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It is a harmful stereotype to label obese people as lacking willpower as you have done. Many obese people don’t have the resources (time, money) or tools (nutr

It is a harmful stereotype to label obese people as lacking willpower as you have done. Many obese people don’t have the resources (time, money) or tools (nutrition understanding) to improve their situation. Many have metabolic or familial history of obesity which has both physical and psychological (normalization) impact on their ability to control their weight. The former can be helped with diet and/or medication, the latter often causes them not to seek help. Most people in the US live in poverty and make marginal spending food decisions based on money per dopamine reward unit rather than optimizing nutrition. McDonalds is cheap and unhealthy; fresh fruits and vegetables and the free time to educate oneself on proper nutrition, then cook healthy meals and do meal prep often cost more money and time than most can afford. As does proper exercise when you’re working 12 hours per day trying to make ends meet. A less harmful way to phrase your point is that medication can help people who self-medicate with food overcome metabolic efficiency. I lost 40 pounds on semaglutide (Wegovy) so far this past year and dropping; exercise and diet alone didn’t work for me. I hope to eventually not rely on medication to maintain a healthy weight.

akomtu 5y ago
No, it's the lack of will power, with few exceptions. Most of the food these days, even expensive food, has atrocious amount of calories, so to burn one cookie-worth of energy one would have to do a stupid amount of weight lifting. For example, lifting a 50 lbs dumbbell 3 feet high burns just 5 calories, while a small cookie I have on my plate has 200 calories. That's 40 times to lift that dumbbell just to burn 1 cookie. Edit: or let's take a look at cheese. I've found some pretty expensive cheese in my fridge, packed into small cube boxes, because otherwise its price per pound would be offensive. So we might expect that cheese would do better than cookies. The nutrinion facts label on its reverse begins with "serving size: 2 table spoons, 120 calories" - a borderline fradulent label that's trying to hide the fact that the small chunk of cheese has 600 calories in it.
AmericanChopper 5y ago
I would say it’s much more harmful to rationalize obesity as something that afflicts people according to their circumstances, rather than what it actually is, a direct outcome of a person’s intentional choices. It’s also quite harmful to dramatize the solutions out to be something unattainable to many people. They are attainable to all people. The healthiest diet I’ve ever eaten was also the cheapest diet I’ve ever eaten, and almost everybody can get 30 minutes of low intensity exercise a day.
- arvinsim 5y ago
  Nutrition and fitness are hardly a one-size-fits-all problem. To take an example, my self, I am doing intermittent fasting and do moderate intensity exercise everyday for at least 30 minutes(gym, cycling, bouldering, etc). No matter what I do, I still have a muffin belly.
  - adrian_b 5y ago
    I also believed that for many years, that no matter what I do, I cannot control my weight. Until one day I began to both weigh myself each day at the same hour with a precise digital scale and also weigh or measure by volume all the food that I eat. After that moment, I reduced my weight by 2/3 and I have maintained easily any target weight. Even now, after some culinary orgy I easily gain a couple of pounds in a day, but then, by eating only measured quantities of food, I lose them after a week. The reason why I have failed to control my weight during many years and most people also fail, is that if you eat until you are satiated, then it is guaranteed that you will not be able to control your weight, no matter how much exercise you do. If you measure what you eat and you only eat pre-planned quantities, it is trivial to reduce how much you eat until you see that the next day you weigh slightly less (e.g. 100 grams less). Then you must keep eating such quantities until you reach the target. If you do not respect your plan and you eat random extra snacks or drink sweet beverages, then of course you have no chance to control your weight. It is much easier to follow a plan when you eat less meals per day, because they can be larger. When eating small meals many times per day it is far more difficult to stop after eating just a little. It is much easier to not start eating.
  - AmericanChopper 5y ago
    If you want to lose body fat you need a caloric deficit, squeezing a caloric surplus into a smaller window of the day isn’t going to do anything productive. Intermittent fasting itself has absolutely no benefit, it can only be useful if the fasting routine helps you maintain a caloric deficit.
- imtringued 5y ago
  >a direct outcome of a person’s intentional choices. You mean like a politician promoting obesity inducing foods? If it is really about individuals then obesity shouldn't be going up in African nations that quickly.
dayvid 5y ago
I agree. After living and traveling abroad, it's easy to see America has an obese-default culture. Most cities and towns have little walking or public transportation. Cheap, high-calorie, nutrient-poor food is easily available anywhere 24 hours a day. Restaurants have an abundance of large amounts of meat and carbohydrates drenched in low-quality oils and sugary seasonings. You have to be consciously active to stay fit or cook the majority of your own food. People in a lot of other countries stay lean and aren't as obsessed with fitness as we are.
- idontwantthis 5y ago
  I lost 20 pounds, got off antidepressants and found love all within 6 months of leaving America at age 24. I don’t really have a point, but there is a lot of poison for body and mind in that country.
  - Nitrolo 5y ago
    Out of curiosity, where did you move to?
    - idontwantthis 5y ago
      Cambodia
fleddr 5y ago
It's much more harmful to obsess over the optics of something potentially offensive at the expense of reality. None of the excuses you listed hold any ground. Time: it costs about 20 minutes to cook a simple, basic fresh meal. With a single weekly groceries delivery (or visit to the store), you're covered for some 5-6 main meals as well as breakfast and lunch. Are you telling me Americans don't have 20 minutes to prepare a meal yet do have that time, or more, to eat out? I've been home cooking 6 days a week for 2 decades. It costs LESS time, not more. The average American watches over 3 hours of TV, or TV-like experiences in their leisure time, but they don't have 20 mins to cook a meal? I guess they all get home from work and fall asleep? Costs: Rice, potatos, bread, vegetables and lean meats...please do the math for me how this is unaffordable? They are incredibly cheap commodities. "Most people in the US live in poverty". Now they do not. The US is in the top 5 of median incomes worldwide, one of the richest countries in the world. If you dismiss Luxembourg and UAE, the USA is in the top 3. It's not a monetary issue. Further, 12 hour work days are an anomaly, not a standard. And even 12 hours is not an excuse. Exercise isn't the core of the issue, junk food is. Time needed to educate on nutrition: your parents or school should have done that, but here goes: don't eat garbage. Cut down on fats, sugars. Education completed. But it's not an educational issue as the person sitting in McDonalds knows exactly what's up. It most definitely is a willpower issue as every other excuse does not hold ground. People in other countries have less time and less money, and still don't have this issue at this scale. Please know that this is a not a burn at obese people, I fully sympathize with the difficulty of lifestyle changes, even more so in a culture like the US where the environment seems stacked up against healthy eating. But we need to attempt to come to real and realistic root causes, and time and money are not the core issues. It creates this illusion that if only economic conditions would improve, we'd all be eating healthier, which is false. The issue is cultural.
- chillingeffect 5y ago
  Youve identified the chain but keep it going: stress and lack of sleep! Ubiquitous coffee, economic pressure, overpriced and weak preventative healthcare system, social pressure, status anxiety, housing insecurity, political threats, public-facing crimes, rampant racism. These all test our self-control around food.
kadoban 5y ago
Gp probably could have stopped after: > Prescriptions of diet and exercise are ineffective Which seems to be true. If any advice your doctor could give yields no measurable difference, is there really a point to giving it?
- giantg2 5y ago
  Considering the root(?) commenter said that a low carb diet did in fact work for them even though they had to go research it on their own, it sounds like it was effective.
  - kadoban 5y ago
    A lot of diets work at least in the short/medium term, for those that have selection bias and "completed" them. That's very much _not_ the same thing as a doctor recommending or prescribing them having any effect.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      There's no talk of completion. This isn't a "diet", it's a diet. We aren't using it as some colloquial meaning for losing weight, etc. This is about a lifelong dietary change to address excessive carbohydrate intake. If it doesn't have "any effect" then I guess all type 1 diabetics are already dead? The point still stands - doctors should be counseling diabetics on dietary changes, even if they are being prescribed medication. Some patients can improve their condition and overall health to the point that they can stop the medication. If you disagree with this, please, show me some sources. As for mine, you can check the AMA, AHA, ADA, and PubMed (American Medical/Heart/Diabetes Associations).
- idorosen 5y ago
  Agree, mostly. Primary care doctors in the US are often limited to 15-30 minutes per patient for routine matters. Referrals to nutritionists / dieticians and other expensive options often lack follow through, or aren’t offered in the first place because prescribing is so much easier. Medical professionals have a duty to arm patients with the information needed to make good choices about their health, but often shirk that duty due to inconvenience or these kinds of time limits. In a perfect world, access to medical professionals would be less scarce and at least the tools (nutrition info) would not be an issue. The medical system really isn’t designed for obese people on multiple levels in the US, and it isn’t designed for good long-term outcomes…yet.
kiba 5y ago
People weren't obese ages ago, and I am sure that's not because of better nutritional education. It's a multifactorial problem.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Nutritional science got better at making people fat.
- idorosen 5y ago
  People didn’t have McDonalds and cars ages ago. Barn-raising, (manual) farming, and hunting are hard energy-intensive work. Our calorie output required to survive dropped while the calorie inputs available cheaply dramatically increased. That is all part of “overcome metabolic efficiency.” :-)
  - alwillis 5y ago
    It's easy to demonize fast-food but that's not even the worst of it. High-fructose corn syrup has been added to so many foods that didn't have it 10-20 years ago. The second or third ingredient on a bottle of ketchup, for example, is high-fructose corn syrup. You can get ketchup that doesn't have high-fructose corn syrup added to it; often it's a natural or organic brand that often costs more than the regular brand. And depending on where someone lives, brands without refined sugars may not be readily available. Google "food desert" and see what comes up. It was literally impossible a generation or two ago to ingest the amount of carbohydrates the average American gets just from eating prepared and processed foods today.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      > It's easy to demonize fast-food but that's not even the worst of it. High-fructose corn syrup has been added to so many foods that didn't have it 10-20 years ago. We should just count ready-meals etc. as 'fast-food' too, no good reason that it implicitly refers to 'restaurants' only really. > The second or third ingredient on a bottle of ketchup, for example, is high-fructose corn syrup. Interesting, that didn't sound right to me (but it has been a long time since I've had it) - found this: https://www.truthorfiction.com/heinz-ketchup-ingredients-u-s-vs-uk/ https://www.truthorfiction.com/heinz-ketchup-ingredients-u-s... (tldr just sugar in the UK)

akomtu 5y ago

No, it's the lack of will power, with few exceptions. Most of the food these days, even expensive food, has atrocious amount of calories, so to burn one cookie-worth of energy one would have to do a stupid amount of weight lifting. For example, lifting a 50 lbs dumbbell 3 feet high burns just 5 calories, while a small cookie I have on my plate has 200 calories. That's 40 times to lift that dumbbell just to burn 1 cookie. Edit: or let's take a look at cheese. I've found some pretty expensive cheese in my fridge, packed into small cube boxes, because otherwise its price per pound would be offensive. So we might expect that cheese would do better than cookies. The nutrinion facts label on its reverse begins with "serving size: 2 table spoons, 120 calories" - a borderline fradulent label that's trying to hide the fact that the small chunk of cheese has 600 calories in it.

AmericanChopper 5y ago

I would say it’s much more harmful to rationalize obesity as something that afflicts people according to their circumstances, rather than what it actually is, a direct outcome of a person’s intentional choices. It’s also quite harmful to dramatize the solutions out to be something unattainable to many people. They are attainable to all people. The healthiest diet I’ve ever eaten was also the cheapest diet I’ve ever eaten, and almost everybody can get 30 minutes of low intensity exercise a day.

arvinsim 5y ago
Nutrition and fitness are hardly a one-size-fits-all problem. To take an example, my self, I am doing intermittent fasting and do moderate intensity exercise everyday for at least 30 minutes(gym, cycling, bouldering, etc). No matter what I do, I still have a muffin belly.
- adrian_b 5y ago
  I also believed that for many years, that no matter what I do, I cannot control my weight. Until one day I began to both weigh myself each day at the same hour with a precise digital scale and also weigh or measure by volume all the food that I eat. After that moment, I reduced my weight by 2/3 and I have maintained easily any target weight. Even now, after some culinary orgy I easily gain a couple of pounds in a day, but then, by eating only measured quantities of food, I lose them after a week. The reason why I have failed to control my weight during many years and most people also fail, is that if you eat until you are satiated, then it is guaranteed that you will not be able to control your weight, no matter how much exercise you do. If you measure what you eat and you only eat pre-planned quantities, it is trivial to reduce how much you eat until you see that the next day you weigh slightly less (e.g. 100 grams less). Then you must keep eating such quantities until you reach the target. If you do not respect your plan and you eat random extra snacks or drink sweet beverages, then of course you have no chance to control your weight. It is much easier to follow a plan when you eat less meals per day, because they can be larger. When eating small meals many times per day it is far more difficult to stop after eating just a little. It is much easier to not start eating.
- AmericanChopper 5y ago
  If you want to lose body fat you need a caloric deficit, squeezing a caloric surplus into a smaller window of the day isn’t going to do anything productive. Intermittent fasting itself has absolutely no benefit, it can only be useful if the fasting routine helps you maintain a caloric deficit.
imtringued 5y ago
>a direct outcome of a person’s intentional choices. You mean like a politician promoting obesity inducing foods? If it is really about individuals then obesity shouldn't be going up in African nations that quickly.

dayvid 5y ago

I agree. After living and traveling abroad, it's easy to see America has an obese-default culture. Most cities and towns have little walking or public transportation. Cheap, high-calorie, nutrient-poor food is easily available anywhere 24 hours a day. Restaurants have an abundance of large amounts of meat and carbohydrates drenched in low-quality oils and sugary seasonings. You have to be consciously active to stay fit or cook the majority of your own food. People in a lot of other countries stay lean and aren't as obsessed with fitness as we are.

idontwantthis 5y ago
I lost 20 pounds, got off antidepressants and found love all within 6 months of leaving America at age 24. I don’t really have a point, but there is a lot of poison for body and mind in that country.
- Nitrolo 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, where did you move to?
  - idontwantthis 5y ago
    Cambodia

fleddr 5y ago

It's much more harmful to obsess over the optics of something potentially offensive at the expense of reality. None of the excuses you listed hold any ground. Time: it costs about 20 minutes to cook a simple, basic fresh meal. With a single weekly groceries delivery (or visit to the store), you're covered for some 5-6 main meals as well as breakfast and lunch. Are you telling me Americans don't have 20 minutes to prepare a meal yet do have that time, or more, to eat out? I've been home cooking 6 days a week for 2 decades. It costs LESS time, not more. The average American watches over 3 hours of TV, or TV-like experiences in their leisure time, but they don't have 20 mins to cook a meal? I guess they all get home from work and fall asleep? Costs: Rice, potatos, bread, vegetables and lean meats...please do the math for me how this is unaffordable? They are incredibly cheap commodities. "Most people in the US live in poverty". Now they do not. The US is in the top 5 of median incomes worldwide, one of the richest countries in the world. If you dismiss Luxembourg and UAE, the USA is in the top 3. It's not a monetary issue. Further, 12 hour work days are an anomaly, not a standard. And even 12 hours is not an excuse. Exercise isn't the core of the issue, junk food is. Time needed to educate on nutrition: your parents or school should have done that, but here goes: don't eat garbage. Cut down on fats, sugars. Education completed. But it's not an educational issue as the person sitting in McDonalds knows exactly what's up. It most definitely is a willpower issue as every other excuse does not hold ground. People in other countries have less time and less money, and still don't have this issue at this scale. Please know that this is a not a burn at obese people, I fully sympathize with the difficulty of lifestyle changes, even more so in a culture like the US where the environment seems stacked up against healthy eating. But we need to attempt to come to real and realistic root causes, and time and money are not the core issues. It creates this illusion that if only economic conditions would improve, we'd all be eating healthier, which is false. The issue is cultural.

chillingeffect 5y ago
Youve identified the chain but keep it going: stress and lack of sleep! Ubiquitous coffee, economic pressure, overpriced and weak preventative healthcare system, social pressure, status anxiety, housing insecurity, political threats, public-facing crimes, rampant racism. These all test our self-control around food.

kadoban 5y ago

Gp probably could have stopped after: > Prescriptions of diet and exercise are ineffective Which seems to be true. If any advice your doctor could give yields no measurable difference, is there really a point to giving it?

giantg2 5y ago
Considering the root(?) commenter said that a low carb diet did in fact work for them even though they had to go research it on their own, it sounds like it was effective.
- kadoban 5y ago
  A lot of diets work at least in the short/medium term, for those that have selection bias and "completed" them. That's very much _not_ the same thing as a doctor recommending or prescribing them having any effect.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    There's no talk of completion. This isn't a "diet", it's a diet. We aren't using it as some colloquial meaning for losing weight, etc. This is about a lifelong dietary change to address excessive carbohydrate intake. If it doesn't have "any effect" then I guess all type 1 diabetics are already dead? The point still stands - doctors should be counseling diabetics on dietary changes, even if they are being prescribed medication. Some patients can improve their condition and overall health to the point that they can stop the medication. If you disagree with this, please, show me some sources. As for mine, you can check the AMA, AHA, ADA, and PubMed (American Medical/Heart/Diabetes Associations).
idorosen 5y ago
Agree, mostly. Primary care doctors in the US are often limited to 15-30 minutes per patient for routine matters. Referrals to nutritionists / dieticians and other expensive options often lack follow through, or aren’t offered in the first place because prescribing is so much easier. Medical professionals have a duty to arm patients with the information needed to make good choices about their health, but often shirk that duty due to inconvenience or these kinds of time limits. In a perfect world, access to medical professionals would be less scarce and at least the tools (nutrition info) would not be an issue. The medical system really isn’t designed for obese people on multiple levels in the US, and it isn’t designed for good long-term outcomes…yet.

kiba 5y ago

People weren't obese ages ago, and I am sure that's not because of better nutritional education. It's a multifactorial problem.

imtringued 5y ago
Nutritional science got better at making people fat.
idorosen 5y ago
People didn’t have McDonalds and cars ages ago. Barn-raising, (manual) farming, and hunting are hard energy-intensive work. Our calorie output required to survive dropped while the calorie inputs available cheaply dramatically increased. That is all part of “overcome metabolic efficiency.” :-)
- alwillis 5y ago
  It's easy to demonize fast-food but that's not even the worst of it. High-fructose corn syrup has been added to so many foods that didn't have it 10-20 years ago. The second or third ingredient on a bottle of ketchup, for example, is high-fructose corn syrup. You can get ketchup that doesn't have high-fructose corn syrup added to it; often it's a natural or organic brand that often costs more than the regular brand. And depending on where someone lives, brands without refined sugars may not be readily available. Google "food desert" and see what comes up. It was literally impossible a generation or two ago to ingest the amount of carbohydrates the average American gets just from eating prepared and processed foods today.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    > It's easy to demonize fast-food but that's not even the worst of it. High-fructose corn syrup has been added to so many foods that didn't have it 10-20 years ago. We should just count ready-meals etc. as 'fast-food' too, no good reason that it implicitly refers to 'restaurants' only really. > The second or third ingredient on a bottle of ketchup, for example, is high-fructose corn syrup. Interesting, that didn't sound right to me (but it has been a long time since I've had it) - found this: https://www.truthorfiction.com/heinz-ketchup-ingredients-u-s-vs-uk/ https://www.truthorfiction.com/heinz-ketchup-ingredients-u-s... (tldr just sugar in the UK)