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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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If you don’t eat double cheeseburgers you eat fewer calories.

While this is true, it's not the entire truth. I've been fat all my life, and I can tell you that I've never eaten a double cheeseburger. Indeed, for my early life, I hadn't access to such fast food (apart from chip shop chips, and that was very occasionally).

It is largely my own fault for eating too much and not exercising enough, but there is also the element of being constantly hungry. It's easy to say "oh just put up with being hungry, the feeling will pass after a couple of days" but not when it's at this kind of "I just ate two hours ago, it's impossible that I should be hungry now again, and yet all the signals my body is sending are 'eat eat eat'" level.

I mean yes. It’s not like double cheeseburgers are magically fattening or something. And I understand that for some people it’s harder than others. But at the same time, unless you have no self control at all, some level of self denial is necessary and probably helpful. I think part of the issue is a cultural change that encourages snacking and never let someone feel hungry. In the 1970s and 1980s it was considered fairly normal to eat three meals and a small snack all day. Yes, people probably got hungry in between times, but I think that’s a normal thing. People get hungry or tired and so on and keep going.

Maybe this is just me personally but I find it empowering to some degree to challenge my limits and find out that I’m not a slave to my body. Just because I am tired, that doesn’t mean I can’t go lift weights or run a mile or whatever I need to get done to be healthy. Nor do I have to eat just because food is available or I feel slightly hungry. I can decide to give in or not.

About a quarter of the world practices a religion where for one month a year adherents don’t eat from dawn to dusk.

One way of promoting agency is giving examples of other people that have done the thing that someone has convinced themselves is nearly or truly impossible for them.

Islamic countries have very high obesity rates, though.