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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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...
People forget how different modern food and entertainment are from the 70s. With no video games, 24x7 entertainment channels, YouTube, TikTok, other social media and porn you had to come up with other sorts of entertainment that at least stimulated you to leave your home ("go play with your friends and don't come back home until dinner", as genxers like to recall this). Less screen media consumption also meant less mindless snacking that doesn't satiate as well as mindful eating. Eating out and delivery were less common and featured far fewer cuisines, and both have portions that are too large, leading to overeating.
the issue is the food, but up to a point. some people have such lousy metabolisms ,and also due to age or other factors, they they need way fewer calories than predicted by calculators to not be overweight. instead of 2k/day for a medium-sized male, more like like 1300-1500. I dunno what percentage of the population is cursed like this, but given what I have read, it's probably not insignificant.
What's so cursed about that? Back when I was on a weight-loss diet I had some 1500 cal days. With bulky vegetable sides I didn't even feel hungry.
yeah but 1500 average daily, not just some days. also it also shows we cannot just blame overeating. Trying to get men over the age of 40s to adopt 1500-2000 calorie/day diets to stop obesity seems like a no-go.
That's what semaglutide does, doesn't it? External willpower for those who have spent too much time cultivating stronger hunger drives to curb them themselves.
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