2 ms·

Of course everyone's struggle is personal. For me, I have been listening to the Maintenance Phase podcast, reading Aubrey Gordon's new book, and learning that a

Of course everyone's struggle is personal. For me, I have been listening to the Maintenance Phase podcast, reading Aubrey Gordon's new book, and learning that a lot of what we hold as fact or "common sense" about weight loss is untrue, that individual bodies respond very differently to the same diet and exercise schedule, and that a lot of the ideas around fatness are rooted in a cultural anti-fatness that views fatness as a personal failing, rather than another parameter of the body like height or hair color. This has helped me learn to simply be happy with my size. Our bodies are not all meant to be skinny like the people we see on TV or instagram. There is a natural variance even for people with healthy diets and good exercise routines. I can't enumerate everything that Aubrey Gordon shares in her excellent book, but I can say that learning to accept myself has been far more rewarding than constantly trying to chase weight loss schemes that only leave me back where I started. I feel confident and sexy now without any weight loss, and this is leading more people to be very obviously more attracted to me (because confidence is sexy!). I realized I never needed to lose weight to be attractive, I needed to accept myself for who I am. I would urge anyone considering these treatments, whose lifelong effects we still do not understand, to learn about anti-fatness and how we have all been misled in to believing that everyone is supposed to be skinny. Here's a great article from Aubrey to get started: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148169767/anti-fatness-keeps-fat-people-on-the-margins-says-aubrey-gordon https://www.npr.org/2023/01/12/1148169767/anti-fatness-keeps... Finally I want to say that if anyone is just going to come in here and say being fat is unhealthy, or repeat any of the common tropes about weight loss, you're not going to get anywhere with me. The whole point of Aubrey's work is that these so-called common sense ideas are so deeply held in our society that few have really questioned them, and it takes more than a cursory examination to try to make sense of how we got here. Repeating the basic ideas does nothing to advance this conversation. If you must respond, read the article above before criticizing the basics of what I am saying. Aubrey can explain it far better than I can.

Georgelemental 3y ago
> that these so-called common sense ideas are so deeply held in our society that few have really questioned them Yes, these issues have been studied and questioned. In traditional hunter-gatherer societies (people whose diet and lifestyle matches what humans evolved for), obesity is almost unheard of, as are diabetes and other metabolic diseases. But when these same hunter-gatherers adopt a modern lifestyle and diet, their rates of these diseases go way up. From this evidence, we can conclude that obesity is not a purely natural phenomenon, but caused in part by modern lifestyles.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  > these issues have been studied and questioned Do you actually have studies you can link to that can show this? With a quick search I see a study [1] that both acknowledges that data on hunter-gatherers is light and also finds that total energy expenditure (which I assume is what you mean by the "lifestyle" part of "lifestyle and diet") is roughly the same between this hunter-gatherer society and western cultures: "Like other complex, continuous traits (e.g., stature), environment can clearly influence TEE, as is evident in the elevated energy expenditures of traditional farmers (Table 1). Nonetheless, TEE is remarkably similar across a broad, global sample of populations that span a range of economies, climates, and lifestyles (Fig. 1, ,2).2). Not only is TEE statistically indistinguishable between Westerners and Hadza foragers, but the range of TEE within Western, foraging, and farming populations largely overlap, both at the individual and population levels (Table 1, Fig. 1, ,2).2). We hypothesize that TEE may be a relatively stable, constrained physiological trait for the human species, more a product of our common genetic inheritance than our diverse lifestyles." [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3405064/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3405064/
  - tfigueroa 3y ago
    I’d have to do some digging, but these observations are largely moot. The “differences in lifestyle” meme is accurate but incredibly imprecise; hunter-gatherer societies are vastly different than say present-day America, so there’s little practical information to glean from studying these differences. Unless, of course, we want to change to those lifestyles wholesale.
  - Georgelemental 3y ago
    That hunter-gatherer tend to have very low rates of obesity and metabolic disorders is well documeted, for example https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/obr.12785 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/obr.12785 . It's also well documented that obesity rates have skyrocketed in recent decades (for example https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-as-obese?tab=chart&facet=none&country=USA~Lower-middle-income~Upper-middle-income~High-income~Low-income https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-a... ). From this evidence, we can conclude that obesity isn't a purely natural phenomenon, it's cause by modern lifestyles. But what part of said lifestyles? We need to look for a culprit(s) that: a) hunter-gathers are insulated from, and b) has greatly increased in just the past few decades, following the trend in rising obesity rates. As you note, there seems to be big change in energy expenditure between hunter-gatherers and us, so that can be ruled out. That would seem to leave us diet changes and environmental contaminants. Sugar is commonly cited as a cause of obesity, but recent increases in obesity rates have been much higher than those in sugar consumption (https://onlinestatbook.com/2/case_studies/sugar.html https://onlinestatbook.com/2/case_studies/sugar.html ). Also, there are hunter-gatherers who eat lots of honey (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040503 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...) and they are not obese. So what could it be? I don't claim to know the answer, but there are two possibilities that seem plausible to me, that satisfy conditions (a) and (b) above: - Environmental contaminants: http://achemicalhunger.com/ http://achemicalhunger.com/ - Vegetable oils: https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/what-causes-chronic-disease https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/what-causes-chronic-disease

Georgelemental 3y ago

> that these so-called common sense ideas are so deeply held in our society that few have really questioned them Yes, these issues have been studied and questioned. In traditional hunter-gatherer societies (people whose diet and lifestyle matches what humans evolved for), obesity is almost unheard of, as are diabetes and other metabolic diseases. But when these same hunter-gatherers adopt a modern lifestyle and diet, their rates of these diseases go way up. From this evidence, we can conclude that obesity is not a purely natural phenomenon, but caused in part by modern lifestyles.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
> these issues have been studied and questioned Do you actually have studies you can link to that can show this? With a quick search I see a study [1] that both acknowledges that data on hunter-gatherers is light and also finds that total energy expenditure (which I assume is what you mean by the "lifestyle" part of "lifestyle and diet") is roughly the same between this hunter-gatherer society and western cultures: "Like other complex, continuous traits (e.g., stature), environment can clearly influence TEE, as is evident in the elevated energy expenditures of traditional farmers (Table 1). Nonetheless, TEE is remarkably similar across a broad, global sample of populations that span a range of economies, climates, and lifestyles (Fig. 1, ,2).2). Not only is TEE statistically indistinguishable between Westerners and Hadza foragers, but the range of TEE within Western, foraging, and farming populations largely overlap, both at the individual and population levels (Table 1, Fig. 1, ,2).2). We hypothesize that TEE may be a relatively stable, constrained physiological trait for the human species, more a product of our common genetic inheritance than our diverse lifestyles." [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3405064/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3405064/
- tfigueroa 3y ago
  I’d have to do some digging, but these observations are largely moot. The “differences in lifestyle” meme is accurate but incredibly imprecise; hunter-gatherer societies are vastly different than say present-day America, so there’s little practical information to glean from studying these differences. Unless, of course, we want to change to those lifestyles wholesale.
- Georgelemental 3y ago
  That hunter-gatherer tend to have very low rates of obesity and metabolic disorders is well documeted, for example https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/obr.12785 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/obr.12785 . It's also well documented that obesity rates have skyrocketed in recent decades (for example https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-as-obese?tab=chart&facet=none&country=USA~Lower-middle-income~Upper-middle-income~High-income~Low-income https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-a... ). From this evidence, we can conclude that obesity isn't a purely natural phenomenon, it's cause by modern lifestyles. But what part of said lifestyles? We need to look for a culprit(s) that: a) hunter-gathers are insulated from, and b) has greatly increased in just the past few decades, following the trend in rising obesity rates. As you note, there seems to be big change in energy expenditure between hunter-gatherers and us, so that can be ruled out. That would seem to leave us diet changes and environmental contaminants. Sugar is commonly cited as a cause of obesity, but recent increases in obesity rates have been much higher than those in sugar consumption (https://onlinestatbook.com/2/case_studies/sugar.html https://onlinestatbook.com/2/case_studies/sugar.html ). Also, there are hunter-gatherers who eat lots of honey (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040503 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...) and they are not obese. So what could it be? I don't claim to know the answer, but there are two possibilities that seem plausible to me, that satisfy conditions (a) and (b) above: - Environmental contaminants: http://achemicalhunger.com/ http://achemicalhunger.com/ - Vegetable oils: https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/what-causes-chronic-disease https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/what-causes-chronic-disease