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When you say this do you mean "we have to look for the underlying causes of calorie imbalance" or do you mean "the human body is capable of materializing mass o

When you say this do you mean "we have to look for the underlying causes of calorie imbalance" or do you mean "the human body is capable of materializing mass out of nothing"? I can't imagine someone saying "the gravity theory of plane crashes is exploded" even though when we look at how to prevent plane crashes we look at other causes.

argella 4y ago
"When you say this do you mean "we have to look for the underlying causes of calorie imbalance" or do you mean "the human body is capable of materializing mass out of nothing"?" when you say this, you reveal your ignorance of the biology that makes it far more challenging for some people to "eat less" than others, and that changes their metabolism to combat the weight loss if they do happen to "eat less" for some time.
Aloha 4y ago
BMR varies hugely by person, its not even a minor difference for some. Yes, calorie imbalance is a thing, but you can be a 300 lb person who eats 2750 calories a day, also be a 200 lb person who eats 2750 calories a day, with each performing a similar amount of exercise. While calories in/calories out will help anyone lose weight, for some, even with the advantage of math - its still much harder, sometimes an order of magnitude harder. I've done this before, and I lose around 100 lbs, and I've kept off about 60 of it - but for the entire two years, I had a gnawing, burning pit of hunger whenever I was away. It never stops, and I never stopped being hungry. I just did my best to ignore it. On top of that, look how many social occasions revolve around food, to stick to any essentially effective diet requires refraining in those situations. That's even harder. "oh, everyone is going for fast food after the thing, I guess I can just have some water? okay, I guess that's okay" because one fast food meal exceeds your calorie goal for the entire day. Now you tell me, how easy is it to eat less if you never felt satiated, never stopped being hungry? My point here, is while calorie counting and exercise works, there is clearly more going on than just that.
- lancesells 4y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with never feeling satiated or anything else you're feeling, but what are your thoughts on prevalent obesity being something that's relatively new to humans (~50) and much higher in the US than most other countries? To me it seems to be a majorityu of cultural & calorie intake thing rather than a medical issue. Not to say it's easy (it's not) and not to say there aren't people with medical issues.
  - Aloha 4y ago
    Obesity has historically been a sign of wealth, it's not new in my eyes. Us having enough calories available and the kinds of work around where people can lead a defacto life of leisure (by comparison to every other period of time). Any time humans have an extended lack of scarcity the natural biological programming that makes someone fatter, takes over.
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I think this is bad faith, but I'll put it like this: There's tribes out there that walk 5+km/day or whatever to get food, but their base calorie consumption isn't significantly higher than a sedentary American even with all their walking. There's something definitely weird going on in the human body in which it can modulate its own calorie burn and I don't think science has gotten that yet. Telling a fatty to eat less might be simple, but if the fat person's body fights them every time it might be helpful to trying to figure out how to make the body stop fighting weight loss.
- Aloha 4y ago
  People really like to believe the ol' 'willpower' thing - and its not completely wrong. But its not everything, like willpower might account for 30-40% of results, the rest are often other factors outside of their control Also, love your username ^^
  - geraldwhen 4y ago
    I’ve trained with bodybuilders for years. I assure you willpower and choosing boring foods is a huge factor. Plain chicken, rice, broccoli, water. Try to gain weight.
maxbond 4y ago
The human body has a lot of latitude and how it stores & taps it's reserves. You could eat less than than you expend & lose muscle mass instead of fat, for example. So yes, humans are a thermodynamic system, but that isn't a model that explains the dynamics of what your body does with it's tissues. It's more complex than that. It's kind of like saying, "a CPU is just a resistive heater." There's a way in which this is true and it's a useful perspective for designing a cooling system. But it's a useless model to give to someone asking for advice in debugging race conditions, because you've erased the complexity their problems arise from. Additionally there's a moralizing component where people erase this complexity in order to blame people for their medical problems and frame it as an issue of irresponsibility. No one has ever said, "aircraft crashes are caused by gravity, and the moral failing of pilots not to understand this most basic principle. Imagine spending so much money on flight school when all you need to do is watch stuff fall, that's all you need to know." There is no gravity theory of airplane accidents in the same way there is a caloric imbalance theory of obesity. Consider also that airplanes are "simple"[1], well understood, engineered systems which are centrally coordinated, and that bodies are complex, evolved systems, containing autonomous components, many of which are very poorly understood. Aircraft are engineered for consistency, with faulty or expired components swapped out, whereas humans vary dramatically, not only between each other, but over the course of their lives. Other people have very different bodies & experiences than you do; it can be night and day. I came to understand this when speaking to a friend with executive dysfunction. I kept telling them they were beating themselves up or undermining themselves when they told me about limitations they experienced. Eventually they snapped at me and described their day to day in detail, and I realized their mind as a different place with different demons than mine, and that there were things I could do easily that they struggled with, and things I struggled with that were an ordeal for them. (They're a very smart and capable person who has abilities I do not, and of course I have demons and struggles they do not have as well.) I meant well but what I was doing was really undercutting and devaluing their lived experience, trying to comfort and bolster instead of understand. [1] In the sense that they are not "complex systems" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system (obviously aircraft are complex in a general sense)

argella 4y ago

"When you say this do you mean "we have to look for the underlying causes of calorie imbalance" or do you mean "the human body is capable of materializing mass out of nothing"?" when you say this, you reveal your ignorance of the biology that makes it far more challenging for some people to "eat less" than others, and that changes their metabolism to combat the weight loss if they do happen to "eat less" for some time.

Aloha 4y ago

BMR varies hugely by person, its not even a minor difference for some. Yes, calorie imbalance is a thing, but you can be a 300 lb person who eats 2750 calories a day, also be a 200 lb person who eats 2750 calories a day, with each performing a similar amount of exercise. While calories in/calories out will help anyone lose weight, for some, even with the advantage of math - its still much harder, sometimes an order of magnitude harder. I've done this before, and I lose around 100 lbs, and I've kept off about 60 of it - but for the entire two years, I had a gnawing, burning pit of hunger whenever I was away. It never stops, and I never stopped being hungry. I just did my best to ignore it. On top of that, look how many social occasions revolve around food, to stick to any essentially effective diet requires refraining in those situations. That's even harder. "oh, everyone is going for fast food after the thing, I guess I can just have some water? okay, I guess that's okay" because one fast food meal exceeds your calorie goal for the entire day. Now you tell me, how easy is it to eat less if you never felt satiated, never stopped being hungry? My point here, is while calorie counting and exercise works, there is clearly more going on than just that.

lancesells 4y ago
I'm not disagreeing with never feeling satiated or anything else you're feeling, but what are your thoughts on prevalent obesity being something that's relatively new to humans (~50) and much higher in the US than most other countries? To me it seems to be a majorityu of cultural & calorie intake thing rather than a medical issue. Not to say it's easy (it's not) and not to say there aren't people with medical issues.
- Aloha 4y ago
  Obesity has historically been a sign of wealth, it's not new in my eyes. Us having enough calories available and the kinds of work around where people can lead a defacto life of leisure (by comparison to every other period of time). Any time humans have an extended lack of scarcity the natural biological programming that makes someone fatter, takes over.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago

I think this is bad faith, but I'll put it like this: There's tribes out there that walk 5+km/day or whatever to get food, but their base calorie consumption isn't significantly higher than a sedentary American even with all their walking. There's something definitely weird going on in the human body in which it can modulate its own calorie burn and I don't think science has gotten that yet. Telling a fatty to eat less might be simple, but if the fat person's body fights them every time it might be helpful to trying to figure out how to make the body stop fighting weight loss.

Aloha 4y ago
People really like to believe the ol' 'willpower' thing - and its not completely wrong. But its not everything, like willpower might account for 30-40% of results, the rest are often other factors outside of their control Also, love your username ^^
- geraldwhen 4y ago
  I’ve trained with bodybuilders for years. I assure you willpower and choosing boring foods is a huge factor. Plain chicken, rice, broccoli, water. Try to gain weight.

maxbond 4y ago

The human body has a lot of latitude and how it stores & taps it's reserves. You could eat less than than you expend & lose muscle mass instead of fat, for example. So yes, humans are a thermodynamic system, but that isn't a model that explains the dynamics of what your body does with it's tissues. It's more complex than that. It's kind of like saying, "a CPU is just a resistive heater." There's a way in which this is true and it's a useful perspective for designing a cooling system. But it's a useless model to give to someone asking for advice in debugging race conditions, because you've erased the complexity their problems arise from. Additionally there's a moralizing component where people erase this complexity in order to blame people for their medical problems and frame it as an issue of irresponsibility. No one has ever said, "aircraft crashes are caused by gravity, and the moral failing of pilots not to understand this most basic principle. Imagine spending so much money on flight school when all you need to do is watch stuff fall, that's all you need to know." There is no gravity theory of airplane accidents in the same way there is a caloric imbalance theory of obesity. Consider also that airplanes are "simple"[1], well understood, engineered systems which are centrally coordinated, and that bodies are complex, evolved systems, containing autonomous components, many of which are very poorly understood. Aircraft are engineered for consistency, with faulty or expired components swapped out, whereas humans vary dramatically, not only between each other, but over the course of their lives. Other people have very different bodies & experiences than you do; it can be night and day. I came to understand this when speaking to a friend with executive dysfunction. I kept telling them they were beating themselves up or undermining themselves when they told me about limitations they experienced. Eventually they snapped at me and described their day to day in detail, and I realized their mind as a different place with different demons than mine, and that there were things I could do easily that they struggled with, and things I struggled with that were an ordeal for them. (They're a very smart and capable person who has abilities I do not, and of course I have demons and struggles they do not have as well.) I meant well but what I was doing was really undercutting and devaluing their lived experience, trying to comfort and bolster instead of understand. [1] In the sense that they are not "complex systems" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system (obviously aircraft are complex in a general sense)