8 ms·

If you have an open mind, I'd like to assign you some homework if you like. Take a look around r/zepbound and count the following: 1. Posts from folks who diet

by gcr 2y ago

If you have an open mind, I'd like to assign you some homework if you like. Take a look around r/zepbound and count the following: 1. Posts from folks who diet+exercise, or who have tried diet/exercise and nothing's worked so they then turned to Zepbound ("excited to hit the gym," "my diet is finally starting to work with Zepbound" and similar) 2. Posts from folks who haven't tried diet/exercise and turned to Zepbound first. (e.g. "I'm excited to eat dessert and laze around on my couch all day!" or "Zep is so much easier than before, no more keto for me" and similar) Which group do you think would have more posts? Selection bias probably prevents us from being able to count "Zepbound didn't work for me, but diet and exercise did" posts, which is why i suggest this. Here's my hypothesis: I think self-control is generally uncorrelated to losing weight. Perhaps it's necessary to have self-control to lose weight "the simple way," but certainly not sufficient. I know lots of friends who've struggled and found it's not so simple.

llamaimperative 2y ago
GP isn't talking about self-control, they're talking about the fact we've created a system that requires obscene amounts of self-control if you wish to maintain physical health. People in the 50s weren't slimmer because they had ironclad determination to stay such.
- nextos 2y ago
  Exactly, good systems do not rely on willpower. They rather make obvious habits effortless. Deviating from the mean is hard. Bad food and sedentarism are the norm.
  - jsrcout 2y ago
    Agree. "Defaults matter".
  - Scoundreller 2y ago
    > They rather make obvious habits effortless. I wouldn’t call taking the stairs in a pre-elevator world “effortless”, rather it was just the only option. I also think better food handling/storage/treatment/blah means we absorb & retain more of the calories that we consume.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      The vast majority of accessible American foods these days are over-processed, poor quality ingredients with fancy marketing on the boxes. (And stories about how the brand was started by a grandmother a century ago...)
  - xcskier56 2y ago
    Traveling from a fairly walkable, but still car dependent midwestern city to NYC and also Europe in the last few months, it's amazing how much our living environment contributes. My first day in NYC and Europe I put in about 14k steps and at least according to my phone, one of those days I burned 750 cal just walking around to various places. Just by living my life I was WAY more active. Making the good choice the easy/only choice is the only way to solve this problem long-term (without drugs)
    - atrettel 2y ago
      I agree. I lived in West LA for a few years and noticed that I was just walking around a lot more than in previous locations. I measured it to be typically 5 to 10 miles per day (I don't recall the number of steps but I recall getting close to 30k/day on some days). And I wasn't going out of my way to go walking --- it just happened because I walked to work, to get groceries, to visit friends, to go to the movies, etc. To me, the best long-term answer is also to change the environment to be more amenable to walking.
  - barrkel 2y ago
    The amount of food you eat isn't a habit. And I don't know what it is that makes people obese, but I don't think it's simply "bad food" as in the stereotype of bad food. It seems clear enough to me that there is something - something - in the ecosystem that messes up the body's weight / energy homeostasis and we haven't identified the culprit. It might be a food additive, but it could be something to do with artificial light in the evening or plasticizers in our plastic products or who knows what. Just my pov as non-overweight person who doesn't exercise (other than flipping my four year old around), doesn't walk or run long distances (but a 5 mile walk every couple of months doesn't phase me), eats very few fruits and vegetables, generally eats mostly meat, pasta, bread, cheese, cream and potatoes, and ends up in a fast food outlet maybe once a week on average.
    - pas 2y ago
      recommended reading about the environmental factor hypothesis https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-getting-contaminated-by-the-wrong-obesity-ideas https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get... it doesn't have to be just habit, but cultural/learned factors likely play a huge part. each generation eats more, gets bigger, obesity runs in the family, (many obesity associated genes are mostly expressed in the brain ... the typical cursed environment-gene interaction), portion sizes got bigger, it became normal to gulp down a lot more sugar, etc.
- mlyle 2y ago
  > People in the 50s weren't slimmer because they had ironclad determination to stay such. No. They lived in an overall healthier environment. But they were also subject to much greater social pressure to stay slim and could endure fairly intense social judgment and stigmatization for weights that we consider normal (particularly women).
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Then why are people scrambling for Ozempic? If it were true that "people think being fat is totally fine or desirable now" then this wouldn't be a blockbuster drug. Weak thesis.
    - adventured 2y ago
      Both things are true. There was a far more vicious shaming culture 50-70 years ago about things like being obese. And culturally it's still looked down upon to be obese, it's just not as acceptable to be vicious about it (and of course sometimes people still are). Today however there is a lot more "always on" pressure: social media is a huge component to social, social acceptance, socializing, social learning & sharing, getting to date people, et al. That's a form of individually focused media pressure that didn't exist back then. And sure you can turn it off, not partake, but there are usually serious consequences especially for younger people. That's the context.
      - soulbadguy 2y ago
        Non sense... There were not a particularly big stigma about being obese 50 or 70 years ago. Socially stigma were more about gender roles, sexuality etc...etc...
        adventured 2y ago
        There was a huge stigma about being obese 50-70 years ago. It was wholly unacceptable for children, young persons and women in particular. Exclusively older men were allowed to be obese culturally without being shamed about it. As recently as the 1980s movies were overloaded with jokes about fat people, it was extremely common. That's stigma in action culturally.
- squidlogic 2y ago
  In my experience fitness is less about self control or will power and more about creating routines that lead to fitness. For example, I have a routine of going to a group fitness class at my gym in the morning. I don't need to summon willpower, I just have a morning routine that involves doing x thing at y time. No thought required. Given the abundance of options for fitness classes and meal plan services, you really can just put this on auto-pilot and have a lifestyle that is healthier than 99% of your peers.
  - elijaht 2y ago
    There is still a certain degree of willpower involved in routines. I wakeup every morning and workout, and every morning I have to fight my brain to get out of bed. I've been doing that for 10 years. That being said - I do feel like reducing the amount of willpower needed is the key. I love junk food, but if I never buy it at a grocery store it's much easier to cut it out. If I have no chips in the house I could still get some at the corner store, but I need to be much less disciplined than if the chips were in my pantry
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Unfortunately we know that simply convincing people to change their behavior is very, very, very fucking hard. Individuals can and do pull it off, yes, but we're talking about a society level change that needs lots of people to succeed at this. It is empirically and demonstrably ineffective as a solution.
    - nightski 2y ago
      Nothing "needs" to happen. People don't have to live how you want them to.
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        Thanks for your insight. What are you even doing here having a conversation if one person has no legitimate bearing on another? Obviously no one is talking about a treadmill concentration camp here, good lord.
- jrflowers 2y ago
  > People in the 50s weren't slimmer because they had ironclad determination to stay such. People in the 50s (in the US) had, among other things, fistfuls of benzedrine. Edit: here is a link for the skeptical folks https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/speedy-history-americas-addiction-amphetamine-180966989/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/speedy-history-americ...
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Whatever, set the clock to the 1820s. Or the 1400s. Or the 1200s. Or the 1990's or 200 BCE, I don't care.
    - golergka 2y ago
      They didn't have that much food available.
    - jrflowers 2y ago
      I didn’t bring up the 1950s, you did. (???) It is a useful and topical period to discuss in a thread about ubiquitous weight loss drug usage.
    - viraptor 2y ago
      Do we really have enough information about their daily habits, food availability, ability to survive, etc. from those times? Once you go before easy refrigeration and distribution, you get people dying from famine in bad years. It's going be to be hard to make any actionable lessons from those times that still apply now.
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        Yes we know that 50%+ of the population was not obese.
        viraptor 2y ago
        https://academic.oup.com/past/article/239/1/71/4794719 https://academic.oup.com/past/article/239/1/71/4794719 > James Nye, for example, was one of a family of eleven children raised in rural Sussex in the 1820s and recalled how the ‘the young ones’ in his family went ‘very short of food’. Despite his mother’s best efforts, he rarely had more than ‘half a bellyful’ at mealtimes, and ate scarcely anything other than bread. > Following the harvest failures of 1816, for example, John Lincoln’s entire family was forced to undergo severe privations. His two children succumbed to disease very easily — their quick deaths from measles were likely owing in part to prior malnourishment. You can't be obese if you don't have food.
- golergka 2y ago
  > a system that requires obscene amounts of self-control if you wish to maintain physical health That's million years of evolution with food scarcity and modern capitalist world which created unprecedented abundance of food (and other things). And before you compare it to Europe — europeans still smoke much more than americans. Tobacco is also just a chemical that decreases effects of obesity, just in a different form.
  - soulbadguy 2y ago
    So that's your explanation ? European are slimmer because they smoke more ??
    - adventured 2y ago
      Which Europeans? Countries in Europe with approximately the same obesity problem as the US: Poland, Croatia, Romania, Britain, Hungary, Georgia, Slovakia, Chechia, Ireland, Greece. And of course New Zealand, Australia, Canada are all in the same boat as well. Those are all over 30% obesity and climbing (Romania is 38%, nearly at the US levels). The US is of course the leader of the pack, however it's all the same fundamental problem.
      - Scoundreller 2y ago
        My running theory is that there’s more weight-discrimination in Europe, so you’re just less likely to see the overweight/obese in customer-facing positions.
    - golergka 2y ago
      Different European countries have different circuimstances, just like their counterparts, american states. But if we're talking about all of Europe and US, then yes, this is the main reason.
      - soulbadguy 2y ago
        Source ?
- screye 2y ago
  Your point is correct. But 50% of people in 50s also smoked cigarettes, a known appetite suppressant. So yeah, culture driven lower portion sizes + meds driven lower appetite is a well-tested combination with known positive outcomes.
- danbolt 2y ago
  Yeah, they had nicotine!
- bsder 2y ago
  > People in the 50s weren't slimmer because they had ironclad determination to stay such. Well, heights increased dramatically for a couple decades so what that meant was that many people in the 1950s were starving. In the 1930s, people died of starvation even in the US. I don't really think that we want to go back to starving our population just to be thin, thanks.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    No one is proposing that, obviously
- presentation 2y ago
  Living in Japan has made it clear to me that cultural attitudes towards food make all the difference. It’s not like there’s a dearth of delicious things here, but obesity rates are more or less a rounding error.
  - Schiendelman 2y ago
    There's a confounding factor to your theory: people in Japan are dramatically less likely to use a car for door-to-door travel. The amount of walking a Japanese person does burns a huge number of calories that most people in the US simply don't burn.
    - elijaht 2y ago
      Only have the anecdata of being in both Tokyo and NYC, but obesity rates are clearly higher in NYC than in Tokyo. I'm not convinced that relative obesity in Japan vs US is primarily due to walking differences. As another commenter posted, the amount of walking even a highly active person does is fairly negligible wrt weight loss/gain. As another anecdote - my ambient walking milage is 5 miles/day and I run an additional 20-30 miles a week and still maintain an obese BMI
    - presentation 2y ago
      I don’t buy it, putting aside the fact that there are many public transit-heavy countries with obesity problems, the amount of calories you burn from walking is a drop in the bucket, you can wipe out a full day of city walking with a small portion of French fries. Diet is a way bigger factor in weight control than activity, unless you’re a pro athlete burning thousands of calories a day from exercise because you’re working out nonstop as your job. You should still walk for general health, but not for weight loss. EDIT: this report from Time about Japanese food culture rings true. https://time.com/6974579/japan-food-culture-low-obesity/ https://time.com/6974579/japan-food-culture-low-obesity/
    - unlikelytomato 2y ago
      This is certainly true. Others will quote that exercise is not an effective mechanism to maintain healthy weight with 40 studies to back it. The goalposts seem to move a lot in this domain. Nevertheless, there is a ton of evidence of people in various behavior patterns that do not have such obesity issues in their society. It's wild to me how many people reach a conclusion of helplessness given that fact. The real kicker is that we aren't talking about one population being 5-10 lbs too heavy. We are taking about a difference between healthy weight and pervasive obesity. It's wild that such a delta is normalized
acabal 2y ago
The more important point the comment you're replying to makes is not "what if people could diet and exercise" - i.e. accept the modern American lifestyle as given, plus force yourself to go to the gym and eat chicken and broccoli - but rather that the modern American lifestyle in fundamentally structured to lead to people being overweight. Instead of being forced to drive everywhere for the most basic possible human needs - like getting groceries, going to the doctor, or dropping kids off at school - as is the case in 90% of America - what if you could walk to those places instead? You would get exercise as part of your every day life, with no extra effort! What if instead of corn syrup being so heavily subsidized, we could use more filling sweeteners in a lower amount instead? What if people lived closer to agriculture, instead of in faraway suburban tract housing only accessible by car, so they had easier access to fresh meat and vegetables, instead of ultraprocessed package food? These dreams are not "diet and exercise", they are a fundamental reshaping of American lifestyle that would directly lead to weight loss. We know this, because America used to look like this before, say, 1940. In old photos you see people in huge crowds in streets as they walked to their everyday errands, and menus and recipes of the era are mostly minimally processed food that is mostly local. Americans of the past were not overweight, because the way society arranged its physical existence didn't permit it!
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  My 1950+s grandparents drove everywhere and were fit. When we try to shoehorn so many agendas into one thing nothing gets resolved. It's also part of why so many people distrust everyone's agenda and truthfulness nowadays. Also 1940s America was mostly rural, not huge crowds of people walking together.
  - Schiendelman 2y ago
    In the 1940s, a huge number of Americans walked because fuel was rationed for the war. I'm not sure you could really find data to back your anecdotes.
- foobarian 2y ago
  IMHO price of calories is the only thing that needs to change. All the talk about wholesome locally grown foods vs. processed industrial stuff is just moralizing and posturing, when the metric that matters is the price. Just look at Coke, which is arguably not even a good example because of pre-war price fixing, but still it costs half as much as in 1950 when adjusted for inflation.
dfxm12 2y ago
I'm not sure how this applies to my comment. I'm not saying anything about self control. I'm not against individuals taking GLP-1s. But, if we're at a point where we're all on drugs to treat lifestyle diseases, we should at least recognize that these lifestyles are largely chosen for us, and we should consider that doing something about that will reap us the benefits we're after.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Those benefits and a billion more! Better state of nature, richer social fabric, probably less political polarization if people were bumping into their neighbors more frequently instead of going from drywall box to steel box back to drywall box day in and day out.
  - briandear 2y ago
    Not having to bump into neighbors is a feature not a bug.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      Not for civilization it isn't.
    - cvwright 2y ago
      This depends entirely on the neighbors
- 1659447091 2y ago
  > these lifestyles are largely chosen for us >> Unfortunately, I have to drive everywhere, work too many hours to have free time for recreation and have no idea which government subsidy is going to help big ag likely at the expense of my health. At what point do people stop letting the choice being largely "made" for them and choose something else? The gov subsidy has nothing to do with my personal health choices. My grocery store has the same fresh fruits & vegetable sections grocery stores in Europe have. I am lucky to live in a state whose dominate grocery store sources regional meats & produce, sells their own brand of food made fully or mostly with ingredients I can pronounce, and has complete whole food prepared meals for 1-2 people that take 25mins in the oven. [for the same price as fast food] It's part of the reason I choose not to move. Other choices are a standing desk with a walking pad, which makes it trivial to walk 3-4+ miles a day. I could make more money studying leetcode and living in "elite" tech valley, or hustling for more work instead of choosing myself over the large house in swank community that society has picked as what is "success" for me. Eventually I chose to take less of what "they" told me to choose; at some point we have to realize the only person that is going to live with our choices is ourself. If GLP-1s is needed to help people get back or get to that point of realization, then maybe it's a blessing to undo all the ills we(society made up of our neighbors) all contributed to creating.
eastbound 2y ago
I’m not obese, just before (1m75 / 82kg) but I have found self control impossible, except when I do intense sports (like musculation 3-6 times a week). Then only, and this is the magic part, I not only eat less, but also enjoy being more brave, with cold showers, being hungry, going to bed early and other efforts in life.
- Gee101 2y ago
  What is musculation?
  - Schiendelman 2y ago
    A transliteration for lifting.
throawayonthe 2y ago
[dead]
Spooky23 2y ago
The people in #1 won’t express it that way. I was that guy. For a variety of reasons that aren’t relevant i developed insulin resistance over a relatively short time that made it increasingly difficult to lose weight. I’m in my mid 40s, which also makes it difficult. I got on one of the GLP drugs 18 months ago. I am down 80 pounds, and am running 20 miles a week. I’ll be doing a half marathon in March. Ive dropped the dose twice and still going strong. Taking the pill made exercise possible. Online everyone likes to apply a moral hazard thing to every discussion. GLP medication twiddled my dopamine system and allowed me to achieve my goals. Period. If you think that makes me weak, I cannot think of anything that I care less about.
huijzer 2y ago
> I think self-control is generally uncorrelated to losing weight Choosing to eat fewer processed foods is very effective but does not require that much self-control since appetite will fall automatically.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
SirMaster 2y ago
But don't you think that it's better to make the changes to prevent obesity rather than focus so much on a cure for after? I don't have a problem with a cure only if it doesn't reduce the focus and effort on prevention. There has to be a reason why so many more people are obese today than decades ago. I refuse to believe we can't find out why and make changes to reverse it. But if it's so easy to cure, will enough people care about figuring out how to prevent it?
amelius 2y ago
Not saying you're wrong but maybe group 2 is too lazy to open their browser and post their experience?
Wytwwww 2y ago
> Perhaps it's necessary to have self-control to lose weight > it's not so simple. Presumably people who have good self control and are not prone to developing addictions (due genetic or various semi-immutable cause) do not become obese in the first place. It might be fairly easy easy for them to lose weight they just don't need.
Aeglaecia 2y ago
counter hypothesis - the amount of self control exhibited by an average human is insufficient to self regulate when placed into a hyper enriched environment , for example the capitalistic profferings of junk food tv porn etc , we did not evolve around these hyper stimulatory activities, how on earth are we meant to adapt to them? drugs are not an answer, they are another bandaid making someone else money and allowing the underlying wounds to fester, the solution is education and awareness of this fucked up situation
bravetraveler 2y ago
My hypothesis: this is more cultural than people want to admit. Try to skip out on too many engagements, sorry, meals and see how many connections you still have.

by gcr 2y ago

llamaimperative 2y ago

GP isn't talking about self-control, they're talking about the fact we've created a system that requires obscene amounts of self-control if you wish to maintain physical health. People in the 50s weren't slimmer because they had ironclad determination to stay such.

nextos 2y ago
Exactly, good systems do not rely on willpower. They rather make obvious habits effortless. Deviating from the mean is hard. Bad food and sedentarism are the norm.
- jsrcout 2y ago
  Agree. "Defaults matter".
- Scoundreller 2y ago
  > They rather make obvious habits effortless. I wouldn’t call taking the stairs in a pre-elevator world “effortless”, rather it was just the only option. I also think better food handling/storage/treatment/blah means we absorb & retain more of the calories that we consume.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    The vast majority of accessible American foods these days are over-processed, poor quality ingredients with fancy marketing on the boxes. (And stories about how the brand was started by a grandmother a century ago...)
- xcskier56 2y ago
  Traveling from a fairly walkable, but still car dependent midwestern city to NYC and also Europe in the last few months, it's amazing how much our living environment contributes. My first day in NYC and Europe I put in about 14k steps and at least according to my phone, one of those days I burned 750 cal just walking around to various places. Just by living my life I was WAY more active. Making the good choice the easy/only choice is the only way to solve this problem long-term (without drugs)
  - atrettel 2y ago
    I agree. I lived in West LA for a few years and noticed that I was just walking around a lot more than in previous locations. I measured it to be typically 5 to 10 miles per day (I don't recall the number of steps but I recall getting close to 30k/day on some days). And I wasn't going out of my way to go walking --- it just happened because I walked to work, to get groceries, to visit friends, to go to the movies, etc. To me, the best long-term answer is also to change the environment to be more amenable to walking.
- barrkel 2y ago
  The amount of food you eat isn't a habit. And I don't know what it is that makes people obese, but I don't think it's simply "bad food" as in the stereotype of bad food. It seems clear enough to me that there is something - something - in the ecosystem that messes up the body's weight / energy homeostasis and we haven't identified the culprit. It might be a food additive, but it could be something to do with artificial light in the evening or plasticizers in our plastic products or who knows what. Just my pov as non-overweight person who doesn't exercise (other than flipping my four year old around), doesn't walk or run long distances (but a 5 mile walk every couple of months doesn't phase me), eats very few fruits and vegetables, generally eats mostly meat, pasta, bread, cheese, cream and potatoes, and ends up in a fast food outlet maybe once a week on average.
  - pas 2y ago
    recommended reading about the environmental factor hypothesis https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-getting-contaminated-by-the-wrong-obesity-ideas https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get... it doesn't have to be just habit, but cultural/learned factors likely play a huge part. each generation eats more, gets bigger, obesity runs in the family, (many obesity associated genes are mostly expressed in the brain ... the typical cursed environment-gene interaction), portion sizes got bigger, it became normal to gulp down a lot more sugar, etc.
mlyle 2y ago
> People in the 50s weren't slimmer because they had ironclad determination to stay such. No. They lived in an overall healthier environment. But they were also subject to much greater social pressure to stay slim and could endure fairly intense social judgment and stigmatization for weights that we consider normal (particularly women).
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Then why are people scrambling for Ozempic? If it were true that "people think being fat is totally fine or desirable now" then this wouldn't be a blockbuster drug. Weak thesis.
  - adventured 2y ago
    Both things are true. There was a far more vicious shaming culture 50-70 years ago about things like being obese. And culturally it's still looked down upon to be obese, it's just not as acceptable to be vicious about it (and of course sometimes people still are). Today however there is a lot more "always on" pressure: social media is a huge component to social, social acceptance, socializing, social learning & sharing, getting to date people, et al. That's a form of individually focused media pressure that didn't exist back then. And sure you can turn it off, not partake, but there are usually serious consequences especially for younger people. That's the context.
    - soulbadguy 2y ago
      Non sense... There were not a particularly big stigma about being obese 50 or 70 years ago. Socially stigma were more about gender roles, sexuality etc...etc...
      - adventured 2y ago
        There was a huge stigma about being obese 50-70 years ago. It was wholly unacceptable for children, young persons and women in particular. Exclusively older men were allowed to be obese culturally without being shamed about it. As recently as the 1980s movies were overloaded with jokes about fat people, it was extremely common. That's stigma in action culturally.
squidlogic 2y ago
In my experience fitness is less about self control or will power and more about creating routines that lead to fitness. For example, I have a routine of going to a group fitness class at my gym in the morning. I don't need to summon willpower, I just have a morning routine that involves doing x thing at y time. No thought required. Given the abundance of options for fitness classes and meal plan services, you really can just put this on auto-pilot and have a lifestyle that is healthier than 99% of your peers.
- elijaht 2y ago
  There is still a certain degree of willpower involved in routines. I wakeup every morning and workout, and every morning I have to fight my brain to get out of bed. I've been doing that for 10 years. That being said - I do feel like reducing the amount of willpower needed is the key. I love junk food, but if I never buy it at a grocery store it's much easier to cut it out. If I have no chips in the house I could still get some at the corner store, but I need to be much less disciplined than if the chips were in my pantry
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Unfortunately we know that simply convincing people to change their behavior is very, very, very fucking hard. Individuals can and do pull it off, yes, but we're talking about a society level change that needs lots of people to succeed at this. It is empirically and demonstrably ineffective as a solution.
  - nightski 2y ago
    Nothing "needs" to happen. People don't have to live how you want them to.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      Thanks for your insight. What are you even doing here having a conversation if one person has no legitimate bearing on another? Obviously no one is talking about a treadmill concentration camp here, good lord.
jrflowers 2y ago
> People in the 50s weren't slimmer because they had ironclad determination to stay such. People in the 50s (in the US) had, among other things, fistfuls of benzedrine. Edit: here is a link for the skeptical folks https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/speedy-history-americas-addiction-amphetamine-180966989/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/speedy-history-americ...
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Whatever, set the clock to the 1820s. Or the 1400s. Or the 1200s. Or the 1990's or 200 BCE, I don't care.
  - golergka 2y ago
    They didn't have that much food available.
  - jrflowers 2y ago
    I didn’t bring up the 1950s, you did. (???) It is a useful and topical period to discuss in a thread about ubiquitous weight loss drug usage.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    Do we really have enough information about their daily habits, food availability, ability to survive, etc. from those times? Once you go before easy refrigeration and distribution, you get people dying from famine in bad years. It's going be to be hard to make any actionable lessons from those times that still apply now.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      Yes we know that 50%+ of the population was not obese.
      - viraptor 2y ago
        https://academic.oup.com/past/article/239/1/71/4794719 https://academic.oup.com/past/article/239/1/71/4794719 > James Nye, for example, was one of a family of eleven children raised in rural Sussex in the 1820s and recalled how the ‘the young ones’ in his family went ‘very short of food’. Despite his mother’s best efforts, he rarely had more than ‘half a bellyful’ at mealtimes, and ate scarcely anything other than bread. > Following the harvest failures of 1816, for example, John Lincoln’s entire family was forced to undergo severe privations. His two children succumbed to disease very easily — their quick deaths from measles were likely owing in part to prior malnourishment. You can't be obese if you don't have food.
golergka 2y ago
> a system that requires obscene amounts of self-control if you wish to maintain physical health That's million years of evolution with food scarcity and modern capitalist world which created unprecedented abundance of food (and other things). And before you compare it to Europe — europeans still smoke much more than americans. Tobacco is also just a chemical that decreases effects of obesity, just in a different form.
- soulbadguy 2y ago
  So that's your explanation ? European are slimmer because they smoke more ??
  - adventured 2y ago
    Which Europeans? Countries in Europe with approximately the same obesity problem as the US: Poland, Croatia, Romania, Britain, Hungary, Georgia, Slovakia, Chechia, Ireland, Greece. And of course New Zealand, Australia, Canada are all in the same boat as well. Those are all over 30% obesity and climbing (Romania is 38%, nearly at the US levels). The US is of course the leader of the pack, however it's all the same fundamental problem.
    - Scoundreller 2y ago
      My running theory is that there’s more weight-discrimination in Europe, so you’re just less likely to see the overweight/obese in customer-facing positions.
  - golergka 2y ago
    Different European countries have different circuimstances, just like their counterparts, american states. But if we're talking about all of Europe and US, then yes, this is the main reason.
    - soulbadguy 2y ago
      Source ?
screye 2y ago
Your point is correct. But 50% of people in 50s also smoked cigarettes, a known appetite suppressant. So yeah, culture driven lower portion sizes + meds driven lower appetite is a well-tested combination with known positive outcomes.
danbolt 2y ago
Yeah, they had nicotine!
bsder 2y ago
> People in the 50s weren't slimmer because they had ironclad determination to stay such. Well, heights increased dramatically for a couple decades so what that meant was that many people in the 1950s were starving. In the 1930s, people died of starvation even in the US. I don't really think that we want to go back to starving our population just to be thin, thanks.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  No one is proposing that, obviously
presentation 2y ago
Living in Japan has made it clear to me that cultural attitudes towards food make all the difference. It’s not like there’s a dearth of delicious things here, but obesity rates are more or less a rounding error.
- Schiendelman 2y ago
  There's a confounding factor to your theory: people in Japan are dramatically less likely to use a car for door-to-door travel. The amount of walking a Japanese person does burns a huge number of calories that most people in the US simply don't burn.
  - elijaht 2y ago
    Only have the anecdata of being in both Tokyo and NYC, but obesity rates are clearly higher in NYC than in Tokyo. I'm not convinced that relative obesity in Japan vs US is primarily due to walking differences. As another commenter posted, the amount of walking even a highly active person does is fairly negligible wrt weight loss/gain. As another anecdote - my ambient walking milage is 5 miles/day and I run an additional 20-30 miles a week and still maintain an obese BMI
  - presentation 2y ago
    I don’t buy it, putting aside the fact that there are many public transit-heavy countries with obesity problems, the amount of calories you burn from walking is a drop in the bucket, you can wipe out a full day of city walking with a small portion of French fries. Diet is a way bigger factor in weight control than activity, unless you’re a pro athlete burning thousands of calories a day from exercise because you’re working out nonstop as your job. You should still walk for general health, but not for weight loss. EDIT: this report from Time about Japanese food culture rings true. https://time.com/6974579/japan-food-culture-low-obesity/ https://time.com/6974579/japan-food-culture-low-obesity/
  - unlikelytomato 2y ago
    This is certainly true. Others will quote that exercise is not an effective mechanism to maintain healthy weight with 40 studies to back it. The goalposts seem to move a lot in this domain. Nevertheless, there is a ton of evidence of people in various behavior patterns that do not have such obesity issues in their society. It's wild to me how many people reach a conclusion of helplessness given that fact. The real kicker is that we aren't talking about one population being 5-10 lbs too heavy. We are taking about a difference between healthy weight and pervasive obesity. It's wild that such a delta is normalized

acabal 2y ago

The more important point the comment you're replying to makes is not "what if people could diet and exercise" - i.e. accept the modern American lifestyle as given, plus force yourself to go to the gym and eat chicken and broccoli - but rather that the modern American lifestyle in fundamentally structured to lead to people being overweight. Instead of being forced to drive everywhere for the most basic possible human needs - like getting groceries, going to the doctor, or dropping kids off at school - as is the case in 90% of America - what if you could walk to those places instead? You would get exercise as part of your every day life, with no extra effort! What if instead of corn syrup being so heavily subsidized, we could use more filling sweeteners in a lower amount instead? What if people lived closer to agriculture, instead of in faraway suburban tract housing only accessible by car, so they had easier access to fresh meat and vegetables, instead of ultraprocessed package food? These dreams are not "diet and exercise", they are a fundamental reshaping of American lifestyle that would directly lead to weight loss. We know this, because America used to look like this before, say, 1940. In old photos you see people in huge crowds in streets as they walked to their everyday errands, and menus and recipes of the era are mostly minimally processed food that is mostly local. Americans of the past were not overweight, because the way society arranged its physical existence didn't permit it!

_DeadFred_ 2y ago
My 1950+s grandparents drove everywhere and were fit. When we try to shoehorn so many agendas into one thing nothing gets resolved. It's also part of why so many people distrust everyone's agenda and truthfulness nowadays. Also 1940s America was mostly rural, not huge crowds of people walking together.
- Schiendelman 2y ago
  In the 1940s, a huge number of Americans walked because fuel was rationed for the war. I'm not sure you could really find data to back your anecdotes.
foobarian 2y ago
IMHO price of calories is the only thing that needs to change. All the talk about wholesome locally grown foods vs. processed industrial stuff is just moralizing and posturing, when the metric that matters is the price. Just look at Coke, which is arguably not even a good example because of pre-war price fixing, but still it costs half as much as in 1950 when adjusted for inflation.

dfxm12 2y ago

I'm not sure how this applies to my comment. I'm not saying anything about self control. I'm not against individuals taking GLP-1s. But, if we're at a point where we're all on drugs to treat lifestyle diseases, we should at least recognize that these lifestyles are largely chosen for us, and we should consider that doing something about that will reap us the benefits we're after.

llamaimperative 2y ago
Those benefits and a billion more! Better state of nature, richer social fabric, probably less political polarization if people were bumping into their neighbors more frequently instead of going from drywall box to steel box back to drywall box day in and day out.
- briandear 2y ago
  Not having to bump into neighbors is a feature not a bug.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Not for civilization it isn't.
  - cvwright 2y ago
    This depends entirely on the neighbors
1659447091 2y ago
> these lifestyles are largely chosen for us >> Unfortunately, I have to drive everywhere, work too many hours to have free time for recreation and have no idea which government subsidy is going to help big ag likely at the expense of my health. At what point do people stop letting the choice being largely "made" for them and choose something else? The gov subsidy has nothing to do with my personal health choices. My grocery store has the same fresh fruits & vegetable sections grocery stores in Europe have. I am lucky to live in a state whose dominate grocery store sources regional meats & produce, sells their own brand of food made fully or mostly with ingredients I can pronounce, and has complete whole food prepared meals for 1-2 people that take 25mins in the oven. [for the same price as fast food] It's part of the reason I choose not to move. Other choices are a standing desk with a walking pad, which makes it trivial to walk 3-4+ miles a day. I could make more money studying leetcode and living in "elite" tech valley, or hustling for more work instead of choosing myself over the large house in swank community that society has picked as what is "success" for me. Eventually I chose to take less of what "they" told me to choose; at some point we have to realize the only person that is going to live with our choices is ourself. If GLP-1s is needed to help people get back or get to that point of realization, then maybe it's a blessing to undo all the ills we(society made up of our neighbors) all contributed to creating.

eastbound 2y ago

I’m not obese, just before (1m75 / 82kg) but I have found self control impossible, except when I do intense sports (like musculation 3-6 times a week). Then only, and this is the magic part, I not only eat less, but also enjoy being more brave, with cold showers, being hungry, going to bed early and other efforts in life.

Gee101 2y ago
What is musculation?
- Schiendelman 2y ago
  A transliteration for lifting.

throawayonthe 2y ago

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Spooky23 2y ago

The people in #1 won’t express it that way. I was that guy. For a variety of reasons that aren’t relevant i developed insulin resistance over a relatively short time that made it increasingly difficult to lose weight. I’m in my mid 40s, which also makes it difficult. I got on one of the GLP drugs 18 months ago. I am down 80 pounds, and am running 20 miles a week. I’ll be doing a half marathon in March. Ive dropped the dose twice and still going strong. Taking the pill made exercise possible. Online everyone likes to apply a moral hazard thing to every discussion. GLP medication twiddled my dopamine system and allowed me to achieve my goals. Period. If you think that makes me weak, I cannot think of anything that I care less about.

huijzer 2y ago

> I think self-control is generally uncorrelated to losing weight Choosing to eat fewer processed foods is very effective but does not require that much self-control since appetite will fall automatically.

deleted 2y ago

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SirMaster 2y ago

But don't you think that it's better to make the changes to prevent obesity rather than focus so much on a cure for after? I don't have a problem with a cure only if it doesn't reduce the focus and effort on prevention. There has to be a reason why so many more people are obese today than decades ago. I refuse to believe we can't find out why and make changes to reverse it. But if it's so easy to cure, will enough people care about figuring out how to prevent it?

amelius 2y ago

Not saying you're wrong but maybe group 2 is too lazy to open their browser and post their experience?

Wytwwww 2y ago

> Perhaps it's necessary to have self-control to lose weight > it's not so simple. Presumably people who have good self control and are not prone to developing addictions (due genetic or various semi-immutable cause) do not become obese in the first place. It might be fairly easy easy for them to lose weight they just don't need.

Aeglaecia 2y ago

counter hypothesis - the amount of self control exhibited by an average human is insufficient to self regulate when placed into a hyper enriched environment , for example the capitalistic profferings of junk food tv porn etc , we did not evolve around these hyper stimulatory activities, how on earth are we meant to adapt to them? drugs are not an answer, they are another bandaid making someone else money and allowing the underlying wounds to fester, the solution is education and awareness of this fucked up situation

bravetraveler 2y ago

My hypothesis: this is more cultural than people want to admit. Try to skip out on too many engagements, sorry, meals and see how many connections you still have.