If you are overweight (obese) at age 18, there is only a 15%(!) chance that you will manage to have a more healthy weight during your adult life. I found that number utterly depressing and shockingly low.
When you're overweight, you "just" have to get into a caloric deficit. "Just" undereat 7700kcal and you've lost 1kg of bodyweight. It's that simple.
Except it's actually hard.
It's just that life often looks like you cannot do it for various reasons. The complicated thing is of course to find a tiny crack in that bubble of constraints where you can force a change.
Just an example: For many people it would be beneficial to ride a bike to get to work. This alone won't change your body completely, but it is a great start, losing you a couple of hundreds of kcal per day and encouraging more bike tours. But that's obviously not possible for everyone and it is difficult to tell from the outside whether someone just rejects this approach because they are lazy or for valid reasons.
We all want to be happy, if for some reason happiness for you is tied a lot more to eating than to being healthy and fit, you can try all you want it just wont make you happy if you do. That means tackling obesity means also asking yourself hard questions about what food does for you, how it got that way (e.g. having grandparents which nearly starved can have an severe effect on the food habits for a few generations down the line, sometimes parents can only express their affection through food which means now you equate food with existential parental love). Changing habits is hard, understanding your own psychological drivers and doing something about it against the resistance of your brain is way harder. Never underestimate the struggles other people have to take in order to do the thing that is easy for you.
Anyway, the point was that being ok with being obese because you are happiest eating a lot doesn’t make eating less any more complicated. It’s just choosing to do something different, which everyone is free to do.
Similarily it is totally easy to imagine getting fit/slim by ignoring the forces acting on someone who is obese. Of course one can do that if it fits with ones world image, but I tend to like my models closer to reality.
Don't underestimate what it does to a kid if e.g. one parent has troubles expressing love through any other means than cooking. Suddenly love comes in the form of food. Similar with situation where ancestors nearly starved — this can fuck up multiple generations. Both examples will take conscious effort to tackle one's psychological drivers, maybe therapy, but quite certainly a lot of time and effort.
Think about a bad habbit you tried to loose and multiply it by a magnitude then you get a glimpse of what this would feel like for an actual obese person (note: I am not obese, neither have I ever been obese). This is why "just eat less and move more" as a statement is ridiculous: a bit like "have you just tried not to be poor" or "have you tried not being depressed all the time". While factually correct it displays ignorance of the forces at play.
If the part I don’t understand is that there is no such thing as being overweight and happy, and people who feel that way have psychological defects, then it’s not that I don’t understand your point but I do disagree.
Most obese people are not happy with their body or the ways their eating habits impact their live in many ways. Most obese people are also happy when they eat or worse: they are unhappy when they don't eat.
If eating gives you a short term improvement even if it makes you unhappy in the long term then you might just do it, like in any other addiction (btw. a well researched topic).
The way out of this is not to "just eat less", the way out of this is to tackle the reason why you only can be happy when eating and then eat less.
The point is that overeating won’t make us happy either. Maybe it will give some 15 seconds of gratification but then most of us will feel guilt, and the long term effect has terrible consequences. Maybe the problem lies also in the fact that our simple brains can’t really understand the future. I’ve read somewhere that many asiatic languages don’t have a future tense, hence people there when facing the choice of eating something think along the lines “if I eat this I AM fatter/less healthy” and this could be a factor in the way lower obesity prevalence.
I don't deny that. Some get unhappy enough to derive enough energy from this unhappiness to tackle this as a real problem. Of course the first box you need to tick to get better is to accept your behaviour is problematic and realize that it makes you unhappy in the long term.
Some might never reach that step to begin with. Many however realize the problems and want to get better but they can't because they constantly fight the symptoms and not the cause, or because their lives give them enough excuses not to do it (whether they are valid excuses or not doesn't matter too much).
I chose to believe that people are a product of both their environments and their own choices. So we are neither completely determined by the circumstances we grew up in nor are we completely free to decide to "just" do things 180° different than we were lead to believe our whole lives. We can shape our environments and ourselves within certain boundaries and over given timescales, but for this we need to know the forces which act upon us. And everybody has forces acting upon them, the believes, rationalizations and stories we tell ourselves about our place in the world are partly a product of this: we try to be happy with ourselves in the place that we have within the universe. We try to establish meaning in the chaos.
This is why explainations like "some people are just lazy" is less of a true statement about the world, but more of a true statement about the stories a certain type of person has to tell themselves in order to feel good. Because if the weren't "just lazy" suddenly one had to reflect upon the environment, the incentive structures that shaped them into the way they are. Suddenly one would feel the ethical need to change said environment and feel powerless confronted with the scale of the problem. Nah. Moar better to say they are "just lazy", then one can stop thinking.
Lazyness is a bug, it's a failure state, it's a medical condition. Much like depression, psychology cannot treat it in all cases, but taking the approach that people are just born lazy and iredeemable seems like the most unscientific, least promising, and most likely to annoy your devoted commenter.
Granted, they often don't think through how to do that, or why the person might be struggling to perform, but it's not usually a belief that the person is incapable of doing better.
Anyway, to say to somebody "don't procrastinate" is like given a guitar to somebody and tell them "just play!". Sure man, how?
I feel like a whole lot of people are trying to help, they're just really bad at it and they need help themselves.
.
Thankfully, psychiatry!
Read a book, boys & girls & enby friends.
Yes. This is exactly what I was trying to get across.
Thanks.
This gets to the very important question of how much choice do we really have.
People are the way they are because of how they were raised, their genetics, where and among whom they were raised and their life experiences. There's arguably some choice mixed in there too, somewhere, but how much real choice people have is debatable.
If people don't have much choice in the way they are, it explains why they have a really hard time changing, and there's no sense in blaming them for something they can't change.
Of course some people do change, but maybe that's because they were the kind of person who could, and other people are the kinds of people who can't.
I appreciate that you're very empathetic, and I feel like not everyone else is. There's a whole lot of people who probably can't imagine what it's like to be somebody else. That's hard, isn't it?
But when you tell lazy people not to be lazy, and they don't do it, then it almost sounds like you must either be calling them dumb, or defective.
So that's why I feel like thinking of it as treatable is a nice and friendly middle ground. Which a lot of people don't seem to.
That doesn't seem to be their impulse. Oh, they're lazy. Let's not fix that.
I've also ran through the mountains until I literally couldn't stand from a pile of stress fractures. Even though very stupid, its an example of mind over matter.
To me laziness is an inability to mentally force action over the brains signals to not incur distress or effort.
I feel pretty confident that there is a large overlap of "lazy people" with people that would have a hard time taking cold showers in the morning for a month, if hot water was available.
This sounds more like you’re trying to explain the behavior of your friends and are choosing the word “laziness”, but that’s a pretty reductive explanation for why some people like to party and others don’t.
Perhaps if you were willing to do the hard work of questioning your own assumptions and seeing life through your friends eyes a little more you could have more sympathy.
But perhaps you aren’t because that’s hard work and causes distress you’d rather not incur, and it’s much easier to describe human behavior as “laziness” than to understand it’s causes.
woke: accusing people of being unwilling to do the hard work.
you know who wasn't lazy in school? All the immigrant friends I had.
I could have instead, easily described the 100s of people I grew up around, that would skip work and get drunk instead, spend all their paycheck the day they get it. The obesity, the abuse, the drug addiction.
I have zero sympathy for able bodied people that can't cope enough to feed their children. I don't care the causes, nor are they relevant.
I have worked for $10 an hour doing construction in 100 degree weather, and I have also work as a SWE at a FAANG. I have seen the complete lack of self awareness most professionals and/or those from upper class backgrounds have.
Growing up in generational poverty and finding myself out of it, I carried a similarly angry perspective about people for a while as an adult.
I would suggest listening to the stories of people who you say can’t cope and maybe be open to the idea of empathy.
Zero sympathy costs more energy than you maybe might realize. Is it really worth it? It wasn’t for me.
Any example you pick is going to be complicated. Because they're people. They're doing their best.
Assume good faith. It's not a law, but it helps.
That the person who did it has their own Wikipedia page makes me think it is probably harder.
Edit:maybe I was thinking to complicated in this reply. The analogy is: you have two different things which can be achieved through doing a specific thing, but doing this thing is hard in both cases so using the word 'just' is not appropriate which is easier to see in the example.
But unfortunately this isn't a complicated subject. Weight is controlled by diet and standard healthy diets are very well known. Nearly everyone can keep their weight down. Even if people don't, it is objectively not that hard to do. A lot of people don't accept the rewards are worth the discomfort.
> [keeping their weight down] is objectively not that hard to do
Would you mind picking one?
“Just ride your bike” is an easy solution for someone who is already normal weight but it’s not nearly as easy for someone who’s overweight.
The example of a person with a musculoskeletal system conditioned to carrying around a 60 kg body, but weighs 120 kgs is basically competing in a Olympic powerlifting competition like situation to just do basic tasks(Using toilets, walking for everyday life tasks).
I can only imagine how hard and near impossible task it is for some one to be exercising everyday.
One problem is that calorie restriction itself is modifying how your body works. So, the weight lost in diet is typically gained back super quickly. And if you repeat the cycle, your body also adjusts by spending less calories.
The other problem is that it just lowering calories easily leads to nutritional deficiency of some sort. Which leads to feeling bad all the time, being tired and passive, unable to perform as previously. So the diet will eventually fail for that reason - because you will be more dysfunctional and breaking it will paradoxically make you more functional.
The problem in this thread with making a distinction between simple/complex and easy/hard is that people are referring to different things. People are even talking past themselves so it’s no wonder others don’t understand what they mean.
E.g., the energy model of weight gain/loss — CICO, or calories in, calories out — is simple. But CI depends on interactions between evolution, hormonal systems (a complex balancing feedback system all its own), psychology, age, money, society, culture, family, food supply, etc., which is complex. For a particular person at a particular point in their life, that bundle of factors may happen to be balanced “downward” so that CI is easy to control and weight loss is simple — and easy). In other cases, a person may need to dig in to those factors and find a way to rebalance them, which is complex — and hard.
When you’re actually referring to the same thing, simple and easy or complex and hard go together. It is easy to control simple system. It is hard to control complex ones.
> Simple/complex refers to a system or problem, while easy/hard refers to the difficulty of controlling the system or solving the problem.
I do think the distinction is important. I did realise as soon as I'd typed the last comment that it was just people talking past each other -- apologies to others in the thread, I should have edited. But what I mean: with specific exceptions (genetic, psychological, physical) normally both the process and the solution is simple, because of the energy model. Eat less, eat sensibly, exercise very regularly, and the majority of people will see positive results. That's simple, not quite trivially so, but almost. Actually doing that is not, however, easy for the majority of people.
A better example I think is: I smoke. This is clearly not good for a number of reasons. The solution, and the process to get to that solution is comically simple: I just stop. But yet it is hard.
That the relationship of calories in to calories absorbed is linear needs some heavy proof before I'll believe it.
My favorite counter point to calories in/out crowd is that the body is a dynamic system. The calories out portion doesn't stay constant. I have lost weight while eating more because my base metabolism increased. In "That Sugar Film," the guy eats the same amount of calories and same activity level but starts to include "daily recommended sugar" and increased his weight. The body is a dynamic system and will change how it stores and processes energy. Yes, you can't violate thermodynamics and eating a calorie deficit will cause weight loss (and possibly other issues), but the system tries to adapt.
(a) CICO (calories-in/calories out) is not the same as the energy conservation principle, you can claim that CICO model does not work while firmly believing in the energy conservation principle
(b) CICO isn't untrue, its just too simple to model the bodies approach to managing the fat stores. Fat storage is very much controlled by insulin and cortisol. If one or both are high, your body is primed to increase your fat storage
CICO crowd equates 7000kcal with 1kg of fat body mass and then you can do calculations that losing 10k of body mass in a year can be achieved by reducing caloric intake by 200kcal/day, or increasing expenditure by the same amount, or a mix of both.
Experienced dieters know that this doesn't work as easily.
I was trying to loose weight with CICO and hang out in the CICO-crowd forums for 2-3 years until I realised I couldn't lose more than 10kg that way until I plateaued. And in these forums, it seemed to be similar for many.
Then, with fasting and/or keto forums I hang out in there are so many more credible reports of extreme weight loss. And that is because water fasting and/or keto reduce the amount of insulin your body emits, and thus allows your body to really tap into the fat reserves it has in store.
When you weigh a certain weight, you have a certain resting energy expenditure.
Let's say the average 200lb(Sorry for the American units) man burns 2000 calories a day. If he then goes a week only eating 1500 calories, he will have burned a pound, and now only weighs 199lb, and his new resting energy expenditure will be slightly less. The next week when he is still eating 1500 calories, he will lose only 0.99 pounds.
So of course you will run into a time eventually when you plateau. At some point 1500 calories a day will be your new equilibrium weight and you will no longer lose weight without additional changes.
This is typically an argument the other way, as when you do the math this way it's very clear that the energy when stored as fat is incredibly energy efficient. An extra 100 calories might mean that you gain a pound in slightly more than a month, but you won't settle on your new equilibrium until you gain more than 10 pounds. According to wolfram alpha, the basal metabolic rate of a 200lb male is 1997 calories. The basal metabolic rate of a 300lb male is 2465 calories. The daily energy expenditure of a 200 pound male, who runs daily for 3 miles over 30 minutes, is equivalent to a 300 pound male. 100 pounds of fat is actually a shockingly small amount of daily calories difference.
Anecdotal evidence: I've lost 70 pounds, then regained the 60 pounds, then lost the 60 pounds, and am currently up 30 pounds. Simple does not mean easy.
The more you eat the less your body will absorb, as your digestive system will digest and absorb more of a 100Kcal meal that a 300Kcal meal. Also the more you consume higher your metabolic rate will be, while the converse it also true. Because of that you you have to restrict your calorie intake by a fair amount to lose weight, and overeat by so much to start gaining weight. Don't forget that all calories are not created equally, as some foods are digested better that others, and different combinations of fat, protein and carbohydrates will affect digestion. The addition of simple carbohydrates raise insulin which can also increase absorption, which is great for gaining weight and stimulating your appetite.
Calories out is equally suspect. Your body has mechanisms to adjust his many calories you burn, and those are not under conscious control.
You get fat one more morsel of food, and one less body movement at a time. You lose weight the same way. One less morsel of food, and one more body movement at a time.
Isn't being overweight hard too?
You just have to pick your hard. What ever choice you make, its hard.
The way most studies of weight loss work is by recruiting a pool of obese applicants. This is intrinsically biased: someone who has had a lifelong struggle with obesity can be recruited across 100% of their lifespan, whereas someone who spent two years obese and then lost the weight and kept it off can only be recruited for that 2 year window, or 2.5%. There are probably other factors that come into play that bias the sample even further.
The question these studies answer is "given a random obese person, how likely is this person to lose weight?" This is a relevant clinical question, and the answer is usually a pretty low percentage. For an individual who hasn't struggled with obesity their entire life, a more pertinent question is "given that I have just become obese, how likely am I to lose the weight again and keep it off?" The chances of that are much higher.
[0] By BMI, which has a pretty big margin for error, but I was visibly overweight.
I was athletic growing up and I’ll always have that experience and know how it feels. Someone obese at 18 has no reference point and neither do any of their body systems.
I'd say this is more of a boiling frog situation where I don't perceive a demarcation between life before and after getting fit.
There probably is some effect from growing up obese, but the sampling bias is hugely relevant to interpreting the statistics, and it's not talked about much.
glad getting back to a normal weight worked for you. This is awesome.
I have lost multiple dress sizes without trying to do so. I finally got the right diagnosis in my thirties, "a better name for my problem than crazy", and changed my diet in accordance with medical recommendations.
I was 245 pounds for at least three years. I haven't weighed myself in upwards of a decade but I've likely finally dropped back below 180 pounds this year. I say that based on no longer feeling like "a beached whale" who has trouble getting up out of a chair and past experience with where that point occurs for me in terms of weight.
I imagine the minority who do solve it likely don't really talk much about what actually worked for them and why they think it worked. I have gotten insane amounts of ugly pushback for trying to talk about what works for me and my opinions about my own life and body and medical condition.
If you have any sense, you find what works for you and keep your trap shut so the "crabs" don't rip your arms off. Unfortunately that means the other 85 percent don't get to hear "calorie counting might just be a broken mental model and seems largely unrelated to what worked for me" and that leaves a whole lot of people stranded behind our current broken mental models because it's not socially acceptable to say "Well, that doesn't fit my experience. Here's what I think about my own life and maybe we can work out better mental models."
Things like moving regularly improve people's health even if they don't result in long term weight loss. The same with diet change - you can eat better and have better health even if you remain fat. You can lower your sugar consumption, stop to drink sweetened drinks and your chance of getting diabetes 2 will go down regardless if whether it moves your weight.
The huge majority of (similar aged) people I had meet between 16-20 which had been obese where so because of "health issues" not directly related to them eating unhealthy being lazy.
As such it's not surprising if you have problems changing it because "just" eating healthy and doing sports is far from enough to fix it. And trying to fix it with that is often a task needing far more discipline and self control then the large majority of humans (independent of weight) have.
I mean let's be honest the difficulty many of this people face is way higher then the difficulty for a young(1) health male to get a black belt in Judo, Karate or similar.
(1): Start training with ~14 or earlier, through not necessary with high commitment, then at some point later (e.g. 16,18,20) added commitment trying to get a black belt.
Also, I specifically never called anyone out as lazy. The majority of obesity is overeating (a single Starbucks muffin is a 10k run). Yes there are people with imbalances/medication that are outliers but most people aren't outliers.
I specifically called out a relationship with food being something that's carried into adulthood as the cause of the relationship between those figures.
An obese 14 year old may have some underlying health condition but is more likely to be a victim of socioeconomic problems; lack of access to healthier and more balanced foods, or to have obese parents (which appears to be a good indicator for childhood obesity). Neither of these are easy solves, and the blame doesn't lie with an individual, but it does explain that someone who is obese as a child is more likely to be obese as an adult.
Idk, I can only speak about people in my environment.
Where I can only remember one case which might have been because of overeating and I say might because I simple don't know.
Multiple of the obese people I did know had a more controlled and some times far more healthy diet then most people I know.
Many cases I know did slowly but continuously got bigger, i.e. something which can totally happen without overeating.
I also had meet people the other way around, like needing to consume ~6000+ kcal a day when they don't do sports or they are at risk of becoming severely underweight...
> called anyone out as lazy.
The main reason I mentioned sport is because I know of a case where the person had a controlled diet and did more sport then most other people in class and still looked quite square, from what I learned this person slowly over multiple years got more and more weight without being able to lose any of it.
> . The majority of obesity is overeating (a single Starbucks muffin is a 10k run).
I'm not sure if it's the majority. It's definitely a thing, and very often a thing for extreme cases. It also might very well play a big role in countries with unusual many and many unusual extreme cases of obesity. But many of the cases I know did slowly accumulate weight over years without being able to lose weight starting from a very very young age on.
I think a lot of people upon seeing that statistic will assume that being overweight by 18 will lead to being overweight later in life, but that's not necessarily the case. Perhaps the body's self-regulation on food is 'inherently broken' and that's why they end up overweight in both cases?
https://resident360.nejm.org/from-pages-to-practice/will-ove...
"Obese 2-year-olds had a 75% chance of still being obese at age 35 and obese 19-year-olds had an 88% risk."