Well, actually, you can safely lose 2 lbs per week of body weight. The pandemic has been going on long enough that that works out to 150 lbs for someone who sta

Well, actually, you can safely lose 2 lbs per week of body weight. The pandemic has been going on long enough that that works out to 150 lbs for someone who started slowly losing weight as soon as the pandemic began (the obesity connection was obvious and well publicized early on) Almost all obese people are less than 150 lbs overweight. So yeah, at both an individual and societal level, we should have responded (and should respond today) by treating obesity as a public health emergency (or at an individual level a personal medical emergency) similar to early stage cancer, severe hypertension, or serious nutrient deficiency, etc. The medical evidence even before covid was clear: obesity kills. I'm going to cross over into controversial territory when I say that in the total absence of modern processed foods and modern sedentism, becoming or staying obese is difficult for most people. (If this were not true, how to explain that obesity was and is rare in places with neither of the above? Why do my size L clothes get labelled as size XL in France and Asia? Why do obesity levels keep rising in America as sedentism and processed food keep marching on? WHY was obesity unknown in my family until immigrated from a traditional agricultural society where every family had deep culinary knowledge and walked or rode horses everywhere to a modern industrialized car dependent one where food comes from freezers and microwaves, and then immediately became very common? Why is Asia thinner than Europe, Europe thinner than NYC and other walkable northeastern cities with a lot of food choice, and those places thinner than flyover country america?) This is an easy problem to solve. It hasn't been solved for decades because bathing the population in processed food and sedentism can't be offset by a few public service ads imploring people to spend all their energies fighting their artificially unhealthy environment. Instead, just give people a healthy environment and watch the problem melt away. Sell healthy food as ubiquitously as fast food and make it easy to get around without a car. Problem solved or at least severely improved. Lots of data obviously showing this. This is a problem we can solve, or at least make enough headway on to save millions of lives. We should have been on it before, but covid should have been a watershed moment on this. Instead we got pandemic stress baking and in some places, even outdoor exercise bans.