> but you have the choice to step out of the fat trap.
People should also talk about the volition trap. I'm 40 and it feels like I've had more than a life's worth of people talking about how "you can do it if you just try!"
> ... advertising signs that con / you into thinking you can do what's never been done / meantime life goes on all around you
The sheer scope of the obesity pandemic should make it clear that we are not the problem, that our volitions are not the problem. Certainly so many people can't be too weak to regulate one of the most basic facets of existence? How did we come all this way as a species if we are so fundamentally flawed at basic metabolic regulation? Certainly so many people shouldn't have to try so hard? Sure, some people succeed, but in world where the overwhelming majority are failing, maybe "trying harder" is just akin to insanity?
I love Dr Jason Fung. His position is that our current system focuses on calories and not eating all the time, not avoiding processed foods, being insulin insensitive, and eating real food. Here's a good video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgmFEb0b0TI His hypothesis is that having high levels of insulin is the issue.
People need to remember that being insulin resistant and being overweight are chronic conditions. You won't be able to fix them overnight. Don't focus on decreasing calories, focus on eating real food. The article mentions this too.
One thing that was counterintuitive to me is that most people's bodies produce insulin in response to artificial sugar so there's no real difference between diet coke and coke on your body.
In India, most people don't take huge junk food. They still get diabetes because of calorie heavy food and eating all time without letting the stomach get empty even for a minute.
It's the food addiction. People can't stop eating just like alcohol, cigarette or drugs.
A lot of people mentioning willpower but not as much attention is given to the fact that everything in our millions of years evolutionary design is biased toward heavy reward for caloric foods, and within the past 100 years we are suddenly in an environment where those cravings can be fulfilled in abundance.
> ... "within the past 100 years we are suddenly in an environment where those cravings can be fulfilled in abundance."
And an environment where a massive completely out of control advertising industry that's injected into pretty much everything these days abuses every psychological trick in the book to capitalize on those evolutionary cravings.
A modern diet is a restrictive diet. We live in a time when half of our produced food is thrown away. That's why veganism makes so much sense nowadays. Nothing about the modern diet is "natural" for most people.
Meat was awesome when calories were sparse/intermittent. Now it's just excess for the sake of a status symbol. Same can be said about a lot of our foods.
>Certainly so many people can't be too weak to regulate one of the most basic facets of existence? How did we come all this way as a species if we are so fundamentally flawed at basic metabolic regulation?
There have been fundamental shifts in CI and CO. Food went from fundamentally scarce and requiring effort to fairly abundant, and the effort to acquire keeps going down. Over the course of US history we have gone from farmers to factory workers to desk workers. Each of those transitions has lowered "natural" daily CO, as such each one has brought about weight increases.
>"trying harder" is just akin to insanity?
Yes, try smarter. CI/CO is true but I find it to be bad advice because a) it is damn near impossible to measure, and b) straight forward CI/CO changes can lead to opposite results.
What I find works for me:
Cut CI a little bit, large calorie cuts can slow metabolism. Up CO a little bit, exercise boosts metabolism even when not working out. Anerobic is better at boosting metabolism than aerobic.
Food wise, sugar and salt drive the human appetite. Reducing them will help you not feel as hungry while reducing CI. The other is just get used to eating less. Low food days help reorient to smaller meals feeing right. By "low food day" I mean find something small, low sugar, and salt (personally I use unsalted peanuts) when you feel hungry stop and focus on the feeling and try to determine if it is actual hunger or just habit hunger, if it is "real" hunger then eat a handful of peanuts and wait 15min before you reevaluate. The day after eating less will feel normal.
I don’t want to disagree with you but I have a hard time with preaching that people are not be personally responsible for themselves.
I get your point that genes are important and some are blessed while others are not. But regardless what your genes are, you need to find a way to take care of yourself. You are not entitled to someone else taking responsibility for you and your problems.
Here's the crux of the issue; for most people who are fat, finding a way to take care of themselves is so onerous, complex, and difficult that they're not technically stuck, but they're effectively stuck. If you need to drive more than an hour to get access to food that won't be terrible for you, it's not surprising that so many people have a problem.
It's not genes here, it's the food industry, constant advertising... There's an entire industry predicated on keeping people fat through overconsumption.
Telling people they should "take care of themselves" is cute, but it's completely pointless. You have to solve the systemic issues.
> How did we come all this way as a species if we are so fundamentally flawed at basic metabolic regulation?
IMO: because we have always had nowhere near enough food. Agriculture revolution was what, 10,000 years ago? That's a blip.
It's entirely possible in my mind that the same mechanism and behaviors that fuel obesity were actually helpful for almost all of human history. It's just now, like right now, that they're a problem.
And it becomes even more obvious to me when I look at other animals. I look at my cute dog. If I gave him infinite access to food, I have no doubt he'd be dead by the end of the week. Is he stupid? Is he broken? Or was he never intended to be in that situation?
> IMO: because we have always had nowhere near enough food. Agriculture revolution was what, 10,000 years ago? That's a blip.
I think its the opposite, agricultural is much more reliable food so then population could grow until everyone barely starved. Before then people either had more food than they could use or they just died from starvation, people generally lived better lives before agriculture but there were much less people.
The reason we grow fat is because its good to be fat when you are a hunter gatherer, since there is more food than you can possible eat when you kill a large animal you just eat as much as you can, and then you survive better if you don't find another kill for a while.
Agriculture only started to produce enough food for everyone when we human stopped multiplying, before then starvation was only a few generations away as people would multiply exponentially until there isn't enough food again.
Societal norms are the problem. We’ve normalized unhealthy food. Big business has figured hit that if they make processed/refined foods easily accessible, you will buy them. Nobody wins here except shareholders, and only those shareholders in good health who don’t have to compete to get access from doctors who are overbooked with patients who have manifested a chronic illness that is statistically correlated with the aforementioned food.
> Certainly so many people can't be too weak to regulate one of the most basic facets of existence?
Why not? We're all weak, in one way or another.
> How did we come all this way as a species if we are so fundamentally flawed at basic metabolic regulation?
There never was enough calories to go around. Getting as much as you can and storing them for later as fat used to make sense until very, very recently.
I’m thin but I agree with you, I don’t have to think or try to be this way, I just am. I do probably have healthier habits than average. But still, it comes naturally to me. I would feel awful and exhausted if it took willpower all the time just to maintain my weight.
The premise of western civilization is that most of us are unfit idiots and natural slaves and we must fight to get out of our miserable subaltern state.
> The sheer scope of the obesity pandemic should make it clear that we are not the problem, that our volitions are not the problem. Certainly so many people can't be too weak to regulate one of the most basic facets of existence? How did we come all this way as a species if we are so fundamentally flawed at basic metabolic regulation? Certainly so many people shouldn't have to try so hard? Sure, some people succeed, but in world where the overwhelming majority are failing, maybe "trying harder" is just akin to insanity?
At least in the US where the problem is much worse than in the EU, I would say the major driving factor is the lack of cheap healthy foods.
We're starting to get more healthy options in the US but the problem I see again and again is that food is always painted as "trendy" and therefore commands a higher price. I can go into McDonalds and buy fries and a cheeseburger for around ~$5. But if I try to get a healthier option from another place I'm looking at $10-15 for just about anything.
Every time I travel to Europe or Latin America I'm always shocked at how easy it is to find cheap healthy food. I can pop down to a local fast food place and for around $5 get a piece of chicken, beans and rice. This by no means fancy but it's solid healthy food.
I’ve heard this before and just don’t get it. Buying healthy food is generally cheaper, or just as expensive in my experience. Buy some vegetables, some chicken, some fruit, eggs. These are generally very affordable, you just have to cook with them.
Sure, buying Just Salad is more expensive than buying McDonald’s, but that’s not the only options.
The bigger problem IMO: we put way more sugar, sweeteners, and addictive substances in food and have big portions where people feel obligated to finish. It’s very easy to eat 100g of sugar every day and hardly notice. Combine that with most American activities involving food and alcohol.
We have a culture that encourages eating and food that responds by being more eatable
A couple of years ago, I was researching modern food science (for unrelated reasons). What really struck me was how focused we are on product longevity. Everything must have low available water in order to survive warehouses, transit, and shelves. Sugar, sodium, oils, and phosphates are all just tools to accomplish this.
Put another way, the bag of chips at the American grocery is _designed from concept to factory_ to be unable to support living beings. Microorganisms would die from dehydration trying to eat the chips. But due to a bug in human psychology, when we eat them we just feel more hungry. There only regulating feeling we get is guilt.
>At least in the US where the problem is much worse than in the EU, I would say the major driving factor is the lack of cheap healthy foods.
And portion sizes! There a several factors that lead to such large portions. Americans expect (and now desire, thanks to the ever expanding gut lines) to be stuffed from an ordered meal so producers spend the extra $1 on food costs to ensure larger portions and fewer complaints. We'd complain is the the $9 burger was made into 1/3 sized $3 burgers. Additionally the fixed costs of running a food joint require to low cost and high margin items (like fountain soda) to survive.
A real mystery indeed ... Or ... we are slowing moving towards some crescendo where all this enshittification is intertwined: cheap packaging, maliciously deceptive marketing, marketing EVERYWHERE, garbage food, exploited workers, etc. The "rant" about corporations are ruining everything is just real life now more than ever. Finding healthy food is difficult and getting more expensive. In general finding quality anything is getting more difficult and more expensive. All while we are bludgeoned with advertising that tells us the opposite.
The idea that one person could fight this battle day in and day out on their own if they just try harder seems comical at best. Feels like victim blaming to be honest and I hate it. Make healthy food easy to find, identify and buy and tax trash food because it is a burden on the community, just like actual pollution/cigarettes/etc.
When you frame the issue as a matter of willpower or trying harder then you're already setting yourself up to fail. Everyone that I know who has succeeded in maintaining a healthy body composition has done so through permanent lifestyle changes in which they set up better defaults and positive habits. The daily exercise program then becomes something that they have to do whether they want to or not, rather that something that they can really choose. And some of these people literally used to be obese alcoholics, so it's totally possible. Discipline has to be progressively built up over time through exercising it, just like a muscle.
While the US is one of the most severe cases (and in particular has a large number of _very_ obese people, making it more _visible_), most of the world does have an obesity problem.
The answer, I believe, is that we are unique among all other creatures in that we are not equipped to be able to master our own actions. We all do things we would say we ought not to have done. The whole concept of fairness is built around the fact that people don’t always do what they should.
And just because everybody isn’t fat doesn’t mean they don’t struggle with porn, or substance abuse, or some other hangup they can’t seem to shake. In fact it’s the people who deny having any issues that are sometimes the least self-aware, having the most glaringly obvious issues to everyone else around them.
Hi HN! OP here. Thank you everyone for reading and commenting. Thanks to your feedback I have done the following edits to the post:
- Added a comment on GLP-1 agonists. I wrote the article like it was 2023, not 2025. These drugs now exist and their benefits massively outweigh their drawbacks, particularly for people that really need help. Anything that helps out of the trap, particularly with this effectiveness, should be front and center. Thank you for pointing it out.
- Added a comment on my take on the usefulness of exercise for this process. I don't believe in exercise as a calory burner, but as something you need in order to be strong, fit, flexible and feel better mentally. It supports you in your journey. Exercise in order to burn calories to get lean is counterproductive. It is a thick wall of the mental fat trap.
- I realize that my struggles (and I don't say this lightly) have been a small fraction of what many of you had to go through, or are still going through. I also mentioned this in the article now. For some, it can be ten, a hundred, a thousand times harder than for others to break free from being overweight and be able to regulate their food in a way that is mentally healthy.
- I also added this: "Incidentally, I don't think this is about willpower (this is another parallel with Carr's insight). The decision to change comes from a deeper source. When I was most obsessed about asserting willpower over my eating, I was having the worst time and making bad choices. Getting out involves awareness, work, and a willingness to fail and keep on trying. The authors above say it much better than I can."
Hope again this was helpful for those with like struggles.
You brought up smoking and were mere inches near the truth but quickly ran away back into the lalaland... Smoking used to be more prevalent than obesity. Did we bring it down with "smoking positivity" and did shaming and harassing smokers only brought harm? What do you think?
For what it's worth, I believe that shaming is generally not helpful. For people to step out of a difficult situation, they need to be empowered. They will probably find your help more useful than you shaming them, or at least your sympathy. At least that's how I see it.
good article, I can (unfortunately) relate.
another aspect of the trap is when you have set backs (stress, life events) or get tired (long days, less sleep, emotional events) typically the first recourse is to stop the hardest parts: physical fitness, e.g., you take a car instead of bike/walk, skip sports, alcohol instead of water.
it's sometimes a vicious circle, you're tired due to overweight, thus eat more to get energy, making you more overweight.
I have extremely lucky genes and have managed to stay just within the green BMI range despite eating all the carbs and fats you can imagine and at times consuming 200-300g of milk chocolate a day.
Some of my friends are obese despite exercising heavily every day.
Finding ways you enjoy to keep an active lifestyle is a great idea, probably the highest impact thing you can do for your long term well being (for people in this community I strongly recommend trying rock climbing or martial arts, especially BJJ, both very mentally challenging sports).
However, author's recipe doesn't work for everyone, and you shouldn't feel terrible if it doesn't work for you. Also, I'm hearing amazing things about those new drugs.
> I have extremely lucky genes and have managed to stay just within the green BMI range despite eating all the carbs and fats you can imagine and at times consuming 200-300g of milk chocolate a day.
You’d be surprised just how little you eat. I’m also like that, thinking that I eat shitton and don’t get fat at all while my friends can’t lose 5 kilo. When I’ve started counting, even with all the junk food, I’ve been barely pushing above 1,5k.
People don't realize how wildly appetite varies between individuals. Thinner people tend to think they eat a lot, because they're fulfilling their appetite. Fatter people often think they don't eat that much, because they're rarely full. IME, that's the thing that varies far more than actual metabolism stuff.
Counter-anecdote: I have a smallish build and have well-tuned satiety, but a consistent measured TDEE of 2400~2500 kCal, and would go hungry and waste away at 1.5k.
I agree there’s no substitute for measuring your numbers. But meticulous calorie and weight tracking is probably a big ask for the average person, even though it’s imo absolutely necessary for controlling your weight one way or another.
> Some of my friends are obese despite exercising heavily every day.
I’ve been chubby despite heavy exercise most of my life. It took me at least 30 years to come to what now seems like the dumbest most obvious realization:
Exercise makes me strong. Food makes me fat.
Now I think of them separately, to a first approximation, as the high order bit. To affect change to my strength, I first need to modify my exercise habits, and to affect change to my weight, I fist need to modify my eating habits. Of course I’m not saying you can’t burn calories exercising, but it’s actually been extremely helpful in my weight loss goals to mentally separate exercise from eating. Instead of thinking of exercise as _the_ way to lose weight, I think of diet as the primary tool, and exercise as something that is primarily for strength and activity and only secondarily for weight control.
The reason I’ve been fat despite exercise is, of course, because I naturally compensate for exercise by eating more. For me, I was eating until I feel a certain level of fullness, and that level seems to be slightly too much regardless of how much physical activity I do. Finally realizing that I don’t need to exercise harder, I ‘just’ need to track what I eat, is what finally actually worked. But like the article says, simple is not easy; I air-quoted the ‘just’ in that last sentence because successful food tracking is mentally difficult.
One of the fun side effects of tracking my eating instead of thinking of exercise as the primary weight loss tool is that with respect to food, exercise sort-of reversed it’s function for me, in a way. Instead of thinking of it as my weight loss tool and relying on it to compensate for what I ate, I sometimes use exercise to allow me to eat more when I’m hungry or want a treat. It’s funny, I know I said the same thing two ways, but my mindset changed almost 180 degrees. When I’m in a calorie deficit, I’ve noticed that days I don’t exercise I get more tired and hungry than days I do exercise.
To support what you said, there has been exactly one time in my life where I was exercising enough that it affected my weight, and that was when I was playing water polo for 3 hours a day, every day. That is a level of exercise that just about no one will put themselves through, where even your down time is spent treading water. And all that working out? Equivalent to pretty much one meal you'll get at a restaurant. And makes you ravenous, so the real reason it worked was that it capped out my availability of food, not my appetite for it.
I’ve come to understand “getting in shape” is literally that. Food just gives your body energy and nutrients, how you use your body decides what shape it’ll take (how it directs that energy and nutrients).
What it does do is improve your metabolism and health, both physical and mental. This can improve lots of your processes. Neglecting exercise is absolutely destructive and restricting calories does not get you those things, in fact it can work against them. Building muscle also helps burn calories and improves insulin response. Obviously, it is not enough on its own without a healthy lifestyle as a whole.
I think focusing on anything solely is detrimental but focusing on exercise as an aspect is good.
- eat a bit less food
- eat food that is higher on the satiety index
- eat food that has less easily absorbed calories/less processed/etc
- build muscle to raise your resting metabolic rate slightly
- sleep well
etc
I think a bit of everything with mostly a focus on less calories will be easier to adopt than just telling people to track calories into perpetuity and feel like they're starving for a good while.
I doubt it. There is no real evidence for genetics playing a major role here. You are probably underestimating your friends' energy intake. Exercise is great for many reasons but you can't outrun a bad diet. They're probably eating a lot more than you think, especially when you're not around.
The new drugs work; just not for everyone. Some folks won't react well to the drugs. For others, there's no reaction, but they don't affect their cravings.
I have several friends that have had miraculous weight loss, as a result of Ozempic.
>I have extremely lucky genes and have managed to stay just within the green BMI range despite eating all the carbs and fats you can imagine and at times consuming 200-300g of milk chocolate a day.
>Some of my friends are obese despite exercising heavily every day.
An often overlooked factor is how much snacking is done. If you eat "all the carbs and fats", but they're contained to a single meal a few times a week, and the portions are reasonable (ie. you're not stuffing yourself every meal), that has far less caloric impact than someone eating "salad" everyday, but loaded with dressing and snacking voraciously on the side.
Since BMI can't differentiate between fat and muscle, it breaks down for people who are very muscular. That said, most people are sedentary and hardly even exercise, so BMI is a good approximation. The people who are very muscular are probably well informed about this caveat that no buff bodybuilder thinks they're the same as an overweight person just because their BMI is the same.
It bears repeating that BMI at an individual level is at best a hint that something is wrong (and never that someone is healthy).
Another point is that you can be good athletically speaking and yet have too much body fat to be considered healthy. An extreme example is that of professional fighters in open-weight categories.
Great point. This comment reminds me of Mary Cain, who was fast and dominant until she joined Nike and Salazar tried to get her to lose weight. It became clear the lower weight impaired her health and performance.
> I have extremely lucky genes and have managed to stay just within the green BMI range despite eating all the carbs and fats you can imagine and at times consuming 200-300g of milk chocolate a day.
> Some of my friends are obese despite exercising heavily every day.
Whether that's a boon or a bane not depends on which body fat and especially visceral body fat you end up with. Looking fit (which is somewhat captured by BMI) but actually being unhealthy (body fat) makes it easier to ignore in the short-term.
Losing weight is hard. Maintaining weight is easier, except that you have to do it forever.
It was incredibly hard and took me a long time to lose 15 pounds as a always had been skinny person whose weight slowly crept up.
I've never been obese and I'm sure it's super challenging to change, considering how hard loosing 15 lbs was for me. But if I were, I do think I'd try a GLP-1 agonist to get my weight down.
> Losing weight is hard. Maintaining weight is easier, except that you have to do it forever.
That second part makes it harder. Losing weight was pretty simple for me, but maintaining that low weight was much harder. Someone said that it takes about half a year to form a habit. I maintained lower weight for about a year, then it came back.
IME the key is a very simple mindset shift. People generally try to ignore or overpower the sensation of hunger. That is super, super difficult over long periods of time. Instead what they should do is very directly and explicitly manage that felt sensation.
The key insight is that your sensation of hunger is primarily driven by the weight of your stomach (not the caloric contents or volumetric fullness of it).
So the question is how do you increase the weight of your stomach (decrease sensation of hunger) without increasing caloric consumption. You just eat a lot of low caloric density foods!
Divide calories by grams on the nutrition label. Lower is better. Replace as many items as you can in your diet with the nearest alternative that is of lower caloric density.
Nonfat greek yogurt and seitan are the two biggest hacks ever. Adopting this mindset will also probably astound you how many calories modern engineering can fit into a gram. Would be a pretty great achievement if we had to trek long distances, but here we are munching on this stuff while sitting all day.
> if I were, I do think I'd try a GLP-1 agonist to get my weight down.
Don't they only prescribe these for the morbidly obese? As someone "merely" overweight (BMI ~27) I'd like to try but I don't think I'm fat enough to get a prescription.
I was around 27 as well. I’m a big guy with a muscular frame but put on extra weight over the last 2 years of intense company building. If you can get a prescription (Hims will prescribe) you may have to pay out of pocket, but worth it IMO. They may want you to be at 30 BMI, but that is easy to fudge on their intake (they won’t do any validation of your intake numbers). Commit to a few months of extreme dedication and let the financial impact be a motivator.
Reassess progress towards your renewal (we did 3 months). It’s literally cheating, in the best way.
For better or worse, most of the online pharmacies like Ro or Hims will prescribe it to anyone with a pulse. Some insurance companies don't cover it unless your BMI is over like 40.
I think the definition of "fat enough" will come down quickly as these drugs become better understood. If the side effects are mild or manageable, why not prescribe it to anyone who even comes within striking distance of "overweight"? There are other kinds of medications, like those for high cholesterol, where it's a no-brainer to just start taking them when your cholesterol crosses some threshold.
Agreed. I lost about 10 kg back to ~60 kg of the teen myself (now I'm 50). It took quite a lot of exercise but that was the easy part. The most difficult part was avoiding eating off hours apart from avoiding alcohol and sugar altogether. Now. Maintenance is surely easier.
On a side note, I keep exercising at least 2-3 hours per week and honestly I feel physically much better than I used to feel in my 30s.
What's working for me now is just deciding what I want to weigh, but I couldn't do that for years. First I had to learn to actually control my eating, like not eating every time I felt like stuffing my face, getting enough sleep so I wasn't constantly fighting urges, and figuring out how much I need to walk to burn off extra calories.
'Just eat less and exercise more' never worked because I needed to learn how to do these smaller skills myself first. Once I learned what it actually takes to eat less and actually exercise more, that simple advice started becoming possible. It's still a work in progress.
For me, quitting tobacco was simple, don’t use. Quitting alcohol was simple. Don’t drink. I cannot simply abstain from eating. I can relate to the struggles and feelings from this article.
Cannabis made me lose 20kg in a short span (~2 months). But the main reason was extreme loss of appetite. I cooked normal and after 40% of a plate I was full.
You do this for a few days and then you start changing your cooking habbits. This was a year ago and I've held the weight since and simply started eating less. My old eating habbits did not make me gain weight though as my old weight was constant for 10 years.
My main liquid is 98% water. I cant stand soda unless its mixed with 90% water.
Tea is a nice alternative to water, and I say this as someone who doesn't like most drinks other than water.
There's a huge variety of tastes among green teas, white teas, oolong, black teas... Specific tea variety, different locations where the plants are grown, different manipulations, all concur to a lot of different tastes. However, a lot of people I've met just say it tastes like "earthy/dirty water"
Many people find "cold turkey" to be an effective way to discontinue bad habits or addictive behaviors. It's brutal, but carrying it out is simple and binary.
You can't do that with food. Your only choice is to develop moderation, restraint, and discipline. You're forced to always be around temptation. To always indulge at least a little, but hopefully somehow not too much.
This is much harder to do. And you have to keep doing forever — even when you're tired or stressed or bored or whichever feelings trigger your bad habits. For life.
"Eat less" / "eat veggies" is a mechanical solution to an emotional and physiological problem. The GP is highlighting that some tools we apply to similar problems can't be applied here, and so we see poor results and higher recidivism.
The point is that black and white, all or nothing is easier for many to stick to. It’s easier to not be tempted by a cigarette if you never see one or hang out with someone who smokes. With food, you can’t take approach.
Except stopping is much harder than not starting. I can relate, I can go weeks/months without drinking. But then I have a beer and it turns into 10+ before the night is over.
I'm lucky I don't have the problem with food, because you cannot just avoid it like other "bad habits".
But we can presumably learn to abstain from eating certain things. Like sweet food and sweet drinks. Or certain foods with high fat content. We can learn to eat some things rather than others. It hard to get fat from eating too much of a healthy diet.
Eating is usually (insert a number of asterisks) not a problem, more often than not it is snacks snacks.
The problem is twofold. First, snacks are typically extremely calorie dense. Even a small snack can easily offset caloric deficit coming from reduced portions. Second, leptin, the satiety hormone, is barely secreted from carbs, which are again calorie dense and main ingredient of snacks.
With these two in mind, it is no coincidence that it is hard to not overconsume snacks and snacks quickly lead to caloric surplus.
I mostly agree, though you could generously say the analogy would be "don't consume high-cal/low-satiety junk foods". I don't think one needs to deprive themselves forever of any indulgence to lose weight, but maybe some find it easier to fully abstain.
You could split eating into meals and snacks. And for snacks, you can totally quit it. And according to my experience, it's the snacks that cause the extra weight.
Controlled diet + controlled exercise.
Freshly prepared daily full-day meals delivery + personal trainer at the gym 2x/week combo is the only thing that ever worked for me. And it worked every time (3 times) in different countries. I would get fat again in between those periods, like I am now, after staying in a rural area without those facilities.
Truth, but I also argue that I am not addressing the underlying emotional traps that I attempted to escape using tobacco and alcohol. Those same mental/emotional traps just shifted/intensified with my eating. Perhaps it is that simple, but I also feel it’s important to address the root factors, which I haven’t, admittedly.
yuck - while the soylent diet might be efficient on short term, it's not sustainable. It's harder at first to eat better, healthier foods (more vegetables and fruits, meat and eggs, less fried foods and stuff with a zillion additives or refined sugars) but so much easier to maintain once the habit is formed. Stuff yourself with whole foods 80% of the time, it's going to be ok to eat a burger with fries or a pizza every now or then, and it doesn't feel like a sacrifice. Bonus: you'll feel the difference in energy levels.
To chime on this topic as one that's also quite personally relevant to me, I was obese as a youth. I got extremely into physical culture and healthy eating and pushed myself to become an elite athlete so that I would have another positive feedback mechanism for my diet and exercise habits besides just looking good. This worked quite well, and for years I enjoyed going to the gym 5 days a week and eating a strictly regimented diet because in addition to looking phenomenal I was chasing records and tracking clear metrics that I could derive satisfaction from on a weekly basis.
This part of my life ended in December 2020 when I was t-boned by a drunk driver going 130Mph. I'm no longer able to engage in intense exercise the way I once was, and the combination of my physical limitations and emotional issues (in addition to losing my life-long hobby and being in constant pain, my son had birth complications in 2022 and required brain surgery, and is now heavily special needs) pushed me towards alcoholism and emotional eating. I gained a _lot_ of weight, and my previous strategies no longer provided me with the guardrails and motivation to deal with the problem.
I've always had an issue with insatiable appetite my entire life, and while I was able to deal with it via a militantly regimented lifestyle and mindset change, I recognize that solution is itself incredibly challenging to implement (if it's even possible in an individual's case). Thankfully Monjourno was able to help me address the problem, and I look forward to GLP medications becoming more widely available as I do think there are a lot of people who suffer from appetite dysregulation due to genetics and emotional trauma who shouldn't have to wage an epic battle with their body to feel normal.
I think the obesity problem isn’t a unique one, but is in fact emblematic of a “class” of problems that are prevalent in the modern world.
They are all characterized something like this: the problem is on the face of it an individual one, with individual solutions. Just stop eating so much. Work out. Eat less unhealthy food. Etc.
But a deeper look and you see that the overall system makes it difficult or impossible for the average individual to really solve the problem. Because it’s too complex, too expensive, takes too much time, and mostly because the framework around “solving the problem” is still locked into the individual mindset.
The same pattern is in voting or affecting the democratic process (an individual action is what matters, but it simultaneously doesn’t really do anything unless you are wealthy/have free time to be an activist.)
Curbing social media addiction is another. It’s seen as an individual problem, but fighting against it requires you to essentially be against the entirety of society.
These are all consequences of the world getting more complex but the tools for dealing with that complexity not keeping pace.
The solution is maybe that we need a new agent or entity that operates in between the individual and the system. Traditionally that was something like your local neighborhood, extended family, etc. but nowadays I don’t think it really exists, because the solutions have been offloaded to individual-focused ones.
For example, there are apps which let you order healthy groceries every month that are delivered to your door. But it’s an individual thing, not a group or community one. You as an individual need to organize and order this stuff.
Some people are going to ding him for including exercise, and it's true that the physical calorie expenditure of exercise won't achieve much for weight loss unless you make cycling a major hobby. However, I think exercise goes a long way towards loosening the mental trap. It helps you build an identity as a healthy person, it relieves the guilt about not taking care of yourself, and it takes the edge off of emotions like anxiety. All of these things make it easier to avoid excessive eating. I don't think exercise is a must-have for everybody for weight loss, but I think more people should try it, and I think it gets overlooked because most of the claims about the calorie burn aspect of it haven't stood up.
Exercise is also a very strong predictor of long-term success in keeping weight off. Plus it's important for overall health anyway. Protects lean body mass, so that when you're shedding the pounds, you lose less muscle and more fat.
That's one effect people are less aware of. One reason your metabolism drops as you lose weight is you can also lose lean body mass. Muscle and organs.
There is also something to be said about doing exercise at a gym/class and seeing other healthy/fit people. It gives you practical evidence right in front of your eyes on how you COULD look. As well as likely becoming friends with people in those spaces that also have healthy habits. I have always found that motivation to be very strong.
Exercise is also something you can "get into". For example, you force yourself to go to the gym a few times, or to go running a few times. And then you start beating your previous records, at which point you get more ambitious. You try to research the best supplements on the web, or the best pull-up bar for at home, and before you know it, you are transforming into a "gym bro" without previously intending to. It's remarkably easy to get into various obsessions, even if they are entirely healthy.
Cycling specifically is incredibly good. It's easy to stay at a low-moderate zone 2 effort you can maintain for many hours, unlike running. It's also very easy on your body
Readit News
People should also talk about the volition trap. I'm 40 and it feels like I've had more than a life's worth of people talking about how "you can do it if you just try!"
> ... advertising signs that con / you into thinking you can do what's never been done / meantime life goes on all around you
The sheer scope of the obesity pandemic should make it clear that we are not the problem, that our volitions are not the problem. Certainly so many people can't be too weak to regulate one of the most basic facets of existence? How did we come all this way as a species if we are so fundamentally flawed at basic metabolic regulation? Certainly so many people shouldn't have to try so hard? Sure, some people succeed, but in world where the overwhelming majority are failing, maybe "trying harder" is just akin to insanity?
People need to remember that being insulin resistant and being overweight are chronic conditions. You won't be able to fix them overnight. Don't focus on decreasing calories, focus on eating real food. The article mentions this too.
One thing that was counterintuitive to me is that most people's bodies produce insulin in response to artificial sugar so there's no real difference between diet coke and coke on your body.
It's the food addiction. People can't stop eating just like alcohol, cigarette or drugs.
And an environment where a massive completely out of control advertising industry that's injected into pretty much everything these days abuses every psychological trick in the book to capitalize on those evolutionary cravings.
Meat was awesome when calories were sparse/intermittent. Now it's just excess for the sake of a status symbol. Same can be said about a lot of our foods.
Sometimes I really really want to punch a certain coworker in the face, but I still don't, and that's despite the temptation by "evolutionary design".
There have been fundamental shifts in CI and CO. Food went from fundamentally scarce and requiring effort to fairly abundant, and the effort to acquire keeps going down. Over the course of US history we have gone from farmers to factory workers to desk workers. Each of those transitions has lowered "natural" daily CO, as such each one has brought about weight increases.
>"trying harder" is just akin to insanity?
Yes, try smarter. CI/CO is true but I find it to be bad advice because a) it is damn near impossible to measure, and b) straight forward CI/CO changes can lead to opposite results.
What I find works for me:
Cut CI a little bit, large calorie cuts can slow metabolism. Up CO a little bit, exercise boosts metabolism even when not working out. Anerobic is better at boosting metabolism than aerobic.
Food wise, sugar and salt drive the human appetite. Reducing them will help you not feel as hungry while reducing CI. The other is just get used to eating less. Low food days help reorient to smaller meals feeing right. By "low food day" I mean find something small, low sugar, and salt (personally I use unsalted peanuts) when you feel hungry stop and focus on the feeling and try to determine if it is actual hunger or just habit hunger, if it is "real" hunger then eat a handful of peanuts and wait 15min before you reevaluate. The day after eating less will feel normal.
I get your point that genes are important and some are blessed while others are not. But regardless what your genes are, you need to find a way to take care of yourself. You are not entitled to someone else taking responsibility for you and your problems.
Here's the crux of the issue; for most people who are fat, finding a way to take care of themselves is so onerous, complex, and difficult that they're not technically stuck, but they're effectively stuck. If you need to drive more than an hour to get access to food that won't be terrible for you, it's not surprising that so many people have a problem.
Telling people they should "take care of themselves" is cute, but it's completely pointless. You have to solve the systemic issues.
IMO: because we have always had nowhere near enough food. Agriculture revolution was what, 10,000 years ago? That's a blip.
It's entirely possible in my mind that the same mechanism and behaviors that fuel obesity were actually helpful for almost all of human history. It's just now, like right now, that they're a problem.
And it becomes even more obvious to me when I look at other animals. I look at my cute dog. If I gave him infinite access to food, I have no doubt he'd be dead by the end of the week. Is he stupid? Is he broken? Or was he never intended to be in that situation?
I think its the opposite, agricultural is much more reliable food so then population could grow until everyone barely starved. Before then people either had more food than they could use or they just died from starvation, people generally lived better lives before agriculture but there were much less people.
The reason we grow fat is because its good to be fat when you are a hunter gatherer, since there is more food than you can possible eat when you kill a large animal you just eat as much as you can, and then you survive better if you don't find another kill for a while.
Agriculture only started to produce enough food for everyone when we human stopped multiplying, before then starvation was only a few generations away as people would multiply exponentially until there isn't enough food again.
Why not? We're all weak, in one way or another.
> How did we come all this way as a species if we are so fundamentally flawed at basic metabolic regulation?
There never was enough calories to go around. Getting as much as you can and storing them for later as fat used to make sense until very, very recently.
At least in the US where the problem is much worse than in the EU, I would say the major driving factor is the lack of cheap healthy foods.
We're starting to get more healthy options in the US but the problem I see again and again is that food is always painted as "trendy" and therefore commands a higher price. I can go into McDonalds and buy fries and a cheeseburger for around ~$5. But if I try to get a healthier option from another place I'm looking at $10-15 for just about anything.
Every time I travel to Europe or Latin America I'm always shocked at how easy it is to find cheap healthy food. I can pop down to a local fast food place and for around $5 get a piece of chicken, beans and rice. This by no means fancy but it's solid healthy food.
Sure, buying Just Salad is more expensive than buying McDonald’s, but that’s not the only options.
The bigger problem IMO: we put way more sugar, sweeteners, and addictive substances in food and have big portions where people feel obligated to finish. It’s very easy to eat 100g of sugar every day and hardly notice. Combine that with most American activities involving food and alcohol.
We have a culture that encourages eating and food that responds by being more eatable
Put another way, the bag of chips at the American grocery is _designed from concept to factory_ to be unable to support living beings. Microorganisms would die from dehydration trying to eat the chips. But due to a bug in human psychology, when we eat them we just feel more hungry. There only regulating feeling we get is guilt.
And portion sizes! There a several factors that lead to such large portions. Americans expect (and now desire, thanks to the ever expanding gut lines) to be stuffed from an ordered meal so producers spend the extra $1 on food costs to ensure larger portions and fewer complaints. We'd complain is the the $9 burger was made into 1/3 sized $3 burgers. Additionally the fixed costs of running a food joint require to low cost and high margin items (like fountain soda) to survive.
The idea that one person could fight this battle day in and day out on their own if they just try harder seems comical at best. Feels like victim blaming to be honest and I hate it. Make healthy food easy to find, identify and buy and tax trash food because it is a burden on the community, just like actual pollution/cigarettes/etc.
When you frame the issue as a matter of willpower or trying harder then you're already setting yourself up to fail. Everyone that I know who has succeeded in maintaining a healthy body composition has done so through permanent lifestyle changes in which they set up better defaults and positive habits. The daily exercise program then becomes something that they have to do whether they want to or not, rather that something that they can really choose. And some of these people literally used to be obese alcoholics, so it's totally possible. Discipline has to be progressively built up over time through exercising it, just like a muscle.
Dead Comment
The "obesity pandemic" is a very distinct trait of USA. The rest of the world does not have this problem at this magnitude.
There are 127 countries with an obesity rate higher than 20% (roughly what the US was at 30 years ago).
In nearly every country in the world, your ancestors from 30 years ago would call you fat.
The US is just ahead of the curve for some reason.
And just because everybody isn’t fat doesn’t mean they don’t struggle with porn, or substance abuse, or some other hangup they can’t seem to shake. In fact it’s the people who deny having any issues that are sometimes the least self-aware, having the most glaringly obvious issues to everyone else around them.
- Added a comment on GLP-1 agonists. I wrote the article like it was 2023, not 2025. These drugs now exist and their benefits massively outweigh their drawbacks, particularly for people that really need help. Anything that helps out of the trap, particularly with this effectiveness, should be front and center. Thank you for pointing it out.
- Added a comment on my take on the usefulness of exercise for this process. I don't believe in exercise as a calory burner, but as something you need in order to be strong, fit, flexible and feel better mentally. It supports you in your journey. Exercise in order to burn calories to get lean is counterproductive. It is a thick wall of the mental fat trap.
- I realize that my struggles (and I don't say this lightly) have been a small fraction of what many of you had to go through, or are still going through. I also mentioned this in the article now. For some, it can be ten, a hundred, a thousand times harder than for others to break free from being overweight and be able to regulate their food in a way that is mentally healthy.
- I also added this: "Incidentally, I don't think this is about willpower (this is another parallel with Carr's insight). The decision to change comes from a deeper source. When I was most obsessed about asserting willpower over my eating, I was having the worst time and making bad choices. Getting out involves awareness, work, and a willingness to fail and keep on trying. The authors above say it much better than I can."
Hope again this was helpful for those with like struggles.
Some of my friends are obese despite exercising heavily every day.
Finding ways you enjoy to keep an active lifestyle is a great idea, probably the highest impact thing you can do for your long term well being (for people in this community I strongly recommend trying rock climbing or martial arts, especially BJJ, both very mentally challenging sports).
However, author's recipe doesn't work for everyone, and you shouldn't feel terrible if it doesn't work for you. Also, I'm hearing amazing things about those new drugs.
You’d be surprised just how little you eat. I’m also like that, thinking that I eat shitton and don’t get fat at all while my friends can’t lose 5 kilo. When I’ve started counting, even with all the junk food, I’ve been barely pushing above 1,5k.
I agree there’s no substitute for measuring your numbers. But meticulous calorie and weight tracking is probably a big ask for the average person, even though it’s imo absolutely necessary for controlling your weight one way or another.
I’ve been chubby despite heavy exercise most of my life. It took me at least 30 years to come to what now seems like the dumbest most obvious realization:
Exercise makes me strong. Food makes me fat.
Now I think of them separately, to a first approximation, as the high order bit. To affect change to my strength, I first need to modify my exercise habits, and to affect change to my weight, I fist need to modify my eating habits. Of course I’m not saying you can’t burn calories exercising, but it’s actually been extremely helpful in my weight loss goals to mentally separate exercise from eating. Instead of thinking of exercise as _the_ way to lose weight, I think of diet as the primary tool, and exercise as something that is primarily for strength and activity and only secondarily for weight control.
The reason I’ve been fat despite exercise is, of course, because I naturally compensate for exercise by eating more. For me, I was eating until I feel a certain level of fullness, and that level seems to be slightly too much regardless of how much physical activity I do. Finally realizing that I don’t need to exercise harder, I ‘just’ need to track what I eat, is what finally actually worked. But like the article says, simple is not easy; I air-quoted the ‘just’ in that last sentence because successful food tracking is mentally difficult.
One of the fun side effects of tracking my eating instead of thinking of exercise as the primary weight loss tool is that with respect to food, exercise sort-of reversed it’s function for me, in a way. Instead of thinking of it as my weight loss tool and relying on it to compensate for what I ate, I sometimes use exercise to allow me to eat more when I’m hungry or want a treat. It’s funny, I know I said the same thing two ways, but my mindset changed almost 180 degrees. When I’m in a calorie deficit, I’ve noticed that days I don’t exercise I get more tired and hungry than days I do exercise.
Exercise is absolutely invaluable for general health but its not effective alone for weight loss for most people.
Exercise -- even heavily -- will never compensate a bad diet; that focus we have on exercise as weight control is detrimental.
- eat a bit less food
- eat food that is higher on the satiety index
- eat food that has less easily absorbed calories/less processed/etc
- build muscle to raise your resting metabolic rate slightly
- sleep well
etc
I think a bit of everything with mostly a focus on less calories will be easier to adopt than just telling people to track calories into perpetuity and feel like they're starving for a good while.
I have several friends that have had miraculous weight loss, as a result of Ozempic.
>Some of my friends are obese despite exercising heavily every day.
An often overlooked factor is how much snacking is done. If you eat "all the carbs and fats", but they're contained to a single meal a few times a week, and the portions are reasonable (ie. you're not stuffing yourself every meal), that has far less caloric impact than someone eating "salad" everyday, but loaded with dressing and snacking voraciously on the side.
Another point is that you can be good athletically speaking and yet have too much body fat to be considered healthy. An extreme example is that of professional fighters in open-weight categories.
Similarly people who appear overweight may have low volumes of visceral fat. Health is hard to determine without analysis and testing.
> Some of my friends are obese despite exercising heavily every day.
Whether that's a boon or a bane not depends on which body fat and especially visceral body fat you end up with. Looking fit (which is somewhat captured by BMI) but actually being unhealthy (body fat) makes it easier to ignore in the short-term.
It was incredibly hard and took me a long time to lose 15 pounds as a always had been skinny person whose weight slowly crept up.
I've never been obese and I'm sure it's super challenging to change, considering how hard loosing 15 lbs was for me. But if I were, I do think I'd try a GLP-1 agonist to get my weight down.
That second part makes it harder. Losing weight was pretty simple for me, but maintaining that low weight was much harder. Someone said that it takes about half a year to form a habit. I maintained lower weight for about a year, then it came back.
The key insight is that your sensation of hunger is primarily driven by the weight of your stomach (not the caloric contents or volumetric fullness of it).
So the question is how do you increase the weight of your stomach (decrease sensation of hunger) without increasing caloric consumption. You just eat a lot of low caloric density foods!
Divide calories by grams on the nutrition label. Lower is better. Replace as many items as you can in your diet with the nearest alternative that is of lower caloric density.
Nonfat greek yogurt and seitan are the two biggest hacks ever. Adopting this mindset will also probably astound you how many calories modern engineering can fit into a gram. Would be a pretty great achievement if we had to trek long distances, but here we are munching on this stuff while sitting all day.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adipocyte#Cell_turnover
Don't they only prescribe these for the morbidly obese? As someone "merely" overweight (BMI ~27) I'd like to try but I don't think I'm fat enough to get a prescription.
Reassess progress towards your renewal (we did 3 months). It’s literally cheating, in the best way.
On a side note, I keep exercising at least 2-3 hours per week and honestly I feel physically much better than I used to feel in my 30s.
'Just eat less and exercise more' never worked because I needed to learn how to do these smaller skills myself first. Once I learned what it actually takes to eat less and actually exercise more, that simple advice started becoming possible. It's still a work in progress.
You do this for a few days and then you start changing your cooking habbits. This was a year ago and I've held the weight since and simply started eating less. My old eating habbits did not make me gain weight though as my old weight was constant for 10 years.
My main liquid is 98% water. I cant stand soda unless its mixed with 90% water.
There's a huge variety of tastes among green teas, white teas, oolong, black teas... Specific tea variety, different locations where the plants are grown, different manipulations, all concur to a lot of different tastes. However, a lot of people I've met just say it tastes like "earthy/dirty water"
You can't do that with food. Your only choice is to develop moderation, restraint, and discipline. You're forced to always be around temptation. To always indulge at least a little, but hopefully somehow not too much.
This is much harder to do. And you have to keep doing forever — even when you're tired or stressed or bored or whichever feelings trigger your bad habits. For life.
"Eat less" / "eat veggies" is a mechanical solution to an emotional and physiological problem. The GP is highlighting that some tools we apply to similar problems can't be applied here, and so we see poor results and higher recidivism.
I'm lucky I don't have the problem with food, because you cannot just avoid it like other "bad habits".
Eating is usually (insert a number of asterisks) not a problem, more often than not it is snacks snacks.
The problem is twofold. First, snacks are typically extremely calorie dense. Even a small snack can easily offset caloric deficit coming from reduced portions. Second, leptin, the satiety hormone, is barely secreted from carbs, which are again calorie dense and main ingredient of snacks.
With these two in mind, it is no coincidence that it is hard to not overconsume snacks and snacks quickly lead to caloric surplus.
So quick snacking.
This part of my life ended in December 2020 when I was t-boned by a drunk driver going 130Mph. I'm no longer able to engage in intense exercise the way I once was, and the combination of my physical limitations and emotional issues (in addition to losing my life-long hobby and being in constant pain, my son had birth complications in 2022 and required brain surgery, and is now heavily special needs) pushed me towards alcoholism and emotional eating. I gained a _lot_ of weight, and my previous strategies no longer provided me with the guardrails and motivation to deal with the problem.
I've always had an issue with insatiable appetite my entire life, and while I was able to deal with it via a militantly regimented lifestyle and mindset change, I recognize that solution is itself incredibly challenging to implement (if it's even possible in an individual's case). Thankfully Monjourno was able to help me address the problem, and I look forward to GLP medications becoming more widely available as I do think there are a lot of people who suffer from appetite dysregulation due to genetics and emotional trauma who shouldn't have to wage an epic battle with their body to feel normal.
They are all characterized something like this: the problem is on the face of it an individual one, with individual solutions. Just stop eating so much. Work out. Eat less unhealthy food. Etc.
But a deeper look and you see that the overall system makes it difficult or impossible for the average individual to really solve the problem. Because it’s too complex, too expensive, takes too much time, and mostly because the framework around “solving the problem” is still locked into the individual mindset.
The same pattern is in voting or affecting the democratic process (an individual action is what matters, but it simultaneously doesn’t really do anything unless you are wealthy/have free time to be an activist.)
Curbing social media addiction is another. It’s seen as an individual problem, but fighting against it requires you to essentially be against the entirety of society.
These are all consequences of the world getting more complex but the tools for dealing with that complexity not keeping pace.
The solution is maybe that we need a new agent or entity that operates in between the individual and the system. Traditionally that was something like your local neighborhood, extended family, etc. but nowadays I don’t think it really exists, because the solutions have been offloaded to individual-focused ones.
For example, there are apps which let you order healthy groceries every month that are delivered to your door. But it’s an individual thing, not a group or community one. You as an individual need to organize and order this stuff.
That's one effect people are less aware of. One reason your metabolism drops as you lose weight is you can also lose lean body mass. Muscle and organs.
Cycling specifically is incredibly good. It's easy to stay at a low-moderate zone 2 effort you can maintain for many hours, unlike running. It's also very easy on your body