Saying that the cure for obesity is to eat less is like saying that the cure for heroin addiction is to stop using heroin. It's both clearly true, and also useless.
And yet most obese people are no more addicted to food than you are addicted to oxygen...
It's so bizarre how many people will pretzel their way into moralistic non sense to find a solution to what is clearly a medical problem.
Obesity as far as we understanding it now is an hunger regulation problem. For unknown reason a lot of people still feel the need to eat even when their body is clearly in calory surplus.
No amount of of impulse control or moderation can make you override billions of years of evolution and not eat when you are starving... if we could... society would be a very different place
> For unknown reason a lot of people still feel the need to eat even when their body is clearly in calory surplus.
Boredom, stress, unhappy life, happy life, laziness - it could be anything. You know what it couldn’t be? Exercise. I’m yet to see a person working out hard and eating at the same time.
> I’m yet to see a person working out hard and eating at the same time.
No, but plenty of people have their hunger stimulated by exercise and eat too much after.
You simply can't fix being overweight or obese with exercise alone in the vast majority of people. Even if you don't believe in the constrained total energy model that a good chunk of metabolic research PhDs think is at least somewhat true and instead believe solely in the additive model, exercise stimulates hunger and it's far easier to eat 1000 calories than burn 1000 calories.
You have to do both and exercise doesn't automatically make the other easy.
My theory is that consuming sugar makes you more hungry. You can eat until you're full, but if you eat desert or a sugary snack a little later, it makes you feel less full and you can eat more. As if your brain notices the sugar source and switches into "full loading mode" and craves more of this historically rare resource.
> And yet most obese people are no more addicted to food than you are addicted to oxygen...
Most obese people seem to be addicted to sugary food, soft drings, desert and all that, which then triggers more eating.
In addition, it might be a gut bacteria thing. If your gut is used to processing lots of sugar, you crave it even more and fighting your gut microbiome requires way too much impulse control and moderation.
The solution might be to recognize this mechanism, remove all sugar from the diet and find a way to control impulses for a few weeks until the gut bacteria changed.
Drinking water and chewing sugar-free gum helps me to remove food cravings temporarily with no downsides. But... I have a normal weight.
I think insulin resistance from excess calorie and carbohydrate consumption has a lot to do with it. One of the symptoms of hyperglycemia is increased hunger, since glucose is staying in your blood stream instead of getting into your cells. 1/3 Americans have prediabetes, and more than that are probably developing insulin resistance.
Ok, in the US start talking about food addiction seriously and see what happens.
Do you remember how long it took to get tobacco mostly banned in the US? Do you remember how much the tobacco industry played the skeptic and introduced bunk science into the mix?
Well Coca Cola, Pepsico, Nestle, and all the other junk food companies have been on this game for years now. Want to change school curriculum?, well your political opponent has $100,000-$1,000,000 more than you from the make people fat industry. Meanwhile there are a crazy number of attack ads against you for being a crazy commie that wants to control peoples lives, you socialist bastard, you're against freedom.
Well, of course if you’ve been jacking heroin for 30 years and all your veins are destroyed beyond repair it’s useless. It’ll take as much, or even more, to return back to normal.
Heroin changes brain chemically, it's (more) serious addiction than obesity, again being a little insensitive to obese people, but they're bad in comparison. And there are degrees of truthfulness & wrongness right!
About the point you're making, two generations before you and me, people where fit, more attentive & generally healthy (outside vaccines that prevent diseases now & positive effects due to advancements in medicine), what changed?
Not as platitude, but go from first principles, the choices you make everyday effects your mind (& the time you spend on particular activities), and if they aren't life affirming (for lack of better words), in due time you limit your options (ie less choices from your mind, bad food or less bad food or multiple bad ways to spend your time?), till you proclaim from high top mountains 'oh god, I'm helpless without acceptance from some higher power!'
This isn't to say, I'll be as preachy and asshole(ish) to a friend or someone I care about in similar need, I'll probably say 'seek medical help etc' like you. But thinking things through & arriving at truth is important, don't you think?
This is different to mental strength or controlling yourself etc, it's more about self reflection & freedom through discipline, respecting your life, decisions & thoughts more than your impulsive emotions in an ever distracting world, that kind of thing..
I don't think I'll change your mind or this will come across in good faith, that's okay, I'm in a reflective mood, and it's awfully chilly outside :-)
>About the point you're making, two generations before you and me, people where fit, more attentive & generally healthy
Everything.
Two generations ago you didn't eat out 4+ times per week. Portion sizes at restaurants were 50%+ smaller. Food sciences were not as optimized at making junk food as they are today. In general we were poorer and bought less junk food. We were more apt to work jobs that didn't involve sitting in one place for long periods of time.
>I don't think I'll change your mind or this will come across in good faith
I believe it's what you think, but when 74% of the population doesn't subscribe your philosophy then you're tilting at windmills. Yea, maybe someday people will catch on to that and all will be good, but that's not the way the entire world is going. We need solutions we can enact now to solve problems we have now.
> About the point you're making, 2 generations before you and me, people where fit, more attentive & generally healthy (outside vaccines that prevent diseases now & positive effects due to advancements in medicine), what changed?
Air pollution, water quality, pestecide, food/produce quality, plastic particule everywhere...
I find this perspective so bizarre.
Whats the most probable in 2 generation of exponentially increasing and barely regulated technological changes : culture has change so dramatically as to change human nature and makes us all lazy... or... something in the environment/food chain is having phisiolical/biological effects...
People living in country side & eating from organic farming, they're doing alright (similar to our closest ancestors), but that's beside the point
Cultural change over 2/3 even 10 generations will not significantly alter your biology. Pollution & disintegration in modern world you're referring to, they do have negative effects on our health, but it's not the whole story and they possibly cannot have effects on your decisions about what you eat and how you spend your time right?
I'm particularly referring to obesity caused by over eating, bad life style etc (not the other rare serious persistent irreversible kind that happens as side effect of more serious ailments or genetics)
I can't quite understand if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me...
You seem to be restating my point as if you are contradicting my statements.
> People living in country side & eating from organic farming, they're doing alright (similar to our closest ancestors), but that's beside the point
Maybe ( I would love to see some sources for this assertion). But even if I give that to you, you basically saying that modern environment are somewhat obisidigenic... which is what I was saying.
> Cultural change over 2/3 even 10 generations will not significantly alter your biology.
Okay... same., still just restating what i have said.
> they possibly cannot have effects on your decisions about what you eat and how you spend your time right?
They can and they do... let me introduce you to lead in paint and in the environment...
> particularly referring to obesity caused by over eating
All obesity is cause by over eating (all most by definition) the point here is that over eating is not cause by lack of will power or poor decision making
