People in the 50s weren't slimmer because they had ironclad determination to stay such.
For example, I have a routine of going to a group fitness class at my gym in the morning. I don't need to summon willpower, I just have a morning routine that involves doing x thing at y time. No thought required.
Given the abundance of options for fitness classes and meal plan services, you really can just put this on auto-pilot and have a lifestyle that is healthier than 99% of your peers.
This is part of what's fucked up about modern American lifestyles.
We shouldn't be promoting layering healthy behaviors (fresh foods and exercise) on top of our default lives -- we should be doing a better job of engineering our environment to make those things the default for all people.
F.ex. what if we highly taxed automobile entry into urban cores and shopping districts?
But because I live in suburban Australia and eat the same pesticide laden slop as everybody else, I too have a gym membership.
What does this actually mean to you? Walking or even running is certainly not comparable to going to the gym, so what, should we lift heavy weights as part of our regular jobs to keep up our upper body muscle mass?
Ergo, we don't need to turn our jobs or built environment into Ninja Warrior.
We just need to build it to encourage that modest amount of activity.
It is empirically and demonstrably ineffective as a solution.
Obviously no one is talking about a treadmill concentration camp here, good lord.
I guess what I want to express is habits are one step closer to a lifestyle change and that's what keeps one ultimately healthy (mentally, too). We can't have nightmare commutes to soul-sucking jobs to continually have people addicted to looking at screens and think that there's no fallout. Adding, "but now there are drugs!" isn't an advancement.
That being said - I do feel like reducing the amount of willpower needed is the key. I love junk food, but if I never buy it at a grocery store it's much easier to cut it out. If I have no chips in the house I could still get some at the corner store, but I need to be much less disciplined than if the chips were in my pantry
Deviating from the mean is hard. Bad food and sedentarism are the norm.
Making the good choice the easy/only choice is the only way to solve this problem long-term (without drugs)
I wouldn’t call taking the stairs in a pre-elevator world “effortless”, rather it was just the only option.
I also think better food handling/storage/treatment/blah means we absorb & retain more of the calories that we consume.
It seems clear enough to me that there is something - something - in the ecosystem that messes up the body's weight / energy homeostasis and we haven't identified the culprit. It might be a food additive, but it could be something to do with artificial light in the evening or plasticizers in our plastic products or who knows what.
Just my pov as non-overweight person who doesn't exercise (other than flipping my four year old around), doesn't walk or run long distances (but a 5 mile walk every couple of months doesn't phase me), eats very few fruits and vegetables, generally eats mostly meat, pasta, bread, cheese, cream and potatoes, and ends up in a fast food outlet maybe once a week on average.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get...
it doesn't have to be just habit, but cultural/learned factors likely play a huge part.
each generation eats more, gets bigger, obesity runs in the family, (many obesity associated genes are mostly expressed in the brain ... the typical cursed environment-gene interaction), portion sizes got bigger, it became normal to gulp down a lot more sugar, etc.
People in the 50s (in the US) had, among other things, fistfuls of benzedrine.
Edit: here is a link for the skeptical folks https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/speedy-history-americ...
On the other hand, if like me, you have ADHD and weight issues, it could be more helpful. Because it could treat your ADHD enough to help you actually establish and follow a structured diet and exercise regime. Especially if your ADHD includes impulsivity. The last time I was on lisdex treatment, I lost about 5kg from the initial boost, a lot of it was probably water weight. Then I managed to cut about 30kg later with calorie counting and regular cardio.
So the physical effects themselves are largely a pisstake.
> James Nye, for example, was one of a family of eleven children raised in rural Sussex in the 1820s and recalled how the ‘the young ones’ in his family went ‘very short of food’. Despite his mother’s best efforts, he rarely had more than ‘half a bellyful’ at mealtimes, and ate scarcely anything other than bread.
> Following the harvest failures of 1816, for example, John Lincoln’s entire family was forced to undergo severe privations. His two children succumbed to disease very easily — their quick deaths from measles were likely owing in part to prior malnourishment.
You can't be obese if you don't have food.
I think they may have taken your prompt and thought about the 1820s, 1400s, 1200s or 200 BCE. Did you mean to direct people to discuss the 1990s by listing the other 4 eras?
It seems like you do not want to discuss any factors relating to obesity in history at all, yet you keep engaging in this topic anyway. It is impossible to have a conversation where one side discusses facts like drug availability or food scarcity and the other says “no think about something else” as a canned response.
What do you think is the cause of the increased level of obesity? What do you think is the solution, if any?
It seems far, far more likely to me that right now is the aberration – in fact we know today is aberrant on several dimensions that are presumably related to obesity, so that's where we should look.
Big, system-wide changes like what we're experiencing are almost always both multicausal and overdetermined.
The causes here are:
1. Production of cheap, extremely palatable, ultra-high caloric density foods (mitigable). Note: This is not the same thing as saying "people used to be thin because they were starving." It is absolutely possible to feed a country amply and not yield the low price/great taste/horrible nutrition profile that dominates the American diet today.
2. Increase in sedentary time due to shift from physically intensive professions (not very solvable), car-centric urban planning (solvable), and the dominance of ass-in-chair leisure activities (probably mitigable)
3. The science is early on this but there's good reason to look further into endocrine-disruptive chemical poisoning (mitigable). We are finding these compounds absolutely everywhere we look and we should be very open to the possibility we are mass-poisoning people and damaging their metabolism: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10003192/
It is a useful and topical period to discuss in a thread about ubiquitous weight loss drug usage.
I think they may have taken your prompt and thought about the 1820s, 1400s, 1200s or 200 BCE. Did you mean to direct people to discuss the 1990s by listing the other 4 eras?
So yeah, culture driven lower portion sizes + meds driven lower appetite is a well-tested combination with known positive outcomes.
No. They lived in an overall healthier environment. But they were also subject to much greater social pressure to stay slim and could endure fairly intense social judgment and stigmatization for weights that we consider normal (particularly women).
They lived in a different environment. The universal appetite-reduction drug was nicotine, and the common methods of administration had a number of undesirable side effects.
In the 1950s, malnutrition was a serious issue that many people in poor areas died from. When was the last time someone died because they didn't have access to food? Obviously, the other side of that coin is that food being so plentiful, people eat much, much more than ever before.
Food abundance is good, but it is not the answer to this question. For example, in America today the richest locations tend to be the most physically fit.
Weak thesis.
There was a far more vicious shaming culture 50-70 years ago about things like being obese. And culturally it's still looked down upon to be obese, it's just not as acceptable to be vicious about it (and of course sometimes people still are).
Today however there is a lot more "always on" pressure: social media is a huge component to social, social acceptance, socializing, social learning & sharing, getting to date people, et al. That's a form of individually focused media pressure that didn't exist back then. And sure you can turn it off, not partake, but there are usually serious consequences especially for younger people.
That's the context.
As recently as the 1980s movies were overloaded with jokes about fat people, it was extremely common. That's stigma in action culturally.
Answer: literally non-existent.
Indeed, we have the inception of Weight Watchers at the start of the next decade, replacing far crazier things like the cabbage diet being used en masse.
Yes, it was easier in some ways to live a healthier life; one reason why was the rampant social policing of each other's weight.
Perhaps, perhaps not. But you'd expect that if there's many different causes making weight gain more common and only one is changes in social pressures (as I've already stipulated in each post).
And, likewise, as stipulated above: overt social stigma is not the only reason why people might prefer to be of a lower weight.
> The success of those efforts has decreased over time.
Well, one reason for this is that we've reduced the use of obviously harmful but effective weight loss techniques like cigarettes and stimulants. The 1950s were the era of the rainbow diet pill clinic, where you'd walk in and get a personalized cocktail of amphetamines and thyroid drugs and laxatives and diuretics to help you control weight.
That's million years of evolution with food scarcity and modern capitalist world which created unprecedented abundance of food (and other things). And before you compare it to Europe — europeans still smoke much more than americans. Tobacco is also just a chemical that decreases effects of obesity, just in a different form.
Countries in Europe with approximately the same obesity problem as the US:
Poland, Croatia, Romania, Britain, Hungary, Georgia, Slovakia, Chechia, Ireland, Greece.
And of course New Zealand, Australia, Canada are all in the same boat as well.
Those are all over 30% obesity and climbing (Romania is 38%, nearly at the US levels). The US is of course the leader of the pack, however it's all the same fundamental problem.
Well, heights increased dramatically for a couple decades so what that meant was that many people in the 1950s were starving. In the 1930s, people died of starvation even in the US.
I don't really think that we want to go back to starving our population just to be thin, thanks.
Diet is a way bigger factor in weight control than activity, unless you’re a pro athlete burning thousands of calories a day from exercise because you’re working out nonstop as your job.
You should still walk for general health, but not for weight loss.
EDIT: this report from Time about Japanese food culture rings true.
Diet is the overwhelming deciding factor when it comes to weight gain.
As another commenter posted, the amount of walking even a highly active person does is fairly negligible wrt weight loss/gain. As another anecdote - my ambient walking milage is 5 miles/day and I run an additional 20-30 miles a week and still maintain an obese BMI
>> Unfortunately, I have to drive everywhere, work too many hours to have free time for recreation and have no idea which government subsidy is going to help big ag likely at the expense of my health.
At what point do people stop letting the choice being largely "made" for them and choose something else? The gov subsidy has nothing to do with my personal health choices. My grocery store has the same fresh fruits & vegetable sections grocery stores in Europe have. I am lucky to live in a state whose dominate grocery store sources regional meats & produce, sells their own brand of food made fully or mostly with ingredients I can pronounce, and has complete whole food prepared meals for 1-2 people that take 25mins in the oven. [for the same price as fast food]
It's part of the reason I choose not to move. Other choices are a standing desk with a walking pad, which makes it trivial to walk 3-4+ miles a day. I could make more money studying leetcode and living in "elite" tech valley, or hustling for more work instead of choosing myself over the large house in swank community that society has picked as what is "success" for me. Eventually I chose to take less of what "they" told me to choose; at some point we have to realize the only person that is going to live with our choices is ourself. If GLP-1s is needed to help people get back or get to that point of realization, then maybe it's a blessing to undo all the ills we(society made up of our neighbors) all contributed to creating.
I debated posting because this is the usual response, instead of seeing the point as, "we" continue to create this society not some magical "others". I am where I am because of my choices + the lucky draw of loving computers and a dedicated family that scrapped and saved and sacrificed to buy me my own computer as a teenager which helped me move out of the situation I was born in. And even that was better than many of the people I grew up with. So no, this wasnt some privileged post of someone who never walked 2+ miles to the corner store with their friend to pick up a half gallon of milk and pasty white "bread" with food stamps so they could have sandwiches for dinner. [added: while this situation sounds bad it's better than where they (and many of my other friends) came from as they could have been deported back to there if found]
Instead of being forced to drive everywhere for the most basic possible human needs - like getting groceries, going to the doctor, or dropping kids off at school - as is the case in 90% of America - what if you could walk to those places instead? You would get exercise as part of your every day life, with no extra effort!
What if instead of corn syrup being so heavily subsidized, we could use more filling sweeteners in a lower amount instead? What if people lived closer to agriculture, instead of in faraway suburban tract housing only accessible by car, so they had easier access to fresh meat and vegetables, instead of ultraprocessed package food?
These dreams are not "diet and exercise", they are a fundamental reshaping of American lifestyle that would directly lead to weight loss. We know this, because America used to look like this before, say, 1940. In old photos you see people in huge crowds in streets as they walked to their everyday errands, and menus and recipes of the era are mostly minimally processed food that is mostly local. Americans of the past were not overweight, because the way society arranged its physical existence didn't permit it!
(You’ll quickly end up with another underground white powder economy though…)
I'm not sure you could really find data to back your anecdotes.
Because they were poor and didn't have a choice. Making driving extremely expensive and inconvenient and prohibitively high taxes on processed food etc. might force people to change their lifestyles, I'm just not sure how politically feasible that.
I was that guy. For a variety of reasons that aren’t relevant i developed insulin resistance over a relatively short time that made it increasingly difficult to lose weight. I’m in my mid 40s, which also makes it difficult.
I got on one of the GLP drugs 18 months ago. I am down 80 pounds, and am running 20 miles a week. I’ll be doing a half marathon in March. Ive dropped the dose twice and still going strong.
Taking the pill made exercise possible. Online everyone likes to apply a moral hazard thing to every discussion. GLP medication twiddled my dopamine system and allowed me to achieve my goals. Period. If you think that makes me weak, I cannot think of anything that I care less about.
Choosing to eat fewer processed foods is very effective but does not require that much self-control since appetite will fall automatically.
I don't have a problem with a cure only if it doesn't reduce the focus and effort on prevention.
There has to be a reason why so many more people are obese today than decades ago. I refuse to believe we can't find out why and make changes to reverse it.
But if it's so easy to cure, will enough people care about figuring out how to prevent it?
Presumably people who have good self control and are not prone to developing addictions (due genetic or various semi-immutable cause) do not become obese in the first place. It might be fairly easy easy for them to lose weight they just don't need.
1. Posts from folks who diet+exercise, or who have tried diet/exercise and nothing's worked so they then turned to Zepbound ("excited to hit the gym," "my diet is finally starting to work with Zepbound" and similar)
2. Posts from folks who haven't tried diet/exercise and turned to Zepbound first. (e.g. "I'm excited to eat dessert and laze around on my couch all day!" or "Zep is so much easier than before, no more keto for me" and similar)
Which group do you think would have more posts?
Selection bias probably prevents us from being able to count "Zepbound didn't work for me, but diet and exercise did" posts, which is why i suggest this.
Here's my hypothesis: I think self-control is generally uncorrelated to losing weight. Perhaps it's necessary to have self-control to lose weight "the simple way," but certainly not sufficient. I know lots of friends who've struggled and found it's not so simple.