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The implication is that something has happened during the last 50-100 years that caused people's "natural weight" to change upward. (Someone's "natural weight"
by ChadNauseam 4y ago
The implication is that something has happened during the last 50-100 years that caused people's "natural weight" to change upward. (Someone's "natural weight" is normally called their "set point".)
The evidence is a little slim (no pun), but there's one theory which I find quite compelling. The theory is that eating foods with high flavor-calorie association increases your set point, and eating foods with low flavor-calorie association decreases your set point.
Flavor-calorie association is when your body knows that a particular flavor results in getting lots of calories in the near future. The flavor-calorie association will be higher for foods that are more flavorful or more calorically dense, and flavor-calorie associations can only be developed for foods you eat regularly. This explains why I lose a bit of weight whenever I go somewhere new – I'm trying new foods, so what I'm eating has doesn't have any flavor-calorie association, so my body's set point goes down, so I get full more quickly, causing me to eat fewer calories overall, causing me to lose weight. And since foods have gotten much more flavorful and calorically dense in the past half-century, it would explain why people's set points have gone up.
There's a simple way to test this theory at home. Extra-light olive oil (not extra-virgin) is tasteless and textureless. So, find a 2-hour window of your day when you don't taste anything with flavor, and have two tablespoons of extra-light olive oil right in the middle of that window. Since the oil has no flavor, it should have no flavor-calorie association, and your set point should go down. I've been doing this, and I've been getting full faster and that's been causing me to lose weight. (If you want to google more info, it's called the shangri-la diet.)
(Note that if you try this, your toothpaste probably counts as a flavor.)
- nerdponx 4y agoI'd be sooner to suspect environmental contaminants (changing types of air pollution, microplastics, pesticides on food, stress hormones in factory-farmed meat, et al) as a cause. Although I suspect there's something to your hypothesis as well. I don't know about a spoonful of oil, but I have gone through phases where food seems less "rewarding" on a physiological level, and as a result I feel more satisfied with less.
- dcolkitt 4y agoAir pollution seems unlikely as it's been falling for decades, and America has much lower levels than Europe. Microplastics are a perennial boogey man, and probably a genuine ecological issue, but there has no been mountains of studies done and documented health effects are virtually non-existent. Livestock and slaughterhouse conditions are certainly not good from an animal welfare perspective, but we've had similar practices for 100+ years and obesity wasn't a major issue in 1960. Pesticides in food products have been substantially reduced since the EPA changed guidelines in the 1990s, and yet obesity has exploded since then.
- adamsmith143 4y agoPFAS chemicals are a likely culprit, their presence increased dramatically as obesity rates took off and they are stubbornly persistent in the water and food supply.
- eldenbishop 4y agoHaven't heard anyone talk about the Shangri-La diet in ages. I did a slight variation of this for awhile way back in my 30s at it worked great. Recently testing this out with OMAD but haven't been doing it long enough to see if it is workable. I'm in my 50s now and a lot of things that worked wonders in my 30s do not work as well as they once did.
- nsxwolf 4y agoI'm going to try this because I recently fell off the OMAD wagon, and it usually takes me 3 solid days of white-knuckling it to get back to it feeling natural without wanting to eat during the day. Wondering if some plain celery or olive oil can ease the transition.
- ChadNauseam 4y agoSince plain celery has very few calories, I doubt it would help much. It seems to me that you're really fooling your body somehow when you're feeding it calories with no flavor.
- galangalalgol 4y agoI'm going to try it with my omad diet because I only remember to take my supplements if I do it in the morning, but some are fat soluble, and the zinc can cause nausea on occasion, but if I get any carbs in the morning I get hungry. Some mct oil or light olive oil seems perfect. The toothpaste thing seems problematic. There are some bland ones, maybe I'll switch.
- nsxwolf 4y agoI don't think toothpaste is a problem for me, maybe because I associate anything minty with medicine instead of food.