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Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
caloric intake reduction while sustaining burn 100% reduces weight. I'm not going to dig through all your cites but you essentially shouldn't cite a Kevin Hall article for anything; I was in the room for his ASN keynote in 2019, the man's an embarrassment to the entire field.

You are...much too overconfident in your, ah, "paradigm reconsidering" framing of this matter.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Apr 27, 2023

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Mellow Seas
Oct 9, 2012
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!
drat man nice post.

What's messed up is that "fat-phobia" in society doesn't seem much less strong among those who are fat. I think the effect is even more pronounced than internalized racism. Even if the correlation of obesity with poor health outcomes is spurious, there's a certain part of me that just wants to be smaller, and says "yes please give me the magic pill that does that."

Discendo Vox posted:

caloric intake reduction while sustaining burn 100% reduces weight. I'm not going to dig through all your cites but you essentially shouldn't cite a Kevin Hall article for anything; I was in the room for his ASN keynote in 2019, the man's an embarrassment to the entire field.
I don't know anything about Hall, but I don't think anybody is disputing that. The point is that maintaining 100% burn requires an increase - sometimes a dramatic increase - in activity levels, if you are under caloric restriction. Reducing calories in, all else being equal, also reduces calories out.

Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Apr 27, 2023

woozy pawsies
Nov 26, 2007

pork never goes bad posted:

Do you have evidence for the bolded part, here? You call it obvious but it's definitely not obvious to me given that it's been the predominant cultural position in the West for centuries and a cornerstone of public health advice for just as long but has not made any dent in obesity rates. In fact, given that no population has sustainably reduced average weight as a result of policy efforts, I'd suggest that anything we view as obvious in this debate should be viewed with a great deal of skepticism.

I'd like to argue for a reexamination of our attitudes towards obesity and dieting more broadly, as well as respond to this part of your post. Not everything I say is specifically aimed at you, but since you've been sharing these weight loss drug articles I'm using it as a jumping off point.

Let me first quickly discuss calories in and calories out, the old trope that is usually thrown around in these discussions. If you wish to defend this paradigm, it seems to me that you're trying to say something useful rather than just repeat a truism. That this advice is supposed to be actionable. Thermodynamics is no real help - the human body is not a closed system. If the point is just that if you starve someone long enough, eventually they'll waste away and die, then sure. But I suspect that what you mean by your "obviously," because of your inclusion of willpower, is that calorie restriction is a plausible mechanism for healthy weight loss. It is this point to which I initially respond. Subsequently I will develop a few more points about how we treat overweight in the doctor's office and in public policy, and how we view fat bodies in society.

Starvation response to calorie restriction tends to adjust the calories out side of the balance more than the calorie restriction does in the long term, with no meaningful studies on the long term efficacy of calorie restriction showing sustained and sustainable weight loss but many showing sustained damage to the metabolism. Furthermore, even when dieting does reduce weight, there's not good evidence that it improves attendant health outcomes. Obese people on calorie restrictive diets can present with all the symptoms of anorexia, including heart arrhythmias, amenorrhea, hypokalemia, and severe complications from malnutrition in all major organs of the body. In fact, so called "atypical anorexia nervosa" which can be diagnosed in normal and overweight people is somewhere between 3 and 10 times more common than the stereotypical abnormally thin anorexia nervosa presentations. Calorie restriction is not an effective intervention in obesity, it is not good advice for a doctor to give, and in fact it causes substantial concrete harms.

Overweight and mildly obese people have no lower life expectancy than normal weight people when controlling for confounders like smoking. Overweight people with healthy biomarkers have lower all cause mortality than underweight people with similar biomarkers and lower all cause mortality than "normal" weight people with unhealthy biomarkers. Though this remains contentious, our best epidemiological studies suggest a mild protective effect of overweight on mortality risk. More specifically, though obesity is a risk factor for all kinds of negative health outcomes, in the medical setting every one of these outcomes has more predictive biomarkers which can be directly measured (ldl-c and apoB for heart disease, a1c for diabetes, crp for certain metabolic disorders and cancers, mobility and strength can be directly measured, etc) and which show a far stronger correlation with the outcomes than weight. These are no harder to build public health campaigns around, and unlike obesity there is good evidence that people can affect these biomarkers positively with lifestyle changes. For mobility or cholesterol, for example, increasing exercise improves these markers and their associated health outcomes irrespective of whether weight change. Focusing on weight makes it less likely that we are able to positively improve health.

Weight stigma in the doctor's office contributes to significant avoidance of care by overweight and obese people, resulting in later diagnosis of many chronic and acute conditions including those unrelated to weight. Obese and overweight people are often denied care for unrelated conditions until they lose weight. Anesthesiologists often refuse to work with overweight patients because of systemic and individual anti-fat bias. We have systematically understudied how to provide care for larger bodies and so anesthesiologists are ill equipped to safely sedate larger patients for routine surgeries. Overweight and obese people often have symptoms of physical injuries such as fractures, broken bones, and soft tissue damage from injury blamed on their weight and the underlying physical injury is left untreated. How much all this affects all cause mortality rates and life expectancy is poorly understood and understudied. Weight stigma in the doctor's office also results in chronic over prescription of statins, fibrates, and t2 diabetes drugs to overweight and obese people who do not have biomarker results suggesting their need and for whom studies of these drugs have shown no medical benefit, with resultant side effects and complications of medication contributing to mortality and life expectancy in ways that are also as yet poorly understood. And weight stigma in the doctor's office is the primary reason that eating disorders are both more common and under diagnosed in overweight populations. Finally, weight loss drugs have historically been greeted with fanfare and hailed as being game changing, but there's a reason that we don't have any right now. They all caused far more harm than benefit in the long run. With healthy weight people requesting this new set, I fully expect this story to play out again.

Fundamentally, our cultural paradigm that being fat is unhealthy is, at best, a well meaning oversimplification. We no longer need to measure weight to manage almost any major health condition, telling patients to lose weight is an ineffective intervention that has concrete and measurable harms, and it is my belief that the continued focus on weight and weight loss reflects unjustifiable animus towards the fat body and societal shame about appearance.

Contrastingly, public health campaigns which focus on dietary improvement or exercise have been shown to have meaningfully positive effects on both biomarkers of chronic disease, health outcomes, and life satisfaction in overweight populations. If we care about health, let's talk about health, and let's design interventions that improve health rather than target weight. We are so locked into our fat-phobic paradigm that I will never judge any overweight or obese person for their efforts to lose weight or encourage any specific action by any individual trying to improve their lot in our broken society, but I do mourn a little every time I hear weight discussed in these terms.

I will not cite every point I've made here in detail, though I'm happy to cite any specific point if asked. To get started, here are a few broad citations, though.

On the Energy Balance Model of obesity, showing the paucity of a "calories in, calories out" paradigm for weight loss (though, this model does support the notion that energy balance does determine obesity, it just shows how the naive conception of how this is so is incorrect): https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/115/5/1243/6522166

On public policy wrt obesity, this piece by Katherine Mayer should end the debate: https://www.proquest.com/openview/4150738197df3b369a81012fa250b3c9/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=37325

On weight and health outcomes, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19680230/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jcsm.12378

On the lack of efficacy of diets and calorie restriction, this review by Traci Mann et al is clear: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17469900/

On eating disorders in fat people, Erin Nicole Harrop is a relatively approachable authority: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=ABaxAMgAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate

I have proof of the bolded part: when people don’t eat calories, they die of starvation after loosing weight.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

cat botherer
Jan 6, 2022

I am interested in most phases of data processing.

Bar Ran Dun posted:

I was “overweight” by BMI when I was an athlete (I was a captain of the swim team at a service academy). During the training trip, one day I ran ten miles, had four hours of practice in the water(so like a marathon’s worth ) and lifted and was like just one day that week.

We had one guy on the team who was there because he wanted to be a seal. He was built like brick shithouse. I remember later hearing a radio program about him getting to kick box in a prison match in Thailand.

BMI really isn’t any good for looking at athletes weight ratios. Now that I’m old and fat, yeah it accurately reflects my health.
BMI is a good population-level measure, and is accurate on a personal level for the vast majority of people - there's not that many college athletes or people who have unusual muscle mass. There's a lot of people who think BMI doesn't apply to them, because they're totally jacked from using Nautilus machines at the Y a couple times a week so they don't have to stop eating at McDonald's (no shame to anybody, but self-delusion isn't healthy either).

Bar Ran Dun
Jan 22, 2006




Failed Imagineer posted:

BMI is a population statistic which gets frequently misused as a personal health metric.

Frequently is underselling it. They put one on the fat list with extra PT and a diet at the academy based on BMI alone, unless you were an athlete. The pinch fat test and things like neck / chest / waist measurements were the far secondary metric. Most doctors use it first too.

Gyges
Aug 4, 2004

NOW NO ONE
RECOGNIZE HULK

PharmerBoy posted:

Something I had never considered until the proximity of the Fox settlement and now the Disney/Florida lawsuit: the state doesn't have the option of settling in something like this do they?

If FL officials are really turning against DeSantis (or say even in a separate hypothetical of a law passed by a previous opposite administration) the state can't just say the other side is right and remove the law without an additional act of congress & executive. Best they can do is just fail to fund a defense and let the other side run the case where they want, which is its own set of dangers.

FL officials aren't turning against DeSantis, because they don't have the spines to ever do such a thing that might be seen as unloyal and Commie Pinko Woke Demoratic. They're just getting very pissy while also full force rubber stamping everything that passes their desk.

On the other hand, yes, now that they've passed the law there is no real settlement. They could possibly agree to replace the board of brainless DeSantis cronies as part of a settlement, but it's highly unlikely Disney would accept that. The compromise settlement was Disney letting DeSantis get the win on paper while in actuality nothing changes until, at best, 20 years after the last grandchild of King Chuck dies.

However, since the board of sycophants and DeSantis have decided that they want to fight, Disney is going to give them a fight. While Disney was 100% preparing various legal outs from the day DeSantis got his tighty whities in a bunch, I'm guessing that the threat to build a prison right next to Disney World in retaliation was the point where Mickey fully unshackled the lawyers and told them that Puddin' Hands just called their mom a bitch.

pork never goes bad
May 16, 2008

Discendo Vox posted:

caloric intake reduction while sustaining burn 100% reduces weight. I'm not going to dig through all your cites but you essentially shouldn't cite a Kevin Hall article for anything; I was in the room for his ASN keynote in 2019, the man's an embarrassment to the entire field.

Can you cite the bolded part showing that this is true in humans who restrict calories as part of a diet? Either you are making a trivially true point that is useless in the discussion of obesity management and public policy related to obesity or you are making a false point.

Re the Hall citation, to make the same point, see this study on Biggest Loser participants.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4989512/

Or see the review by Traci Mann that I cited on the effectiveness of diets.

pork never goes bad
May 16, 2008

cat botherer posted:

BMI is a good population-level measure, and is accurate on a personal level for the vast majority of people - there's not that many college athletes or people who have unusual muscle mass. There's a lot of people who think BMI doesn't apply to them, because they're totally jacked from using Nautilus machines at the Y a couple times a week so they don't have to stop eating at McDonald's (no shame to anybody, but self-delusion isn't healthy either).

Do you believe that having an overweight BMI is unhealthy in and of itself? Do you have data that shows people with overweight BMIs and good biomarkers have worse health outcomes? If not, why do we not simply use biomarker measurement to manage individual health and dispense with this lovely, harmful idea that we can determine people's health by looking at them.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Mellow Seas posted:

I don't know anything about Hall, but I don't think anybody is disputing that. The point is that maintaining 100% burn requires an increase - sometimes a dramatic increase - in activity levels, if you are under caloric restriction. Reducing calories in, all else being equal, also reduces calories out.

Not remotely to the same proportion, and caloric reduction remains the actual causal mechanism of weight reduction.

pork never goes bad posted:

Can you cite the bolded part showing that this is true in humans who restrict calories as part of a diet? Either you are making a trivially true point that is useless in the discussion of obesity management and public policy related to obesity or you are making a false point.

Re the Hall citation, to make the same point, see this study on Biggest Loser participants.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4989512/

Or see the review by Traci Mann that I cited on the effectiveness of diets.

You're at a ten in certainty and defensiveness here, and you should be at maybe a two. You've also once again shifted the claim to "restricting calories as part of a diet". In doing so, you're reframing the claim in a manner that equivocates between caloric reduction, the "trivially true", and something you seem to have latched onto from a set of heavily promoted research on diet and weight loss. That "dieting" doesn't work does not mean that diet change, specifically caloric reduction, does.

Your sources are not as good as you think they are, generally- I am curious where you're getting them. The Biggest Loser study isn't going to be particularly ecologically valid (also it's still part of Hall's work). You're functionally working backward from Hall's framing of the issue.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Apr 27, 2023

Leon Trotsky 2012
Aug 27, 2009

YOU CAN TRUST ME!*


*Israeli Government-affiliated poster

I think the analysis of social stigma and BMI being confused for an individual indicator and not a population indicator are good points, but some of this seems pretty questionable.

Do you have a source that there are no real health improvements for obese people who lose weight on a calorie restricted diet/obese people can't lose weight on a calorie-restricted diet? The source you provided says that being mildly overweight has no major impact on life expectancy, but that being obese definitely does. There are also problems in between "killing you" and "nothing" that are linked to obesity.

I also don't think there is really any evidence I have been able to find that weight stigma from doctors is the reason that eating disorders are on the rise. I've never heard that before and can't really find anything to back it up via google.

Mellow Seas
Oct 9, 2012
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!

pork never goes bad posted:

Can you cite the bolded part showing that this is true in humans who restrict calories as part of a diet? Either you are making a trivially true point that is useless in the discussion of obesity management and public policy related to obesity or you are making a false point.
I think it's a true point, and how trivial it is could be debated. You're right that somebody maintaining 100% of their metabolism while restricting their caloric intake, and maintaining that over a long period of time, which is the desired outcome, is not a common outcome of caloric restriction. But DV is saying that if you set "calories out" as constant, then of course restricting calories will make you lose weight. I wouldn't call that point "trivial," because it's a critical underpinning of all weight loss methods (including Ozempic et al), but it is oversimplified and potentially misleading.

Discendo Vox posted:


Not remotely to the same proportion, and caloric reduction remains the actual causal mechanism of weight reduction.
Yes and yes, not disputing either.

The main thing that makes losing weight hard is that if you eat less food than you usually do, even if that's more than you need, your brain pitches a fit, and 9 times out of 10 (or slightly more, statistically) you end up eating what you were before. (This is supported by how Ozempic works really really well by just telling your brain to shut the gently caress up about being hungry, without doing anything to offset metabolic effects.)

The metabolic effects don't help though - in my experience, mostly by making weight loss excruciatingly slow, and making it hard to keep morale up - and seem to increase in severity the more one "yo-yos" - I don't have data on that, I'll see if I can find anything and would be interested in what you know.

Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Apr 27, 2023

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
Hall has also benefitted from this distortion, because he's used it as part of the promotion of the NOVA framing of dietary practices, which if it successfully infects policymaking is going to wind up wasting a lot of money and potentially killing a lot of people. I believe I've written about the "highly processed food" bullshit in here before.

edit: It makes a hell of an impression when you sit in a room for an hour and watch a man say things like "I chose my independent variable because I read a magazine article about it", "I didn't consider alternative independent variables", "we adjusted things to get stronger results", and saying he'd never though of a whole laundry list of really basic confounding variables that he could have controlled. That the man has access to a metabolic lab is criminal.

edit 2: for clarity, when I say "metabolic lab", running a longer-term high-rigor weight loss study means basically placing all participants in a location and completely controlling and measuring their intake and, often, output, for an extended period. That's really expensive- there are only a handful of such places in the country, and it's really hard to get the funding or access to use them. Hall using the NIH one is like using the large hadron collider for a month to write an article about how homeopathy is real.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Apr 27, 2023

Mirotic
Mar 8, 2013




pork never goes bad posted:

Do you have evidence for the bolded part, here? You call it obvious but it's definitely not obvious to me given that it's been the predominant cultural position in the West for centuries and a cornerstone of public health advice for just as long but has not made any dent in obesity rates. In fact, given that no population has sustainably reduced average weight as a result of policy efforts, I'd suggest that anything we view as obvious in this debate should be viewed with a great deal of skepticism.

I'd like to argue for a reexamination of our attitudes towards obesity and dieting more broadly, as well as respond to this part of your post. Not everything I say is specifically aimed at you, but since you've been sharing these weight loss drug articles I'm using it as a jumping off point....

This is an excellent post.

Anecdotally, I basically gave myself an eating disorder in high school (I'm a woman, it was easy, and fwiw I am also tall). At my smallest weight I was still considered overweight by the BMI and I have noticed a distinct change in my metabolism since this happened. On top of that, relearning better eating habits, not falling back into heavy restriction (1200-1500/day was my goal in high school) and exercise, and not being able to discuss weight at any doctor's appointment pretty much ever remain challenges a decade-plus later.

You are absolutely correct that we need to rethink how we give fat people medical care because I should never have been praised for dropping a significant portion of my body weight at 17 without questions about how I was doing it, because I am now living with that damage in more ways than one.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
Weight stigma and mistreatment in a clinical setting is a profound problem, and one that doesn't appear to be consistently addressed in more recent and otherwise beneficial reforms to medical education. While not quite as bad as it was a generation or two ago, most clinicians and treatment guidelines still rely on BMI due to its availability, and instruction on how to address different weight and health scenarios are inconsistent, at best. The scenario Mirotic describes should be less common in younger doctors who have had training around eating disorders, but the other end of the spectrum, on addressing and responding to individuals with higher weight, is really poor.

Mellow Seas
Oct 9, 2012
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!
Following up

Mellow Seas posted:

The metabolic effects ... seem to increase in severity the more one "yo-yos" - I don't have data on that, I'll see if I can find anything and would be interested in what you know.
You will not be surprised to find that many dubiously credentialed commercial entities are happy to tell you all about the latest research about the effect of yoyo dieting on metabolism! :v:

But anyway, here's a pretty straightforward "no": https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120814213252.htm from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Here's one from NIH that does not have a handily simplified journalistic summary: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6917653/
From what I can understand, that one seems to be saying that there are a lot of chemical processes working against somebody who has had a lot of weight fluctuation, but they don't seem to be metabolic per se.

Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Apr 27, 2023

Mirotic
Mar 8, 2013




Discendo Vox posted:

Weight stigma and mistreatment in a clinical setting is a profound problem, and one that doesn't appear to be consistently addressed in more recent and otherwise beneficial reforms to medical education. While not quite as bad as it was a generation or two ago, most clinicians and treatment guidelines still rely on BMI due to its availability, and instruction on how to address different weight and health scenarios are inconsistent, at best. The scenario Mirotic describes should be less common in younger doctors who have had training around eating disorders, but the other end of the spectrum, on addressing and responding to individuals with higher weight, is really poor.

Again anecdotal, but my current doctor is younger and still managed to trigger me so badly at my last physical that I went home and cried.

As you say, it is extremely inconsistent, and "should" does not mean "is". If you are far and go to a doctor - particularly if you're a woman - it's a crapshoot to find someone who won't make you feel like dogshit. At best.

pork never goes bad
May 16, 2008

I'm certainly not beginning from Hall's work. I'm beginning from the observation that the dominant paradigms have failed repeatedly and over a pretty long timescale to make a dent in the problem they purport to address. When people talk about the obesity epidemic, the usual reason given for addressing it is the health impacts it has and the costs of those health impacts for society. My fundamental point is that if we want to improve health outcomes, we should use better proxies for health than weight. We have those proxies.

The secondary point I make is that the continued focus on weight causes concrete harms which those who purport to care about obesity fail to account for or adequately study.

Our approach does not work and it does cause harm. We should change our approach. It's fair enough to quibble with the details and citations I provide or tell me that my certainty mismatches the evidence, Discendo Vox, but do you disagree with the prior two sentences?

Leon - Try searching "weight stigma and eating disorders" or look at the Tracy Harrop link I posted. She has a lot of work on this. Some clarifications - I said that weight stigma in the doctor's office was the main driver for EDs in overweight people. This was an overstatement. Firstly, I should not have said that it's the main driver. It's a major driver. Weight stigma out of the doctor's office is also a major driver. There may be other drivers. Secondly, weight stigma is also a major driver of eating disorders in non-overweight people.

Edits to fix some grammar errors from when I rewrote sentences while typing..

pork never goes bad fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Apr 27, 2023

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
Nutrition science research is a toxic wasteland, generally, because high quality research often starts at the same level of cost as pharmaceutical development and then layers on additional confounds and intersecting fields like behavioral science. Researchers basically never have adequate competence to cover all the relevant material in a given area, and the entire field also lacks the level of sustained public funding necessary to do that research- so the whole area is filled with industry funding, covering both good and bad and completely fraudulent research. And you have to have insider knowledge or do a ton of digging to even begin to know the potential conflicts of interest involved.

pork never goes bad posted:

I'm certainly not beginning from Hall's work. I'm beginning from the observation that the dominant paradigms have failed repeatedly and over a pretty long timescale to make a dent in the problem they purport to address. When people talk about the obesity epidemic, the usual reason given for addressing it is the health impacts it has and the costs of those health impacts for society. My fundamental point is that if we want to improve health outcomes, we should use better proxies for health than weight. We have those proxies.

The secondary point I make is that the continued focus on weight causes concrete harms which those who purport to care about obesity fail to account for or adequately study.

Our approach does not work and it does cause harm. We should change our approach. It's fair enough to quibble with the details and citations I provide or tell me that my certainty mismatches the evidence, Discendo Vox, do you disagree with the prior two sentences?

Leon - Try searching "weight stigma and eating disorders" or look at the Tracy Harrop link I posted. She has a lot of work on this. Some clarifications - I said that weight stigma in the doctor's office was the main driver for EDs in overweight people. This was an overstatement. Firstly, I should not have said that it's the main driver. It's a major driver. Weight stigma out of the doctor's office is also a major driver. There may be other drivers. Secondly, weight stigma is also a major driver of eating disorders in non-overweight people.

Your "beginning observation" has no relationship to the actual claims about caloric reduction and weight loss that you're attacking. Your two sentences aren't meaningfully engaged with these claims either. Weight is a useful proxy for health, obviously, and it is not and has never been the appropriate sole proxy for health- and those other proxies are also used. The "dominant paradigm," "our approach", that you're attacking isn't well defined or characterized, and seems detached from what people are actually talking about.

More broadly, I encourage you to stop relying on Kuhn.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Apr 27, 2023

Levitate
Sep 30, 2005

randy newman voice

YOU'VE GOT A LAFRENIÈRE IN ME

Mellow Seas posted:

I think the main contributor is cable TV, video games and PCs making sitting on your rear end way, way, way more fun than it ever was in the past. There are a lot of other things about the food supply, increase in sedentary work, etc, that contribute, and yeah maybe even water contaminants or viruses, but I really do think it's mostly all the super awesome cool stuff we can now do with our brains while, physically, doing pretty much nothing.

Like, what would a "couch potato" even look like before the advent of those forms of entertainment? The term wasn't even coined until the '70s before catching on in the '80s. Now the term is barely even used anymore because the behavior it describes is near-ubiquitous.

Reading books? Not quite as addictive in many ways but when I was younger and had more time I definitely have "wasted" almost entire days sitting on the couch reading. I don't think that was/is quite as common as TV or video game marathons though, people tend to get a bit tired of reading after a bit and get up to move around.

Mellow Seas posted:

I don't know anything about Hall, but I don't think anybody is disputing that. The point is that maintaining 100% burn requires an increase - sometimes a dramatic increase - in activity levels, if you are under caloric restriction. Reducing calories in, all else being equal, also reduces calories out.

How's that?

just to throw around made up numbers, if you're living a fairly sedentary lifestyle and eating 3k calories per day, and you cut that by I dunno 700 calories per day but don't change your routine (no more exercise, no less activity) how is calories out also being reduced? Is the claim that metabolism slows down and so you don't go anywhere with that? Is there a legitimate source that can be cited about this? e: like I'm actually curious, people say a lot of stuff about "metabolism changes!" but it seems like something incredibly hard to quantify but is used very commonly in all things weight related.

Anecdotally I've always found calories in/out and exercise incredibly effective at losing or maintaining weight. It's often more about finding how to maintain a level of calorie intake and avoiding cravings and such, and tracking every single thing you eat/drink so that you have accurate information. That sucks and is hard for a lot of people and can lead to bad places mentally for some, which is part of why it's all hard to do. I feel like the addictive quality of most snack food etc these days, with high salty and sugary content, is incredibly hard to ignore or eat in moderation. A serving size of crackers or chips or something 1 oz and like 150 calories, but how many people do you think just eat 1 handful and leave it at that?
On top of that you can't think of it as a "diet" where you're doing it for a bit to lose weight and then you can ignore it. It's 100% about changing how and what you eat and developing new habits, not things that you do for a little while. I think that's why a ton of people lose weight and then gain it back...the pressure and lure to overeat is very high with the kind of foods that are common these days and changing your overall diet to stay within a range conducive to weight loss or management at a lower weight is really tough.

Mizaq
Sep 12, 2001

Monkey Magic
Toilet Rascal
How many calories are excreted out of a diet? If you consume 3k calories per day but excrete 800 of them, could you then reduce your caloric intake to say 2.5k calories daily and your body goes into panic and excretes only 300 instead and thus netting you nothing but hunger pangs? Does weight lose research methodically count calories out via excretion like it does via exercise/physical and mental activity? Heck, is mental activity measured?

Edit: semi-beaten by Levitate

Space Cadet Omoly
Jan 15, 2014

~Groovy~


Mellow Seas posted:

I think that as neuroscience advances we will ultimately find that almost nothing anybody does is ever actually their fault. Like, including things that we would all consider inexcusable and indefensible with our current understanding of the brain.

As a counselor I don't think this is true. Obviously some things are chemically based which is why I take meds for my ADHD because I can't produce the chemicals my neurotransmitters need for that on my own anymore than a diabetic can produce insulin. However, there's a lot of things that people can change through developing things like better coping mechanisms and emotional regulation. I know this because I've both done it myself and helped others do it.

Mirotic
Mar 8, 2013




Levitate posted:

Reading books? Not quite as addictive in many ways but when I was younger and had more time I definitely have "wasted" almost entire days sitting on the couch reading. I don't think that was/is quite as common as TV or video game marathons though, people tend to get a bit tired of reading after a bit and get up to move around.

How's that?

just to throw around made up numbers, if you're living a fairly sedentary lifestyle and eating 3k calories per day, and you cut that by I dunno 700 calories per day but don't change your routine (no more exercise, no less activity) how is calories out also being reduced? Is the claim that metabolism slows down and so you don't go anywhere with that? Is there a legitimate source that can be cited about this? e: like I'm actually curious, people say a lot of stuff about "metabolism changes!" but it seems like something incredibly hard to quantify but is used very commonly in all things weight related.

Anecdotally I've always found calories in/out and exercise incredibly effective at losing or maintaining weight. It's often more about finding how to maintain a level of calorie intake and avoiding cravings and such, and tracking every single thing you eat/drink so that you have accurate information. That sucks and is hard for a lot of people and can lead to bad places mentally for some, which is part of why it's all hard to do. I feel like the addictive quality of most snack food etc these days, with high salty and sugary content, is incredibly hard to ignore or eat in moderation. A serving size of crackers or chips or something 1 oz and like 150 calories, but how many people do you think just eat 1 handful and leave it at that?
On top of that you can't think of it as a "diet" where you're doing it for a bit to lose weight and then you can ignore it. It's 100% about changing how and what you eat and developing new habits, not things that you do for a little while. I think that's why a ton of people lose weight and then gain it back...the pressure and lure to overeat is very high with the kind of foods that are common these days and changing your overall diet to stay within a range conducive to weight loss or management at a lower weight is really tough.

Here you go.

A leading theory on the biological level is that BMR decreases when you lose weight; lowering the TDEE is a greater amount than expected relative to the loss of body mass.[8] This lowering of TDEE is referred to as adaptive thermogenesis, decreasing energy expenditure to match the lower caloric intake dietarily, thus halting or decreasing the rate of weight loss.

[...]

To achieve weight loss, people reach a point where their energy expenditure is lower than it used to be. Research shows that people who lose weight secrete higher levels of ghrelin, a hormone known to increase hunger, opposite of the effect of the hormone leptin involved in satiety. These hormones can also impact and increase fatigue.[10][11] Studies have shown an increase in ghrelin also promotes the conservation of fat stores.[12]

Leon Trotsky 2012
Aug 27, 2009

YOU CAN TRUST ME!*


*Israeli Government-affiliated poster

Mizaq posted:

How many calories are excreted out of a diet? If you consume 3k calories per day but excrete 800 of them, could you then reduce your caloric intake to say 2.5k calories daily and your body goes into panic and excretes only 300 instead and thus netting you nothing but hunger pangs? Does weight lose research methodically count calories out via excretion like it does via exercise/physical and mental activity? Heck, is mental activity measured?

Edit: semi-beaten by Levitate

What do you mean by mental activity? Are you saying that it is possible to burn excess calories in any meaningful way by thinking harder/differently?

According to every source I can find, brain activity variance makes no real difference in caloric use.

If you were maximizing your brain activity for 24 hours straight, it would result in a change of about 17 calories. And nobody is doing mentally complex thinking for 24 hours in a row all day every day, so the actual impact would be even lower.

quote:

That means during a typical day, a person uses about 320 calories just to think.

Different mental states and tasks can subtly affect the way the brain consumes energy. “If we were to put you in a scanner and we looked at what’s going on [in your brain] while in front of the TV or doing a crossword, your brain’s activity would change if we gave you a demanding task, and it would use more energy,” he says.

quote:

But if you’re hoping to think yourself slim, Raichle says you’re out of luck. While the brain burns a lot of energy, any changes in brain activity and energy use during a tough mental task are minute: “maybe a 5% change against the backdrop of all brain activity,” he says.

Even if you were to keep your brain immersed in difficult mental pursuits all day long, this 5% change wouldn’t add up to much. “Calorie-wise it would be very modest,” Raichle says, adding that you would expend more energy pacing back and forth.

https://time.com/5400025/does-thinking-burn-calories/

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Mellow Seas posted:

I think that as neuroscience advances we will ultimately find that almost nothing anybody does is ever actually their fault. Like, including things that we would all consider inexcusable and indefensible with our current understanding of the brain.

Space Cadet Omoly posted:

As a counselor I don't think this is true. Obviously some things are chemically based which is why I take meds for my ADHD because I can't produce the chemicals my neurotransmitters need for that on my own anymore than a diabetic can produce insulin. However, there's a lot of things that people can change through developing things like better coping mechanisms and emotional regulation. I know this because I've both done it myself and helped others do it.

The claim can be true in a fundamental and broad sense based on external causality, but that's more a question of whether the concept of free will exists. Maybe we should bring some philosophy thread users in here to talk about the problems of compatibilism.

Mellow Seas
Oct 9, 2012
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!

Levitate posted:

Is the claim that metabolism slows down and so you don't go anywhere with that? Is there a legitimate source that can be cited about this? e: like I'm actually curious, people say a lot of stuff about "metabolism changes!" but it seems like something incredibly hard to quantify but is used very commonly in all things to stay within a range conducive to weight loss or management at a lower weight is really tough.
Here's a recent study I found, it's limited in scope but supports the principle: https://www.uab.edu/news/research/item/12593-weight-loss-may-take-longer-than-expected-due-to-metabolic-adaptation

University of Alabama Researchers posted:

In premenopausal women with overweight, metabolic adaptation after a 16% weight loss increases the length of time necessary to achieve weight loss goals.
For what it's worth, it also matches up well with my anecdotal experience, and that of many others, of maintaining a certain level calorie restriction - yes, really - and yet having my weight loss not stop, but slow down significantly.

Discendo Vox posted:

The claim can be true in a fundamental and broad sense based on external causality, but that's more a question of whether the concept of free will exists. Maybe we should bring some philosophy thread users in here to talk about the problems of compatibilism.
Consciousness is always a current event!

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Mellow Seas posted:

Here's a recent study I found, it's limited in scope but supports the principle: https://www.uab.edu/news/research/item/12593-weight-loss-may-take-longer-than-expected-due-to-metabolic-adaptation

For what it's worth, it also matches up well with my anecdotal experience, and that of many others, of maintaining a certain level calorie restriction - yes, really - and yet having my weight loss not stop, but slow down significantly.

UAB has a good rep, as does Obesity, but at a minimum I can say the research isn't "new"- a casualty of the university PR department. The actual article, linked in the UAB press release and here, helpfully includes the concept of metabolic adaptation in the "already known" inset box (and in the citations). The actual study's claims and quality, well...I wish they'd gotten higher adherence and an interaction term. The findings are solid, though- they reinforce (though, again, it's not new) that adaptation occurs to some potentially significant degree. The sample and other data issues mean it can't be generalized in terms of the extent, though.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Apr 27, 2023

Leon Trotsky 2012
Aug 27, 2009

YOU CAN TRUST ME!*


*Israeli Government-affiliated poster
NBC has a new survey out of American attitudes on cultural/social issues.

Full crosstabs: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23789655-full-nbc-news-april-2023-poll

The interesting thing is that basically everyone agrees that discrimination is wrong, but nobody can really agree on what constitutes discrimination. People also have conflicting views/definitions of different things and you have roughly 70% of Americans agreeing with both "the government needs to encourage traditional values" and "the government needs to encourage tolerance of different lifestyles."

https://twitter.com/SteveKornacki/status/1651598950149812224
https://twitter.com/SteveKornacki/status/1651602402246639619

This result from the poll is basically America.txt.

Roughly 80% of Democrats think trans rights have not gone far enough and roughly 80% of Republicans think it has gone way too far.

https://twitter.com/MeetThePress/status/1651320297725779969

Roughly 3/4 of Americans have heard of the term "woke," but nobody knows what the actual definition of "woke" is. However, everyone has very strong opinions on it despite being unable to agree on a definition:

quote:

But a middle-aged Republican man from Kentucky described being woke as “an excuse to run rampant and do what you please under a false pretense that you are for a righteous cause.” And an older independent woman from Wisconsin described it as “newfangled gobbledygook” and “a bunch of B.S.”

It's within the margin of error, but this is also the first poll NBC has ever done where a majority of Americans say that U.S. society is racist. But, a large chunk of people also think that society is racist, but people are not judged by the color of the skin - which is another odd situation where people have seemingly contradictory views.

Article writeup:

quote:

‘A country on fire’: New poll finds America polarized over culture, race and ‘woke’

The country’s cultural divides and political divides have become one and the same, according to a new national NBC News poll.

The poll finds stark partisan differences on major cultural issues — racism, accepting LGBTQ people, the term “woke,” and even the fundamental goals of American society.

Half of Americans — 50% — believe society should be promoting greater respect for traditional social and moral values, while 42% say society should be encouraging greater tolerance of people with different lifestyles and backgrounds. That perspective has stayed almost completely stagnant since the poll asked the same question in 2013.

Digging into those numbers reveals a deep partisan divide.

Three in four Republicans say the country should promote traditional social and moral values, while 67% of Democrats want greater tolerance of diverse lifestyles and backgrounds. Independents are split, with 49% picking traditional values and 41% siding with greater tolerance.

“The survey revealed a country on fire, seething with anger at our political leaders and too often at each other,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research, who conducted the poll along with GOP pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies.

The poll “revealed a country sharply divided on these questions politically, and often ethnicity and generation,” he added.

Americans are also divided on whether their country judges by the content of their character rather than the content of their skin. Significant majorities of Black adults (79%) and Latinos (61%) disagree with that statement, while a slight majority of white adults (53%) agree with it.

Overall, 52% of Americans disagree that the country judges people by the content of their character rather than their skin color, while 47% agree.

While this divide is within the poll’s margin of error, it’s the first time since 2008 the majority of respondents have disagreed with the statement, which evokes the famous declaration by civil rights icon Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Asked if American society is racist, 59% of adults agree, with a whopping 79% of Black adults and 69% of Latino adults saying society is racist.

Defining ‘woke’

These partisan divides come as Republican presidential hopefuls have been leaning into the culture wars as they appeal to the GOP base — the field of candidates (and likely candidates) have largely rallied around rejecting “woke” perspectives and promoting restrictions on transgender people, particularly in schools or for gender-affirming care for minors.

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is widely expected to run for president, often says that his state is “where woke goes to die.” And former President Donald Trump said he’d block any federal agency from trying to “promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.”

The poll finds that the term “woke” is well known, with 76% of Americans saying they are familiar with the term, while 22% were not familiar with it. But the country is again divided along partisan lines over what exactly “woke” means, and if it is a positive or negative concept.

Open-ended interviews with those polled show that partisans also differ on how to define “woke.” Democrats describe it as a personal view that expresses empathy and awareness of systemic injustices, while Republicans, and some independents, were more likely to describe wokeness as an agenda promoting far-left priorities.

Being woke means being “filled with empathy and trying to understand other people,” said one older Democratic man from California. A younger female Democrat from the District of Columbia said it means being “mindful of historical inequities.”

But a middle-aged Republican man from Kentucky described being woke as “an excuse to run rampant and do what you please under a false pretense that you are for a righteous cause.” And an older independent woman from Wisconsin described it as “newfangled gobbledygook” and “a bunch of B.S.”

Divides on transgender acceptance

The poll also finds 48% of Americans believe the country has gone “too far” in accepting transgender people. A slightly smaller share of Americans — 43% — believe the country has “not gone far enough in ending discrimination against transgender people.” It’s a divide within the poll’s margin of error.

Again, respondents fell along party lines with 79% of Republicans saying the country has gone too far and 76% of Democrats saying the country has not gone far enough. Fifty percent of independents say society has gone too far, and 36% say it hasn’t gone far enough.

The survey finds that most Americans do not personally know someone who identifies as transgender — just 28% say they themselves, a friend, a family member or a coworker are transgender. Those who fall in that category are more likely to be younger, Democrats and highly educated.

And those relationships, or lack thereof, appear to make a big difference in views on society’s acceptance of transgender people.

Among those who say they know a transgender person, 67% say society hasn’t gone far enough in accepting transgender people and 25% say society has gone too far.

Among those who say they do not know a transgender person, 57% say society has gone too far, while 34% say it hasn’t gone far enough.

Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Apr 27, 2023

Killer robot
Sep 6, 2010

I was having the most wonderful dream. I think you were in it!
Pillbug
I'm failing to see what the real disageement is about here. The two statements seem to be "When you reduce calories consumed faster than calories burned" and "when you reduce calories consumed the body attempts to compensate and reminds you to eat more" and they're not at all incompatible. The first alone would imply that you cut 3500 calories from your weekly intake you'd lose a pound of fat. Adding the second doesn't contradict anything though, it just means it's less than a pound and you're hungrier and the diet is harder to maintain. Yeah, that's why it's hard.

It's like if you cut someone's salary from $50,000 to $40,000. Their net worth a year later will probably not be $10,000 lower than it would have otherwise since they'll cut more corners. But they'll almost certainly lose money.

Mellow Seas
Oct 9, 2012
Probation
Can't post for 10 years!

quote:

‘A country on fire’: New poll finds America polarized over culture, race and ‘woke’
Doesn't all seem a little catastrophized sometimes?

I don't want to be overly pollyannaish - this is more about how terrible the past was than how good the present is, because the present is not particularly good. But Christ, in the 60s you had legal apartheid; you had poverty levels even higher than they are now; you had young men being forced, under threat of imprisonment to go to a war that killed eight times as many US soldiers as have died in this century. You had a cultural divide over whether women should be allowed to have jobs. People terrified of nuclear annihilation, the US government throwing coups all around the world.

It doesn't make it feel any better if you are under the gun as the wedge demographic du Jour, but the insistence that we are living in a particularly divided time in US history seems off base to me. Our political system is more polarized, but I think there is actually a broader agreement on values. There is a divide among "the people" but it's exaggerated as an excuse for our leadership's abdication of responsibility.

Leon Trotsky 2012
Aug 27, 2009

YOU CAN TRUST ME!*


*Israeli Government-affiliated poster
Two new studies out today that confirm trends among the youth that started about 15 years ago, but accelerated in the last 5, are still going on.

Kids are having much less sex than they used to and loving nicotine products way more than they used to. Even "post-pandemic" the trends are still continuing.

The late 90's and early 2000's campaigns against teen pregnancy and teen sex have combined with new forms of birth control being invented and Obamacare making most birth control free to succeed too well and now they are worried about having too few pregnancies and kids not having enough sex.

Additionally, tobacco and nicotine use is going down overall (hitting a new record low), but nicotine product usage is still rising significantly among youth.

The kids, especially young women, are also really into being bisexual. Kind of an interesting gender difference is that men are much more likely to identify as gay and very few identify as bi, but the opposite is true for women. Women are much more likely to identify as bisexual, but not many identify as lesbian. However, these distinctions may be purely hypothetical as most of the kids are celibate now. 70% of high schoolers now say they are virgins and 79% say they aren't currently sexually active.

The youth of today are sexually open chewing tobacco and vaping enthusiast virgins.

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1651673930279579673
https://twitter.com/AP/status/1651658767321145361

quote:

NEW YORK (AP) — The first years of the pandemic saw a huge decline in high school students having sex, according to a government survey.

Teen sex was already becoming less and less common before COVID-19.

About three decades ago, more than half of teens said they’d had sex, according to a large government survey conducted every two years. By 2019, the share was 38%. In 2021, 30% of teens said they had ever had sex. That was the sharpest drop ever recorded by the survey.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday released reports analyzing the latest findings from the survey that looks into risky youth behaviors, including smoking, drinking, having sex and carrying guns.

More than 17,000 students at 152 public and private high schools responded to the 2021 survey. Participation was voluntary and required parental permission, but responses were anonymous.

The CDC also noted declines in students who said they were currently having sex or who’d had at least four sex partners.

The declines clearly had a lot to do with the pandemic that kept kids isolated at home for long stretches and, often, under extended adult supervision, experts said.

“I think these together paint a picture of high school students building fewer strong interpersonal connections that can be protective of good mental health,” said Laura Lindberg, a Rutgers University researcher who studies adolescent sexual behavior.

“This is an opportunity to say maybe teens are having too little sex,” said Lindberg, who was not involved in the reports.

The CDC’s Kathleen Ethier said the decline may be a good thing if it reflects more young people making healthy decisions to delay sex and reduce their number of partners.

“But what concerns me is this is potentially a reflection of social isolation,” said Ethier, director of the CDC’s division of adolescent and school health.

Health officials generally like to see trends that result in fewer teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, but the decline in teen sex coincided with increased reports of social isolation and poor mental health.

The 2023 survey, which will show if the decline was temporary, is currently underway.

Another finding: The proportion of high school kids who identify as heterosexual dropped to about 75%, down from about 89% as recently as 2015. Meanwhile, the share who identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual rose to 15%, up from 8% in 2015, when the survey began asking about sexual orientation.

There were also increases in the proportion who said “other” or that they were questioning or uncertain, the CDC found. The changes may be at least partly related to social changes that have reduced the stigma about identifying as not heterosexual, Lindberg said.

Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Apr 27, 2023

Shooting Blanks
Jun 6, 2007

Real bullets mess up how cool this thing looks.

-Blade



Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

The youth of today are sexually open chewing tobacco and vaping enthusiast virgins.

I may need to borrow this quote....

GlyphGryph
Jun 23, 2013

Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead.

pork never goes bad posted:

Can you cite the bolded part showing that this is true in humans who restrict calories as part of a diet? Either you are making a trivially true point that is useless in the discussion of obesity management and public policy related to obesity or you are making a false point.

A lot of this commenting seems to be saying people are wrong and then, when pressed, admitting that they are right but then arguing that it's not important or its bad because the implications of saying it are bad?

As far as persuasive tactics go, it's really not working well from my perspective, and you seem to want to convince people so I figured I'd point out that at least for me, another approach might see better results than that one.

(To top it all off, the argument on the whole you are making here, in terms of implications, is way worse, since your actual argument seems to amount to "we should not help people lose weight, and its not a medical issue so insurance shouldn't cover weight loss pills or anything really for people who want it, because if its not causing serious survival-based health problems its obviously not a problem for people" which is bulllllllshit)


Why does this article read like it was poorly written by a robot?

Anyway, in my anecdotal experience, the major influence to metabolic loss here is just... losing weight. Ignoring any larger metabolic adaptations that may occur or how long they might last, like those mentioned in that article (though its interesting that the article says it disappears after only a few weeks), lots of folks dieting don't really seem to grasp that the more of you there is, the more you burn, simply through basic body processes, and losing weight at a consistent rate means that even if nothing else was a factor you would still need to make regular downwards adjustments to your caloric intake. This is the big reason almost every CICO program I've seen has a floating target that changes on your current weight, and why as you lose weight there's increasing emphasis on the "out" part.

GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Apr 27, 2023

Mendrian
Jan 6, 2013

Weight in this country is a super complex issue and is the end result of:

* Overworked people who are too tired and depressed.
* Accessible and calorie dense foods are cheaper than foods that are rich in vital nutrients
* Not having enough time to make or prepare food for work or for dinner and get enough sleep and pursue non-work related passtimes that give life meaning.
* No mental health care; food is a coping mechanism for many Americans
* Abnormally stressful lives
* Food-as-passtime; there are almost no places to go or things to do when you're poor that don't involve eating or spending money. We lack parks, trails, or easy walks even in most major cities.
* Poor education about nutrition and inconsistent messaging (is milk good or bad for you?)
* Generational problems that persist through genetics, upbringing, and circumstance

"Just eat less and lose weight" or, "just eat better food" is an extremely privileged way to approach weight loss even when you're talking about individuals. I've gained 20 pounds in 10 years but am still a healthy-ish weight; I leave my house at 6am, get to work by 8 on many days. I get home at 6pm most days, and I have a disabled spouse that I help take care of. I have probably one or two hours per day that are not spoken for. I have definitely been guilty of skipping exercise or squeezing in an easy meal because it's all I have the energy for. Talking about this stuff on a society-wide scale and then it's just nonsense. You can't 'willpower' a demographic; you have to address the underlying issues. Some cities try to ban or tax sugary foods and that's great and all but you aren't addressing the underlying issue of why those foods are desirable.

Jaxyon
Mar 7, 2016
I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

Bar Ran Dun posted:

Frequently is underselling it. They put one on the fat list with extra PT and a diet at the academy based on BMI alone, unless you were an athlete. The pinch fat test and things like neck / chest / waist measurements were the far secondary metric. Most doctors use it first too.

Insurers literally use personal BMI as a cutoff for covering bariatric surgery

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
I should note that I view these weight loss meds with a degree of skepticism; post-covid, drug approval regulatory scrutiny is probably at an all-time nadir, and coverage of them (including their prior off-label use) will be at least in significant part a product of industrial promotion. None of this means they don't work; all of it means greater critical evaluation, especially in the longer term.

Edgar Allen Ho
Apr 3, 2017

by sebmojo
A lot of these posts really demonstrates to me that food education is a huge problem in the US. Like saying that having grown up obese in the US and staying that why till I lived away from my mom.

In no world are you so hard pressed that drive thru at rush hour is saving you time or money compared to a million slow cooker dishes or even slapping together a sandwich at home. HFCS is easily avoidable without paying extra at fancy places, it’s at walmart for store brand prices.

Brands and bad education have kinda hosed us and made a lot of people give up. I don’t mean the desperately impoverished or those trapped in food deserts, I mean people who can somehow afford 5x fast food meals that are a days worth of calories alone a week, but also enough more calories to be at an unhealthy weight.

We need a reboot from childhood on. Unfortunately I don’t see us getting us that any time soon.

And yes, we need to treat obesity as something other than a moral failing. Another thing we don’t do, same way too many people think other substance abuses are like “yep just woke up today and decided to down a bottle of vodka bc I suck and am stupid.

E: also work hours wise, it’s not that fast food is actually faster. It’s that getting home exhausted and beat down makes you want to not do poo poo. The gooniest of couch potatoes almost certainly would find a great, physical hobby be if anything from gardening to long walks to mountain climbing, if not for lack of time, money, and fatigue

Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Apr 27, 2023

Jaxyon
Mar 7, 2016
I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

The youth of today are sexually open chewing tobacco and vaping enthusiast virgins.

thread title

haveblue
Aug 15, 2005



Toilet Rascal
Young people just eat each others' asses so technical virgins at best

GlyphGryph
Jun 23, 2013

Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead.

Jaxyon posted:

Insurers literally use personal BMI as a cutoff for covering bariatric surgery

This seems like the opposite of the problem people are complaining about? Like specifically what is wrong with the requirement here, I'm not sure what your complaint is?

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

In no world are you so hard pressed that drive thru at rush hour is saving you time or money compared to a million slow cooker dishes or even slapping together a sandwich at home. HFCS is easily avoidable without paying extra at fancy places, it’s at walmart for store brand prices.

Total actual time and money is not actually the resource that's at a premium, though they can be as well, but generally it is capacity, complexity, practical time and money. Drive through meals have minimal overhead, minimal executive burden, and are very hard to gently caress up. Slow cooker dishes offer a hundred different things that need to be done and managed to make them happen and you can gently caress up at any of those steps. Home sandwiches are easier by a wide margin, but (and I say this as a sandwich lover) there's still at least a dozen potential failure points and a comparative increase in cognitive load. I know, I hit most of them pretty regularly and realize I've hosed myself yet again and end up ordering out instead because I just can't deal with yet another loving thing, you know? And that's working from home now, where everything is much simpler, I managed to gently caress up bringing sandwiches to the office at least twice a week on average.

GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Apr 27, 2023

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Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
I would like a GWS thread on sandwich failure points.

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