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PaperclipPerfector  3yr ago (text post)   33435 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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'Eat [less] and move [more]' doesn't actually work.

Of course it works. All the time. For countless people.

We have almost a century of evidence showing that this advice does not work.

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.

If it did, people would successfully be able to lose weight long term.

Tons (heh) of people successfully lose weight long term all the time.

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.

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.

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).

The data does not seem to support this extreme conclusion.

We do not control our appetites

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.

Fat people have disregulated metabolisms, not a lack of self control.

Obesity certainly isn't monocausal, but I haven't seen sufficient evidence to exclude the latter explanation as a factor.

then we would have to come to the baffling conclusion that the entire industrialised world started to decline in self-control in the 1970s.

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.

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.

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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