Rising rural BMI is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults

You'd be borderline suicidal to do that regularly in the US.

This is bad advice, it's been shown over and over again that in the long term people don't manage to lose weight by exercising. They give up, don't exercise enough, overestimate how many calories they burnt, over-compensate by eating more and/or unhealthier ('because I earned it after taking a run'), etc.

You don't have to 'diet' to lose weight, just try to eat a little less each day, and watch what you are eating. Only 100 calories less than what you need each day, and you'll steadily lose maybe ~3KG a year.

Experience and anecdote does not substitute for real scientific evidence. Research suggests that your body compensate for any activity expenditure to maintain caloric burn within that specific range. This is known as constrained total energy expenditure.

I notice that I have a baseline of appetite, hunger. Going below that makes me deeply uncomfortable. At the same time, I know that I don't need too much exercise to come to a calorie neutrality or slight deficit - but I can't reach that energy expenditure with a sedentary lifestyle.

If I do a 30min run every day, plus walk to work (another 30min), I spend enough calories so I can eat comfortably (still healthy).

A tracker like the Apple Watch helps to see this in action. Closing your rings in the city? Easy. Closing your rings while car centric? Hard.

I don't trust smartwatches and other devices to track caloric expenditure accurately given that they seemed to have constantly overestimate how much I burn.

This does not dissuade me from making sure that I get at least an hour of exercise everyday.

People should not need to diet. They should spend enough calories to burn off excess food. Note I am talking about healthy BMI, not Instagram fitness model levels. Dad bod, etc. Not morbidly obese.

I agree that people should not do anything special, but here we are in a food environment that makes this difficult.

It's unlikely a 30m run and a 30m walk is going to burn off their excess calories.

An Olympic level athlete might burn 30 kcal per minute at their best. I would bet a regular person burns at most 15 kcal per minute while running, so that's 450 kcal for a 30 min run, and maybe a couple hundred more for a walk. People consume that in a single large sugary coffee or soda drink. You can't ignore inputs.

I spend a decent amount of time in a small (~3k) town in the American west that's the largest place for about two hours in any direction. It has one grocery store. Prices and selection in this (non-chain) store are genuinely appalling. Fresh fruit and veg is expensive and generally low in quality. As a result, nobody but the occasional out-of-towner fisherman buys it, so there's no incentive to stock more/better stuff. It's kinda like a slightly scaled up version of the basket of brown bananas in the bodega: a desultory corner of the store where there's visible dust on the apples.

What do many folks buy instead? TV dinners. Lots of them. It's not uncommon to see a cart in the checkout line that's nothing but about twenty TV dinners, cheap beer and maybe a loaf or two of wonder bread. Not everyone lives like that, but it's common enough that it's rare for me to leave that store without feeling kinda sad.

So, yeah, food deserts aren't just an urban problem.

n.b. on reflection, a partial counterexample: the Walmart in the nearest larger (~20k) town, despite having more produce and similar goodies on offer, also does a very brisk trade in TV dinners. Access to nutrition is probably relevant, but there's got to also be broader cultural/economic/wellness issues at play.

I've lost and kept off about half my bodyweight, so I feel entitled to the opinion that that's horseshit dreamed up by marketing to tell people what they want to hear. There is one definitive way to lose weight, time tested and provably infallible: consume fewer calories than you expend.

Now certainly there are some factors involved in both sides of that equation that can be adjusted by what you eat, but take it from a food addict that weight loss is most definitely more about how much you eat.

Research shown that those expenditure doesn't matter. Your body adjusts. Nevertheless, we should create an environment that encourages everyday physical activity.

There's a floor to how far your body can compensate for reduced intake - starvation. There's not such a simple ceiling to stop you from eating back up to what you exercise.

No, it won't. You need about 2000 kcal/d just to maintain body temperature. That's assuming a constant heat output of 100W. A bit less is surely possible, muss less isn't. Reduce food intake below that, and you will lose weight. Because physics.

> > Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg omelette. One bowl of grain. Three slices of French toast topped. Three chocolate-chip pancakes.

> > Lunch: One pound of pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise on white bread, plus energy drinks.

> > Dinner: One pound of pasta, an entire pizza, and even more energy drinks.

I don't think it's the industrialization so much as the quantity.

https://www.motherjones.com/media/2012/06/supersize-biggest-...

However, you do see more overweight people on modern films than in the 50’s. What’s really odd some characters where supposed to be noticeably overweight, but they don’t seem that way to modern eyes.

This would be inconvenient to the business models of Big Medicine and Big Food.

Good places to start an investigation are the official advocacy for replacing saturated fats with deodorized vegetable oils [1], the holy war against sweet forms of sugar (mix of fructose/glucose) instead of waging war on starch (chains of non-sweet insulin-stimulating glucose), the advocacy for chemical non-caloric sweetners (sucralose, etc), the contamination of the food supply with imitation foods (orange drink vs. orange juice, etc), and considering whether fortified grains is really the nutritional panacea it is supposed to be.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10536349

edit: added "non-caloric" and "sucralose"