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I've yet to meet a fat person who didn't eat large portions and sugary foods. "It's a glandular problem," you'd often hear a few decades back. Now, there is ot

I've yet to meet a fat person who didn't eat large portions and sugary foods. "It's a glandular problem," you'd often hear a few decades back. Now, there is other mumbo-jumbo. But, at the end of the day, fat people eat too much. Period. Mass is not created out of thin air. (Unless you're a plant.) Whether this fact is "helpful" to people trying to lose weight, I'll leave to the psychologists. But, it's true. And, there are some fat people that do change their behavior when presented with the truth; namely, quit eating foods with so many carbs, starches, and sugars.

hcurtiss 7y ago
Of course they eat too much. The question is why? Taubes has a good example. If I asked you why that restaurant was so full, and you responded "because more people entered than exited," I would think you were an asshole. But CICO is the same kind of platitude. It doesn't actually tell you anything. Taubes and many others assert that the kind of food you put in your body dictates your drive to put more food in your body. Eat sugary foods, and you'll drive insulin, pack glucose away in adipose tissue, move less, and want to eat more. Sugar drives energy into adipose tissue AND slows your BMR AND drives hunger. That's a far more useful observation than CICO.
- bscphil 7y ago
  Well... sort of. There's a major difference in that restaurants usually don't have the ability to directly control how many people enter and how many people leave. So pointing out that there's an in/out inbalance is useless, as you say, since there's nothing that can be easily done about it, and that's obvious, so the person asking the question probably didn't want to know that. In the case of eating, you can control directly how many calories are coming in, and you have at least a little control over how many calories are going out. So in fact CICO is very often useful: it's a kind of promise that if you cut your intake sufficiently you will lose weight. It's true that certain diets will make you want to eat more calories: but the promise of CICO is that if you ignore what you are inclined to do, and simply focus on your intake, you will lose weight. Obviously you are better off adjusting your diet too, but that's because doing so makes it easier by burning slightly more calories and making you slightly less hungry. What you're doing is a sort of sociological analysis: figuring out why people eat too much. Sure, if you can come up with tricks to eat less that help dieters, that's great, but people who want to diet fundamentally have to learn to ignore the instinct to eat and limit their intake.
- scarface74 7y ago
  I’m always hungry. There is hardly ever a time that I feel completely satiated. In other words, there is never a time that I don’t have a drive to eat too much. It takes constant discipline to keep my calorie balance in check. As humans, we all have the mental capacity to not give in to our lizard brain.
  - hcurtiss 7y ago
    I think the fundamental mistake of the last three decades of health advice is overestimating that capacity in the face of declining insulin sensitivity due to persistently high glycemic loads.
- lurquer 7y ago
  >Of course they eat too much. The question is why? Because they are gluttons and lack self-control. Why coddle them?

hcurtiss 7y ago

Of course they eat too much. The question is why? Taubes has a good example. If I asked you why that restaurant was so full, and you responded "because more people entered than exited," I would think you were an asshole. But CICO is the same kind of platitude. It doesn't actually tell you anything. Taubes and many others assert that the kind of food you put in your body dictates your drive to put more food in your body. Eat sugary foods, and you'll drive insulin, pack glucose away in adipose tissue, move less, and want to eat more. Sugar drives energy into adipose tissue AND slows your BMR AND drives hunger. That's a far more useful observation than CICO.

bscphil 7y ago
Well... sort of. There's a major difference in that restaurants usually don't have the ability to directly control how many people enter and how many people leave. So pointing out that there's an in/out inbalance is useless, as you say, since there's nothing that can be easily done about it, and that's obvious, so the person asking the question probably didn't want to know that. In the case of eating, you can control directly how many calories are coming in, and you have at least a little control over how many calories are going out. So in fact CICO is very often useful: it's a kind of promise that if you cut your intake sufficiently you will lose weight. It's true that certain diets will make you want to eat more calories: but the promise of CICO is that if you ignore what you are inclined to do, and simply focus on your intake, you will lose weight. Obviously you are better off adjusting your diet too, but that's because doing so makes it easier by burning slightly more calories and making you slightly less hungry. What you're doing is a sort of sociological analysis: figuring out why people eat too much. Sure, if you can come up with tricks to eat less that help dieters, that's great, but people who want to diet fundamentally have to learn to ignore the instinct to eat and limit their intake.
scarface74 7y ago
I’m always hungry. There is hardly ever a time that I feel completely satiated. In other words, there is never a time that I don’t have a drive to eat too much. It takes constant discipline to keep my calorie balance in check. As humans, we all have the mental capacity to not give in to our lizard brain.
- hcurtiss 7y ago
  I think the fundamental mistake of the last three decades of health advice is overestimating that capacity in the face of declining insulin sensitivity due to persistently high glycemic loads.
lurquer 7y ago
>Of course they eat too much. The question is why? Because they are gluttons and lack self-control. Why coddle them?