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If getting people to stop overeating is impossible, and the only way to lose weight is to stop overeating, then yes, losing weight is impossible. I don't see why making that distinction helps apart from allowing us to cast moral aspersions on fat people.
Like sure, it's technically possible to lock someone in a cage and feed them the exact number of calories they need to lose weight. But then their bodies will fight back by reducing their metabolism, increasing their food cravings and generally making them miserable. Not only that, their reduced metabolisms won't even recover after the (inevitably) regain the weight back.
So I stand by my original point, weight loss through diet is impossible. Once weight is gained, it's essentially permanent. A more interesting question is why obesity came out of nowhere in the mid-20th century and exploded from the 1970s onwards. There's really only one likely culprit in my mind.
Obesity is defined as being above the threshold of a BMI of 30. Imagine a population where currently everyone has a BMI of 25, but it starts to increase by 1 every year from now. What would the corresponding graph like the one you linked look like? It would be 5 years of no change, until in year x+5 obesity "explodes" to 100%, despite the fact that the actual causal trend has been going on linearly for 5 years!
If we look at actual weight itself to avoid thresholding effects like I described above, there doesn't seem to be anything special about the 70s at all, they're right on trend. There's other data like discussed in this that indicate that the surge in weight had already begun around WWI, subsided a bit around the Great Depression and accelerated again in the immediate aftermath of WWII.
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It's important because the message is wrong-headed. Telling people that there is nothing they can do when there definitely are very simple things they can do (move more, eat less) is cruel because it leaves people to their misery.
Also, I don't see how it's necessarily wrong to cast some moral judgement on fat people. It doesn't mean I suddenly cast them out of the circle of persons who should be afforded curtesy, respect or dignity. It means I disapprove of behaviour that is harmful to themselves and others. I also disapprove when someone smokes indoors or farts in an elevator. And that disapproval might actually motivate them to break the cycle.
I know that our culture has elevated enabling people with all sorts of miscalibrated habits to a twisted virtue, but being nice and doing the right thing aren't always identical.
Very interesting. Are there any studies with a larger cohort?
It is eminently possible. Eat fewer calories than you consume. If your point is that it's impossible to maintain unhealthy eating and exercise regimens without becoming fat, then you're right. But there is no law of nature that says you have to stuff your face. Your argument about drastically reduced metabolism after increased physical activity is interesting, but I'll have to see more evidence.
'Eat more and move less' doesn't actually work. We have almost a century of evidence showing that this advice does not work. If it did, people would successfully be able to lose weight long term. Just Google 'long term weight loss study' and you'll find pages and pages of evidence showing that even among the small number of people who successfully lose weight, almost all of them gain it back. Dieting and/or exercising for weight loss does not work. Cruelty is pretending that fat people lack the moral fiber necessary to lose weight when actually, nobody can do it (barring a tiny number of outliers).
We do not control our appetites, we do not control our metabolisms, we do not control how our body partitions nutrients. We can temporarily override our appetite and consciously try to burn more calories through exercise, but ultimately the body's lipostat wins. Fat people have disregulated metabolisms, not a lack of self control. If self-control were really the issue, then we would have to come to the baffling conclusion that the entire industrialised world started to decline in self-control in the 1970s.
Or, it could be because we introduced massive amounts of an agricultural waste product into our diet in the mid-20th century that doesn't have the same nutrient profile as anything humans have eaten in our evolutionary history.
Of course it works. All the time. For countless people.
We have tons of evidence of people not taking the advice, that's very different. We don't conclude from people driving drunk that "don't drink and drive" is bad advice or that drinking heavily doesn't impair your ability to pilot a car.
Tons (heh) of people successfully lose weight long term all the time.
The systematic review by Curioni and Lourenco (2005) found that weight regain in individuals included in both diet and exercise programs approached 50%. Not great, but far from "diet and exercise works for absolutely no one". And given that the review only included studies with obese and overweight people (who in all likelihood have a history of following unhealthy habit and likely exhibit low willpower), we can take that as the upper bound.
The data does not seem to support this extreme conclusion.
To some extent, we very much do, given that appetite does adjust to changed habits. We can also just ignore it, you know? We control our urges all the time.
Obesity certainly isn't monocausal, but I haven't seen sufficient evidence to exclude the latter explanation as a factor.
I don't find that baffling. Laissez-faire education styles, social mores that promote the externalisation of personal issues, and the abundance of superstimuli are all plausible factors for this.
Another very plausible factor.
Look man, if you want to conclude that telling people to exercise more and eat less isn't really that effective an intervention at the population level, that's fine. I think you have your work laid out for you. But to assert that therefore, it is literally impossible to lose weight and that CICO isn't a simple law of physics is throwing the babe out with the bathwater.
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It makes you fat. And 'Eat less and move more' reduces your weight. And 'Eat less and move less' usually reduces your weight too.
I assure you that if fat people stopped putting anywhere near as much food into their mouth, they would lose weight. This is a difficult thing to do, but it is quite simple. The issue is indeed self control, though also self-deception (pretending things that are high in calories are "healthy", pretending certain things "don't count", that sort of nonsense)
You're not really addressing the argument I'm making. If weight loss is simply a case of choosing to eat less and choosing to move more, why does all the literature show that dieters regain their weight in the long term? According to your model, they must be choosing to lose weight through dieting and then choosing to regain more than they lost? Why do people who lose significant weight have permanently lowered metabolisms, and burn fewer calories than we would expect for their size? Why did the entire planet suddenly start getting fat in the 70s?
Calories in, calories out isn't a prescription for weight gain or loss, it's a description of it. It's like someone asking why the bar gets full on Saturday night and responding with 'more people enter than leave'. You're describing weight gain, but you're not explaining why it happens.
Look at this chart, what do you think caused the massive inflection?
Because they stop eating less and moving more in the long term.
Cheaper food, reduction of lead in the air, reduction in smoking.
It happens because people eat more.
As above, less smoking, less lead, and cheaper food.
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Because they stop eating less and moving more. This is, uh, pretty simple? Whether they consciously pay enough attention to make it an affirmative choice or just slip into habits casually because they're no longer paying attention is not really the operative thing here.
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Really?
It is not even per person. It is not compared with total callories change. Not compared with say sugar production.
If you look at the chart Trends in Daily Calories from Major Food Groups on this article, you'll see that vegetable oil consumption per capita has almost tripled since the 1960s. There are dozens of other sources online saying the same thing. Literally nobody is arguing that vegetable oil consumption has fallen. The only debate is whether the gigantic increase in vegetable oil consumption has anything to do with the gigantic increase in obesity that happened at the exact same time.
Meanwhile both sugar and grain consumption has actually been falling since the late 90s.
tl;dr: no indicator that calories from vegetable oils are special
Has Americans started to live longer by any chance since then? Or are better diagnosed?
With very quick look at https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life-expectancy - it seems that people now live longer and this person failed to even mention it!
In fact they start from "where our healthy life expectancy is actually decreasing year over year" - while from 1935 it massively increased!
Exercise graph is starting in 1998, how much change is from 1935?
Mixing stats starting in 1935, 1998 and just few years ago is a massive malpractice. You do not get to compare last 2 years of life expectancy and 97 of another. You need to take the same timeframe for both!
Also, curiously "total eaten calories" remains missing. From trend in plant vs animal foods: it is increasing. What may be enough to explain direct cause of people getting fatter, via simple CICO again.
(I have not even got to checking sources: I suspect that this exercise trend may entirely measure that people are more likely to lie about exercising and be unrelated to actual exercise being done)
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