Being fat is a trap

> Some of my friends are obese despite exercising heavily every day.

I’ve been chubby despite heavy exercise most of my life. It took me at least 30 years to come to what now seems like the dumbest most obvious realization:

Exercise makes me strong. Food makes me fat.

Now I think of them separately, to a first approximation, as the high order bit. To affect change to my strength, I first need to modify my exercise habits, and to affect change to my weight, I fist need to modify my eating habits. Of course I’m not saying you can’t burn calories exercising, but it’s actually been extremely helpful in my weight loss goals to mentally separate exercise from eating. Instead of thinking of exercise as _the_ way to lose weight, I think of diet as the primary tool, and exercise as something that is primarily for strength and activity and only secondarily for weight control.

The reason I’ve been fat despite exercise is, of course, because I naturally compensate for exercise by eating more. For me, I was eating until I feel a certain level of fullness, and that level seems to be slightly too much regardless of how much physical activity I do. Finally realizing that I don’t need to exercise harder, I ‘just’ need to track what I eat, is what finally actually worked. But like the article says, simple is not easy; I air-quoted the ‘just’ in that last sentence because successful food tracking is mentally difficult.

One of the fun side effects of tracking my eating instead of thinking of exercise as the primary weight loss tool is that with respect to food, exercise sort-of reversed it’s function for me, in a way. Instead of thinking of it as my weight loss tool and relying on it to compensate for what I ate, I sometimes use exercise to allow me to eat more when I’m hungry or want a treat. It’s funny, I know I said the same thing two ways, but my mindset changed almost 180 degrees. When I’m in a calorie deficit, I’ve noticed that days I don’t exercise I get more tired and hungry than days I do exercise.

>Certainly so many people can't be too weak to regulate one of the most basic facets of existence? How did we come all this way as a species if we are so fundamentally flawed at basic metabolic regulation?

There have been fundamental shifts in CI and CO. Food went from fundamentally scarce and requiring effort to fairly abundant, and the effort to acquire keeps going down. Over the course of US history we have gone from farmers to factory workers to desk workers. Each of those transitions has lowered "natural" daily CO, as such each one has brought about weight increases.

>"trying harder" is just akin to insanity?

Yes, try smarter. CI/CO is true but I find it to be bad advice because a) it is damn near impossible to measure, and b) straight forward CI/CO changes can lead to opposite results.

What I find works for me:

Cut CI a little bit, large calorie cuts can slow metabolism. Up CO a little bit, exercise boosts metabolism even when not working out. Anerobic is better at boosting metabolism than aerobic.

Food wise, sugar and salt drive the human appetite. Reducing them will help you not feel as hungry while reducing CI. The other is just get used to eating less. Low food days help reorient to smaller meals feeing right. By "low food day" I mean find something small, low sugar, and salt (personally I use unsalted peanuts) when you feel hungry stop and focus on the feeling and try to determine if it is actual hunger or just habit hunger, if it is "real" hunger then eat a handful of peanuts and wait 15min before you reevaluate. The day after eating less will feel normal.

I’ve heard this before and just don’t get it. Buying healthy food is generally cheaper, or just as expensive in my experience. Buy some vegetables, some chicken, some fruit, eggs. These are generally very affordable, you just have to cook with them.

Sure, buying Just Salad is more expensive than buying McDonald’s, but that’s not the only options.

The bigger problem IMO: we put way more sugar, sweeteners, and addictive substances in food and have big portions where people feel obligated to finish. It’s very easy to eat 100g of sugar every day and hardly notice. Combine that with most American activities involving food and alcohol.

We have a culture that encourages eating and food that responds by being more eatable

Yeah, I think accountability is a straw man.

If you make it cheaper, easier and more socially acceptable for a group of people to eat low quality processed foods, even a portion of the time (as is the case where I live), that group of people will be more likely to eat processed foods.

It’s not impossible to follow the advice in the in the article, it’s just harder than it should be for some groups of people. Unfairly so, I think.

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