Being fat is a trap

For me, quitting tobacco was simple, don’t use. Quitting alcohol was simple. Don’t drink. I cannot simply abstain from eating. I can relate to the struggles and feelings from this article.

> Getting out of the physical fat trap, strictly speaking, is simple: Develop basic sleep habits so that you get decent sleep. Exercise daily or almost daily. Reduce refined carbs, unhealthy fats and alcohol from your diet. Focus on getting enough vegetables, fruits, complex carbs and healthy fats.

Well... and that's the problem. It sounds easy on paper but in fact it is not easy at all in practice for the wide masses:

- work 8 hours, add 1h overtime and lunch, add 2 hours for commute, so out of the 24 hours a day, you already lose 11 hours to work related matters. Add 8 hours for a decent sleep time and whoops, only 5 hours remaining in the day for everything else: getting ready for work in the morning (0.5h), do chores (1h), make, eat and digest dinner (1.5h) have some quality time with your partner (1h) and children (1h), and whoops the entire day is gone before even considering anything actually relaxing, hobbies, or working out.

- shift work, particularly rotating shifts, or on-call work that's effectively being abused as regular overtime, makes developing healthy sleep patterns outright impossible.

- many people are outright unable to afford healthy groceries, which is why they're going for unhealthy highly processed food

- of those that are able to afford groceries, good luck getting them in one of the way too many food deserts

Our health issues (and the lack of children) to a very large degree tie back right into the expectation that people have to work 40 hours a week just to afford bare survival. That is the true trap - systemic forces leave the wide masses no other way.

> Getting out of the physical fat trap, strictly speaking, is simple:

Because it's CICO. Focusing on whole-foods can make you resistant to undesirable weight-gain, but losing substantial amounts of weight requires caloric restriction in some form or another. That isn't easy to adhere to, it needs to be done in whichever way is the most sustainable. Low-hanging fruit is to boost protein and fiber at higher-than-normal amounts for satiety.

All of the programs/diets that don't have you track calories are just tracking something else as a stand-in, obfuscating restriction. If you go low-carb and hit a wall, what are you going to do next, cut out negative carbs? If you go low-fat, will you cut out fat that's no longer there?

> The notion of two traps, a physical trap and a mental trap, comes from Allen Carr’s fantastic Easy Way To Stop Smoking. He states, quite convincingly, that there is a physical aspect to smoking (nicotine addiction) and a mental aspect to smoking (feeling that you need it).

I think Carr's perspective is very strong advice for kicking a bad habit. However, "emotional" and/or binge-eating may benefit from more targeted therapy.

Ok, but there's also an environmental (and one completely reasonable mental) factor: I live in a place where it is unpleasantly hot (upper 90s and humid) most of the year and there are few public outdoor spaces generally thanks to rampant overdevelopment, I hate gyms and toxic gym culture, I have a quaint bungalow that doesn't have space for equipment, I work an intense job that keeps me focused for hours at a time, I live in a country that prioritizes fast, processed, sugary foods, etc. Much like fighting climate change, placing all the responsibility on the end user without changing some of the social conditions is a flawed approach, even if there are some things individuals can do to help. Put another way, there are plenty of situations where all the mental fortitude, discipline, self-honesty, commitment to change, and persistence won't be enough in the face of it simply being difficult to find time, space, or money to be healthy.

One of the most dead-on articles I've ever read on HN.