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by guerrilla 1308 days ago
> It’s a generalization because, more often than not you aren’t controlling your intake if you are overweight. There will always be the minority that truly have hormonal imbalances and need assistance losing weight.

But we know it's not a minority. Most people who try to eat less fail, repeatedly, for all of their lives.

3 comments

But it is.

It’s because people who ‘try’ their whole lives yo-yo diet or crash diet and that’s

1) unsustainable 2) extremely likely to result in more long term weight gain 3) very unhealthy for your body to constantly be fluctuating in weight so rapidly

If you are eating right (let me be very clear here, right doesn’t mean whole 30 or some vegan diet: it means calories within the means to not add or lose weight which is called maintenance) you are not going to fluctuate in weight very much.

The majority of people in America are overweight because they lack basic understanding of nutrition, don’t exercise enough (still you cannot outwork a bad diet), self-control thus overeat or some permutation of all three.

It’s straight up a bold face lie to say that the majority of people have hormonal problems otherwise we would have a national crisis on our hands with something that we should drop our jobs for right now and study because our water or air or food is heavily impacting our hormones to cause every single person on earth to gain weight.

If losing and maintaining a healthy weight was easy, we would have put it into a pill already.

Not to mention you don’t need to be in a caloric deficit your whole life. Hell you could even be 15% BF and maintain that for 40+ years.

Most people adopt those fad diets and realize how much they hate it because it’s so restrictive.

The main goal of a good and healthy caloric intake is to basically eat the right foods you want to eat within the portion that allows you to maintain.

It’s pretty simple if you look at all the diets today - keto - intermittent fasting - vegan/ vegetarian - whole 30 - carnivore

It’s all an aim to put guard rails on your diet by making some foods ‘off limits’. CICO literally calorie restriction by cutting out entire groups of food.

It’s not sustainable because everyone eventually runs out of will power and wants a donut.

The key is, track your caloric intake. Micro-adjust to get to a healthy weight. Maintain.

You should be able to eat the foods you wanna eat the rest of your life on a good diet, just less of them and you need to find foods that satiate you personally well to counteract overeating.

The thing that worked for me was time restriction. I can't reliably count calories but I can quite easily look at the clock and decide whether it's feeding hours or fasting hours. Doesn't make it easy, but made it possible.

(lost 20ish kg first time with fitness and diet change, put most of it back on over many years due largely to buffet lunch in the office followed by bad habits, lost it again by using time restriction and that seems to have stuck so far)

About a decade ago I read an interview with an applied mathematician about how he applied his knowledge of math to practical applications. I don't recall if he was working for the NSF or the NIH at the time, but his work for the past few years had to do with this.

He said that of all the contributing factors to being overweight, the factor that was clearly the most significant by a margin was food production per capita. If you produce a lot more food, people will consume a lot more as well.

Putting down the fork may not be an effective solution, but the problem definitely is eating too much. Other factors like how our bodies absorb more from the same food than they did 40 years ago pale in comparison.

> but the problem definitely is eating too much

Not necessarily. Eating too much may be the result of whatever the actual problem may be. People know they're eating too much already. They still, very reliably, can't do anything about it.

> People know they're eating too much already. They still, very reliably, can't do anything about it.

Consistent with my comment. That they can't cut down eating doesn't mean the problem isn't overproduction.