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Saying that the cure for obesity is to eat less is like saying that the cure for heroin addiction is to stop using heroin. It's both clearly true, and also usel

Saying that the cure for obesity is to eat less is like saying that the cure for heroin addiction is to stop using heroin. It's both clearly true, and also useless.

chrismarlow9 2y ago
The cure is to teach from an early age about impulse control, moderation, and how to spot signs of addiction in yourself early. This goes for: Social media Drugs and alcohol Food Or literally any other addiction. I don't think this is a useless thing to discuss.
- soulbadguy 2y ago
  And yet most obese people are no more addicted to food than you are addicted to oxygen... It's so bizarre how many people will pretzel their way into moralistic non sense to find a solution to what is clearly a medical problem. Obesity as far as we understanding it now is an hunger regulation problem. For unknown reason a lot of people still feel the need to eat even when their body is clearly in calory surplus. No amount of of impulse control or moderation can make you override billions of years of evolution and not eat when you are starving... if we could... society would be a very different place
  - WA 2y ago
    My theory is that consuming sugar makes you more hungry. You can eat until you're full, but if you eat desert or a sugary snack a little later, it makes you feel less full and you can eat more. As if your brain notices the sugar source and switches into "full loading mode" and craves more of this historically rare resource. > And yet most obese people are no more addicted to food than you are addicted to oxygen... Most obese people seem to be addicted to sugary food, soft drings, desert and all that, which then triggers more eating. In addition, it might be a gut bacteria thing. If your gut is used to processing lots of sugar, you crave it even more and fighting your gut microbiome requires way too much impulse control and moderation. The solution might be to recognize this mechanism, remove all sugar from the diet and find a way to control impulses for a few weeks until the gut bacteria changed. Drinking water and chewing sugar-free gum helps me to remove food cravings temporarily with no downsides. But... I have a normal weight.
    - scotteric 2y ago
      I think insulin resistance from excess calorie and carbohydrate consumption has a lot to do with it. One of the symptoms of hyperglycemia is increased hunger, since glucose is staying in your blood stream instead of getting into your cells. 1/3 Americans have prediabetes, and more than that are probably developing insulin resistance.
  - wiseowise 2y ago
    > For unknown reason a lot of people still feel the need to eat even when their body is clearly in calory surplus. Boredom, stress, unhappy life, happy life, laziness - it could be anything. You know what it couldn’t be? Exercise. I’m yet to see a person working out hard and eating at the same time.
    - cthalupa 2y ago
      > I’m yet to see a person working out hard and eating at the same time. No, but plenty of people have their hunger stimulated by exercise and eat too much after. You simply can't fix being overweight or obese with exercise alone in the vast majority of people. Even if you don't believe in the constrained total energy model that a good chunk of metabolic research PhDs think is at least somewhat true and instead believe solely in the additive model, exercise stimulates hunger and it's far easier to eat 1000 calories than burn 1000 calories. You have to do both and exercise doesn't automatically make the other easy.
- pixl97 2y ago
  Ok, in the US start talking about food addiction seriously and see what happens. Do you remember how long it took to get tobacco mostly banned in the US? Do you remember how much the tobacco industry played the skeptic and introduced bunk science into the mix? Well Coca Cola, Pepsico, Nestle, and all the other junk food companies have been on this game for years now. Want to change school curriculum?, well your political opponent has $100,000-$1,000,000 more than you from the make people fat industry. Meanwhile there are a crazy number of attack ads against you for being a crazy commie that wants to control peoples lives, you socialist bastard, you're against freedom.
- dleink 2y ago
  The presently addicted and obese thank you for your service to the future.
indiebat 2y ago
Heroin changes brain chemically, it's (more) serious addiction than obesity, again being a little insensitive to obese people, but they're bad in comparison. And there are degrees of truthfulness & wrongness right! About the point you're making, two generations before you and me, people where fit, more attentive & generally healthy (outside vaccines that prevent diseases now & positive effects due to advancements in medicine), what changed? Not as platitude, but go from first principles, the choices you make everyday effects your mind (& the time you spend on particular activities), and if they aren't life affirming (for lack of better words), in due time you limit your options (ie less choices from your mind, bad food or less bad food or multiple bad ways to spend your time?), till you proclaim from high top mountains 'oh god, I'm helpless without acceptance from some higher power!' This isn't to say, I'll be as preachy and asshole(ish) to a friend or someone I care about in similar need, I'll probably say 'seek medical help etc' like you. But thinking things through & arriving at truth is important, don't you think? This is different to mental strength or controlling yourself etc, it's more about self reflection & freedom through discipline, respecting your life, decisions & thoughts more than your impulsive emotions in an ever distracting world, that kind of thing.. I don't think I'll change your mind or this will come across in good faith, that's okay, I'm in a reflective mood, and it's awfully chilly outside :-)
- soulbadguy 2y ago
  > About the point you're making, 2 generations before you and me, people where fit, more attentive & generally healthy (outside vaccines that prevent diseases now & positive effects due to advancements in medicine), what changed? Air pollution, water quality, pestecide, food/produce quality, plastic particule everywhere... I find this perspective so bizarre. Whats the most probable in 2 generation of exponentially increasing and barely regulated technological changes : culture has change so dramatically as to change human nature and makes us all lazy... or... something in the environment/food chain is having phisiolical/biological effects...
  - indiebat 2y ago
    People living in country side & eating from organic farming, they're doing alright (similar to our closest ancestors), but that's beside the point Cultural change over 2/3 even 10 generations will not significantly alter your biology. Pollution & disintegration in modern world you're referring to, they do have negative effects on our health, but it's not the whole story and they possibly cannot have effects on your decisions about what you eat and how you spend your time right? I'm particularly referring to obesity caused by over eating, bad life style etc (not the other rare serious persistent irreversible kind that happens as side effect of more serious ailments or genetics)
wiseowise 2y ago
Well, of course if you’ve been jacking heroin for 30 years and all your veins are destroyed beyond repair it’s useless. It’ll take as much, or even more, to return back to normal.

Saying that the cure for obesity is to eat less is like saying that the cure for heroin addiction is to stop using heroin. It's both clearly true, and also useless.

chrismarlow9 2y ago

The cure is to teach from an early age about impulse control, moderation, and how to spot signs of addiction in yourself early. This goes for: Social media Drugs and alcohol Food Or literally any other addiction. I don't think this is a useless thing to discuss.

soulbadguy 2y ago
And yet most obese people are no more addicted to food than you are addicted to oxygen... It's so bizarre how many people will pretzel their way into moralistic non sense to find a solution to what is clearly a medical problem. Obesity as far as we understanding it now is an hunger regulation problem. For unknown reason a lot of people still feel the need to eat even when their body is clearly in calory surplus. No amount of of impulse control or moderation can make you override billions of years of evolution and not eat when you are starving... if we could... society would be a very different place
- WA 2y ago
  My theory is that consuming sugar makes you more hungry. You can eat until you're full, but if you eat desert or a sugary snack a little later, it makes you feel less full and you can eat more. As if your brain notices the sugar source and switches into "full loading mode" and craves more of this historically rare resource. > And yet most obese people are no more addicted to food than you are addicted to oxygen... Most obese people seem to be addicted to sugary food, soft drings, desert and all that, which then triggers more eating. In addition, it might be a gut bacteria thing. If your gut is used to processing lots of sugar, you crave it even more and fighting your gut microbiome requires way too much impulse control and moderation. The solution might be to recognize this mechanism, remove all sugar from the diet and find a way to control impulses for a few weeks until the gut bacteria changed. Drinking water and chewing sugar-free gum helps me to remove food cravings temporarily with no downsides. But... I have a normal weight.
  - scotteric 2y ago
    I think insulin resistance from excess calorie and carbohydrate consumption has a lot to do with it. One of the symptoms of hyperglycemia is increased hunger, since glucose is staying in your blood stream instead of getting into your cells. 1/3 Americans have prediabetes, and more than that are probably developing insulin resistance.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  > For unknown reason a lot of people still feel the need to eat even when their body is clearly in calory surplus. Boredom, stress, unhappy life, happy life, laziness - it could be anything. You know what it couldn’t be? Exercise. I’m yet to see a person working out hard and eating at the same time.
  - cthalupa 2y ago
    > I’m yet to see a person working out hard and eating at the same time. No, but plenty of people have their hunger stimulated by exercise and eat too much after. You simply can't fix being overweight or obese with exercise alone in the vast majority of people. Even if you don't believe in the constrained total energy model that a good chunk of metabolic research PhDs think is at least somewhat true and instead believe solely in the additive model, exercise stimulates hunger and it's far easier to eat 1000 calories than burn 1000 calories. You have to do both and exercise doesn't automatically make the other easy.
pixl97 2y ago
Ok, in the US start talking about food addiction seriously and see what happens. Do you remember how long it took to get tobacco mostly banned in the US? Do you remember how much the tobacco industry played the skeptic and introduced bunk science into the mix? Well Coca Cola, Pepsico, Nestle, and all the other junk food companies have been on this game for years now. Want to change school curriculum?, well your political opponent has $100,000-$1,000,000 more than you from the make people fat industry. Meanwhile there are a crazy number of attack ads against you for being a crazy commie that wants to control peoples lives, you socialist bastard, you're against freedom.
dleink 2y ago
The presently addicted and obese thank you for your service to the future.

indiebat 2y ago

Heroin changes brain chemically, it's (more) serious addiction than obesity, again being a little insensitive to obese people, but they're bad in comparison. And there are degrees of truthfulness & wrongness right! About the point you're making, two generations before you and me, people where fit, more attentive & generally healthy (outside vaccines that prevent diseases now & positive effects due to advancements in medicine), what changed? Not as platitude, but go from first principles, the choices you make everyday effects your mind (& the time you spend on particular activities), and if they aren't life affirming (for lack of better words), in due time you limit your options (ie less choices from your mind, bad food or less bad food or multiple bad ways to spend your time?), till you proclaim from high top mountains 'oh god, I'm helpless without acceptance from some higher power!' This isn't to say, I'll be as preachy and asshole(ish) to a friend or someone I care about in similar need, I'll probably say 'seek medical help etc' like you. But thinking things through & arriving at truth is important, don't you think? This is different to mental strength or controlling yourself etc, it's more about self reflection & freedom through discipline, respecting your life, decisions & thoughts more than your impulsive emotions in an ever distracting world, that kind of thing.. I don't think I'll change your mind or this will come across in good faith, that's okay, I'm in a reflective mood, and it's awfully chilly outside :-)

soulbadguy 2y ago
> About the point you're making, 2 generations before you and me, people where fit, more attentive & generally healthy (outside vaccines that prevent diseases now & positive effects due to advancements in medicine), what changed? Air pollution, water quality, pestecide, food/produce quality, plastic particule everywhere... I find this perspective so bizarre. Whats the most probable in 2 generation of exponentially increasing and barely regulated technological changes : culture has change so dramatically as to change human nature and makes us all lazy... or... something in the environment/food chain is having phisiolical/biological effects...
- indiebat 2y ago
  People living in country side & eating from organic farming, they're doing alright (similar to our closest ancestors), but that's beside the point Cultural change over 2/3 even 10 generations will not significantly alter your biology. Pollution & disintegration in modern world you're referring to, they do have negative effects on our health, but it's not the whole story and they possibly cannot have effects on your decisions about what you eat and how you spend your time right? I'm particularly referring to obesity caused by over eating, bad life style etc (not the other rare serious persistent irreversible kind that happens as side effect of more serious ailments or genetics)

wiseowise 2y ago

Well, of course if you’ve been jacking heroin for 30 years and all your veins are destroyed beyond repair it’s useless. It’ll take as much, or even more, to return back to normal.