Obesity Epidemic Explained in 0.9 Subway Cookies

I find this post naive, like much writing on weight management. 
 

I have struggled with my weight for 40 years (BMI currently 26, slightly overweight but strangely enough the level at which death rates are lowest). And I have read just about every book on the subject and cubic meters of academic papers. Perhaps I have learned something. 

> things that will help

I tried all, yes all, those things over the years. Some worked, a bit, temporarily and none worked permanently. I agree that they are plausible stories but they are nothing more.

What this and most writing on diet ignore is that weight management is tightly controlled by the body and lower brain, almost entirely out of conscious control. Yes you can eat less for a while, just as you can consciously stop breathing for a while. But in the end willpower has almost zero effect. 

Feedback mechanisms operate through many mechanisms - by regulating appetite. by downregulating metabolism, willingness to expend energy, feelings of fatigue, sleepiness etc. If you have not woken at night having been dreaming about eating, with the only thought in your head being "I don't care what happens I must eat now" you have not experienced hunger. In Ancel Keys' WWII study on starvation subjects were found literally eating from garbage cans after a while.

When people are young they find it far easier to control weight. As you get older it gets harder. BY 50-60 virtually everyone is struggling. So don't declare victory too soon. https://politicaldictionary.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/mission-accomplished-moment.jpg

The idea that eating one extra cookie a day voluntarily will have the results predicted by a simplistic mathematical model is  not even wrong. You see this in studies where they try to get people to gain weight - it is just as hard for many people to gain weight as it is for others to lose weight. the nody adapts and counters any destablizing inputs.

As Ey pointed out no-one thinks that weight loss is worth the price if it means you effectively lose 15-20 points of IQ because your body has decided to economize on energy supplies to the brain. And no-one thinks that weight loss is good if you mostly lose lean body mass, bone mass and your immune system is weakened. What people want to lose is fat. This is a very different thing from weight loss.

So what is the solution? I have lost 15kg of fat over the years (10 kg of weight when you take into account +5kg muscle).

I do not claim any of the things below are a magic  bullet. Such a thing does not exist. But these things have helped me. 

1. Eat a nutritionally rich diet. If you are lacking nutrients you will be hungry. Something like the diet recommended in "Eat Rich Live Long". Just ignore the author's views on covid19. Protein is often the nutrient in short supply.

1a. In general try to avoid empty calories. Sorry this includes wine and beer, even 'craft' beer. 

2. Limit carbohydrates to the lowest level consistent with feeling OK. Note that a period of adaption is needed.  Especially avoid sugar/fructose. You do not need keto but low carb changed the game for me.

3. Limit polyunsaturated fats especially Omega 6 "vegetable oils". Like sugars they are nutritionally barren and do not provide satiety commensurate with calories. They are essential but only to 2-3% of calories and it is virtually impossible on a diet with real food to go under this. In contrast saturated fat produces great feelings of satiety and is IMO metabolically benign.

4. Eat seldom e.g. once or twice a day.  This helps your body learn to burn fat. 

5. A combination of small amounts of intense exercise and large amounts of light exercise such as walking. I walk about 6km/day and do weightlifting. But rest days are important too.

6. It seems to take about 2 years for the body to adapt to your new level of fat. In the meantime you will be hungry. But after the adaption (IMHO due to a reduction in the number of fat cells - contrary to medical orthodoxy) things get a lot better.

7. Get plenty of sleep and limit stress and have pleasure in your life. If you are miserable and stressed you are far more likely to overeat comfort food.

8. Avoid toxic environments like fast food outlets, most cafes, restaurants etc. The focus on hyper-palatability combined with hyper-calories and hypo-nutrition is terrible. 

9. Be aware that much nutritional advice, including that delivered by captured regulatory agencies, is warped out of recognition by financial agendas, and various other ideological agendas (e.g. that coming out of the College of Nutritional Evangelism, now renamed Loma Linda University, whose doctrines seem to be inspired by 19th century religious fantasies that held that everyone including the lions were vegans in the Garden of Eden). The whole medical field is also very prone to capture by "Great Men" who dominate the field for decades for reasons utterly removed from the correctness of their theories. 
 

There's pretty strong evidence that the rise in obesity is not primarily behavioral.  For example, here [LW · GW].  If obesity is the result of a collective depletion of willpower, than why is obesity increasing in animals?  Why does it depend on elevation?

Furthermore, the curves that you present are way too steep.  The average American puts on about 1 pound/year, which suggests that our bodies are more or less in homeostasis.  The question is, what long-term trend is pushing this homeostasis upwards?

You have not explained why a vast population should mystically choose to eat 0.9 more cookies per day or to replace dancing with Netflix. Yet we see that something equivalent in effect has in fact happened.

And you are assuming a deeply unrealistic model in which each person exercises unlimited long-term control not only over specific behaviors (which are in fact hard to control), but over the total ensemble of all their actions. Not only are you assuming that a person can feasibly cause themselves to eat 0.9 fewer cookies per day for many years, but that, given that they have done so, they will also somehow prevent themselves from switching from dancing to Netflix without even noticing that they have made that switch.

No point in driving yourself crazy for 6 days until you snap and eat a whole cake on day 7

Unless the alternative is to eat the whole cake every day, of course. Then, eating the whole cake only 1 day out of 7 is a huge improvement.

This seems to be ignoring the set point hypothesis- was that deliberate?

Eliezer made a Facebook post asking for advice losing weight saying not to bother telling him to eat less because it doesn't work.

To steelman this (I haven't seen the Facebook post), just getting told to "eat less" is not helpful advice. There is a sense where it's the solution: there are two variables, calories in and calories out, and "eat less" decreases the calories in. However, it's not good advice because people don't generally have enough long term commitment power to just cut out food. Your suggestions at the end of the post are ways to make eating less easier, but you need to have those intermediate solutions.

↑ comment by tinyanon (aaron-teetor) · 2021-08-12T21:28:32.743Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I agree getting told to eat less is not helpful advice.  Here is the Facebook post, which I don't think your steelman applies to.