[saw-lau]

I'm around 310 lbs (a smidge over 22 stone for UK people). Like yourself, I always thought when I was younger 'how do people let themselves get that way?'.

It just kind of happened for me. I know I eat unhealthy food; I know I drink too much; I know I don't do enough (as in, any) exercise... I look at my face in the mirror and think 'that's not too bad!' but then catch my side profile at some point and think 'eek!'.

It's all a bit miserable, really. :-(

You should be so proud of yourself for your weight loss!!! I really hope things continue on the right path for you.

[dkdbejwi383]

As a person from the UK in their mid-30s I have no idea what a stone or a lb is. I did the conversion and 310 lbs is approx. 140 kg.

[VBprogrammer]

Weird, I'm also mid-30s in the UK and stone is my native person weight. As well as pounds and ounces for babies.

That said, I have a reasonable intuition for the conversion factors. Enough that I wouldn't have to run to Google to understand the jist of the story.

[nikanj]

And the memes still claim that the UK is metric.

[weberer]

So is the USA on paper

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act

[smcl]

Ah that is a bit unusual. We're roughly the same age, and I only switched to kg after going abroad - otherwise bodyweight was always stone for me.

[ben_w]

I'm 39 and never used imperial weights despite living in the UK from birth until relocating in 2018. I don't even know how many pounds to the stone today without looking it up, and constantly get surprised by all the other Brits who don't think in metric by default (but that happens enough that I do know to multiply kg by 2.2 to get lbs).

[smcl]

Yeah Pounds to Stone is a pain in that it's fourteen while Ounces to Pounds is sixteen. I think the only thing I used imperial for is bodyweight and that's just due to either parents or doctors using it. Other than that we used to ask for a "quarter" of boiled sweets at the shop, but I never internalized what the exact weight was (I guess a quarter of a pound) it's just what my dad taught me to ask for when I was ~4 and I kept it up.

[dxuh]

If you want to be accommodating to people using different units of measurement, I would consider adding kilograms rather than stones.

[itsthejb]

It pains me to see other Brits of my generation using Imperial as the norm

[saw-lau]

Sorry for disappointing you!

It's weird, but I always use metric for 'small' measurements (a number of metres, for example), but for distances on the road it'll be miles. And I've used miles per hour for so long that I just can't get my head around how fast something's moving if it's quoted in km/h. (Of course, the fact that road signs are miles and MPH over here kind of drums that in somewhat...)

Likewise, when I'm cooking I'll work in grams and litres, but for body weight it's always been stones.

(Was born in 1970, by the way.)

[k__]

Kg is around 1/2 of the pound value.

[andrelaszlo]

I weigh around 1.64 Ezra Pounds...

[smcl]

Yeah it's ~2.2 lbs to the kg, so when I have to convert I divide kg by two and then take off an amount that feels about right (or in the other direction, double it and then add a similarly gut-feel amount)

[dustincoates]

There's an even easier way of going from kg to lbs. than gut feel: double the kg and then add a tenth of that value. Voilà.

[smcl]

Yeah it's that one-tenth that I just sorta fudge, if you're converting 84kg to pounds then multiplying by 2 lands you with 168, at which point you can either:

1. add exactly 16.8 to the value in your head

2. open the calc app (at which point you might as well put "84 kg in lbs" to google)

3. don't worry about the exact result, give a rough approximation: "it's about 180-something"

#3 will suffice, people are usually looking for a rough ballpark figure. If it was important then I'd obviously convert it carefully, but I'm talking about when I've done a conversion when talking with a US friend in the pub or something where I'd probably mess up whether you add a tenth of the original value or the doubled value anyway :)

[saw-lau]

Fair enough - I should have thought of that myself. :-(

[macintux]

I hadn’t exercised for over 20 years, but then I bought an Apple Watch. I ignored the rings for the first few months, but finally started taking them seriously. The gamification of fitness is very much a thing.

I still hate exercise, I still have no upper body strength, I’m still overweight, but my overall fitness level has gone up significantly and I’ve lost some weight. Baby steps.

[SpelingBeeChamp]

Same here with the Apple Watch. After a couple of months of thinking that the rings were ridiculous, I found myself taking intentional steps to close them. Last night, even though I should have been sleeping, I went for a brisk walk just before midnight… after I realized that I was just shy of closing a ring. I like it.

[nickybearblog]

_Really_ sneaks up on you, doesn't it? Especially the side profile thing. I have a couple of shirts that make me look fine from the font, but I turn to the side and just see the gut. Are you looking at losing weight at the minute?

[saw-lau]

It's something that I know I need to do, but - and I know this is pathetic - always gets put off ('I'll start next week; after Christmas; after my birthday...').

[smcl]

I think "the right path" here is finding happiness regardless of your weight. Whether that involves losing weight, or eating/exercising a bit differently or simply being happy and comfortable with the build you currently have.

People can spend their lives spiralling into depression and ill-health by constantly following diets or setting goals that even if they achieve doesn't always make them feel satisfied. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't do anything in particular - but I hope you don't feel pressured or guilted into something by what others say or what you think they feel.

The fact that you can look in the mirror and think "that's not too bad" means you're already happier than a lot of people - there are some shredded people with physiques you or I may envy, but who are either miserable about their lifestyle or who still just don't like how they look.

I don't know how this comment comes across - but my intent was to give a little support that wasn't just "you can lose weight too!" because that is not the be-all-and-end-all :)

[thfuran]

>because that is not the be-all-and-end-all :)

Not quite, but it is important. Being ~100 lb overweight is a serious medical condition. It's bad for your knees, it's bad for your heart, and it puts you at much higher risk of tons of other problems.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

Okay, but also being miserable about it isn’t going to help the fat guy. In fact being miserable makes it statistically more likely he stays fat or gets fatter.

[smcl]

This is where it starts to become complicated. I am not the best person to properly enumerate these complications so if this comment made you curious, check the podcast Maintenance Phase and their episode "Is Being Fat Bad For You?"[0]. However I can briefly try to summarise some of them for your curiosity:

- it is received wisdom that if you are fatter you are "unhealthier" and this is reflected in a lot of data whenever this is studied

- however this tends to not get controlled for some important factors (e.g. lower income people are generally more unhealthy overally than those on higher incomes) for a whole variety of reasons that aren't necessarily related to weight or whether you're categorised as overweight

- a very undeappreciated problem is that if you're "overweight"[1] you tend to be quite under-served by doctors currently. So it's common for an "overweight" person to go to the doctor with a problem - heart pains, gastro-intestinal problems, whatever - and to be told "lose some weight, you're overweight". While someone thinner would get some more attention even though they may both have a weight-agnostic root cause . This is not very well studied or measured, but this type of treatment is widely reported problem whenever you survey "overweight" people

- people with eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia are often excluded from these studies with the intent to get untainted data. These eating disorders are usually only diagnosed for people below a certain BMI, when in fact they are still definitely present among higher-BMI individuals and have a similarly detrimental effect on their health. Sustained dieting can have pretty serious effects on your body, and if you go to a doctor because, say, you're a woman on a diet who has stopped menstruating ... well, see the previous bullet point, you're just just get told "lose some weight"

There a few other additional issues, but I hope this is enough to make you stop and think that while yeah there's possibly increased health risks it's potentially less than we might realise and is a pretty complex subject that deserves careful study and to be treated with more nuance than it usually is.

[0] - the answer is "kinda yes, but not as much as you think and not in every way and it's more complicated": https://www.stitcher.com/show/maintenance-phase/episode/is-b...

[1] - Aubrey Gordon, a host of the podcast I mentioned, has suggested she doesn't like "overweight" etc euphemisms, but I chickened out of using just "fat" like she does ... but I still think "overweight" possibly incorrectly suggests there is a correct weight you should be - so I surrounded it in coward-quotes :) I do know for a fact that "obese" (and morbidly obese) are heavily frowned-upon and tbh not particularly helpful categorisations, I saw them floating around elsewhere in this thread.

[edanm]

This is very interesting, thanks for the detailed list. I will check out the podcast.

That said... this is one of those cases where I have to defer to the experts here. Basically every expert I've heard on this topic has said that being obese is unhealthy. And while you (summarizing the podcast) raise a lot of interesting points, I don't think I'm in a position to disagree with the scientific consensus here. And it's not like the people studying this stuff haven't thought about a lot of these objections themselves.

Also, anecdotally, it seems fairly common sense that people who are obese are less healthy in many ways. I know that's just an impression, but c'mon, it's a pretty strong one, to me at least. I've seen so many people go from finding it hard to walk much without breathing hard when overweight, to being fine after. Just as an example of someone famous with many health problems that got much better- Penn Jillette.

[smcl]

Yep sorry it wasn't my intention to hide that - the consensus is that being very fat is bad for you in various ways. But specifically how fat and how much worse in which ways is a bit of a crapshoot because it seems some of the research on it is a bit methologically flawed or inconsistent or ideologically driven (the ep references a bit of back/forth between Katherine Flegal and Walter Willett on that which was very interesting).

But yeah does feel right (as an anecdotal aside I feel "healthier" at 84kg than when I was 94kg) and as I said in the extreme it does seem to be correct - the same is true for very thin people. But we're mistreating thin and fat people alike by boiling down a lot of health problems down to a single dimension and saying those who fall on one side of a line are healthy and those on the other aren't. I'm not suggesting you were doing just that - you seem to appreciate the nuance to it - but many people do and I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't that kind of person at one point in my past.

[edanm]

Oh I don't think you were hiding anything, I'm just saying a single podcast is not enough to convince me of anything.

That said,I started listening to it... It's fantastic. They've made really great points so far. A bunch of questionable stuff too that I disagree with, but lots of great points.

And even not just about obesity. I think they made some analogies that will stick with me about correlations.

I have no idea who these are, but I'm super thankful you introduced me to them I'm definitely going to try more of their stuff.

[saw-lau]

The comment came across very positively - thanks!

[leeroyjenkins11]

Yes, I think a key for stopping that is making sure you weight yourself once a week at least. It's much easier to catch the weight creeping up and manage it when it's 5 pounds and not 15.

[AstralStorm]

Right. Catch yes, do something actually working about it, not really.

[hhjinks]

I find it funny that you did a conversion for stone, but not one for kilograms.

[saw-lau]

I know! I clearly wasn't thinking straight...

[0dayz]

I hope you're able to take the right path to, it's a hurdle but possible.

[turing_complete]

You can do it too!