13 ms·

I don’t understand how this needs anything beyond surface level complexity… you have fat people who for show reasons were tightly controlled on exercise and foo

I don’t understand how this needs anything beyond surface level complexity… you have fat people who for show reasons were tightly controlled on exercise and food intake - which works for well understood reasons - then they took that away and left the people to their lifelong established habits. Of course they regain the weight. These people didn’t magically create mass from nothing. They ate too much for their activity. Done. Stop doing that if you don’t want to gain weight. Obviously easier said than done. But I’m sick of the idea that these poor souls are visited at night by globs of mass that force their way inside. All these magic drugs are going to do is incentive bad food and bad habits. This isn’t good news.

belltaco 3y ago
> These people didn’t magically create mass from nothing. They ate too much for their activity. Done. Stop doing that if you don’t want to gain weight Not true. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-reveals-why-calorie-counts-are-all-wrong/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-reveals-w... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5082693/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5082693/ > discovered that certain Russian populations had large intestines that were about 57 centimeters longer on average than those of certain Polish populations. Because the final stages of nutrient absorption occur in the large intestine, a Russian eating the same amount of food as a Pole is likely to get more calories from it. People also vary in the particular enzymes they produce. By some measures, most adults do not produce the enzyme lactase, which is necessary to break down lactose sugars in milk. As a result, one man's high-calorie latte is another's low-calorie case of the runs. > Call out: Germ-free mice can eat more and gain less weight than conventional mice
- netr0ute 3y ago
  The problem is, it still boils down to CICO due to thermodynamics. That means they're still eating too much given a certain amount of physical activity.
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  > "certain Russian populations" Yes, of course. There are always outliers. But 50+% of the American population doesn't fall into this bucket, do they? Nor did they suddenly become that after they were born (i.e., obesity is a relatively new problem and not so much driven by DNA else why didn't it exist so much even just 50 yrs ago?). We keep looking for all kinds of "answers" to obesity but we already have the one that works for most people most of the time: Take in more calories than you burn, and those extra calories will become added weight. That's it. It is *that* simple. But people refuse to change their diet and/or lifestyle. In fact they're being told it's not their fault, as if someone else is responsible for what goes in their mouth and their sedentary lifestyles.
  - SirMaster 3y ago
    But what if consuming as low amount of calories as needed to be equal to or less than energy expended leaves you constantly feeling tired and with headaches and such from eating so little? Is this not something that actually happens? It seems like a spiral of doom. Eat less, so now I have even less energy for activity and thus now I am burning less energy, so I need to eat even less...
    - chiefalchemist 3y ago
      Sure. That sucks. But so does diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, and premature death. The ultimate solution is prevention. But bring that up and you're accessed of being insensitive, fat shaming, etc. We've normalized the abnormal, and too few what to see that reversed.
  - awfulneutral 3y ago
    It might be that simple from a high level conceptual standpoint, but when the amount of calories you burn passively adjusts up or down as your body fights to maintain its weight, it is much more complex.
    - chiefalchemist 3y ago
      Agreed. But that's a weight *loss* issue. The more basic "Why has there been a rise in obesity?" keeps being asked, and that's already answered. The idea that people are falling asleep next to a pod and waking up with too much weight for some mysterious reason is a false narrative. It's not making anyone any more aware or any healthier.
- goostavos 3y ago
  Sigh. Exhibit A of lazy internet arguing. The things you linked are completely irrelevant. First link: The calorie counts of food are wrong? Sure. Absolutely. No shock there. Treat them as rough estimates. Second link: different people are different? Whoa. Wow. Oh man, mind blown. What you naively describe as "not true", the universe itself would describe as bedrock reality. Despite the bad scientism (i.e. coping) everyone hides behind, nothing changes the fact that if you burn more calories than you consume, you'll loose weight. If you aren't loosing weight AND counting all of your calories, guess what: you've counted wrong. Dial them back more. Keep dialing back until results are achieved. The gym bros have truly found This One Weird Trick that works 100% of the time.
- thefz 3y ago
  You just proved the point you want to disprove. Those that absorb more calories gain more weight, thus CICO.
paulpauper 3y ago
For those contestants, weight loss was a full time job, and they had trainers and dieticians. How is that supposed to work for average people who have jobs and families or do not have a lot of willpower? Weight loss drugs can make it easier, which I am all for. Availing oneself of medical technology is not cheating; it's why the technology exists in the first place.
- jay_kyburz 3y ago
  I agree that people should accept help if they need it, and should not feel ashamed for doing it, but having a strong willpower is a superpower that will help people in all aspects of their lives. I wonder if there are ways you can improve your willpower.
  - paulpauper 3y ago
    I wonder if there are ways you can improve your willpower. stimulants
louwrentius 3y ago
Sure, blame the people. Fat shame all you want. Problem solved. Done. It's so easy, just stop eating so much. As if fat people haven't heard that one a bilion times over. As if fat people havent tried time and time again. Personal responsibility! you put that stuff in your mouth, rah! rah! Personally I'm actually sick of people having no eye for the bigger picture, for many systemic reasons and larger society, and just blame stuff like this on individuals.
- goostavos 3y ago
  But... Not eating works, though? How are statements about reality fat shaming?
  - louwrentius 3y ago
    Why don’t poor people just work hard and become rich?
    - goostavos 3y ago
      Alas, the laws of thermodynamics remain despite irrelevant comments.
- wexomania 3y ago
  Well, it is easy to hold people accountable for what they themselves put in their mouths no? That being said, there is some issues with the prevelance of hyperprocessed unhealthy foods. The fact that the most unhealthy options also tend to be the cheapest and easies, really do not help.
  - Dagger2 3y ago
    Easy, yes, but not exactly correct and certainly not helpful in the slightest.
- rustcleaner 3y ago
  Too bad bootstrappers can't be barred from welfare. They can never dogfood their own philosophy when on the wrong side of it!
thaanpaa 3y ago
It requires that complexity because a metric shit ton of scientific research shows that it is more complicated than that. Permanent weight loss of more than ten pounds is nearly impossible from a scientific standpoint. The success rate after 5 years of weight loss is somewhere around 0.1%. You'd think that if it was as easy as everyone claims, more people would succeed. Heck, many people who have had gastric bypass surgery regain a significant amount of weight, even if their stomachs have been reduced to the size of a ping pong ball.
- paulpauper 3y ago
  yup, the stomach gradually expands and the weight returns. Really hard to beat the body.
- bodiekane 3y ago
  My weight floats in a range that's 40-50 pounds lighter today than I was a decade ago. It's because I eat less and move more. Physically, weight-loss is utterly trivial. Literally everything that people say works, does. Eat less calories, eat less sugar, cut out snacking, cut out liquid calories, cut out processed food, reduce carbs, literally any and all of those work, choose whichever is most appealing to the individual. The challenge to weight and diet in America is mental and cultural. Obese people remain obese because they have unhealthy relationships with food and eat addictively or emotionally, using food to soothe anxiety, depression, loneliness, disappointment, etc and because cultural norms and advertising have normalized obesity-causing diets. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
  - vkazanov 3y ago
    Fully agree. The science of body metabolism is hard. But the rules for weight loss are simple: move more, eat less. For some people it's just "Move more, eat the same". "Eat less" means "less calories", volume can be the same - really helps. PS chips are a crime against humanity
    - thefz 3y ago
      Not even that, if you change what you eat, you can have a dramatic effect as well. Try cutting out carbs and sugar as much as possible, results in two weeks. Changing when you eat is a factor too.
bluescrn 3y ago
The bad food habits are only going to get worse as meat+dairy is forcibly taken away from us by the powers that be. Fewer options for an appealing 'proper meal', more temptation to eat sugar-laden junk.
- thomasfromcdnjs 3y ago
  I agree 100%. (though I don't think there are any particular "powers" at play) The sentiment still stands though, all the cogs in play seem to spin to make real food inaccessible and expensive. (by real I mean animal products and good produce) (raw milk is straight up illegal in Australia, most of the world would laugh at that) ==== Side note: Judging health questions off a game show is ridiculous
frankus 3y ago
Do you have first-hand experience with being overweight and/or losing a significant amount of weight? I think you're vastly overestimating how much of this (particularly "calories out") is under voluntary control. We're discussing an article that showed that extra active calories burned tend to lead to a compensatory reduction in resting metabolism. And there are some very strong psychological/physiological drives that influence "calories in" (read up on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment for examples).
- paulpauper 3y ago
  yup. many of these people who are on weight loss drugs already tried dieting and it did not work.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    “It did not work”… interesting choice of words.
jklinger410 3y ago
> They ate too much for their activity. Done. Stop doing that if you don’t want to gain weight. So much science out here to disprove this kind of statement, yet you still make it.
thefz 3y ago
Welcome to weight loss discussion on HN, where any rational point like "eat less" or "calories in, calories out" gets downvoted and discussed to death. Apparently for this crowd taking medicines is better than stopping stuffing yourself, because you know, if you take a medicine you can keep stuffing yourself. Oh, and also "it's more complicated than that" is always a nice escape from the harsh reality of thermodynamics.
- Dagger2 3y ago
  It gets downvoted because it's stupid and unhelpful. If your body has the wrong idea of how much fat it should store, it'll do its best to force you to eat more to get that fat, even if it makes you unhealthily overweight. Medication can fix the body's idea of how much fat it should have. Taking that medication doesn't mean you can keep stuffing yourself, it means you can finally _stop_ stuffing yourself, without your body incorrectly reporting that it's starving. The point of the medication is to make it possible to do the right thing.
- petesergeant 3y ago
  > if you take a medicine you can keep stuffing yourself That’s not at all how these new medicines work. You can’t (well, don’t) keep stuffing yourself on Wegovy (Ozempic) and Zepbound (Mounjaro), because you no longer spend all your time wanting to. These drugs work by switching off your desire to stuff yourself, not by allowing you to stuff yourself without weight gain. When you eat a big meal on these medicines, you feel satisfied and over-full, rather than like an addict who just got a partial hit and wants to ride it. I take an immensely helpful SSRI for GAD, that no amount of mindfulness, therapy, or healthy living seemed to touch. I take a GLP-1 agonist for a food compulsion I’ve had for 25 years and couldn’t shake. I never got properly fat, but fighting a desire to EAT ALL THE FOOD no longer occupies 50% of my mental energy. Have you ever come off nicotine? If so, you’ll know the little voice in your head that is continually telling you that you should have a cigarette for the first few days. You can’t shut it up. Hey, have a cigarette. You know what’s be good right now? A cigarette. Oh you just woke up? Have a cigarette. It fades eventually for nicotine. In my experience, and, in that of many/most fat people, you have that constantly for food, that food noise. GLP-1 agonists turn the food noise off.
rustcleaner 3y ago
Ah, moralism.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  As opposed to the immoralism that has been making us fatter and fatter?

belltaco 3y ago

> These people didn’t magically create mass from nothing. They ate too much for their activity. Done. Stop doing that if you don’t want to gain weight Not true. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-reveals-why-calorie-counts-are-all-wrong/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-reveals-w... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5082693/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5082693/ > discovered that certain Russian populations had large intestines that were about 57 centimeters longer on average than those of certain Polish populations. Because the final stages of nutrient absorption occur in the large intestine, a Russian eating the same amount of food as a Pole is likely to get more calories from it. People also vary in the particular enzymes they produce. By some measures, most adults do not produce the enzyme lactase, which is necessary to break down lactose sugars in milk. As a result, one man's high-calorie latte is another's low-calorie case of the runs. > Call out: Germ-free mice can eat more and gain less weight than conventional mice

netr0ute 3y ago
The problem is, it still boils down to CICO due to thermodynamics. That means they're still eating too much given a certain amount of physical activity.
chiefalchemist 3y ago
> "certain Russian populations" Yes, of course. There are always outliers. But 50+% of the American population doesn't fall into this bucket, do they? Nor did they suddenly become that after they were born (i.e., obesity is a relatively new problem and not so much driven by DNA else why didn't it exist so much even just 50 yrs ago?). We keep looking for all kinds of "answers" to obesity but we already have the one that works for most people most of the time: Take in more calories than you burn, and those extra calories will become added weight. That's it. It is *that* simple. But people refuse to change their diet and/or lifestyle. In fact they're being told it's not their fault, as if someone else is responsible for what goes in their mouth and their sedentary lifestyles.
- SirMaster 3y ago
  But what if consuming as low amount of calories as needed to be equal to or less than energy expended leaves you constantly feeling tired and with headaches and such from eating so little? Is this not something that actually happens? It seems like a spiral of doom. Eat less, so now I have even less energy for activity and thus now I am burning less energy, so I need to eat even less...
  - chiefalchemist 3y ago
    Sure. That sucks. But so does diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, and premature death. The ultimate solution is prevention. But bring that up and you're accessed of being insensitive, fat shaming, etc. We've normalized the abnormal, and too few what to see that reversed.
- awfulneutral 3y ago
  It might be that simple from a high level conceptual standpoint, but when the amount of calories you burn passively adjusts up or down as your body fights to maintain its weight, it is much more complex.
  - chiefalchemist 3y ago
    Agreed. But that's a weight *loss* issue. The more basic "Why has there been a rise in obesity?" keeps being asked, and that's already answered. The idea that people are falling asleep next to a pod and waking up with too much weight for some mysterious reason is a false narrative. It's not making anyone any more aware or any healthier.
goostavos 3y ago
Sigh. Exhibit A of lazy internet arguing. The things you linked are completely irrelevant. First link: The calorie counts of food are wrong? Sure. Absolutely. No shock there. Treat them as rough estimates. Second link: different people are different? Whoa. Wow. Oh man, mind blown. What you naively describe as "not true", the universe itself would describe as bedrock reality. Despite the bad scientism (i.e. coping) everyone hides behind, nothing changes the fact that if you burn more calories than you consume, you'll loose weight. If you aren't loosing weight AND counting all of your calories, guess what: you've counted wrong. Dial them back more. Keep dialing back until results are achieved. The gym bros have truly found This One Weird Trick that works 100% of the time.
thefz 3y ago
You just proved the point you want to disprove. Those that absorb more calories gain more weight, thus CICO.

paulpauper 3y ago

For those contestants, weight loss was a full time job, and they had trainers and dieticians. How is that supposed to work for average people who have jobs and families or do not have a lot of willpower? Weight loss drugs can make it easier, which I am all for. Availing oneself of medical technology is not cheating; it's why the technology exists in the first place.

jay_kyburz 3y ago
I agree that people should accept help if they need it, and should not feel ashamed for doing it, but having a strong willpower is a superpower that will help people in all aspects of their lives. I wonder if there are ways you can improve your willpower.
- paulpauper 3y ago
  I wonder if there are ways you can improve your willpower. stimulants

louwrentius 3y ago

Sure, blame the people. Fat shame all you want. Problem solved. Done. It's so easy, just stop eating so much. As if fat people haven't heard that one a bilion times over. As if fat people havent tried time and time again. Personal responsibility! you put that stuff in your mouth, rah! rah! Personally I'm actually sick of people having no eye for the bigger picture, for many systemic reasons and larger society, and just blame stuff like this on individuals.

goostavos 3y ago
But... Not eating works, though? How are statements about reality fat shaming?
- louwrentius 3y ago
  Why don’t poor people just work hard and become rich?
  - goostavos 3y ago
    Alas, the laws of thermodynamics remain despite irrelevant comments.
wexomania 3y ago
Well, it is easy to hold people accountable for what they themselves put in their mouths no? That being said, there is some issues with the prevelance of hyperprocessed unhealthy foods. The fact that the most unhealthy options also tend to be the cheapest and easies, really do not help.
- Dagger2 3y ago
  Easy, yes, but not exactly correct and certainly not helpful in the slightest.
rustcleaner 3y ago
Too bad bootstrappers can't be barred from welfare. They can never dogfood their own philosophy when on the wrong side of it!

thaanpaa 3y ago

It requires that complexity because a metric shit ton of scientific research shows that it is more complicated than that. Permanent weight loss of more than ten pounds is nearly impossible from a scientific standpoint. The success rate after 5 years of weight loss is somewhere around 0.1%. You'd think that if it was as easy as everyone claims, more people would succeed. Heck, many people who have had gastric bypass surgery regain a significant amount of weight, even if their stomachs have been reduced to the size of a ping pong ball.

paulpauper 3y ago
yup, the stomach gradually expands and the weight returns. Really hard to beat the body.
bodiekane 3y ago
My weight floats in a range that's 40-50 pounds lighter today than I was a decade ago. It's because I eat less and move more. Physically, weight-loss is utterly trivial. Literally everything that people say works, does. Eat less calories, eat less sugar, cut out snacking, cut out liquid calories, cut out processed food, reduce carbs, literally any and all of those work, choose whichever is most appealing to the individual. The challenge to weight and diet in America is mental and cultural. Obese people remain obese because they have unhealthy relationships with food and eat addictively or emotionally, using food to soothe anxiety, depression, loneliness, disappointment, etc and because cultural norms and advertising have normalized obesity-causing diets. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
- vkazanov 3y ago
  Fully agree. The science of body metabolism is hard. But the rules for weight loss are simple: move more, eat less. For some people it's just "Move more, eat the same". "Eat less" means "less calories", volume can be the same - really helps. PS chips are a crime against humanity
  - thefz 3y ago
    Not even that, if you change what you eat, you can have a dramatic effect as well. Try cutting out carbs and sugar as much as possible, results in two weeks. Changing when you eat is a factor too.

bluescrn 3y ago

The bad food habits are only going to get worse as meat+dairy is forcibly taken away from us by the powers that be. Fewer options for an appealing 'proper meal', more temptation to eat sugar-laden junk.

thomasfromcdnjs 3y ago
I agree 100%. (though I don't think there are any particular "powers" at play) The sentiment still stands though, all the cogs in play seem to spin to make real food inaccessible and expensive. (by real I mean animal products and good produce) (raw milk is straight up illegal in Australia, most of the world would laugh at that) ==== Side note: Judging health questions off a game show is ridiculous

frankus 3y ago

Do you have first-hand experience with being overweight and/or losing a significant amount of weight? I think you're vastly overestimating how much of this (particularly "calories out") is under voluntary control. We're discussing an article that showed that extra active calories burned tend to lead to a compensatory reduction in resting metabolism. And there are some very strong psychological/physiological drives that influence "calories in" (read up on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment for examples).

paulpauper 3y ago
yup. many of these people who are on weight loss drugs already tried dieting and it did not work.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  “It did not work”… interesting choice of words.

jklinger410 3y ago

> They ate too much for their activity. Done. Stop doing that if you don’t want to gain weight. So much science out here to disprove this kind of statement, yet you still make it.

thefz 3y ago

Welcome to weight loss discussion on HN, where any rational point like "eat less" or "calories in, calories out" gets downvoted and discussed to death. Apparently for this crowd taking medicines is better than stopping stuffing yourself, because you know, if you take a medicine you can keep stuffing yourself. Oh, and also "it's more complicated than that" is always a nice escape from the harsh reality of thermodynamics.

Dagger2 3y ago
It gets downvoted because it's stupid and unhelpful. If your body has the wrong idea of how much fat it should store, it'll do its best to force you to eat more to get that fat, even if it makes you unhealthily overweight. Medication can fix the body's idea of how much fat it should have. Taking that medication doesn't mean you can keep stuffing yourself, it means you can finally _stop_ stuffing yourself, without your body incorrectly reporting that it's starving. The point of the medication is to make it possible to do the right thing.
petesergeant 3y ago
> if you take a medicine you can keep stuffing yourself That’s not at all how these new medicines work. You can’t (well, don’t) keep stuffing yourself on Wegovy (Ozempic) and Zepbound (Mounjaro), because you no longer spend all your time wanting to. These drugs work by switching off your desire to stuff yourself, not by allowing you to stuff yourself without weight gain. When you eat a big meal on these medicines, you feel satisfied and over-full, rather than like an addict who just got a partial hit and wants to ride it. I take an immensely helpful SSRI for GAD, that no amount of mindfulness, therapy, or healthy living seemed to touch. I take a GLP-1 agonist for a food compulsion I’ve had for 25 years and couldn’t shake. I never got properly fat, but fighting a desire to EAT ALL THE FOOD no longer occupies 50% of my mental energy. Have you ever come off nicotine? If so, you’ll know the little voice in your head that is continually telling you that you should have a cigarette for the first few days. You can’t shut it up. Hey, have a cigarette. You know what’s be good right now? A cigarette. Oh you just woke up? Have a cigarette. It fades eventually for nicotine. In my experience, and, in that of many/most fat people, you have that constantly for food, that food noise. GLP-1 agonists turn the food noise off.

rustcleaner 3y ago

Ah, moralism.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
As opposed to the immoralism that has been making us fatter and fatter?