Even they admit that in the end CICO is correct. You cannot escape physics.
That being said, the real question is: if somebody stopped eating, would their body die instead of using their fat for energy? There could definitely be cases where that happens (likely caused by modern tech / science), but given things like this happen:
It’s likely just a willpower/intellect issue once cico is handled. How long can you keep it up, are you able to make effective modifications, etc until you reach your goal weight.
I’d wager that it’s much more likely society lacks willpower & intelligence (when presented with excess resources) instead of we introduced something that makes our bodies unable to lose weight.
Anecdotally, as a former obese person and with many family members who have dealt with/are dealing with obesity cico + willpower was always the answer. It’s very likely the willpower needed to lose weight is something a large portion of the population fundamentally can’t achieve without cultural enforcement.
Sure, CICO definitely applies, but so what? The first derivative of stored calories doesn't tell you anything interesting about causes.
Your bank balance is a sum of money coming and and money going out, but what causes money coming in and what causes money going out are much more useful to anyone trying to earn wealth or avoid debt than the mere fact that your bank balance is their sum.
Like you, many people are convinced that the issue is "willpower / intellect". But this doesn't share a causal relationship with CICO! The willpower argument is like saying "oh yeah, to become rich, just earn more than you spend!" -- sure, that's true, and then someone says "ok, how do I do that?"; if your answer is "willpower!" I doubt they'll find that very satisfying.
Since I suspect you didn't read the post either, I'll excerpt two questions here:
(1) Rates of obesity in lab rats -- whose diets haven't changed -- have also increased over the last 50 years. Do they lack willpower too?
(2) Average calorie consumption hasn't changed much over the last 50 years, and nor has calorie expenditure. Average weight gain is in fact super slow, on the order of a few pounds per year, for most obese individuals. That's the equivalent of overeating by ~7000 calories each year -- only 1% of typical annual consumption. It's hard to imagine that people don't have the willpower to reduce their food consumption by 20 calories per day. Losing weight by keeping up a caloric deficit requires a ton of willpower because your body super fights against starvation. But why would a lack of willpower be the reason people perpetually eat 1% too many calories? And why did they only start doing that 50 years ago?
CICO is not a useful causal explanation for the obesity epidemic. Obesity at the societal level is a more interesting problem than merely CICO, despite how many people think the reason is some variant of willpower.
> (1) Rates of obesity in lab rats -- whose diets haven't changed -- have also increased over the last 50 years. Do they lack willpower too?
There are so many explanations for this outside of "some environmental factor causing everyone to get fat" that I don't think it needs explaining.
> Average calorie consumption hasn't changed much over the last 50 years, and nor has calorie expenditure
The methods for estimating these are likely wildly off. At face value, this would be an incredibly difficult statistic to obtain accurately. Nearly impossible. I'd need access to more data than is available to trust such a tremendous claim. Trying to simplify complex data like this is borderline pseudoscience.
That being said, I'm not saying CICO is the casual explanation. I'm saying we have a large surplus of resources, and humans are designed to consume. Overcoming that drive is likely beyond many people.
> There are so many explanations for this outside of "some environmental factor causing everyone to get fat" that I don't think it needs explaining.
Do you not realise that this point alone jeopardizes your entire argument? If this effect is real, the rest of this discussion belongs straight in the trash.
Yes, that’s my point. Parent is trying to “appeal to authority” essentially. We’re both arguing with no evidence, but parent is trying to act like they aren’t.
Can you point to other contexts with an equivalent level of surplus of today?
Even if you could, our science is not advanced enough to control for all the confounds. You can’t point to “evidence” or “science” to prove your point because we are not advanced enough to accurately claim anything at the level you’re attempting to.
Research like you’re referencing is great for “this is interesting” and not “this is why the world works this way”.
This must be part of some disinformation effort to streer people away from the simple answer.
Their conclusion is that you're helpless if your fat and that's just not true. The idea that this is not in your hands is ridiculous. If you are fat and you don't want to be fat you simply change your eating habits. This can be very difficult to do because you have formed these habits throughout your life but it isn't complicated and you should just do it anyway.
Obviously you [0] didn't read the article, but that is not their conclusion.
There seems to be some kind of unfortunate "shame brigade" out on the Internet that comes out of the woodwork to overrun any conversation around obesity that even hints that there might be reasons for the obesity epidemic other than individual people's poor choices.
The lab rats whose rate of obesity has increased over the last 30 years, despite consuming the exact same controlled diets, are certainly not "changing their eating habits" -- there must be more to the picture than merely eating habits.
This set of articles explores that. We don't have answers yet, but these folks make a strong argument that the question is worth asking.
[0] It's an unfortunate fact of scientific progress that ideologues have, in other fields, at other times, held back that scientific progress for decades through their inability to consider disconfirming evidence against a favored theory. This kind of comment should be ignored by anyone who values truth over consensus.
When I was obese and I thought about my own obesity, I decided it was under my control and I changed my habits (this was hard!) and I lost 110lbs. There was no more to the picture than my eating habits. Perhaps I was a strange outlier; lucky for me.
But when I think about other people's obesity, I am not allowed to think that, because I would be part of a shame brigade.
I wish the shame brigade had gotten to me years earlier.
The question "what can I do about this thing affecting me personally?" and the question "what can the group do about this thing that is affecting the group in large numbers?" are going to have quite different answers. I'm glad you've found a solution that works for you, but there's a good deal of data to support that telling this story to more people will not fix the group problem.
Even if your obesity was helped along by plastic based endocrine disruptors or micro-biome based issues or weird viruses, you found a solution for you.
> Our suggestions are very prosaic: Be nice to yourself. Eat mostly what you want. Trust your instincts.
>
> Diet and exercise won’t cure obesity, but this is actually good news for diet and exercise. You don’t need to put the dream of losing weight on their shoulders, and you can focus on their actual benefits instead
I haven't read it all but I have read a lot and I have been doing this for a long time.
To give people an excuse that diet and exercise is not the answer, it's irresponsible.
Our world makes it incredibly difficult to be healthy. My opinion is simply that you should still try everything you can to be healthy. The problem as I see it is that people have no clue what to eat and what not to. Most people just eat what their parents ate and think nothing of it. We buy food at a grocerie store thinking this is food because it came from a grocerie store. Most stuff in a grocerie store will slowly kill you.
And about those lab rats. They are inbred clones. Maybe suitable for some lab work but the fact that they are getting fatter has to do with their awful genetics. And yes, there's obviously some variability there.
I've been thinking about what this blog series for the past days and they don't seem to understand that muscle gain and weight loss happens slowly over years. If you're fat and you don't want to be fat anymore you have a really difficult job a head of you.
To make up excuse to pretend and act as if reality isn't exactly this is disingenuous and it's going to lure people into false sense of security. Not good.
> This kind of comment should be ignored by anyone who values truth over consensus.
I hope you're talking about your own comment, because consensus is truth, for all practical purposes.
What's really toxic is taking a fringe theory and pretending it has equivalence and/or equal weight with scientific consensus, when it doesn't have even 1% of the rigor and reproducible evidence behind it. That kind of attitude is absolutely glorifying ignorance and is utterly toxic to actual progress.
Oof, you are definitely right about this. Very few people are able to distinguish truth where it deviates from consensus, and basically no one can do it in domains where they lack expertise.
That said, there is no scientific consensus about the causes of the obesity epidemic, so I'm not sure what criticism you're directing at me, exactly -- though I deduce from your tone that I triggered you in some way.
I'm not putting forth any fringe theory about the causes of the obesity epidemic; the link I posted examines common explanations for the epidemic and tries to figure out whether they're valid, and if not, what other causes there might be. They don't claim anything definitive, in the end, because it would take actual studies to prove any real connection. They're pretty clear about what they can and can't claim.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean:
> it doesn't have even 1% of the rigor and reproducible evidence behind it. That kind of attitude is absolutely glorifying ignorance and is utterly toxic to actual progress.
Also, the questions asked generally here "How can society as a whole have less obesity" is different from the one you are answering: "If I am obese, what can I do to improve my health."
I'm assuming you know we excrete unused chemical energy, so we aren't a closed system in which the CICO principal would be more deterministic.
I was similarly skeptical until I read it (ever since the first part appeared on HN) and it convinced me on many points.
That said, I think you're half right? SMTM's environmental contagion hypothesis is an explanation for population-level obesity rates, not individual cases of obesity. Anybody who cares sufficiently about their own obesity can change it through individual efforts. However, on a population level, "just change your habits", or even worse, shaming people who are obese, is a less effective strategy than "figure out what is causing their bodies to signal hunger and store fat in dysfunctional, self-harmful ways that they didn't used to anywhere on earth until the mid-1900s".
Well the messaging should be positive. Maybe we someday can have a public informed discussion on health. I don't think shaming will work too well but we have to acknowledge that being fat is not good. But also that it's a fixable thing you shouldn't be ashamed of. When we concede language to protect feelings I'm not sure we're going down the right road. I wish for people to be healthy and their best but you have to know that there are options to be better.
