On behalf of the skinny people of the board, I'd like to make the correction that it was A FEW skinny people, not THE skinny people. I want no part of that attitude!

I don't want to hear "exercise more" from someone who has no idea how much I exercise.

So....just to add fuel to the fire...
What is "Skinny" exactly? I don't consider myself skinny....I consider someone who weighs less than me "Skinny".

But perhaps someone that weighs more than me, might think I'm "skinny"???
Um, do you see where this starts to get a little silly, folks?
I agree with the several people that say all advice is good...and personally, anyone that tries to empathsize with me, I realize has good intentions and is ok in my book.

I think it's important to be able to hear unpleasant advice without taking offense, but also not to get upset if your advice is rejected.

Now THIS is a War Zone thread. Gloves off, feelings exposed, reasonably civilized yet obviously heartfelt arguments. Feels good to get things off one's chest eh?

Another thought while we meander along, is that a goal weight is just some artificial number we choose at the beginning of our journey, something we can shoot for. Like everything in life, your results may vary. I don't believe a person can simply choose a goal weight and get there regardless. You make adjustments to your way of eating and see what happens. Any weight loss that is sustained, is good for us.

Eating reasonably low carb and still being overweight (using whatever criteria you care to employ), is more healthy than eating high carb and being ANY weight. The sole exception to this, might be early in the diet when some people see an increase in cholesterol numbers. I attribute this to the beginnings of fat mobilization, and as long as your arteries are not already seriously clogged (take Bill Clinton for example) then it is certainly worth the initial risk. Even Clinton has seen the benefits, and I don't guess his surgery would have been unneccessary had he not gone on South Beach.

Congrats on sticking to what you needed to in order to reach your goal.

Good point. However, THIS debate isn't about goal weight or fat vs. skinny. It's not about any individual's success. It's about using the numbers (start weight vs. current) to judge advice given. If progress appears to be slow, according to this view, then that person's advice should be ignored in favour of someone whose stats appear to show greater success.

It's possible, in some cases, that the starting number reflects the highest weight a person reached in their lifetime, which may have been many years ago. The actual weight lost THIS time, with low-carb, may be much lower. Newcomers might assume they'd lost all the weight since starting lc. If stats alone were used to judge worthiness of advice, then that person's post(s) could be seen as more valid than someone whose loss appears smaller and slower.

Every person is a success story in my book , but the idea that "the proof is in the stats" is not helpful advice to newcomers, and is unfair to long time members whose numbers alone don't indicate actual experience.


Doreen

I totally agree- when I had the chance to visit here regularly and was stalling on Atkins I used to check out what women of my height and close to my (then) current and target weight were up to. Often Atkins, which will categorically not get me personally where I want to end up, stats or health-wise. But frequently I'd find things that helped me out from all heights, sizes and sexes until I found an amalgam of things that worked for me.


Agreed, again. If you look behind some stats and posts there are eating disordered behaviours, the adoption or imitation of which can never be construed as "helpful".

Here's a thought, Dr. Neal Bernard of PETA and PCRM is one of the leanest, skinniest people you can find, certainly leaner than Dr. Atkins, Dr. Sears, Dr. Edes, Dr. Agatson, (authors of the Atkins, Zone, PP, SBD, respectively). Why not listen to him, and follow his diet book instead, since he does have much better stats? Same goes for Richard Simmins as well.... or the "stop the insanity" gal, etc.

Similarly, why would financial analysts pay attention to Alan Greenspan, and not Donald Trump? Donald Trump makes a lot more money, so he must be more knowledgeable about the economy and financial matters than some salaried government employee who never became a multi-billionaire....

There are some basics about weight loss that most people know, and there are some intricate details on nutrition and biochemistry that few people know. You don't need to know everything about weight loss to lose weight. You don't have to follow one specific way to lose weight. And you don't necessarily lose weight if you know everything about weight loss. They're two different things.

Food for thought

Wa'il

...............

You know what I hate? People who have absolutely nothing to contribute to a thread and have to post anyway because the thread is going off in really interesting directions.

Actually, I don't really hate it too much, and just wanted to dive in and enjoy the company.

I'm not sure that the specific reason for having advice ignored is the heart of it, though. I routinely get my ideas discounted because some consider me a "fat" maintainer, because others see me as skinny and angular, because I am actually fairly opinionated (bet nobody noticed that, right?), because I count calories and exercise, because I'm now "invisibly obese" and somehow that must mean that I forgot what it is like to be "visibly obese".

I get the opposite as well, with 3-post gung-ho newbies sometimes being too enthusiastic about wanting to know my secrets (which is a royal pain when they drop from the board after their 4th post - I love wasting my typing time (not)). Also, I do get some hostility from large folks in real life - apparently being bony and buying non-processed foods in the grocery store must be my way of personally insulting some people.

I'm sure some of the time this is personally directed, either through hostility or just plain ignorance. But I also think that most of the time it feels a whole lot more personal than it is, and that whoever is dismissing me is doing it without any real thoughts about me - and just has their own personal need to ward off an idea, or a stranger's appearance, that they either don't like or don't want to like.

And then you do get the handful of folks who truly are dismissive. They end up making it a lot harder to stay objective about questionable comments from folks who really aren't trying to grind an axe in anyone, even though they may sound a bit like it.

Gee, that was fun joining in and muddying the waters further. Hopefully it wasn't in a negative way.

Lynda

P.S. Yo! Diane! Get back on that treadmill! (Just kidding.)

I can’t talk about the other TDCers, only about myself, but that is exactly why it’s working this time for me on a whole different level than any of the other two times I’ve done low carb. The pain of being fat is too much for me to bear anymore, and whatever the personal sacrifice, I’m going to get myself out of it and stay out of it this time. Whatever I have to do (short of anything illegal, obviously ) I will do it, and gladly, because I can’t stand another day of the pain and misery I went through and go through being fat. Advice is great, once you give it to me, I can either use it or discard it as I see fit, but like it or not, it won’t “ring true” if you haven’t been there. Until you’ve stood where I’ve been and had your own family tell you you’re so disgustingly fat to them that you won’t be invited to family functions, don’t expect me to boohoo with you over your chicken legs and small bust
That’s why I “hang out” in the TDC forum, mostly. Other people (fat, skinny, maintenance, newbie, everyone) can give advice that I may or may not use, but my people in the TDC get, on a fundamental level, what I go through every day in a way others can’t. It isn’t to say that others’ opinions are invalid, or that they can’t sympathize, but if they’ve never been mooed at when they’re walking to their car, will they understand the shame of it? Nor would I understand being an African American single mom- I can empathize all I want, but it isn’t the same- how could it be?

I, like Woo and others, have been both. I have been so skinny I was accused of having eating disorders (which, eventually, became true, but wasn’t in the beginning) and I have been so fat that I’ve been treated as a lump of dirt under someone’s shoe. All I can say in my experience is the “pain” I went through being skinny and being teased was not even LIGHT YEARS close to the pain I felt and feel from the way I’m treated being obese. Before I was teased because I was envied, now I’m teased because I’m pitied.

I try my hardest not to “exclude” anyone, because G-d do I know how it stings, but the fact is that society has been based on “groups” since the beginning of time and will be. It’s only natural I would take the advice of someone in a similar situation as me to have more merit than someone who has never been overweight who has like, 10 pounds to lose.

Indeed. Some us, especially those of us who are older, are willing to take any old color - we mainly want something that is reliable and will deliver good performance for longer, with less maintenance. It's not that we're unwilling to make "sacrifices" for thinness... in fact I'd be willing to bet that at your age, Woo, many of us did, it's just that health is no longer one of those things we're willing to sacrifice for rapid and/or extreme weight loss.

Considering the huge lifestyle changes that I've made for my health (for which weight normalization is not the goal but merely a secondary sign of improvement), I find the idea that someone would think I am unable or unwilling to make "sacrifices" mind boggling.

Wyv

So, how do you think the dynamics of the forum would change if we just did away with the whole stats area and nobody knew anyone's numbers? (I'm addressing this question to everyone, not just Doreen)

that, to a certain extent, is understandable. It's similar to a person who has never had children giving advice on how to handle situations that arise when you have children (something I call armchair parenting). But would you discount the advice of someone who started out just as heavy as you but had not yet lost as much weight even though they had been low carbing longer? Would you try to convince someone else to discount their advice? Or try to push your opinion in a thread by pointing out that you had lost more weight than someone who you disagreed with?
I think that's the sort of thing that I think we're talking about here and it's not helpful at all as it creates an atmosphere where many people are left to wonder, as the original poster, how much they need to lose before their opinion will be considered valid.