The Obesity Era

> I started putting on weight when I was 40,

A late bloomer, huh... did you stay active your whole youth and then stopped for some reason? Or did you have an I-can-eat-anything-I-want metabolism in your youth which then petered out a little? I do wonder...

Hmm, well one thing I've noticed is that people in Tokyo walk/bicycle a lot more than most people in any American city I've lived in. Not intentionally, really, but simply as a side-effect of the non-car-oriented transportation system and urban design that results in highly walkable environments. Anecdotally, co-workers who had temporary assignments to other locations where they drove everywhere complained of gaining 5-10kg over the year or so they were there.

I regularly see things in Japan like dressed-up women in high-heels, elderly people, and other non-particularly-athletic-looking types, sprinting up long staircases to make the train. In the U.S. I would be quite surprised to see anyone sprinting in public...

Portions also often seem to be smaller. While of course it's easy enough to order large portions in Japan ("oomori kudasai!"), there's far less of the feeling of hard-to-avoid excessively large portions I often seem to get in the U.S. In Japan, "small" always seems to be on the menu, and is often the default; in the U.S., not so much...

I think it's important that such things are not unusual and "intentional" actions that you have to remember to do (and can easily shirk), but rather are a side-effect of the environment, and so happen all the time, even when you're tired, even when you're busy, even when you're out with friends to play, etc.

You know, if your algorithm worked on the first few test cases you threw at it but after that you kept on finding holes in it, you wouldn't say it had solved the problem, would you?

12 years ago, I lost 55 pounds in six months. All I had to do was carefully monitor everything I ate and burn 1000+ calories exercising six days a week.

Thing is, that was a solution that worked very well for me when I was self-employed 30-year-old single man. It has not worked at all for me as a 42-year-old married man with a child. I don't have the time for 90 minutes of exercise every day. There is always loads of food around I shouldn't be eating. I have vastly more stress in my life than I had then. And my body very definitely reacts differently to food than it used to.

What I'm trying to say is, I found a great hack for losing weight quickly back in the day. I did not find a solution to keep my weight down in the long term.

>>You know, if your algorithm worked on the first few test cases you threw at it but after that you kept on finding holes in it, you wouldn't say it had solved the problem, would you?

The parent said he lost 30 pounds over 6 months. This is not a "test case." He implemented the solution effectively. What he ended up doing however was to change the input variables (literally) by increasing the amount he was eating. Therefore the solution he implemented failed, and he gained the weight right back.

The mechanics of weight gain and loss are fascinating. Every time I read an article like this it makes me appreciate the complexity of the human body even more.

That said, the issue as a whole is not rocket science, and should not be treated as such. While it is very interesting to examine and discuss how the human body treats various types of calories, at the end of the day the closed system that is the human body is still governed by calories in minus calories out. It is impossible for someone to continue to gain weight if they are eating less calories than they are consuming. Literally. Impossible.

The problem is one of human psychology, both at the calorie consumption side and calorie burning side.

On the consumption side, there are two main causes. First, for overweight and obese people, the act of putting food in their mouths and drinking high-calorie drinks has become so second nature that their minds simply stop registering it after a while. This is why in scientific studies and surveys that examine the topic, overweight and obese participants massively under-report what they ate throughout the study while those who have trouble putting on weight (the so-called "hardgainers") over-report it. The mind underplays the importance of events and situations it is familiar with (such as eating) and vice versa.

The second reason is that even when people do pay attention to how much they are eating and count the calories at that moment, they are terrible at estimating their daily or weekly intake. They try to do "mental accounting," the most common example being "I ate a salad at lunch today, so it's OK for me to order some fries at dinner." For obvious reasons, this approach fails hard.

There's also the calorie burning side. Just like most people are terrible at estimating how much they are eating, they are also terrible at estimating how much they are burning. For example, walking counts as exercise for a surprisingly large number of people, yet walking for an hour straight at moderate pace burns only about as many calories as in a slice of bread. And yet the mental accounting comes into play afterward during dinner and they justify their bad habits by telling themselves they exercised that day.

There are other issues, such as the way food companies manufacture their products in very specific ways so as to maximize their consumption, or the way they market to children. But in my opinion these are at the periphery. Ultimately the matter is about the individual. It's about how much they individual eats. Not what they say they eat, but what they actually eat.