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AndrewH comments on How I Lost 100 Pounds Using TDT - Less Wrong
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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).