This question touches on some very deep and controversial ideas kicking around in the current conversation. The question of whether we have an inherent "human nature", a biological substrate that informs our capabilities and behavior, touches on everything from education to tech employment. I don't want to debate the subject generally.
But can we agree, for the specific case of food consumption that
1) we have very strong impulses that are difficult to consciously resist; that
2) these impulses originate in biology; that
3) the existence of exceptional willpower is a mark of exceptional self-discipline, a level not practical to achieve for most; and that
4) advertisers prey on the difficulty most people experience in controlling their food behavior?
I don't agree that this is what's going on.
People don't avoid obesity by exceptional willpower. They just have healthy eating habits, usually ones formed during childhood.
Likewise, overcoming obesity and returning oneself to a healthier weight that one can maintain requires changing habits and one's relationship with food.
Habit formation and modification can be difficult, but it's sufficiently well understood that it can be implemented.
The difficulty is getting information into people's hands about how to modify habits successfully (I like the book The Power of Habit), cutting through the misinformation surrounding what constitutes healthy eating habits and how to lose weight, and often just education about how to cook food cheaply and in a way that doesn't seem intimidating to people who are pressed for time and resort to fast food out of convenience.
When people know the concrete steps one must take to achieve something, they become that much more willing to believe they can do it.
Advertising is no doubt a factor in the obesity epidemic, but I'm not sure that's among the primary causes of it. It seems to me that food portion sizes have increased tremendously over the past four decades. Purveyors of food often seem to peddle the sheer size of portions as features. Additionally, foods that once might have been thought outrageously decadent, such as "coffee" covered in whipped-cream and loaded with caramel (basically a dessert in a cup), and pizza with crust infused with cheese, are now perceived as normal things to consume, quite possibly on a daily basis. My non-scientific observation is that the normalization of consumption of huge portions of calorie-dense "foods" is directly correlated with increases in obesity. Since we're not willing to de-normalize the former as far as I can tell, the emerging societal trend is to normalize the latter.
[0] "http://www.livescience.com/49-decade-study-americans-taller-...
Are people in low-obesity countries more resistant to such biological impulses? Do they have fewer food ads? Are they able to resist those advertisers in a more coherent fashion? Or just exhibit better willpower at national level?
* Don't consume soda or sugary drinks of any kind
* Go on 3 mile walks 3-4x weekly
* Have switched to soylent 100% of meals to make calorie counting dead simple
* Recently cut out alcohol too
You're right that "eat less, fatty" is not a helpful message. That's actually the key point in these discussions - we do know how to avoid weight gain in the abstract sense (consume less than you burn), but the implementation of that is what's difficult. Different foods have different effects on metabolism; it's difficult to count calories accurately; people often overestimate the calories that exercise burns and underestimate their consumption. It's made more difficult by sedentary lifestyles, prepared foods, and so on.
If you are gaining a pound a month consuming nothing but soylent, then you're consuming too much of it. There's no way around that fact. But the point is that it's not a failing on your part - it just demonstrates how difficult it is in practice to control one's own lifestyle.
That is incorrect, but it does help sell gym memerships.
Moreover, expending more calories via exercise typically leads to weight gain, according to emprirical studies (and anecdotal look around gym's elliptical machines next time you're in one) https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/exercising-but-gai...
Fat accummulation (and disposal) are governed by insulin, whose production is triggered by sugars and other carbohydrates.
Confusingly, consuming a high-fat, low-protein and zero-carbohydrate diet will also lead to a severe decrease in calories (as it's pretty hard to overdose on olives, coconut oil or lardo), but it's nevertheless a correlation.
It can be that our models for calculating TDEE, etc. are wrong and not accounting for a multitude of factors that might affect energy expenditure but still, it boils down to calories in -> calories out in the most simplistic level.
Calorie present != calorie consumed != calorie processed by digestive system != calorie deposited in the fat tissue
If all calories were the same, consuming 300 calories from a can of Coke and consuming 300 calories of green salad would lead to same outcomes. In long term they do not.
There's a reason why you lose weight if you have a tapeworm or have chronic diarrhea while eating the same amount of food isn't a mystery to the scientific community.
Most people don't see that much variation between the calories that pass their mouths and those that are digested by their GI tract. It's usually constant enough that calories in - calories out is enough to figure out how much you need to eat to lose weight. Even if there was a disparity between calories consumed and calories processed by the GI tract, that would only present itself as a "higher/lower metabolism" and wouldn't mean lowering calories wouldn't work to lower weight.
You can't get around physics and biology.
Okay, but that seems like an outlier case. The study I am looking for would be summarized roughly as "100 fat people start on a lower-calorie diet and increase their exercise routine over the course of 180 days. 98% of them (some statistical variation to account for weird genetics) consistently lose X pounds, a large group (60-70%) loses as many as Y pounds".
Most experiments that were set up that way either ended up reporting the results "inconclusive", or worse, as the caloric intake generally decreased, the weight increased http://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(96)00456-1/abstract
I am looking for the one, or two, or a dozen, that doesn't. Should be relatively easy to replicate.
"While this study didn’t track the women’s eating and movement habits away from the lab, it is likely that those who gained weight began eating more and moving less when they weren’t on the treadmills, “probably without meaning to,” Dr. Gaesser said."
Expending more calories via exercise increases one's weight when you eat more calories than you burned. There's nothing new there.
You'd think with a thesis this obvious it should be relatively easy to reproduce.
Hard to discuss the specifics of this exact experiment without knowing the details, but you have the control group that admits they have a weight problem and honestly tries to lose weight by signing up for this experiment. All of a sudden they turn into a bunch of cheaters buying up passes to an all-you-can-eat buffet? Is every obese person walking around extremely weak-willed? Is every thin person you see meticulously tracking their caloric intake and output?
What about entire countries that have low obesity rates? Are French or Koreans strong-willed at national level, consistently under-eating and over-exercising?
There are thousands of examples online of people who've lost weight and maintained that weight loss, not to mention the thousands of people who manipulate their weight at will to compete in events with weight classes.
Studies about diet and exercise are usually poorly designed and poorly funded, so they don't always accurately reflect reality and the existence of thousands of successes isn't invalidated by a poorly run study. Nor is our knowledge of basic physiology.
Rule of thumb: any study that relies on self-reporting diets is basically useless. It's not about lying. People are just really bad at measurement unless they explicitly measure every gram of food that enters their mouth. Intentions don't affect the quality of an implementation if you don't know how to implement something successfully. People who are underweight tend to eat less than they think and people who are overweight tend to eat more than they think.
Note that studies in which the number of calories a person consumes are tracked by the researchers leave no ambiguity in the direct relationship between the number of calories a person consumes and how their weight changes.
Distilling these issues into one of willpower is just incredibly misguided IMO and reflective more of the views of journalists who struggle with their weight and pass on the results of poorly designed studies. I addressed what I thought was a better way of looking at these issues in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13827878
It's not as though Americans have "lost willpower" over the course of a couple generations. We just started eating more and moving less.
Why we started eating more isn't a mystery. Agriculture and food companies started processing food to be less satiating and more addictive by adding sugar and fat to sell more (a massive simplification of history, admittedly). Obesity wasn't an epidemic back when we were eating whole foods since they're so much more satiating and it's difficult to maintain a caloric surplus on a diet of lentils and vegetables or whatever.
As countries like France, China, Japan, and others who have more recently maintained their normal weights on a population level get introduced to these processed Western foods, they too are seeing their rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes go up.
That is correct. I am happy to fill that knowledge gap, though, if you have any links handy.
> studies in which the number of calories a person consumes are tracked by the researchers leave no ambiguity in the direct relationship between the number of calories a person consumes and how their weight changes
Can you point me to those?
These two links are great starting points, and link to the studies if you feel like reading them:
https://examine.com/nutrition/what-should-i-eat-for-weight-l...
https://examine.com/nutrition/does-metabolism-vary-between-t...
* Your gut biome might need a "reset". Sometimes people experience extended weight gain after antibiotics because they ended up with a different, less effective biome. (Soylent might also contribute to this issue.)
* Another health issue changed your digestive process
* You're losing muscle mass, making it easier to gain fat
* You're sleeping more poorly or are more stressed
Calorie counting really isn't sufficient to know what's going on with weight changes. The factors are numerous.
If you're gaining 10-15lbs per year, then you know how much you're overconsuming. An annual gain of 15 lbs * 3500 Calories per pound of fat is about 150 Calories per day over your TDEE.
Reduce your daily caloric intake by 250-500 Calories and you should see weight loss over the long term.
If not, and you actually do know exactly how many calories you're consuming and have been tracking your weight to see how it changes, then you need to see a physician.
I have dropped weight only through calories counting, I've done cycles of bulk/cut while weightlifting, dropping weight boils down to "calories in -> calories out", we might not have a very good model of this, we might be overlooking a multitude of variables that control energy expenditure but we can't create fat from nowhere, we need to consume and have spare energy to store it.
It's not easy but it is simple. Again: I'm not saying our models for calculating TDEE or how energy restriction affects our body completely but if you are expending more calories than you are eating you are going to consume fat to create energy.
Try this: drop how many calories you are eating by another 100~200kcal/day for a week, see if the trend changes (a moving average works). If not, drop another 100~200kcal/day and watch for a week. Being STRICT is the "not easy" part.
It may be hard to limit calories without feeling hungry on a mostly soylent diet. Salad and veggies make it easier because they're low on calories, but still have a lot of bulk which helps stave off hunger.
* Are you actually tracking your calories with something like MyFitnessPal? What's your calorie intake?
* Are you tracking honestly? Especially if/when you have a bad day, or cheat day, or whatever you want to call it.
* Are you tracking accurately? If you aren't using a scale or measuring cup, the answer is probably no. Most people severely underestimate the size of their portions.
You can control the input in that equation, but on the output the body is quick to go into calorie preservation state any time the balance goes negative. Lack of energy, irritability, mid-day fatigue, general weakness, mild headaches - the list goes on.
In an ideal world everyone runs marathons while sustaining themselves on water and celery sticks. In reality maintaining consistent caloric deficit while trying to remain a functional member of the society is challenging.
A day fast is really not that bad IMO. I used to do them every sunday and found it a really effective tool to get from "obese" to "overweight" (BMI). Got much less effective as I approached "normal" though.
An excellent book on this topic is The Obesity Code by Dr Jason Fung
Obesity is a public health problem, like tobacco smoking or STIs. There's no secret - avoid ling disease by not smoking, and avoid STIs by not having unprotected sex. But clearly the "it's stimple, just fix it" approach isn't effective at improving the overall health of a population.
I honestly don't care at all about the overall health of the population. I really don't. Not that I wish them any ill-will, but I can't even begin to muster up the slightest bit of care for people I don't know ruining their lives because they eat too much or smoke. It's just not even on my radar.
I realise I'm not supposed to admit this, but I also realise I'm not the only one who thinks it.
</sarcasm>
So the question isn't what happened to personal responsibility. It's why exercising that responsibility is apparently so much more difficult than in the past. Address that, and you'll find the "agency" problem largely solves itself.
Is that not the effect of "asking the government to step in and help us?"
We'd prefer very much going around believing that behavior is somehow disjoint from genetics. That just isn't true, and as long we continue believing it's true, we're going to make bad public policy.
It is not just genetics and it is not just self control. If you eat more fat and no carbs is much easier to eat less calories in total.
But sugar in particular has an addiction characterisc. Once you go some time without it, you don't miss it as much anymore.
And fat is also delicious.
I personally rarely drink alcohol, don't smoke, take drugs etc etc. I still don't think any of the above should be forbidden. I've found it's a good idea to me - cheaper, better for my health, better for my mental state. Somehow I'm able to follow this without the state compelling me to do so.
Should we ban alcohol as well - as that is how "society works"? It does a lot of harm in many countries.
I don't understand why every good idea has to be enforced with a law.
(As an aside, I'm from a country where bicycle helmets are mandatory, despite their dubious safety benefits, and the fact as soon as the law was introduced cyclist numbers plummeted).
Consumer-choice and personal responsibility is a nice thing as long as that choice isn't systematically undermined by market forces.
FTFY.
Different people accept different levels of control over their lives, and feel they have different levels of control over their own lives. This can even change over one's life. And sometimes it's not a feeling but a much more objective fact. I know people whose interests would be better served if someone else made all their financial decisions because they have a long pattern of poor decision making regardless of the monetary amount. I don't feel I should force such a thing on those people when they don't want it, but often it's possible for an in-between solution they find agreeable enough of removing some autonomy but not all. This delicate balance is best done as locally as possible.
It's all very variable. I strongly disagree with a dichotomy I see often propped up of "we need the full force of the federal government in our daily lives" against "move to Somalia if you don't like it". A better approach is federalism. In the US at least there's been "enough" federalism to keep most larger groups of different people happy enough (even now I know I can move to a different state and be free of some of what I dislike about my current state) but the trend is less state decision and more federal control. Extending this to the city level for large cities works fine too. I don't care if Seattle wants to enact some nanny law, maybe the people of Seattle want that and indeed will have better lives because of it, but I don't care because I don't live there nor have to live there. Even if Washington State, where I do live, does something I hate, I can move. When it's the whole US that has a law that I really find unbearably intrusive, things suddenly become a lot more challenging because the cost of exit is much higher. When you can't really do anything about it you either become unhappy or rely on stoicism or whatever to get you through, it would be better though if the negative factor wasn't even there to begin with.