastery.
He was a strong man, and always lean....all of my rural relatives before the mid 80s were lean and functionally strong.
A part of the problem these days is most kids are being brought up in the city, and a majority of country kids now don't come off productive farms. Schools don't have the same level of opportunity for informal or formal activity.
Country kids I knew off viable farms were tough and lean.
They had to make or fix fences, chop wood, handle animals with confidence, handle heavy machinery.
Today a fat kid could not do the same workload.
Have a look at the sheep shearers in the video below, and note how none of them likely have bodyfat above 15%.
Any slacker who thinks these guys are thin, weak, and look like death, have never done a hard week's yakka in their lives.
To be a gun shearer is one of the toughest feats of physical endurance there is. Any extra weight slows you down due to higher core body temp, and shunting of blood from muscles to get heat out of the body.
Stockmen I met when doing a stint in the Northern Territory were never fat. Anyone who carried weight they scorned as being lazy and not "pulling their weight". And they'd test anyone new to get their mettle.
Of course things have changed a bit, and there's more overweight slackers on farms.
What's happened in the last 40 years is people have been urbanized and mollified into living softer lives. But that's not the worst of it. Expectations in life and the workplace have been lowered dramatically.
Blame equal opportunity, blame 'a more civil society', blame work place health and safety.
I'm not saying we need to move back to a testosterone fueled macho ignorance, but we've overshot in moving away from that.
Boys and young men used to take pride in their physical prowess, because it used to be a reasonable indicator or what kind of provider, partner, and father you'd be.
The heaviest I've been put me at a BMI of 30.9. It was when I lived in the country, and drank heavily with several foreign doctors.
That phase only lasted about 6mths, and I was always trying to get back to a healthier lifestyle.
It ended up being totally up to me to pull away from their influence. Intellectual arrogance and weak characters was what I needed to see within those 4 doctors before I got back in touch with and respected my own Still Small Voice Within.
The docs called me all sorts of names and bad mouthed me after I stopped boozing with them....it sucked, but it was yet another lesson in how when you refuse to be owned by ignorance and bad habits, or kow tow to peer pressure, and choose to stand on your own two feet, drawing your strength and purpose from within, you are going to get a lot of flack from outside.....but it will ALWAYS be from the weak and devoid of life purpose and clear direction.
Here's a pic of a woman who was treated by Walter Kempner in the 1930s. She was fed his usual diet of white rice and fruit. And it wasn't a super starvation diet at somewhere between 2000 and 2500 Calories. How she got big in the first place must be an interesting story, because the majority of people in that era were not overweight.
Some more info about Kempner
https://nutritionfacts.org/2016/08/16/i ... rice-diet/
Finally, over the weekend I read something very very insightful.
It was about how the US Dietary Guidelines came into being.
Back at that time, there was political pressure to reduce the cost of welfare programs such as food stamps and school lunches.
The food science boffins recognized the importance of vegetables and fruit, but the govt authorities said f&v were too expensive.
Hence there was pressure to change the dietary guidelines so government funded programs could be seen to meet mankind's nutritional needs.
Don't ever think government puts the citizenry's best interests first!
And if you are going to be suspicious of big pharma and big farmer.....then don't leave out big brother!
