People in the 50s weren't slimmer because they had ironclad determination to stay such.
Deviating from the mean is hard. Bad food and sedentarism are the norm.
Making the good choice the easy/only choice is the only way to solve this problem long-term (without drugs)
It seems clear enough to me that there is something - something - in the ecosystem that messes up the body's weight / energy homeostasis and we haven't identified the culprit. It might be a food additive, but it could be something to do with artificial light in the evening or plasticizers in our plastic products or who knows what.
Just my pov as non-overweight person who doesn't exercise (other than flipping my four year old around), doesn't walk or run long distances (but a 5 mile walk every couple of months doesn't phase me), eats very few fruits and vegetables, generally eats mostly meat, pasta, bread, cheese, cream and potatoes, and ends up in a fast food outlet maybe once a week on average.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-get...
it doesn't have to be just habit, but cultural/learned factors likely play a huge part.
each generation eats more, gets bigger, obesity runs in the family, (many obesity associated genes are mostly expressed in the brain ... the typical cursed environment-gene interaction), portion sizes got bigger, it became normal to gulp down a lot more sugar, etc.
I wouldn’t call taking the stairs in a pre-elevator world “effortless”, rather it was just the only option.
I also think better food handling/storage/treatment/blah means we absorb & retain more of the calories that we consume.
Diet is a way bigger factor in weight control than activity, unless you’re a pro athlete burning thousands of calories a day from exercise because you’re working out nonstop as your job.
You should still walk for general health, but not for weight loss.
EDIT: this report from Time about Japanese food culture rings true.
Diet is the overwhelming deciding factor when it comes to weight gain.
As another commenter posted, the amount of walking even a highly active person does is fairly negligible wrt weight loss/gain. As another anecdote - my ambient walking milage is 5 miles/day and I run an additional 20-30 miles a week and still maintain an obese BMI
People in the 50s (in the US) had, among other things, fistfuls of benzedrine.
Edit: here is a link for the skeptical folks https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/speedy-history-americ...
> James Nye, for example, was one of a family of eleven children raised in rural Sussex in the 1820s and recalled how the ‘the young ones’ in his family went ‘very short of food’. Despite his mother’s best efforts, he rarely had more than ‘half a bellyful’ at mealtimes, and ate scarcely anything other than bread.
> Following the harvest failures of 1816, for example, John Lincoln’s entire family was forced to undergo severe privations. His two children succumbed to disease very easily — their quick deaths from measles were likely owing in part to prior malnourishment.
You can't be obese if you don't have food.
I think they may have taken your prompt and thought about the 1820s, 1400s, 1200s or 200 BCE. Did you mean to direct people to discuss the 1990s by listing the other 4 eras?
It seems like you do not want to discuss any factors relating to obesity in history at all, yet you keep engaging in this topic anyway. It is impossible to have a conversation where one side discusses facts like drug availability or food scarcity and the other says “no think about something else” as a canned response.
What do you think is the cause of the increased level of obesity? What do you think is the solution, if any?
It seems far, far more likely to me that right now is the aberration – in fact we know today is aberrant on several dimensions that are presumably related to obesity, so that's where we should look.
Big, system-wide changes like what we're experiencing are almost always both multicausal and overdetermined.
The causes here are:
1. Production of cheap, extremely palatable, ultra-high caloric density foods (mitigable). Note: This is not the same thing as saying "people used to be thin because they were starving." It is absolutely possible to feed a country amply and not yield the low price/great taste/horrible nutrition profile that dominates the American diet today.
2. Increase in sedentary time due to shift from physically intensive professions (not very solvable), car-centric urban planning (solvable), and the dominance of ass-in-chair leisure activities (probably mitigable)
3. The science is early on this but there's good reason to look further into endocrine-disruptive chemical poisoning (mitigable). We are finding these compounds absolutely everywhere we look and we should be very open to the possibility we are mass-poisoning people and damaging their metabolism: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10003192/
I think they may have taken your prompt and thought about the 1820s, 1400s, 1200s or 200 BCE. Did you mean to direct people to discuss the 1990s by listing the other 4 eras?
It is a useful and topical period to discuss in a thread about ubiquitous weight loss drug usage.
On the other hand, if like me, you have ADHD and weight issues, it could be more helpful. Because it could treat your ADHD enough to help you actually establish and follow a structured diet and exercise regime. Especially if your ADHD includes impulsivity. The last time I was on lisdex treatment, I lost about 5kg from the initial boost, a lot of it was probably water weight. Then I managed to cut about 30kg later with calorie counting and regular cardio.
So the physical effects themselves are largely a pisstake.
For example, I have a routine of going to a group fitness class at my gym in the morning. I don't need to summon willpower, I just have a morning routine that involves doing x thing at y time. No thought required.
Given the abundance of options for fitness classes and meal plan services, you really can just put this on auto-pilot and have a lifestyle that is healthier than 99% of your peers.
This is part of what's fucked up about modern American lifestyles.
We shouldn't be promoting layering healthy behaviors (fresh foods and exercise) on top of our default lives -- we should be doing a better job of engineering our environment to make those things the default for all people.
F.ex. what if we highly taxed automobile entry into urban cores and shopping districts?
But because I live in suburban Australia and eat the same pesticide laden slop as everybody else, I too have a gym membership.
What does this actually mean to you? Walking or even running is certainly not comparable to going to the gym, so what, should we lift heavy weights as part of our regular jobs to keep up our upper body muscle mass?
Ergo, we don't need to turn our jobs or built environment into Ninja Warrior.
We just need to build it to encourage that modest amount of activity.
It is empirically and demonstrably ineffective as a solution.
Obviously no one is talking about a treadmill concentration camp here, good lord.
I guess what I want to express is habits are one step closer to a lifestyle change and that's what keeps one ultimately healthy (mentally, too). We can't have nightmare commutes to soul-sucking jobs to continually have people addicted to looking at screens and think that there's no fallout. Adding, "but now there are drugs!" isn't an advancement.
That being said - I do feel like reducing the amount of willpower needed is the key. I love junk food, but if I never buy it at a grocery store it's much easier to cut it out. If I have no chips in the house I could still get some at the corner store, but I need to be much less disciplined than if the chips were in my pantry
Well, heights increased dramatically for a couple decades so what that meant was that many people in the 1950s were starving. In the 1930s, people died of starvation even in the US.
I don't really think that we want to go back to starving our population just to be thin, thanks.
That's million years of evolution with food scarcity and modern capitalist world which created unprecedented abundance of food (and other things). And before you compare it to Europe — europeans still smoke much more than americans. Tobacco is also just a chemical that decreases effects of obesity, just in a different form.
Countries in Europe with approximately the same obesity problem as the US:
Poland, Croatia, Romania, Britain, Hungary, Georgia, Slovakia, Chechia, Ireland, Greece.
And of course New Zealand, Australia, Canada are all in the same boat as well.
Those are all over 30% obesity and climbing (Romania is 38%, nearly at the US levels). The US is of course the leader of the pack, however it's all the same fundamental problem.
So yeah, culture driven lower portion sizes + meds driven lower appetite is a well-tested combination with known positive outcomes.
No. They lived in an overall healthier environment. But they were also subject to much greater social pressure to stay slim and could endure fairly intense social judgment and stigmatization for weights that we consider normal (particularly women).
They lived in a different environment. The universal appetite-reduction drug was nicotine, and the common methods of administration had a number of undesirable side effects.
In the 1950s, malnutrition was a serious issue that many people in poor areas died from. When was the last time someone died because they didn't have access to food? Obviously, the other side of that coin is that food being so plentiful, people eat much, much more than ever before.
Food abundance is good, but it is not the answer to this question. For example, in America today the richest locations tend to be the most physically fit.
Weak thesis.
There was a far more vicious shaming culture 50-70 years ago about things like being obese. And culturally it's still looked down upon to be obese, it's just not as acceptable to be vicious about it (and of course sometimes people still are).
Today however there is a lot more "always on" pressure: social media is a huge component to social, social acceptance, socializing, social learning & sharing, getting to date people, et al. That's a form of individually focused media pressure that didn't exist back then. And sure you can turn it off, not partake, but there are usually serious consequences especially for younger people.
That's the context.
Answer: literally non-existent.
Indeed, we have the inception of Weight Watchers at the start of the next decade, replacing far crazier things like the cabbage diet being used en masse.
Yes, it was easier in some ways to live a healthier life; one reason why was the rampant social policing of each other's weight.
Perhaps, perhaps not. But you'd expect that if there's many different causes making weight gain more common and only one is changes in social pressures (as I've already stipulated in each post).
And, likewise, as stipulated above: overt social stigma is not the only reason why people might prefer to be of a lower weight.
> The success of those efforts has decreased over time.
Well, one reason for this is that we've reduced the use of obviously harmful but effective weight loss techniques like cigarettes and stimulants. The 1950s were the era of the rainbow diet pill clinic, where you'd walk in and get a personalized cocktail of amphetamines and thyroid drugs and laxatives and diuretics to help you control weight.
As recently as the 1980s movies were overloaded with jokes about fat people, it was extremely common. That's stigma in action culturally.