Mysteries of obesity: wild animals are becoming more obese too
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The environment is totally polluted with it. As we speak, you are most likely inhaling plastic microfibers from your clothes and furniture.
Once inside your body, some of them can mimic hormones.
This one will be so hard to swallow for so many people. I actually assume it will never go away, and linger eternally in people’s mind as it’s a way too seductive myth to be resisted.
I realize that people can fight homeostasis short term, but very few successfully fight it long term. We need to figure out the real causes of obesity, because calories in/calories out doesn’t appear to actually help very many people.
The killing joke being that the “OUT” has been times and times shown to be regulated depending on the “IN”, so reduction in calorie intake generally cascades in reduced calorie spending in a variety of ways.
It's not complicated. If someone is overweight and consuming 3,000 calories a day and then reduces to 2,000 they might not lose weight. But then they just need to reduce further.
All humans will lose weight at 0 calories per day. You just gotta find the right calorie level.
Yes exact absorption greatly varies and is impossible to measure. But that's why you just reduce until you are losing at the desired speed. You don't need to precisely measure anything. You just need to be able to tell if overall consumption is going up or down.
Of course this is mentally very challenging so people try to find reasons for it to not work. But energy has to come from somewhere.
But why not call the body's bluff? Cut input further! And then cut it again. Be more stubborn than your body.
Not saying it would be easy. It would probably be really hard. Not sure if I could actually do it if I had to. But surely, it is possible?! What little physics I know seems to strongly support it.
People with health conditions that directly depend on them losing weight will need specific ways, adapted to them, to lose that weight. Telling them “just eat less dumbass” (which is an actual advice thrown at people, almost verbatim) is condescending, ignoring the complexity of dieting, and only looking at it short term when they are trying to change the rest of their life.
We wouldn’t throw “money in/money out” mantras at random bankrupt people (or do we? I can’t tell anymore), we shouldn’t do that to overweight people either.
The entire personal finance sphere is based around this advice. Make a budget, cut costs, get spending under income enough to pay off debt. So yes, we do distill it down to “money in/money out” for people who mismanage their money. Fortunately, when it comes to money it generally is that simple, provided the income is sufficient to maintain the basic necessities of life.
For people straight in the red, more often than not the advices I've seen applied IRL are akin to talking to one's bank to reevaluate the situation, checking with local institutions how they can help, reviewing tax declarations, giving up on too low paying jobs to completely change their status etc.
To me these changes are often more structural or complicated than just deciding where the money goes or to how much extent.
It might be meant in jest or just as a rhetorical point, but it is really the core of your argument. Basically it’s a simple recipe for anyone to lose weight if they don’t care about any of the consequences, including straight dying. So then is there any point for losing weight to them ?
It reminds me of the rule of metrics: when you replace a complex goal with an easy to mesure number, that number will be optimized irrelevant of the complex goal being met or not.
My personal position is that people should accept there’s no simple and universal rule if they deal with a complex system. And god are our bodies complex.
Besides, if the estimates are wrong and you are not losing weight just eat less calories in the next week and see what happens. This is a form of feedback control; this kind of control can lessen the impact of modelling errors.
If you stick to this plan, you're guaranteed to lose weight, 100% of time.
Detractors of CICO usually say that people don't have the willpower to stick to this plan indefinitely. This might be generally true for most people (I don't know). But alas, some people have enough willpower, and some have enough support, such as having their portions be prepared by someone else. For them, this strategy will always work.
I imagine you are chronically in-debt from your health bills, college loan, dead beat husband who lost his third job in a row and you still have to feed your two kids.
You go read some books for advice on being in a better financial shape, and they tell you “Just spend less money. If in the next weeks you still aren’t getting rich, spend even less money, and so on. It’s just simple math, spend less than you earn ! It’s hard but stay strong !”
I wonder how you’d feel about that advice.
But I stand to my comment that CICO works for weight loss.
It's not generally true, however, that people in financial disarray can get rich by just spending less. Our cost of living is a fundamental limit on how much we can save. But more than that, people can't get rich if they don't have a high income.
An eye opening study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19288019/
According to this webpage, lecithin production and worlwide use really took off in the late 1970's: https://www.soyinfocenter.com/books/193
As of today, lecithins are present in lots and lots of different manufactured food worldwide.
I'd advocate more studies on lecithin, because it became absolutely ubiquitous about 40 years ago, in all the food actual poor fat people consume on an hourly basis: cereals, margarine, chocolate, puddings, cookies, etc.
The real culprit for this obesity pandemic was introduced in our diet only about 45 years ago.
Emulsifiers like lecithins should be looked at very seriously, along with other recent history additives.
The problem then becomes you have entrenched interests manufacturing those chemicals, which makes them hard to ban.
Somewhere back in common law we made the mistake of allowing private parties to pollute the commons. And now we have centuries of case law that are impossible to overturn.
This includes HRTs that don't get removed in water treatment but also many plasticizers in plastics are estrogenic.
They are ignoring expert opinion and answers. And instead making a lot of big claims based on some correlations.
The most laughable part being the claim that reducing calorie intake doesn't work. Everyone will lose weight by reducing calorie intake. It's just physics.
Now in practice people have an extremely hard time sticking to diets which makes them ineffective. But people not following diets is not proof that you can't lose weight by reducing calories.