There is a lot of evidence that obesity is mostly hereditary/predetermined and not a choice. That's the great thing in this area of science: Everybody proofs everything all the time. No one's wiser.
> To take it to the extreme, there were no fat people in Auschwitz. That is not to say that it was good in any way and that people should starve, but just that it is not impossible to be normal for anyone, you just have to try.
So, you state that one can be lean by being forcefully starved (Auschwitz), then state that you don't think this is a good idea and then state "but it is not impossible to be normal for anyone" - well: You didn't provide an example for "normal". This people in Auschwitz were starving. Food-related diseases (and all other diseases) were on an all-time high. People were dying all the time. This is not an example of "normal", this is an example that the human body is able to withstand many, many forms of abuse until it breaks.
You would help this discussion if you were able to provide examples of big groups of obese people (there are always outliers) which were able to get lean without starving (starving is really, really bad for your body). Thanks.
edit: I've missed the part about Vietnam/Africa before. If you didn't see any fat people in Vietnam then you probably didn't look hard enough. I was there and I've seen them. Africa: Documentaries on Africa usually focus on the really poor parts of Africa. People starve there too, so: See above. (Also: There is the case of hunger obesity where you get really obese because or starvation. Try Google, but beware of shocking results)
As well your examples are very weak and can be beaten in minutes using google:
* http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15954744/ns/health-diet_and_nutr... - deciding about Africa from 0.01% of its population (specifically Bushmen that are usually covered in documentaries). I don't know.
* http://www.vietnewsonline.vn/News/Society/Health/9483/Childh...
Good thing I'm at a startup trying to help people eat healthy and in reasonable portions without feeling unduly hungry.
Metabolism is controlled in a large way by hormones. For example, extremely undernourished people will slow their metabolism way down in order to preserve what fat reserves are left. A diet that significantly increases blood sugar will, in many people, cause a high insulin response and cause fat to be stored and only glucose to be burned.
Essentially you're looking at this from the wrong way. For the body to grow in any manner, hormones are required (c.f. growth hormones during puberty). And for the body to have grown, excess calories must have been consumed. What forces people to eat so many calories that they grow in size is triggered by their hormones generally telling them that they are starving, even if they are not. See Metabolic Syndrome, Diabetes, Insulin Resistance, etc.
So yes, calories in/calories out, but you're not even considering _why_ those calories were consumed in the first place.
Disclaimer: I've been eating Low-Carb/High-Fat diet that brought my steadily worsening weight issue to a much more healthy level (91kg to 75kg) through control of my blood sugar and appetite.
The study didn't fail to do so, so therefore I didn't.
>Metabolism is controlled in a large way by hormones. For example, extremely undernourished people will slow their metabolism way down in order to preserve what fat reserves are left.
This is a myth as far as western society is concerned. No one in western society not near-death from anorexia needs to concern themselves with this.
http://www.weightwatchers.com/util/art/index_art.aspx?tabnum...
> What forces people to eat so many calories that they grow in size is triggered by their hormones generally telling them that they are starving, even if they are not.
This is not true, you've been reading too much keto literature on leptin.
I say this as someone who is a proponent of low-carb diets as a way of promoting satiety and controlling caloric intake.
>So yes, calories in/calories out, but you're not even considering _why_ those calories were consumed in the first place.
I have a whole team of nutritionists working with us, as well as my own personal experience and research, I've gathered quite a bit of experience.
Let me lay out a few things for you.
Low-carb works, anecdotally (key modifier here), because it happens to push people into eating almost no empty calories. In a diet simply absent bread, sugar, and other empty calories, virtually everything you eat is contributing your satiety as well as your overall health.
That alone will allow you to eat far less and feel fuller. Taking it that much further and saying that the entire leptin hypothesis along with the keto diet usually associated with it is somehow responsible for weight-loss when that loss could be explained purely in terms of eating healthier in general, is unscientific and unproven.
Control for people who don't eat empty/junk calories versus people who stay strictly keto, and we'll have a better idea of what impact blood sugar and leptin have on the matter.
I don't deny that insulin resistance has a long-term impact on health, but I sincerely doubt it has much, if anything, to do with short-term weight loss.
The tricky part is in making it easier to eat less than you burn.
Eating healthier food that better sates you inside some kind of structure will help you accomplish that.
Our product will solve all of those problems as well as take the pain out of meal planning even for people not trying to necessarily lose weight.
Calories in/out is just extreme oversimplification that doesn't help in the slightest and causes people to starve themselves needlessly because of bad intuition, also risking their health and ultimately achieving the opposite of the desired effect.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3723464
Our product accounts for a great deal of factors, don't conflate my over-simplistic agreement with the OP for a lack of dedicated research into how we actually plan to help others.
Macronutrients and their impact on satiety are core to our product and to helping people eat healthier.
Other people: keep my username bookmarked for future updates, I'll be posting the product on HN once we're ready for more publicity.
Good luck on your weight loss whether you end up a user of our product or not.
Generally, yes, you are technically correct. What I hate about where this train of thought often leads is: it is not human, at all. It ultimately makes all fat people look like lazy, greedy and stupid slobs because hey, the answer is sooo simple and totally obvious, right? 100% calories in vs. out!
What you completely fail to realize is the squishy human part that makes a lot of people eat way too much and not move around enough. Food and food addiction (mild or heavy) can be very powerful escape mechanisms for underlying psychological problems and once you are caught in that downward spiral, it can be very difficult to find a way out of e.g. depressions AND on top of that shedding all that excess weight with potentially life-long damage already done to your tissue and skin.
With fat shaming being a very widely accepted form of discrimination, it will take a LOT of courage and strength to lift oneself out of that hole, so I don't find it that surprising that a lot of people can ultimately not change and they hardly get any sympathy or healthy, positive encouragement, quite on the contrary, a lot of additional toxic shame.
So there definitely is a lot more to this.
It's unreasonable to expect every human being to possess the knowledge of a nutritionist just to manage their own diets.
Hopefully the product I'm working on will level the playing field.
I was in Vietnam 5 years ago. I didn't see any fat people. Look at photos/documentaries of Africa. No fat people.
To take it to the extreme, there were no fat people in Auschwitz. That is not to say that it was good in any way and that people should starve, but just that it is not impossible to be normal for anyone, you just have to try.