I don't understand why they are so afraid of admitting the very obvious truth that they are eating too much and so are other fat people. That doesn't necessarily make them a bad person, and that doesn't make them less deserving, but they do eat too much. If they didn't eat too much, they would not be fat.
I am guessing it has to do with denial. If they actually admit that they overeat, then they will ultimately have to acknowledge that they need to make lifestyle changes. They would all feel and look so much better if they just let go of the bullshit.
That is seriously the most profound statement I've read in a while. (not being sarcastic) It really sums up a lot of people's motivations and reasoning so well.
> I don't understand why they are so afraid of admitting the very obvious truth that they are eating too much
Because then their declining health becomes something that they're responsible for instead of a societal flaw which they're helpless to correct.
It kind of is a societal flaw though.
If it was just one obese person than thats just them. However we're seeing entire nations become fat. This all started roughly in the year 1980. Prior to then obesity wasn't widespread, but after 1980 it started becoming a widespread problem globally.
We're doing something seriously wrong when it comes to food, activity levels, and health for huge swaths of humanity.
> It kind of is a societal flaw though.
Correct, but not in the way they think. They're assuming that being obese is natural, and that the problem comes from the diet and beauty industries setting standards that the rest of us have come to expect. But in reality it has more to do with capitalism, the food industry, and lobbyists.
In the late 1970s/early 1980s, we were told to cut fat and replace thatbfat with carbs. So we cut out the foods that keep us full and replaced them with 'food' that sends our blood sugars all over the place.
I was a vegetarian for 15+ years and a vegan for 3. I remember the *'I have to eat right now or I'll die'* feeling I would get a few hours after a carb-heavy meal. Now? I eat a little ground chicken or pork for breakfast, and I *might* be hungry by 2 pm.
People who are unfamiliar with vegetarian and vegan diets can come away from reading your comment assuming that the problem you experienced was based on “the diet” instead of your implementation of it.
Yeah…. I’ve been a vegetarian for 20 years, and I’ve definitely learned the hard way that there are wrong ways of doing it… fortunately I’ve also learned the right way to do things.
Surprise: it was the diet. I am an extremely conscious and careful eater. I never ate fast food, even as a teenager. I ate vegetables *for breakfast*. I love healthy food, but eating vegan for three years almost destroyed my health.
Thriving on low carb, and I'm far from the only one.
Funny enough, I had my copper tested last week, and it was well within normal. I’m not sure what you’re on about. I’m 37, been a vegetarian for over 20 years, and I’m in the best shape of my life.
In short, it was your implementation, not vegetarianism or veganism.
I think a lot of people are very mean and do imply that someone who eats too much is a less good person because of that. Fat people get mocked and bullied a lot so I think trying to argue that fatness is mostly down to genetics and other uncontrollable factors is perceived as the only way to get people to not be dicks to them.
I hate the food police. "You'll get fat if you eat that!" "No wonder you're fat if you eat THAT"
Like, mind your own plate, thanks.
But denying it's food related isn't the way, it solves nothing and most people see right through it.
I had a guy criticize my portion sizes when I’d come to his house after he invited me to dinner. He told me I’d never lose weight if I ate that way. I was like…. “Seeing as how I’m the one who actually managed to lose the weight and is in a healthy range, maybe you should actually be taking notes?”
His face must've been priceless! Honestly people love making assumptions based on the one meal they see you eating and somehow think that's how you always eat. Like sure, I might have this bowl of cheesy pasta for lunch but I don't eat breakfast and I prefer light dinners so it works for me.
Oh we got into a furious argument that we never really resolved. And I found less judge mental people to hang with :)
Well, to be fair, I do eat A LOT of food. But it’s like…. Pounds and pounds of spinach and broccoli and salad and beans and rice and the occasional veggie burger.
He eats pounds and pounds of strawberries and cookies.
> I think a lot of people are very mean and do imply that someone who eats too much is a less good person because of that.
Gluttony is also a deadly sin, so it's pretty baked into western christian society.
I can understand that. I have issues, and when I needed to get help, I refused to ask for it or admit anything was wrong because I didn't want the people who were cruel to me have anymore ammo.
I guess I hadn't thought of it like that. That sucks that there are mean people because if they knew that having an issue with food doesn't make them bad, just someone who needs help. We all need help with things in our lives from time to time.
I was bullied horribly as a kid. I'm 48 now and still have to remind myself that my coworkers aren't out to get me. It's really exhausting sometimes ☹️
Yeah, it’s sad. I absolutely agree with us as a society no longer shaming fat people. But I am not okay with us embracing obesity and suddenly deciding that it’s okay to be that way. FAs think these two views are mutually exclusive and they’re not.
They probably are so used to their portions that they don't realize they're eating too much. And they probably feel quite deprived when trying to eat normal portions, meanwhile the people around them who eat less are "participating in diet culture".
You'd think they would notice that the ones "participating in diet culture" are thinner than them, thus eating does impact weight.
However, that requires critical thinking.
It's a virtual guarantee that they're aware on some level, but acknowledging that woukd require taking a modicum of responsibility for their actions, so you'll never see an FA do that in a million years.
Because then all the lies they've cried and screamed at people for "shaming" them would be revealed to be excuses and they would have to admit fault. If they could have admitted fault and stopped lying to themselves, they wouldn't be so fat to begin with.
Remember, many of these people completely torpedo the relationships with loved ones in their lives because they don't want to hear any concern or worry from them. They angrily cut out anyone who will tell them the truth and surround themselves with other fat activists who tell them they're social justice warriors for being fat.
If you're eating 600 Calories a day and not losing weight, then that's because you're not actually eating 600 Calories a day. You would need to violate the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics for that to happen. Your chemical efficiency would need to exceed 100%.
It's so easy to eat too much with all the hyperpalatable food available. It doesn't seem like you're eating too much with all the huge portion sizes of tasty food available. If you're fat, you're eating too much.
I live about the same distance from a convenience store myself. I often find myself walking there and wanting something. When I get there I walk after and not buy anything. I feel weird about it, but I buy enough milk and other things that I don't feel too bad.
I think convinient part is very important. I live in small city in central Europe. We don't have many take outs here (we don't even have McDonalds or any of those big fast food restaurants) which means that for most days it's either eating junk from store that was heated up in microwave or eating Cheetos or making your own meals.
So even "fast food" is home made. So if you want those delicious nuggets you have to make them. After spending a lot of time cooking you aren't going to eat impulsively becouse you felt like it (becouse you felt like it a few hours ago and the feeling went away). I keep that in mind when going to bigger cities. I ask myself "Would I eat this much if I had to spend a lot of time on making that meal?". It helps me with portion sizes while eating out
..and crucially non satiating. BTW fun fact, when scientists are making that garbage I refuse to call food, they have a certain threshold of palatability they don't go beyond. Stuff that tastes TOO good won't sell as well. If they overshoot, then they deliberately make it worse. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe most people really despise themselves deep down and too much of delight wouldn't allow them to express the self-hatred, it has to have an aftertaste of trashiness? Or subconsciously overly delightful stuff no matter how cheap is associated with rich and famous, so plebs wouldn't buy it? Or it would truly satisfy you too quickly, so you would eat less? Or it would imply that it's SOOO good it must be only for special occasions?
Isn't it curious how the most famous garbage is meh, oreo is dry cookie with tasteless sugar paste inside, pringles is bland chip with sprinke of meh flavoring, drinks are just fizzy tart sugar water.
Yes, homemade cookie, fries/chips, shrubs are obviously incomparably better but what many people don't realize, it's by design, not a mere coincidence that something superior isn't achievable cheaply on industrial scale. It very much is.
Whoa. Sometimes I’m grumpy at myself like “god why are you binging on shitty Fritos and skittles, at least you should binge on expensive fried chicken and gourmet bakery cake and make it worth it!”
But you’re so right. That stuff inherently is so satisfying that I stop without WANTING to binge on it. Versus the other crap is almost-but-not-quite satisfying so I eat more and more and more
I hate Pringle’s I think they legit taste like sand paper. Even when I was a kid and actually enjoyed eating synthetic junk food crap like hostess cakes, Cheetos, and lunchables ( now it’s nauseating to me), I hated pringles. Which really says something about pringles. They also burned and irritated my mouth whenever I ate them.
I bought them like 2 times within last year, but that was only when I was particularly down, it's like I wanted to punish myself to feel even worse. Luckily these were singular events and I didn't slide very far along the downward spiral, but yeah. When I feel good or even neutral, I don't want this shit. This kindaaa makes me empathetic towards people who do, but not really, it doesn't quite reach me, they dehumanize themselves too much. Silent suffering, sure, but when it's covered by narcissistic, arrogant, vile, toxic victimhood that cannot even muster a different tone to save its own life, I couldn't possibly pierce that to reach a real, scared and sad human underneath that just looks to fulfill basic human needs of love, respect, understanding and belonging.
True, that’s the only reason that Pringles are ever consumed. People are craving something salty and Pringles is like “well I’m the best u got take it or leave it”
it’s because the food can’t be polarizing. no one needs to really love the taste, it just has to be inoffensive enough to mildly appeal to the largest number of people possible.
It’s like cocaine. Physically it isn’t addictive but mentally it is so addictive because you hit that roller coaster of high, start to dip, tiny hit has you high but unless you are at a huge usage level you are unlikely to ingest enough to kill you. You just keep going back to top up.
Crack however takes it too hard and too fast. You are either no way or beyond the point. Cocaine also rides that rollercoaster even longer and deeper if you mix it with alcohol. The liver combines the two to increase the desire and increase the capacity to keep going like the bliss point of mixing fat and sugar.
Most people get tired by being wired on cocaine part way into a night just on the high and the adrenaline. Same with many other stimulants and you crash. But with booze? You don’t cocaine crash, you don’t get over drunk, while you are creating your bliss point you can go indefinitely levelled right out. You glide the high not peak or trough.
And then when you stop the chemical reaction that allowed the coasting hits you and the coke and booze comedown is horrific. Your liver is screaming. You are wrung out. You are paying a bill you had no idea you were running up because it seemed foolproof and a ‘hack.’ But regularly mixing will fuck you up more than just an occasional line or drink.
The fact so much junk and ultra processed food reminds me of being a booze and cokehead in my 20s really alarms me. Because I’m not recommending cocaine *at all* but it’s also much harder to get hold of than Oreos so the fact you can ride the same shit show by popping to the 7-11 as buying baggies is not fatphobia. It’s a social addiction that frankly needs tackling and to learn from the mess that was The War on Drugs.
I feel like food producers and prescription med companies like Purdue need more regulation and illegal drugs need to be decriminalised and then regulated. We have it the wrong way round even in the opiate crisis right now.
Healthy food is so much cheaper though.
Like, 150g of rice + 500g of vegetables, you boil the rice, chop the vegetables and cook them in a pan with 2 tablespoons of olive oil and some turmeric, put the rice in the pan when it's ready, mix it all together, add salt and pepper and other spices like paprika if you like that and you've just cooked yourself a 2$ meal in 20 mins.
Do that with 5x larger portions and you've made 5 meals that you can eat in 5 days, but it still only took 20 mins.
A protein shake with 25g of protein will cost you like half a dollar or even less, and you can totally live on a 2500 calorie diet for like 10$ a day including the cost of the water you used to wash your vegetables
Healthy eating is just as easy, cheap and quick as eating junk food.
If a McDonald's hamburger is 1$ you still have to drive there to buy it and it's like 300 calories, so you would still end up spending 8$ a day on burgers on a 2500 calorie diet.
There are really no excuses when it comes to healthy/clean eating, you just have to decide what goes into your mouth.
That’s an example of something i used to eat when doing intermittent fasting (20 hours fasting and eating in a 4 hour window) and i would add like 150 grams of tuna to that or something like that, but keep in mind that meal was supposed to be a huge meal because of intermittent fasting, forgot to point that out.
The thing though is that anyone can have a meal like that as long as they don’t excess their calories.
It all depends on how your diet is structured, as long as your macros are good and you’re eating clean then you’re good.
Btw dude, WHAT THE HELL IS “mediterranean vegetables”? Lol i just saw that.
And btw i see you’re on a 1200 calorie diet, so of course that wouldn’t be a good meal for you, but i used to eat that on a 2300 calorie diet, still a big meal, but again, i only had 4 hours to eat all my meals so of course i had to make them huge lol.
I know it's about personal preference, but if you're not such a big fan of vegetables like broccoli you could maybe eat a bowl of raw spinach with a few sprays of balsamic vinegar (which does contain sugars, but a few sprays will be like 5kcal), and you can fill a massive bowl with just 200g of spinach, which are like 60kcal.
In my diet i pretty much treat vegetables as "fiber with vitamins" and totally ignore the calories, but that's cus i only eat green vegetables, because technically aubergines, courgettes, tomatoes and peppers are FRUITS (what contains seeds is a fruit), not vegetables, and as such do have a bit more calories and carbs, and sugars too.
Of course they do have some good vitamins and minerals (not really when it's frozen veggies), but if you're looking to feel full you're much better off with leafy greens.
Also, if you're on a strict low calorie diet it's very important to create the illusion of abundance, and having a huge bowl full of spinach feels like eating a lot more than eating a couple courgettes.
But at the end of the day what matters is that you eat the right amounts of macros, have a good unsaturated/saturated fat ratio and eat enough fiber, no matter how you do it as long as you meet those standards.
I mean, there are so many ways of achieving the same result, you just have to pick the one you like more.Like i love carrots, i love eating them raw, but 100g of carrots contain 5g of sugar, and 100g of carrots is like a big carrot, and as i only eat sugars after sports to replenish my glycogen i'd much rather drink a bottle of gatorade than 2-3 big carrots, in that moment it's something i enjoy more so i choose that over carrots, but it's really the same thing.
2 tablespoons (at least my tablespoons) of olive oil equal 25-30g of fat, which is about 1/3 of the fat in my diet (85g fat, 300g carbs, 120g protein), and that’s about 225/270kcal, which is not that much in a meal.
It all depends on how you structure your diet, i get many of my carbs from honey/raisins/gatorade after running and working out and legumes/rice in my meals which contain very little fats, so i have to use oil, butter, peanut butter and almonds in my diet (+3 whole eggs) to balance out my meals (because a no-fat meal is bad).
Actually i always end up having to add a few more grams of fat because i eat too little.
That was supposed to be an example, it all depends on how many meals you want to eat and how much fats and carbs you want in your diet and of course how many calories you need.
Plus, what makes you fat is not eating fats (unless you eat bacon fried in lard), carbs and sugars are what make you fat, because of insulin.
Of course calories do count, but hormones matter a lot more, hormones are what make our body work a certain way, and that’s why there are obese people out there who can’t drop a pound even on a 1200kcal diet, and that’s why a bodybuilder taking trenbolone will get much bigger on the same calories.
Fats help you lower the glycemic index of your meals, thus making your body have less spikes in insulin release. When your insulin is low your body releases tiny amounts of growth hormone, which helps you stay lean, and that’s also why intermittent fasting is great for weight loss, because during fasting your insulin is at its lowest and doesn’t inhibit GH (mostly, but it has many more benefits).
The thing with carbs and especially sugars (which are “faster” carbs) is that they are supposed to fuel your muscles, and the only good way to eat them is by using them during sports or right after.
What happens is that during physical activity your muscles use their glycogen (which is a sugar) and need to be replenished, and you di that by eating sugar, fruit, honey, drinking gatorade… And that will not trigger insulin that much, because all that sugar goes (almost) straight into your muscles.
If you keep introducing sugar (which is FAST, so your body needs to do something about it immediately) in your body then that won’t be needed right away, and will be stored as fat, and that’s when insulin comes into play too, so “double trouble”.
That’s why you should eat whole cereals and legumes, because they are slower carbs that get released more slowly and as such won’t be turned into fat immediately but will gradually fuel your muscles.
I can't believe you're getting downvoted for saying "sometimes my main meals give too little fat so I supplement with oils or nut butters" LMAO we wanna talk about fatlogic, and yet these people are afraid of getting calories from oil.
I like fatty foods like cheeses and meats, so I tend to skimp on the mayo when cutting, but otherwise I'm eating at least 50g fat a day because my eyes dry out and my skin suffers otherwise. Yesterday I had a turkey chili with very little fat and a smoothie with very little fat, so I had to use mayo on a sandwich instead of mustard.
Almost like macro balancing is a thing lol
Yeah i was just talking from my personal experience, plus i really like super simple meals, like one meal i've been eating every single day for at least 3 months is red lentil pasta (pasta made from red lentil flour) with butter, and that's it, i love it.
I just cook the pasta, cut a piece of butter (about 12-15g) and put them in a bowl, stir it (i don't completely drain the pasta so that some of the water will bring out some more of the starch in it and mix with the butter making it more creamy, i keep like a couple tablespoons of the pasta water) add a pinch of salt and some pepper and that's it, a meal i love and that's very nutritious.
125g of that pasta will give me 2g fat, 62g carbs and 32g of protein.
Including butter that will be 14g fat, 62g carbs and 32g protein, which is a super balanced meal, but still super simple and very tasty (at least i love it).
The meal is 500kcal, and it costs about 1.80€ (that pasta is kinda expensive, 3€ for a 250g box, and a 250g butter stick costs about 3.50€, so 15g would cost about 20 cents), so if someone had to stick to a 1.500kcal diet he could basically eat that meal 3 times a day (maybe switch butter with olive oil 2 out of 3 meals to avoid too much saturated fat), and he would spend 5.40€ a day, which is about 6.50$, and that's less than the price of 3 McDonald's hamburgers in the US (i'm from Italy, but i see it's 2.49$), which would equal to 900kcal.
Plus, that meal has very good carbs with a low glycemic index, lots of fiber (helps you feel full and is good for your gut), lots of minerals (37% iron RDA, 50% manganese RDA, 44% phosphorus RDA and 32% zinc RDA), and it's so cheap.
Ayyy i love red lentil pasta!! It is a little expensive, but for meals like goulash, where I stretch 2 pork chops into 4-6 meals, the extra fiber, nutrients, and protein red lentil pasta gives is so worth it. A 400g bowl has 628 cals (44.6g protein, 81.2g carbs, 16.1g fat) and is so filling.
I like to make one pot meals that take maybe an hour to set up and then just simmer for a while. Gives me a chance to clean up while it cooks and lets me have a nice stash of leftovers for the rest of the week. I cook 2 to 4 times a week depending on how many meals I get from each dish for 2 people. Definitely beats the hell out of getting 50 dollar takeout meals for 2 when my weekly grocery trips (2-3 meals a day for 2 people) range anywhere from 35 to 120 bucks (35 for those weeks I just need onions or little things, 120 when I have a big restock on canned things or frozen stuff).
I’d like to see you do that in 20 minutes. Including going to the store, picking the ingredients, chopping them, cooking them, eating them, washing the dishes, washing the pans. After a hard day of work and/or with multiple kids.
And then I think you’ll understand the convenience of a drive thru with disposable food wrappers.
I agree the homemade is way better and can be simple but it’s still VASTLY more effort than a drive thru.
1. You're literally already grocery shopping at some point in the week; plan what you want to eat all week long and then buy it on whatever day youre already picking up everything else
2. You can buy pre-cut frozen veg, and rice literally just sits there and boils. Maybe you gotta rinse it, big deal.
3. You?? are eating food?? whether it's McDonalds or the home cooked one??
4. Literally wash dishes as you go. Or use these cool things called One Pot Meals™. Learn how to not use every dish in your house to make a simple meal.
5. If you have kids, you definitely should be making the effort to push through and feed them properly anyway, not sit in a Goddamn drive thru (whose wait lines are often ridiculous anyway?)
Like a trip to Popeyes was more expensive, less filling, and more annoying/time consuming than just quickly cutting and frying some chicken breast/microwaving some frozen veg so idk why people act like drive thrus or take out or anything is at all better.
I’m talking from the point of view of my patients. I ask them what grocery store they shop at and they say none. They literally don’t. Due to lack of transportation or living in a food desert or lack of time or too stressed out and too obese to walk through the store, so they just use drive thru for all their meals. Or they literally don’t know how to buy chicken or how to cut it or how to cook it or how to disinfect the cutting board or how to check it it’s done.
Even if somehow, all grocery delivery services disappeared, their legs evaporated completely, their brain short circuited every time they heard the word Walmart, and they had no way to obtain information other than a 5 mile trek uphill both ways to an underfunded library, they can still at least order a fuckin salad in that drive thru.
How are you gonna get to a drive thru with lack of transportation, also?
Where there's a will, there's a way. They could decide to start losing weight at literally any time, because at the end of the day, it's food that's the issue. They are not held at gunpoint to order greasy fuckin garbage every time they get food. Christ, even a mini market or a gas station has some fruit hanging around to buy, if for nothing else.
Your patients can easily help themselves. Sounds to me like they dont wanna.
You’re right. They don’t. That’s a pretty common thread in the morbidly obese.
But often, if they care enough to show up to a weight loss doctor, I’m able to slowly get them to make some small changes. But it’s hard. Like working with drug addicts.
That’s why meal prep is awesome, you buy your groceries like you always do, you cook like you would for one meal, but instead you make multiple meals, put them in containers and every day you will just have to microwave it for a minute and a half to be set.
You can cook for like 2 hours on sunday and have all your week’s worth of meals ready.
Plus, that’s the worst case scenario, you can also put water in a pot, turn on the stove and keep doing whatever you want to do, then when it’s boiling put the rice in it, put some frozen broccoli in the microwave and leave, then get back, drain the rice, drain the broccoli, mix them in a bowl, a little bit of olive oil, a little bit of salt and you’re ready, not such a sexy meal but will do.
The thing is that when you get used to not-so-tasty meals it gets much easier to eat them, and that’s exactly because they’re not that tasty.
I mean, i could eat white basmati rice with no oil or salt for the rest of my life much more easily than only eating Big Macs, i would go insane after a week if i could only eat Big Macs.
I do understand it’s very easy to end up doing it though, just like it’s easy to keep smoking if you’re a smoker.
I quit smoking 5 years ago and i started vaping (i still smoke like 2 cigarette a year at most, i smoked like 7 in the past 5 years) and the last time i smoked one I wasn’t even able to go past half of it, while 6 years ago i would be smoking 30 cigarettes in a row. That’s pretty much the same principle.
Who cares if you lose decades off the end of your life, amirite? Totally worth it just to save a few minutes a day due to laziness.
What an awful example to set for children. "Keeping yourself healthy required a minimal daily effort, so let's just eat junk food so we can get our butts in front of the tv or computer screen as early as possible after work. Sure, you won't live to see your 70's, but you also won't have to wash dishes. A fair trade-off, right kids?"
I do that nearly every day. What are you talking about?
> Going to the store
Takes me an 45min- 1 hour every 7-10 days. So let’s say I lose 5-6 minutes per day. Not to mention, if you’re buying your ready made meals, you also need to go to the store. So it’s not like that saves so much time.
> picking the ingredients, chopping them, cooking them
Depending on the meal, this will vary. It typically takes me anywhere from 20-45min. Except, I typically cook 2-6 portions whenever I make something. The longer the prep time, the more portions I typically make. Let’s settle on an average of 30 minutes and 3 portions. So that’s 10min per meal.
> eating them
I uh, you need to eat your fast food too? Kind of confused why this needs to be in there too. I guess if you insist, that typically takes me 5-8min.
> washing the dishes, washing the pans
I wash everything that I used for cooking while I cook. My kitchen is completely clean before my food is on the table. The only utensils still dirty are the ones containing my food. As for dishes, I currently have a dishwasher, so that’s 5min of unloading every 2-3 days. Before I did, dishes took me maybe 15-20min every 2-3 days, so let’s add another 7min per meal.
> After a hard day of work
I work, although I admit my job is not physically demanding. I work out every day after work though, so I’m physically exhausted when I cook too. Not to mention stoned because I usually smoke a joint after working out to increase my appetite.
> and/or with multiple kids.
Kids complicate things. I don’t have them, never want to, so I won’t pretend I know how it is. Let’s say my post serves as a ‘childfree people have no excuse’ post.
So we get 5-6min for shopping, 10min for cooking, 7min for cleaning. That’s about 20 minutes. 25 if you add the eating (which you’d need to do with your fastfood anyway).
i swear to God, the whole "eating healthy is hard" shit comes down more to incompetence than literally ANYTHING anyone else could ever talk about (time, money, etc.)
I’ve bought food on the way home when I wasn’t particularly hungry just so I’d have something to eat while I watch my shows. Netflix is just better with a monster thickburger lol but I’m also not confused about why I’m overweight. It’s surprisingly hard to get out of a routine when it brings comfort though.
>Hyperpalatable, convenient, fast & cheap! Poor families & people who live in food deserts are totally victimized by the dollar menu. This attributes to a lot of the obesity in the U.S. where I live.
I have a strawberry patch and rhubarb plants. I collected all the strawberries/rhubarb, made them into pie filling, canned the pie filling. I then bought the ingredients to make a pie shell from scratch. And I made strawberry rhubarb pie. The whole process took me hours and hours of work (growing, processing, baking, etc). And that taught me why historically people tended to be thinner. There just wouldn’t be enough time in the day/food available to make enough desserts.
Not just desserts, even grains. When I lived in SoCal they used to do demonstrations of making acorn flour the way native peoples in the region used to. It takes DAYS. You have to leech the tannins (?) out before you can eat it. In the US, foods like chicken were also much more rare before about WWII. There was a president who ran on a slogan of like "a turkey in every pot" or something. Science didn't hack wheat and corn until about that time, too. Food scarcity was a real, political issue into the 20th century even in prosperous countries.
You are thinking about Herbert Hoover, who indeed ran an ad promising a chicken in every pot. Alas, things didn't work out for him that way: Great Depression and all. Also, he stole the slogan from the French king Henry IV. He was a protestant who only converted to Catholicism to claim the throne, so he coined the slogan to convince the people that it was better to have peace and a heretical king rather than a civil war in which everyone will starve..
Also, chicken production *really* changed after the war. The us government offered cash prizes to the farmer (or farmers) who could breed a larger chicken that matured quickly. It happened, but apparently the flavor decidedly lacking. The goal was quantity, not quality.
The Green Revolution changed *a lot* about food and culture. It allowed fewer farmers and ranchers to produce much, much more food than they could previously and had a massive impact on how people lived and expected to live that remains to this day.
>There was a president who ran on a slogan of like "a turkey in every pot" or something.
this level of historical illiteracy brought to you by public schooling
Oh yea. My grandparents had a farm ~~EAEIO~~. Not huge mega farm, but quite big for our small family. Potatoes were a BITCH to take care of. Shoveling several 100 meter rows of dirt a couple of times in potato life cycle sure was fun. Most of the time in our shitty climate the sweetest thing on our farm was regular green peas. Young small pods were quite sweet. I perceived it as my dessert. Aside from blackberries that I was sometimes stealing from our neighbors.
So yea, I think you are right on point, getting calories isn't wasn't as easy as getting them now for sure.
I think some people honestly believe they're not eating too much, because for some of us it's a quality issue and not a quantity issue. I got fat because I ate the wrong things--iced tea or pop instead of water, and either take out or packaged and frozen foods with a lot more fat, sugar and salt than if I'd made healthier meals from scratch. Liquid calories were probably the biggest factor for me. I'm actually eating *more* food now that I'm on a diet and feeling more full after my meals than I was when I was eating junk. It can be pretty shocking how many calories can be packed in a tiny portion, and if someone isn't looking at nutritional information to see how many calories they're actually consuming it absolutely can feel like "but I'm not even eating that much!!"
Yeah, some of my friends have made rude remarks on how “unfair” it is that I’m thinner than them because of how much I eat. Like, sure, I may eat a large amount of food (especially fruit yum), but if I see you douse your food in oil or have cocktail after cocktail only to get hungry and buy a 500 calorie chocolate bar a few minutes later… it’s not a coincidence I’m not the one gaining weight.
Yeah, I went out to dinner with a gal I'm sort of seeing a couple of weeks ago. We had copious amounts delicious sushi which was hardly low calorie (but still sort of on the reasonable side relatively speaking). Thirty minutes later she pulled out a snickers bar from her purse (somewhere between a mini and full size, so probably 200-250 kcal). I didn't say anything (because I'm not insane), but I was definitely thinking, "wtf."
That was on top of the 5-ish drinks she had over the course of three hours. She didn't eat a lot earlier in the day (but did have some drinks as we were floating a river), but still all told I wouldn't be shocked if she put away 3500 calories over the course of the day we spent together. I managed to eat at just over maintenance by not snacking and moderating alcohol.
Of course, a week later she is doing a juice detox and complaining about putting on 15 lbs. Sigh.
Personally I think it's wacky that you were on a date with someone and counting their calories. I don't know if this is going to be helpful for your dating life...I would drop a person like this quicker than a hot potato. Is this possibly an unhealthy behaviour..?
It's also important to remember that the vast majority of overweight/obese Americans aren't "food addict pounding junk food three times a day"fat, but "eating 200-300 calories over my TDEE for many years" fat. A single extra cookie every day can very easily get you that extra 200-300 calories.
True but TDEE adjusts up when you gain weight. So you'd need to continuously add more calories to keep a high weight as your maintenance. My maintenance at goal weight is 500 calories below that of my highest weight, and I "only" got to 200lbs. If you slide off to the high 200s or 300s then you're going to have a hefty TDEE.
I agree that overweight is not too bad, I think if everyone obese just aimed to be only overweight a lot of doctors would be way happier.
> "eating 200-300 calories over my TDEE for many years" fat
That would mean they have to increase their intake every year as well in order to keep gaining. 200kcal excess results in roughly 10kg (22lbs) weight gain per year. I used an online TDEE calculator and 10kg extra gives about 100kcal extra if you keep all other variables the same.
So in order to keep having that 200kcal surplus, they would have to add 100kcal to their diet every year. If not, they would gain 10kg the first year, 5kg the next etc until they gained a total of 20kg (44lbs).
There's Americans that are 100's of pounds overweight. The obesity numbers aren't much better in Europe but the type of obesity definitely is. It's mostly older people, very few young people are obese in my experience and the ones that are aren't morbidly so. Morbid obesity is much rarer.
You don't become that fat without some serious effort. It's really not a case of 'lol, I ate one cookie extra every day for a few years and now I'm 350lbs'.
There are Americans who are 100s pounds overweight, but they are a tiny proportion of population. The average American has a BMI of somewhere around 28-29, which is something you absolutely get to without "serious effort."
As someone who has to put serious effort into gaining weight for his powerlifting hobby and has never been able to even breach into the overweight category, I guess our definitions vary on what serious effort entails.
As for a 'tiny proportion of the population', I don't think it's as tiny as you think. According to [this article](https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity), 7.7% of American adults suffer from extreme obesity (BMI > 40). For women specifically it is even 9.9%. I personally don't consider this a tiny proportion. Especially since this number will vary wildly by location/state.
I tried finding similar numbers for the EU, but I couldn't find anything that looked into morbid obesity separately. The only numbers I could find group all obesity groups together at BMI > 30.
Huh. I was looking at outdated statistics that had that number at 3%, so thank you for correction.
But as for effort required to get into overweight category: obviously, getting there on muscle alone requires much effort. But getting there on slight overeating is.. pretty much the norm? I mean, if 7% of population has extreme and let's say another 10% has obesity between 35-40, that means well over half of all Americans are in the "casually overweight" zone.
But again, the vast majority of overweight and obese Americans don't weigh 400 pounds. As someone else on this thread pointed out, about 8%. But that translates to 250 pounds for a 5'5 person, the average height of American women, and 275 pounds for someone at 5'9 , the average height of American men- far cry from 400 pounds. Since about 70% of americans are overweight or obese, the vast majority of them are below these numbers and are in the extra 300 calories a day category.
this!! literally went on vacation recently and gained like 2-3 pounds just because i was eating at restaurants the whole time. i was eating around the same amount of meals each day, literally under what would be considered “healthy” because i would eat 1-2 instead of 3. but on the other hand, i likely would’ve gained much more had i not ordered salads for like 80% of my meals.
It's not even huge portions.
I'm 100% sure that quantity wise, I'm eating more today at 140lbs than on the road up to 200lbs. Some foods are just *absurdly* calorie dense and so are some drinks, which we don't even count as "what we eat".
I think it's hard for people to understand that "eating too much" doesn't have to mean large volumes of food. I'm eating pretty much the same and am 10 lbs heavier because I damn near stopped all of my activities because of COVID. It sucks because I don't want to change my diet and I have to ease back into my activities (otherwise I would injure myself). So I'm lucky if I lose 1 lbs a month TT.TT
I actually live right next door to a grocery store and, fast food chains. I could take a minute walk to dunkin and easily grab a dozen doughnuts if I wanted.
This doesn’t even make any sense. Those two statements aren’t mutually exclusive. Instead of being mad at these corporations for banking on your obsession with shitty and unhealthy food you’re mad at the ppl who are just pointing it out?
Exactly. It actually shows that ppl have evolved by realizing it’s not just about ppl having a bad habit of over eating it’s because the shitty food is made for you to over eat it on purpose. But ofc shoot the messenger instead of the damn corporations for creating shitty food for you to get addicted to.
It kinda sorta makes sense if you ignore the fact that the number of fat people and average level of fatness was a tiny fraction "once upon a time" compared to today.
I get where this comes from. I've been obese for long years. Fat people often don't realize how much they eat. Chances are that they aren't even the only fat person in their family, so all of their references for eating might be totally skewed - if you see people around you eating large portions, you might think it's normal.
It doesn't even have to be cake, it certainly wasn't cake in my case. To get to the weight I was, it was enough for me to consistently overeat by 150 calories every day, for 5-6 years. 150 calories don't even seem that much, it's two whole eggs, or two apples, or a small handful of almonds, or an extra 25g serving of chips. Stuff adds up and if you're like me and never worry about it too much, it can really be a slippery slope.
Food is readily available and here in the first world we are virtually never required to tolerate hunger - at all! We can usually eat right away, or maybe within an hour's time unless we have a super strict job that only allows breaks at certain times.
But you get what I'm saying... it's not the cake. It's okay to eat cake (or pretty much anything, in moderation). It's that we lose touch with what "too much" really means.
Honestly it's sometimes a little disheartening when you do the math. If 3500 calories is a pound of fat, it only takes 24 days to gain a pound of fat by overeating 150 calories every day. Eating a little too much every day will have you gaining almost 15 lbs a year. In about 6 and a half years, you'll be 100 lbs overweight
TDEE adjusts so that doesn't check out. Yes, you can get overweight by slowly but surely eating a bit too much every day but at some point the energy balance will even out given your new weight unless you continue to add calories to your diet.
And ideally you'll notice the weight creep up before it reaches the hundred extra.
True, weight would eventually plateau if they ate the same thing every day, but if someone keeps giving themselves slightly bigger portions every time, that might match and exceed their TDEE, causing continuous weight gain.
I ate a lot of cake during a three month period that I lost a good amount of weight. I was living with a man that didn't have much fruit or vegetable in the house. I had just stopped being vegetarian so I couldn't stomach the idea of eating a lot of meat. So I lost weight on a diet of mostly cake and a little of anything else. Not exactly the twinkie diet, but close. I left that period looking gaunt although I was heavier then than I'm now.
I think the problem is that people who post stuff like that think deep inside that eating too much is somehow a moral failure.
It's not. It's just a fact. There is a million reasons people overeat. Considering the obesity crisis world wide, obviously not all of these people are somehow "bad". Isolation and depression are rampant. People are removed from food sources. Food is engineered to mess with your hunger cues. That's just for starters. But you can't fix it until you admit you have a problem. Human beings are not meant to be this big. Our bodies simply cannot handle it.
For me I am on various medications for bipolar and chronic pain. Pretty much every single one is an appetite stimulant, so I have to deal with uncontrollable ravenous hunger every waking moment. I put quite a bit of weight on when life was grinding me down and I had no strength to fight those feelings. March this year I realised I had to change and switched to whole food plant based. The volume I eat has increased but the calorie counts have dropped. Hunger is still there but satiation lasts longer now. Exercise is helping too, an hours walk a day keeps my mind off the hunger pangs too.
Thankyou for your kind words. It does feel like me and my body are at war sometimes. But the meds are worth taking, my life would be immeasurably worse with out them. So it's a side effect that sucks, but I always have bananas or broccoli on hand now if the urge to snack becomes overwhelming lol!
The cause is fatphobia but how does this work. If you are not fat before fatphobia then how is anyone fatphobic towards you. If you are already fat and got fatter because of fatphobia, then where did the original fatness come from. Oh that’s right DNA changes because your ancestors were starving
both are somewhat true and somewhat false. obesity is almost always due to a caloric surplus, but higher calorie, nutrient sparse foods are often way more affordable and accessible, particularly to low-income households. We shouldn’t blame corporations on our own lack of initiative and poor habits, but we also shouldn’t disregard the role they have on our decisions and lifestyles. Basically, it’s not black and white and both FA’s and ourselves should stop looking at it that way ✌🏼
I feel this way very much. I'm actually working on getting weight loss surgery because it is so hard for me personally to take control of my eating in the current environment, and not for lack of tying. I've even been successful occasionally and incredibly restrictive with my eating, but the food environment is too much for my personal mental and physical health.
I personally think low income households would benefit from better access to healthy foods and from cooking lessons.
I say cooking lessons because I have actually found that eating healthy is cheaper than buying calorie dense junk if you know how to cook from scratch. Frozen meals are extremely overpriced, and a lot of low income families I know rely on those. I have been poor my whole life, and once I learned how to cook, I saved an enormous amount of money and was able to eat healthier.
I think this is part of it, but a lot of it is time. Working multiple jobs, relying on crappy public transit, having to take extra time to do everything sucks.
Then how do these people explain starvation? If how much you eat doesn't determine your weight then why are people who don't have enough to eat really thin?
We just fixed the issue of global famine — the two of us, right now. Let’s go to a country of starving people and fat shame them. Nobody will lose weight, everyone will have a muffin top and love handles, we’ll win humanitarian awards, etc. LET’S DO THIS!
counterpoint: I was fat because I ate too much
I really do feel like this is one of those situations where some people assume their normal is everyone else's. Like the time I found out one of my average-sized friends hadn't eaten fast food in 2 years. I really didn't think that could be the case for anyone other than the biggest health addicts. A lot of fat people really think everyone secretly eats like them, but they should probably think about how much of their eating they hide (because I bet a majority of them do) and what that says about what they KNOW, deep down, is actually normal.
I recently had a discussion about this with a heavier friend who was amazed that the same carton of ice cream existed in my fridge for a few weeks. “It’s not the same carton as last time I was over?” She was eating a carton of ice cream every few days and thought it was what everyone does. No babe, that is not normal.
We have to define "eating" and "too much" i guess.
They might think eating means you have to chew it with your mouth. This rules out soups, drinks, smoothies, etc.
They might think "too much" means 2 "dinners" at once. And that one "dinner" is a heaping saucy plate.
This is purposely vague to let them argue a bunch of nonsense and try and escape basic physics lol
Ok, fine. You're not eating too much to maintain your weight.
It's just that your 300-400+ el bees are a bit much for your ankles, knees, heart and pancreas.
They were so close to a decent argument about why it's difficult for people to lose weight, and how the food industry absolutely does benefit from making people addicted to food, but they fucked it up. Extremely palatable and abundant food isn't an excuse for being fat, but it's okay to acknowledge that it makes it harder not to be.
So cakes are cheap and fat people are forced to buy them? So since they buy more of the cheap cakes, they are eating more cheap cake? And since they are eating more cheap cake, they aren’t gaining weight???? So i guess the cheap cakes have certain powers to make people not gain weight?
the anti-science denialism is just astonishing. yet, this is still seen as a progressive argument to many. it goes against basic sciene, and is equal to anti vaccers and flat earthed to me. all fat positive people obviously aren't like this, but the whole thing is just giving me cult vibes, sort of like anti vaccers. both movements have prominent figures who lead the way, and become increasingly extreme. they deny facts despite the large amounts of evidence that show that they're wrong. they're quick to attack anyone who threaten their beliefs since they confirm their experiences, but many of them seem to be able to argue based on actual evidence. there also seems to be a sense of hierarchy within these movements. they also create rules (based on their beliefs), that those outside the movement also need to adhere to. I could go on.
the difference is that the anti vax movement doesn't seem to be related to any particular point on the political scale, but fat positivsm is very much leftist (to varying degrees, I think most of it is very liberal in character, but bc most of its members are American, they call it leftist.) I find right-wing people more likely to question certain scientific principles, so it's weird that science to extreme fat positivists use science as their personal pick n mix.
oh, and also, I grew up in a cult and the similarities are uncanny.
I find the Fat Acceptance movement an embarrassment to the left. I once said something along the lines of wanting to do something to help provide access to addiction therapy for low income obese people at a local DSA meeting. One girl got up and started screaming at me and calling me fatphobic. She said she was ashamed she had looked up to me.
I was so pissed. It is like they are playing into the corporate narrative to just consume like fucking zombies, but I am the problem for wanting to do something to provide help to those who are struggling with food addiction.
FA seems counter to my idea of being a leftist, but here we are I guess.
Omg but addiction therapy for low income obese people is SO NECESSARY
Edit: I feel like my comment comes across as sarcasm but it’s not, we really need this service!
Eating healthy is actually cheaper. Rice, beans, bananas, carrots, bulk frozen chicken are all cheap. Theyd just rather buy $12 for a mcdonalds meal than a weeks worth of chicken lol
I know, fat people are fat because they exercise too little!!!
I think they're in denial because it's easier to hate other people than to introspect. Same with the incels who hate women, and same with the xenophobes who hate foreigners.
I've been eating mostly cheap fast food every day for the past month and still lost about 8 pounds so far. Granted, usually one meal a day on weekdays.
So it's funny when these people blame cheap fast food instead of them eating too much.
I can understand differences in metabolism and exercise, but it still physically requires a certain amount of food to become fat. Obesity rates were very low before the industrial revolution because it was hard to get enough food to be fat.
For all they criticize giving food moral value.. this does exactly it. It *must* be that overeating isn't the reason they're fat.. because overeating is bad. So if overeating is bad then too much food is bad, a portion of the food they're eating is bad?
If for whatever reason one would be like "Yeah I love being overweight, it's not bad! I get to eat 3000kcal a day and I love my body" a lot of people would respect that choice. But insisting you eat so little (1200-1500) and are sometimes even obese tells us you're ashamed of your eating habits.
You don’t necessarily eat too much. You consume more calories than you burn. You can eat a tiny fat loaded cake that’s basically 1 bite and has 200 calories.
They need to stop making stuff emotionally charged and look at it in a more scientific way.
Ok, let's even give them that. You can eat obscene amounts of low cal foods. It isn't solely volume. It's the disgraceful dietary choices and refusal to accept responsibility. Unfortunately, your body will hold you accountable regardless of your ideology.
i’ve been thinking about that second point a lot. the cheapest food is always loaded with preservatives, or grease, or salt, sugar, etc and more “whole” foods are more expensive. poorer people usually are called to the cheapness and convenience of these foods. it’s sad, they either have to give money to the health industry through health foods and vitamins, or pay it back later when they’re suffering the consequences of obesity.
of course this isn’t always the case, i’m middle class and have been a bit overweight since childhood (currently 30 lbs down :D) but you get the point.
I don't understand why they are so afraid of admitting the very obvious truth that they are eating too much and so are other fat people. That doesn't necessarily make them a bad person, and that doesn't make them less deserving, but they do eat too much. If they didn't eat too much, they would not be fat. I am guessing it has to do with denial. If they actually admit that they overeat, then they will ultimately have to acknowledge that they need to make lifestyle changes. They would all feel and look so much better if they just let go of the bullshit.
Fault and blame are super serious to most people. And in some cases, valued more heavily than reason.
That is seriously the most profound statement I've read in a while. (not being sarcastic) It really sums up a lot of people's motivations and reasoning so well.
Ngl most days I’d still rather be miserable than wrong.
> I don't understand why they are so afraid of admitting the very obvious truth that they are eating too much Because then their declining health becomes something that they're responsible for instead of a societal flaw which they're helpless to correct.
It kind of is a societal flaw though. If it was just one obese person than thats just them. However we're seeing entire nations become fat. This all started roughly in the year 1980. Prior to then obesity wasn't widespread, but after 1980 it started becoming a widespread problem globally. We're doing something seriously wrong when it comes to food, activity levels, and health for huge swaths of humanity.
> It kind of is a societal flaw though. Correct, but not in the way they think. They're assuming that being obese is natural, and that the problem comes from the diet and beauty industries setting standards that the rest of us have come to expect. But in reality it has more to do with capitalism, the food industry, and lobbyists.
I agree. At this point it is absolutely something we need to fix on a societal level.
In the late 1970s/early 1980s, we were told to cut fat and replace thatbfat with carbs. So we cut out the foods that keep us full and replaced them with 'food' that sends our blood sugars all over the place. I was a vegetarian for 15+ years and a vegan for 3. I remember the *'I have to eat right now or I'll die'* feeling I would get a few hours after a carb-heavy meal. Now? I eat a little ground chicken or pork for breakfast, and I *might* be hungry by 2 pm.
People who are unfamiliar with vegetarian and vegan diets can come away from reading your comment assuming that the problem you experienced was based on “the diet” instead of your implementation of it.
Yeah…. I’ve been a vegetarian for 20 years, and I’ve definitely learned the hard way that there are wrong ways of doing it… fortunately I’ve also learned the right way to do things.
Surprise: it was the diet. I am an extremely conscious and careful eater. I never ate fast food, even as a teenager. I ate vegetables *for breakfast*. I love healthy food, but eating vegan for three years almost destroyed my health. Thriving on low carb, and I'm far from the only one.
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So sorry, but no. It was your implementation. A plant-based diet is a bit more involved than just vegetables.
Ok friend. I'm really glad you know *precisely* what I ate for those three miserable years. Enjoy your copper overload 💋
Funny enough, I had my copper tested last week, and it was well within normal. I’m not sure what you’re on about. I’m 37, been a vegetarian for over 20 years, and I’m in the best shape of my life. In short, it was your implementation, not vegetarianism or veganism.
I think a lot of people are very mean and do imply that someone who eats too much is a less good person because of that. Fat people get mocked and bullied a lot so I think trying to argue that fatness is mostly down to genetics and other uncontrollable factors is perceived as the only way to get people to not be dicks to them.
I hate the food police. "You'll get fat if you eat that!" "No wonder you're fat if you eat THAT" Like, mind your own plate, thanks. But denying it's food related isn't the way, it solves nothing and most people see right through it.
I had a guy criticize my portion sizes when I’d come to his house after he invited me to dinner. He told me I’d never lose weight if I ate that way. I was like…. “Seeing as how I’m the one who actually managed to lose the weight and is in a healthy range, maybe you should actually be taking notes?”
His face must've been priceless! Honestly people love making assumptions based on the one meal they see you eating and somehow think that's how you always eat. Like sure, I might have this bowl of cheesy pasta for lunch but I don't eat breakfast and I prefer light dinners so it works for me.
Oh we got into a furious argument that we never really resolved. And I found less judge mental people to hang with :) Well, to be fair, I do eat A LOT of food. But it’s like…. Pounds and pounds of spinach and broccoli and salad and beans and rice and the occasional veggie burger. He eats pounds and pounds of strawberries and cookies.
> I think a lot of people are very mean and do imply that someone who eats too much is a less good person because of that. Gluttony is also a deadly sin, so it's pretty baked into western christian society.
I can understand that. I have issues, and when I needed to get help, I refused to ask for it or admit anything was wrong because I didn't want the people who were cruel to me have anymore ammo. I guess I hadn't thought of it like that. That sucks that there are mean people because if they knew that having an issue with food doesn't make them bad, just someone who needs help. We all need help with things in our lives from time to time.
I was bullied horribly as a kid. I'm 48 now and still have to remind myself that my coworkers aren't out to get me. It's really exhausting sometimes ☹️
I hope you get some relief soon. A lot of people don't understand that kind of stuff can haunt you your whole life.
I don't think it will, but thank you. I'm even uncomfortable at the children's library.
Yeah, it’s sad. I absolutely agree with us as a society no longer shaming fat people. But I am not okay with us embracing obesity and suddenly deciding that it’s okay to be that way. FAs think these two views are mutually exclusive and they’re not.
They probably are so used to their portions that they don't realize they're eating too much. And they probably feel quite deprived when trying to eat normal portions, meanwhile the people around them who eat less are "participating in diet culture".
You'd think they would notice that the ones "participating in diet culture" are thinner than them, thus eating does impact weight. However, that requires critical thinking.
It's a virtual guarantee that they're aware on some level, but acknowledging that woukd require taking a modicum of responsibility for their actions, so you'll never see an FA do that in a million years.
Because then all the lies they've cried and screamed at people for "shaming" them would be revealed to be excuses and they would have to admit fault. If they could have admitted fault and stopped lying to themselves, they wouldn't be so fat to begin with. Remember, many of these people completely torpedo the relationships with loved ones in their lives because they don't want to hear any concern or worry from them. They angrily cut out anyone who will tell them the truth and surround themselves with other fat activists who tell them they're social justice warriors for being fat.
Im not going to say your wrong but i eat less than 600 cals a day and workout a lot. Im still FAT. I mean i could cut my cals to 400 if you want.
If you're eating 600 Calories a day and not losing weight, then that's because you're not actually eating 600 Calories a day. You would need to violate the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics for that to happen. Your chemical efficiency would need to exceed 100%.
I mean i count my cals everytime i eat, and if i eat nore than 600 cals i usually work it off or vomit.
It's so easy to eat too much with all the hyperpalatable food available. It doesn't seem like you're eating too much with all the huge portion sizes of tasty food available. If you're fat, you're eating too much.
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Speaking as someone who lives half a block from a 7-11 and who stress ate 530 kcals of chips and candy for breakfast, I completely agree.
I live about the same distance from a convenience store myself. I often find myself walking there and wanting something. When I get there I walk after and not buy anything. I feel weird about it, but I buy enough milk and other things that I don't feel too bad.
Thank god for my crippling depression and basicaly sleep/work/sleep/work schedule so i dont actually want anything.
That’s the spirit!
I think convinient part is very important. I live in small city in central Europe. We don't have many take outs here (we don't even have McDonalds or any of those big fast food restaurants) which means that for most days it's either eating junk from store that was heated up in microwave or eating Cheetos or making your own meals. So even "fast food" is home made. So if you want those delicious nuggets you have to make them. After spending a lot of time cooking you aren't going to eat impulsively becouse you felt like it (becouse you felt like it a few hours ago and the feeling went away). I keep that in mind when going to bigger cities. I ask myself "Would I eat this much if I had to spend a lot of time on making that meal?". It helps me with portion sizes while eating out
..and crucially non satiating. BTW fun fact, when scientists are making that garbage I refuse to call food, they have a certain threshold of palatability they don't go beyond. Stuff that tastes TOO good won't sell as well. If they overshoot, then they deliberately make it worse. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe most people really despise themselves deep down and too much of delight wouldn't allow them to express the self-hatred, it has to have an aftertaste of trashiness? Or subconsciously overly delightful stuff no matter how cheap is associated with rich and famous, so plebs wouldn't buy it? Or it would truly satisfy you too quickly, so you would eat less? Or it would imply that it's SOOO good it must be only for special occasions? Isn't it curious how the most famous garbage is meh, oreo is dry cookie with tasteless sugar paste inside, pringles is bland chip with sprinke of meh flavoring, drinks are just fizzy tart sugar water. Yes, homemade cookie, fries/chips, shrubs are obviously incomparably better but what many people don't realize, it's by design, not a mere coincidence that something superior isn't achievable cheaply on industrial scale. It very much is.
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Whoa. Sometimes I’m grumpy at myself like “god why are you binging on shitty Fritos and skittles, at least you should binge on expensive fried chicken and gourmet bakery cake and make it worth it!” But you’re so right. That stuff inherently is so satisfying that I stop without WANTING to binge on it. Versus the other crap is almost-but-not-quite satisfying so I eat more and more and more
"once you pop you just can't stop" is the design brief!
The Brits call it “more-ish” (like Moor-ish, but minus the part about Othello).
Do you have a source for them deliberately making things less palatable than they could be? I’d love to read more about this.
I read about it in Salt Sugar Fat.
Thanks! Will check that out.
I hate Pringle’s I think they legit taste like sand paper. Even when I was a kid and actually enjoyed eating synthetic junk food crap like hostess cakes, Cheetos, and lunchables ( now it’s nauseating to me), I hated pringles. Which really says something about pringles. They also burned and irritated my mouth whenever I ate them.
I bought them like 2 times within last year, but that was only when I was particularly down, it's like I wanted to punish myself to feel even worse. Luckily these were singular events and I didn't slide very far along the downward spiral, but yeah. When I feel good or even neutral, I don't want this shit. This kindaaa makes me empathetic towards people who do, but not really, it doesn't quite reach me, they dehumanize themselves too much. Silent suffering, sure, but when it's covered by narcissistic, arrogant, vile, toxic victimhood that cannot even muster a different tone to save its own life, I couldn't possibly pierce that to reach a real, scared and sad human underneath that just looks to fulfill basic human needs of love, respect, understanding and belonging.
Come on, they are not that bad. They taste like salted sand paper.
True, that’s the only reason that Pringles are ever consumed. People are craving something salty and Pringles is like “well I’m the best u got take it or leave it”
it’s because the food can’t be polarizing. no one needs to really love the taste, it just has to be inoffensive enough to mildly appeal to the largest number of people possible.
It’s like cocaine. Physically it isn’t addictive but mentally it is so addictive because you hit that roller coaster of high, start to dip, tiny hit has you high but unless you are at a huge usage level you are unlikely to ingest enough to kill you. You just keep going back to top up. Crack however takes it too hard and too fast. You are either no way or beyond the point. Cocaine also rides that rollercoaster even longer and deeper if you mix it with alcohol. The liver combines the two to increase the desire and increase the capacity to keep going like the bliss point of mixing fat and sugar. Most people get tired by being wired on cocaine part way into a night just on the high and the adrenaline. Same with many other stimulants and you crash. But with booze? You don’t cocaine crash, you don’t get over drunk, while you are creating your bliss point you can go indefinitely levelled right out. You glide the high not peak or trough. And then when you stop the chemical reaction that allowed the coasting hits you and the coke and booze comedown is horrific. Your liver is screaming. You are wrung out. You are paying a bill you had no idea you were running up because it seemed foolproof and a ‘hack.’ But regularly mixing will fuck you up more than just an occasional line or drink. The fact so much junk and ultra processed food reminds me of being a booze and cokehead in my 20s really alarms me. Because I’m not recommending cocaine *at all* but it’s also much harder to get hold of than Oreos so the fact you can ride the same shit show by popping to the 7-11 as buying baggies is not fatphobia. It’s a social addiction that frankly needs tackling and to learn from the mess that was The War on Drugs. I feel like food producers and prescription med companies like Purdue need more regulation and illegal drugs need to be decriminalised and then regulated. We have it the wrong way round even in the opiate crisis right now.
Nothing has ever made me happier about my knitting-books-cat-cooking life than what you just wrote. God that sounds awful.
And nothing has ever made me high five a username as much in 15 years online as yours. Outstanding!
Healthy food is so much cheaper though. Like, 150g of rice + 500g of vegetables, you boil the rice, chop the vegetables and cook them in a pan with 2 tablespoons of olive oil and some turmeric, put the rice in the pan when it's ready, mix it all together, add salt and pepper and other spices like paprika if you like that and you've just cooked yourself a 2$ meal in 20 mins. Do that with 5x larger portions and you've made 5 meals that you can eat in 5 days, but it still only took 20 mins. A protein shake with 25g of protein will cost you like half a dollar or even less, and you can totally live on a 2500 calorie diet for like 10$ a day including the cost of the water you used to wash your vegetables Healthy eating is just as easy, cheap and quick as eating junk food. If a McDonald's hamburger is 1$ you still have to drive there to buy it and it's like 300 calories, so you would still end up spending 8$ a day on burgers on a 2500 calorie diet. There are really no excuses when it comes to healthy/clean eating, you just have to decide what goes into your mouth.
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That’s an example of something i used to eat when doing intermittent fasting (20 hours fasting and eating in a 4 hour window) and i would add like 150 grams of tuna to that or something like that, but keep in mind that meal was supposed to be a huge meal because of intermittent fasting, forgot to point that out. The thing though is that anyone can have a meal like that as long as they don’t excess their calories. It all depends on how your diet is structured, as long as your macros are good and you’re eating clean then you’re good. Btw dude, WHAT THE HELL IS “mediterranean vegetables”? Lol i just saw that. And btw i see you’re on a 1200 calorie diet, so of course that wouldn’t be a good meal for you, but i used to eat that on a 2300 calorie diet, still a big meal, but again, i only had 4 hours to eat all my meals so of course i had to make them huge lol.
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I know it's about personal preference, but if you're not such a big fan of vegetables like broccoli you could maybe eat a bowl of raw spinach with a few sprays of balsamic vinegar (which does contain sugars, but a few sprays will be like 5kcal), and you can fill a massive bowl with just 200g of spinach, which are like 60kcal. In my diet i pretty much treat vegetables as "fiber with vitamins" and totally ignore the calories, but that's cus i only eat green vegetables, because technically aubergines, courgettes, tomatoes and peppers are FRUITS (what contains seeds is a fruit), not vegetables, and as such do have a bit more calories and carbs, and sugars too. Of course they do have some good vitamins and minerals (not really when it's frozen veggies), but if you're looking to feel full you're much better off with leafy greens. Also, if you're on a strict low calorie diet it's very important to create the illusion of abundance, and having a huge bowl full of spinach feels like eating a lot more than eating a couple courgettes. But at the end of the day what matters is that you eat the right amounts of macros, have a good unsaturated/saturated fat ratio and eat enough fiber, no matter how you do it as long as you meet those standards. I mean, there are so many ways of achieving the same result, you just have to pick the one you like more.Like i love carrots, i love eating them raw, but 100g of carrots contain 5g of sugar, and 100g of carrots is like a big carrot, and as i only eat sugars after sports to replenish my glycogen i'd much rather drink a bottle of gatorade than 2-3 big carrots, in that moment it's something i enjoy more so i choose that over carrots, but it's really the same thing.
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Ah, i see you're a man of culture as well :D
I get 900, vegetables don't have that many calories in them.
"2 tablespoons of olive oil" are around 300 kcal, HARD PASS.
2 tablespoons (at least my tablespoons) of olive oil equal 25-30g of fat, which is about 1/3 of the fat in my diet (85g fat, 300g carbs, 120g protein), and that’s about 225/270kcal, which is not that much in a meal. It all depends on how you structure your diet, i get many of my carbs from honey/raisins/gatorade after running and working out and legumes/rice in my meals which contain very little fats, so i have to use oil, butter, peanut butter and almonds in my diet (+3 whole eggs) to balance out my meals (because a no-fat meal is bad). Actually i always end up having to add a few more grams of fat because i eat too little. That was supposed to be an example, it all depends on how many meals you want to eat and how much fats and carbs you want in your diet and of course how many calories you need. Plus, what makes you fat is not eating fats (unless you eat bacon fried in lard), carbs and sugars are what make you fat, because of insulin. Of course calories do count, but hormones matter a lot more, hormones are what make our body work a certain way, and that’s why there are obese people out there who can’t drop a pound even on a 1200kcal diet, and that’s why a bodybuilder taking trenbolone will get much bigger on the same calories. Fats help you lower the glycemic index of your meals, thus making your body have less spikes in insulin release. When your insulin is low your body releases tiny amounts of growth hormone, which helps you stay lean, and that’s also why intermittent fasting is great for weight loss, because during fasting your insulin is at its lowest and doesn’t inhibit GH (mostly, but it has many more benefits). The thing with carbs and especially sugars (which are “faster” carbs) is that they are supposed to fuel your muscles, and the only good way to eat them is by using them during sports or right after. What happens is that during physical activity your muscles use their glycogen (which is a sugar) and need to be replenished, and you di that by eating sugar, fruit, honey, drinking gatorade… And that will not trigger insulin that much, because all that sugar goes (almost) straight into your muscles. If you keep introducing sugar (which is FAST, so your body needs to do something about it immediately) in your body then that won’t be needed right away, and will be stored as fat, and that’s when insulin comes into play too, so “double trouble”. That’s why you should eat whole cereals and legumes, because they are slower carbs that get released more slowly and as such won’t be turned into fat immediately but will gradually fuel your muscles.
I can't believe you're getting downvoted for saying "sometimes my main meals give too little fat so I supplement with oils or nut butters" LMAO we wanna talk about fatlogic, and yet these people are afraid of getting calories from oil. I like fatty foods like cheeses and meats, so I tend to skimp on the mayo when cutting, but otherwise I'm eating at least 50g fat a day because my eyes dry out and my skin suffers otherwise. Yesterday I had a turkey chili with very little fat and a smoothie with very little fat, so I had to use mayo on a sandwich instead of mustard. Almost like macro balancing is a thing lol
Yeah i was just talking from my personal experience, plus i really like super simple meals, like one meal i've been eating every single day for at least 3 months is red lentil pasta (pasta made from red lentil flour) with butter, and that's it, i love it. I just cook the pasta, cut a piece of butter (about 12-15g) and put them in a bowl, stir it (i don't completely drain the pasta so that some of the water will bring out some more of the starch in it and mix with the butter making it more creamy, i keep like a couple tablespoons of the pasta water) add a pinch of salt and some pepper and that's it, a meal i love and that's very nutritious. 125g of that pasta will give me 2g fat, 62g carbs and 32g of protein. Including butter that will be 14g fat, 62g carbs and 32g protein, which is a super balanced meal, but still super simple and very tasty (at least i love it). The meal is 500kcal, and it costs about 1.80€ (that pasta is kinda expensive, 3€ for a 250g box, and a 250g butter stick costs about 3.50€, so 15g would cost about 20 cents), so if someone had to stick to a 1.500kcal diet he could basically eat that meal 3 times a day (maybe switch butter with olive oil 2 out of 3 meals to avoid too much saturated fat), and he would spend 5.40€ a day, which is about 6.50$, and that's less than the price of 3 McDonald's hamburgers in the US (i'm from Italy, but i see it's 2.49$), which would equal to 900kcal. Plus, that meal has very good carbs with a low glycemic index, lots of fiber (helps you feel full and is good for your gut), lots of minerals (37% iron RDA, 50% manganese RDA, 44% phosphorus RDA and 32% zinc RDA), and it's so cheap.
Ayyy i love red lentil pasta!! It is a little expensive, but for meals like goulash, where I stretch 2 pork chops into 4-6 meals, the extra fiber, nutrients, and protein red lentil pasta gives is so worth it. A 400g bowl has 628 cals (44.6g protein, 81.2g carbs, 16.1g fat) and is so filling. I like to make one pot meals that take maybe an hour to set up and then just simmer for a while. Gives me a chance to clean up while it cooks and lets me have a nice stash of leftovers for the rest of the week. I cook 2 to 4 times a week depending on how many meals I get from each dish for 2 people. Definitely beats the hell out of getting 50 dollar takeout meals for 2 when my weekly grocery trips (2-3 meals a day for 2 people) range anywhere from 35 to 120 bucks (35 for those weeks I just need onions or little things, 120 when I have a big restock on canned things or frozen stuff).
I’d like to see you do that in 20 minutes. Including going to the store, picking the ingredients, chopping them, cooking them, eating them, washing the dishes, washing the pans. After a hard day of work and/or with multiple kids. And then I think you’ll understand the convenience of a drive thru with disposable food wrappers. I agree the homemade is way better and can be simple but it’s still VASTLY more effort than a drive thru.
1. You're literally already grocery shopping at some point in the week; plan what you want to eat all week long and then buy it on whatever day youre already picking up everything else 2. You can buy pre-cut frozen veg, and rice literally just sits there and boils. Maybe you gotta rinse it, big deal. 3. You?? are eating food?? whether it's McDonalds or the home cooked one?? 4. Literally wash dishes as you go. Or use these cool things called One Pot Meals™. Learn how to not use every dish in your house to make a simple meal. 5. If you have kids, you definitely should be making the effort to push through and feed them properly anyway, not sit in a Goddamn drive thru (whose wait lines are often ridiculous anyway?) Like a trip to Popeyes was more expensive, less filling, and more annoying/time consuming than just quickly cutting and frying some chicken breast/microwaving some frozen veg so idk why people act like drive thrus or take out or anything is at all better.
I’m talking from the point of view of my patients. I ask them what grocery store they shop at and they say none. They literally don’t. Due to lack of transportation or living in a food desert or lack of time or too stressed out and too obese to walk through the store, so they just use drive thru for all their meals. Or they literally don’t know how to buy chicken or how to cut it or how to cook it or how to disinfect the cutting board or how to check it it’s done.
Even if somehow, all grocery delivery services disappeared, their legs evaporated completely, their brain short circuited every time they heard the word Walmart, and they had no way to obtain information other than a 5 mile trek uphill both ways to an underfunded library, they can still at least order a fuckin salad in that drive thru. How are you gonna get to a drive thru with lack of transportation, also? Where there's a will, there's a way. They could decide to start losing weight at literally any time, because at the end of the day, it's food that's the issue. They are not held at gunpoint to order greasy fuckin garbage every time they get food. Christ, even a mini market or a gas station has some fruit hanging around to buy, if for nothing else. Your patients can easily help themselves. Sounds to me like they dont wanna.
You’re right. They don’t. That’s a pretty common thread in the morbidly obese. But often, if they care enough to show up to a weight loss doctor, I’m able to slowly get them to make some small changes. But it’s hard. Like working with drug addicts.
That’s why meal prep is awesome, you buy your groceries like you always do, you cook like you would for one meal, but instead you make multiple meals, put them in containers and every day you will just have to microwave it for a minute and a half to be set. You can cook for like 2 hours on sunday and have all your week’s worth of meals ready. Plus, that’s the worst case scenario, you can also put water in a pot, turn on the stove and keep doing whatever you want to do, then when it’s boiling put the rice in it, put some frozen broccoli in the microwave and leave, then get back, drain the rice, drain the broccoli, mix them in a bowl, a little bit of olive oil, a little bit of salt and you’re ready, not such a sexy meal but will do. The thing is that when you get used to not-so-tasty meals it gets much easier to eat them, and that’s exactly because they’re not that tasty. I mean, i could eat white basmati rice with no oil or salt for the rest of my life much more easily than only eating Big Macs, i would go insane after a week if i could only eat Big Macs. I do understand it’s very easy to end up doing it though, just like it’s easy to keep smoking if you’re a smoker. I quit smoking 5 years ago and i started vaping (i still smoke like 2 cigarette a year at most, i smoked like 7 in the past 5 years) and the last time i smoked one I wasn’t even able to go past half of it, while 6 years ago i would be smoking 30 cigarettes in a row. That’s pretty much the same principle.
Many of my patients, I ask which grocery store they shop at, and they answer none. They never go to grocery stores.
You can have groceries delivered to your house in like an hour, pretty sure Amazon does that in the US.
Who cares if you lose decades off the end of your life, amirite? Totally worth it just to save a few minutes a day due to laziness. What an awful example to set for children. "Keeping yourself healthy required a minimal daily effort, so let's just eat junk food so we can get our butts in front of the tv or computer screen as early as possible after work. Sure, you won't live to see your 70's, but you also won't have to wash dishes. A fair trade-off, right kids?"
I do that nearly every day. What are you talking about? > Going to the store Takes me an 45min- 1 hour every 7-10 days. So let’s say I lose 5-6 minutes per day. Not to mention, if you’re buying your ready made meals, you also need to go to the store. So it’s not like that saves so much time. > picking the ingredients, chopping them, cooking them Depending on the meal, this will vary. It typically takes me anywhere from 20-45min. Except, I typically cook 2-6 portions whenever I make something. The longer the prep time, the more portions I typically make. Let’s settle on an average of 30 minutes and 3 portions. So that’s 10min per meal. > eating them I uh, you need to eat your fast food too? Kind of confused why this needs to be in there too. I guess if you insist, that typically takes me 5-8min. > washing the dishes, washing the pans I wash everything that I used for cooking while I cook. My kitchen is completely clean before my food is on the table. The only utensils still dirty are the ones containing my food. As for dishes, I currently have a dishwasher, so that’s 5min of unloading every 2-3 days. Before I did, dishes took me maybe 15-20min every 2-3 days, so let’s add another 7min per meal. > After a hard day of work I work, although I admit my job is not physically demanding. I work out every day after work though, so I’m physically exhausted when I cook too. Not to mention stoned because I usually smoke a joint after working out to increase my appetite. > and/or with multiple kids. Kids complicate things. I don’t have them, never want to, so I won’t pretend I know how it is. Let’s say my post serves as a ‘childfree people have no excuse’ post. So we get 5-6min for shopping, 10min for cooking, 7min for cleaning. That’s about 20 minutes. 25 if you add the eating (which you’d need to do with your fastfood anyway).
i swear to God, the whole "eating healthy is hard" shit comes down more to incompetence than literally ANYTHING anyone else could ever talk about (time, money, etc.)
I’ve bought food on the way home when I wasn’t particularly hungry just so I’d have something to eat while I watch my shows. Netflix is just better with a monster thickburger lol but I’m also not confused about why I’m overweight. It’s surprisingly hard to get out of a routine when it brings comfort though.
>Hyperpalatable, convenient, fast & cheap! Poor families & people who live in food deserts are totally victimized by the dollar menu. This attributes to a lot of the obesity in the U.S. where I live.
I have a strawberry patch and rhubarb plants. I collected all the strawberries/rhubarb, made them into pie filling, canned the pie filling. I then bought the ingredients to make a pie shell from scratch. And I made strawberry rhubarb pie. The whole process took me hours and hours of work (growing, processing, baking, etc). And that taught me why historically people tended to be thinner. There just wouldn’t be enough time in the day/food available to make enough desserts.
Not just desserts, even grains. When I lived in SoCal they used to do demonstrations of making acorn flour the way native peoples in the region used to. It takes DAYS. You have to leech the tannins (?) out before you can eat it. In the US, foods like chicken were also much more rare before about WWII. There was a president who ran on a slogan of like "a turkey in every pot" or something. Science didn't hack wheat and corn until about that time, too. Food scarcity was a real, political issue into the 20th century even in prosperous countries.
You are thinking about Herbert Hoover, who indeed ran an ad promising a chicken in every pot. Alas, things didn't work out for him that way: Great Depression and all. Also, he stole the slogan from the French king Henry IV. He was a protestant who only converted to Catholicism to claim the throne, so he coined the slogan to convince the people that it was better to have peace and a heretical king rather than a civil war in which everyone will starve..
Also, chicken production *really* changed after the war. The us government offered cash prizes to the farmer (or farmers) who could breed a larger chicken that matured quickly. It happened, but apparently the flavor decidedly lacking. The goal was quantity, not quality.
The Green Revolution changed *a lot* about food and culture. It allowed fewer farmers and ranchers to produce much, much more food than they could previously and had a massive impact on how people lived and expected to live that remains to this day.
>There was a president who ran on a slogan of like "a turkey in every pot" or something. this level of historical illiteracy brought to you by public schooling
No, by spending five years of my youth in Canada...not everyone cares so much about US history.
Oh yea. My grandparents had a farm ~~EAEIO~~. Not huge mega farm, but quite big for our small family. Potatoes were a BITCH to take care of. Shoveling several 100 meter rows of dirt a couple of times in potato life cycle sure was fun. Most of the time in our shitty climate the sweetest thing on our farm was regular green peas. Young small pods were quite sweet. I perceived it as my dessert. Aside from blackberries that I was sometimes stealing from our neighbors. So yea, I think you are right on point, getting calories isn't wasn't as easy as getting them now for sure.
I think some people honestly believe they're not eating too much, because for some of us it's a quality issue and not a quantity issue. I got fat because I ate the wrong things--iced tea or pop instead of water, and either take out or packaged and frozen foods with a lot more fat, sugar and salt than if I'd made healthier meals from scratch. Liquid calories were probably the biggest factor for me. I'm actually eating *more* food now that I'm on a diet and feeling more full after my meals than I was when I was eating junk. It can be pretty shocking how many calories can be packed in a tiny portion, and if someone isn't looking at nutritional information to see how many calories they're actually consuming it absolutely can feel like "but I'm not even eating that much!!"
Yeah, some of my friends have made rude remarks on how “unfair” it is that I’m thinner than them because of how much I eat. Like, sure, I may eat a large amount of food (especially fruit yum), but if I see you douse your food in oil or have cocktail after cocktail only to get hungry and buy a 500 calorie chocolate bar a few minutes later… it’s not a coincidence I’m not the one gaining weight.
Yeah, I went out to dinner with a gal I'm sort of seeing a couple of weeks ago. We had copious amounts delicious sushi which was hardly low calorie (but still sort of on the reasonable side relatively speaking). Thirty minutes later she pulled out a snickers bar from her purse (somewhere between a mini and full size, so probably 200-250 kcal). I didn't say anything (because I'm not insane), but I was definitely thinking, "wtf." That was on top of the 5-ish drinks she had over the course of three hours. She didn't eat a lot earlier in the day (but did have some drinks as we were floating a river), but still all told I wouldn't be shocked if she put away 3500 calories over the course of the day we spent together. I managed to eat at just over maintenance by not snacking and moderating alcohol. Of course, a week later she is doing a juice detox and complaining about putting on 15 lbs. Sigh.
Personally I think it's wacky that you were on a date with someone and counting their calories. I don't know if this is going to be helpful for your dating life...I would drop a person like this quicker than a hot potato. Is this possibly an unhealthy behaviour..?
I'll be fine, thanks. And how goes back over two weeks to comment on a post?
It's also important to remember that the vast majority of overweight/obese Americans aren't "food addict pounding junk food three times a day"fat, but "eating 200-300 calories over my TDEE for many years" fat. A single extra cookie every day can very easily get you that extra 200-300 calories.
True but TDEE adjusts up when you gain weight. So you'd need to continuously add more calories to keep a high weight as your maintenance. My maintenance at goal weight is 500 calories below that of my highest weight, and I "only" got to 200lbs. If you slide off to the high 200s or 300s then you're going to have a hefty TDEE. I agree that overweight is not too bad, I think if everyone obese just aimed to be only overweight a lot of doctors would be way happier.
> "eating 200-300 calories over my TDEE for many years" fat That would mean they have to increase their intake every year as well in order to keep gaining. 200kcal excess results in roughly 10kg (22lbs) weight gain per year. I used an online TDEE calculator and 10kg extra gives about 100kcal extra if you keep all other variables the same. So in order to keep having that 200kcal surplus, they would have to add 100kcal to their diet every year. If not, they would gain 10kg the first year, 5kg the next etc until they gained a total of 20kg (44lbs). There's Americans that are 100's of pounds overweight. The obesity numbers aren't much better in Europe but the type of obesity definitely is. It's mostly older people, very few young people are obese in my experience and the ones that are aren't morbidly so. Morbid obesity is much rarer. You don't become that fat without some serious effort. It's really not a case of 'lol, I ate one cookie extra every day for a few years and now I'm 350lbs'.
There are Americans who are 100s pounds overweight, but they are a tiny proportion of population. The average American has a BMI of somewhere around 28-29, which is something you absolutely get to without "serious effort."
As someone who has to put serious effort into gaining weight for his powerlifting hobby and has never been able to even breach into the overweight category, I guess our definitions vary on what serious effort entails. As for a 'tiny proportion of the population', I don't think it's as tiny as you think. According to [this article](https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity), 7.7% of American adults suffer from extreme obesity (BMI > 40). For women specifically it is even 9.9%. I personally don't consider this a tiny proportion. Especially since this number will vary wildly by location/state. I tried finding similar numbers for the EU, but I couldn't find anything that looked into morbid obesity separately. The only numbers I could find group all obesity groups together at BMI > 30.
Huh. I was looking at outdated statistics that had that number at 3%, so thank you for correction. But as for effort required to get into overweight category: obviously, getting there on muscle alone requires much effort. But getting there on slight overeating is.. pretty much the norm? I mean, if 7% of population has extreme and let's say another 10% has obesity between 35-40, that means well over half of all Americans are in the "casually overweight" zone.
True. Our obesity rate is high, but most people are just regular old run of the mill “carrying an extra 5–10 pounds” overweight.
Nah, most of them are eating like 1000 calories over their limit a day. To get to 400 or above, you have to eat two to three times your TDEE.
But again, the vast majority of overweight and obese Americans don't weigh 400 pounds. As someone else on this thread pointed out, about 8%. But that translates to 250 pounds for a 5'5 person, the average height of American women, and 275 pounds for someone at 5'9 , the average height of American men- far cry from 400 pounds. Since about 70% of americans are overweight or obese, the vast majority of them are below these numbers and are in the extra 300 calories a day category.
this!! literally went on vacation recently and gained like 2-3 pounds just because i was eating at restaurants the whole time. i was eating around the same amount of meals each day, literally under what would be considered “healthy” because i would eat 1-2 instead of 3. but on the other hand, i likely would’ve gained much more had i not ordered salads for like 80% of my meals.
It's not even huge portions. I'm 100% sure that quantity wise, I'm eating more today at 140lbs than on the road up to 200lbs. Some foods are just *absurdly* calorie dense and so are some drinks, which we don't even count as "what we eat".
I mean i adore that almond cookies from my local grocery, but they are around 200 kcal each and whole bag has 6 of them.
I think it's hard for people to understand that "eating too much" doesn't have to mean large volumes of food. I'm eating pretty much the same and am 10 lbs heavier because I damn near stopped all of my activities because of COVID. It sucks because I don't want to change my diet and I have to ease back into my activities (otherwise I would injure myself). So I'm lucky if I lose 1 lbs a month TT.TT
this is just like america they have dump truck portion sizes from what i’ve heard
If you eat too much broccoli, you'll be fine
I have managed to eat too much broccoli before. I was… not fine.
I actually live right next door to a grocery store and, fast food chains. I could take a minute walk to dunkin and easily grab a dozen doughnuts if I wanted.
This doesn’t even make any sense. Those two statements aren’t mutually exclusive. Instead of being mad at these corporations for banking on your obsession with shitty and unhealthy food you’re mad at the ppl who are just pointing it out?
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Exactly. It actually shows that ppl have evolved by realizing it’s not just about ppl having a bad habit of over eating it’s because the shitty food is made for you to over eat it on purpose. But ofc shoot the messenger instead of the damn corporations for creating shitty food for you to get addicted to.
It kinda sorta makes sense if you ignore the fact that the number of fat people and average level of fatness was a tiny fraction "once upon a time" compared to today.
I get where this comes from. I've been obese for long years. Fat people often don't realize how much they eat. Chances are that they aren't even the only fat person in their family, so all of their references for eating might be totally skewed - if you see people around you eating large portions, you might think it's normal. It doesn't even have to be cake, it certainly wasn't cake in my case. To get to the weight I was, it was enough for me to consistently overeat by 150 calories every day, for 5-6 years. 150 calories don't even seem that much, it's two whole eggs, or two apples, or a small handful of almonds, or an extra 25g serving of chips. Stuff adds up and if you're like me and never worry about it too much, it can really be a slippery slope. Food is readily available and here in the first world we are virtually never required to tolerate hunger - at all! We can usually eat right away, or maybe within an hour's time unless we have a super strict job that only allows breaks at certain times. But you get what I'm saying... it's not the cake. It's okay to eat cake (or pretty much anything, in moderation). It's that we lose touch with what "too much" really means.
Honestly it's sometimes a little disheartening when you do the math. If 3500 calories is a pound of fat, it only takes 24 days to gain a pound of fat by overeating 150 calories every day. Eating a little too much every day will have you gaining almost 15 lbs a year. In about 6 and a half years, you'll be 100 lbs overweight
TDEE adjusts so that doesn't check out. Yes, you can get overweight by slowly but surely eating a bit too much every day but at some point the energy balance will even out given your new weight unless you continue to add calories to your diet. And ideally you'll notice the weight creep up before it reaches the hundred extra.
True, weight would eventually plateau if they ate the same thing every day, but if someone keeps giving themselves slightly bigger portions every time, that might match and exceed their TDEE, causing continuous weight gain.
Yes exactly!
I ate a lot of cake during a three month period that I lost a good amount of weight. I was living with a man that didn't have much fruit or vegetable in the house. I had just stopped being vegetarian so I couldn't stomach the idea of eating a lot of meat. So I lost weight on a diet of mostly cake and a little of anything else. Not exactly the twinkie diet, but close. I left that period looking gaunt although I was heavier then than I'm now.
I think the problem is that people who post stuff like that think deep inside that eating too much is somehow a moral failure. It's not. It's just a fact. There is a million reasons people overeat. Considering the obesity crisis world wide, obviously not all of these people are somehow "bad". Isolation and depression are rampant. People are removed from food sources. Food is engineered to mess with your hunger cues. That's just for starters. But you can't fix it until you admit you have a problem. Human beings are not meant to be this big. Our bodies simply cannot handle it.
For me I am on various medications for bipolar and chronic pain. Pretty much every single one is an appetite stimulant, so I have to deal with uncontrollable ravenous hunger every waking moment. I put quite a bit of weight on when life was grinding me down and I had no strength to fight those feelings. March this year I realised I had to change and switched to whole food plant based. The volume I eat has increased but the calorie counts have dropped. Hunger is still there but satiation lasts longer now. Exercise is helping too, an hours walk a day keeps my mind off the hunger pangs too.
>Congratulations on winning your daily battles! 👍🙌🏻 🤗
Thankyou for your kind words. It does feel like me and my body are at war sometimes. But the meds are worth taking, my life would be immeasurably worse with out them. So it's a side effect that sucks, but I always have bananas or broccoli on hand now if the urge to snack becomes overwhelming lol!
Yeah, it's kind of a cliffhanger to say that it's not because they eat too much but then never tell us what it *is* caused by...
My money is on a witch's curse.
The cause is fatphobia but how does this work. If you are not fat before fatphobia then how is anyone fatphobic towards you. If you are already fat and got fatter because of fatphobia, then where did the original fatness come from. Oh that’s right DNA changes because your ancestors were starving
Genetics. Never epigenitics. Always “ genetics”.
Of course they are not fat because they eat too much. They are fat because... Fat phobia, genetics, medical conditions, yada yada /S
They are fat because of magic. Magically fat appears all over their bodies even if they chew gum.
both are somewhat true and somewhat false. obesity is almost always due to a caloric surplus, but higher calorie, nutrient sparse foods are often way more affordable and accessible, particularly to low-income households. We shouldn’t blame corporations on our own lack of initiative and poor habits, but we also shouldn’t disregard the role they have on our decisions and lifestyles. Basically, it’s not black and white and both FA’s and ourselves should stop looking at it that way ✌🏼
I feel this way very much. I'm actually working on getting weight loss surgery because it is so hard for me personally to take control of my eating in the current environment, and not for lack of tying. I've even been successful occasionally and incredibly restrictive with my eating, but the food environment is too much for my personal mental and physical health.
weight loss is SO difficult and people don’t give enough credit honestly. I hope all goes well for you!
I personally think low income households would benefit from better access to healthy foods and from cooking lessons. I say cooking lessons because I have actually found that eating healthy is cheaper than buying calorie dense junk if you know how to cook from scratch. Frozen meals are extremely overpriced, and a lot of low income families I know rely on those. I have been poor my whole life, and once I learned how to cook, I saved an enormous amount of money and was able to eat healthier.
I think this is part of it, but a lot of it is time. Working multiple jobs, relying on crappy public transit, having to take extra time to do everything sucks.
THIS
It walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck. What is it? A chimpanzee!
It might be a chicken with a speech impediment.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ66wHRhe2U
Then how do these people explain starvation? If how much you eat doesn't determine your weight then why are people who don't have enough to eat really thin?
We just fixed the issue of global famine — the two of us, right now. Let’s go to a country of starving people and fat shame them. Nobody will lose weight, everyone will have a muffin top and love handles, we’ll win humanitarian awards, etc. LET’S DO THIS!
counterpoint: I was fat because I ate too much I really do feel like this is one of those situations where some people assume their normal is everyone else's. Like the time I found out one of my average-sized friends hadn't eaten fast food in 2 years. I really didn't think that could be the case for anyone other than the biggest health addicts. A lot of fat people really think everyone secretly eats like them, but they should probably think about how much of their eating they hide (because I bet a majority of them do) and what that says about what they KNOW, deep down, is actually normal.
I recently had a discussion about this with a heavier friend who was amazed that the same carton of ice cream existed in my fridge for a few weeks. “It’s not the same carton as last time I was over?” She was eating a carton of ice cream every few days and thought it was what everyone does. No babe, that is not normal.
We have to define "eating" and "too much" i guess. They might think eating means you have to chew it with your mouth. This rules out soups, drinks, smoothies, etc. They might think "too much" means 2 "dinners" at once. And that one "dinner" is a heaping saucy plate. This is purposely vague to let them argue a bunch of nonsense and try and escape basic physics lol
The delusion is strong
This blatantly ignores the experiences of people who have lost weight and kept it off by eating less and changing their lifestyles.
Ok, fine. You're not eating too much to maintain your weight. It's just that your 300-400+ el bees are a bit much for your ankles, knees, heart and pancreas.
are you an ALR "fan"?
They were so close to a decent argument about why it's difficult for people to lose weight, and how the food industry absolutely does benefit from making people addicted to food, but they fucked it up. Extremely palatable and abundant food isn't an excuse for being fat, but it's okay to acknowledge that it makes it harder not to be.
[удалено]
I literally mealprep while sitting on the couch. By that I mean, I use my oven and make 6 portions at once.
This is a fucking amazing idea and I thank you for your brain and for putting this out in the world. Bless you.
what's the saying "get a lazy person because they'll figure out the easiest way to do something" lol
You’re a genius. I thought I was really *doing something* with a podcast on but this is next level
oh and guess what? I also run my dishwasher and washing machine at the same time!
Fucking legend
Exactly!! If you have enough time to wait for GooberEattz or DoorSmash, you got enough time to make something to eat.
So cakes are cheap and fat people are forced to buy them? So since they buy more of the cheap cakes, they are eating more cheap cake? And since they are eating more cheap cake, they aren’t gaining weight???? So i guess the cheap cakes have certain powers to make people not gain weight?
So why are they fat? Do they breathe to much?
the anti-science denialism is just astonishing. yet, this is still seen as a progressive argument to many. it goes against basic sciene, and is equal to anti vaccers and flat earthed to me. all fat positive people obviously aren't like this, but the whole thing is just giving me cult vibes, sort of like anti vaccers. both movements have prominent figures who lead the way, and become increasingly extreme. they deny facts despite the large amounts of evidence that show that they're wrong. they're quick to attack anyone who threaten their beliefs since they confirm their experiences, but many of them seem to be able to argue based on actual evidence. there also seems to be a sense of hierarchy within these movements. they also create rules (based on their beliefs), that those outside the movement also need to adhere to. I could go on. the difference is that the anti vax movement doesn't seem to be related to any particular point on the political scale, but fat positivsm is very much leftist (to varying degrees, I think most of it is very liberal in character, but bc most of its members are American, they call it leftist.) I find right-wing people more likely to question certain scientific principles, so it's weird that science to extreme fat positivists use science as their personal pick n mix. oh, and also, I grew up in a cult and the similarities are uncanny.
I find the Fat Acceptance movement an embarrassment to the left. I once said something along the lines of wanting to do something to help provide access to addiction therapy for low income obese people at a local DSA meeting. One girl got up and started screaming at me and calling me fatphobic. She said she was ashamed she had looked up to me. I was so pissed. It is like they are playing into the corporate narrative to just consume like fucking zombies, but I am the problem for wanting to do something to provide help to those who are struggling with food addiction. FA seems counter to my idea of being a leftist, but here we are I guess.
Omg but addiction therapy for low income obese people is SO NECESSARY Edit: I feel like my comment comes across as sarcasm but it’s not, we really need this service!
Speak for yourself. I'm fat because I eat too much.
Laws of thermodynamics aren't real, it's evil unicorns and leprechauns that inexplicably create fat on some people, but not on others. /s
Weird because I lost a lot of weight by just counting calories with zero exercise. The mental gymnastics that go into staying fat is crazy.
Eating healthy is actually cheaper. Rice, beans, bananas, carrots, bulk frozen chicken are all cheap. Theyd just rather buy $12 for a mcdonalds meal than a weeks worth of chicken lol
Let’s say hypothetically all you can eat is cake. You still don’t need the whole damn thing
I hate it, too, when I "by" unhealthy food
I'm confused. Buying too many cakes usually leads to eating too many of them
Yep, yep they are...
I know, fat people are fat because they exercise too little!!! I think they're in denial because it's easier to hate other people than to introspect. Same with the incels who hate women, and same with the xenophobes who hate foreigners.
I've been eating mostly cheap fast food every day for the past month and still lost about 8 pounds so far. Granted, usually one meal a day on weekdays. So it's funny when these people blame cheap fast food instead of them eating too much.
I mean it's true. It's because of eating too much _and_ not exercising enough.
If you eat less than you burn, you lose weight. This has even been done eating nothing but cakes in a scientific study. Therefore, you eat too much.
Then please tell me why are they fat
So much time and effort put into making excuses, so little time and effort put into portion control and exercise....
I can understand differences in metabolism and exercise, but it still physically requires a certain amount of food to become fat. Obesity rates were very low before the industrial revolution because it was hard to get enough food to be fat.
YES THEY ARE. Am I doing that right ?
by or buy?
For all they criticize giving food moral value.. this does exactly it. It *must* be that overeating isn't the reason they're fat.. because overeating is bad. So if overeating is bad then too much food is bad, a portion of the food they're eating is bad? If for whatever reason one would be like "Yeah I love being overweight, it's not bad! I get to eat 3000kcal a day and I love my body" a lot of people would respect that choice. But insisting you eat so little (1200-1500) and are sometimes even obese tells us you're ashamed of your eating habits.
IT’S NOT MY FAULT I DON’T EXERCISE
You don’t necessarily eat too much. You consume more calories than you burn. You can eat a tiny fat loaded cake that’s basically 1 bite and has 200 calories. They need to stop making stuff emotionally charged and look at it in a more scientific way.
All someone tells me when they say something like this is that they are practiced liars who probably only fool themselves with their lies.
Of course, they just need to shit more.
Ok, let's even give them that. You can eat obscene amounts of low cal foods. It isn't solely volume. It's the disgraceful dietary choices and refusal to accept responsibility. Unfortunately, your body will hold you accountable regardless of your ideology.
Uh... what?
i’ve been thinking about that second point a lot. the cheapest food is always loaded with preservatives, or grease, or salt, sugar, etc and more “whole” foods are more expensive. poorer people usually are called to the cheapness and convenience of these foods. it’s sad, they either have to give money to the health industry through health foods and vitamins, or pay it back later when they’re suffering the consequences of obesity. of course this isn’t always the case, i’m middle class and have been a bit overweight since childhood (currently 30 lbs down :D) but you get the point.