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This is the view that I disagree with. It strikes me as a just so story. If you succeed in exercising, you were able to do the very hard thing because of your implied moral superiority; if you weren’t, you had to try harder, but you could have. The problem with this kind of thinking is manifold. Trump and Elon Musk are extremely goal-driven people (I am choosing them because they are household names). Why are they both fat? Marines went through boot camp. Why can’t they exercise for something more valuable than that? Normally people want to impress others and secure mates and enjoy life. So why can’t they exercise when this enables that? A 30yo fat person may see their obese parents die a slow agonizing death. What human would experience that and not be motivated to avert that state?
It’s very easy to just morally impugn fat people — it’s hard, it’s uncomfortable, you could do it but you don’t want to. The problem is that there is no evidence for this assumed phenomenon. Where is the study showing that fat people don’t wish to be healthier more than those who do exercise? Fat people probably want to exercise even more than those who do exercise. But clearly there is something in the way: more pain when exercising (?); a microbiome which especially wants to be sedentary (?); an extreme deficit in willpower as it relates to physical exertion which requires a dedicated program…
But maybe I’m misunderstanding what you are saying. “ultimately, the answer is that what they need to do is actually very simple but very difficult, hence most people don't”, this to me implies a universality in how difficult exercise is, but I seriously doubt that’s the case.
The wrinkle here is that every person who exercises has the experience of using their willpower to overcome the impulse to be sedentary. I get what you're saying, but when I look back on me thinking to myself "it seems like a lot nicer to just sit on the couch than go to the gym, but i gotta go" or "yeah i'm exhausted, but I'm going to do one more set" what I see is me making the hard decision to overcome those sedentary instincts. In every way, it looks like I used to my willpower to dictate my own behavior, and every time I fail at doing so, it looks like a failure of will to me. I personally don't see any reason to think it isn't exactly as it appears to me.
It reminds a lot of CICO discussions: it is obviously true that if you eat less calories than you burn, you will lose weight. There are all kinds of additional layers of complication and justification and difficulty and most of all copes on top of that, but the fundamental facts are simple.
It's the same with willpower and exercise: it is obviously true that whether or not you exercise depends on whether or not you do it (tautological, obviously), and doing it is a matter of applied will against pressures to the contrary. Whether or not you overcome those pressures by force of will does, in fact, determine whether or not you exercise. So while yes, there are lots of different complications and justifications and difficulties and most of all copes on top of that, they're all really just inputs to the equation [willpower]-[forces against]=[do you work out].
When you say that there isn't a universality in how difficult exercise is, what you're saying is that [forces against] has a different value for different people. Obviously that is true. Some people find exercise easy, some people find it difficult, some people have physical ailments that make it painful to exercise, etc etc. It is obviously also true that some people have significantly greater willpower than others. But that doesn't change the fundamental question, which is "is [willpower]>[forces against]".
And in the end, what the inputs are to the equation doesn't matter, what matters is whether or not you can get over the threshold and exercise. Does this have lots of potentially nasty implications about some people getting a shit deal in life because they're mentally weak, or physically afflicted, or even just born lazy? Yep. Not only are there health implications, but like you said, there are massive moral implications to whether or not you are able to overcome your own weakness and destructive instincts. Nobody's burden is the same, life's not fair, sucks to suck.
It does in the sense that I am alleging “forces against” are of exclusive importance and “willpower” is of negligible importance (on a population scale). We can measure the former but I don’t know any attempt to measure the latter. Do we see that fat people with similar intelligences and backgrounds perform worse on typical willpower tasks? I don’t recall reading this. It would be a big finding if so.
If willpower can be summed up as anything which is in our control, frankly it’s the felt salience of death and the patient hope in deliverance from that death. That’s the experience of the morbidly obese, though. Every trip to doctor is memento mori along with a hopeful plan and a page about resources to help them. So… what exactly are we talking about when we talk about willpower, if it doesn’t spring out of such experiences? At this point we are now talking about such an internal source of willpower that the most serious real life experiences don’t result in it, I do feel we are just impugning the souls of these people at this point. Like: no brush with death can save them, no hopeful lecture can save them, no inspiring figure can save tnem — they are damned. I am not comfortable saying that. Are we saying that these morbidly obese people have never cried tears of desire for salvation and at the worst case scenario attempted to kill themselves out of shame? How is that not a “highly motivated” state of willpower?
Meanwhile in my own personal experiences, here I am with the willpower of a sloth, but I have never been overweight — my body wants to fidget and pace frequently. It is non-volitional. After making my parent comment I went and got a burger and fries after fasting in the morning because I wasn’t hungry. Willpower doesn’t factor in at all here, just “forces out of my control”. What caused my body to like movement and not like eating frequently? An early life experience, something in my microbiome, genes? It’s definitely not willpower.
Tritely: that doesn't make it untrue.
I don't need a scientific study to prove that fat people tend to perform worse on typical willpower tasks like "don't eat a second piece of pie, even though you want to and you know it will be bad for you."
The reason that advice at a population scale tends to be different from personal advice is that the majority of people are, as you put it, damned. "No brush with death can save them, no hopeful lecture can save them, no inspiring figure can save them." When you give advice to an individual, you give them the benefit of the doubt that they don't suck. When you deal with populations, the unavoidable fact is that enough people obviously suck enough that you can't give them the benefit of the doubt (plus there's no politeness or interpersonal charity to consider). The stats don't lie. They are weak, they are lazy, they have high time preference, they are stupid, and they are never not going to be any of those things. I think this is a major failure point of most high functioning people: they don't grok how low-functioning most people are.
It is probably simply true that there is a ceiling for [willpower] for many people that is less than [forces against]. Just like how someone might be condemned by being 80 IQ to a life of poverty, never working anything but the most menial and low paying jobs, one might be condemned to a life of fatness, never being able to control their own eating due to a weak will. To quote George Carlin: "The mayfly only lives one day, and some days it rains." Most people get dealt a bad hand, and as I said before, it sucks to suck.
That being said, I think there is some hope, and that hope is (ironically?) shame. "the felt salience of death and the patient hope in deliverance from that death" are clearly insufficient motivating factors to get people to not be fat. I respond to that by pointing out the truism that many people fear public speaking more than death. I believe that people (at a population level, ha) tend to respond to their incentives. Clearly death and disfigurement and the quiet shame of fatness is an insufficient incentive. However, I notice that countries that have a strong culture of overt shame around fatness like China or Japan tend to be significantly less overweight statistically than countries that don't, like the US. I think that for most, the incentive of overt social shaming is actually a stronger incentive than death, and that therefore perhaps the best way to incentivize people to be a healthy weight is to shame them for being fat.
Both you and /u/Gaashk brought up in your replies the example of people who are just "naturally" skinny without any willpower. I don't think that invalidates my model, I think those people, including yourself, just happened to be born with/live with factors that lead to an extremely low value of [forces against] or a very high level of [willpower] such that it doesn't feel like willpower. That could be because of a low lipostat "body set weight", or natural hyperactivity, or a default low level of hunger, or any number of factors. Your coefficients are different, but that doesn't change the equation.
If someone has capable willpower in many areas of life but still finds himself fat then we should consider whether being fat is mostly unrelated to willpower. They have excellent willpower in many domains but not in this one. So either we are now alleging domain-specific willpower, or the concept of willpower is nonsensical altogether. If there is domain-specific willpower regarding exercise, why are former military service members fat? If there is domain-specific willpower regarding dieting, then why is it that the 30-day yearly Ramadan fast does not result in sustained weight loss?
So neither intensive physical regimens nor intensive fasting regimens affect weight loss in large scale populations. We are left with motivation, but as I’ve written, it doesn’t appear that there is any experience an obese human can have that will reliably result in weight loss, given just how many bad experiences they have. Now you note —
but fat people are already shamed explicitly and implicitly. They are shamed more today implicitly than in the past, with social media giving them a peer ranking of their popularity and male interest where it is plainly obvious that their weight is a deciding factor. If you are fat in school you will get comments. Re: China, China’s obesity is increasing. But Chinese Americans also have genetically lower obesity rates.
Well it’s very important to determine whether obesity is a generally volitional health state before we launch our campaign to shame half the population. That’s why this topic is important actually. If the willpower theory is unevidenced then we want to focus our efforts somewhere else — not on hating fat people but perhaps hating the ultrawealthy who sell poison in stores. Perhaps it is the department of education for making schools too sedentary. Perhaps it is neighborhood designers. Perhaps it is feminism. Perhaps these are damned and the fats are the victims?
Apart from microbiome, some other hypotheses I wonder about are —
Poor or insufficient breastfeeding, already associated with obesity
accidentally reinforcement of food at an early age through conversation, snacking, social / comfort associations
the de-reinforcement of physical activity due to a loss in communal dancing, physical play in kids, and destinations which can only be reached by long walks
A divine curse placed on our stock because of the way we treat livestock, taking the form of metabolic and DNA changes we aren’t familiar with yet
Why? Some people want some things more than they want other things.
Because temporarily restricting your caloric intake does not permanently change your weight. This is well known. Everyone knows a fat person who dieted for a month and lost 20 pounds. What happens when they go back to eating the way they were before? They regain the weight. Permanent weight loss requires permanently changing your CICO equation.
Believing that people have agency and that losing weight is mostly a matter of finding the will to do it does not require hating fat people. Sure, a lot of people do hate fat people, and justify it with variations on "They could just put the fork down," but you can recognize that losing weight is very hard without either shaming those who fail or inventing ways in which fat manifests out of the aether.
The bulk of fat people do not want to be fat. Being fat is a #1 deterrent in a relationship, it reduces respect between peers, it harms health and reduces activity levels. And this is well-known. So the willpower theory doesn’t make sense in light of just how many fat people there are who otherwise practice willpower throughout their life.
Implying willpower, it would. It’s a 30-day intensive practice of delaying gratification according to an external timeline with serious feedback. That’s practice. So we can deduct another point off the scale of willpower theory. At a population level, a month of serious willpower practice every year does not affect weight. But we should expect it would, given that most fat people do want to lose weight, and they just practiced that skill for a month.
Fat people are aware that they need to eat less to lose weight. This cannot be accomplished for the reason we are trying to determine.
Your arguments are completely irrational.
People make poor, counterproductive decisions they know will hurt them all the time. People stay in bad situations they know they should leave despite ongoing misery and self awareness. That fat people don't want to be fat and yet it's not enough to get them to sufficiently change their lifestyle is entirely explainable by human failings that affect all other areas of life.
As for fasting, most people can fast for a limited time. They can also do a vigorous exercise program for a limited time (the "New Year's resolution" phenomenon). Usually they'll lose weight. The weight doesn't stay off because the lifestyle changes don't stick.
Yes, fat people are aware they need to eat less and exercise more to lose weight. The problem is twofold: (1) They don't. (2) If they do, they become discouraged when they realize they have to keep doing it, and they stop.
If studies found that adults were making continually poorer decisions year after year, and that by 2030 half of all adults chronically made poor decisions, and this was ever-increasing, then I would look for non-volitional factors at play. Lead poisoning? Something involving early life? Something involving complex social-environmental reinforcement mechanisms? That’s what I would begin to look at. Do Americans today lack willpower relative to Americans in 1980 or did other things change? You could have bought lots of pastries and sugar and candy as early as the 1920s, when few were obese. Milk was cheap and highly caloric, alcohol plentiful.
Hunger is different from a typical rational decision. When people are very hungry they will resort to cannibalism and murder, which proves this. Alright, so somewhere between “quite famished” and “eating my crewmate” we may have the polyphagia of the obese. I agree with your (1) and (2), my disagreement is: (A) the problem stems from how their body non-willfully reacts to the cues of food, with enhanced hunger and decreased inhibitory control, versus (B) they really ought to want to be skinny more. We already have evidence of (A) in other cases, like certain drug treatments reliably increasing appetite and increasing weight gain despite not affecting their willpower.
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