Ian G Batten said:In article <[email hidden]>, Arthur Clune
<[email hidden]> wrote:
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:A moderate amount of "fat" doesn't harm health - I could
go with that. Therefore the government's worrys about
obesity are overdone. Erm, no.
Quoted message said:A neighbour of ours is a part-time GP who also does some
epidemiology and goes to various incomprehensible WHO
workshops around the world. His wife is also a GP. Both
them are, before anyone says they are engaged in self-
justification, whippet thin keen cyclists.
Quoted message said:His view is that there's actually little evidence that
losing weight, in itself, is a good thing, for anyone other
than the morbidly obese. The things you do to lose weight
may be good: increased exercise, `better' diet. But simply
assuming that any someone who loses two stone is by
definition better off in health terms is just not supported
by evidence.
Note the careful phrasing: "not supported by evidence".
Perfectly true. It is also perfectly true that it is not
contradicted by evidence. In short, this is a classic case
of switching absence of evidence for evidence of absence
while you're not paying close attention. Either your doctor
is deliberately fooling you, or someone has fooled him,
which is not good, since he's supposed to have professional
training in the assessment of evidence. Of course he
wouldn't be maliciously fooling you, he'd just be doing the
same thing the police do when they know the chap is guilty
but haven't got the evidence -- they just fit him up enough
to convince a jury.
Quoted message said:Indeed, if someone goes from a sedentary lifestyle to an
active one, they may well put weight on as they convert fat
to muscle. To tell them that they are harming their health
because they weigh more is just perverse.
Quite so, and in my youth, whenever I trained, I routinely
got thinner and stayed the same weight, because I gained
muscle as fast as I lost flab.
These older and fatter days, whenever the bathroom scales
annoy me enough, I start eating less, only eating when
hungry and stopping when not hungry, rather than eating for
fun. For me it's a fairly simple and reliable way of losing
weight slowly but surely. And if I lose a stone I notice
that I have more energy and bounce, can walk a lot further
before my joints start complaining, can walk up hills much
faster, and snore a lot less when asleep (my wife notices
that one).
--
Chris Malcolm [email hidden] +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
["]http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]
