The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I have been thinking about the issue of obesity. I posit there are two kinds of obesity, the first being force-feeding obesity, in which someone overeats huge quantities of food (>6000 calories/day or more), possibly due to some emotional disturbance, and is able to override, temporality, the body's set point. Losing weight is also the easiest for such individuals because all they have to do is not eat as much and their weight rapidly returns to normal, but without the constant starvation of dieting because they are still eating a normal amount of food (3000 calories) which is in line with calculators.
The second type of obesity, which is worse, is what I call 'shit genetics' obesity, which means a slow metabolism. The second groups has a much slower metabolism than the first and in order to not be obese has to eat surprisingly small quantities of food, and become obese eating only average quantities of food, maybe only 2500-3000 calories/day (lower than predicted by calculators for height, age, gender, activity level, etc.). These people are screwed and need these GLP-1 class of drugs or else they will feel starving all day. These ppl will become overweight or obese in almost any environment, short of famine. Both forms of obesity are made worse by modernity, like hyper-palatable foods, but the second group is even worse off.
As always, the question is: why not prior to the last ~50 years? Unless all the newly obese people of the last 50 years are the first type you mention, the lack of a significant number of obese people in past generations cries out for an explanation.
Bad genetics can explain the existence of a fixed proportion of the population being obese even in the 70s, 60s etc. As food became more palatable and due to sedentary lifestyles, more people in group one became obese, too. Even in the 80s and 70s a certain fraction of the population was obese , around 10-20%. Reading people's personal accounts on Hacker News and elsewhere lends credence to bad genetics, not willfully overeating, as an explanation for some obesity, such as men who consume far fewer calories than predicted by calculators but are still obese or way overweight (although as a caveat, people tend to underreport caloric intake). Metabolism varies greatly among individuals even controlling for factors like age, height, sex, lifestyles, etc. Like height, IQ, or any other trait that is normally distributed, it stands to reason there are individuals with the short end of that stick...
Self-proclaimed calorie intake is generally unbelievable. People either lie quite deliberately, they are so confused that they might as well lie (1,000 calorie Starbucks coffees don’t count because they’re drinking, not food) or aren’t exactly measuring portions (eyeballs are much less precise than kitchen scales).
The idea of “slow metabolism” is evolutionarily improbable: consuming less energy, and thus less food is needed to do the same thing without any downsides would be a huge benefit for fitness. It is possible that they will make some compromises (e.g. perhaps less performance in normal times means survival in hunger). But there is a narrow window, because the famine disaster driving the adaptation can not occur too often (or everyone will have the same “slow metabolism” that will prove optimal), but not too rarely (or owners of “slow metabolism” are overtaken in good times). In addition, metabolism is very basic and crucial for life; as in reproduction, we should expect that the metabolism will be one of the most preserved parts of human biology and that there is limited functional variability. What we see in practice: with accurate calorie tracking and body composition estimates, BMR estimates are accurate within 10%.
That is like saying low IQs are improbable yet they exist .Why would it not be variable, like any other trait. There was an individual I read about who at 6'0 and 120 pounds his maintenance was 1900 calories/day, which he measured meticulously. This is astonishing given his very low body weight. By comparison, Ancel Keys' subjects had to diet to 1570/day to archive a similar weight loss, and some even lower than that (Keys was also meticulous about measuring calories). But it shows how variable it can be.
so is intelligence and physical strength, yet those also vary greatly among individuals even controlling for relevant factors. why do some guys who train bench 315 and other cannot do 225 despite equal training and other factors?
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