> Replicated by other studies, that research helps explain the discouraging finding that within five years of having lost weight, 95% of dieters will regain all the weight they lost. And most will gain a few extra pounds as well.
I'm part of that privileged 5%. I lost around 60 pounds in 2009-2010 and I've kept it off. It really is a lifestyle change. You have to be constantly aware of the portions you choose and remember what you've already eaten that day to keep in "budget". There are tools and processes that can help, but it's a constant struggle against your body that is constantly lying to your brain. I can definitely see why many people would give up.
I haven't A/B tested it so I can't say for sure if I "have" to but yes, I continue to manage my intake as closely as I can. I read the labels on everything, measure liquids or weigh foods where the package is larger than a single serving, and so on.
I lost 55 lbs and have kept it off for a year now.
It's a constant struggle. If I stop watching what I'm eating, I'll start overeating immediately and start gaining weight. I went to a wedding a week or 2 ago and gained 5-7 lbs. Watching my diet since then, I've dropped most of it again. If I hadn't watched it immediately, it would have stuck and I'd have a hard time losing it again.
I'm very careful about what I eat for breakfast and lunch, to the point of almost always having the same thing. Dinner is very varied, but I still have to watch things or I'll go overboard.
I eat burgers, Mexican food, Italian, pizza, etc etc... But I do not eat dessert. I've found that there's no way to avoid gaining weight if I eat any dessert at all.
To deal with my sweets craving, I drink diet sodas (they've improved a lot lately) and Tic Tacs.
If I really need a snack, it'll be peanuts and pretzels. They're high in calories, but no sugar.
My wife lost about 70lbs and has kept it off for over three years. She is a fitness nut now (bar and ring muscle ups, handstand walks and handstand pushups, olympic lifting...). It is constant battle for her to manage her calorie and macro nutrient intake.
I lost around the same amount about 2012, then gained 10kg/22lbs back as soon as I started earning enough to not worry about rent and medical costs every single time I went grocery shopping. Good for you - wish I could have been so disciplined (though 40lbs still isn't that bad when everything is said and done)
Education does not work. Mexico has shown that regulation does work, they regulated sugar which has had a positive effect on health. The food industry needs to be regulated. The few conglomerates are engineering unhealthy people. It's that simple. There is very little actual food choice because the market optimizes for profits, not for health. In order to give health a fighting chance you need to regulate the market to change the game. Food is an addictive drug, we regulate all other addictive drugs.
> There is very little actual food choice because the market optimizes for profits, not for health.
Hold on! The market consists of both suppliers and customer. One would think that being fat is not profitable for the latter. Meanwhile, only 3% of Japanese people have a BMI over 30, while 32% of Americans do. It must be that Japanese markets don't optimize for profit! Or maybe you got the source of the problem wrong. Guess which one I think it is.
> Mexico has shown that regulation does work, they regulated sugar which has had a positive effect on health.
Hungary has a higher sugar tax, had it for a longer time, and it appears to have no effect on health at all. Go figure.
IMO it's not so much about education as about how to help people shape their habits. People already know that candy-bars and french-fries correlate to obesity, after all.
> that simple
Or at least, so close to being that simple that there's no point confusing people with erroneous details.
You're of course leaving out the complexity in how "Calories in" and "calories out" are derived for individuals.
Some people consume too much calorically as a mental-health coping mechanism. Some people consume too much calorically because the food culture they were raised in promotes that. Some people consume too much calorically because they have a lack of real options to purchase fresh whole foods.
Some people don't expend enough calories because their lifestyle makes it difficult (work + family + etc). Some people don't expend enough calories because the lifestyle they were raised with doesn't promote that.
These are just some of the ways that simple equation you've posted become immediately more complex.
Every complexity you posted still comes down to consuming more calories than is needed.
The reality is the vast majority of people eat way too much, and the dietary guidelines for caloric intake are far too high for a largely sedentary society.
I do not want to sound like I am arguing with you for the sake of arguing, but I have lost weight and several of my friends and family have lost weight without feeling hungry by switching to a low carb (ketogenic) diet. It was so crazy to eat mostly fatty food and green vegetables and lose weight very quickly. One major thing I noticed was how much longer I was able to go without eating on this diet without feeling hungry. I used to feel very ill if I did not eat at least 3 meals at day. I can now, if I choose, eat a snack in the early afternoon and then eat dinner and feel fine (1.5 meals instead of 3).
This matches my experience as well. The transition period (~1.5 weeks, but especially brutal on days 2-5) was rough, but once established, it was the easiest diet to stay on if you could control your environment and mostly cook for yourself or choose where to eat.
It is somewhat harder to stay on the diet while traveling, attending conferences, or business meetings. Having a host choose a place to eat, offer you local cuisine, etc makes it harder to stay in keto. Hunger though, was never a problem after the first full week.
Keto is great but there's still a willpower component, it can be more or less difficult depending on the person. I don't really like cooking a lot, but I don't mind eating the same things most of the time. It would be a lot harder for someone who hates cooking and hates eating the same thing all the time. While raw hunger never bothered me I did find cravings an occasional issue (never constant, but even after months never quite disappearing) and sometimes they'd be for things I haven't had in years. Eventually it might be something easy to satisfy like a pizza and when you give in once it's easy to say "screw it", though some people can only continue if they have an occasional cheat day.
I'm an on-and-off-again keto dieter (I appreciate that for me it seems to take at least 2-3x as long to put the weight back on as it takes to take off as I inevitably revert to former diet choices...) and I never find the transition period difficult, but there's a consistent point where I hit "eh, still fat, but don't feel super fat anymore" and that's when the cravings or the pressures of eating non-keto with company have the highest chance of getting to me. There are also unforeseen stressors that can make things difficult (in my case a forced house move) but I'm ok with the state of flux. I don't want a six-pack physique enough, not really, and that's the last willpower component -- how long can you stick with it (and introduce more exercise), even with bumps and setbacks? My friend who introduced me to the diet lost 100 lbs by forcing himself to do keto for about 5 months, but he was fat enough at the start that he could stand to lose another 50 lbs but it's not as easy now. Still, he's much happier and healthier now than before. One's level of willpower is still involved even with how great keto is and is the difference between losing 50 lbs (not bad), 100 lbs (pretty awesome), and 150 lbs (your ideal).
I didn't take it as arguing for the sake of arguing at all. I know a lot of people who really do well with low carbs - and I'm slightly jealous.
I've tried before, but I feel like complete garbage. I'm told it goes away, but I don't really have days to waste feeling dizzy trying out something that may or not work for me.
You'd think that the link between "eating less" and "losing weight" is so well-proven that any subsequent study would re-validate it. Yet there's not a single study where 100% of participants who cut their caloric intake lost weight in 100% of the cases. The reports, at best, are "inconclusive". http://time.com/2809007/eat-less-exercise-more-isnt-the-answ...
On a global scale countries low on the obesity scale (Japan, Singapore, Korea, France) are not teeming with starving under-nourished citizens, and countries high on the obesity scale (Mexico, US) are not lacking gyms, exercise equipment, or opportunities for simple nature walks.
Being obese and eating less or feeling hungry doesn't mean you're starving or malnourished. That's complete hyperbole.
The fact is if you're fat, you've conditioned yourself to eat too many calories, and eating a normal amount of calories will likely leave you feeling hungrier while you adjust.
And yet fasting diets do not consistently work, and it's the fattest countries of the world that have supermarket shelves full of low-calorie products (finding a low-calorie yogurt or low-fat cheese in a French supermarket would be a challenge)
"In the adult US population the prevalence of overweight rose from 25.4% from 1976 to 1980 to 33.3% from 1988 to 1991, a 31% increase. During the same period, average fat intake, adjusted for total calories, dropped from 41.0% to 36.6%, an 11% decrease. Average total daily calorie intake also tended to decrease, from 1,854 kcal to 1,785 kcal (−4%). Men and women had similar trends. Concurrently, there was a dramatic rise in the percentage of the US population consuming low-calorie products, from 19% of the population in 1978 to 76% in 1991. From 1986 to 1991 the prevalence of sedentary lifestyle represented almost 60% of the US population, with no change over time."
My point is that you can't just tell someone this simple equation and expect them to adopt it due to the elegant rationality of the solution.
Somebody who is using food as a coping device has an underlying issue they have to tackle before they can reduce their caloric intake. I mean, you could force folks to eat less, but you really want them eating less because it's healthier for them and that they themselves recognize and embrace that truth so they adopt the healthier habits as their personal culture to re-transmit to family and friends.
When your body is breaking down simple carbohydrates, it causes your blood sugar levels to spike, and during this period you're packing away more fat than you would otherwise. Combined with a sedentary lifestyle it's really bad. It does matter where you're getting your calories from.
This is why poor people have greater obesity problems than the rest. Potato Chips, white bread, pasta, and of course sugar feature prominently in their daily calorie intake, these are the cheapest calories you can make a diet out of.
None of that matters, it's like jitter on a clock line. The timespans we are talking (months), these differences vanish.
I'm sure there are tons of intricacies in how metabolism works, but glycogen storage in a human is about 2000 kJ. Once your deficit surpasses that (and we'll happily allow a multiple to account for any error here), your body will either consume fat or you'll experience actual low blood sugar and drop dead.
The point is that there's a whole lot of complexity hiding behind "calories in" and "calories out". The behaviors of eating, the psychology and physiology of feeling full, of being active, exercising, etc are all very complex. The simple equation is hiding immense complexity.
CICO isn't very useful because all diets that are successful are CICO. It's like saying space travel is simply applying enough force in the right direction.
Logging and limiting calories isn't the only way to achieve CICO.
Yes, but it's a gross oversimplification! If I asked you "what's the secret to getting rich?" and you said "earn more than you spend", it would be true, but it wouldn't be very helpful.
The fact is that different calories affect our brains differently. Some cause us to crave more food, some cause us to feel satiated, etc. I hate this modern trend of saying "calories in vs calories out" as if it's a magic cure.
> "earn more than you spend", it would be true, but it wouldn't be very helpful.
It's actually very helpful advice but only if you are able to realize that's the only way you can predictably get rich through.
Most people choose to rather belive that they are spending not more than they believe they should or must and will not always look for new job that pays more, and instead believe that they can get rich by using tricks or will surely have some lucky break.
Same with weight loss. Calories in, calories out is a magic cure for many people but only if they are grounded enough in reality of what they can be sure about, to accept it.
Yes, and reality is just an application of the universal wave function. Just derive your diet from that.
Claiming "calories in calories out end of story" is like saying "the solution to aids and unwanted pregnancies is condoms." People are still getting HIV and unwanted pregnancies, and most of them know about condoms. What gives? "The solution" doesn't take into account we are mammals with millions of years of evolutionary programming driving our every action.
Honestly, ending conversations because of CICO prevents people from exploring the real problem. It's counter productive. Please take a moment and listen.
Calorie balance certainly matters but it is not that simple. Most leading health research institutions believe dietary quality plays a major part in health and weight management. Certain foods are associated with patterns of overeating.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/best-diet-quali...
The average American diet has changed dramatically in the last century with the growth of the restaurant and food processing industry. Exercise participation has actually increased substantially in the last 20 years (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2015/057.pdf) in the same time period obesity has soared.
Energy balance being responsible for weight gain is too readily used by the food processing industry in an effort to shift away blame for this epidemic.
Unfortunately this isn't good advice for a fat person trying to lose weight. Even a very low IQ fat person understands that if they eat less and move more they'll lose weight. Nor is it particularly good advice for trying to craft a top-down policy unless the intention is to force people to eat a certain amount only and burn a minimum amount of energy.
Excercise doesn't do much for you when it comes to weight loss. You have to run excessive distances to burn food that'll take you just a moment to simply not eat.
If cutting food was the answer, then fasting would be a conclusive answer to weight loss. It's not.
All the obese people you see walking around are not suffering from a lack of willpower to go on a fasting diet. All the thin people you see walking around are not meticulously tracking their calorie intake and burn.
All the pepole that are consistently eating 1500-1800 calories per day and are not bedridden are loosing weight and getting thin or less fat regardless of calorie counting and willpower.
There are people who eat more and still are thin but if you are not one of those people they should be none of your concern similarily to how people who inherited wealth - what they do - is meningless for person that was born poor, is poor and wants to get bit richer.
And fasting is conclusive anwer to weight loss if you can enforce it.
If you were in charge of getting inmate less fat that's exactly what you would order and he'd loose weight.
The problem with fasting in real world is that weight loss is not the only thing it affects end you can't ignore the side effects like you could do with an inmate.
Is it really in the best interest of society to allow food makers to advertise superstimuli-level [1] food products that we know in aggregate make is less happy and likely to die earlier? Why? We regulate all sorts of substances that we know are harmful when ingested. We shouldn't make exceptions for things that happen to be called food. Even if we don't want to enact anything as drastic as a "soda tax" or a ban on refined sugar, we can at least stop processed-food companies advertising to children and creating life-long bad habits.
The FDA could also be more eager in approving appetite-regulating drugs, allowing people to choose to take on certain risk in exchange for large potential weight loss. Several effective agents have been known since the 1920s; is a small risk of cataracts or heart valve damage in a small number of people really worth allowing millions of people to be sicker than they would otherwise be?
Speaking of drugs: smoking decreases BMI quite a bit. Granted, it damages the lungs, but like most things, tobacco has a mixture of positive and negative effects. Given that we have an obesity crisis, was taboo-ing one of the more popular and effective anti-obesity tools really the right choice?
At what point do people take responsibility for their own bodies and their own lives? We all know the secret to not being obese. Asking the government to step in and help us just seems... childish. Are we not adults? Do we have no agency?
You're correct about there being a genetic component to obesity. Unfortunately, it's also the case that it is just "eating less" --- physics has no special case for 21st century humans. The way to square this circle, and what's particularly difficult for people in this society, is to accept that that there is a genetic component to this behavioral issue.
We'd prefer very much going around believing that behavior is somehow disjoint from genetics. That just isn't true, and as long we continue believing it's true, we're going to make bad public policy.
It's not childish, it's how a society works. It's the same concept behind seatbelt laws. Not wearing a seatbelt "should" be an individual choice but individuals not wearing a seatbelt in aggregate is a net negative for society so we legislate their use.
I think wearing a seatbelt is a great idea, and if I'll refuse to drive a car unless all my passengers are wearing their seatbelt first. My partner is from a country where it's not enforced at all, and I have insisted she always wear a seat-belt when I noticed she didn't wear them routinely.
I personally rarely drink alcohol, don't smoke, take drugs etc etc. I still don't think any of the above should be forbidden. I've found it's a good idea to me - cheaper, better for my health, better for my mental state. Somehow I'm able to follow this without the state compelling me to do so.
Should we ban alcohol as well - as that is how "society works"? It does a lot of harm in many countries.
I don't understand why every good idea has to be enforced with a law.
(As an aside, I'm from a country where bicycle helmets are mandatory, despite their dubious safety benefits, and the fact as soon as the law was introduced cyclist numbers plummeted).
I think alcohol is a thorny example because of status quo bias stretching back thousands of years. Based on what I know of the physical harms of alcohol, I think if it was invented today it would be illegal.
You can view it from the other side, though. if the market is skewed in such a way that most food readily available contains e.g. unnecessary amounts of sugar and you need specific skills, knowledge and mental resolve (not to mention money) to not eat unhealthy food, I believe a bit influence to re-balance things is justified.
Consumer-choice and personal responsibility is a nice thing as long as that choice isn't systematically undermined by market forces.
Bear in mind that it's not a binary choice - "total free-for-all" versus "ban it". We can implement public health measures that strongly discourage harmful activities, or offer mitigation, without banning them.
> It's not childish, it's how a nanny-state works.
FTFY.
Different people accept different levels of control over their lives, and feel they have different levels of control over their own lives. This can even change over one's life. And sometimes it's not a feeling but a much more objective fact. I know people whose interests would be better served if someone else made all their financial decisions because they have a long pattern of poor decision making regardless of the monetary amount. I don't feel I should force such a thing on those people when they don't want it, but often it's possible for an in-between solution they find agreeable enough of removing some autonomy but not all. This delicate balance is best done as locally as possible.
It's all very variable. I strongly disagree with a dichotomy I see often propped up of "we need the full force of the federal government in our daily lives" against "move to Somalia if you don't like it". A better approach is federalism. In the US at least there's been "enough" federalism to keep most larger groups of different people happy enough (even now I know I can move to a different state and be free of some of what I dislike about my current state) but the trend is less state decision and more federal control. Extending this to the city level for large cities works fine too. I don't care if Seattle wants to enact some nanny law, maybe the people of Seattle want that and indeed will have better lives because of it, but I don't care because I don't live there nor have to live there. Even if Washington State, where I do live, does something I hate, I can move. When it's the whole US that has a law that I really find unbearably intrusive, things suddenly become a lot more challenging because the cost of exit is much higher. When you can't really do anything about it you either become unhappy or rely on stoicism or whatever to get you through, it would be better though if the negative factor wasn't even there to begin with.
Do we all know? I currently weigh 270lbs (and climbing) and I
* Don't consume soda or sugary drinks of any kind
* Go on 3 mile walks 3-4x weekly
* Have switched to soylent 100% of meals to make calorie counting dead simple
* Recently cut out alcohol too
And yet pounds are adding on not coming off. I've been gaining about 10-15lbs a year every year since I hit 30 after being at a stable weight of 170lbs for all of my teens and 20s and none of the adjustments I've made have had ANY impact on it what-so-ever. So maybe its not just "eat less, fatty". Maybe there is something else going on?
Fat is approximately 3500 calories per pound. If you are gaining 15 pounds per year you are overeating by 3500x15/365 calories per day. If you would like to instead lose 30 pounds per year, reduce your caloric intake per day by 3500x15/365x3 = 432 calories/day.
Once you cutout the obvious high calorie culprits like sugar, 400 calories is a pretty decent sized, healthy meal. Cutting out a meal a day is really hard to do. Hunger sucks, and had a lot of negative impacts on the rest of your day.
(Anecdotally) It gets easier as time goes on, and you can use intermittent fasting [1] to halve the amount of days with restriction and still maintain a net loss.
Consider seeing a doctor or dietician (not a "nutritionist".) All else being equal if you consume fewer calories than you burn you'll lose weight, end of story. So if your weight is staying the same... sounds worth finding out if all else isn't equal. Probably also worth consulting a professional before replacing 100% of your diet with soylent.
> if you consume fewer calories than you burn you'll lose weight, end of story
You can control the input in that equation, but on the output the body is quick to go into calorie preservation state any time the balance goes negative. Lack of energy, irritability, mid-day fatigue, general weakness, mild headaches - the list goes on.
In an ideal world everyone runs marathons while sustaining themselves on water and celery sticks. In reality maintaining consistent caloric deficit while trying to remain a functional member of the society is challenging.
Well, are you calorie counting and have been for a while? If you are not losing over a span of months, you are probably not burning as much as you estimate to do.
Perhaps unfortunately, the human body cannot ignore physics - weight gain does ultimately come down to "you are consuming more calories than you are expending"!
You're right that "eat less, fatty" is not a helpful message. That's actually the key point in these discussions - we do know how to avoid weight gain in the abstract sense (consume less than you burn), but the implementation of that is what's difficult. Different foods have different effects on metabolism; it's difficult to count calories accurately; people often overestimate the calories that exercise burns and underestimate their consumption. It's made more difficult by sedentary lifestyles, prepared foods, and so on.
If you are gaining a pound a month consuming nothing but soylent, then you're consuming too much of it. There's no way around that fact. But the point is that it's not a failing on your part - it just demonstrates how difficult it is in practice to control one's own lifestyle.
> weight gain does ultimately come down to "you are consuming more calories than you are expending"
That is incorrect, but it does help sell gym memerships.
Moreover, expending more calories via exercise typically leads to weight gain, according to emprirical studies (and anecdotal look around gym's elliptical machines next time you're in one) https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/exercising-but-gai...
Fat accummulation (and disposal) are governed by insulin, whose production is triggered by sugars and other carbohydrates.
Confusingly, consuming a high-fat, low-protein and zero-carbohydrate diet will also lead to a severe decrease in calories (as it's pretty hard to overdose on olives, coconut oil or lardo), but it's nevertheless a correlation.
"While this study didn’t track the women’s eating and movement habits away from the lab, it is likely that those who gained weight began eating more and moving less when they weren’t on the treadmills, “probably without meaning to,” Dr. Gaesser said."
Expending more calories via exercise increases one's weight when you eat more calories than you burned. There's nothing new there.
The number of studies where participants ate less, engaged in more exercise and consistently lost weight is 0, though.
You'd think with a thesis this obvious it should be relatively easy to reproduce.
Hard to discuss the specifics of this exact experiment without knowing the details, but you have the control group that admits they have a weight problem and honestly tries to lose weight by signing up for this experiment. All of a sudden they turn into a bunch of cheaters buying up passes to an all-you-can-eat buffet? Is every obese person walking around extremely weak-willed? Is every thin person you see meticulously tracking their caloric intake and output?
What about entire countries that have low obesity rates? Are French or Koreans strong-willed at national level, consistently under-eating and over-exercising?
The number of studies that you're personally aware of may be zero. I'm not confident in your knowledge of the state of research when you missed the fact that they didn't even track diet in the study you linked to prove your thesis.
There are thousands of examples online of people who've lost weight and maintained that weight loss, not to mention the thousands of people who manipulate their weight at will to compete in events with weight classes.
Studies about diet and exercise are usually poorly designed and poorly funded, so they don't always accurately reflect reality and the existence of thousands of successes isn't invalidated by a poorly run study. Nor is our knowledge of basic physiology.
Rule of thumb: any study that relies on self-reporting diets is basically useless. It's not about lying. People are just really bad at measurement unless they explicitly measure every gram of food that enters their mouth. Intentions don't affect the quality of an implementation if you don't know how to implement something successfully. People who are underweight tend to eat less than they think and people who are overweight tend to eat more than they think.
Note that studies in which the number of calories a person consumes are tracked by the researchers leave no ambiguity in the direct relationship between the number of calories a person consumes and how their weight changes.
Distilling these issues into one of willpower is just incredibly misguided IMO and reflective more of the views of journalists who struggle with their weight and pass on the results of poorly designed studies. I addressed what I thought was a better way of looking at these issues in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13827878
It's not as though Americans have "lost willpower" over the course of a couple generations. We just started eating more and moving less.
Why we started eating more isn't a mystery. Agriculture and food companies started processing food to be less satiating and more addictive by adding sugar and fat to sell more (a massive simplification of history, admittedly). Obesity wasn't an epidemic back when we were eating whole foods since they're so much more satiating and it's difficult to maintain a caloric surplus on a diet of lentils and vegetables or whatever.
As countries like France, China, Japan, and others who have more recently maintained their normal weights on a population level get introduced to these processed Western foods, they too are seeing their rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes go up.
> The number of studies that you're personally aware of may be zero.
That is correct. I am happy to fill that knowledge gap, though, if you have any links handy.
> studies in which the number of calories a person consumes are tracked by the researchers leave no ambiguity in the direct relationship between the number of calories a person consumes and how their weight changes
I don't really keep a list of the studies I read, but Examine.com is a great resource for people without the scientific background and training in reading the research literature.
These two links are great starting points, and link to the studies if you feel like reading them:
No, that's not incorrect. By thermodynamics it's impossible you are gaining weight by not consuming more calories than what you are spending, you don't absorb this energy out of thin air or radiation, you've eaten it, not used and your body has stored it.
It can be that our models for calculating TDEE, etc. are wrong and not accounting for a multitude of factors that might affect energy expenditure but still, it boils down to calories in -> calories out in the most simplistic level.
Calorie is a unit of energy. Wooden logs have calories, and so does paper and chalk. Leaving safety concerns aside, I cannot substitute my salad with some paper I can get from the shredder. If I did, I am unlikely to get extremely obese on shredded paper diet, as most of it is fiber, so it just hits the output channel of the digestive track.
Calorie present != calorie consumed != calorie processed by digestive system != calorie deposited in the fat tissue
If all calories were the same, consuming 300 calories from a can of Coke and consuming 300 calories of green salad would lead to same outcomes. In long term they do not.
The idea that biologists aren't aware of the difference in the digestibility of paper versus lettuce is just insultingly ignorant.
There's a reason why you lose weight if you have a tapeworm or have chronic diarrhea while eating the same amount of food isn't a mystery to the scientific community.
Most people don't see that much variation between the calories that pass their mouths and those that are digested by their GI tract. It's usually constant enough that calories in - calories out is enough to figure out how much you need to eat to lose weight. Even if there was a disparity between calories consumed and calories processed by the GI tract, that would only present itself as a "higher/lower metabolism" and wouldn't mean lowering calories wouldn't work to lower weight.
> you lose weight if you have a tapeworm or have chronic diarrhea while eating the same amount
Okay, but that seems like an outlier case. The study I am looking for would be summarized roughly as "100 fat people start on a lower-calorie diet and increase their exercise routine over the course of 180 days. 98% of them (some statistical variation to account for weird genetics) consistently lose X pounds, a large group (60-70%) loses as many as Y pounds".
Either you need to tweak your calorie limit down (it's above what your body needs for maintenance, which varies from person to person), or you're forgetting to count some items.
It may be hard to limit calories without feeling hungry on a mostly soylent diet. Salad and veggies make it easier because they're low on calories, but still have a lot of bulk which helps stave off hunger.
* Your gut biome might need a "reset". Sometimes people experience extended weight gain after antibiotics because they ended up with a different, less effective biome. (Soylent might also contribute to this issue.)
* Another health issue changed your digestive process
* You're losing muscle mass, making it easier to gain fat
* You're sleeping more poorly or are more stressed
Calorie counting really isn't sufficient to know what's going on with weight changes. The factors are numerous.
I'd honestly experiment with fasting and skipping meals. I think you're just conditioned to eat way too many calories.
A day fast is really not that bad IMO. I used to do them every sunday and found it a really effective tool to get from "obese" to "overweight" (BMI). Got much less effective as I approached "normal" though.
I'll be the last to say that weight management is easy - I've fought the battle my whole life - but if you eat less calories than your body burns, you will lose weight. The hard part is doing it consistently over the long run. Things I would ask, are (I'm not necessarily asking you to answer, just think about the answers):
* Are you actually tracking your calories with something like MyFitnessPal? What's your calorie intake?
* Are you tracking honestly? Especially if/when you have a bad day, or cheat day, or whatever you want to call it.
* Are you tracking accurately? If you aren't using a scale or measuring cup, the answer is probably no. Most people severely underestimate the size of their portions.
If calorie counting is dead simple for you, then that must mean you know precisely how much you're consuming.
If you're gaining 10-15lbs per year, then you know how much you're overconsuming. An annual gain of 15 lbs * 3500 Calories per pound of fat is about 150 Calories per day over your TDEE.
Reduce your daily caloric intake by 250-500 Calories and you should see weight loss over the long term.
If not, and you actually do know exactly how many calories you're consuming and have been tracking your weight to see how it changes, then you need to see a physician.
So drop more calories, you are still eating above what you are expending. Like I said in another comment: our bodies aren't supernatural things that ignore thermodynamics, it's impossible for your body to create fat without spare energy consumed.
I have dropped weight only through calories counting, I've done cycles of bulk/cut while weightlifting, dropping weight boils down to "calories in -> calories out", we might not have a very good model of this, we might be overlooking a multitude of variables that control energy expenditure but we can't create fat from nowhere, we need to consume and have spare energy to store it.
It's not easy but it is simple. Again: I'm not saying our models for calculating TDEE or how energy restriction affects our body completely but if you are expending more calories than you are eating you are going to consume fat to create energy.
Try this: drop how many calories you are eating by another 100~200kcal/day for a week, see if the trend changes (a moving average works). If not, drop another 100~200kcal/day and watch for a week. Being STRICT is the "not easy" part.
> At what point do people take responsibility for their own bodies and their own lives?
This question touches on some very deep and controversial ideas kicking around in the current conversation. The question of whether we have an inherent "human nature", a biological substrate that informs our capabilities and behavior, touches on everything from education to tech employment. I don't want to debate the subject generally.
But can we agree, for the specific case of food consumption that
1) we have very strong impulses that are difficult to consciously resist; that
2) these impulses originate in biology; that
3) the existence of exceptional willpower is a mark of exceptional self-discipline, a level not practical to achieve for most; and that
4) advertisers prey on the difficulty most people experience in controlling their food behavior?
I'd argue it is human nature to sleep in every morning, yet a significant portion of the population defies that just fine. You can make a habit of most anything, hunger or overeating.
It's pretty hard to starve oneself and be a functioning member of the society at the same time. Any task requiring physical or mental energy will be lacking, and body will quickly resort to calorie conservation by falling into permanently fatigued state.
Far more people in the past, say pre-1980, seemed to be able to deal with these phenomena and avoid obesity. 'The average weight for men rose "dramatically," in the CDC's words, from 166.3 pounds in 1960 to 191 pounds in 2002. Women went from 140.2 pounds in 1960 to 164.3 pounds in 2002.' [0]
Advertising is no doubt a factor in the obesity epidemic, but I'm not sure that's among the primary causes of it. It seems to me that food portion sizes have increased tremendously over the past four decades. Purveyors of food often seem to peddle the sheer size of portions as features. Additionally, foods that once might have been thought outrageously decadent, such as "coffee" covered in whipped-cream and loaded with caramel (basically a dessert in a cup), and pizza with crust infused with cheese, are now perceived as normal things to consume, quite possibly on a daily basis. My non-scientific observation is that the normalization of consumption of huge portions of calorie-dense "foods" is directly correlated with increases in obesity. Since we're not willing to de-normalize the former as far as I can tell, the emerging societal trend is to normalize the latter.
Why a blanket statement covering all humans and their respective nature? There are countries with high obesity rates as well as countries with low obesity rates.
Are people in low-obesity countries more resistant to such biological impulses? Do they have fewer food ads? Are they able to resist those advertisers in a more coherent fashion? Or just exhibit better willpower at national level?
> 3) the existence of exceptional willpower is a mark of exceptional self-discipline, a level not practical to achieve for most; and that
I don't agree that this is what's going on.
People don't avoid obesity by exceptional willpower. They just have healthy eating habits, usually ones formed during childhood.
Likewise, overcoming obesity and returning oneself to a healthier weight that one can maintain requires changing habits and one's relationship with food.
Habit formation and modification can be difficult, but it's sufficiently well understood that it can be implemented.
The difficulty is getting information into people's hands about how to modify habits successfully (I like the book The Power of Habit), cutting through the misinformation surrounding what constitutes healthy eating habits and how to lose weight, and often just education about how to cook food cheaply and in a way that doesn't seem intimidating to people who are pressed for time and resort to fast food out of convenience.
When people know the concrete steps one must take to achieve something, they become that much more willing to believe they can do it.
I think as a society it is pretty clear that we do not know the secret to not being obese. I can't count how many times a day I am bombarded with messages telling me to eat junk food, that it's fine, it's fun. People do not live in a vacuum and can't be judged too harshly for choosing the options that society has worked very hard to place in front of them and promote. It's simple psychology that when faced with sizes such as small, medium, large, giant, extra giant, then people stop choosing small. Should we accept personal blame for our innate cognitive biases? No, of course not. What we should do as a society is stop manipulating people into making choices which ultimately harm them.
Maybe we don't know exactly the right way to get lots of people to eat less, but it's certainly not making everything ultra-delicious with tons of sugar and running continuous advertisements to children for these new ultra-delicious foods.
Just a few comments above you people strongly advocate consuming fewer calories to lose weight, and, as we all know, sugar is less calorie-dense than protein or fat.
As the article notes, eating less than you burn is effective for a while until the body works to get back up to a previous set point to maintain homeostasis.
An excellent book on this topic is The Obesity Code by Dr Jason Fung
That's true in a strict sense. But how do you implement that at population scale? If it were easy to control one's weight, then we wouldn't have an obesity problem.
Obesity is a public health problem, like tobacco smoking or STIs. There's no secret - avoid ling disease by not smoking, and avoid STIs by not having unprotected sex. But clearly the "it's stimple, just fix it" approach isn't effective at improving the overall health of a population.
But clearly the "it's stimple, just fix it" approach isn't effective at improving the overall health of a population.
I honestly don't care at all about the overall health of the population. I really don't. Not that I wish them any ill-will, but I can't even begin to muster up the slightest bit of care for people I don't know ruining their lives because they eat too much or smoke. It's just not even on my radar.
I realise I'm not supposed to admit this, but I also realise I'm not the only one who thinks it.
You pay for their healthcare through your taxes. Every pothole on the road, unbuilt subway station and uneducated youth is a result of more tax money being redirected to the healthcare system in order to treat some smoker's lung cancer or some sweet tooth's diabetes.
Yeah but my response to that is less "let's fix society!" and more "stop taxing me so much". It's the government that puts me in that situation, not people.
I guess we have learnt enough to know you cannot blame people for their sexuality, or their inability to come out of poverty without external help, etc. But see a fat person and its open season to make all kinds of value judgements without knowing the root cause of their obesity.
Partly its because there's this huge "health" industry that encourages the blame game by pushing out messages like if you were to just try a little harder, you would be lean and fit too. But thats just BS, people should educate themselves and try to understand the near impossibility of losing weight and keeping it off on a long term sustained basis.
Either tremendous numbers of people simultaneously and coincidentally find themselves sapped of will and personal responsibility... or there's something systemic at work.
So the question isn't what happened to personal responsibility. It's why exercising that responsibility is apparently so much more difficult than in the past. Address that, and you'll find the "agency" problem largely solves itself.
I would argue that banding together as a society to stop a marketing industry whose goal it is (in many cases) to scientifically undermine our agency is exactly people taking responsibility for their own bodies and lives.
Is that not the effect of "asking the government to step in and help us?"
Simply raising prices on bad food would not be enough. Food education and getting healthy food choices to be more affordable are key. There are huge swathes of people who have no clue what eating healthy looks like. And eating healthy is more expensive.
BMI is not always a valid gauge. It does not take into account above average muscle mass. My BMI says that I am obese. I have, maybe, 20 extra pounds on me. If I lost that, I would be abs-in-your-face shredded (or very near it).
> weight bias and discrimination raise the risk of developing heart disease and diabetes
The idea that a study conclusively demonstrated that in a meaningful way seems extraordinarily unlikely. I'd be awful curious to see the methodology of that.
I haven't really paid attention to men's physiques, but there's a stark difference between the silhouettes of women in many cities of Europe and those in even the most "superficial" US states such as California.
I know the PC police will eat me for lunch for saying this, but the dating pool, at least in the 20s and 30s range, shrinks considerably in the US for anybody used to European body image standards.
Whatever's happening to the population here is not normal. I don't know if it's our lifestyles becoming totally sedentary, if it's food marketing having reached absolutely irresistible heights, or if it's the lack of a culture of slow eating, but something is clearly not working and it really doesn't feel like the individual's fault, it seems actually systemic.
One thought is perhaps we should start treating the constant incessant advertisement of food the same way we treated the cigarette industry and regulate its appeal to children, put up disclaimers about what happens when you down that entire bag of cheetos etc.
One of the more plausible (to an uneducated person like me) theories I've seen in a few places is that we've bred food (both plants and animals) for size and pest/disease/shipping durability at the direct expense of flavor. Flavor is a key signal for nutrition, so our brain goes "not enough nutrients, eat more to get them!"
> Flavor technology got very powerful in the early 1960s, and it wasn't long after that that we began to see the startling increases in body mass index.
> All the good stuff we grow — tomatoes, strawberries, lettuce — has gotten continually more bland. This has been measured. They have become diluted of nutrients, as well. As we selected crops for agronomic traits like yield, shelf life and disease resistant, we never selected for flavor. And we lost flavor as a result. It's reverse evolutionary pressure.
It is slowly happening elsewhere in the world, anywhere the diet is leaking in a preponderance of food from packages with nutrition labels on them, roughly speaking. Was in the PRC relatively recently, and was shocked at the levels of obesity I noticed while entering the country at the airport. Still not anywhere close to US levels, but very noticeable.
Once I got to their grocery stores and strolled around noticing the explosion of restaurants that served an increasingly sugar-laden menu, it clicked together for me.
No, it's the individual's fault. I was severely overweight a year ago and lost 80lb doing nothing other than eating healthy, exercising, and...being patient.
The deferment of responsibility and lack of self-control is the problem. Of course, companies–and more specifically, their marketing teams/firms–know people are weak-minded and as a result, can more or less control people's habits (read: greed outweighs public concern). It doesn't help that the culture has tilted toward justifying poor health in the form of all the body image propaganda.
The point is that until this last century the average human didn't have to obsess over this stuff as much as we do now. No keto, no HIIT, no fitness trackers, no low carb, no leptin management.
You ate what you could get your hands on and you mostly stayed in pretty average shape because food wasn't that stimulating, that heavily processed, heavily advertised, and you have to be a lot more mobile than you are today. Humans didn't evolve to have to count calories, no animal in nature does it or is capable of doing that effectively.
If "people are weak minded" then how is it their "fault"? You can't have it both ways.
Also have you considered that you might have motivation and willpower far above average? Not to mention the time, money, level of education and understanding necessary to change your diet.
Ultimately you are one single data point - do you believe that everybody can do all the things you can do just as well as you? No. Why should diet be any different?
- Eggs (WIC)
- Bacon (WIC)
- Bananas (WIC) – a case of 100 is ~$20
- Yogurt (WIC?)
- Almond Milk (justifiably more expensive, so swap with milk)
- Salmon (justifiably more expensive, swap with chicken or another protein)
- Cous Cous (justifiably more expensive, swap with another carb/fiber).
I'd argue that, yes, if you take the steps to build up the motivation, you can. I was a shell of a man before I started on my current path. It just takes time. I didn't start out where I am and I don't expect others to, either.
We're at a point where there is so much technological, cultural, malicious disruption that people don't know how to live anymore and are trying to find their way on the fly or based on some diet/lifestyle du jour.
Yes personal responsibility and all, but we've made it awful easy to fall into this trap.
Note that you can select earlier years using the controls below the map. Some depressing observations:
• In 1990, the highest rate was 15% (Mississippi) and the lowest was 6.9% (Colorado).
• In 2000, the highest was 23.9% (West Virginia) and the lowest 14.5% (Colorado). Note that in a mere 10 years, the lowest was almost equal to what had been the highest.
There are plenty of other charts on the site. There is one for physical inactivity. That shows two interesting things:
• The states with the highest obesity have the most inactivity, and the states with the least obesity the least inactivity.
• However, for each state the level of inactivity has remained fairly flat over the last 10 years, even though the obesity rate has risen in those states. Inactivity might explain why some states are more or less obese than others, but it doesn't appear to have anything to do with why we are getting fatter everywhere.
It really is interesting that only in the last 20-25 years has the obesity rate really taken off. In other words, it doesn't seem like this was gradual linear trend starting much earlier. So, why didn't it happen earlier? What changed (the most)? Was it a convergence of forces reaching a tipping point? Or did a single major change occur in the 90s, such as the food industry introducing a key st of addictive ingredients?
As much as people like to jump up and down about public health issues like cigarettes or even guns, what I find interesting is how few people seriously talk about the car being one of the biggest public health crises to originate in the 20th century.
There is of course the direct effect of the hundreds of thousands of vehicular related deaths per year (globally) as well as serious injuries but there are a bunch of other effects.
One of these is the change in urban planning where life is centered around the car such that Americans, in particular, walk far less than people in other countries [1].
There's a big difference here between walking and needing to walk. People in NYC for example pretty much need to walk. I'm not saying it's impossible to become obese when your daily life requires you or even just encourages you to walk more but it sure makes it more difficult.
Losing a significant amount of weight and keeping it off is difficult but possible. My brother and I both did it, but in very different ways.
Personally, I maxed out at a BMI of 34. I lost about 70 pounds, got back into the normal BMI range, and have stayed there for about a decade now. I changed my diet, changed my physical activities, and changed a lot of habits and modes of thinking. That last one is perhaps most important of all. For example, as kids, we were taught not to waste food, and that meant eating everything there was. Well, cleaning your plate (and the pot) isn't going to put food on the plates of starving children. Whether you eat it or not, the waste happened at the supermarket when you bought too much food!
My brother saw me losing weight and wanted to do it too, so I tried to help him. He hated the food I was now eating. He didn't want to work out. He didn't want to change the way he thought. Instead, he got a lot fatter and, eventually, a sleeve gastrectomy. He's not in the normal BMI range yet, but he's been making steady progress and it's not optional for him. He literally can't eat enough to stay fat. His stomach is now tiny and fills up rather quickly. The prep for the surgery was harsh, and included a brutal, several week long crash diet. The surgery itself went off without a hitch, but he still had to recover on a morphine drip. I have no idea what kind of pain that involves, but it can't be pleasant. Bottom line, he thought he was choosing the easy way at the time, but we now both know it was the hard way. Harder by far. I got healthy. He inflicted a disability on himself that has the side-effect of losing weight. He still isn't active and, not surprisingly, has terrible energy levels.
After both our experiences, I can reasonably say the media does a terrible job of helping people. It tells them about healthy things to eat, but never mentions these things are only healthy if you eat them instead of your usual fare, and in appropriate amounts. It tells people they need to be ripped, cross-fitting gym-bunnies to be fit, when doing just about anything besides sitting on your butt will be an improvement for many people. Finding a physical activity you can enjoy is far more important than being ripped. Above all, it rarely attempts to help people change the way they think, which is the key to making permanent changes.
TL;DR: If I had to offer one piece of advice to those wishing to lose weight and become more active, it would be to ignore all the crap articles out there on diet fads and gym-crazes and pay some attention to how you think about food and activity. Change how you think, and everything else will come as a consequence of that change.
Our culture has acquired a lot of poor health habits that are seemingly inescapable, depending on your socioeconomic background:
* Most industrial food products are adulterated with dairy, sugar, or both
* Industrial food is also cheap and widespread. It takes dedication to avoid it or restrict its impact: At parties, the default non-alcoholic beverage is sugar water, and the default food is pizza
* "Sleep is for the weak" is an oft-repeated, sometimes praised meme
* Driving everywhere is expected in many cities. In some neighborhoods, "taking a walk" is looked upon with suspicion
* Most jobs now are low on physical intensity, while work hours and work-related stress remain high
* The most popular recreations involve "screen time"
* Fitness is polluted with snake oil, "bro science" superstition, and image-driven advice; exercise and training itself as a form of character-building is viewed derisively
* Diet advice is similarly polluted with snake oil and superstition. Commerce drives the market, leading to quick-fix bandaids that promise a temporary change followed by a return to the original (unhealthy) habit
Lots of people are stuck in this scenario, because it takes uncommon dedication and some financial freedom to break with the culture and build a lifestyle of your own design. When their health fails we all pay the price.
It honestly is pretty simple, self-control and discipline. I lost 75lbs over the last year. I was at my high weight (250) for over 8 years. I finally just gave up almost all "sugary" things, which was the most difficult part, I didn't realize I was so addicted. I ate much less calories than I used to. I started exercising regularly, not too much at first, but eased myself into it. After 4 months, and a significant weight loss, I stepped up my calorie intake a bit and then started exercising more vigorously. Currently I go through periods of eating a lot, and then eating very little. My weight continues to go down. It really is simple, if you can get over the feelings of "severe hunger" for the first few months you can shrink your stomach. I hardly get hungry anymore, and have been trying to eat more recently to get my stomach a bit bigger so I don't lose too much. It's just willpower and dedication. Companies are to blame for making it easy to eat unhealthy, but I feel healthier than I ever did just by cooking my own meals and eating a reasonable amount.
I think most of the comments in this thread miss out the fundamental issue, which is bad food not only tastes better than "good food" it also often is cheaper and crucially is more convenient.
Convenient food, that tastes good but is bad for you will beat out inconvenient food that tastes "ok" and is healthy for you.
For a lot of people cooking is just more work and if they've got the choice and the money they'll order take out or buy pre-made ready meals.
Moaning about sugar and advertising is just tinkering around the edges, to me if you want to solve this problem you've got to make eating healthy as convenient if not more convenient as eating badly.
As a skinny immigrant who moved to USA and started growing a tummy, I have a few questions.
- Why does American food go bad so much later than back home? It shocks me how strawberries here can stay in the fridge for over a week and not go bad, same about tomatoes, or yogurt, or even bread! Back home if you don't eat your strawberries on the same day, the next day they're just gonna be mushy, and the day after they're gonna be inedible. I get so skeptical whenever I see any food that can last over a year
- The portions are just monstrous, I remember when I was new I couldn't finish a single restaurant main course, and now I sometimes catch myself that I could actually get a main course and an appetizer, and a dessert! Wouldn't restaurants make more money if they sold less food for the same price?
- The culture of "snacking" is quite interesting, I used to only eat during dinner/breakfast, now I find myself snacking in between, because snacks are so accessible and yummy and almost addictive
- Ingredients are often tasteless, so you guys add a lot of sauces to make them taste better. The sauce usually contains sugar and other stuff that doesn't help you stay fit. Why not just have food with more natural flavor? This applies to everything from blueberries to meat
- Meat sizes are completely bizarre! I've never seen such huge chicken breasts where I'm from. They're also quite bland and not soft/juicy at all. How does this even work?
- The concept of zoning is a disaster, if I wanna eat I need to sit in a car and drive where the restaurants are, and if I want booze I need to sit in a car and drive where the bars are, and if I wanna work again sit in a car and go where work is, then for sleep I need to sit in a car and drive home. Why?? Why can't I live in a residential building where first floor is restaurants and cafes, and a few blocks away is my work? You have huge residential communities where it would be foolish to even attempt to walk out of them, because the nearest grocery store is several miles away! Who came up with this, and how can this be a thing?
- Most fruits in the US are bred to last longer and picked earlier so that they can survive long trips from the farm to the grocery store.
- Take a closer look at the ingredients in your bread. You're most likely buying bread with preservatives. There are bread makers that make bread without them and those will go bad sooner. Look for sprouted bread. Those can go bad within a couple days of the sell by and the sell by itself is only like 3 days from when they get it in.
- Why would a customer want to pay more for less versus your competitors?
- Ingredients are tasteless because same as with breeding fruits for transport, we do not optimize for flavor but quantity and cost. Good meat is a function of what the animal eats and if they exercise. What you're looking for can be most likely found at your local farmers market.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadI'm part of that privileged 5%. I lost around 60 pounds in 2009-2010 and I've kept it off. It really is a lifestyle change. You have to be constantly aware of the portions you choose and remember what you've already eaten that day to keep in "budget". There are tools and processes that can help, but it's a constant struggle against your body that is constantly lying to your brain. I can definitely see why many people would give up.
I lost 55 lbs and have kept it off for a year now.
It's a constant struggle. If I stop watching what I'm eating, I'll start overeating immediately and start gaining weight. I went to a wedding a week or 2 ago and gained 5-7 lbs. Watching my diet since then, I've dropped most of it again. If I hadn't watched it immediately, it would have stuck and I'd have a hard time losing it again.
I'm very careful about what I eat for breakfast and lunch, to the point of almost always having the same thing. Dinner is very varied, but I still have to watch things or I'll go overboard.
I eat burgers, Mexican food, Italian, pizza, etc etc... But I do not eat dessert. I've found that there's no way to avoid gaining weight if I eat any dessert at all.
To deal with my sweets craving, I drink diet sodas (they've improved a lot lately) and Tic Tacs.
If I really need a snack, it'll be peanuts and pretzels. They're high in calories, but no sugar.
Calories in - calories out = fat accumulation. It is literally that simple.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/nov/03/obese-soda-suga...
Hold on! The market consists of both suppliers and customer. One would think that being fat is not profitable for the latter. Meanwhile, only 3% of Japanese people have a BMI over 30, while 32% of Americans do. It must be that Japanese markets don't optimize for profit! Or maybe you got the source of the problem wrong. Guess which one I think it is.
> Mexico has shown that regulation does work, they regulated sugar which has had a positive effect on health.
Hungary has a higher sugar tax, had it for a longer time, and it appears to have no effect on health at all. Go figure.
IMO it's not so much about education as about how to help people shape their habits. People already know that candy-bars and french-fries correlate to obesity, after all.
> that simple
Or at least, so close to being that simple that there's no point confusing people with erroneous details.
https://xkcd.com/669/
Some people consume too much calorically as a mental-health coping mechanism. Some people consume too much calorically because the food culture they were raised in promotes that. Some people consume too much calorically because they have a lack of real options to purchase fresh whole foods.
Some people don't expend enough calories because their lifestyle makes it difficult (work + family + etc). Some people don't expend enough calories because the lifestyle they were raised with doesn't promote that.
These are just some of the ways that simple equation you've posted become immediately more complex.
The reality is the vast majority of people eat way too much, and the dietary guidelines for caloric intake are far too high for a largely sedentary society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CdwWliv7Hg
It is somewhat harder to stay on the diet while traveling, attending conferences, or business meetings. Having a host choose a place to eat, offer you local cuisine, etc makes it harder to stay in keto. Hunger though, was never a problem after the first full week.
I'm an on-and-off-again keto dieter (I appreciate that for me it seems to take at least 2-3x as long to put the weight back on as it takes to take off as I inevitably revert to former diet choices...) and I never find the transition period difficult, but there's a consistent point where I hit "eh, still fat, but don't feel super fat anymore" and that's when the cravings or the pressures of eating non-keto with company have the highest chance of getting to me. There are also unforeseen stressors that can make things difficult (in my case a forced house move) but I'm ok with the state of flux. I don't want a six-pack physique enough, not really, and that's the last willpower component -- how long can you stick with it (and introduce more exercise), even with bumps and setbacks? My friend who introduced me to the diet lost 100 lbs by forcing himself to do keto for about 5 months, but he was fat enough at the start that he could stand to lose another 50 lbs but it's not as easy now. Still, he's much happier and healthier now than before. One's level of willpower is still involved even with how great keto is and is the difference between losing 50 lbs (not bad), 100 lbs (pretty awesome), and 150 lbs (your ideal).
I've tried before, but I feel like complete garbage. I'm told it goes away, but I don't really have days to waste feeling dizzy trying out something that may or not work for me.
On a global scale countries low on the obesity scale (Japan, Singapore, Korea, France) are not teeming with starving under-nourished citizens, and countries high on the obesity scale (Mexico, US) are not lacking gyms, exercise equipment, or opportunities for simple nature walks.
The fact is if you're fat, you've conditioned yourself to eat too many calories, and eating a normal amount of calories will likely leave you feeling hungrier while you adjust.
http://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(96)00456-1/abstract
"In the adult US population the prevalence of overweight rose from 25.4% from 1976 to 1980 to 33.3% from 1988 to 1991, a 31% increase. During the same period, average fat intake, adjusted for total calories, dropped from 41.0% to 36.6%, an 11% decrease. Average total daily calorie intake also tended to decrease, from 1,854 kcal to 1,785 kcal (−4%). Men and women had similar trends. Concurrently, there was a dramatic rise in the percentage of the US population consuming low-calorie products, from 19% of the population in 1978 to 76% in 1991. From 1986 to 1991 the prevalence of sedentary lifestyle represented almost 60% of the US population, with no change over time."
Somebody who is using food as a coping device has an underlying issue they have to tackle before they can reduce their caloric intake. I mean, you could force folks to eat less, but you really want them eating less because it's healthier for them and that they themselves recognize and embrace that truth so they adopt the healthier habits as their personal culture to re-transmit to family and friends.
This is why poor people have greater obesity problems than the rest. Potato Chips, white bread, pasta, and of course sugar feature prominently in their daily calorie intake, these are the cheapest calories you can make a diet out of.
I'm sure there are tons of intricacies in how metabolism works, but glycogen storage in a human is about 2000 kJ. Once your deficit surpasses that (and we'll happily allow a multiple to account for any error here), your body will either consume fat or you'll experience actual low blood sugar and drop dead.
Logging and limiting calories isn't the only way to achieve CICO.
It's literally the first law of thermodynamics.
Everyone tries to over complicate things, but the reality is if you eat more calories than you burn, you will become fat.
The fact is that different calories affect our brains differently. Some cause us to crave more food, some cause us to feel satiated, etc. I hate this modern trend of saying "calories in vs calories out" as if it's a magic cure.
Of course some people are more addicted to food than others, some eat more healthy than others. But the solution nevertheless is the same.
It's actually very helpful advice but only if you are able to realize that's the only way you can predictably get rich through.
Most people choose to rather belive that they are spending not more than they believe they should or must and will not always look for new job that pays more, and instead believe that they can get rich by using tricks or will surely have some lucky break.
Same with weight loss. Calories in, calories out is a magic cure for many people but only if they are grounded enough in reality of what they can be sure about, to accept it.
Claiming "calories in calories out end of story" is like saying "the solution to aids and unwanted pregnancies is condoms." People are still getting HIV and unwanted pregnancies, and most of them know about condoms. What gives? "The solution" doesn't take into account we are mammals with millions of years of evolutionary programming driving our every action.
Honestly, ending conversations because of CICO prevents people from exploring the real problem. It's counter productive. Please take a moment and listen.
That is a gross oversimplification. Countless people, including myself, on ketogenic diets can attest to that.
The average American diet has changed dramatically in the last century with the growth of the restaurant and food processing industry. Exercise participation has actually increased substantially in the last 20 years (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2015/057.pdf) in the same time period obesity has soared.
Energy balance being responsible for weight gain is too readily used by the food processing industry in an effort to shift away blame for this epidemic.
A few instances: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/12/obesity-exercise... http://www.cbsnews.com/news/good-news-pepsicos-indra-nooyi-s... http://blogs.plos.org/speakingofmedicine/2012/07/05/is-obesi... https://therussells.crossfit.com/2015/09/23/transparency-coc...
It's literally just that simple too.
Unfortunately this isn't good advice for a fat person trying to lose weight. Even a very low IQ fat person understands that if they eat less and move more they'll lose weight. Nor is it particularly good advice for trying to craft a top-down policy unless the intention is to force people to eat a certain amount only and burn a minimum amount of energy.
At best the results range from "inconclusive" or "wide variation" to "they tried to expend more calories via exercise and gained weight, oopsie" https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/exercising-but-gai...
All the obese people you see walking around are not suffering from a lack of willpower to go on a fasting diet. All the thin people you see walking around are not meticulously tracking their calorie intake and burn.
There are people who eat more and still are thin but if you are not one of those people they should be none of your concern similarily to how people who inherited wealth - what they do - is meningless for person that was born poor, is poor and wants to get bit richer.
And fasting is conclusive anwer to weight loss if you can enforce it.
If you were in charge of getting inmate less fat that's exactly what you would order and he'd loose weight.
The problem with fasting in real world is that weight loss is not the only thing it affects end you can't ignore the side effects like you could do with an inmate.
The FDA could also be more eager in approving appetite-regulating drugs, allowing people to choose to take on certain risk in exchange for large potential weight loss. Several effective agents have been known since the 1920s; is a small risk of cataracts or heart valve damage in a small number of people really worth allowing millions of people to be sicker than they would otherwise be?
Speaking of drugs: smoking decreases BMI quite a bit. Granted, it damages the lungs, but like most things, tobacco has a mixture of positive and negative effects. Given that we have an obesity crisis, was taboo-ing one of the more popular and effective anti-obesity tools really the right choice?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
We'd prefer very much going around believing that behavior is somehow disjoint from genetics. That just isn't true, and as long we continue believing it's true, we're going to make bad public policy.
It is not just genetics and it is not just self control. If you eat more fat and no carbs is much easier to eat less calories in total.
But sugar in particular has an addiction characterisc. Once you go some time without it, you don't miss it as much anymore.
And fat is also delicious.
I personally rarely drink alcohol, don't smoke, take drugs etc etc. I still don't think any of the above should be forbidden. I've found it's a good idea to me - cheaper, better for my health, better for my mental state. Somehow I'm able to follow this without the state compelling me to do so.
Should we ban alcohol as well - as that is how "society works"? It does a lot of harm in many countries.
I don't understand why every good idea has to be enforced with a law.
(As an aside, I'm from a country where bicycle helmets are mandatory, despite their dubious safety benefits, and the fact as soon as the law was introduced cyclist numbers plummeted).
Consumer-choice and personal responsibility is a nice thing as long as that choice isn't systematically undermined by market forces.
FTFY.
Different people accept different levels of control over their lives, and feel they have different levels of control over their own lives. This can even change over one's life. And sometimes it's not a feeling but a much more objective fact. I know people whose interests would be better served if someone else made all their financial decisions because they have a long pattern of poor decision making regardless of the monetary amount. I don't feel I should force such a thing on those people when they don't want it, but often it's possible for an in-between solution they find agreeable enough of removing some autonomy but not all. This delicate balance is best done as locally as possible.
It's all very variable. I strongly disagree with a dichotomy I see often propped up of "we need the full force of the federal government in our daily lives" against "move to Somalia if you don't like it". A better approach is federalism. In the US at least there's been "enough" federalism to keep most larger groups of different people happy enough (even now I know I can move to a different state and be free of some of what I dislike about my current state) but the trend is less state decision and more federal control. Extending this to the city level for large cities works fine too. I don't care if Seattle wants to enact some nanny law, maybe the people of Seattle want that and indeed will have better lives because of it, but I don't care because I don't live there nor have to live there. Even if Washington State, where I do live, does something I hate, I can move. When it's the whole US that has a law that I really find unbearably intrusive, things suddenly become a lot more challenging because the cost of exit is much higher. When you can't really do anything about it you either become unhappy or rely on stoicism or whatever to get you through, it would be better though if the negative factor wasn't even there to begin with.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13825676
You can control the input in that equation, but on the output the body is quick to go into calorie preservation state any time the balance goes negative. Lack of energy, irritability, mid-day fatigue, general weakness, mild headaches - the list goes on.
In an ideal world everyone runs marathons while sustaining themselves on water and celery sticks. In reality maintaining consistent caloric deficit while trying to remain a functional member of the society is challenging.
You're right that "eat less, fatty" is not a helpful message. That's actually the key point in these discussions - we do know how to avoid weight gain in the abstract sense (consume less than you burn), but the implementation of that is what's difficult. Different foods have different effects on metabolism; it's difficult to count calories accurately; people often overestimate the calories that exercise burns and underestimate their consumption. It's made more difficult by sedentary lifestyles, prepared foods, and so on.
If you are gaining a pound a month consuming nothing but soylent, then you're consuming too much of it. There's no way around that fact. But the point is that it's not a failing on your part - it just demonstrates how difficult it is in practice to control one's own lifestyle.
That is incorrect, but it does help sell gym memerships.
Moreover, expending more calories via exercise typically leads to weight gain, according to emprirical studies (and anecdotal look around gym's elliptical machines next time you're in one) https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/exercising-but-gai...
Fat accummulation (and disposal) are governed by insulin, whose production is triggered by sugars and other carbohydrates.
Confusingly, consuming a high-fat, low-protein and zero-carbohydrate diet will also lead to a severe decrease in calories (as it's pretty hard to overdose on olives, coconut oil or lardo), but it's nevertheless a correlation.
"While this study didn’t track the women’s eating and movement habits away from the lab, it is likely that those who gained weight began eating more and moving less when they weren’t on the treadmills, “probably without meaning to,” Dr. Gaesser said."
Expending more calories via exercise increases one's weight when you eat more calories than you burned. There's nothing new there.
You'd think with a thesis this obvious it should be relatively easy to reproduce.
Hard to discuss the specifics of this exact experiment without knowing the details, but you have the control group that admits they have a weight problem and honestly tries to lose weight by signing up for this experiment. All of a sudden they turn into a bunch of cheaters buying up passes to an all-you-can-eat buffet? Is every obese person walking around extremely weak-willed? Is every thin person you see meticulously tracking their caloric intake and output?
What about entire countries that have low obesity rates? Are French or Koreans strong-willed at national level, consistently under-eating and over-exercising?
There are thousands of examples online of people who've lost weight and maintained that weight loss, not to mention the thousands of people who manipulate their weight at will to compete in events with weight classes.
Studies about diet and exercise are usually poorly designed and poorly funded, so they don't always accurately reflect reality and the existence of thousands of successes isn't invalidated by a poorly run study. Nor is our knowledge of basic physiology.
Rule of thumb: any study that relies on self-reporting diets is basically useless. It's not about lying. People are just really bad at measurement unless they explicitly measure every gram of food that enters their mouth. Intentions don't affect the quality of an implementation if you don't know how to implement something successfully. People who are underweight tend to eat less than they think and people who are overweight tend to eat more than they think.
Note that studies in which the number of calories a person consumes are tracked by the researchers leave no ambiguity in the direct relationship between the number of calories a person consumes and how their weight changes.
Distilling these issues into one of willpower is just incredibly misguided IMO and reflective more of the views of journalists who struggle with their weight and pass on the results of poorly designed studies. I addressed what I thought was a better way of looking at these issues in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13827878
It's not as though Americans have "lost willpower" over the course of a couple generations. We just started eating more and moving less.
Why we started eating more isn't a mystery. Agriculture and food companies started processing food to be less satiating and more addictive by adding sugar and fat to sell more (a massive simplification of history, admittedly). Obesity wasn't an epidemic back when we were eating whole foods since they're so much more satiating and it's difficult to maintain a caloric surplus on a diet of lentils and vegetables or whatever.
As countries like France, China, Japan, and others who have more recently maintained their normal weights on a population level get introduced to these processed Western foods, they too are seeing their rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes go up.
That is correct. I am happy to fill that knowledge gap, though, if you have any links handy.
> studies in which the number of calories a person consumes are tracked by the researchers leave no ambiguity in the direct relationship between the number of calories a person consumes and how their weight changes
Can you point me to those?
These two links are great starting points, and link to the studies if you feel like reading them:
https://examine.com/nutrition/what-should-i-eat-for-weight-l...
https://examine.com/nutrition/does-metabolism-vary-between-t...
It can be that our models for calculating TDEE, etc. are wrong and not accounting for a multitude of factors that might affect energy expenditure but still, it boils down to calories in -> calories out in the most simplistic level.
Calorie present != calorie consumed != calorie processed by digestive system != calorie deposited in the fat tissue
If all calories were the same, consuming 300 calories from a can of Coke and consuming 300 calories of green salad would lead to same outcomes. In long term they do not.
There's a reason why you lose weight if you have a tapeworm or have chronic diarrhea while eating the same amount of food isn't a mystery to the scientific community.
Most people don't see that much variation between the calories that pass their mouths and those that are digested by their GI tract. It's usually constant enough that calories in - calories out is enough to figure out how much you need to eat to lose weight. Even if there was a disparity between calories consumed and calories processed by the GI tract, that would only present itself as a "higher/lower metabolism" and wouldn't mean lowering calories wouldn't work to lower weight.
You can't get around physics and biology.
Okay, but that seems like an outlier case. The study I am looking for would be summarized roughly as "100 fat people start on a lower-calorie diet and increase their exercise routine over the course of 180 days. 98% of them (some statistical variation to account for weird genetics) consistently lose X pounds, a large group (60-70%) loses as many as Y pounds".
Most experiments that were set up that way either ended up reporting the results "inconclusive", or worse, as the caloric intake generally decreased, the weight increased http://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(96)00456-1/abstract
I am looking for the one, or two, or a dozen, that doesn't. Should be relatively easy to replicate.
It may be hard to limit calories without feeling hungry on a mostly soylent diet. Salad and veggies make it easier because they're low on calories, but still have a lot of bulk which helps stave off hunger.
* Your gut biome might need a "reset". Sometimes people experience extended weight gain after antibiotics because they ended up with a different, less effective biome. (Soylent might also contribute to this issue.)
* Another health issue changed your digestive process
* You're losing muscle mass, making it easier to gain fat
* You're sleeping more poorly or are more stressed
Calorie counting really isn't sufficient to know what's going on with weight changes. The factors are numerous.
A day fast is really not that bad IMO. I used to do them every sunday and found it a really effective tool to get from "obese" to "overweight" (BMI). Got much less effective as I approached "normal" though.
* Are you actually tracking your calories with something like MyFitnessPal? What's your calorie intake?
* Are you tracking honestly? Especially if/when you have a bad day, or cheat day, or whatever you want to call it.
* Are you tracking accurately? If you aren't using a scale or measuring cup, the answer is probably no. Most people severely underestimate the size of their portions.
If you're gaining 10-15lbs per year, then you know how much you're overconsuming. An annual gain of 15 lbs * 3500 Calories per pound of fat is about 150 Calories per day over your TDEE.
Reduce your daily caloric intake by 250-500 Calories and you should see weight loss over the long term.
If not, and you actually do know exactly how many calories you're consuming and have been tracking your weight to see how it changes, then you need to see a physician.
I have dropped weight only through calories counting, I've done cycles of bulk/cut while weightlifting, dropping weight boils down to "calories in -> calories out", we might not have a very good model of this, we might be overlooking a multitude of variables that control energy expenditure but we can't create fat from nowhere, we need to consume and have spare energy to store it.
It's not easy but it is simple. Again: I'm not saying our models for calculating TDEE or how energy restriction affects our body completely but if you are expending more calories than you are eating you are going to consume fat to create energy.
Try this: drop how many calories you are eating by another 100~200kcal/day for a week, see if the trend changes (a moving average works). If not, drop another 100~200kcal/day and watch for a week. Being STRICT is the "not easy" part.
This question touches on some very deep and controversial ideas kicking around in the current conversation. The question of whether we have an inherent "human nature", a biological substrate that informs our capabilities and behavior, touches on everything from education to tech employment. I don't want to debate the subject generally.
But can we agree, for the specific case of food consumption that
1) we have very strong impulses that are difficult to consciously resist; that
2) these impulses originate in biology; that
3) the existence of exceptional willpower is a mark of exceptional self-discipline, a level not practical to achieve for most; and that
4) advertisers prey on the difficulty most people experience in controlling their food behavior?
Advertising is no doubt a factor in the obesity epidemic, but I'm not sure that's among the primary causes of it. It seems to me that food portion sizes have increased tremendously over the past four decades. Purveyors of food often seem to peddle the sheer size of portions as features. Additionally, foods that once might have been thought outrageously decadent, such as "coffee" covered in whipped-cream and loaded with caramel (basically a dessert in a cup), and pizza with crust infused with cheese, are now perceived as normal things to consume, quite possibly on a daily basis. My non-scientific observation is that the normalization of consumption of huge portions of calorie-dense "foods" is directly correlated with increases in obesity. Since we're not willing to de-normalize the former as far as I can tell, the emerging societal trend is to normalize the latter.
[0] "http://www.livescience.com/49-decade-study-americans-taller-...
Are people in low-obesity countries more resistant to such biological impulses? Do they have fewer food ads? Are they able to resist those advertisers in a more coherent fashion? Or just exhibit better willpower at national level?
I don't agree that this is what's going on.
People don't avoid obesity by exceptional willpower. They just have healthy eating habits, usually ones formed during childhood.
Likewise, overcoming obesity and returning oneself to a healthier weight that one can maintain requires changing habits and one's relationship with food.
Habit formation and modification can be difficult, but it's sufficiently well understood that it can be implemented.
The difficulty is getting information into people's hands about how to modify habits successfully (I like the book The Power of Habit), cutting through the misinformation surrounding what constitutes healthy eating habits and how to lose weight, and often just education about how to cook food cheaply and in a way that doesn't seem intimidating to people who are pressed for time and resort to fast food out of convenience.
When people know the concrete steps one must take to achieve something, they become that much more willing to believe they can do it.
</sarcasm>
An excellent book on this topic is The Obesity Code by Dr Jason Fung
Obesity is a public health problem, like tobacco smoking or STIs. There's no secret - avoid ling disease by not smoking, and avoid STIs by not having unprotected sex. But clearly the "it's stimple, just fix it" approach isn't effective at improving the overall health of a population.
I honestly don't care at all about the overall health of the population. I really don't. Not that I wish them any ill-will, but I can't even begin to muster up the slightest bit of care for people I don't know ruining their lives because they eat too much or smoke. It's just not even on my radar.
I realise I'm not supposed to admit this, but I also realise I'm not the only one who thinks it.
So the question isn't what happened to personal responsibility. It's why exercising that responsibility is apparently so much more difficult than in the past. Address that, and you'll find the "agency" problem largely solves itself.
Is that not the effect of "asking the government to step in and help us?"
The cost of health care to manage obesity and related issues is staggering and will only increase.
Maybe the USA should start having a BMI tax?
Really, it should be no different than any other sin tax. It's behavior you want to discourage, so tax it.
The idea that a study conclusively demonstrated that in a meaningful way seems extraordinarily unlikely. I'd be awful curious to see the methodology of that.
I know the PC police will eat me for lunch for saying this, but the dating pool, at least in the 20s and 30s range, shrinks considerably in the US for anybody used to European body image standards.
Whatever's happening to the population here is not normal. I don't know if it's our lifestyles becoming totally sedentary, if it's food marketing having reached absolutely irresistible heights, or if it's the lack of a culture of slow eating, but something is clearly not working and it really doesn't feel like the individual's fault, it seems actually systemic.
One thought is perhaps we should start treating the constant incessant advertisement of food the same way we treated the cigarette industry and regulate its appeal to children, put up disclaimers about what happens when you down that entire bag of cheetos etc.
Here's a Vox review/summary of a book: http://www.vox.com/2015/7/30/9070255/dorito-effect
> Flavor technology got very powerful in the early 1960s, and it wasn't long after that that we began to see the startling increases in body mass index.
> All the good stuff we grow — tomatoes, strawberries, lettuce — has gotten continually more bland. This has been measured. They have become diluted of nutrients, as well. As we selected crops for agronomic traits like yield, shelf life and disease resistant, we never selected for flavor. And we lost flavor as a result. It's reverse evolutionary pressure.
Once I got to their grocery stores and strolled around noticing the explosion of restaurants that served an increasingly sugar-laden menu, it clicked together for me.
The deferment of responsibility and lack of self-control is the problem. Of course, companies–and more specifically, their marketing teams/firms–know people are weak-minded and as a result, can more or less control people's habits (read: greed outweighs public concern). It doesn't help that the culture has tilted toward justifying poor health in the form of all the body image propaganda.
You ate what you could get your hands on and you mostly stayed in pretty average shape because food wasn't that stimulating, that heavily processed, heavily advertised, and you have to be a lot more mobile than you are today. Humans didn't evolve to have to count calories, no animal in nature does it or is capable of doing that effectively.
Also have you considered that you might have motivation and willpower far above average? Not to mention the time, money, level of education and understanding necessary to change your diet.
Ultimately you are one single data point - do you believe that everybody can do all the things you can do just as well as you? No. Why should diet be any different?
- Eggs (WIC) - Bacon (WIC) - Bananas (WIC) – a case of 100 is ~$20 - Yogurt (WIC?) - Almond Milk (justifiably more expensive, so swap with milk) - Salmon (justifiably more expensive, swap with chicken or another protein) - Cous Cous (justifiably more expensive, swap with another carb/fiber).
I'd argue that, yes, if you take the steps to build up the motivation, you can. I was a shell of a man before I started on my current path. It just takes time. I didn't start out where I am and I don't expect others to, either.
Yes personal responsibility and all, but we've made it awful easy to fall into this trap.
Note that you can select earlier years using the controls below the map. Some depressing observations:
• In 1990, the highest rate was 15% (Mississippi) and the lowest was 6.9% (Colorado).
• In 2000, the highest was 23.9% (West Virginia) and the lowest 14.5% (Colorado). Note that in a mere 10 years, the lowest was almost equal to what had been the highest.
There are plenty of other charts on the site. There is one for physical inactivity. That shows two interesting things:
• The states with the highest obesity have the most inactivity, and the states with the least obesity the least inactivity.
• However, for each state the level of inactivity has remained fairly flat over the last 10 years, even though the obesity rate has risen in those states. Inactivity might explain why some states are more or less obese than others, but it doesn't appear to have anything to do with why we are getting fatter everywhere.
There is of course the direct effect of the hundreds of thousands of vehicular related deaths per year (globally) as well as serious injuries but there are a bunch of other effects.
One of these is the change in urban planning where life is centered around the car such that Americans, in particular, walk far less than people in other countries [1].
There's a big difference here between walking and needing to walk. People in NYC for example pretty much need to walk. I'm not saying it's impossible to become obese when your daily life requires you or even just encourages you to walk more but it sure makes it more difficult.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/walking/2012/04/why_don_t...
Personally, I maxed out at a BMI of 34. I lost about 70 pounds, got back into the normal BMI range, and have stayed there for about a decade now. I changed my diet, changed my physical activities, and changed a lot of habits and modes of thinking. That last one is perhaps most important of all. For example, as kids, we were taught not to waste food, and that meant eating everything there was. Well, cleaning your plate (and the pot) isn't going to put food on the plates of starving children. Whether you eat it or not, the waste happened at the supermarket when you bought too much food!
My brother saw me losing weight and wanted to do it too, so I tried to help him. He hated the food I was now eating. He didn't want to work out. He didn't want to change the way he thought. Instead, he got a lot fatter and, eventually, a sleeve gastrectomy. He's not in the normal BMI range yet, but he's been making steady progress and it's not optional for him. He literally can't eat enough to stay fat. His stomach is now tiny and fills up rather quickly. The prep for the surgery was harsh, and included a brutal, several week long crash diet. The surgery itself went off without a hitch, but he still had to recover on a morphine drip. I have no idea what kind of pain that involves, but it can't be pleasant. Bottom line, he thought he was choosing the easy way at the time, but we now both know it was the hard way. Harder by far. I got healthy. He inflicted a disability on himself that has the side-effect of losing weight. He still isn't active and, not surprisingly, has terrible energy levels.
After both our experiences, I can reasonably say the media does a terrible job of helping people. It tells them about healthy things to eat, but never mentions these things are only healthy if you eat them instead of your usual fare, and in appropriate amounts. It tells people they need to be ripped, cross-fitting gym-bunnies to be fit, when doing just about anything besides sitting on your butt will be an improvement for many people. Finding a physical activity you can enjoy is far more important than being ripped. Above all, it rarely attempts to help people change the way they think, which is the key to making permanent changes.
TL;DR: If I had to offer one piece of advice to those wishing to lose weight and become more active, it would be to ignore all the crap articles out there on diet fads and gym-crazes and pay some attention to how you think about food and activity. Change how you think, and everything else will come as a consequence of that change.
* Most industrial food products are adulterated with dairy, sugar, or both
* Industrial food is also cheap and widespread. It takes dedication to avoid it or restrict its impact: At parties, the default non-alcoholic beverage is sugar water, and the default food is pizza
* "Sleep is for the weak" is an oft-repeated, sometimes praised meme
* Driving everywhere is expected in many cities. In some neighborhoods, "taking a walk" is looked upon with suspicion
* Most jobs now are low on physical intensity, while work hours and work-related stress remain high
* The most popular recreations involve "screen time"
* Fitness is polluted with snake oil, "bro science" superstition, and image-driven advice; exercise and training itself as a form of character-building is viewed derisively
* Diet advice is similarly polluted with snake oil and superstition. Commerce drives the market, leading to quick-fix bandaids that promise a temporary change followed by a return to the original (unhealthy) habit
Lots of people are stuck in this scenario, because it takes uncommon dedication and some financial freedom to break with the culture and build a lifestyle of your own design. When their health fails we all pay the price.
Convenient food, that tastes good but is bad for you will beat out inconvenient food that tastes "ok" and is healthy for you.
For a lot of people cooking is just more work and if they've got the choice and the money they'll order take out or buy pre-made ready meals.
Moaning about sugar and advertising is just tinkering around the edges, to me if you want to solve this problem you've got to make eating healthy as convenient if not more convenient as eating badly.
- Why does American food go bad so much later than back home? It shocks me how strawberries here can stay in the fridge for over a week and not go bad, same about tomatoes, or yogurt, or even bread! Back home if you don't eat your strawberries on the same day, the next day they're just gonna be mushy, and the day after they're gonna be inedible. I get so skeptical whenever I see any food that can last over a year
- The portions are just monstrous, I remember when I was new I couldn't finish a single restaurant main course, and now I sometimes catch myself that I could actually get a main course and an appetizer, and a dessert! Wouldn't restaurants make more money if they sold less food for the same price?
- The culture of "snacking" is quite interesting, I used to only eat during dinner/breakfast, now I find myself snacking in between, because snacks are so accessible and yummy and almost addictive
- Ingredients are often tasteless, so you guys add a lot of sauces to make them taste better. The sauce usually contains sugar and other stuff that doesn't help you stay fit. Why not just have food with more natural flavor? This applies to everything from blueberries to meat
- Meat sizes are completely bizarre! I've never seen such huge chicken breasts where I'm from. They're also quite bland and not soft/juicy at all. How does this even work?
- The concept of zoning is a disaster, if I wanna eat I need to sit in a car and drive where the restaurants are, and if I want booze I need to sit in a car and drive where the bars are, and if I wanna work again sit in a car and go where work is, then for sleep I need to sit in a car and drive home. Why?? Why can't I live in a residential building where first floor is restaurants and cafes, and a few blocks away is my work? You have huge residential communities where it would be foolish to even attempt to walk out of them, because the nearest grocery store is several miles away! Who came up with this, and how can this be a thing?
- Take a closer look at the ingredients in your bread. You're most likely buying bread with preservatives. There are bread makers that make bread without them and those will go bad sooner. Look for sprouted bread. Those can go bad within a couple days of the sell by and the sell by itself is only like 3 days from when they get it in.
- Why would a customer want to pay more for less versus your competitors?
- Ingredients are tasteless because same as with breeding fruits for transport, we do not optimize for flavor but quantity and cost. Good meat is a function of what the animal eats and if they exercise. What you're looking for can be most likely found at your local farmers market.