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army1987 comments on How I Lost 100 Pounds Using TDT - Less Wrong
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Obesity rates used to be low. They're now higher. The most obvious changes are higher food availability (and different food availability, read refined sugar/high fructose corn syrup/superstimuli fast food deliciousness), and more sedentary lifestyles. There may be other subtler changes, like the permanent psychological effects of being exposed to food advertising from a young age, and a million things that we don't know yet, but there's something out there, in the physical world, that has changed. And it's not liposuction–that, and gastic bypass surgery, etc, didn't exist a hundred years ago–their invention apparently hasn't reduced obesity rates.
In summary, people moralizing about how obesity is just "calories in calories out" aren't doing anything to solve the problem. But saying that thermodynamics is "moralizing disguised as an invocation of natural law" is just pointing out how not to solve the problem–it's not helpful either unless you suggest an alternate solution. Or a list of 20 different things to try, at least 1 of which should work for >99.9% of the population. Or a drug that can target some mysterious fat cell receptor to make them cooperatively release energy during exercise/dieting. Or a special diet that empirically does the same thing, even if no one knows how or why. Or a way to raise children so that they have the same obesity risk as children 200 years ago. Or a way to at least treat the negative cardiovascular health benefits of obesity and make it harmless. Or liposuction. Etc etc etc. I don't think people will get so mad about "moralizing" when this problem has a better solution.
...Oh, and a society that doesn't massively penalize people for being chubby as long as their cardiovascular health is good would be a massive step in the right direction. As a normal weight girl who used to train in the pool every day, but still spent most of high school thinking I was fat and unattractive because of media images of models, I have a particular pet peeve with this.
In previous centuries, people rich enough not to have to worry about calories were rarely fat, certainly not at anything like modern rates. Food types have changed. Calorie supply seems like as much a red herring as the number of pirates or global warming.
Here's someone fat enough to be a circus freak one century earlier:
http://www.coolcrack.com/2011/06/fat-circus-freak-century-ago.html
"Thermodynamics" doesn't explain that change. Some significant number of people a century ago could afford to eat as many calories as they wanted. Also, are we supposing that the circus freak was exceptionally rich?
And are the kinds of food our ancestors ate no longer available today?
Plenty of foods available today not available to our ancestors, such as semi-dwarf wheat.
Or Coke, for that matter.
But if the reason why we are fat and our ancestors were thin is that there are foods we have and they didn't, and we don't want to be fat, we can just not eat those foods. “[We are fatter than our ancestors because] food types have changed” only entails that you can't affect your weight through your diet if you cannot choose to eat what your ancestors did.
Everything we eat has been bred for thousands of years. Does any of it have enough in common with our ancestors' diets that "eat only that" can work?
I suppose one might look at what wild primates eat in the present day to answer that. Part of that is "smaller primates", so that still might not be the way to go.
I meant “ancestors” on the timescale of one or two centuries (the time it took for the prevalence of obesity to rise from negligible to sizeable), not megayears. By “food types have changed” EY was referring to (I assume) availability of industrial superstimulus foodstuffs full of high-fructose corn syrup and whatnot.
Ok, I had thought this was going in the direction of the whole paleo thing. Eating as we ate a couple of centuries ago looks much more doable, at the individual level. (Changing the whole society would be a whole different thing.) But perhaps "eat food, mostly plants, not too much" is already one of the things EY has tried?
If you can eat "not too much" without your fat cells starving you to death, you're probably already thin. I haven't tried "mostly plants" because it's vastly underspecified and I'm not particularly interested in being told afterward that I ate the wrong plants.
Probably he has; but, unless the fraction of “metabolically disprivileged” people like him has been rising a lot in the past couple centuries, I guess that the rising prevalence of obesity means there are a sizeable number of people who haven't tried that (seriously enough).
No.
English can be surprisingly ambiguous at times.