941–950 of 1001 posts
If weight gain was genetic then we’d have fat ancestors. Nobody has fat ancestors. So sure we can drug everyone to try and fix it, but that’s not actually fixing the cause.
“when lifestyle changes aren’t enough.” People don’t want to hear it, but we do nobody any favors by pretending this is more complicated than it is. It’s actually pretty simple. The solution is to adjust calories in vs calories out. Fast a few days a week. Cut out bread, sugar and other simple carbs. We don’t help alcoholics or opioid addicts by enabling them with statements like “when not getting drunk isn’t enough……
While I agree, you're right, nobody wants to hear it. There's no point telling people to have discipline, because discipline is not spread through strangers telling each other to have it. Someone either has the capacity to have discipline (instilled through upbringing or formative events), or they don't. These magic pills are for everyone who doesn't have discipline.
I noticed skinny people tended to eat less and skip meals. I noticed bariatric surgery worked, for awhile.
I tried fasting. I’m now quite healthy. Exercise doesn’t help lose weight, but it can be a better way to change your biochemistry than eating tasty food. People should be told these 2 simple things, and none of the other stuff that doesn’t really help. It’s simple. Eat less.
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Do you often cook with ingredients like canned beans or canned diced tomatoes or premade stock? Do you buy any kind of grocery store bread, including the "fresh" stuff from the bakery section? All of these things usually contain added sugar in the US, sometimes in shockingly huge amounts. I think people from other countries don't know to look out for sugar in these kinds of processed but not ultra-processed food item…
Nope. I never buy anything without reading ingredients and yes the US is really bad about adding sugar to stuff. Even some meat which is absurd. But when I say I cook from scratch I mean it. If I want beans I buy a bag of dried beans. I will sometimes buy canned Marzano tomatoes from Italy, ingredients: tomatoes.
“when lifestyle changes aren’t enough.” People don’t want to hear it, but we do nobody any favors by pretending this is more complicated than it is. It’s actually pretty simple. The solution is to adjust calories in vs calories out. Fast a few days a week. Cut out bread, sugar and other simple carbs. We don’t help alcoholics or opioid addicts by enabling them with statements like “when not getting drunk isn’t enough……
> The pharma industry will enable addicts because it wants money. This is a little over-simplistic. The "pharma industry" is not a monolith, and is made up in large part by academics who love spending their time thinking about how to make the world better, and by doctors who have no conflict of interest, etc etc.
Gambling can be fun, and nothing wrong with casinos, but in the long run they are optimized for one thing. A casino that is not optimized for profit will disappear.
Same is true for the healthcare industry. If a corporation is not optimized to make money they disappear.
I think it’s valuable from a financial perspective to avoid casinos. I think it’s valuable from a health perspective to avoid drugs, to the extent possible. But, yes, casinos can be fun, and you can even profit from them if you play your cards right.
> In the past, scientists and the public often thought that those with obesity simply lacked the willpower to lose weight. But evidence is growing that most people’s bodies have a natural size that can be hard to change. In the context where we have gone from obesity rates of 13 percent to 40, to suggest that people have a natural weight and that's the cause of this seems absurd to me.
> to suggest that people have a natural weight and that's the cause of this seems absurd to me People do have a natural weight, and a fraction of people are genetically predisposed to be overweight regardless of lifestyle. But what I find impossible to accept is that somehow that number has mushroomed in the past half-century and particularly in the U.S. I've lived and/or worked on every continent over the past 40 ye…
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> to suggest that people have a natural weight and that's the cause of this seems absurd to me People do have a natural weight, and a fraction of people are genetically predisposed to be overweight regardless of lifestyle. But what I find impossible to accept is that somehow that number has mushroomed in the past half-century and particularly in the U.S. I've lived and/or worked on every continent over the past 40 ye…
The other big difference between the USA (and Canada) and other places in the world is the built environment. NA does have a scattered few walkable cities, but there's a great many places where it's effectively impossible by design to go about the tasks of ones day fueled only by person power and not by getting in a car. This has implications on the amount of calories people are burning every day.
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I've done keto for three months and my body's ability to process fat has completely changed. I honestly think were never meant to eat as many carbs as we do in a day. It sounds like a very similar symptoms except only for the first few weeks of Keto. Ketosis is where the body starts to use fats to produce its own sugars for the blood rather than relying on carbs to suppliment. Anyway I'm off keto now and I find mysel…
I'm doing carnivore -- it's like keto but better.
I think the fat gimmick in keto is just that too. It certainly helps but don't be fooled into eating unhealthy amounts to lose weight.
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A marvel movie body is made through injecting steorids.. not living healthily.
Natural bodybuilding is a thing. It does require eating a ton of protein though, so whether or not it's "living healthily" depends on what you consider a normal amount of poultry and fish a person should be eating on a daily basis.
Not to mention that makeup, specific lighting, timed pumps and short term dieting tricks can be used for movies. How an actor looks on the day of a shoot isn't how they walk around looking.
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> It’s so hard to eat healthy, I honestly cannot fathom how people do it. It's honestly just what you're used to. If you eat tonnes of sugar and fat then that's what you crave. If you cut sugar out of your diet, after a while the amount of sugar you used to eat will taste wayyy too sweet. Same with fat - eating chips for example will leave a gross fatty taste in your mouth. 99% of food bought out will have a whole lo…
This would be more persuasive if it wasn't more or less the opposite of what current nutrition research suggests about fat and satiety.
Lots of deep fried, Canola oil or vegetable oils, bacon etc.
I agree that "fat" isn't harmful, but I do think people get a taste for the nasty ones.
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I'm also on one of these drugs (Tirzepatide) and have been for a few months. The first time I remember knowing I was fat was when a babysitter made fun of me for it at age 6. I've been fat ever since and I'm in my late 30s now. I've lost significant amounts of weight (60+ pounds) three times in my adult life, through simple calorie restriction (intermittent fasting, including before I'd ever heard the term). Every ti…
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First, willpower is absolutely a trainable skill. In the late 90s there was scientific support for the idea that willpower was a limited resource. The let people choose weather they wanted to eat a healthy snack (radish or cucumber, I think) or a cookie, then after that had them solve an impossible puzzle. People who ate the cookie kept trying almost twice as long as the healthy-snack group. They took it to mean that willpower was limited and the healthy-snack group had used it up in resisting the cookie. More recently this was disproved and an even stronger conclusion was reached - The reason why the stop exerting willpower is that they _believe_ it is a limited resource. People who don't have that idea, tend to stay in it longe.
Second, it's not exclusively willpower that keeps people healthy - things CAN get easier or harder. People who are already obese, for instance, will have a hard time loosing weight and an even harder time staying lean - because the body is indeed pushing towards that same body-fat content.
It gets easier when you avoid a situation where you need to exert the willpower in the first place. I recall a study where they seated kids in a room with a marshmallow and if they didn't eat it for X minutes, they'd get another one and then they could eat two - The kids who were allowed to leave the room for the X minutes (and did leave) had much higher success rates than the ones who chose (or were forced) to stay in the room.
I also recall some neurochemistry that makes it easier to do hard things (like working out) in the morning that later in the day.
People also tend to operate in absolutes - stay on a strict regiment of calorie counting until that one weak moment when they have a cookie. And now they're completely off because, well, they're streak was broken or because they tell themselves "I failed so I can't do it."
None of that should discount the effects of willpower. But the degree to which people need to apply it varies a lot. Just like it's easier for a non-smoker to not pick a cigarette than it is for a chain-smoker going a-pack-a-day. If someone is in the hard-to-lose weight category, I empathise - you have your work cutout for you. But training your willpower is the only long-term sustainable way to do it.