Mewis
9mo ago
Well, what can I say - good for you. Personally, I find that calorie counting does not work very well for predicting weight gain, even after a year of trying it. And if it's true that label calories can be as little as half of the actual content, and it's not possible for a normal person to measure calories out, then perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. As they say, garbage in, garbage out. If you put in garbage data, and you get an impossible result like a TDEE of 4000, then is it actually reasonable to persist?
It seems like false precision to me. CICO advocates call for weighing every leaf of lettuce and drop of oil. When estimates of calorie content can be off by so much, how is that not false precision? Particularly in the context of weight gain, it's not even rational to refuse to eat food that can't be measured.
Mewis
9mo ago
Sure, the skinny/fit one. Outside of the context of perfectly spherical cows, BMI is really just one variable among many - race, age, gender, all of which could justify discrimination. Men, for example, are much more likely to be criminals than women are, while old people are much more likely to die.
Mewis
9mo ago
According to you, food can have up to twice the amount of calories listed on the packaging. Leaving aside whether this is reasonable, that means that the person who thinks he's eating 2000 calories could actually be eating 4000 calories. This is obviously a large enough variation as to blow any attempt at tracking calories out of the water, to say nothing of variations in BMR. It's like piloting a plane with only one button and no altimeter. The interface being simpler doesn't make it easier - it can make it harder, because you don't get feedback! As you yourself suggest, it can take many months to get accurate predictions of weight loss, and maybe never get accurate predictions of weight gain.
Controlling one's food intake is actually pretty easy. My favourite cheat meal, I joke, is nothing. Eating is honestly just a chore.
Mewis
9mo ago
Yes, I agree that judgment contains a moral dimension, and it's not without basis to apply the concept here - clearly, the consensus that is being built here is that fat people are bad people. But is that judgment actually useful or valuable? That is to say, that if Linda, 52, obese, white, divorcée, six years of experience, applies for an admin position, should her fat ass go to the back of the line? Should you factor in his fatness when deciding if Uncle John is invited to the barbeque? On a population level, have obesity rates skyrocketed over the last hundred years because we've become less moral, and not because it's harder to exercise that discipline in the Oreo Age?
(Of course, I wrote that comment for entirely orthogonal reasons - I often worry compulsively that other people judge me based on being small or weak. And the question stands - would we consider judging an anorexic*, or a weak man?)
(*Anorexia is of course, interesting to me, because I can see the appeal. In many ways it's the inverse of morbid obesity in that it's the fetishization of discipline and adhittana. It's admirable really in a kind of Prince Pamiya kind of way.)
Mewis
9mo ago
I have a similar understanding of the published literature to you, I think - but knowing that planes crash when their altitude decreases is not enough to avoid crashing a plane. The published literature tells us, for example, that calories out should probably exceed calories in by about 500 and then you'll lose weight. But as I've heard in this thread there is no reliable way to measure either, calories out has been shown to change in response to calories in, so you are in effect chasing a constantly moving target.
What useful information are we left with? Pretty much, eat more or less until you get the desired change in weight, and that "more or less" refers specifically to calorie content. Which is a reasonable start.
But all this amounts to is a fine motte. The actual bailey of CICO is that everyone who follows a calorie tracker and gets an incorrect result is lying or denying science, that it's physically impossible to fail to lose weight on 1800 calories or to fail to gain weight on 4000 calories, and that hormones don't affect weight.
Mewis
9mo ago
That's silly. Of course you should make a judgment on the people you live with and whether they will steal from you or not. That is an example of a very useful judgment. Judging people on the TV is not useful.
Mewis
9mo ago
My actual experience of CICO was exactly the opposite. It worked initially but when I tried to bulk, I found it predicted weight gain very poorly. Since CICO is of course, perfect and never wrong, it must have been a mistake I was making, and since I couldn't find my mistake, I decided to spare myself the stress and anxiety and stopped tracking.
Mewis
9mo ago
You might benefit from reading what I said. I said I'm not interested in judging others, not that I didn't - I of course, pass judgment on others, naturally and uncontrollably, and according to values I did not generate. But that judgment is rarely useful - if someone irritates me, or displeases me, what can I do about it other than seethe? Isn't that the real poison in whale watching on reality TV? Why not watch Sam Sulek instead?
Oh, come on now. You literally have reality TV shows devoted to displaying fatties like circus freaks for the people in this thread to hate on. If you needed to be told by your television set that it's okay to hate fat people, then you're not being brave. If you're watching it, it's for you - people watch shows like this to be told they're right, not to be challenged.
Mewis
10mo ago
I don't have a spouse or children, but I think it's fine to persuade or even directly forbid them from certain associations.
Mewis
11mo ago
And yet Democrats sometimes lose elections. Kamala might well lose, her chances are worse than Hillary Clinton's.
Mewis
11mo ago
And I was laughed at for saying that the second most recent Thing was a nothing burger.
Mewis
11mo ago
Biden is surrounded by people. He probably has more people around him than any other human being alive. It's not the job, specifically, of the VP to be his physician, or to advocate against him.
It comes up, often, in discussions of nuclear weapons and their use whether officers in the nuclear chain could refuse to carry out orders if they were insane or came from an insane president. It's certainly within the realm of imagination. But to put it bluntly, it's not reasonable. Military officers are trained and selected to obey orders, not to question them. It's not reasonable to expect them to be a check on the President. So too, for the VP. The VP is not now, and never will be, a check on the President. I just don't feel that's a reasonable expectation.
There is no precedent for removing an "unfit president". Kamala could invoke the 25th, and likely fail, or Congress could impeach Biden. Neither of those things have ever been done successfully to a sitting President. It's not clear, either, what these things have to do with going to the press and telling them that Biden is unfit. The media cannot remove Biden from office!
Mewis
11mo ago
You're right that it's irrational, but it's not unthinkable coming from a severely dysfunctional organisation where there are very strong incentives to lie.
Mewis
11mo ago
Well, this sounds way better to me but doesn't really make a lot of sense. So you want liberals to lose their jobs but also for that to be illegal? I thought that the point was to attack and not relent or "roll over"?
In addition this is a Step One that has already occurred in many cases. This might be news to you but people on the left get cancelled all the time. At some points more often because there are more of them in spaces controlled by leftists. This hasn't really led to a change of heart. I think it's plausible that the left might allow changes like the one suggested, but not because of this specific event - but because they're losing their grip over social media. But that's an ongoing change, something that's been happening slowly now for a few years.
I don't know if I've ever said it about the left but I've definitely had the thought before. What can I say - I can't prove I'm a perfectly even minded person to the satisfaction of a hostile stranger online.
I don't think people should be upset, but I also don't think that sadistic glee is appropriate either.
Mewis
9mo ago
If you're implying that I don't believe in the laws of Thermodynamics, I'm not. I'm not questioning them. I'm questioning the broader doctrine built around that motte, including the claim that calorie tracking always works and that it's impossible to eat 4000 calories a day and not gain weight.
If you're suggesting that counting calories is as difficult and complex as building semiconductors, you're free to make that claim, and I shan't bother arguing with it.
Mewis
9mo ago
Right, but the whole argument against fats is that being fat is immoral because it indicates a lack of discipline. Being anorexic is not a lack of discipline. Indeed, deliberately starving yourself and going on extended fasts used to be seen as a praiseworthy spiritual practice.
Mewis
9mo ago
Ah, my mistake. I should have remembered Yakov, but I didn't know about Artyom.
Mewis
9mo ago
I concede that in addition to society's values, you also inherit a bit from evolution. Either way, you are not forming your values. For example, you say that it's not fair of you to have a negative reaction to DS people. But you didn't invent that notion of fairness independently.
Mewis
9mo ago
There is a small coterie of fat acceptance activists that is occasionally wheeled out like the Washington Generals or the Libertarian Party to be laughed at, but for the most part, no. That's why 600lbs Life even exists in the first place, it's a show that as we have just discussed in this thread, make fat people look even worse. Why does such a show exist? So people can watch it and feel justified in hating fat people. Which is to say, it makes them feel better about something they were already doing. It's not by accident that you are, yet again here, casually mentioning how easy* it is for you to gain fifty pounds of muscle or lose fifty pounds of fat on a dime. It's not because you're embarrassed.
- It comes and goes, but it was once the fashion for people to brag about how hard they trained or how strictly they didn't. In the year 2024 it seems the opposite - fitness models take pictures of themselves eating donuts, and now people seem to brag about how little they need to train.
Mewis
10mo ago
Sharing a land border and being poor should make the job harder. But you're right - it's a question of motivation.
Mewis
10mo ago
I don't think there's any peace deal that doesn't result in some combination of territorial gains for Russia and robust security guarantees for Ukraine, which might take the form of NATO membership. This is obviously not what either side really wants, but Russia cannot force Ukraine to accept vassalization, and Ukraine cannot force Russia to release the territory they have taken.
This is what people are telling me right here in this thread! I agree that it's silly to count vegetables. I never counted vegetables - I was told I was doing it wrong!
Look, call them weakmen if you like, but I was told, when I was not getting anywhere counting calories, that it was because I was lying, or crazy, or had a tapeworm, or that it was scientifically impossible to eat 4 thousand calories a day and not gain weight, or that the labels on my food were probably wrong. Who knows? As a non-scientist, I don't have the ability or authority to evaluate or challenge these claims. And if that takes the form of personal criticism, you definitely can't ignore it or defend against it. Maybe they are strawmen - how am I supposed to know?
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