Seriously, how is anyone dumb enough to be fat?

[Aractus]

"Rule of thumb" is that anything excessive is not good for the human body. Even excessive exercise. What disturbs me is the ease of obsession one can achieve by 'calorie/ kilojoule counting', 'meat/ non-meat' eating, gym/ non-gym exercise.

Yes I think we agree here that obsession isn't a good thing. There is a difference between awareness and learning and that of obsession. Being aware of how much you should eat is different to be obsessed by calories.

Seriously, how can anyone be dumb enough to give themselves and obsession? What is so wrong with just eating enough of what you like to eat?

Depends if it's a good habit or a bad habit. A good habit trumps a bad one, we all know that.

BMI has been discredited as an inaccurate "golden rule" and is viewed more as a guide line. There is of course the emotional eaters. How does the WHO doctrine account for them?

Well yes BMI is limited, but it in fact fails most in the overweight to obese category where it does fail to recognize a proportion of people that are actually obese and only categorize them as overweight. It also doesn't account for aging and a more accurate calculation would take in: height, weight, gender and age.

But just because it's limited doesn't mean we can't use it. Hell Newtonian Mechanics has been disproven as well, but we still used it to put people on the moon and we still use it to put satellites into orbit!

77kg on 1600 calories a day? Good grief Charlie Brown! My father would think his throat was cut!

I usually consume more, you caught me on a rather light day.

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Why is this "nannystating?" I don't mind knowing how many calories are in the food I'm eating and it can help people make better choices by simply giving them the information. If they don't care about calories they'll ignore it, if they do they'll appreciate it.

Giving information isn't being a nannystate - what's being a nannystate is legislating the maximum drink size. Now that's some bullshit right there.

While I do agree with you, if people took notice how many calories are in the foods they buy at the supermarket they should be able to reasonably accurately estimate how many calories are in a restaurant meal, and while I do think having the number of calories in fast food and restaurant food displayed is helpful, I don't think it should be mandatory.

* A major pet peeve of mine is Nutrition Information boxes on foods and drinks. I think it should be a requirement, especially with drinks, that the Nutrition Information be given for the bottle, as well as the serving size, not just for a serving size and then tell you that there's actually three servings in the bottle knowing full well that the person is going to sit there and drink the whole thing. I think it's hugely misleading for them to do it by serving size only. I think this could easily be extended to all foods where Nutrition Information is required as part of their packaging.

Well that's not quite true since they give you the serving size amount and also the average per 100g or 1kg (or whatever unit you use there, eg. lbs). But in terms of coke for instance, the 375ml can serving size is 375ml, the 600ml bottle (the most popular size) serving size is 600ml, and yet the 1.25L and 2L bottle serving size is 250ml! Even though most tumblers hold around 350ml not 250ml.

There's only one place to get a kebab in Canberra in my opinion, and that's here, one of my favourite takeaways, but even without having nutrition information I know the thing contains around 700 maybe 800 calories, certainly not unhealthy in a proper diet. The trick with fast food isn't not to eat it, but to choose good options.