This doesn’t make sense to me Paul. Isn’t one of the goals to getting healthy losing excess weight if a person still has a lot to lose? 36kg is a lot. Maybe the key word in Phinney’s statement is typical, meaning some people lost a lot more. Was Phinney talking at an academic type conference, or just burbling when being interviewed by someone. Grats on losing the initial 36 kg tho, that’s a huge accomplishment.
How do I know I am getting enough fat?
PaulL
(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?)
#42
There is a difference between being metabolically ill and obese and being metabolically healthy and obese. In fact, there are two medical terms that are relevant here: TOFI (“thin on the outside, fat on the inside”; in other words, people who are normal-weight but metabolically ill) and MHO (“metabolically healthy obese”).
About 20% of obese people are actually MHO. So while obesity and disease often go together, they don’t all the time. In fact, the latest figures I’ve seen show that in the U.S. there are 10,000,000 more TOFI’s than there are metabolically ill obese people. Go figure!
MeganNZ
(Megan)
#43
So being metabolically healthy is the only thing that matters, as far as being healthy goes?
PaulL
(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?)
#44
Metabolic health is certainly important, but so is freedom from infectious disease, injuries, and auto-immune disease. The point I was trying to make in my earlier post was simply that carrying too much fat is not, in and of itself, unhealthy. It is the chronic diseases caused by metabolic dysregulation that are the problem.
The standard thinking that links obesity with those chronic diseases is dangerous, precisely because that assumption allows thin people to get into serious trouble without realising they have a problem. Obesity can indeed be caused by metabolic dysregulation, but not everyone who is obese is metabolically unhealthy, and being thin is no guarantee of metabolic health. That’s all I was trying to say.