Volume eating acts as an effective weight-loss hack
hussle.com
hussle.com
If someone asks how to make money to pay the rent, the answer is to get a job and an income. There are some niche ways to make money otherwise but that's the path.
Usually going to work sucks. You have to set alarms in the morning, keep a schedule, go every day without fail, etc.
But you do it because you want to pay the rent.
That's fitness. You don't need a hack, you just need to recognise that you have to restrict your caloric intake. Everything above that is an optimisation that has barely any impact in comparison.
A lot of people don't do that because it's optional. It's not even that important in the grand scheme of things unless you're, say, 300lbs+, and that doesn't happen by just eating normal meals and foods.
It's not an interesting question to ask. You may as well ask - how can we get the population to become strength athletes.
Most people just don't care, it's not a priority for them. A lot of people just like food, and they'd rather enjoy big tasty meals than be slim. So what?
>Most people just don't care, it's not a priority for them
Blatantly false. Clearly an enormous amount of people are unhappy with the condition of their body.
Almost the entire weight loss industry is basically a scam, just like get rich quick schemes.
Or quitting smoking. Once you see yourself as not being a smoker, forever, that's 90% of the battle.
Again. The size of the industry shows the demand for people who want to see a change. And make at least a financial committment to change.
>People know what they need to do if they want to lose weight
What particularly? Eat less, exercise more?
Exercising, and eating adult meals, can help, but they're way lower on the list than simply eating the correct amount.
But you know this. I know that you know this. You just want some sort of collectivist answer that doesn't exist.
It's harder to e.g. make eggs for breakfast, or cook a roast dinner, than it is to just go and have a donut from the drive through.
There is obviously no way to "solve" that on a population level. You may as well ask "how do we get people to stop using social media and read books". They have to do it themselves. Many people will say they want to, but they really don't. Many just don't care at all.
Case in point, here I am on HN rather than doing something more healthy. These are my revealed preferences. Who cares?
Clearly there is a solution, since it used to not be a problem. "People eat more now" is just a tautology. Why do they do it though? Food was worse in the 60s?
There's probably more affordable fast food about. Lately there seems to be a movement towards enabling obesity via lack of shame. If those things changed there would probably be movement.
But whilst that might be interesting to an academic, that doesn't change what a person needs to do as an individual. You're not going to lose weight by complaining about the lack of healthy restaurants around you.
>But whilst that might be interesting to an academic,
I think it should be important to politicians. If the literal health of their populaion is not a priority, then what is?
>You're not going to lose weight by complaining about the lack of healthy restaurants around you.
Absolutely. But I am not talking about "me", since it is a population wide problem, population wide solutions are the only solutions.
That's what I mean by political.
It's not a problem to me that someone else prefers food over health, it doesn't affect me at all. Drug addicts in the street affect me, that's something that I'd call a "population wide problem" since there's nothing I can personally do about it.
The solution you're looking for would require legislating a ban on any food products that didn't exist before the mid-twentieth century.
You may find that this would be politically unpopular.
Why? You can have food that is more satiating and less palatable without banning all food from before the 60s, you even claim it has been engineered for the opposite effect. In fact that does not seem like a high ask of the food industry.
Industries don't sacrifice profits for the public good.
Just look at the fossil fuel and tobacco industries.
That's one of the primary reasons we have governments. To solve issues like this.
The problem is that the human body isn't wired for losing weight. It's really that simple. Every single system in humans is set up to make use of scarce calories and hoard them when available.
Complete nonsense. Obesity was never an issue in human society before the 60s. No, this is definitely not about the human body wanting to preserve calories as fat. The body has means to regulate its weight and those mechanisms worked up until a few decades ago. ("more food" is not to blame by the way, e.g. look at Japan, almost nobody there suffers from a poverty induced calorie deficit)
1) A lot of people still had food scarcity up through the 1980s.
I think people on these forums don't remember prior to 1980 very well. When I was child, there were definitely students who were obviously malnourished. There is a reason we're still fighting for school meals.
My family didn't plant gardens to be hip; we planted gardens to have food. It was really common. Your garden and canning was the difference between hungry and sufficient.
Worldwide, heights for men in various countries peaked in the 1980s. That suggests that prior to 1980 there genuinely WAS caloric deficit for the average person.
This is one of the reasons why I tend to goggle at people explaining to me about the "Good Old Days(tm)" prior to the 1980s. WTF? Everybody I knew was some level of poor. My family all worked those "good" mill and mine jobs, and we still all had gardens and hoarded repair parts. Sending their kids to college was a difficult financial decision--especially if they had multiple children (very common back then). I can go on and on. I really want to know where were those "Good Old Days(tm)" because nobody in family sure as hell ever saw them.
2) Nicotine is a remarkably good appetite suppressant.
Smoking was rampant before the 1980s. One of the standard answers among the sorority sisters to the "Freshman 15" was to take up smoking. It generally worked on their weight.
It would be interesting to correlate the drop in smoking in various countries with the rise in obesity. I suspect nobody in the medical community wants to do this because the conclusion is not something they're going to want to publicize.
3) Japan really did have food scarcity.
Japan had widespread malnourishment from the 1940s for several decades. We know because of the height differentials. Suppressed height almost always correlates with food scarcity.
And, now that they don't have scarcity, their height and weights went up. And, it's only in the 30 year olds that Japan has almost caught up in heights. And Japan is now seeing obesity in the younger cohorts.