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Comment by remarkEon | Hacker News Reader

I used to think this, that the obesity thing was just a function of an increase in calorie consumption and a drop off in physical activity. I just can't take this view seriously anymore. When you look around today, there are body types that never existed prior to the 1970s - at least at any kind of scale. Comparing pictures of family gatherings from the 1950s through the 1970s, and then to the 1990s and beyond and there's such a stark, shocking difference. Two of my cousins had gastric bypass surgery (before they passed away), and there was never a real change in their diet or exercise (one was a cop, so it's not like he didn't get exercise). Something is poisoning us in America, and if there was one issue presidential candidates should be talking about that should be an easy bipartisan win it's health and fitness.

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Whenever I tried "eating healthy" without calorie counting, I didn't lose weight. 6 weeks on keto to lose 200g was demoralizing.

Then I did calorie counting with MyFitnessPal and ate at a 500 cal deficit, and I lost weight. It works. But I pretty much had to stop eating out because I couldn't know the numbers on restaurant meals. I was basically eating raw food half the time, just to make it easier to calculate.

I'm surprised there's no government initiative to help people do calorie counting. Open up-to-date database, force restaurants to feed it nutritional info, etc.

It is the calories. We are simply eating many more calories than in the 1970s. Cheap, high calorie, highly processed food were not ubiquitous like they are today.

Being a cop is a very sedentary position in most of America. Unless you are a city cop out walking around you are probably in your car most of the day.

I'm not being clear, because there's some confusion in the replies to my comment here and elsewhere in the larger thread. I'm not denying that calorie counting helps most people lose weight. I did it to cut after a gain phase when I was training for certain events. Of course it works (for most people), and I agree with you that I wish more people did it.

What I am saying is that, for many and an increasing number of people, something is wrong - calorie surplus or not - with that they're ingesting. Even the physiology of being "fat" in the 1950s looked absolutely nothing like obesity does today. The "processed" part is the difference, though, so we certainly agree on that point.

> there was never a real change in their diet or exercise

Don’t you think that could have been the reason their health continued to fail?

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