Meanwhile, KSU nutrition professor Mark Haub proved that you can go from ham to human eating a calorie deficit of Twinkies.     Haub limited himself to less than 1,800 calories a day. A man of Haub’s pre-dieting size usually consumes about 2,600 calories daily.  "B-but fat people don't eat lots of food!  That's just a stereotype!" Haub didn't even exercise, his diet consisted almost entirely of Twinkies and similar foods, and got the following results:  Haub’s “bad” cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent His “good” cholesterol, or HDL, increased by 20 percent.  A Tumblrina at Haub's old weight, when not calling themselves "smallfats," would have shouted to the moon that her blood work results were good.  But obviously that's not true when compared to actually healthy blood results of a thin person.  He reduced the level of triglycerides, which are a form of fat, by 39 percent. Haub’s body fat dropped from 33.4 to 24.9 percent.  The same results happened when high school science teacher John Cisna lost 56 pounds eating a calorie deficit of nothing but the McDonald's menu.  The mere fact of losing 56  pounds and not being as obese as before made his results healthier in every single measurement:  Cholesterol: started at 249 and lowered to 170 Triglycerides: from 156 to 80 LDL: from 170 to 113  This is despite the fact that Haub had worse muscle retention than he would have had with a high-protein calorie deficit (a far bigger mistake was that Haub stopped at a 24.9 BMI--and Americans are so fat that John Cisna being 219 pounds, not even at a healthy human BMI yet, is held up as a success story to the point that McDonald's made him a spokesman). So yes, "exercise for your health, not to be thin" is a false dichotomy.  Being fat, no matter how much you brag about going to the gym, is unhealthy.  A thin person who doesn't exercise and ate 1800 calories of Twinkies--with the high BF% and low muscle mass that results--is healthier in every statistic than being fat.  In other words, "shallow beauty standards" have significant predictive power for a mate's health, fertility, and physical fitness.