It really is the âpull yourself up by the bootstrapsâ or âjust donât take any drugs, duhâ of weight loss. Like, you canât just ignore all the social, systemic issues in our health and food industries, reduce it all to cals in vs cals out, and expect that to work. Itâs reductive and unproductive.
People arenât having trouble with math or willpower, theyâre having trouble with the fact that most (emphasis on âmostâ) readily available, cheap food is bad for you. Most people in poverty grew up with processed, heavily advertised junk and have literal addictions to this shit.
Itâs almost identical to saying âjust stop taking drugs.â Or âjust stop drinking.â
The reasons people turn to drugs and alcohol are not entirely different from the reasons people turn to food, but you have to keep eating something, and changing your diet from a very unhealthy one to a healthy one is a lot of work. You can keep going to the drive through, but a, theyâre literally designed to get you to buy more than you want, and b, would you tell an alcoholic to go in to a liquor store for soda on day 1 of recovery?
Itâs also misleading as hell, because calorie absorption and basal metabolic rates differ so widely among people. My husband and I live similarly active lifestyles and eat about the same amount of food. Iâm slightly taller than he is, but half his weight. I donât know how that happens, but it does.
Not really, evidence suggests that between average people you will see at most 4% difference in BMR
If itâs not a big difference, how does it lead to such divergent results? Iâd suggest that a 4% difference is in fact pretty big, as thatâs the equivalent of over 500 calories a week.
Do you have a link for the evidence? Iâd be interested to see what it says about calorie absorption, as I suspect that has an even greater effect. Unfortunately, everyone just seems to repeat CICO as though itâs easy or simple to measure either of those inputs with accuracy. People just hope theyâre average and that it will work normally for them. Most people are average, so that works for a lot of people, but not everyone.
I personally donât digest animal fat well, so anything other than white meat chicken will give me the shits. I donât eat animal products anymore, but when I did, I obviously wasnât receiving 200 calories from 200 calories worth of beef. My sister has celiacâs, and when she realized it and stopped eating gluten, she gained a bunch of weight, because she was finally absorbing calories from her diet.
just ignore all the social, systemic issues in our health and food industries, reduce it all to cals in vs cals out, and expect that to work
Thatâs literally exactly how it has worked for me. Obviously it takes some will power and discipline, but so does basically everything.
Our individual stories do not always translate to the bigger picture, gmtom. You might have grown up in a household where you were insulated from the predations of the processed food industry. You might have had better habits instilled in you as a child. You might have had a positive body image at one point in your life, to serve as inspiration for your weight loss journey. Maybe none of those are true and you truly are one of the lucky (and hard working!) ones who escaped this situation just like the addicts who recover through willpower alone. Regardless, we cannot all rely on being gmtom.
My final paragraph is not focused on the individual but on the epidemic of obesity. We cannot solve this through brow beating about CICO just like Republicans arenât going to solve the drug addiction crisis through jailing everyone with an addiction. People are using food to fill a hole in their lives, just like drugs, and we have to do the hard work of figuring that root out. Otherwise, we are doomed to become ineffective and unhelpful, leaving people to suffer.
