army1987 comments on Akrasia and Shangri-La - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 April 2009 08:53PM

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Comment author: simon 10 April 2009 10:20:24PM *  18 points [-]

The metabolically privileged don't believe in metabolic privilege, since they are able to lose weight by trying!

Some of us do believe in it since we are able to stay very thin without trying. I have never dieted and never needed to.

But, we probably don't post very much on diet blogs.

I come from a family of thin people who eat fairly unhealthily but are quite active. When I first stopped living with my parents, I basically stopped exercising and ate even more unhealthily. I became very unfit in the sense of e.g., not being able to run a block without getting out of breath, but gained very little weight. So I figure the causation is probably not mainly exercise -> thinness, but more on the lines of genes -> (thinness & athleticism) or genes -> thinness -> athleticism.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 September 2012 08:44:37AM *  1 point [-]

So I figure the causation is probably not mainly exercise -> thinness

Which ought to be nearly obvious to anyone who has compared the calorie expenditures of common physical activities with the calorie contents of common foodstuffs. (Yes, increasing muscle mass increases thermogenesis (but so does caffeine) and I personally feel that doing abs help me feel less hungry because they kind of compress my stomach (but so does wearing higher-rise trousers and pulling their belt tighter), but those are second-order effects.)

Comment author: hesperidia 22 December 2014 07:40:36AM 1 point [-]

I personally feel that doing abs help me feel less hungry because they kind of compress my stomach (but so does wearing higher-rise trousers and pulling their belt tighter)

This is also observed when wearing back-braces and corsets over the long term. In the corset-wearing/waist-training community particularly, some people have observed that without significant changes in behavior, corsets may decrease appetite; the actual effect is of course highly variable, but it's frequent enough to be conventional wisdom in that community, so.