On an individual level, yes, "try harder" is all we personally can do (well, until GLP-1 agonists, LOL). So, sure, it's "good advice" in that it's all there is.
On a policy level? As far as medical intervention efficacy? It's entirely useless. Even crazy-expensive interventions involving several hours of professionals' time per week, for months on end, are wildly less effective than one might think.
What does work? Changing environment! Just ("just", lol) move to a skinnier country. You'll probably lose weight. Conversely, if people from there move to the US, they'll probably get fatter. That is, willpower and accountability and all that are not why certain populations are skinnier than others. Environment, which likely encompasses tons of factors that'd be incredibly expensive and take decades to change, seems to be it.
> Your claim that "trying harder" is "akin to insanity" is such an overreaction that it's misleading exaggeration, not worthy of further dissection.
"Akin to insanity" in the sense that nobody who's aware of research on the topic thinks it can work over a population... I mean, yes, very much so.
It's hard to wrap your head around that when you got fit working out. They will firmly believe that obesity will be solved by people working out and having a stricter diet. I took me years to understand that it's doesn't work for an entire population. Honestly, even if that happened (everybody started working out), people would have a lot of problems with body image, as we can see in teenagers boys nowadays.
Dieting and working out definitely does work, the problem is that the median person attempting it will badly yo-yo over the years while feeling terrible about themselves and probably not really getting that much healthier over the long term. So it does work, but it also doesn't, practically at all, for the overwhelming majority of people who attempt it. That's why a lot of these posts end up having people talking (well, writing) past each other: diet and exercise does work. It works great. It's also a miserable failure that's nearly useless.
Again, even those with extensive and expensive outside support see depressingly poor outcomes on average, though of course that does improve things somewhat. Those are still a ton worse than GLP-1 agonists, as far as efficacy. And that's the very best effort we've got for "diet and exercise" interventions, short of live-in dietitians and chefs and personal trainers or putting people in total institutions.
Meanwhile, people move from a skinnier country to a fatter one and usually get fatter. Willpower wasn't what was keeping them skinnier. It makes no sense to expect willpower to be what'll make the fatter country skinnier when that doesn't seem to be why skinnier countries are skinnier.
I seems like people cant help but discuss this issue in a black or white way, when it isnt a binary. Choice obviously matters. It is difficult to change. Environment obviously matters. It is difficult to change.
When talking about human society, environment is a culmination of collective choice.
People who say willpower is futile are still faced with choice of if they feed their kids soda and McDonalds for breakfast.
It's difficult to do but demonstrably possible. That's why it is hard to consider any non-willpower solution. And why it is very easy to be consumed by ego if you've done it. I used to be in the militant-willpower camp because I pulled myself up by the bootstraps, so to speak. I had to study... me, in order to make it work. I had to be smarter than default mode network me and anticipate my behavior.
To change my lifestyle meant somehow incorporating all the good behaviors I wanted to do but within the limitations of being me. It took a lot of work. I carefully measured my caloric intake (gram scale all the things) and expenditure (fitness watch with optical HR, fancy schmancy scale that does body fat estimation) plus doing things like: always taking the stairs, combine my morning run/cycle with my commute (shower at the office), taking the longer way, etc. Dropped 40kg. Went from couch to running half-marathons and cycling centuries. I had to completely change my relationship with food and study all of the nutrition stuff that was never taught to me. I had to unlearn habits instilled by my parents (emotional eating, boredom eating) which meant finding different ways to deal with stress and relieve boredom. ADHD is a bitch. And weed is awesome. Learning how to accommodate munchies without putting on weight also requires forethought.
No. It really isn't all that realistic for everyone to do what I did much less have the same privileges and opportunities. I had to treat my body like a biologist studying a critter. I was incredibly lucky to be at the right spot in my life where I hit a glass ceiling at work and had so much fuck you energy pent up from feeling out of control of my life. I chose to exert maximum control over my body in order to cope and prove something.
It was a monumental amount of effort over a two year period. It is extremely unrealistic to ask people to use a gram scale for their food consistently. Or to log/track their food intake for every bite. Or to always monitor their heart rate to estimate/track your caloric output. Hyper monitoring your body is a weird hobby.
I really do think instead we should be legislating and regulating food more strictly. Labeling isn't really enough. Food science is being weaponized, much like psychology has been with advertising. We shouldn't allow that kind of manipulation for profit.
On a micro level you can change your environment easily - stop buying foods that are bad for you at the store. Don't go down the chip and candy aisle. If you are not the one who shops for food in your household, inform the one who is that for your health they need to not purchase snacks.
In my anecdotal experience, fat people grossly underestimate how much they eat or lack the understand of how calorically dense the foods they consume are.
Taking a picture of everything you consume in a week that isn’t water, and reviewing it at the end of the week is fucking mind blowing if you’re honest about it.
Science is a process, not an agent that can agree or disagree.
On a personal level we can do a lot more than just try harder. We can make permanent lifestyle changes in which healthier options become the default rather than something that we have to actively choose. This can be done in (almost) any environment.
In the first one, the communion was actual wine. The priest was adamant about it being real wine. But, we had a guy who was a recovering alcoholic in the congregation. Now, if you know anyone that is recovering from alcohol abuse, then you know that even one sip of booze is enough to send you on a bender. But, our priest was adamant that we all take communion in full bodied wine.
The other church I was at had communion too. But this church has the communion wine as sugar free grape juice, and all the bread served was gluten free. Covered the diabetics and the alcoholics with the 'wine' and covered the ceiliacs with the bread. No one in the congregation ever complained about the tastes; we all grew to rather like it that way, thankyouverymuch.
Which, I dare ask, was the more christ-like way of taking holy communion?
It's wild to me that the question of "why in the goddamn fuck are we eating Jesus's body and drinking his blood?" is in the background of this entire comment.
Could you please stop posting flamebait comments? We've already had to ask you this. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so we eventually ban accounts that keep doing it.
This seems far too harsh. Some people just poop out excess calories. Other people store excess calories as an energy reserve much more efficiently. Not everyone who is obese does that, but it's definitely a factor for many people.
For what it's worth, completely putting the environment at fault also doesn't seem right to me. But genetics absolutely plays a part, as does what is considered a "standard" meal/portion.
No, that's not how it works. Everyone will store excess calories as fat. People don't just poop out excess calories unless they have a serious medical condition that inhibits functioning of the digestive system. Outside of rare genetic conditions that cause adipose tissue hypertrophy, genetics only play a minor role like a few percent plus or minus.
> For those who are obese, in 99% of cases, they are the problem, not genetics. A lack of discipline is attributable to the individual, rarely external factors alone.
If the environment doesn't nudge the individual to be more disciplined, whose fault is it? If it's the individual, how exactly do you think this can be solved? Any solution that starts with "if everyone just did X then Y would be solved" is a non-solution, people respond to nudges, and incentives.
There needs to be something systemic happening for so many individuals across many different cultures to be lacking the will power to change something that the majority of the sufferers are not happy with, just brushing this into the "personal responsibility" bucket is a cop out, it's a non-solution, and not even wrong.
It might make you feel better but it doesn't provide any path to a system-based solution.
Not really. genetics play a huge role in satiety signaling, and you can't just willpower your way out of it the way someone who simply lacka discipline can.
Accountability for what? To who? And for what purpose?
> in 99% of cases, they are the problem, not genetics
Where'd you get that number? What are you basing it on?
> Your claim that "trying harder" is "akin to insanity" is such an overreaction that it's misleading exaggeration, not worthy of further not worthy of further dissection.
What does this even mean? How is my claim an overreaction? An overreaction to what? In what context or reference frame for appropriate reaction is my claim an overreaction?
In my comment above I am basically just saying "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
If you make it cheaper, easier and more socially acceptable for a group of people to eat low quality processed foods, even a portion of the time (as is the case where I live), that group of people will be more likely to eat processed foods.
It’s not impossible to follow the advice in the in the article, it’s just harder than it should be for some groups of people. Unfairly so, I think.
You lack accountability to yourself. Read this comment you wrote:
> People should also talk about the volition trap. I'm 40 and it feels like I've had more than a life's worth of people talking about how "you can do it if you just try!"
"People should" instead of "I'm going to". "It feels like" instead of making a direct statement.
Nobody here knows your situation or why you formed the way you did. But also, it doesn't actually matter. We always want some deep explanation but understanding is often just a way of dealing with impotence.
This just sounds like you got brainwashed by Nike ("advertising signs that con / you into thinking..."). I'm not a person who makes excuses, and I'm not making excuses here. I'm not even obese.
I'm just observing phenomena. And the question I want to know is how is it that so many humans, who came this far evolutionarily, are all of a sudden so messed up? I mean, literally every single person alive today stands on the shoulders of giants. We are progeny of the winners, the tenacious, the survivors, the killers. What happened??
What happened? My morbidly obese coworker eats almost an entire pizza for lunch. That's really the whole thing summed up.
We allowed the normalization of incredibly calorie and sugar dense foods. We got kids hooked on the diet young. We made cartoons showing that kids hate vegetables while demonizing Michelle Obama got wanting good meals.
At some point, the social pressures got removed. Being severely overweight and eating more than a normal share stopped getting ridiculed. And then doctors started getting pushback because patients would rather giggle about their obesity and pretend it's okay than accept they're killing themselves. And those people fed that attitude to their kids, who are now dealt a losing hands when their parents raise them fat. Our culture's "iconic breakfast" is a bowl of milk filled with marshmallows and sugary carb bits.
But the unpleasant reality is that if my coworker just stopped ordering the pizza, they would start losing weight. It's hard, especially once in the hole, but everyone who isn't morbidly obese does that every day.
I see it the same as with alcohol, tobacco and other substances. Lack of self-control. Modern food is specifically engineered to be addictive and easy to get. Full of starch, sugars and fats.
There will be no obesity if person maintains a low calorie intake.
Like let's say all of a sudden wolves started getting super obese. What happened to wolves that they evolved for millions of years just fine, and then whoop all of a sudden they were all diabetic and obese?
Because food is cheap and they have no self-control.
And because certain groups promote fatness as a virtue, or that fatness is healthy.
Just a few comments above you claimed "The sheer scope of the obesity pandemic should make it clear that we are not the problem", and now you admit that it's your fault. Which one is it?
