Speaking wholly anecdotally, I lost 25+ pounds my first six-eight months of serious exercise 7-8 years ago, going from 190 to 165 and from about 27% body fate to about 10%, and I looked gaunt. In subsequent years my body fat has gone up to 17-18%, my body didn't like 165 lb, 19% body fat, and I'm back up to 185-6, but a lot of the weight gain is muscle, and much to my astonishment I am pretty buff, can bench press 165, 12 reps and do 15 deep squats at about 225-250. Schwartzenegger I'm not but I don't want to be. This way support Kolata's idea about the 20 point range, but as described she misses out on a key point: you don't just end up in the same slouchy shape only 20 lbs thinner but just as fat and slouchy. You can end up pretty ripped. Work out and eat right, and genes or health permitting you go, or can go, from pudge to buff. My wife annoyed some colleagues looking at pix of cute guys in a mag, the women were complaining, why don't their husbands look like that, Mine does, she said. I' not boasting, and I'll never look like Brad Pitt, it's just that for a 50 year old guy (later this month) I'm in the best shape of my life -- even though, Kolata-like, I have not moved much off my original weight.
--- Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 8 Jul 2007, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>
> > > So why, if corpulence is so baked in the cake,
> are Americans now so >
> > > much fatter than they used to be, and so much
> fatter than most other >
> > > people in the world?
> >
> > Do we really know this to be true?
> >
> > Of course, current stats say this is so but as
> Jerry (citing Gina Kolata)
> > points out, we only have figures for the post WWII
> period
>
> Yes, but within those figures there is a drastic
> change starting 25 years
> ago. If you want to say that the huge weight gain
> since then is purely a
> range change, you've basically assumed what you want
> to prove. And you
> haven't explained the change we want to explain at
> all.
>
> AFAICT, the genetic inference is simply that -- the
> inference any
> biologist would make based on the what seems to be
> invariant behavior
> (namely that most people who try to diet fail). But
> the "n is tiny"
> argument that you make above about the stats is much
> more of an objection
> to a biological argument that it is to a social one.
> There is zero
> justification to consider diet failure a biological
> invariant if all you
> have is data on one population in one time period --
> it doesn't matter how
> many people are in that population.
>
> Despite this, genetic determinism is the near
> universal inference of
> choice among biologists anyway. But that doesn't
> seem mysterious. This
> is biology's null-case hypothesis, the one
> biologists tend to assume until
> they disprove it. It's what guides their research.
> If they assumed a
> social hypothesis, they'd be out of a job as
> researchers -- they have no
> competence to investigate that. (Sociologists FWIW
> exhibit exactly the
> same behavior in reverse and for the same reasons.
> They assume all
> widespread and seemingly intractable behaviors must
> be caused socially,
> and will continue to assume it until disproven.
> Which disproof, in both
> cases, is usually impossible, to both of their
> relief.)
>
> Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, I would think
> by now that everyone
> had given up the whole genetic/environmental
> opposition. Genetics
> operates by making us more or less sensitive to
> environmental stimulus
> (using environment here to cover every realm from
> the micro-cellular to
> the macro-ecological). It does not stop us from
> being influenced by the
> environment. Including the social environment,
> which is one of the most
> important. Including in a long term, one way
> direction, like getting
> fatter. (Or taller). And it doesn't at all
> proscribe what can be done by
> willpower. It only determines what is easier and
> what is harder -- and
> part of how much.
>
> Michael
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