31–40 of 59 posts
I think I finally get why people actually want to live on Soylent. It's the "abstention" cure for food addiction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no idea why people are voting you down. It must be out of pure utter ignorance with no practical experience in trying to do this. As someone who weight lifts naturally what you said is factually correct viz. (a) it is as easy as counting calories and eating at a deficit. (b) it's difficult to eat at a deficit and keep muscle mass because you're essentially low on fuel and your body has to burn something for en…
I didn't down vote, but saying that losing weight is easy is like saying playing the piano is easy. In reality, they are indeed both easy, but you need determination and time.
I think I finally get why people actually want to live on Soylent. It's the "abstention" cure for food addiction.
That's a bit how I view "keto". If you read /r/keto people seems to discover the golden diet and way of living. It's cool that it works for them but do you really need a restrictive diet (I would even say "socially restrictive diet") when the first I want to scream to Americans is "just eat smaller portions FFS!".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no idea why people are voting you down. It must be out of pure utter ignorance with no practical experience in trying to do this. As someone who weight lifts naturally what you said is factually correct viz. (a) it is as easy as counting calories and eating at a deficit. (b) it's difficult to eat at a deficit and keep muscle mass because you're essentially low on fuel and your body has to burn something for en…
I didn't down vote, but saying that losing weight is easy is like saying playing the piano is easy. In reality, they are indeed both easy, but you need determination and time.
This article is full of BS. 40 years ago the majority of the population of the US or North Europe was thin. This has been so for the entire evolution of the human species. People 40 years ago did not starve. They just ate things that refrigerators and mass industrial production do not preserve well, like vitamins, or fiber, or natural fat(like butter). Now, when most people eat mass-processed foods, odd things happen…
Consider the following:
-The ideal client for a health-club or gym is someone who signs up for a full year on January 2nd and then never returns.
-Expensive state-of-the-art exercise machines are actually inferior to cheap, old-fashioned free weights.
-A diet conducive to health loss typically consists of precisely the kind of foods that can't be pre-packaged and advertized on TV. I suppose I don't watch TV much these days, but if raw kale and spinach are getting superbowl ads, I haven't seen them.
-Personal trainers, diet coaches, etc. are all service providers, and repeat customers are the life blood of the service industry. Succeeding in teaching clients how to achieve their goals permanently and independently is the one sure-fire way to shrink the client base.
Fat people aren't a problem for the economy. They're a wonderful new growth industry! It's highly profitable to sell "light" TV dinners, diet shakes, diet soda, ab machines, balance ball workout lessons, miracle herbs, etc.. There's relatively little profit in pig iron and kale.
The successful 5% aren't endowed with superhuman willpower. They just figured out how to reconfigure their lives to make physical activity and a healthy diet the easy default. Unfortunately, just being in the 5% doesn't make it easy to teach others to be that way too. Consider sports. Say you're an expert skier, snowboarder, etc.. You might have had some lessons a long time ago, but you probably got really good just by doing it a lot. You can do stuff that awes the instructors at the local bunny hill, but odds are that a newbie is going to learn a lot more in a lesson from the instructors than they would from you! Teaching uses a different skill-set, and it's hard to do well.
The current situation in weight-loss land is this: The 5%'ers mostly figured things out on their own. Their ability to teach others is variable and, on average, not that great. The professional teachers are almost entirely people who aren't a part of the 5%. Even those who are 5%ers are financially disincentivized to actually teach people to become a part of the 5%. Becoming a 5%'er is like learning to ski at a hill populated by daredevil experts who suck at teaching and instructors who only get paid if you flunk their class and have to take it again. It really shouldn't surprise anyone that your chances of becoming a good skier are awful.
End Result: Should you find yourself unsatisfied with being in the 95%, you really ought to examine the profit motives of the people you're paying to help you. If your success would hurt their bottom line, they might not really be helping you.
This article is full of BS. 40 years ago the majority of the population of the US or North Europe was thin. This has been so for the entire evolution of the human species. People 40 years ago did not starve. They just ate things that refrigerators and mass industrial production do not preserve well, like vitamins, or fiber, or natural fat(like butter). Now, when most people eat mass-processed foods, odd things happen…
This article is full of BS. 40 years ago the majority of the population of the US or North Europe was thin. This has been so for the entire evolution of the human species. People 40 years ago did not starve. They just ate things that refrigerators and mass industrial production do not preserve well, like vitamins, or fiber, or natural fat(like butter). Now, when most people eat mass-processed foods, odd things happen…
40 years ago people were born from thin parents, today they're born from obese parents. This has to have an effect on the genetic makeup of the children.
To be more precise: I know there are animal species that changed their natural colors to grey-ish tones nearby the cities in less than 100 years, but that seems to me more a result of selective breeding: the non-grey individuals were eaten/killed, so in a relatively short span only those with the grey gene survived. However, given that we are not killing those that are born without the obesity gene, there shouldn't be any reason for such change at a genetic level in such a short timespan at a big scale (unless the obese were over-breeding the non-obese by at least one order of magnitude, which is nonsense).
I think I finally get why people actually want to live on Soylent. It's the "abstention" cure for food addiction.
I tend to disagree with this definition.
The function of a body might look like a 'machine', but that machine is made of trillions of small living beings (cells), all having the same properties as the larger organism - they need to breathe, eat and drink, they age and they multiply and each cell is a very specialised 'machine' in itself. So if you want to call the body a 'machine', then call it a 'machine of machines'.
But there's more. Our bodies cannot exist outside of what we call 'nature'. We need to eat other living beings in order to live. The living beings in turn need to eat the remains of other living beings and so on.
The circle of life is the flow of water, energy and a couple percent of other stuff (like minerals and proteins) through all living things. One thing is transformed into another and so on, forever.
From that angle, living beings (including our bodies) are a process, a flow through the matrix of Life, rather than a static object or mechanism.
This flow has continued since life first appeared and it has tuned itself to perfection. Until recently, when we started intervening.
The obesity epidemic (and also cancers, cardiovascular diseases and many many other 'modern' health issues) are the consequence of humans tinkering with nature and our bodies.
From this perspective I agree with the OP, it is probably impossible to have a healthy body in our society, until everybody becomes 'enlightened' about the nature of reality around them. But we have other issues, like which political party should win or what piece of land we need to grab.
All this while eating millions of tons of synthetic pills (prescribed by doctors), consuming incredible amounts of meat grown in insane conditions and fed with synthetic foods mixed with drugs watered down with lots of alcohol, while breathing toxic air and drinking synthetic drinks.
The only way to be healthy is to be part of the circle of life, but we are doing everything we can to disconnect ourselves from it and suffering the consequences.