People are overweight because something in their diet, psychology or physiology overrides the natural desire to stop eating when they’ve had enough calories. As long as that thing isn’t addressed, trying to use willpower to overcome it can easily lead to burnout and disappointment. Sometimes raw willpower works, but most people who are overweight have tried that and found it doesn’t work for them.
Those people aren’t failures, they just happened to have a problem that didn’t eliminate itself when using willpower. If your problem is the chemicals in fast food, then stopping fast food by willpower can solve things, but if your problem is pica for some vitamin deficiency than stopping fast food by willpower will not solve things. People that stop by willpower alone are lucky, nothing more.
So most people who are overweight do in fact need more scientific knowledge, or better environments, or both. A pedestrian-murdering hellscape isn’t great for getting enough exercise. Micronutrients, letting your stomach rest, avoiding blood sugar spikes and dips, metabolism-affecting drugs like caffeine, stress eating, etc can all affect things.
And because people can’t just get up and move to a pedestrian-friendly area, or because vegetables are twice as expensive as meat per calorie, or because their job requires them to sit still for eight hours, they want to try the messy imperfect solutions that do as much as possible in their limited environment.
I can well believe that intermittent fasting works better than “burn more eat less” for someone with the unnatural lifestyle of sitting in an office chair for hours straight. The traditional 3 meal structure was built on a society where people did lots of physical labor throughout the day every day, so just trying to eat less in those 3 meals doesn’t change the fact that your body needs far fewer calories at certain times than that diet frees up, and the same goes for exercising outside of work hours.
Veggies aren’t a primary source of calories, when trying to reduce calorie intake and eating healthy. Veggies are there for other important reasons. You focus on beans, lentils, and other legums for calories. Meat doesn’t even come close to their value. Rice, while having it’s own problems, is also more calories per dollar by far.
There’s the mechanism which is excess calorie intake v expenditure, and then there’s the reasons for the excess calorie intake. It’s dangerous to blend these because doing so mostly platforms excuses and denial of personal responsibility among obesity sufferers.
That’s a bit like saying “In order to run faster, you need to make longer steps and more steps per minute”. It’s obviously true, but the hard part is how to do that.
My weight has fluctuated from a low of 180lbs to a high of 450lbs throughout my entire adult life.
I know what to do. I know it’s easy to do it.
The hard part is knowing that the second I stop counting, it all comes piling back on.
It’s incredibly discouraging to know that most people can just…live. They eat when they’re hungry. They don’t constantly have a voice in their head telling them to eat when they aren’t. They don’t use sweets for emotional support or stress relief. They can leave food on a plate when they’re full. And they feel full with reasonable portions of food.
Moreso, they aren’t riddled with anxiety whenever their fat ass is on display out in public doing exercise.
I had an elderly woman at physical therapy tell me I’m the biggest man she’s ever seen. You know how upsetting that is? Like, no shit, I know I’m fat. And sure she likely has no filter because of dementia but man it still burns.
It’s an entire lifetime of learned experiences, eating habits, and psychological trauma. That elderly woman may as well have been one of the bullies in grade school or a douche in a pickup jeering at me on a walk. That’s the hard part.
It’s one thing to cut calories for a few months and lose weight. It’s another to look at the entire rest of your life and know, from experience, that as soon as you fall off the wagon, it’s back to square one. That you now have to change what’s essentially been hard-coding itself into your brain since some of your earliest thoughts. That you will, forever, have to continue counting calories and tracking food.
That’s the daily struggle. Resisting what you’ve known your entire life. And worse, needing it. Because you still have to eat, right? So you’ve got to eat, but you have to control it.
You have to control what, and how much, you eat while the food industry keeps on shoveling chemically-addictive foods in front of your face everywhere you go. Piping delicious smells out their exhaust vents as you drive by.
I don’t expect you to understand. People who never struggled with weight really don’t get it. Good for you.
On paper it’s easy. But our brains and bodies aren’t made of paper.
Imagine telling an alcoholic they need exactly one beer a day for the rest of their life. I would wager that’s harder than completely quitting alcohol, or even developing a healthier relationship with it. It has to be in the house. Eventually they have to go to the bar or the liquor store. And every day, for the rest of their life, they have to maintain that restraint.
But the everything is screaming at me to eat. You’re hungry. And the voices from childhood! Don’t waste food! That’s a fucking sin! Don’t throw anything away, it’s better to treat your own body like a trashcan than to actually throw anything away!
And when you do eat, how do you stop? Because my brain knows there’s more food in the kitchen. It also knows how to make more food. And it’s going to go in there. It’s exhausting to have to say no every second of every day to a brain that’s a toddler.
It is complex. There’s a mix of biology & psychology. Some people eat because they’d die if they didn’t. Others, for pleasure. Still others, it’s the only pleasure they experience in a day.
What do you do when the dopamine hit only occurs when you eat?
Some people drown anxiety in alcohol or xanax addictions. Others do it with food. The problem there is you can’t detox from food and remove it from your life.
Dig into some of the research nuggets, in this area, it’s wild stuff.
In addition there’s work to try to parse out some answers by studying cats. Why is one of your cats a behemoth while the other is a normal weight, both eating the same food from the same bowl?
So the people struggling to lose weight just don’t actually want to lose weight? There are no psychological factors involved at all, no hormones, genetics, environmental factors, education - nothing to figure out?
Please point to another mechanism by which weight is lost.
Type 1 diabetics, without treatment, can consume vast amounts of food (and hence as a result calories) and yet continue to waste away. How do you explain this with CICO?
Actually, your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) can change.
What you see online is based off of your age and your height and your weight, you should burn approximately x number of calories per day.
But people with thyroid issues and hormone issues and metabolic irregularities can actually burn less or more than the standard BMR listed on the internet.
To find out your true BMR, you have to go and get tested.
That being said, what you should do, ideally, is trust what the internet says about it, and then, if you find yourself having problems losing weight, then go and get your BMR tested. There are many sports medicine places that have the testing equipment that will do it for fifty to a hundred dollars, and you can find out that if you deviate from the norm. For instance, I burn about 200 calories less than my BMR says I should.
So if I’m eating 500 calories under that on my diet, I’m only burning 300 calories a day.
And if I eat specifically the number of calories my BMR says I should be allowed to eat and maintain my weight, I’m actually putting on 200 calories every day.
some people look at me in horror if i say i’m skipping dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow, or god forbid, not eating until day after tomorrow-- they absolutely think it’s a “fad” and that i’m going to die immediately if i don’t eat burgers and fries ASAP
i don’t know where you are, but where i live, skipping a meal or two is like… spitting on jesus or something
i lost ~50 lb last year just by intermittent fasting and walking more. actually i stopped eating processed junk too
Almost like the only “scientific knowledge” you need is to burn more and take in less.
“Just stop being depressed and enjoy life”.
People are overweight because something in their diet, psychology or physiology overrides the natural desire to stop eating when they’ve had enough calories. As long as that thing isn’t addressed, trying to use willpower to overcome it can easily lead to burnout and disappointment. Sometimes raw willpower works, but most people who are overweight have tried that and found it doesn’t work for them.
Those people aren’t failures, they just happened to have a problem that didn’t eliminate itself when using willpower. If your problem is the chemicals in fast food, then stopping fast food by willpower can solve things, but if your problem is pica for some vitamin deficiency than stopping fast food by willpower will not solve things. People that stop by willpower alone are lucky, nothing more.
So most people who are overweight do in fact need more scientific knowledge, or better environments, or both. A pedestrian-murdering hellscape isn’t great for getting enough exercise. Micronutrients, letting your stomach rest, avoiding blood sugar spikes and dips, metabolism-affecting drugs like caffeine, stress eating, etc can all affect things.
And because people can’t just get up and move to a pedestrian-friendly area, or because vegetables are twice as expensive as meat per calorie, or because their job requires them to sit still for eight hours, they want to try the messy imperfect solutions that do as much as possible in their limited environment.
I can well believe that intermittent fasting works better than “burn more eat less” for someone with the unnatural lifestyle of sitting in an office chair for hours straight. The traditional 3 meal structure was built on a society where people did lots of physical labor throughout the day every day, so just trying to eat less in those 3 meals doesn’t change the fact that your body needs far fewer calories at certain times than that diet frees up, and the same goes for exercising outside of work hours.
Just addressing one part of this.
Veggies aren’t a primary source of calories, when trying to reduce calorie intake and eating healthy. Veggies are there for other important reasons. You focus on beans, lentils, and other legums for calories. Meat doesn’t even come close to their value. Rice, while having it’s own problems, is also more calories per dollar by far.
You should consider looking into the bioavailability of nutrients from meat vs legumes when factoring in value for money, also.
You seem to be conflating 2 different things.
There’s the mechanism which is excess calorie intake v expenditure, and then there’s the reasons for the excess calorie intake. It’s dangerous to blend these because doing so mostly platforms excuses and denial of personal responsibility among obesity sufferers.
Oh no, reducing people with eating disorders’ sense of personal responsibility for their disorder. What a nightmare that would be.
Next up, let’s yell at someone with anorexia for throwing up in the bathroom!
Your comment is so accusatory and disingenuous.
You’re clearly missing my point intentionally.
And I have an eating disorder, so don’t start, bud.
That’s a bit like saying “In order to run faster, you need to make longer steps and more steps per minute”. It’s obviously true, but the hard part is how to do that.
Measuring how many calories you eat in a day is literally the simplest form of managing your own nutrition.
Tracking how many calories you burn is likewise something so accessible a child can (and frequently does) do it.
What is so difficult to figure out, again?
What’s difficult is keeping with it.
My weight has fluctuated from a low of 180lbs to a high of 450lbs throughout my entire adult life.
I know what to do. I know it’s easy to do it.
The hard part is knowing that the second I stop counting, it all comes piling back on.
It’s incredibly discouraging to know that most people can just…live. They eat when they’re hungry. They don’t constantly have a voice in their head telling them to eat when they aren’t. They don’t use sweets for emotional support or stress relief. They can leave food on a plate when they’re full. And they feel full with reasonable portions of food.
Moreso, they aren’t riddled with anxiety whenever their fat ass is on display out in public doing exercise.
I had an elderly woman at physical therapy tell me I’m the biggest man she’s ever seen. You know how upsetting that is? Like, no shit, I know I’m fat. And sure she likely has no filter because of dementia but man it still burns.
It’s an entire lifetime of learned experiences, eating habits, and psychological trauma. That elderly woman may as well have been one of the bullies in grade school or a douche in a pickup jeering at me on a walk. That’s the hard part.
It’s one thing to cut calories for a few months and lose weight. It’s another to look at the entire rest of your life and know, from experience, that as soon as you fall off the wagon, it’s back to square one. That you now have to change what’s essentially been hard-coding itself into your brain since some of your earliest thoughts. That you will, forever, have to continue counting calories and tracking food.
That’s the daily struggle. Resisting what you’ve known your entire life. And worse, needing it. Because you still have to eat, right? So you’ve got to eat, but you have to control it.
You have to control what, and how much, you eat while the food industry keeps on shoveling chemically-addictive foods in front of your face everywhere you go. Piping delicious smells out their exhaust vents as you drive by.
I don’t expect you to understand. People who never struggled with weight really don’t get it. Good for you.
On paper it’s easy. But our brains and bodies aren’t made of paper.
Imagine telling an alcoholic they need exactly one beer a day for the rest of their life. I would wager that’s harder than completely quitting alcohol, or even developing a healthier relationship with it. It has to be in the house. Eventually they have to go to the bar or the liquor store. And every day, for the rest of their life, they have to maintain that restraint.
That’s what obesity is like.
It’s miserable. Eat less and move more!
But the everything is screaming at me to eat. You’re hungry. And the voices from childhood! Don’t waste food! That’s a fucking sin! Don’t throw anything away, it’s better to treat your own body like a trashcan than to actually throw anything away!
And when you do eat, how do you stop? Because my brain knows there’s more food in the kitchen. It also knows how to make more food. And it’s going to go in there. It’s exhausting to have to say no every second of every day to a brain that’s a toddler.
Hate it.
Seriously those starving children in Africa owe me a little bit of thanks for always finishing my plate. Or something.
It is complex. There’s a mix of biology & psychology. Some people eat because they’d die if they didn’t. Others, for pleasure. Still others, it’s the only pleasure they experience in a day.
What do you do when the dopamine hit only occurs when you eat?
Some people drown anxiety in alcohol or xanax addictions. Others do it with food. The problem there is you can’t detox from food and remove it from your life.
Dig into some of the research nuggets, in this area, it’s wild stuff.
In addition there’s work to try to parse out some answers by studying cats. Why is one of your cats a behemoth while the other is a normal weight, both eating the same food from the same bowl?
Totally agree with you. And also the effect of drugs like antipsychotics. Even the skinniest people gain weight and have trouble keeping it off.
So the people struggling to lose weight just don’t actually want to lose weight? There are no psychological factors involved at all, no hormones, genetics, environmental factors, education - nothing to figure out?
Are you not aware of what “simplest” means?
Did I say that measuring calories is the end-all, be-all of nutrition and dietary knowledge?
Don’t put words in my mouth.
You did say CICO is the only thing you need.
Please point to another mechanism by which weight is lost.
Proper intake of vitamins, minerals, and essential nutrients is above the scope of what we’re discussing.
Proper nutrition absolutely able to be maintained at a caloric level that would facilitate weight loss.
Stop arguing in bad faith.
Sounds like goalposting to me.
Type 1 diabetics, without treatment, can consume vast amounts of food (and hence as a result calories) and yet continue to waste away. How do you explain this with CICO?
Actually, your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) can change.
What you see online is based off of your age and your height and your weight, you should burn approximately x number of calories per day.
But people with thyroid issues and hormone issues and metabolic irregularities can actually burn less or more than the standard BMR listed on the internet.
To find out your true BMR, you have to go and get tested.
That being said, what you should do, ideally, is trust what the internet says about it, and then, if you find yourself having problems losing weight, then go and get your BMR tested. There are many sports medicine places that have the testing equipment that will do it for fifty to a hundred dollars, and you can find out that if you deviate from the norm. For instance, I burn about 200 calories less than my BMR says I should.
So if I’m eating 500 calories under that on my diet, I’m only burning 300 calories a day.
And if I eat specifically the number of calories my BMR says I should be allowed to eat and maintain my weight, I’m actually putting on 200 calories every day.
Intermittent fasting is a framework for how to organise that. If you don’t need a framework, good for you.
That’s just being healthy. I’d hardly call that a fad diet
some people look at me in horror if i say i’m skipping dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow, or god forbid, not eating until day after tomorrow-- they absolutely think it’s a “fad” and that i’m going to die immediately if i don’t eat burgers and fries ASAP
i don’t know where you are, but where i live, skipping a meal or two is like… spitting on jesus or something